climate models

Something amusing (or perhaps absurd?) that I noticed the other day.

An old article in The Australian from October 10, 2013: Climate change tipping point revealed by study published in Nature.

THE dreaded climate-change "tipping point", when changes to weather patterns will become irreversible, has been identified. And it is terrifying.

Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot - permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043.

Australia will not be far behind, with dates ranging from 2038 in Sydney to 2049 in Adelaide.

Virtually the whole world will have changed by 2050.

This, as usual, is all based on computer models:

To arrive at their projections, the researchers used weather observations, computer models and other data to calculate the point at which every year from then on will be warmer than the hottest year ever recorded over the past 150 years.

So how well are they doing? They give a long list of cities and the dreaded year when all h*** breaks loose in the poor blighted district. Examples:

Melbourne 2045

Sydney 2038

Perth 2042

Adelaide 2049

Conveniently far enough out that we'll all have forgotten this piece of idiocy when the prediction fails to come to pass. But someone didn't do their proofing well enough! They let slip one near-term prediction:

Manokwari (West Papua) 2020

Well we're nearly half way there. Things should be getting pret-ty sticky in poor Manokwari by now. So how is it panning out?

Dear oh dear! All those naive newborns who trust "climate scientists"! Wake up and smell the scandal. Case in point, Wattsupwiththat carries a report today from the University of Wisconsin-Madison of a new study that can't avoid the fact that the models and the data are now in clear, unambiguous contradiction. From the report:

“We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions,” says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. “Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming.”

A real scientist, of course, would conclude that, things having been checked and rechecked (see definition of "robust"), the models are wrong. And since the models are the only evidence for the catastrophic global warming theory, which is already in serious disagreement with reality, that the theory is wrong too. But what do the authors of this "study" conclude?

It seems the world is going to be hoodwinked again by those pushing the global warming scam, this time for another 30 years.

And the most discouraging thing about it is: the sane people, those who know CO₂ isn’t a significant cause of planetary warming, are showing all the signs of being suckered by the deception yet again.

Roger Pielke Jr’s blog reports on a leaked copy of the IPCC Extremes Report. The show-stopper centrepiece of the leaked report is:

"Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability".

That, of course, makes a complete mockery of the entire global warming theory. Remember that the theory’s only “evidence” is the computer models, which, it is said, cannot account for the late 20^th century warming by the mere effects of natural climate variability. And yet, now, after 13 years of flat temperatures, they predict that we could be in for another 30 — 43 years in all! of flat temperatures due to natural variability masking the rise due to CO₂-induced warming. Wow! CO₂ must be a pretty poor warming agent if, as anthropogenic CO₂ emissions rage ahead, temperatures can remain flat for 43 years.

The truth, of course, is that all this makes no sense whatever. If natural variability can cause 43 years of flat temps while CO₂ races upwards, then it could also have caused the late 20^th century warming without any help from CO₂.

A long article has been released with many quotes from the core group of global warming alarmist 'scientists'. Why do I quote that word? - because so far none of them have told us, the intelligent public, a full, proper, scientifically argued case giving evidence of four things:

1. dangerous,
2. human-emitted,
3. carbon-dioxide-caused,
4. global warming is taking place.

In other words, there are four propositions that must all be substantiated with credible evidence before a scientific theory exists that there is anything to fear from carbon dioxide. My take on the status of these four is: (1) is certainly false, (2) uncertain, (3) most likely largely false, and (4) most likely true, but not as large as it has been represented. But this post is not about the correctness of the theory, but the more basic question whether it is a scientific theory at all.

I think most people know of the concept that scientific theories must be falsifiable. There are a lot of subtleties around that idea that need not concern us now, but we can use it as a rough test for good science. Remember, good science doesn't have to be correct - a theory proposed, tested properly, and rejected for making incorrect predictions is still an exercise in good science, even if it failed to come up with an advance. And contrariwise, a wild guess shoved down people's throats by force without any attempt to test against reality is bad science, even if by some chance the guess happened to be correct.

So we see that the question of whether this is good science is not the same as the question whether it is correct (although the two are obviously related).

So how does the CAGW theory stack up?

From The Australian August 18:

THE Australian Academy of Science has pitted its expertise against the greenhouse sceptics in a report stating that humans are changing our climate. ...

Kurt Lambeck, immediate past president of the academy and a professor at the Australian National University's research school of earth sciences, initiated work on the document to clear up common misconceptions. ...

He said the fundamental principles of climatology, such as the role of carbon dioxide in global warming, were beyond dispute. But scientists were still arguing about the complex Earth systems feedback mechanisms, such as the possible cooling effect of clouds.

"If temperatures go up, there is going to be more evaporation, and that will produce more clouds," Professor Lambeck said. "That could produce a negative feedback, but to quantify that is a very difficult thing.

"How do we put that cloud cover into the models? That's where uncertainty comes in, but that's not going to change the basic outcomes."

Really?

A change of just 1% in cloud cover would account for all of twentieth century warming (Plimer's Heaven and Earth p 112). (And that's the claimed warming, including the uncheckable 'adjustments' made by people who have now lost the raw data - but that's another question.)

Jeremy Grantham has put out a report claiming to be "everything you need to know about global warming in five minutes". Thank you Jeremy for summarising the global warming case so succinctly. It should make it much easier for readers to see where the truth lies. Here are my comments on your case, please feel free to post any response you wish.

1) The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, after at least several hundred thousand years of remaining within a constant range, started to rise with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It has increased by almost 40% and is rising each year. This is certain and straightforward.

True. It is also a fact, proved by literally hundreds of careful scientific experiments, and also by every operator of a commercial greenhouse, that almost every plant on Earth grows better—30% better for a 300ppm increase is a conservative average—with more CO2. There are six billion people on Earth, and the increase in CO2 you mention has fed about a billion of them with the same cropland under cultivation. I think you had something else in mind when you mentioned the CO2 increase, but it had better be really important if  you intend us to put it ahead of the lives of billions.

In a previous post on peacelegacy.org,I used the example of a chappie called Fred to show you why the absence of an atmospheric hotspot is, all by itself, a complete disproof of the hypothesis of dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW). For those who came in late, the entire basis for the AGW claim is that certain unverified, and now falsified, computer models predict a lot of warming over the coming 100 years. It is shocking, but true, that there is no actual evidence whatsoever for this idea; it is computer models alone, and those models are basically no more than coded guesswork. And what do these models predict?

They predict that the world is heated by the appearance of a 'hotspot' in the atmosphere above the equator.

Model predicts air above the tropics heats up. from the NIPCC Report p. 107
But the reality is that this hotspot has failed to develop:

There's a story on wattsupwiththat about the UK MET office's hot new computer. The headline of the story is:

Met Office supercomputer: A megawatt, here, a megawatt there, and pretty soon we’re talking real carbon pollution

Of course Anthony Watts is saying that tongue in cheek, because carbon dioxide is plant food, not pollution. So the truth is the MET office has one of the GREENEST buildings in the UK. CO2 is nutrient. We should be glad of that small bounty as they go about proving the uselessness of their forecasts.

Here's the facts about numerical modelling: chaos principles guarantee that within a relatively short time the results are nonsense. No amount of speed or computer memory can change that. It's a mathematical fact. Three weeks out is probably the best possible, no matter what computing resources you throw at it.

This is a reasonably short work, very different from Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth. Although Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and erstwhile Chief Research Scientist with Australia's CSIRO, he has put together an accessible summary of some of the damning evidence against the global warming alarmism.

When I started looking into the claims of dangerous warming due to carbon dioxide, I was completely baffled, buried in details of climate models, puzzled by energy balance diagrams, and so forth. Was there a "greenhouse" blanketing the Earth, slowly frazzling us to death? The truth could have been anything. If you've followed this path too, you'll know what I mean. But one thing, one single piece of the jigsaw, cut through all the fog and answered the question. I want to show you the thing that absolutely clinched the global warming question for me. I have postgraduate training in physics, which helped, but the basic point is understandable by anyone, and in this article I want to explain what seems to me the key, conclusive fact in everyday terms.