Tag: climate models

Southern ocean absorbs more CO2 than expected

9:38 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists have found that the ability of the southern ocean surrounding Antarctica to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide varies much more drastically than they had predicted.

In 2011, the ocean took in 4.4 gigatonnes of CO2, according to the study — more than 10% of the CO2 emitted by human activity at the time. That was roughly double what it absorbed a decade earlier. The increase marks a sharp turnaround from simulations published a few years ago, which suggested that the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 had dropped in the 1980s and 1990s, and predicted that this trend would continue.

“It doesn’t mean that our [climate-change] projections for the future are going to change dramatically,” says Nicolas Gruber, an environmental physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who co-authored the latest paper. Rather, he says, the study shows that the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon changes more drastically than researchers had anticipated. [emphasis mine]

Typical of much of the climate research community, the scientist above insists that just because their models were wrong is no reason to change them, or the reasoning behind them. We are going to charge ahead, regardless of the facts!

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A calculator beats IPCC supercomputer models in predicting climate

10:22 am

IPCC computer models vs observations

The uncertainty of science: A simple climate model [pdf], designed to run on a calculator and not relying on the premise that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming, appears more accurate at predicting the climate than the high-powered supercomputer models of the IPCC.

The current climate models fueling belief in manmade global warming do have fairly good “fit” to the data on which they were tested. However, the predictivity isn’t that great – see the recent warming “pause” or have a look at the figure above. They’re also hella complex, requiring thousands of hours of supercomputer computations.

Early this year, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, David Legates of the University of Delaware, and Matt Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars” and sometimes PJM contributor, published a paper in Science Bulletin (the Chinese equivalent of Science) entitled “Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model”.

They took a different approach. Observing the issues with the current climate models, they constructed a very simple model working from first principles. “Irreducibly” here means “it can’t get simpler and reflect basic physics.” … This model is about one step advanced from a “back of the envelope” calculation, since it requires taking a natural logarithm as well as some multiplication, but it’s easily done with a scientific calculator — or even a slide rule.

But it models actual temperature observations better than the complex models. [emphasis in original]

The figure on the right is from the new Monckton paper, and shows the utter failure of every complex global-warming climate model to predict the global climate for the past 35 years. Whether this new very simple model is more accurate than these supercomputer models, however, remains to be seen, but their work definitely points out the uncertainty and failure of the present theories to explain the climate. They simply don’t do so, and thus are not a useful tool for gauging what we should do about the climate, if anything. As the writers of the simple model conclude,

The general-circulation models now face a crisis of credibility. Not one of them predicted a stasis of as long as 18 years 6 months in global temperatures. Indeed, it is often stated that periods [greater than] 15 years without warming are inconsistent with models’ predictions. For instance, [two IPCC papers] state: ‘‘The simulations rule out (at the 95 % level) zero trends for intervals of 15 year or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate’’.

The models relied upon in [the IPCC reports] predicted twice as much warming from 1990 to 2014 as has been observed. All models predicted a warming rate in the crucial tropical mid-troposphere considerably in excess of observation. It is no longer credible to ignore these ever-widening discrepancies between prediction and observation. IPCC itself has recognized that, at least as far as medium-term prediction is concerned, the models have failed, raising the legitimate question whether the longer-term predictions may also have been exaggerated, perhaps as greatly as the medium-term predictions.

As I say over and over again, the science of climate is incredibly complex and uncertain. No one yet understands fully how the Earth’s climate functions, and anyone who claims they do is either an ignorant fool or an outright liar. Keep that in mind as this presidential election cycle unfolds and candidates are challenged by the mainstream press (made up mostly of ignorant fools and outright liars) to comment on man-made global warming.

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Global Warming advocates debunk their own theory

10:32 am

Climate models vs climate reality

The statements and data provided by advocates of human-caused global warming themselves provide strong evidence that their theory of human-caused global warming is wrong.

The article is detailed and includes a lot of hard but easy-to-digest data, such as the graph on the right, which shows how all the computer models predicting global warming have failed to predict the lack of warming for the past eighteen years. (The models predicted the rising colored lines. Actual global temperatures are shown by the black line.) This quote however is a nice summation:

Allow us to cite one more example out of many that could be brought to bear. On June 6, 2007, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition published an analysis of seasonal climate predictions made by the New Zealand Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) showing that the Institute did not even achieve 50 percent accuracy. Director Dr. Jim Renwick’s response was telling. “Climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well,” he told the New Zealand Herald. Dr. Renwick, who is an IPCC lead author and a member of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Climatology Expert Team on Seasonal Forecasting, stated on New Zealand Radio, “The weather is not predictable beyond a week or two.”

This is huge! Phil Jones, a top AGW guru, admits “we don’t know what natural variability is doing,” and Judith Curry says that the climate models are “imperfect and incomplete” and natural causes “dominate” human effects on global temperatures. And IPCC/WMO bigwig Jim Renwick concedes his organization’s climate predictions are wrong more than half the time — and they can’t predict the weather more than two weeks out. Yet, we are supposed to empower national and international politicians and bureaucrats to completely regulate, re-engineer, tax, and regiment human civilization on a planetary scale, based upon the same faulty computer models that have universally, spectacularly failed — over and over again.

I hate to say this, but it appears that the only “deniers of reality” we have in this debate are the political advocates of human-caused global warming, people like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Al Gore, who continue to refuse to recognize the reality that there has been no warming during the past eighteen years.

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An analysis of the climate models used by global warming advocates to illustrate the consequences of climate change finds them to be totally useless.

11:56 pm

Climate fraud: An analysis of the climate models used by global warming advocates to illustrate the consequences of climate change finds them to be totally useless.

These models have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis: certain inputs (e.g. the discount rate) are arbitrary, but have huge effects on the SCC estimates the models produce; the models’ descriptions of the impact of climate change are completely ad hoc, with no theoretical or empirical foundation; and the models can tell us nothing about the most important driver of the SCC, the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome. IAM-based analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision, but that perception is illusory and misleading. [emphasis added]

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A science poster released at an American Geophysical Union conference this week finds again that the global warming climate models used by policy makers have all failed to predict what has actually happened.

3:38 pm

The uncertainty of science: A science poster released at an American Geophysical Union conference this week finds again that the global warming climate models used by policy makers have all failed to predict what has actually happened.

Some devastating quotes from the poster:
» Read more

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The predictions of seventy-three climate models are compared to real data and not one comes even close to reality.

4:21 pm

The predictions of seventy-three climate models are compared to real data and not one comes even close to reality.

Remember: computer modeling is not science research. It does not tell us anything about the actual climate. It is instead theoretical work useful for trying to understand what the data actual is telling us.

Computer modeling, however, is totally useless if it doesn’t successfully mimic that actual data. Since all of these climate models fail to do this, they very clearly show that they do not understand the climate itself, and are not valid theories to explain its processes. If the scientists who created them were honest about these results, they would immediately go back to the drawing board and rewrite these models.

I unfortunately have serious doubts they will do this.

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Comparing all the global warming climate models for the past twenty years with the actual data.

9:15 pm

A scientist compares all the global warming climate models developed during the past twenty years with the actual data:

We’ve checked all the main predictions of the climate models against the best data. The climate models get them all wrong. … Therefore:

  • The climate models are fundamentally flawed. Their assumed threefold amplification by feedbacks does not in fact exist.
  • The climate models overestimate temperature rises due to CO2 by at least a factor of three.

Read the whole article. Not only does Evans outline the failures of all the climate models, he also clearly and distinctly describes the actual debate that has been going on in the climate field for the past three decades. It isn’t the effects of carbon dioxide that climate scientists have been arguing about, but, as Richard Lindzen explained to the UK Parliament last week, whether other climate factors, called feedbacks, will amplify or suppress the warming produced by CO2.

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The science remains uncertain

5:38 pm

Two papers published this week by the American Geophysical Union once again indicate that the science of climate change remains exceedingly uncertain. More significantly, the models that try to predict the future of the Earth’s climate continue to appear unreliable, with such large margins of error that it is at this time foolish to make any policy based on their predictions.

diagram of Atlantic currents

The first paper took a close look at the deep water currents in the Atlantic to see if it could track changes to what the authors’ call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), more generally referred to as the Atlantic conveyor belt. This conveyor belt begins with the sinking of salty dense water in the northeast Atlantic off of Europe and Africa. The deep water current then travels south and into the Indian and Pacific Oceans where it comes to the surface only to flow back to the Atlantic, traveling north along the coast of North America as the Gulf Stream, bringing with it the warm temperatures that make Europe’s climate much warmer than its latitude would normally suggest.

According to most global warming models, higher temperatures should cause the glaciers in the Arctic and Greenland to melt, thereby pouring an increased amount of fresh water into the North Atlantic. This infusion of fresh water is then expected to lower the salinity and density of the Atlantic water, thus preventing it from sinking and thus acting to slow the conveyor belt, and possibly even causing it to shut down. The consequence would be no more Gulf Stream to warm the climate of Europe.

In other words: Disaster! Death! Destruction! All caused by global warming!

Unfortunately for these global warming models, the paper above found no trend at all. The conveyor belt is not slowing, as predicted. To quote the paper’s abstract:
» Read more

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