Beyond the clouds
June 12, 2009 Climate One of the most hilarious mantras that climate modellers intone in their media appearances is that the models must be right "because they've got physics in". The fact that huge swathes of the physics are parameterised - in other words they are not modelled at all, but are summarised down to a single number that the scientists hope will do the job - is quietly overlooked. Or at least, it's quietly overlooked by the climate modellers. Sceptics, of course, have been yelling about the deficiencies of this approach for years, to complete media indifference.
One of the most egregious parameterisations in the climate models is that of clouds, which are one of the most important feedbacks to the climate system. There has now been an attempt to rectify this failing - Steve McIntyre has picked up a remarkable report from a few years back that raises some interesting questions.
A team of climate modellers decided to take their model that one step further and intead of parameterising their clouds, they built a simple cloud model into each gridcell column (imagine vertical atmospheric columns rising up from each point on the earth's surface). The result was that the Earth turned out to be much less sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously advertised. The clouds essentially stopped some of the heat reaching the Earth in the first place.
Crisis over then? Perhaps. We'll have to see.
In the meantime we can wonder why these results, which were available to the IPCC during its Fourth Assessment of the world's climate, barely warranted a mention in the report. As someone once said, "Hey, it's climate science".
Reader Comments (7)
I could but follow with: "I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow, it's modelling illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all"
Science consists, among other things, of a body of knowledge. It is not akin to a gnostic religion that is to be interpreted by a coterie of high priests!
When Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1905 he had to wait well over a decade before his calculations of the deviation of light by the sun were confirmed by the observations organised by Eddington.
What would happen to the reputation of a researcher in the field of superconductivity who asserted that "science is settled" and that we would have a room temperature superconducter in one hundred years time?
The opinions of scientists is not science! Nullius in verba!
Did you see this quote from Professor Stefan Rahmstorf (A RealClimatist) -
“The global temperature is rising just as expected. If you look at the trend over the last twenty years or so, of course there is natural variability, around that trend, there are some warmer years like 2001 to 2005 were above the long term trend, and then 2008 is a little below the long term trend. But global temperature is basically rising as expected, and that’s very reassuring to me as a climate modeler, because we think global temperature is easy, we understand it well, it’s simple energy balance, so we shouldn’t be too far off.”
I'm glad the getting the correct global temperature is so easy... mmmmmmmm
See http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/real-climate-blogger-accurate-truthful-you-decide/ fro more details
Yes, I saw it. Bizarre.
The CLOUD experiments at Cern will answer some of the unknowns re clouds and cosmic rays...
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Research/CLOUD-en.html
...meanwhile the USA is poised for legislation that would U.S. emissions to 83 percent below 2005 levels. If implemented, this would allow the average American in 2050 to emit only as much carbon dioxide as the average American emitted in 1867...
http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2E3NjU2Njc5ZjJkMzE0ODVmNjNlNDUyMjVmYzlmY2Y=
"Decision based evidence making"
ROFLMAO!!!