Bishop Hill Ducking, diving, dodging, weaving
Jul 3, 2013 Climate: Models There was an interesting written answer in the House of Lords yesterday, with Baroness Verma singularly failing to answer a question about falsifying climate models.
Lord Donoughue (Labour): To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the Met Office has set a date by which, in the event of no further increase in global temperatures, it would reassess the validity of its general circulation models.
Baroness Verma (Whip, House of Lords; Conservative): General circulation models developed by the Met Office are continually reassessed against observations and compared against international climate models through workshops and peer reviewed publications. The validity of general circulation modelling has been established for over four decades, as evident in the peer-reviewed literature. Such models are further developed in light of improvements in scientific understanding of the climate system and technical advances in computing capability.
Short term fluctuations in global temperature do not invalidate general circulation models, or determine timelines for model development. The long term projection remains that the underlying warming trend will continue in response to continuing increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
It was Baroness Verma who was on the receiving end of Lord Donoughue's questions on surface temperature trends, and her ability to duck, dive, dodge and weave, often at the same time, was something to behold. It was many, many weeks before Lord D was able to pin her down to an answer.
Here we go again.
Reader Comments (109)
I have it in mind that Bernard Donoghue deserves some sort of public recognition. Hopefully in the fullness of time he will get his rewards for devotion to the cause of truth.
Meanwhile, as you say, here we go again.
Excellent question and a waffle bullshit non-answer.
They'll avoid answering the question no matter what.
The Met Office has made it clear that the *only* information about future climate change comes from their models. Discredit their models and the whole scam evaporates so they will never answer this question.
There is now firm evidence that models, the Met Office's, and those of their contempories, are downright wrong. It's important to get this made known.
Why reply with 107 words that fail to answer the question, when a simple "No" suffices?
I suppose it keeps the wordsmiths off the Unemployment Register.
Pretty extraordinary that the Minister would even attempt an answer like that on the record.
Somewhat akin to answering the question, “Are you a man, or woman?" by explaining that men and women have different genitalia.
Ronald Reagan was once asked what he was going to wear to a costume party. He responded that he was going "to put egg on my face and go as a liberal economist."
Will there be enough eggs in England to cover all the faces of those who stand by the efficacy of the GCMs?
On another thread, chippy asked "How about a tax on BS?"
If the Met Office had to pay such a tax, it would be bankrupt.
It's an interesting answer. Just consider:
"The validity of general circulation modelling has been established for over four decades, as evident in the peer-reviewed literature. Such models are further developed in light of improvements in scientific understanding of the climate system and technical advances in computing capability."
No mention of 'developing' the models should their output be seen to deviate from observations over a period of 15-20 years?
Again: Why do we ignore the fact that we are in an interglacial period in which warming is expected to continue until...it doesn't? Global warming isn't the key question. It is whether we should waste (ahmmm...finance a bunch of insiders) billions of dollars for no reasonable return.
DNFTT
The Baroness is technically correct. Some people are still deluded that models are there to improve the understanding of the real world. No. They are there to improve themselves.
Models don't need no validation from the real world: they define their own existence, and are valid because they are.
Gavin has been making this point for years. As I said already, look at all the "climate" satellites launched in orbits that last a few years, not the decades needed for climate observations: those satellites are there to improve models, and that's it.
No point in replying to the Troll, both her posts and your replies including my post will be deleted by BH.
"Short term fluctuations in global temperature do not invalidate general circulation models, or determine timelines for model development. "
Just what is meant by short-term?
Currently anything less than 20 years.
And when the hiatus has lasted 20 years?
You might as well ask the good Baroness how long a piece of string is.
'The validity of general circulation modelling has been established for over four decades, as evident in the peer-reviewed literature'
Its therefore a shame that they fail to match the actual weather or climate , but then who needs reality when you have enough faith in the models
"Yes Minister" is alive and well with Sir Humphrey transmogriphied into a female form.
Jul 3, 2013 at 6:34 PM | Unregistered CommenterNeil
DNFTT
Why is it that people who talk about "peer review" in connection with climate science always give the impression that they have got something to hide? The time is coming when nobody will be able to use the phrase "peer reviewed" except in an ironic sense.
Jul 3, 2013 at 6:34 PM | Unregistered CommenterNeil
DNFTT
Jul 3, 2013 at 6:53 PM | Registered CommenterMartin
Point taken, but some times I just can't help myself.
The validity of the GCM's has certainly not been shown to be true. Just the opposite is true. Everyone who's looked at them recently has shown their projections against actual empirical measurement to be very divergent.
Cannot Lord Donoughue simply submit Roy Spencer's recent plots in conjunction with a follow up query?
Perhaps "peer reviewed" gives the MET office wiggle room?
I propose that the baroness is asked a question which will enable her to ramble on ad infinitum.
How many hairs constitute a beard?
At least the question is as meaningless, as will be the answer.
Should make everybody happy.
"without the background noise of natural variation?"
Because CAGW was supposed to completely swamp natural variation (in order to be definitely 'catastrophic').
Hence this alarmist is tacitly admitting that man made warming is a smaller effect than natural variations. Progress at last!
The time is coming when nobody will be able to use the phrase "peer reviewed" except in an ironic sense.
Jul 3, 2013 at 7:26 PM Roy
In former existences involving publishing research papers and reviewing research papers submitted to journals, I never heard the phrase "peer reviewed". One took it for granted that all proper papers were reviewed.
The review of a paper confirmed:
- It was a relevant subject for the journal and likely to be of interest to its readers.
- It reported a significant advance, over and above what any competent person could produce.
- It was not obviously erroneous, crackpot or derivative.
- It appeared to be original.
- It made adequate reference to related previous work.
I was never aware of reviewing being considered a guarantee of the correctness of the work.
I think it must have been the IPCC's line that they only considered "peer reviewed" stuff that resulted in it being climate science's seal of approval, becoming considered as equating to "correct and indisputable". But as we have seen over the past few years, it is often a guarantee merely that it pleases The Team.
I agree with Roy. Perhaps already it has become a term of derision.
I am sorry folks but this was not a good question, it was the wrong question and politicians like this will avoid them all day long.
Chemical reactions do not have pauses, plateaus or off days, they just happen when certain molecules/atoms come together and they happen all the time with no breaks and no pauses as long as the relevant molecules/atoms are present.
The IPCC concluded that CO2 was the only possible cause of recent warming and natural variations were ruled out.
The question to ask is "what is preventing the planet from warming since we are pumping ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere". The Met office does not know and as far as I can see nobody knows ^.^
Ask her a question she can not answer and then pile in hehe.
Martin A,
As you say, all peer-review was a gate-keeping mechanism to attempt to ensure journals published papers which were topical, interesting, that the data gathering and analysis weren't obviously flawed; something which potentially added to the state of knoweledge in the field.
There were plenty of peer-reviewed papers which were shown to be invalid, the work not reproduceable, the analysis faulty, etc.
The first time I heard 'peer-review' bandied about as a mark of quality, was about 20 years ago on Usenet, where some character with a PhD in Astrology was defending his assertions on the grounds that they were 'peer-reviewed'.
"what is preventing the planet from warming since we are pumping ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere".
Jul 3, 2013 at 8:39 PM Dung
Short term fluctuations in global temperature do not invalidate general circulation models, or determine timelines for model development. The long term projection remains that the underlying warming trend will continue in response to continuing increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Jul 3, 2013 at 8:46 PM Baroness Verma:
I do not mind if it be an impostor.
An unfalsifiable model? Unfalsifiable by how many decades of false
predictionsprojectionsscenarios?Ahh, belief! 'Tis a wondrous thing. But, a characteristic of religion.
Not science.
I think Phil Jones answered this question in the CG emails
"The no upward trend has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried"
So a question which invites a yes, no or a date as an answer gets none of them in reply. Tells you all you need to know. Thanks once again to Lord Donoughue for shining light on this junk.
As for this shizzle:
"The validity of general circulation modelling has been established for over four decades, as evident in the peer-reviewed literature."
Please can we have the references?
Here's one that should be on the list:
Koutsoyiannis, D., A. Efstratiadis, N. Mamassis, and A. Christofides, 2008: On the credibility of climate predictions, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 53 (4), 671-684.
with the abstract
“Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.”
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/on-the-credibility-of-climate-predictions-by-koutsoyiannis-et-al/
From a credible author and team:
http://www.egu.eu/awards-medals/henry-darcy/2009/demetris-koutsoyiannis/
Oh, she does love the peer-reviewed literature, Has he ever read any, I wonder?
Once you know who to ignore in the comments section it becomes a much more interesting, informative and civilised read.
"Baroness Verma" seems to be posting from a French ISP.
Jul 3, 2013 at 8:39 PM | Dung
///////////////////////
Don't you know that it is going into the oceans where it cannot be measured? And don't you know that it will somehow and soon re-surface and bite us with a vengeance? Keep up, get with the programme.
The entire conjecture is built on waffle, so there will always be wriggle and waffle room.
Maybe she's got a holiday home in France, which she can flit to when the lights go out here in the UK.
Just in case it is the real Baroness Verma, two links you really should take a look at:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means.
Prof. Salby presentation, on why man-made CO2 is not the driver of atmospheric CO2 or climate change, (Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany, April 2013).
And surely it is regrettable that the great British public have been on the receiving end of such an obviously contrived inept reply.
Am I alone in thinking that we are not being best served by our elected legislators? They are elected, are they not:-)?
In response to a "Have you stopped beating your wife?" question addressing an unlikely scenario, Baroness Verma gave an answer which accurately described the Met Office approach to the use of GCMs.
Lord Donahue's question addressed an unreal situation. With Hadcrut4 showing 2010, 2005 and 1998 as the first, second and third warmest years on record, where is the evidence that there will be no further warming?
Baroness:
Please list the underlying warming trends by month, by year to prove how accurate the models are and to give us a general idea just how cold it would be right now without CO2.
Perhaps we all would appreciate CO2's role in preventing Britain from freezing and starving if your general circulation models correctly estimated falsifiable CO2 warming levels.
Jul 3, 2013 at 11:15 PM | lapogus
The real Baroness Verma and her Met Office advisors would do well to study Professor Salby's talk.
Salby shows comprehensively that IPCC climate models are contradicted by observed reality. Then, having quoted Richard Feynman's descriptions of how we would look for a new physical model and verify it, Salby says simply
"... if it disagrees with observation, it's wrong.
That's all there is to it."
ATheoK
One might also ask where Lord Donohue got his evidence that there will be "no further increase in global temperatures"??
Martin A
A model is as good as the information available at the time. Consider the models used to produce IPCC AR4. Are you complaining that they failed to include the weak Solar Cycle 25, with its associated reduction in forcing. Should they have predicted the high levels of aerosols as a result of China's rapid industrial growth?
It is easy to carp when you have 20/20 hindsight!
Re: EM
It wasn't anything like a "Have you stopped beating your wife?" question. There is no accusation or inference of wrong doing in the question that was asked.
The met office GCMs show a continually rising global temperature*. It is reasonable to ask at what point they will reassess this if the global temperature does not rise.
* The met office has previously admitted that their GCM has a centennial warming bias of 5C
Re: EM
> One might also ask where Lord Donohue got his evidence that there will be "no further increase in global temperatures"??
One might ask where Lord Donohue claims that there will be no "no further increase in global temperatures".
where is the evidence that there will be no further warming?
Jul 3, 2013 at 11:58 PM Entropic Man
There is none. Exaclty the same as there is no evidence that there will be further warming.
You have missed the point. The question was to expose the Met Office's bullshit, not to prove that the climate is going to do something or other.
The Met Office claim their models can and do predict future climate. Yet their only claim to have validated their models is to explain that:
- They can reproduce past climate.** This is a well known fallacy in system simulation where the model has to rely on past data for its parameters.
- If they switch off the CO2 warming bit of their model, it no longer predicts warming. This is dealt with by the Mandy Rice-Davis retort ("well, they would do that, wouldn't they?")
The Met Office claim to be able to predict climate is false and it is a disgrace and a scandal that a civil service organisation should feed falsehoods to the government that they advise.
________________________________________________________________________
** "But reproducing the known change of global temperature is 20/20 hindsight. It's not a strong test of predictive skill. That experiment is called a hind-test. The real test is a forecast, predicting future evolution. Only then can one be confident that models haven't been tuned to match observed behaviour. That's tantamount to a double-blind test, the standard ?protocol? required in clinical trials of pharmaceuticals. Neither the patient (the model) nor the clinician (the guy running the model) then knows the outcome." Murry Salby
It is easy to carp when you have 20/20 hindsight!
Jul 4, 2013 at 12:15 AM | Entropic Man
Evaluating the eventual outcome of predictions involves 20/20 hindsight. If the predictions turn out to be wrong it is not carping to point this out. It's like saying that a quality inspector is carping when they find defects in the product they are inspecting.
No offence but I think you should reflect on what you have written before hitting the "create post" button.
Terry S
Read Lord Donohue's qustion. He asks about the Met Office's plans in the event of "in the event of no further increase in global temperatures". I consider it likely that the Met office regards this as too unlikely to be worth planning for.
He's also rather vague. Does he regard the rise as having already stopped? Does he expect it to stop in the near future, and if so, when? How does he square this expectation with the continued accumulation of " warmest years" during the noughties? Where is his evidence that " no further increase" is a scenario worthy of consideration?
Putting eight vague questions at once strikes me as a fishing expedition; an attempt to trap Baroness Verma into some loose wording which could be used as sceptic propoganda.
"* The met office has previously admitted that their GCM has a centennial warming bias of 5C"
Reference and explaination , please.
Martin A
"it is a disgrace and a scandal that a civil service organisation should feed falsehoods to the government that they advise."
I think that's called paranoia.
Hind-testing is how you tune a model. Ask any engineer and he will tell you that theory is not a perfect predictor of real world behaviour. A pendulum runs slightly differently than predicted due to air resistance or slight local variations in gravity. Flaws in a steel beam will make it weaker than theory would predict.
Similarly the physics of energy flow varies from theoretical ideals in the real world, exaggerated by small scale effects which it is not practical to include in the model.
Think of Earth as a machine driven by its Sun. Energy flows into, around and out of the climate system in complex ways which cannot be simulated in full detail on the time and spatial scales on which models operate. To compensate, the model needs tuning to bring its response closer to reality. Hind-tuning a GCM is like tuning a car engine, to optimise it against the real world.
Just as a finite element model of a bridge is as good, and as weak, as the size of the elements allows, a GCM is as good, or bad, as its information and computing power allow. Note that the IPCC predictions, and those published subsequently , all include a measure of uncetrtainty
I'm curious to know why you are convinced that all the models and all the scientists using them are wrong. You seem to share Lord Donohue's comviction that there will be no further temperature rise, and on equally non-existant evidence. evidence. Note that the IPCC predictions, and those published subsequently , all include a measure of uncertainty. What are the 95% confidence limits on your prediction that no further increase in climate will occur?
I think that's called paranoia.
Jul 4, 2013 at 12:40 AM Entropic Man
If you know of any evidence that the MO can predict future climate, presumably you'd have mentioned it.
Accusing someone you are discussing with of being mentally ill is not a convincing argument.
Entropic Man
We were blessed last year with a prolonged engagement with the blog by Richard Betts from the MO. During his time here (probably to aid the research into what psychiatric help was needed by skeptics) he stated that The MO had no idea why the planet was not warming, does this help you at all?
Dung
The problem is not that the Met Office has no idea, but that it has too many possibilities. Sorting out their relative effects is ongoing. If you could persuade Congress to finance a replacement GLORY satellite it would be a big help.
Martin A
Making unsubstantiated claims that the Civil Service deliberately lies to its government is not usually a sign of a fully sane individual.
Entropic Man
"have no idea" is a quote so do not argue with me, go take it up with the MO mate.
I would also suggest that making claims that that the civil service deliberately lies to its government is a sure sign of a well adjusted and very sane individual.
IJul 4, 2013 at 12:59 AM | Entropic Man
Haven't got the time to figure out who you are talking to. But it doesn't matter, anybody who thinks any future prediction model has any future other than its own future wellbeing is quite frankly a modern day fool.