Bishop Hill Not waving but drowning
Sep 23, 2013 Climate: MetOffice Climate: Models Climate: WG3 A couple of journalists seem to have shown some interest in Nic Lewis's critique about the UKCP09 climate projections. This may explain why the Met Office has suddenly issued a response a week after Nic's report came out:
Today an article by the GWPF think-tank looks at one element of this – the UK’s official climate projections, known as UKCP09, which were produced by the Met Office.
It claims the Met Office climate model used to make those projections, HadCM3, contains an error and that, because of this error, the projections overestimate warming. The GWPF’s article, however, accepts that the claims of an error have not been substantiated.
UKCP09 used a sophisticated method that used both model projections and observations to provide a range of potential future warming which attempts to take in the uncertainties in model parameters. The GWPF article fails to note that UKCP09 also used information from many other climate models, and that the projections were independently reviewed prior to publication.
Ultimately there is nothing in the GWPF article which undermines UKCP09 or the way climate models, including the Met Office’s HadCM3, project future temperature changes.
This is an astonishingly lightweight argument. Perceptive readers will note that it doesn't actually address the substantive criticisms made in Nic's report and my briefing. There is just a lot of handwaving going on. Or perhaps the bigwigs at the Met Office are not waving but drowning.
Meanwhile, Nic emails the text of the comment he has left under the Met Office blog post (currently in moderation).
I didn't claim that the HadCM3 model contained an error (and nor, so far as I can see, does the GWPF document claim it did, contrary to what is stated). I wrote that, since the observational data strongly contraindicate aerosol forcing being highly negative, "whatever the actual level of ECS [climate sensitivity], HadCM3-derived ECS estimates are bound to be high." This indicates that the HadCM3 study was unsuitable for use in generating projections that are, supposedly, constrained by observations.
The Met Office claimed in their July report The recent pause in global warming(3) that, in the Harris et al 2013 study underlying UKCP09 "uncertainty in the response of the climate system to CO2 forcing is comprehensively sampled". That is clearly incorrect.
The statement "The GWPF’s article, however, accepts that the claims of an error have not been substantiated." is misleading since it suggests that the claims referred to in the article (those in my critique of he Met Office report) have been refuted. They most certainly have not been refuted. The Met Office has not yet even made a substantive response to my claims.
The statement says "UKCP09 used a sophisticated method that used both model projections and observations to provide a range of potential future warming which attempts to take in the uncertainties in model parameters." deserves comment. The method was indeed sophisticated, and there were attempts to take in uncertainties about model parameters. I said as much in my critique of the Harris et al 2013 study. But sophisticated does not imply valid, and attempts are not always successful. And in fact the taking into account in the study, within limits, of uncertainties in model parameters did not enable the HadCM3 model to simulate a climate system in which both climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing were modest, as suggested by several recent observational studies.
The statement that "the projections were independently reviewed prior to publication" is irrelevant. It is doubtful whether any reviewer would have spotted the problem that I have identified, which involved some detailed analysis and modelling work.
The use of information from other climate models that is referred to is also irrelevant, since use of that information did not overcome the fundamental problem – the inability of the HadCM3 model to simulate a climate system in which both climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing are modest.
The Met Office have not provided any justification for the unsupported claim that "Ultimately there is nothing in the GWPF article which undermines UKCP09 or the way climate models, including the Met Office’s HadCM3, project future temperature changes."
Bishop Hill
The first of the news stories is live, in the shape of Fiona Macrae at the Mail.
The Met Office’s global warming predictions are flawed and could result in millions of pounds being squandered, it is claimed.
A report for a think tank led by former Tory chancellor Lord Lawson says a computer programme behind figures that shape climate change policy is biased in favour of higher temperatures.
Large sums of public and private sector money could be ‘malinvested’ in everything from wind farms to heat-proof road surfaces as a result, it claims.
Bob Ward's response is hilarious:
This is a political stunt by Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation to try to distract attention from the IPCC report.
Reader Comments (51)
Bob Ward's just panicking. If the Met Office had replied in detail by now, it wouldn't be the issue it is. Since they haven't, then it's an issue. I doubt Nic planned it thus, it just happened that way, Events dear boy, events.
IMHO, you have nailed the Met's attitude in your title, 'Not waving, but drowning'.
No more needs to be said.
Nic Lewis:
"I didn't claim that the HadCM3 model contained an error (and nor, so far as I can see, does the GWPF document claim it did, contrary to what is stated)."
The GWPF document:
"The error
A significant problem in the use of the Met Office’s HadCM3 climate model has been
identified and described by independent climate scientist Nic Lewis.
Lewis’s report on the subject has been acknowledged by the Met Office, which has indicated that it
will respond in due course.
The error, assuming it is substantiated, has important implications for UK policy. The
HadCM3 model underpins the current version of the official UK Government climate
projections, known as UKCP09. HadCM3 was also used in the previous version,
UKCIP02, as well as being used in the Met Office’s regional modelling system and,
until recently, its decadal forecasting system.
In this section, a detailed description of the error..."
What am I missing?
James
The wording in the report is "an error in the use of the model".
For sale.... state of the art games computer, pre-loaded games included.
A bit OT but I never realised my old supervisor had signed up to one of Bobs old moans about the Great Global Warming Swindle in 2007. (I thought that was a pretty well made thought provoking program)
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/channel4/openletter.html
I definitely lose respect for people on his list, especially the ones I know.
'Ultimately there is nothing in the GWPF article which undermines UKCP09 or the way climate models, including the Met Office’s HadCM3, project future temperature changes.' even if true the problem remains the models 'failure' undermines them. Remember repeated mistakes in long term forecasts , which by 'lucky chance' favoured AGW, caused the MET to stop making this forecasts public .
There in it because they been so wrong so often and its leadership have become political players leaving the actual science behind, If the MET dies when 'the cause ' falls it really only as itself to blame .
"UKCP09 used a sophisticated method that used both model projections and observations to provide a range of potential future warming which attempts to take in the uncertainties in model parameters."
A simple sentence which makes precisely clear why the Met Office should be shut down now. That the Met Office is incapable of writing ordinary English can be taken as a given. That it should offer such self-evident gobbledegook in its defense makes plain it is staffed either by half-wits or the desperate, perhaps both.
Either way, it is pitiful stuff.
agouts, as someone who has spent half a lifetime sending reports back to their authors to be re-written in clear English, (several times if necessary), I could not have put it better myself.
There's a sound in the distance - like a fat lady starting to sing.
Richard? Richaaaard? Hellloooo??? Richard, are you there?
Hello? Hello? Richaaaaaaaard...
I hope that every MP, including those strange types at the. DECC, receive a simplified abstract of this paper.
Sep 23, 2013 at 9:44 PM | James Evans
...
James, this, to me, implies that the method of application of the model by the UKMO requires to be substantiated.
"Astonishingly lightweight" is true of much of what the Met Office produces.
Take for example their pride in their 'forecast accuracy' - ie
"At the time of writing this blog, the Met Office is beating all of its forecast accuracy targets. As an example, 87.7% of our next day maximum temperature forecasts are accurate to within 2C. The target is 80%.
The Met Office is consistently recognised by the World Meteorological Organization as one of the top two most accurate operational forecasters in the world."
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/the-spectator-how-accurate-is-the-met-office/
So they only have to be +/- 2C and then only 80% of the time to achieve their targets!!!
And wasn't 2C the magic number we should all be fearful of -
“It’s now clear that man-made greenhouse gases are causing climate change. The rate of change began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long-term.”
“It’s a problem we all share, because every single country will be affected. Together, today, we must take action to adapt to it and stop it — or, at least, slow it down.”
“What will happen if we don’t reduce emissions?
If emissions continue to grow at present rates, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is likely to reach twice pre-industrial levels by around 2050. Unless we limit emissions, global temperature could rise as much as 7 °C above pre-industrial temperature by the end of the century and push many of the world’s great ecosystems (such as coral reefs and rainforests) to irreversible decline.
Even if global temperatures rise by only2 °C it would mean that 20–30% of species could face extinction. We can expect to see serious effects on our environment, food and water supplies, and health.”
http://hro001.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/uk-met-quick_guide.pdf
That was the propaganda pushed out back in October 2009 in the run-up to Copenhagen.
(yep the same document with that incredibly exaggerated hockey stick)
And yet when that booklet was produced there had been no warming for over a decade.
Oh, and the quote above
"Unless we limit emissions, global temperature could rise as much as 7 °C above pre-industrial temperature by the end of the century"
was taken from the actual booklet distributed free at the time (of which I still have a copy), interesting that the on line version was amended to
"This is very likely to commit the Earth to an eventual global temperature rise of 1.8–6.4 °C"
but then we're used to such dishonesty from the Met.Office!!!
Verily, in every word agouts speaks to the actuality.
I wonder how this compares to the null method of predicting tomorrow's maximum temperature to be within +/- 2C of today's, or some other method that doesn't entail a highly-paid attempt to model every gnat fart on Earth.
Perhaps the MO could publish a cost per percentage point improvement over such a method.
With Comical Bob saying "This is a political stunt by Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation to try to distract attention from the IPCC report." it is often what goes unsaid that is most interesting.
If what the GWPF and Nic Lewis have done is a political stunt then the IPCC report is political too, the process of writing it is political, the science is politicised due to the way gate keeping, funding issues and the consensus method perverts the outcome, the SPM is influenced by politicians and the SPM is then jumped on by governments with a catalogue of vested interests. Bob would rather the politics was one way only - the way that lines his pockets.
I'm sure the Bishop has plenty of readers whose cultural background is in a language other than English, so I will point out that the headline comes from this poem by Stevie Smith.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
RoHa
Although, for practical purposes, I consider English to be my first language I was unaware of Stevie Smith. Thank you for prompting an interesting digression through Wikipedia.
Rob Burton,
I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments regarding the signatories of those who sought to oppress discussion of CAGW by condemning Martin Durkin.
I'm also slightly amused at how Ward's name stands out among the academically qualified (albeit gullible) he suckered into co-signing his mercenary rant: 22 profs, 13 docs, 2 RS, one @ret_
wardAndrew, Australia's ABC 24H news channel has just shown about 10 seconds of you talking about climate uncertainties. They are uber warmists, but must have been stung by criticisms of their bias, and a realization that with the new Abbot government the rules have changed.
You came across well BTW.
A simple sentence which makes precisely clear why the Met Office should be shut down now. That the Met Office is incapable of writing ordinary English can be taken as a given. That it should offer such self-evident gobbledegook in its defense makes plain it is staffed either by half-wits or the desperate, perhaps both.
Either way, it is pitiful stuff.
Sep 23, 2013 at 10:39 PM | Unregistered Commenteragouts
Nothing new for the MO, here they get an award for it.
"Met Office shamed at Plain English awards
An attempt by the Met Office to justify the inaccuracy of its weather forecasts has been picked out as one of this year's worst examples of gobbledegook, at the annual Plain English Campaign awards.
By Matthew Moore
6:14PM GMT 09 Dec 2008
The national weather forecaster was shamed for posting message on its website which explained in 45 words what could have been said in three: "We're not sure.""
"Seasonal forecasts indicate how slowly-varying large-scale climate influences make particular seasonal conditions more likely than others. Random, unpredictable factors ('chaos') also partly determine year-to-year variations, and these will sometimes override large-scale influences. Such uncertainty makes a probabilistic format, as used here, advisable for seasonal forecasts," it read.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3691669/Met-Office-shamed-at-Plain-English-awards.html
Mick
"This is a political stunt by Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation to try to distract attention from the IPCC report."
The correct statement is:
"This is a political stunt by Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation to try to focus attention on the deeply flawed substance of the IPCC report rather than the facile headlines claiming we are doomed the IPCC were hoping to garner."
Nice one,Agouts, I spent a considerable portion of my adult life marking essays and, like you, returning many of them to be made comprehensible. The paragraph you referred to brings to mind very bright students attempting to cover their own depth of ignorance acquired through a lack of study leading them into attempts to blind me with flowery verbosity.
My copy of Strunk and White (my go-to text on academic writing of English) had very pungent things to say about such practices.
"At the time of writing this blog, the Met Office is beating all of its forecast accuracy targets. As an example, 87.7% of our next day maximum temperature forecasts are accurate to within 2C. The target is 80%."
So how much has it improved in the last (say) 25 years. When did the best improvements happen and at what cost?
I had a quick look at the Met office claims of success linked above. Their targets are just meaningless figures plucked out of the air (and considerably less impressive when looking at precipitation, which is based upon 3-hour forecasts). In medicine, you would expect a placebo condition of some sort as a baseline against a drug that is being testsed. For predicting the weather, I would want to know how much better the Met office does against simpler predictions, such as 'tomorrow will be the same as today'. If I was one of the supposedly highly qualified rocket scientists at the Met Office, I would know that this sort of test is necessary, so why isn't it there. Another dog that didn't bark at nighttime Dr Watson.
87.7% of our next day maximum temperature forecasts are accurate to within 2C
I wonder how this compares to the null method of predicting tomorrow's maximum temperature to be within +/- 2C of today's, or some other method that doesn't entail a highly-paid attempt to model every gnat fart on Earth.
Perhaps the MO could publish a cost per percentage point improvement over such a method.
Sep 24, 2013 at 12:21 AM | Unregistered CommenterJake Haye
Taking a UK site (Waddington) and a year (2005) at random from the ecad v1.1 database, your null method would have worked on 209 days out of 364, a 57.4% success rate.
RoHa,
Thanks for the cultural reference on Stevie Smith, who was unknown to some of us whose first language is "American English" (I know, some say that's an oxymoron).
"At the time of writing this blog, the Met Office is beating all of its forecast accuracy targets. As an example, 87.7% of our next day maximum temperature forecasts are accurate to within 2C. The target is 80%.
Their beyond 5 day forecast is even worse. Have a look at their site for your town. They offer a temp range for both max and min which would cover them if winter or full summer arrived on those days.
Hi Andrew,
Just to let you know you made it on to New Zealand tv news in a report on the pause and the upcoming IPCC report.
You came across really well, and, even more importantly were used as the closing argument which is huge in the context of the usual alarmist coverage.
"The GWPF article fails to note that UKCP09 also used information from many other climate models, and that the projections were independently reviewed prior to publication."
Lets forget about observational data and model validity, just stick to models and play games - yup its the Met Office again!
The Met Office response is meaningless waffle but the overall impression for the uninformed is that there is no problem with the model. However, for those who understand what this is all about, it is the most appalling garbage, not what you would expect from a so called world class organisation.
I hope the GWPF, Nic Lewis and His Grace will keep up the pressure.
Their short-term forecasts change throught the day and week and very often the later forecasts utterly contradict the earlier. So do they really use the right method for their short-term success rate calculation? For their seasonal forecasts, which are usually 100% wrong, I'm used to them issuing an after the fact hindcast and attempting to pretend it was a forecast. It has got to the point where I get more useful information by just looking out the window and making my own guess.
I remember a documentary from 1992 or thereabouts where the Met Office were very clear in stating that pretty much all wild weather in the UK was linked to the Jetstream. Where did these people go?
87.7% of our next day maximum temperature forecasts are accurate to within 2C
So 1 out of 8 next day maximum temperature forecasts are wrong by MORE than 2deg C !
The prime reason why the Met Office models are wrong is because the aerosol optical physics originating from Sagan is wrong. He misintterpreted van der Hulst's empirical data. In 2004, NASA killed off the only true competitive aerosol optical physics of Twomey so as to get AR4; the claim that AGW was being hidden by aerosol cooling. Twomey had warned of a second optical effect for thicker clouds which means large droplets control albedo.
Slingo is a cloud physics specialist, apparently. The Met Office had better stock up with fresh supplies of seaweed whilst the present people are in charge - that'll give the forecasters something to use which isn't compromised by blind ideology from the apparently scientifically challenged.
Wonder if Nic Lewis's comment will ever show up on the Met Office blog?
Flesch Reading Ease figure (0-100; higher the better) 18.47. Agouts' comment 59.91!
Says it all!
But then you have to assume that what they write is meant to be understood by real people which is not necessarily the case.
Incidentally, for anyone else wanting to play this game try this link
Bob Ward was quoted as saying:-
This is a political stunt by Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation to try to distract attention from the IPCC report.
Actually, far from distracting attention from the IPCC report it is more likely to make people study its conclusions carefully. That is exactly what people like Bob Ward don't want. They want the conclusions to be accepted. They do not want them to be examined too closely first.
This is an interesting observation about aerosols
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/22/the-eruption-over-the-ipcc-ar5/
@Don Keiller: the 'homeostatic control system' is very fast acting in its Proportional and Derivative aspects. This is because it keeps SW in = OLR so the effect of cooling from bare aerosols is countered actively; a timeconstant of less than a day.
The Integral part is connected to ENSO. In total, the planet reacts in surprising ways over varying time scales. Because the working fluid is CO2, it has, in my view, no effect over a considerable range so long as atmospheric mass is constant. That variation is responsible for major climate variation, e.g. Devonian compared with now.
As a rough and ready test of the 'Farmers' Forecast' method I had a little browse of HaCEt daily maxima for this year, predicting tomorrow will be the same temperature as today gives us the following accuracies:
January: 83.9%
February: 89.3%
March: 80.6%
April: 83.3%
May: 83.9%
Got a little bit bored there, but it would seem that the "old farmers' forecast" easily surpasses the stringent Met Office targets, which begs the question who set the targets and how were they allowed to get away with such lax targets?
Perhaps 87.7% is not so impressive after all...
From the mail article;
"Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics,..."
Since when??
Jake Haye
I have too much time on my hands at the moment, I downloaded the CET daily maximum data from 1878 to present. After a bit of formatting as it's not in a format to assist the work (31 days for every month) I can answer your question
The max temperature for the next day is within +/- 2'C of the max for today 70% of the time. I think that the MO achieves it slightly better results by knowing when changes are about to happen, cyclone to anti-cyclone and vice versa, I reckon you could do better if you have a mate in Dingle or Bantry and contacted them every evening to see if a change was due in Central England the next day. I'm not sure how much local conditions affect the data either, a clear day in a series of cloudy days or a cloudy day in a series of sunny days.
@Rightwinggit.
"Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics,..." is a missprint. It actually should read:
"Bob Ward, a climate change propagandist at the London School of Economics,..."
It's their standard method - issue a vague "forecast" with a wide range, then widen it even further by claiming "accurate" within a margin of error which is added to the original range of forecast, so that "accurate" becomes meaningless.
Then claim that this "accuracy" validates their CAGW models when they supposedly show changes of less than 1 deg. C.
It is my experience that very bright Ph.D. types can nevertheless be guilty of muddled thinking and be incapable of logic. Nic Lewis (who does not suffer from these problems) point is simple: if they vary only one thing at a time they can't discover that a low sensitivity model with low aerosol forcing gives a good result. But even this sentence will zoom right over their heads.
Thanks, Mike J, for the Flesch test website. Interesting, as I write fairly technical reports on securitisation / asset-backed securities and still managed to get a 40.03 mark ! Gunning Fog, which is presumably related to some of the mathsy stuff came in at 16.54 years, however, so my prose is clearly not meant for under 21s.
I do wonder whatever happened to the policy of engaging with the public to explain the science, oh how I miss those halcyon days. Is it time for another trip to Exeter yet Bish?
I was surprised by the target error margin, this appears extremely large especially when one takes account that this covers all seasons. Consider, for example, the winter months average daily temperature, a 2 degree difference is a huge margin of error on such small numbers.
Is the reason why they have such wide error margins that it supports their securing their performance bonuses. If only one could be judged by such whopping errors in the private sector!