Bishop Hill Falsifiability in my lifetime
Jan 16, 2014 Climate: Models An article on the Nature website looks at the failure of global temperatures to rise in line with the climate models and finds a possible explanation in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I notice what may be the start of a new meme emerging:
...none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
The idea that the predictions of climate models are only good over periods this long seems to represent a considerable upping of the ante, but it's one that I have heard elsewhere in recent days - if I remember correctly it was also mentioned by David Kennedy in his evidence to the Energy and Climate Change Committee. In the past, the community has stood by a period of 30 years (at least when it suited them), but it may well be that the public start to realise that the models have been running hot over periods of several decades, the climate modelling community has been forced to extend the limits.
100 years should ensure that all concerned make it to retirement.
Reader Comments (202)
It also puts them conveniently into the domain where no living person can gainsay them from memory of failed model predictions. (Not that that prevents them from changing the predictions as they go along.)
It's ... worse than we thought. Explaining everything with "natural cycles" and "natural variability" plus "internal variability".
You can't explain away holes in your own bloody theory with "natural variability".
Just in time for:-
Decadal forecast
Will it be a decadal forecast or will it be like last year, a 5 year long decadal forecast?
Will it take into account "we are not out of the woods yet"?
What is he talking about? What underlying models? What underlying laws? What is the legacy of some 20 years of toil?
You couldn't make it up...
Oh, hang on....
If I recall 10 years of Hansen's data presented in 1988 was sufficient for those who swore the world would end in a ball of fire.
One suggestion is “stall”. What are some others?
Jan 16, 2014 at 11:22 AM Douglas J. Keenan
Halt
Standstill
Cessation
Jan 16, 2014 at 12:47 PM | Registered CommenterMartin A
Seeing as David Kennedy in his evidence to Tim Yeo's "Energy and Climate Change Committee" was in cherry-picking mode, then so am I. The monthly RSS satellite temperature record since early 1998 suggests that temperatures are in a "trough". (Well, something, or someone, is.... and it sounds a better description than googled suggestions like "ditch", or "gutter", or taking a "cut".)
So, let's see: a storm in the Pacific that is well within historical norms is *proof* of AGW.
But the failure of models to predict a halt to temperature increases for over 15 years is not a failure of the models they rely on.
Sure. Pull the other one.
I knew I was right when I first heard about Hansen spouting his crap 25 years ago.
One suggestion is “stall”. What are some others?
Jan 16, 2014 at 11:22 AM Douglas J. Keenan
Halt
Standstill
Cessation
Jan 16, 2014 at 12:47 PM | Registered CommenterMartin A
This warming is no more!
It has ceased to be!
It's expired and gone to meet its maker!
This is an ex-warming!
If you imagine that the Earth's climate is a complex filter, then any sharp change in the input would result in a settling down period (depending on the filter time constant and type of filter).
So perhaps this pause, halt, hiatus, plateau should be called a settling down period.
There again if you are not drunk on CO2, you might think this was just natural variability.
@ Doug Keenan
Skeptics should adopt a more neutral term, I think. One suggestion is “stall”. What are some others?
Mean reversion?
Sundance-
"If I recall 10 years of Hansen's data presented in 1988 was sufficient for those who swore the world would end in a ball of fire."
Hansen was dead certain of his models in 1981, with 15 years of warming, starting at the depths of the Agung VEI 5 volcanic eruption temperature dip. The warming trend has since been adjusted away from the record.
It is interesting that Guy Callendar's model from 1938 continues to perform better than most of the state-of-the-art climate models. Having just celebrated its 75th anniversary, Callendar's model vintage falls right in the middle of the new accepted timespan.
Apparently there is nothing to be learned from Callendar's choices of parameters, or the relatively low climate sensitivity that it concludes?
Its sounding more and more like Mormonism every day
I keep these golden plates in my hat, and translate them with these stones, and nobody else is allowed to see them, and only I can translate what they say... Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb...
E's passed on! This warming is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker!
'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the IPCC 'e'd be pushing up the daisies!
'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig!
'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-WARMING!!
Sorry Paul M.
Susan Solomon? Dangerously ambitious senior IPCC rottweiler as-was if I remember correctly what Donna wrote.
Or maybe I'm quite wrong.
But 97% of me says not.
Re: Pause/whatever: When I suggested 'Peak', I hadn't taken into consideration the current use of this word, as in 'Peak Oil' - and we all know what's happening there. So maybe 'Peak' has been corrupted in this context. [grin]
Pooh & Piglet would increase the intellectual hp of the warmist fraternity manyfold
My concern is that once they start predicting temperatures won't go up for a while, then we can count on them to go up!
@ Harry Passfield 1140am
"...a distinct possibility this could be the point we go over the hump"
A Tipping Point no less
Pining for the glaciers.
=============
Flatlining and heading for a triple dip.
"100 years should ensure that all concerned make it to retirement", just about sums up the whole sorry affair from the beginning. I once posted on the BBC ( now defunct) weather forum, that the debacle was due to the emergence of ever more sophisticated software within a decade or so that rendered unreliable all that came before it. I was ridiculed by the CAGW brigade at the time with their usual viciousness, but I now realise that my common sense view was right all along.
Well, kiddoes, one of the reasons for my hunch that this pause is a peak is a bit of nice icecore, which shows the peaks of the previous Holocene Optimae to be slowly declining. By this scenario, the Modern Warm Period will peak a little lower than the Medieval Warm Period, which peaked a little lower than the Roman Warm Period, and so on ad the beginning of the Holocene.
If the Holocenic pattern is determined by natural forces, and who says it isn't, and if the pattern is from millenial scale solar cycles, then the forthcoming grand or lesser solar minimum may well produce cooling, antiphase from the recovery from the LIA.
Climate science, and its sorceror's apprentices may soon be overwhelmed, and may the brooms sweep clean.
===============
Keenan, regarding the halt/hiatus/stall/pause description:
Plateau is an excellent word. Geographically, the plateau could be merely a pause in the climb up the hill, or it could be the top of a mesa (southwestern US reference) - fog obscures what lies ahead.
It's the sneak curve ball now being played, a metamorphosing of the long ball game.
Hansen's crazy man appearance at that congressional hearing in 88 told us everything was pointing to the planet boiling over and "soon man - very soon!"
Prince Charles told us that, "we only have 100 months to save the planet!"
That twerp 'rent a quote' - Prof' Wadhams of somewhere in Cambridge told us and in no uncertain terms that, "sea ice will be gone" come 20..07....13......[choose a date].
97% of 30 scientists tell us, "All of the models predicted"............blah, blah, blah blah and so it goes on to Solomon.
Solomon, now weighs in and tells us there's no need to panic in the immediate future but it [boiling planet] will happen in some 50 or 100 years or so.
Implication being, "keep taking the medicine" and maybe, just maybe save the future of your great, great, great grandchildren:
Whatever will be will be.
Mind you, the great scam has already nigh on bankrupted the western world.
"Gadzooks it's worse than we thought" here though, what with Britain racing to the bottom more quickly thanks to the 2008 CCA and coalition green agenda policies like the carbon floor price still firmly on track to kill off what remains of our manufacturing and industry. A "back to the land" as the end game for the greens, will possibly come sooner than you think, all thanks to our loony tunes MPs. I mean, who cares what happens in fifty or, even a hundred years when you can
obliterate the industrial base of your countrygreen up sooner?Seen Figueres' latest? No conspiracy necessary, just the old morbid urge.
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@SayNoToFearmongers Jan 16, 2014 at 10:59 AM
Agreed. I really like that comment from Trenberth:
"…Human induced global warming really kicked in during the 1970s, and warming has been pretty steady since then…"
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/22/kevin-trenberth-struggles-mightily-to-explain-the-lack-of-global-warming/
CO2 ?
Em I thought it was supposed to be about the amount of CO2 ..not the amount of time ?
Trend ? All that matters is *
1. That the temperature stays within survivable limits
2. That there is no unrecoverable tipping point
ANY EVIDENCE of that ?.. Have we really seen anything new that never happened before like MWP ?
Get back to me when you are talking about :
1. A proper magazine
2. Proper models that predict reality
3. Scientists who use scientific language ..not Sci-activists talk loaded with spin
4. Science articles with real numbers substantiating the claims, not just "could be's"
@PM Good one how come they quote stuff in per decade instead of quoting per century. That shows they are pushing the short term.
@DJK * The temperatures are what they WERE we can only state what it has done, not what it might do (and not accurately measured), and may not actually mean much any way,
- Picking a trend is a bit of a mugs game partially depending on what time period you pick (rise, plateau, fall)
- What's it matter if the temperature rises for 1000 years and then falls for next 100 years ?
- "stall" No @ptw is right "plateaued" , "levelled off" is better, short term declining ?
- PEAK ..haha cheeky ..but known peak warming has passed as @PTW says
..Nature uses "Global Warming Hiatus" in the article title
- Can we say "X years is a trend ..any less is noise ?"
@PB right ..floundering
@Tiny "Yes, public think that, but they are wrong. How do elected politiicians get it over to them" paraphrasing "BBC journalist" Justin Rowlatt on BBC Business Daily
@Fred spot on "If a theory cannot be falsified for 100 years then the theory should not be used to make public policy until 100 years.have passed."
@Ratty - Yes "The deniers haven't seen the proof of CAGW that is written on the golden tablets, that God took back"
@Chris Wright - yeh why´s it different from any other historic warming period ?
BTW see how
- when it suits them :
They'll tout the short term "Oh my God, rain, heatwave, cyclone, snow"
- when it suits them :
Theyll disown the shown term "it's only weather ! it's not enough time for a trend"
: CHERRYPICKERS with excuses, not genuine scientists out to disprove their own theories, which is how proper science works.
NQuote : "The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability."
Flippers are saying that when models results are wrong it's the fault of nature !
as WUWT commenter says simplest is that models are BS
Jesus, then they attribute Haiyan
Trenberth says. “At some point" water will slosh back and temperature SPIKE ...Em why couldn't it just gently rise ?
Anywhere where's the catastrophe ? ..it could just fall again
- Other scientists have hypotheses : Trenberth has excuses.
...Where will his future calamity be hiding next time ?
The warmist's say : "anyway it is not the fault of our science .. It's that we can't get the urgency over in the media !"
Actions have consequences, that come back on you.
..Be absolutely certain about something and then be proved wrong, then you'll suffer :
..unless you are a Banker or Green Activist
We reached Peak Warming 18y ago.
Just like financial markets, temperature trends only go in one direction.
.. I know that for certain !
- Has someone like Trenberth made any predictions that have paid off ?
Business and agriculture benefits from short term weather predicitions, but has any benefitted from predictions of patterns that run into years and decades ?
"“If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,”
Being an honest lass and a genuine scientist she will certainly have spent the period since Hansen pronounced on CAGW (2-6C and 1-4 ft of sea level rise by 2050) in 1998 based on a trend from 1979, denouncing him and his alarmist supporters as not being real scientists.
Or not as the case may be.
Just remember that these "models" are still running hot (= failing miserably) even when compared with the constantly "adjusted" (= fiddled) temperature datasets.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/18/hansens-nasa-giss-cooling-the-past-warming-the-present/
These people are fraudsters.
I did a course on climatology at University of Aberdeen about 37 years ago and learned then that The Pacific Ocean controlled Earth's climate. It is therefore incredible that climate science is only just awakening to this reality and to the reality of natural cycles. Accepting the Nature report as "fact" has consequence that all climate models are wrong (we knew that already) and their replication of past climate change as "fraud" - basically tuning variables to produce the desired outcome and calling it science. Without including natural cycles they can have no predictive power.
The PDO 60 year oscillation is only one of a number of natural cycles that climate models currently lack. A more important one is the 1000±500 year Bond / DO cycle. IF the Bond 2001 data are reliable (and they are contested) then what they describe is periodic ingress of the Labrador current into the N Atlantic and this truncates the Gulf Stream correlating with cold periods in NW Europe. A simplistic view of the consequence would be less evaporation from the Gulf Stream in the N Atlantic leading to reduced GH warming and regional cooling.
I discuss some of this in The Ice Man Cometh and a modified version of the key chart showing Bond cycles is here.
Let's face it, in any scientific field other than climate "science", if one piece of evidence failed your hypothesis, you would throw it out and start again (see Feynman). When lots of pieces of evidence fail your hypothesis, then it is akin to scientific fraud to continue to make up arbitrary reasons off the top of your head as to why the hypothesis remains valid.
There is an official unit of time, the Hermie, which is used in situations like this. Clive James, at the BBC, described it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8408386.stm
One suggestion is “stall”. What are some others?
Jan 16, 2014 at 11:22 AM Douglas J. Keenan
Halt
Standstill
Cessation
@Jan 16, 2014 at 12:47 PM | Martin A
===================================================================
How about "cooling"?
retreating rise?
tonyb
In her 2010 paper on the reduction since 2000 of stratospheric water vapour by 25%, Solomon claimed that this reduction of pH2O had allowed more IR energy to escape to Space thus reducing warming. In so doing she let slip a key part of the mistaken mindset of Climate Alchemists. The reality is that there is a spectral transition for poorly mixed H2O which, above a critical altitude, sets its spectral temperature and that part of OLR. That this exists also shows there can be no thermalisation of IR energy above Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium. A corollary is that the Tyndall experiment has been misinterpreted so there is no 'missing heat'.
"When lots of pieces of evidence fail your hypothesis, then it is akin to scientific fraud to continue to make up arbitrary reasons off the top of your head as to why the hypothesis remains valid."
As I've said before, with apparently $1Billion being spent every day on climate research and 'low carbon' technologies, there are a _lot_ of vested interests in keeping the bandwagon rolling.
It would take a rare honest but brave scientist to step out of line and tell the truth.
Bishophill,
Solomon is following what seems to be a new game plan for climatologists. It was originally introduced by David Kennedy during during a UK Parliament committee hearing (starting at 10:20:20 in the video recording available at http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/1/8/deben-and-kennedy-sinking-fast.html) made a claim that the climate models do not involve short times scales under 50 years. They are trying to “play a blinder”, not too many of us will be here when the time is up for the model verification in Kennedy’s and Solomons terms. In other words, Kennedy is telling us to forget the 15-year-Phil-Jones and 17-year-Santer periods for falsification, and to wait 33 more years (Solomon even more), while in the mean time to trust him and the other “experts” in terms of policy recommendations. All this might seem clever in their eyes since the PDO will most likely switch to a new warming trend by then (although Solomon was not careful with her upper limit) see this graph: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/ipcc-amo-pdo-warming.jpg
The big question is of course why should that 50/100 years period of falsification only apply to falsification of the theory of CO2-induced global warming due to lack of warming, while we are supposed to trust them and their theory in the meanwhile?
To me, such statements are an implicit admission that the science (i.e. the understanding of the basic physical processes and their interactions) is still immature and so cannot provide reliable explanations of past records, nor predictions of future behaviour. As a consequence, any statements about future climate trends or impacts are mere conjecture and therefore irrelevant to major policy discussions.
Other ideas for the current temperature trend:
> Standstill
> Diminuendo....suggests that it is fading away
> Anticline.....not really accurate but suggests anticlimax
I like to refer to it as "last century's warming" which is both accurate and makes it sound historic, long gone.
I recall back in the 70s a trend where corporations did not report a "loss" preferring to post a "negative profit".
There is a lot going on today that reminds me of the 70s
Pause.
Hiatus.
Flat line.
Standstill.
Peak.
Pinnacle.
Plateau.
Stop.
etc etc etc
Precisely none which were predicted by the 'experts' or their models.
So if there's just one thing this debate has absolutely, positively, definitely proven for once and for all, it's that the science is NOT settled!
PS Ask these 'experts' to predict when the Pause they didn't predict will start moving again, why it will move, and for good measure in which direction will the temperature move - up or down? Let's be honest here - they won't have a clue.
Oh go on - have it large:
climate coma
Most of the "no warming" claims I've seen start with the record set in 1998 during the big El Nino event. If the next El Nino event produces a new temperature record, will this be regarded as evidence of warming?
We, the realists, suggested “natural variation” plays a major role in climate change years ago. We were accused of being sceptics, deniers, unscientific and many far more abusive terms.
Now the "real" scientists, the ones that count, say “natural variation” plays a major role in climate change what should we call them?
Considering they have managed to con nearly everyone on the planet, cost the tax payers of many countries huge amounts of money. Through the wisdom of these eminent scientists who convinced pathetically weak politicians to adapt ludicrously inefficient energy policies, which has caused/is causing/will cause fuel poverty and deaths for years to come. I hope you are proud!
Thanks you bast***s.
Climate catatonia?
NeilC
I presume that by natural variation you mean the PDO.
If you want to use the PDO you have a problem. The graph in the Nature article shows that temperatures warm during the "warm" phase and stagnate during the "cold" phase. Since each warm peak is hotter than the one before, there is a long term warming trend.
I ascribe this to cAGW. What other mechanism would you suggest?