Discussion > Let's get real about climate models
Martin A
Incidentally, the adjustment you mentioned in your 9.30 post made no statistically significant difference to the warming rate.
Entropic man
Entropic man
Martin A
Found this at ATTP.
We are now reasonably sure that relative humidity remains roughly constant as we warm. This then allows us to constrain the role water vapour and indicates that it will have a net positive effect (it will amplify warming
Thought you might be interested.
Entropic man
Hello? Crisis?
Simon Hopkinson
Entropic man: I have asked what I think is quite a simple question, but you do seem to avoid answering it, and it would appear that I am not the only one whose patience is wearing thin. While references to back your belief would be useful, they are not absolutely necessary, so just give one – ONE – climate crisis that you feel we are plunging towards. Failing that, just give ONE (1) climate crisis that has already occurred (note: extreme weather events do not apply – it has to be an identifiably climate-related crisis).
Radical Rodent
My patience with/tolerance of the trolls has never been good, I accept that, but for the sake of making the conversations we have actually count for anything I think there should at least be some tangible TERRIBLE THING™ that we're worrying about or sleepwalking into.
There just doesn't seem to be any point in wasting time or effort on the "concerns" of Raff, Endoscopic Man or And Then There's Psychosis if there's nothing REAL to worry about. Everything they're panicking about exists in their minds, as far as I can tell, and nowhere else.
Simon Hopkinson
Entropic man.
Done.
Just wonder why you place more reliance on a model of 5ft above the surface than real data from a large part of the atmosphere?
SandyS
Simon Hopkinson
I think they only answer those they regard as their intellectual inferiors.
SandyS
SandyS: is that a compliment? Why, thank you – though I would rather you had used more impressive comparators.
Radical Rodent
As for the insistence on calling into doubt the accuracy of the satellite sensors, perhaps we should be more interested in their uniformity – is the reading at the end of the series comparable with that at the beginning? How is the accuracy of the sensors determined, and, if there is drift in the accuracy, how is that being determined, and how is it being corrected? If (how big an If?) there has been no drift, then the trend is accurate, irrespective of what the readings actually are, and irrelevant to what you want it to be.
Radical Rodent
Your climate conspiracy has fiddled the result to REDUCE the warming rate.
Jan 23, 2016 at 9:47 AM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
EM - *My* "climate conspiracy"?
Previously you said "Are you seriously suggesting that the output of thousands of scientists over 200 years is a deliberate plot by "them" to control the world?" but you did not point out where I had said anything like that;
I refer you to what I said previously to Raff:
I have no reason not to believe that both images were presented by NASA and that the temperatures were changed for what seemed to the people making the changes correct, rational and useful improvements in the quality of the data.But changes like that seem always to involve the past being made cooler and recent times being made warmer. In anything that involves subjective judgements, it is very hard - impossible really - avoid preconceptions of what the data should show from affecting the way it is changed. Things that turn out as you expect them to turn out tend to be accepted much less critically than things that turn out the opposite of what you expect. It's how the human mind works.
Martin A
Martin ACourtesy o Eli Rabbett, combined post 1880 temperature data. The raw NOAA data is the pale blue line.
Note that the postwar data has hardly changed, but the prewar adjusted data is much warmer than the raw data.
Your climate conspiracy has fiddled the result to REDUCE the warming rate.
Jan 23, 2016 at 9:47 AM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
That's right. It seems NOAA fiddled their result so that it matched the Gistemp and Hadcrut records, to get rid of the embarrassing discrepancy.
(As in "We'd better get our story straight"...?)
Martin A
Raff, Endoscopic Man or And Then There's Psychosis
Subtle, very subtle. Kudos. Does anyone know if there is some kind of "shakes head" emoticon (or something else that might be appropriate).
...and Then There's Physics
EM, you-know-who is probably smoking crack again. Not only is specific humidity not constant, neither is relative humidity, especially where it matters most, in the upper atmosphere (where satellites and radiosondes can measure it, lol).
Science of Doom had an article a few years ago The Strange Case of Stratospheric Water Vapor, Non-linearities and Groceries.
Once more, it's another case of scientific naïfs making assumptions (probably based on equilibrium-thinking) for their conceptual model. Seemingly plausible, but unwarranted assumptions lie at the heart of many, if not most, scientific fails.
michael hart
Sandy, can you explain Homewood's post? The sonde data show a clear upward trend at all altitudes except 40000ft which doesn't really support the satellite data. I commented to that effect over there, but it didn't appear. You obviously thought that it supported the satellite view although maybe since then you've searched out your real skeptic hat, given it a brush and taken a skeptical look - and now you have doubts. If not, can you explain?
Martin, the graphs seem to come from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ and from "Plate 6(b) in Hansen et al. (2001)" referenced there - although the 2001 graph you show is not actually Plate 6(b). It is fairly similar but is strangely different between 1880 and 1900. I guess someone redrew it to put in the blue confidence intervals and screwed up.Or maybe not, who knows, or cares? So your mission now, if you choose to accept it, is to go through the records of what was changed between GHCNv1 (presumably in use in 2001) and GHCNv3 and find some "FRAUD!". Good luck. You may find that you are right and the changes have involved subjective judgements that just happened to go the way the researchers were expecting etc. Or maybe not. My guess is that if your mind is made up about that, whatever the facts, and that others are certain there is something nefarious going on - a conspiracy. A badly organized one, though, as they obviously went to the trouble of exaggerating the slope of the NASA graph and then had to reduce the slope of the NOAA one to fit. Incompetent buggers!
Raff
For those demanding evidence of damage from climate change present or future, I'd ask you simply to name one single person who can be proved to have died of lung cancer because of smoking. Or if you are of a sporting bent, prove that Lance Armstrong won any particular race because he took performance enhancing drugs.
Raff
Found this at ATTP.
We are now reasonably sure that relative humidity remains roughly constant as we warm. This then allows us to constrain the role water vapour and indicates that it will have a net positive effect (it will amplify warming
Thought you might be interested.
Jan 23, 2016 at 10:12 AM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
Thanks EM. A couple of leaps of faith there by good old Attp.
It seems plausible that if the world were to get warmer, the relative humidity of the atmosphere would stay about the same (more water evaporated but greater capacity of the atmosphere to hold water). Would that mean more clouds or fewer clouds? Would more clouds mean more positive feedback or more negative feedback? "Buggered if we know" seems to be the honest answer, though 97% of climate scientists are clearly pinning their hopes on it turning out to be +ve.
The page at Attp points to a short video of a guy at Texas A&M waffling on about water vapour and climate. Attp repeats the guy's words uncritically, including the great climate myth "clouds trap heat".
While, at night in winter, it can seem colder with a clear sky than with a cloudy sky, this does not necessarily mean that the clouds are "trapping heat". I just don't know why the myth is so widely believed.
Martin A
including the great climate myth "clouds trap heat"
Rather than claiming it's a myth, why not look this up? The basic process is that high-level clouds are cold. They therefore absorb more energy from below than they radiate away into space. Hence, the net effect is that they "trap heat". Low-level clouds tend to reflect incoming radiation, and hence have a cooling influence. Overall, it seems as though the cloud feedback is very slightly positive (a warming influence).
Now, it is possible that some essentially anonymous person on a blog that specialises in science denial might be right, and all the actual experts might be wrong. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that is likely or not.
...and Then There's Physics
Martin,
Actually, did you bother to read your own link? I'll even copy the relevant bit below
High clouds are much colder than low clouds and the surface. They radiate less energy to space than low clouds do. The high clouds in this image are radiating significantly less thermal energy than anything else in the image. Because high clouds absorb energy so efficiently, they have the potential to raise global temperatures. In a world with high clouds, much of the energy that would otherwise escape to space is captured in the atmosphere. High clouds make the world a warmer place. If more high clouds were to form, more heat energy radiating from the surface and lower atmosphere toward space would be trapped in the atmosphere, and Earth’s average surface temperature would climb.
...and Then There's Physics
Subtle, very subtle. Kudos. Does anyone know if there is some kind of "shakes head" emoticon (or something else that might be appropriate).I trust you know it's only banter. :) I don't get upset by EM calling me Hodgkinson or those of an alarmed disposition calling us "septics" (though I think "denier" is loaded and inappropriate).
There's no common emoticon, ASCII or otherwise, AFAIK but the acronym "smh" is fairly commonly understood to mean "shaking my head" but can be mistaken for Australia's "Sunday Morning Herald". For those of us with a sceptical disposition, of course, these can be synonymous and interchangeable.
Simon Hopkinson
I trust you know it's only banter.
Honestly, no I it's not what I took it to be. If how you've conducted yourself on this thread is some indication of how you behave in real life, then I really hope I never have the misfortune to actually encounter you. I say that with utter sincerity.
...and Then There's Physics
Ah ATTP - you are back I see.
I haven't actually read this yet, but it may answer your question.
Jan 16, 2016 at 5:07 PM | Unregistered Commenter...and Then There's PhysicsAttp - Thank you but I don't see how an article that *you have not read* can tell me what *you* mean by "boundary conditions".
I'm still interested to know what you mean by "boundary conditions". The fact that you evidently consider "initial conditions" as being something different (rather than just a boundary condition for t = 0) seems to indicate that, for you, they are something different from what is normally understood in formulating systems of partial differential equations.
Care to enlighten us, so we can make sense of what you were on about about systems being deterministic?
Martin A
Honestly, no I it's not what I took it to be. If how you've conducted yourself on this thread is some indication of how you behave in real life, then I really hope I never have the misfortune to actually encounter you. I say that with utter sincerity.
Oh well, suck it up. [snip- venting]
Simon Hopkinson
Martin,
I provided you with a link - that I've now had a chance to read - that explains it quite clearly and that is written by someone who has extensive expertise in this topic. If that wasn't good enough for you, then I probably can't say anything that will be any better.
Also, I have little confidence that your question is honest (apologies if it really is). I fully expect that your question is entirely motivated by a desire to now engage in a pedantic discussion about terminology. One give-away, is that if you understand the basics of computational physics, you could actually present your own views, rather than continually insisting that I answer your question. You could, of course, correct your misunderstanding of clouds, as an indication that I might be wrong in my general impression.
The fact that you evidently consider "initial conditions" as being something different (rather than just a boundary condition for t = 0)
I don't see why you've concluded this. The initial conditions clearly are the values at t = 0. Of course, some quantities evolve in time, some are fixed, and some change in time but in a pre-determined way (i.e., they're external, such as solar insolation, for example). The key point is that if you want to make some kind of weather prediction, then the initial conditions are crucial. The climate (or some suitably defined average) on the other hand, is expected to depend less on the precise initial conditions and more on the quantities that constrain the energy flows.
...and Then There's Physics
Martin A
Too early in the morning for me.! Look at the second graph here.