You're going back to short term thinking again. If you're working off a 30 year running mean then the "pause" doesn't even come in to play. On top of that "pause" is a misnomer. Ocean warming where over 90% of the added energy always goes has not slowed down. It's also a misnomer because although the slope of the warming curve is lower in the 2000's than it was in the 1980's and 1990's warming has continued. In several of the temperature records 2005 and 2010 are the warmest year and 2014 will likely set a new record once they finish crunching the numbers. Finally as I've said you can't expect a climate model to take into account the effects of natural variability since they're impossible to predict ahead of time. Again I direct you to this article about a paper where they selected model runs that just happened by coincidence to have representations of ENSO closer to real world observations of ENSO and it turned out they also modeled real world temperature better too.
Of course we have detailed temperature records for well over 100 years and you can construct a 30 year running mean for them up to about 2001. We also have climate model output data that covers that time too. It's not that hard to compare the two. As I've said the climate models are doing pretty well.
Speaking of those who hold bitcoins I heard on NPR this morning that there are only about 250,000 people in the world who hold bitcoins. That's not enough people for me to take it seriously.
Restaurants have the ability to ban customers and refuse them entry to the premises (it is private property)...
Restaurants and other "open to the public" businesses have very limited ability to ban customers and refuse them entry (in the US at least). They are not allowed to refuse service on the basis of race, sex, religion, and lately sexual orientation. They can refuse service to people for things like not wearing a shirt.
A climate model isn't based on any time period. It's based on physics.
As I said AGW started in the late 1700's when people started burning significant quantities of fossil fuels. The usage was small enough until the late 1800's/early 1900's that it didn't cause noticeable climate change that can be attributed to anthropogenic effects until sometime in the 1900's.
The falsifiable test for the climate models is obvious. You're just too impatient to wait for it to play out (and I am too for different reasons). The falsifiable test is to compare the 30 year running mean of surface temperature observations to the model output. If the model output gets and stays too far afield of the observations then the model is falsified. So far they haven't.
Hmm... As I suspected you don't really understand climate models and their limitations. Climate models aren't expected to predict a 10 year period. That's more akin to a weather prediction than a climate prediction. As I have said the standard period for climatology is 30 years.
In fact it's impossible at the present time and may never be possible to produce a climate model that would accurately (to your standards) predict a 10 year period. That's because it's impossible to predict ahead of time the natural variability of things like ENSO and volcanic activity (to name a couple of the big ones). If no one can predict ahead of time the phases of ENSO and volcanic activity how can you expect a climate model to factor them in to its predictions.
The thing about natural variability is its mostly quasi-cyclical stuff (with the possible exception of volcanic activity). That is natural variability factors like ENSO and other ocean oscillations cycle from one extreme to the other over time periods that are not precisely predictable but in the long run their effects net out to near zero. 30 years is the minimum time period for that to happen for the most part.
A note on terminology: Climate models make projections, not predictions. I used "predictions" above to avoid confusing you. They are called projections because many of the real world factors that affect climate like natural variability are not predictable ahead of time and how the level of CO2 in the atmosphere rises depends on what we may or may not do to reduce emissions. So they feed realistic simulations of them to the model and the output is a projection of what will happen if the real world matches the simulation. They run the model many times with different realistic simulations to capture the full range of possibilities of the evolution of climate and what the public mostly sees is graphs of all of the model runs averaged together with uncertainty bars that cover the range and variability of the different runs.
The gist of the study is that when they selected individual model runs where the realistic simulations of ENSO coincidentally happened to match well with real time observations of ENSO the models temperature output matched up well with real world observations of temperature (maybe even good enough to satisfy you). When they selected model runs where the realistic simulations least matched the real world the temperature projections were way off.
AGW is not based on temperature observations at all. It's based on the radiative absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide and the expected side effects of that. It started at the dawn of human industrialization in the late 1700's although the effect was small enough until some time in the early 1900's to hardly be noticeable.
No other species laughs (Hyenas' "laughs" aren't from humor)...
This is demonstrably not true. Also, I'm pretty skeptical about saying that at least some animals, particularly our close cousins the great apes don't have a sense of humor. There seems clear evidence they do.
Going back you say "I'm asking you to show me any earth climate model that has been subjected to empirical testing and survived." So far I've been just assuming what you mean by "empirical testing" but why don't you get more specific about what you mean. How close does the temperature output of models need to be to satisfy you? What about precipitation, winds, absolute humidity? What kind of time scales are you using for the comparison?
I have to say as far as my understanding of what climate models are capable of they are working fairly well. For scientists it's not a binary question of whether they're right or wrong but whether they help us better understand the complex interactions that make up the climate. As George Box famously said "All models are wrong but some are useful." I think climate models are more useful than any other approach we have to the problem. You appear to be saying that unless climate model output match observations to your standards then they are worth nothing and we should ignore them. To me they're far from perfect but they're better than anything else we have. And as I've said, the observations still match within the statistical standards climate models set
Also as I went back this quote from you caught my eye:
The Japanese had this experience with Mann's models. They gave him a super computer to test his models on and he couldn't do it. It was pathetic. He had to use plug variables to tell the model what the right answer was in advance. And that was the only way it was able to get close to an accurate prediction.
Now I know you're just making shit up. Michael Mann doesn't have a climate model and never did The hockey stick graph is a temperature reconstruction from proxies with some modern thermometer observations tacked on the end. The statistical analyses he runs on temperature proxies can easily be run on a PC. Maybe someone did what you said but it wasn't Michael Mann.
Unless you've written a climate model yourself I don't think you're qualified to judge the models. I accept the judgement of the people who write the models. You can pontificate on it all you want but until you demonstrate your criteria align with the expectation of the modelers you're just blowing smoke.
We could go back and forth forever because I just don't accept your criteria for model validation. As I've said before observations are still within the range projected by climate models. That's good enough for me. Get back to me when observations are significantly outside of the range of model projections.
if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
provides the basic model. Yes there are lots of complications but the underlying relationship is still there.
I'll go with nearly 200 years of science. Fourier discovered that the Earth was warmer than it should by by simple thermodynamics in the 1820's, Tyndall discovered and quantified the infrared absorption characteristics of various greenhouse gases in the late 1850's. Arrhenius made an explicit statement about the warming caused by CO2 in the 1890's. All science in the field since then has been built on that foundation. At this point I think it's you who needs to provide evidence that it is not true.
CO2 is already doing something "special". Without the presence of greenhouse gases the surface temperature of the Earth would be some 58 degrees F cooler than it is and CO2 is a major part of that. Why would you think additional CO2 would act differently?
“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
Considering that 2005 then 2010 and now 2014 are the warmest years up to that point in several of the major temperature records I don't think the current record conforms to the qualifications of that quote. Warming continues albeit at a lesser rate than in the 1980's and 1990's.
“Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”
What wins ultimately despite anything else is objective reality. You can't avoid that ever. Maybe just put it off for a while but Mother Nature bats last and always wins.
The findings are meaningless only if they don't reflect the objective reality they are reporting.
If you're concerned about the data and methods for Mann, et. al.'s hockey stick graph they have been available for a decade at least. You can find them here. Back when the paper was first published in 1998 the internet was still pretty young and getting stuff like that online wasn't that common yet.
It certainly is possible to use different methods to arrive at the same conclusion.
I think I got that it is an energy balance problem from Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate. He also said that predicting weather in an initial values problem: given the current weather conditions how do we expect it to evolve in the future? That breaks down after a week or two because of chaotic influences. Climate prediction on the other hand is a boundary values problem: what are the boundaries within which weather will vary in the future. Any chaotic effects take place on a much longer time scale than weather and in the short term (less than a century) it very much is an energy balance problem.
I still think you're placing too much importance on the significance of models. It's easy to do and I get caught up in it too sometimes. Yet the Earth continues to accumulate energy, ice keeps melting, sea level continues to rise, changes in the Earth's outgoing longwave radiation point to the increase in greenhouse gases.
Those Japanese scientists you keep bringing up don't represent the whole of Japanese science. The Japanese Meteorological Agency just declared 2014 the warmest year in more than 120 years of record keeping.
I think if you live long enough you will find that climate scientists are getting more right than they are wrong. The effects of warming are becoming more and more obvious as time passes.
That is, I have seen many models that can model past events however they do it by telling the model what the correct answer is and force it to not vary its conclusion much beyond that those values.
Hmm... I haven't seen that but I'm willing to look at where you got that information.
I was going to respond but Geoffry Landis already did better than I could have. I'll just note that you can't ignore that Santer said "at least 17 years".
Slashdot Mirror
You're going back to short term thinking again. If you're working off a 30 year running mean then the "pause" doesn't even come in to play. On top of that "pause" is a misnomer. Ocean warming where over 90% of the added energy always goes has not slowed down. It's also a misnomer because although the slope of the warming curve is lower in the 2000's than it was in the 1980's and 1990's warming has continued. In several of the temperature records 2005 and 2010 are the warmest year and 2014 will likely set a new record once they finish crunching the numbers. Finally as I've said you can't expect a climate model to take into account the effects of natural variability since they're impossible to predict ahead of time. Again I direct you to this article about a paper where they selected model runs that just happened by coincidence to have representations of ENSO closer to real world observations of ENSO and it turned out they also modeled real world temperature better too.
Of course we have detailed temperature records for well over 100 years and you can construct a 30 year running mean for them up to about 2001. We also have climate model output data that covers that time too. It's not that hard to compare the two. As I've said the climate models are doing pretty well.
Speaking of those who hold bitcoins I heard on NPR this morning that there are only about 250,000 people in the world who hold bitcoins. That's not enough people for me to take it seriously.
The Invisible Hand does give the best HJs...
:) I'm going to remember that one.
To avoid confusion for the US readers the liberals in Australia are the equivalent of the Republican Party in the US.
Restaurants have the ability to ban customers and refuse them entry to the premises (it is private property) ...
Restaurants and other "open to the public" businesses have very limited ability to ban customers and refuse them entry (in the US at least). They are not allowed to refuse service on the basis of race, sex, religion, and lately sexual orientation. They can refuse service to people for things like not wearing a shirt.
An activist judge is one who makes a decision you don't like.
A climate model isn't based on any time period. It's based on physics.
As I said AGW started in the late 1700's when people started burning significant quantities of fossil fuels. The usage was small enough until the late 1800's/early 1900's that it didn't cause noticeable climate change that can be attributed to anthropogenic effects until sometime in the 1900's.
The falsifiable test for the climate models is obvious. You're just too impatient to wait for it to play out (and I am too for different reasons). The falsifiable test is to compare the 30 year running mean of surface temperature observations to the model output. If the model output gets and stays too far afield of the observations then the model is falsified. So far they haven't.
Hmm... As I suspected you don't really understand climate models and their limitations. Climate models aren't expected to predict a 10 year period. That's more akin to a weather prediction than a climate prediction. As I have said the standard period for climatology is 30 years.
In fact it's impossible at the present time and may never be possible to produce a climate model that would accurately (to your standards) predict a 10 year period. That's because it's impossible to predict ahead of time the natural variability of things like ENSO and volcanic activity (to name a couple of the big ones). If no one can predict ahead of time the phases of ENSO and volcanic activity how can you expect a climate model to factor them in to its predictions.
The thing about natural variability is its mostly quasi-cyclical stuff (with the possible exception of volcanic activity). That is natural variability factors like ENSO and other ocean oscillations cycle from one extreme to the other over time periods that are not precisely predictable but in the long run their effects net out to near zero. 30 years is the minimum time period for that to happen for the most part.
A note on terminology: Climate models make projections, not predictions. I used "predictions" above to avoid confusing you. They are called projections because many of the real world factors that affect climate like natural variability are not predictable ahead of time and how the level of CO2 in the atmosphere rises depends on what we may or may not do to reduce emissions. So they feed realistic simulations of them to the model and the output is a projection of what will happen if the real world matches the simulation. They run the model many times with different realistic simulations to capture the full range of possibilities of the evolution of climate and what the public mostly sees is graphs of all of the model runs averaged together with uncertainty bars that cover the range and variability of the different runs.
Which brings up a scientific study that was published in Nature last year. Nature is paywalled but here is an article on it by one of its authors.
The gist of the study is that when they selected individual model runs where the realistic simulations of ENSO coincidentally happened to match well with real time observations of ENSO the models temperature output matched up well with real world observations of temperature (maybe even good enough to satisfy you). When they selected model runs where the realistic simulations least matched the real world the temperature projections were way off.
AGW is not based on temperature observations at all. It's based on the radiative absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide and the expected side effects of that. It started at the dawn of human industrialization in the late 1700's although the effect was small enough until some time in the early 1900's to hardly be noticeable.
At first I though you wrote "We could use a few less merkins in the world."
Well, he said a "shit load". And that would depend on the size of the manure spreader he's using.
No other species laughs (Hyenas' "laughs" aren't from humor) ...
This is demonstrably not true. Also, I'm pretty skeptical about saying that at least some animals, particularly our close cousins the great apes don't have a sense of humor. There seems clear evidence they do.
LOL, maybe I deserved that.
Going back you say "I'm asking you to show me any earth climate model that has been subjected to empirical testing and survived." So far I've been just assuming what you mean by "empirical testing" but why don't you get more specific about what you mean. How close does the temperature output of models need to be to satisfy you? What about precipitation, winds, absolute humidity? What kind of time scales are you using for the comparison?
I have to say as far as my understanding of what climate models are capable of they are working fairly well. For scientists it's not a binary question of whether they're right or wrong but whether they help us better understand the complex interactions that make up the climate. As George Box famously said "All models are wrong but some are useful." I think climate models are more useful than any other approach we have to the problem. You appear to be saying that unless climate model output match observations to your standards then they are worth nothing and we should ignore them. To me they're far from perfect but they're better than anything else we have. And as I've said, the observations still match within the statistical standards climate models set
Also as I went back this quote from you caught my eye:
The Japanese had this experience with Mann's models. They gave him a super computer to test his models on and he couldn't do it. It was pathetic. He had to use plug variables to tell the model what the right answer was in advance. And that was the only way it was able to get close to an accurate prediction.
Now I know you're just making shit up. Michael Mann doesn't have a climate model and never did The hockey stick graph is a temperature reconstruction from proxies with some modern thermometer observations tacked on the end. The statistical analyses he runs on temperature proxies can easily be run on a PC. Maybe someone did what you said but it wasn't Michael Mann.
LOL, you didn't prove a damned thing. You're arguing like a lawyer, not a scientist.
Unless you've written a climate model yourself I don't think you're qualified to judge the models. I accept the judgement of the people who write the models. You can pontificate on it all you want but until you demonstrate your criteria align with the expectation of the modelers you're just blowing smoke.
We could go back and forth forever because I just don't accept your criteria for model validation. As I've said before observations are still within the range projected by climate models. That's good enough for me. Get back to me when observations are significantly outside of the range of model projections.
Svante Arrhenius's statement:
if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
provides the basic model. Yes there are lots of complications but the underlying relationship is still there.
I'll go with nearly 200 years of science. Fourier discovered that the Earth was warmer than it should by by simple thermodynamics in the 1820's, Tyndall discovered and quantified the infrared absorption characteristics of various greenhouse gases in the late 1850's. Arrhenius made an explicit statement about the warming caused by CO2 in the 1890's. All science in the field since then has been built on that foundation. At this point I think it's you who needs to provide evidence that it is not true.
CO2 is already doing something "special". Without the presence of greenhouse gases the surface temperature of the Earth would be some 58 degrees F cooler than it is and CO2 is a major part of that. Why would you think additional CO2 would act differently?
“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
Considering that 2005 then 2010 and now 2014 are the warmest years up to that point in several of the major temperature records I don't think the current record conforms to the qualifications of that quote. Warming continues albeit at a lesser rate than in the 1980's and 1990's.
“Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”
Did you notice the part I bolded?
What wins ultimately despite anything else is objective reality. You can't avoid that ever. Maybe just put it off for a while but Mother Nature bats last and always wins.
The findings are meaningless only if they don't reflect the objective reality they are reporting.
If you're concerned about the data and methods for Mann, et. al.'s hockey stick graph they have been available for a decade at least. You can find them here. Back when the paper was first published in 1998 the internet was still pretty young and getting stuff like that online wasn't that common yet.
It certainly is possible to use different methods to arrive at the same conclusion.
I think I got that it is an energy balance problem from Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate. He also said that predicting weather in an initial values problem: given the current weather conditions how do we expect it to evolve in the future? That breaks down after a week or two because of chaotic influences. Climate prediction on the other hand is a boundary values problem: what are the boundaries within which weather will vary in the future. Any chaotic effects take place on a much longer time scale than weather and in the short term (less than a century) it very much is an energy balance problem.
I still think you're placing too much importance on the significance of models. It's easy to do and I get caught up in it too sometimes. Yet the Earth continues to accumulate energy, ice keeps melting, sea level continues to rise, changes in the Earth's outgoing longwave radiation point to the increase in greenhouse gases.
Those Japanese scientists you keep bringing up don't represent the whole of Japanese science. The Japanese Meteorological Agency just declared 2014 the warmest year in more than 120 years of record keeping.
I think if you live long enough you will find that climate scientists are getting more right than they are wrong. The effects of warming are becoming more and more obvious as time passes.
That is, I have seen many models that can model past events however they do it by telling the model what the correct answer is and force it to not vary its conclusion much beyond that those values.
Hmm... I haven't seen that but I'm willing to look at where you got that information.
I was going to respond but Geoffry Landis already did better than I could have. I'll just note that you can't ignore that Santer said "at least 17 years".