This recent quote from Stefan Rahmstorf appears in Environmental Research Letters:
“The global temperature is rising just as expected. If you look at the trend over the last twenty years or so, of course there is natural variability, around that trend, there are some warmer years like 2001 to 2005 were above the long term trend, and then 2008 is a little below the long term trend. But global temperature is basically rising as expected, and that’s very reassuring to me as a climate modeler, because we think global temperature is easy, we understand it well, it’s simple energy balance, so we shouldn’t be too far off.”
Are you wondering if this is accurate? Are you wondering if it’s truthful? Or, like many things emanating from the pages of Real Climate, does it appear to be a carefully rehearsed attempt to spew forth accurate factoids that resorts to ambiguity where helpful, and applies adjectives in ways that result in a message that is, at best, misleading?
Let’s begin by pointing out ambiguities. When Stefan says “long term trend” what does he mean? What does he mean by “just as expected? Does he mean “observed temperature are falling inside the uncertainty intervals illustrated by the IPCC in the AR4?” We really can’t evaluate whether his statements are accurate or inaccurate without knowing what he means. However, he is speaking as a climate modeler, so I’ll assume he is comparing to model projections of some sort and in particular, that temperatures rising “just as expected” means falling inside the uncertainty ranges actually indicated in the IPCC AR4.
Moving on, whatt does Stefan mean he uses the word “warmer” applying no adjective? I’ll assume he means “at least 0.001 C warmer than predicted by the multi-model mean”. If observations are a tiny bit warmer than models, they are “warmer”. If observations are a tiny bit colder than models, the observations are “cooler.” Of course, maybe Stefan may use the word “warmer” differently.
Finally, how does Stefan use the adjective “a little bit”?
To help diagnose how Stefan’s uses words and let you decide if his message is, on the balance truthful, I’ve computed the multi-model mean of 25 models used by the IPCC available at The Climate Explorer and computed the annual average by averaging over 12 adjacent months using a baseline of Jan 1980-Dec 1999. All models runs were driven by the SRES A1B scenario. I computed annual averages for GISS and HadCrut using a similar method. The graph is shown below; I’ve inserted a small portion of Figure 10.4 from the AR4. That image illustrated the projections and their ±1 standard deviation uncertainties the authors of the IPCC felt were appropriate way back in 2007 when they finalized their projections and communicated them to the public.
Now for some answers to questions:
- Was the observed temperature at year end 2001 above the longterm trend? Multi-model mean= 0.240C GISSTemp= 0.230 HadCrut= 0.247 . So, applying Rahmstorf 50% accurate and 50% inaccurate. HadCrut observations indicated the earth temperatures was warmer than the the multi-model mean projection but GISSTemp says the earth temperatures were cooler than the models.
If you examine the graph to the above, I think very few people not consider the observed temperature in 2001 “warmer” than predicted. One observations is above; on below. Most would say “neither warmer nor cooler”. Failing to note that one of the observations is “cooler” strikes me as not truthful; others may see things differently.
- Was the observed temperature for 2005 warmer than expected based on the projected the long term trend? Yes.
The multi-model mean for 2005 was 0.267C; observations wereGISSTemp= 0.308C, HadCrut= 0.304C. Looking at the graph and squinting, I think most people might apply the adjective “a little” to this comparison. Rahmstorf omitted this adjective. But then, maybe he doesn’t consider this difference to be “a little”. Maybe he considers it “a lot”. Let’s see how he uses “a little”.
- Is 2008 is “a little below” the long term trend as indicated by Rahmstorm? Well, the multi-model mean projected for that years was 0.408C; the observations were GISSTemp= 0.191C and HadCrut= 0.163C. These are definitely cooler the multi-model mean; Stefan got that big right.
But what about the adjective ” a little”. In fact, the observed anomalies fell outside the ±1 standard deviation uncertainties published in the AR4, which has a lower bound of 0.228C.
Given that Stefan did not apply “a little” to the comparison of 2005 temperatures to projections, it seems a bit misleading to apply “a little” to the comparison in 2008. By doing so, Stefan gives the impression that the difference in 2008 is smaller than in 2005. In reality, the difference in 2008 is quantitatively larger. More importantly, at year end 2008, the observations were not only cooler than the model projections, but fell outside the uncertainty intervals Stefan concocted when working creating projections that would communicate the modelers notions to the public.
All in all if “The global temperature is rising just as expected” means falling inside the uncertainty ranges published in the AR4, then no, they aren’t rising “just as expected”. At the end of 2008, only one year after the projections were published, the temperatures fell outside the uncertainty ranges published in the AR4. I should think it’s fair to say that back in 2007, readers and policy makers were lead to believe the uncertainty ranges meant something and that temperature falling outside the stated uncertainty bounds were at least somewhat unexpected back when projections were made.
Funny bit
I know some of you who have never done a thermo dynamics or heat tranfer problem may not see the humor in the final part of Stefan’s quote: “…because we think global temperature is easy, we understand it well, it’s simple energy balance, so we shouldn’t be too far off”
Well… yes. If you can estimate the amount of heat gained by the system and the amount of heat lost, and the heat capacity everywhere on the planet, why the change in surface temperature is a snap! So why don’t the models do a better job? Oh..yeah. The problem isn’t applying the heat balance, it’s uncertain magnitude of the dang forcings and feed backs!
The article continues with a variety of climatologist listing the parade of horrible that is about to ensue. Of course, they may well ensue. However, Stefan’s decision to kick the entire shpeil off with unbalanced spin makes me think the climatologist all took off their scientist hats and put on some other form of head gear.
Heat balance is easy — so long as you have ALL of the variables accounted for — and understood!
Of course the only heat balance I’ve ever done is determining the actual power level of a nuclear power plant using system parameters — a simple matter compared to balancing the heat of the planet’s climate, I would think.
Hmmm…
Sounds like he’s thinking in terms of headwear that’ll go well in in Copenhagen.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/a-plea-from-a-policy-maker-5502
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0486407926/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
Mike–
Same with conservation of mass and momentum. If you know the mass flow rates in and out of a tank, it’s easy to figure out the rate of accumulation of mass. Heck, it’s the same with dieting. If you eat 1000 calories a day fewer than you burn, you’ll lose 2 lbs a week. It’s estimating how many calories you eat or burn that’s the tough part.
“If you can estimate the amount of heat gained by the system and the amount of heat lost, and the heat capacity everywhere on the planet, why the change in surface temperature is a snap! So why don’t the models do a better job? Oh..yeah. The problem isn’t applying the heat balance, it’s uncertain magnitude of the dang forcings and feed backs! ”
Refreshing candid honesty. Thank you.
Lucia, from the above graph it looks like the models don’t do a bad job of matching some of the variation until about 2001, then there appears to be some appearance of a diverging trend with measured. The models here are up to 2007 (yes?) so have they been tuned to hindcast better up to this date, hence the agreement with the past? If so then even the last 6 years of tuned model data (2001 to 2007) looks to be a bit too optimistic.
Was there better agreement with older models?
I’ll probably get a lot of heat about this, but here goes anyway.
We don’t do heat balances; we do energy balances. Heat is generally used to denote the transport / transfer of energy. The energy content of materials may be changed by heat transfer processes and phenomena. Just as we don’t do velocity balances; we do mass and momentum balances.
The ‘average temperature’ of thermodynamically heterogeneous systems is determined by the energy content of the subsystems that comprise the system. Only in the most special cases can this be reduced to an average temperature of one single subsystem as determined by measuring only the temperature of that subsystem.
I’ve mentioned this nomenclature issue to Professor Pielke Sr. a couple of times. But it didn’t take over there either.
On the subject of this post, note the citation of a single year (weather) to support arguments about climate; ‘climate’ being generally recognized to mean multi-decade averages of the weather.
I, as does Micky C, wonder about the supposed accuracy of the models being due to tuning and fitting.
And I really choked on the part where he is reassured “because we think global temperature is easy, we understand it well, it’s simple energy balance, so we shouldn’t be too far off.â€
Does he “think” global temperature is easy or does he “know” it is easy? If indeed if it is easy then why the divergence between the models? You would think that only one model would be required.
I wonder why ‘natural variability’ stops at ’20 years or so’
Those dedicated to CO2 will continue to extend the time scale of ‘natural variability’ to justify their hypothesis no matter the evidence.
First, it was just El Nino – 5 years or so. Since 1998, we’ve been hearing…
‘Just you wait, sonny for that next big El Nino! It’s gonna set a temperature record, lemme tellya!! It’s gonna set a big ol’ temperature record, and its gonna GITCHA! And then you’d better look out, cause that ain’t gonna be no weather, sonny! That ain’t gonna be no ‘natural variability’. That’s gonna be CLIMATE….just you wait!!!
The climate models are composed of three things:
– a weather model;
– natural log formulae for greenhouse gases; and,
– a bunch of plugged guess-estimates.
A gazillion watts of energy comes in from the Sun each day and a gazillion watts of energy escapes from the Earth into space each day. These energy flows are then modulated by gazillions of electrons in gazillions of molecules. These numbers would have 50 Zeros behind the significant digits.
1.12 gazillion watts might come in one day and 1.11 gazzillion might leave that day. The next day 1.13 gazillion will come in and 1.14 gazillion will escape to space.
There is little chance a climate model is simulating these gazillions in a realistic manner. Hence, the plugged guess-estimates and as long as the modelers can build in another plug, the climate models will always be able to hindcast the actual temperature changes reasonably close. The forecasts, however, have always been off by a factor of 2 to date.
When time comes to audit the forecast, they can just respond that we missed the Aerosols forcing from China or we have new numbers for Black Carbon now so other than that our model was 99.99% accurate (and my pet peeve, that the error was within the +/-0.2C width of the line we published).
Here are the numbers from Hansen’s 1988 forecasts (GHGs to date are just below those used in Scenario B – so off by half to date).
http://www.realclimate.org/data/scen_ABC_temp.data
The double standard about natural variability is striking indeed. I have long wondered why “nature” is allowed to fluctuate in only one direction-down. As Lindzen has pointed out, if one wants to attribute the current discrepancies to natural variability the attribution argument falls apart.
“…because we think global temperature is easy, we understand it well, it’s simple energy balance, so we shouldn’t be too far offâ€
This quotes smacks of arrogance. If it’s “easy” then why do we need 20 climate models giving different projections?
The problem with this type of thinking is that it doesn’t allow for any conflicting viewpoints. If it’s so easy and we understand it so well then anyone that disagrees obviously must be wrong. And that’s exactly the attitude we see from some climate scientists.
“I know some of you who have never done a thermo dynamics or heat tranfer problem may not see the humor in the final part of Stefan’s quote: “…because we think global temperature is easy, we understand it well, it’s simple energy balance, so we shouldn’t be too far offâ€.
Lucia – I have studied fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and heat transfer all of my professional life (I am 47). I have PhD. in computational fluid dynamics and have published in the Journal of Computational Physics. I can say, without a doubt, that Mr. Rahmstorf’s quote is one of the most ridiculous and ignorant statements from a so-called practitioner of numerical modeling that I have ever read. I wonder, in fact, if Mr. Rahmstorf can even write down the complete differential equation which governs the conservation of energy for the multiphase, multi-species, turbulent flow of the atmosphere/ocean along, with the appropriate boundary conditions (including radiation). If he could do this, he could show us how to “easily” express all of the source terms, diffusion coefficients, turbulent fluxes etc. in this equation, and then how to “easily” integrate this equation in time, along with continuity, momentum, and other coupled transport equations in a stable manner so as to “easily” and accurately calculate the earth’s “surface” temperature…
Frank K.
It is EASY because they approximate virtually everything and then “adjust” as necessary to obtain the expected output!!!
A question for anyone willing to edumacate me. How can we have a TOA ENERGY BALANCE????
In every system there are losses or we would could have perpetual motion machines. The incoming energy drives numerous processes in the earth system. How can we get anywhere near the same amount of energy out??? Unless, of course, geothermal, gravity, and electro/magnetic aren’t quite as inconsequential as we are told by the priests of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change)?
MikeC– I don’t know if the agreement with past models is specifically better because the model runs from the TAR aren’t as readily available. But the TAR projected “about 1.5C/century” or warming and the AR4 projects “about 2 C/century” of warming for the current periods. Since the TAR projected less warming, it will match the lower trends better.
Dan–You are correct that energy is, strictly speaking, the correct term. And, if we want to be precise, we discuss work too. But the earth’s system doesn’t do work on the universe. I don’t think the main difficulty in agreeing or disagreeing is over semantics.
Bill Illis– I don’t think the AOGCM’s use the log law. I think they do something at a more detailed level. But if your point is there is a lot of estimating of various things at different levels: I suspect so.
Frank K– Yep. I thought the Ph.D. Fluid dynamicists and thermo dynamicists would get a kick out of that. The advantage we have over those who took introductory thermo only is that we know that statement is ridiculous.
Kuhnkat– Overall, over large periods of time, pretty much the same amount of energy does enter and leave the atmosphere. This doesn’t violate the second law of thermo-dynamics. Perpetual motion machines aren’t impossible because energy is destroyed (it’s not.) Energy is sort of degraded from forms that can be accessed to do useful work to forms that can’t. So, for example, when water is at the top of Niagra falls, it has “potential energy”. That energy could be used to drive a turbine and generate power. But if the water flows over the falls, the potential energy is degraded to thermal energy. Thermal energy is a sort of less useful form of energy. But it’s still energy.
Reading the RC blog quote that starts this thread makes me think of when Spencer asserts something to the effect that a lot AGW promoters do not understand the science very well.
I’m not sure that comparing a 25 models average with a single year is meaningful. I’d rather try the average deviation.
In his german blog “Klimalounge” Stefan Rahmstorf wrote on 29th of April 2009 an article titled ” How much CO2 is too much?”. In a postscriptum to it ,he couldn`t resist to mention,that,at Potsdam,where his “Institut für Klimafolgenforschung” is,they had a recordsetting warm april unprecedented in 114 years. What is this? Are these scientists,hiding behind their equations and models after all nothing more than ordinary people. Is their scientific judgement at the end a function of their sweating hands or their cold feet? Should climate scientists care less about their work and think more about more about their own consciousness?
This frightened me.
The comment by the Danish PM shows how science is corrupted by politics.
“But understand me correctly; at the end of the day, here in Copenhagen, we have—as politicians—to make the final decision, and to decide on exact figures, I hope. And this is a reason why I would give you the piece of advice, not to provide us with too many moving targets, because it is already a very, very complicated process. And I need your assistance to push this process in the right direction, and in that respect, I need fixed targets and certain figures, and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.”
Climate is probably the hardest problem that science has tried to tackle and here we have a politician saying he does not want to hear too much about uncertainty. It is a madhouse.
Ahab–
Many critics of the modelers and the IPCC think it makes no sense at all to make projections based on the model mean. However, the IPCC chose that and explained their reasons for doing so in the AR4. They also chose to communicate the standard deviation of the model spread.
That’s why I am comparing the data to what the IPCC said we should expect. Stefan was pretty much in charge of making these choices.
So, while I can understand that you and many of my other readers might think his choices were inappropriate, they are the ones he liked and communicated to the planet back in 07. So, I don’t see how he can now say he ‘expected’ temperature to do what they have done.
In the following paragraphs Stefan acknowledges that there are various things that the models can’t reproduce.
Although what he says is misleading, it is not as bad ‘Key message 1’, which is clearly false:
lol at “unbalanced spin.” because he said “little.”
I agree that Stefan was spinning a little 🙂 here, but compared to the friends of this blog–Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Jeff Id, etc–he looks like a frickin amateur. Come on, Rahmstorf, if you’re gonna spin, spin, man!
Boris–
His unbalanced spin is the crafting a paragraph to make it appear the temperatures are tracking the models. Dropping “a little” where the difference is large and omitting it where the difference is imperceptible is an element of the method. But your also missing the bit about saying 2001 was warm relative to models when 2001 was not warm relative to the models.
For what it’s worth, the interview is long, and that’s just the first paragraph of actual interviews. I can’t check every representation. But the fact that it starts like that doesn’t give me any confidence that the scientists-turned-spinmeisters are going to put their scientist hats back on in their remaining responses. But if you want to go through and check each later claim against specific information, maybe you can show that the rest of the long document is free of spin! I doubt you will succeed.
Lucia,
well, actually he made just a few examples, i ‘don’t think he means to do a serious comparison. There are better years to pick to show larger positive or negative fluctuations and deviations from the models mean.
Anyways, even if it’s the “super climatologist” Stefan Rahmstorf to do the comparison, i doubt it makes any sense 😉
If I look at that graph it will take just a few years before it is clear who’s right. Unless offcourse a stratosferic volcano erupts. So, for the sake of the argument, let’s hope for no volcano’s for the coming years.
But no matter what side of the debate you’re on, this is an exiting time.
BTW: If it turns out to be cooling soon, and that becomes a steady trend, we can only assume what will become of the public’s perception of science. I mean, nobody is going to believe long term projections anymore. I have thought about the reasons for the fierceness of the debate for quite some time and I figure it might be felt that very credibility of science itself is on the line.
Hehe, now now Boris, everybody is entitled to spin a little if they are transparent about it. Unfortunately Stefan, as a scientist, is supposed to be above that, or else admit he is being an advocate.
Hm, me thinks Boris should start a blog where things are free of spin-a sort of “No Spin Zone” 😆
peek–
“Science” will survive this. But, if the the temperature drops due to a volcanic eruption, we can’t test the projecions. They don’t include a volcanic eruption. With respect to testing long term trends, volcanic eruptions hav always been a “gimme” for the models because the runs matching volcanic eruptions cannot be performed until after a volcano erupts. So, all temperatures prior to the eruption are known, and the forcings can be tweaked.
I read a news piece today, on how it appears that wind speeds have fallen since the 70s.
The modeling community, lead by Gavin Schmidt, say this is wrong, as their MODELS show different results.
Gavin should recall that the IPCC tried this approach; using modeled over measured for sea levels, in the first few reports. They were severely castigated by the sea level community, especially by Morner, and eventually the IPCC recanted. The sea level predictions of the IPCC have since fallen to levels much more in line with the measured results.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090610/wind_research_090610/20090610?hub=SciTech
I have (unfortunately) read some of the other comments in the link Lucia provided above. It’s even worse than I thought – it is very hard to imagine any of these people being an “expert” in anything – let alone climate modeling.
Here is one comment that stood out to me from a Mr. Will Steffen that is just bursting with incoherence. Let me know if anyone here can figure out his logic:
—
“Will Steffen (WS): Yes, I think that one of the aspects again that Stefan referred to that is reassuring because we think we understand and that models predict the fact that extreme events will increase in frequency and intensity as the climate
shifts towards higher temperatures and more energy basically at the Earth’s surface. We’re starting to see this now, we see it in terms of increasing floods in many parts of the world, increasing heat waves, the 2003 heat wave in Central Europe is a classic example. But there have been others. There was a fairly bad
one recently in southeastern Australia. We see droughts and drying in many parts of the world. Ironically the planet overall is getting wetter. And again, that’s exactly what you’d expect as temperature goes up—increasing evaporation,increasing water vapor content in the atmosphere and increasing precipitation. It’s
very uneven.”
—
By the way, Mr. Steffen said the “P” word – “models PREDICT…” (no – not PROJECT – PREDICT!).
my bad.
The sea level
predictionsprojections of the IPCC have since fallen to levels much more in line with the measured results.It’s very likely that when he said, “it’s simple energy balance”, he’s referring to that simplistic Global Radiative Equilibrium energy balance. Unfortunately, it is so simplistic that it has no useful purpose. Even moving to the simple radiative-convective equilibrium balance introduces several important processes that require parameterizations.
If the problem was well set by either of these approaches, it would have been solved several decades back in time. In fact, the ranges of estimates for the sensitivity haven’t decreased significantly for the past 3 decades, at least.
Even the concept that the Earth’s systems have ever been in equilibrium, both internally amongst themselves and with the external energy source, is open to serious questions. And, if Radiative Equilibrium is expected to be attained, the time scale is measured in several hundreds to a few thousand years. That time scale is such that it is highly unlikely that the effects as reflected in any ‘global average surface temperature’ of some parts of the Earth’s systems hasn’t yet begun to be detectable.
The concept of Radiative Equilibrium also opens questions about the correspondence between the physical system and the theoretical system. That is, does the material in the physical system for which the temperature is being measured correspond to the material in the theoretical system for which the Radiative Equilibrium is to apply? This difficultly is additionally compounded by the fact that measurement and ‘averaging’ of the temperature of parts of the Earth’s system is not the proper method to understand the thermal response of thermodynamically heterogeneous systems to an energy supply.
Another point. Emissions are higher than expected supposedly, and yet we are supposed to be reassured (scared?) that models are on track. Shouldn’t they be frighteningly off track?
Okay, okay, just a bit of fun. Concentrations are not the same as emissions, but it is interesting in that a lot of the assumptions are being challenged and yet everything is “on track” anyway. Nope, not quite.
Where do you get the idea that I’m complaining about spin? Everyone spins, even Lucia. Probably even your humble Boris. It’s just that if you were out to find egregious examples of spin relating to climate science, you would put Rahmstorf’s statement somewhere in the mid 1,873,420’s.
Boris-A bit of fun, with all the talk of spin I couldn’t resist any perceived opportunity to say “No Spin Zone”.
BTW, I’m not sure if that’s an attempt at ranking or an point that at this point spinning comments are numbering in the millions, I suspect you are wrong either way. The spin filled remarks number in the billions at this point.
I think Stefan likes Katherine so science doesn’t come into it 🙂
Lucia-
” I thought the Ph.D. Fluid dynamicists and thermo dynamicists would get a kick out of that. The advantage we have over those who took introductory thermo only is that we know that statement is ridiculous.”
Nope, with only two single semester courses on thermo, and a bit of experience modeling multiphase chemical reactions, I know it is ridiculous as well.
Re #14354.
For information, Professor Will Steffen is Executive Director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University and is one of Australia’s most influential climate scientists.
The present and prospective incidence of drought is a subject of intense controversy in Australia. The Government’s position, as reflected in the terms of reference of an inquiry issued to the independent Productivity Commission (PC) in June 2008, is that “Australia is [i.e., was then] experiencing a drought that has been unprecedented in its geographic extent, length and severityâ€; and that “Climate change is expected to increase the frequency, severity and length of drought periods in future.†These claims were subsequently strengthened in the light of a scientific report from CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.
However, in its Inquiry Report published on 12 May 2009, the PC appeared to challenge these statements, concluding that “the data presented in this report confirm that the period from 2002 to 2007 ranks with the Federation Drought and the Forties Drought as one of the three most severe, widespread and prolonged dry periods since 1900†(p. 75); and that “For most regions the available science leaves open the possibility that severe drought over the next thirty years could either be more prevalent or less prevalent than in the past†(p. 79).
Lucia, Good timing. I have a note coming out in Energy and Environment 20:4 about a previous statement by Rahmstorf and others contradicting his quote above.
RECENT CLIMATE OBSERVATIONS: DISAGREEMENT WITH PROJECTIONS David R.B. Stockwell
ABSTRACT: The non-linear trend in Rahmstorf et al. [2007] is updated with recent global temperature data. The evidence does not support the basis for their claim that the sensitivity of the climate system has been underestimated.
SteveF–
What I often find is those who only took introductory courses feel tentative. They know it sounds wrong to them but aren’t sure.
According to RSS satellite data, the actual global temp increase (not trend) is 0.3 C over 30 years (-0.1 to +0.2), or 1.0 C per century. How is this representative of the climate models (which predict 4-7 C per century temperature rise)? Apparently, real climate puts a lot of faith in land-based measurements since 1950 (I don’t). Too bad we can’t speed up the next 10 years to say who is correct.
David Stockwell’s forthcoming comment on a “previous statement” by Rahmstorf and others is to be welcomed. That statement, which was in a one-page paper published in ‘Science’ online on the eve of the release of the IPCC WGI Report in February 2007, has been discussed (and criticised) on many blogs: e.g., Lucia wrote ‘That paper is dreadful, and it shows nothing. The fact that it was published reflects badly on Science and the seven authors who can’t tell how dreadful their own paper is’ (“Comment on the Slide and Eyeball Methodâ€, #2038, 22 April 2008).
Stefan Rahmstorf also discussed the relationship between model projections and observations of global temperature in his Chapter 3 of Zedillo [ed.], “Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyotoâ€, 2008). Here Rahmstorf claimed that “The fact [sic] that observed warming runs along the upper edge of the model scenarios illustrates the absurdity of Lindzen’s claim that models overestimate warming by a factor of three to six†(footnote 50, p. 53).
For those interested in the actual exchange Ian describes but who would prefer not to pony up for the book, you can even get bonus material:
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/L_R-Exchange.pdf
I’m told this is fascinating. I wasn’t able to make it through half of Stefan’s part before blood shot out of my eyes, so I couldn’t tell you.
Ian Castles (Comment#14366) June 10th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Re #14354.
“For information, Professor Will Steffen is Executive Director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University and is one of Australia’s most influential climate scientists. ”
—
So, Mr. Steffen is Australia’s version of our own loose cannon, Jim Hansen. Great…
It’s very hard to take these people seriously when they say things like…
“We see droughts and drying in many parts of the world. Ironically the planet overall is getting wetter. And again, that’s exactly what you’d expect as temperature goes up—increasing evaporation,increasing water vapor content in the atmosphere and increasing precipitation. It’s very uneven.â€
I was thinking about the statement “the planet overall is getting wetter”. Does this mean we are mysteriously gaining water mass from some previously unknown source? Maybe space aliens are depositing water here on Earth from the spaceships, making the planet “wetter”?? Hmmmmm…. :^)
FYI, I still haven’t turned the AC on at my house. It’s been cool enough no to. Does that make me Green? Woo hoo! 😉
Andrew
I haven’t turned on AC either. But we’re always the last to turn on the AC. I haven’t heard my neighbors AC yet either. Worse, my basil seeds haven’t sprouted. They like warm soil.
Lucia,
I have some newly planted Eastern Redbud trees in my backyard. My dad planted them there in the winter and they looked like they were just little sticks in the ground (they were). Now they (4 of them) are all at least a foot tall and lots of big leaves. We have had what seems to be lots of good rain the last couple of months and it’s been mild except for a couple of “hot” days. That’s my Farmer’s Almanac Report for today. Peace!
Andrew
We went with two fans in the office this summer, one pointing in from a window on one side of the apartment and the other pointing out the window on the other side. It creates a nice breeze, and so far we’ve avoided turning on the AC. That said, its been a relatively cold summer so far in NYC.
Lucia,
” Energy is sort of degraded from forms that can be accessed to do useful work to forms that can’t”
Ok, so there is conservation of mass and energy. I always thought that meant that it was never DESTROYED!!
Energy, in the form of photons or light waves, enter the atmosphere and are absorbed by the earth. They heat the earth and SOME are then emitted. If ALL were emitted then there would be a perfect engine where the work expended expanding the earth and causing convection from conduction of heat to the atmosphere…
Do you see the question I have here?? If all the SW is converted to LW so there is a TOA BALANCE, we are getting free energy at the surface and in the atmosphere. This is even better than a perpetual motion machine. This is a generator where the fuel is not expended!!!
Imagine a big mirror reflecting the OLR at TOA onto a boiler. Double free power!!!
Some of the SW has been converted to other forms, not LW, and is not available to hit TOA as OLR.
Another example, scientists measure the temp delta in boreholes trying to estimate temperatures from the past. How could this be if some of the SW didn’t get converted to heat that was conducted into the earth??? This heat is still in the earth from hundreds (thousands…) of years ago. It has never left the system or these scientists are dumber than I am!!!
So, I guess I am asking if there are perfect machines making up our system. That is, is there 100% efficiency whenever SW is absorbed and reemitted as LW. When LW is absorbed and thermalised. When that thermalised LW is conducted to other gasses through collision. When it is convected to GHG through collision and emitted again…
?????????????????????????
Regarding the model means, how about looking at individual models? I am particularly interested in the model runs that predicted high levels of warming.
According to Tamino and others(discussed in ‘You Bet’, and also in Decadal Scale Coolings at Chris Colose’s blog), the models that project this have about the same short term temperature trend as the low warming models. I was arguing that the recent cooling should lower the likelihood of high warming, and cause a lowering of the estimate for future warming.
Also, could you provide a run through of how I would get such data from Climate Explorer? I don’t understand the material they have on their site.
MikeN
I wrote up how to access the runs manually here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/monthly-time-series-for-ipcc-projections/
SteveM has some R code to help.
I am not sure what Lucia is trying to show, but any fair minded person would look at these plots and think that the models do an excellent job in forecasting.
Giovanni–
Could you explain what you are seeing that makes you think the graph indicates the models forecast well? Bear in mind: forecast was published in 2007 and none of the model runs used to create the forecast predate 2001.
It’s easy, just redefine “fair minded” to mean someone who cat tell a forecast from a hindcast.
kuhnkat (Comment#14481) June 11th, 2009 at 11:21 pm ,
Yes we are getting free (in the thermodynamic sense) energy at the surface. It’s called enthalpy and is the result of incoming photons having an effective temperature of 5800 K and outgoing photons having a temperature of 255 K, in round numbers. Any work done through moving air or water eventually ends up as heat too. The total incoming and outgoing energy balance, but entropy increases. Even a tiny imbalance would result in massive temperature change over hundreds of millions of years. But of course the temperature change would be in the direction required to achieve balance again.
Sunlight can be used to operate a photovoltaic cell and generate electricity. Outgoing IR can’t because there are insufficient photons at high enough energy to overcome the band gap in a practical photocell. The free energy content of outgoing IR is too low.
Lucia, I’ve polished my R-script a bit and will post up on it at CA. I can now do emulate many of the radio buttons in the R-call – for example, I can do land masks and lat-long screens. I’ve collated call information for the models listed as at a few months ago. I scraped TRP results for all 20c3m runs with land mask and sea mask separately in about 4 minutes of computer time. Needless to say, I could have done it manually in less time than it took to figure out how to do this. 🙂 But I’ve got a pretty good tool now.
I’ve adapted it to retrieve some of the observation sets and that took only a couple of minutes.
Thanks. I don’t suppose there is a source anywhere that has the 2100 results for all of the model runs?
Mike– You get those by downloading each run at The Climate Explorer and reading the values for 2100. It’s not a lot of data.
But no site has conveniently tabulated that specific information for you.
Lucia, I uploaded a collation of A1B runs for TRP (-20 to 20) that I’ve been working on to CA. This is a R-list of 24 items (24 models), each item in the list being a time series of the model runs varying from 1 to 7. You can download and extract the 2100 values as follows:
This gives the required information for each model and each run.
Isn’t that quick enough to make you want learn R??
Cool! I guess I should have figured that out since you published the script to scrape the data and stored it in a file. (I avoid being a “source” of data because I’m worried about the ensuring the provenance.)
Oh… I should probably learn R. But, that three line code only works because you already created http://www.climateaudit.org/data/models/knmi/ensemble.a1b.tab . I looked at your scraping code and it’s much longer than 3 lines. Plus, I downloaded http://www.climateaudit.org/data/models/knmi/ensemble.a1b.tab. How do I inspect that? It seems to be binary. Is it? )
Because I don’t know R, I can google and learn what sapply does. then, but I have no idea what tsp(A) does. I have no idea why I’m applying to sapply ensemble.a1b instead of temp.dat. (Worse, why to ensemble.a1b and not ensemble.a1b.tab? No doubt if I knew R, I would know why.)
So, right now, I can only take your word that it returns the 2100 values from whatever happens to be in “…. http://www.climateaudit.org/data/models/knmi/ensemble.a1b.tab“.
On the one hand, yes, I would like to learn R. On the other hand, can you name three nice textbook to step people through useful things? Really useful things? That uses actual english to explain what a function is going to do and why? Plus examples that aren’t ambiguous?
I’m speaking as a person who taught herself, Perl, php, C, and javascript having learned fortran. None of these are difficult– but the main thing i there are multiple fairly well organized references to give someone working in isolation a decent start.
If I knew three suggested references, I could order them all from the library, figure out which best suited my needs and pick one and buy it. With R, motivation alone with organized pedagogical materials is just not sufficient.
May I recommend “The R Book” by Michael Crawley for a start? Amazon lets you review examples of the books contents which may give you a better feel for how they’re written.
I looked up the tsp function in R help which gives you the start, end times and frequency of a time series (R has online help files and package manuals are on the CRAN site). The sapply takes the list in the first entry and applies the function to each of the entries in the list (instead of using a for loop).
The two hardest parts of R for me are changing my programing so my R code doesn’t look like C or Java and learning which packages to use.
BarryW–
I’ll order that from the library. Thanks.
Where are you getting the error ranges from for the models?
I’m really confused looking at these model runs, because the IPCC reports warming under A2 of 2.0 to 5.4, yet the model runs do not have this range, instead it is just 3.0-4.0.