Posted on 02/07/2022 4:15:46 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Scientists admit they did not model clouds accurately and that they need a supercomputer 1000 times more powerful to accurately do that...
The Wall Street Journal reports Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy.
That is a non-paywalled, free-to-read link courtesy of the WSJ.
It's lengthy but an excellent read. I encourage everyone to take a look.
The dire predictions went out the window, seemingly unanimously. But there is plenty in the article for the fearmongers and the sceptics to both say "I told you so".
Italic emphasis in the snips below is mine.
For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming?
They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again.
The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.
When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth’s atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared—perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy.
“We thought this was really strange,” said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. “If that number was correct, that was really bad news.”
The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. “The old way is just wrong, we know that,” said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. “I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It’s probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another.”
“We have a situation where the models are behaving strangely,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, a leading center for climate modeling. “We have a conundrum.”
In November 2021, as leaders met in Glasgow to negotiate limits on greenhouse gases under the auspices of the 2015 Paris Accords, there were more than 100 major global climate-change models produced by 49 different research groups, reflecting an influx of people into the field.
In its guidance to governments last year, the U.N. climate-change panel for the first time played down the most extreme forecasts.
Before making new climate predictions for policy makers, an independent group of scientists used a technique called “hind-casting,” testing how well the models reproduced changes that occurred during the 20th century and earlier. Only models that re-created past climate behavior accurately were deemed acceptable.
Because clouds can both reflect solar radiation into space and trap heat from Earth’s surface, they are among the biggest challenges for scientists honing climate models.
At any given time, clouds cover more than two-thirds of the planet. Their impact on climate depends on how reflective they are, how high they rise and whether it is day or night. They can accelerate warming or cool it down. They operate at a scale as broad as the ocean, as small as a hair’s width. Their behavior can be affected, studies show, by factors ranging from cosmic rays to ocean microbes, which emit sulfur particles that become the nuclei of water droplets or ice crystals.
“If you don’t get clouds right, everything is out of whack.” said Tapio Schneider, an atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology and the Climate Modeling Alliance, which is developing an experimental model. “Clouds are crucially important for regulating Earth’s energy balance.”
In an independent assessment of 39 global-climate models last year, scientists found that 13 of the new models produced significantly higher estimates of the global temperatures caused by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide than the older computer models—scientists called them the “wolf pack.” Weighed against historical evidence of temperature changes, those estimates were deemed unrealistic.
Dr. Gettelman, who helped develop CESM2, and his colleagues in their initial upgrade added better ways to model polar ice caps and how carbon and nitrogen cycle through the environment. To make the ocean more realistic, they added wind-driven waves. They fine-tuned the physics in its algorithms and made its vintage Fortran code more efficient.
Even the simplest diagnostic test is challenging. The model divides Earth into a virtual grid of 64,800 cubes, each 100 kilometers on a side, stacked in 72 layers. For each projection, the computer must calculate 4.6 million data points every 30 minutes. To test an upgrade or correction, researchers typically let the model run for 300 years of simulated computer time.
In their initial analysis, scientists discovered a flaw in how CESM2 modeled the way moisture interacts with soot, dust or sea-spray particles that allow water vapor to condense into cloud droplets. It took a team of 10 climate experts almost 5 months to track it down to a flaw in their data and correct it, the scientists said.
The NCAR scientists in Boulder would like to delve more deeply into the behavior of clouds, ice sheets and aerosols, but they already are straining their five-year-old Cheyenne supercomputer, according to NCAR officials. A climate model able to capture the subtle effects of individual cloud systems, storms, regional wildfires and ocean currents at a more detailed scale would require a thousand times more computer power, they said.
Climate models need to link rising temperatures on a global scale to changing conditions in a local forest, watershed, grassland or agricultural zone, says NCAR forest ecologist Jacquelyn Shuman and NCAR scientist Gerald Meehl.
“Computer models that contain both large-scale and small-scale models allow you to really do experiments that you can’t do in the real world,” she said. “You can really ramp up the temperature, dial down the precipitation or completely change the amount of fire or lightning strikes that an area is seeing, so you can really diagnose how it all works together. That’s the next step. It would be very computationally expensive.”
“I think the climate models are the best tool we have to understand the future, even though they are far from perfect,” said Dr. Gettelman. “I’m not worried that the new models might be wrong. What scares me is that they might be right.”
Scientists need to keep doing what they are doing. The models surely will get better.
Despite the models being wrong, they appear to be better than I expected.
Yet, had we listened to the dire forecasts from Al Gore, globetrotting Gretta, President Biden, and media darling AOC, where would we be?
Al Gore wanted to spend $90 trillion to fight climate change.
Recall my February 7, 2019 post AOC "New Green Deal" Stunningly Absurd: Far More Ridiculous Than Expected
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) released her bill for a "Green New Deal". It's stunningly absurd.
On February 25, 2019 I noted I compared AOC's Green New Deal Pricetag of $51 to $93 Trillion vs. Cost of Doing Nothing
William Nordhaus, a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, compared AOC's Green New Deal with the cost of doing nothing and various alternatives.
Nordhaus’s model—at least as of its 2007 calibration—estimated that such a policy goal would make humanity $14 trillion poorer compared to doing nothing at all about climate change.
2007 is admittedly way out of date, yet the models then were on the dire side.
On January 22, 2019 I noted Ocasio-Cortez Says World Will End in 12 Years: Here's What to Do About It
.@AOC on millennials and social media: "We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change" pic.twitter.com/HjhbVyfFN4 — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 22, 2019
AOC now says her comment was out of context, but play the video and you will see that her comments clearly weren't.
Perhaps it was hyperbole, but extreme fearmongering of this kind will do nothing but raise eyebrows.
We have had an endless parade of fearmongers including Al Gore, Gretta,, AOC, Senator Elizabeth Warren, President Biden, the UN, and countless others demanding "clean energy now".
None of them have factored in the amount of copper, lithium, rare earth materials, etc., needed for their demands.
Their demands also depend on unreliable wind and battery storage techniques that do not even exist yet.
Solar energy is surprising cheap provided there is enough cheap land, there are no clouds, there is no nighttime, and the energy needs are in the desert, not New York City.
Alternatively, solar needs storage technology that does not yet exist, but even if it did, we still have issues regarding need for more lithium, rare earth metals, etc., for the storage.
We will get there over time, but that time is not now. Fearmongering does not help.
Per capita emissions chart courtesy of Our World in Data.
The US, EU, and UK have made huge strides in emissions. China, India, and many emerging markets are headed in the opposite direction.
The political reality of the matter is that actions by the US and EU will not do much unless China and India do much more, much faster.
Please recall my April 5, 2021 , post Global Net Zero Climate Change Targets are 'Pie in the Sky'.
India lambasted the richer world's carbon cutting plans, calling long term net zero targets, "pie in the sky."
In a pre-summit climate change meeting of 197 countries, China did not show up. India blasted the targets as "Pie in the Sky".
"2060 sounds good, but it is just that, it sounds good," Raj Kumar Singh, India's minister for power, told a meeting organized by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Scientists discarded 13 of 39 models, those with the most dire predictions and those that could not explain the ice age. Guess which ones the media, the politicians, and the fearmongers most quoted.
Now the scientists struggle with clouds.
One of my readers repeatedly challenges me to a debate on climate change.
I am sure he understands the models way better than I do. But those models were wrong on the dire side. Yet, I admit the models seem better than I expected.
However, my main objection to all of this has been vindicated.
Anyone expecting government fearmongers to do anything sensible about climate change were, and still are wrong.
Science is advancing rapidly. Clean energy, especially solar, will make a dent. But along the way, we dropped nuclear from the equation to appease the Greens.
Dropping nuclear energy was a huge mistake, especially in Europe where Germany is now using more coal and is increasingly dependent on Russia for natural gas.
That is the irony of Green demands. The Greens perpetually demand more from science than science permits, at prices the Greens don't even bother to calculate.
Finally, the Greens ignore the huge political reality regarding China and India. India is talking 2060 and China 2050 on net zero.
There is no way to force countries to go along with US and EU mandates. The cost of attempting to do so via tariffs would be massive, undoubtedly resulting in a global recession, if not depression.
"I've looked at clouds from both sides now
"From up and down and still somehow
"It's cloud's illusions I recall
"I really don't know clouds at all"
* * *
Please define/explain your formula and values.
GIGO is still true, even for a super-duper computer.
Sorry, was distracted at time…
Te = 58 + Log2(CO2/280) * 1.8
Average temperature of earth (according to all democrats)
Is 58 degrees (F) - temperature of earth before industrial revolution
Plus log base 2 of current CO2 ppm concentration in atmosphere divided by the pristine earth CO2 atmospheric concentration before industrial revolution times the current accepted value of how much the temperature increases per doubling of CO2.
The point is to show that the average earth temperature is a function of CO2 and only CO2 and has little or nothing to do with thousands of other factors
Clouds affect the weather? Who could have guessed.
Next someone will say that the sun affects the weather.
FTA: “A climate model able to capture the subtle effects of individual cloud systems, storms, regional wildfires and ocean currents at a more detailed scale would require a thousand times more computer power, they said.”
Q. How do you power all of those supercomputers?
A. With electricity.
Q. Where do you get the electricity?
A. Rainbows and unicorn farts.
Yep - been saying the same thing for about the same amount of time. The earth is self-balancing. Man, in his self-deluded “scientific” wisdom, cannot understand this.
Its not the supercomputer thats the problem
Its their fatally flawed, incorrect, inaccurate computer models.
Theyve known for years their models are not right
They will run data from the 70s and 80s and they cant forecast and match the acrual known data from the 90s and 2000s, for example.
“We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Amazing how AOC can be so wise, prescient, and scientific at such a young age. /s
"The Science is Settled"TM
So all those eco nazi regs get wiped out and we can get our money back right?
Would you take a medication that had only been tested in a computer model of human drug effects and had never been given to actual humans in a clinical trial?
After having worked in IT for 30 years and developed many programs I can tell you that a modeling program is only as good as the logic that the programmer can devise, the data that is fed into it, and the people interpreting the results. Software is a tool - not a crystal ball or an omniscient being. It amazes me how people that don’t understand this just swallow this propaganda down.
See Dr. Roy Spencer’s take on this from over ten years ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/13/spencer-clouds-dominate-co2-as-a-climate-driver-since-2000/
His research is still the most formidable about this subject, I believe.
I can tell you with absolute fact that if CO2 goes below 180 parts per million then plants die.. This has been proven in closed greenhouses. Furthermore greenhouses pump extra CO2 into them to make plants grow faster.
We are at one of the lowest levels of CO2 ever recorded and are in the midst of a 2 million year old ice age. Coincidence?
Without CO2 in the atmosphere we would all be dead. CO2 is Fundamental to life on earth as the only molecule that plant photosynthesis is based on so trying to contain it at its present anemic, unhealthy levels is pure insanity.
Not flawed data, flawed minds.
Claw back all the grant funds for the last six decades...
the flawed minds created the flawed models which generated the flawed predictions
Patently obvious. They can’t tell us accurately if it will rain 3 days from now. How the hell can they model future climate? The best proof is that no current models can describe actual past climate. They were all wrong. It is painfully obvious that the input paramaters are too vast for our current technology.
This is just on the surface - this knowing that climate change models are useless and therefore inaccurate.
Beyond that, once you realize this all began with the Club of Rome, tie into UN Agenda 21, and that the strategy of using Environmental Alarmism to control population and starve the US of cheap energy, everything else makes sense.
Models will get better... Bulltaco. Not in the next 100 years they won’t.
I would bet that climate models are as poor with oceans as they are with clouds. So even if they could model clouds reasonably well (LMFAO at that), they would still have to master modelling oceans for climate models to be of any use.
The challenge appears insurmountable. A massive leap in real time planet wide data collection would be needed along with computing power to process it. I won’t say “never”, but it seems like cold fusion will be a reality long before we can model long term climate.
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