Re: predictions of Global Warming....The models are wrong (but only by 400%)

JoNova ^ | August 11th, 2010 | Joanne

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

McKitrick, McIntyre, and Herman 2010: It’s been a long time coming. A humdinger of a paper.

International Journal Of (Popular) Climatology

It’s a big step forward in the search for the hot-spot. (If the hot spot were a missing person, McKitrick et al have sighted a corpse.)

In 2006 the CCSP quietly admitted with graphs (in distant parts of various reports) that the models were predicting a hot spot that the radiosondes didn’t find (Karl et al 2006).

The models predicted a hot spot (left), the radiosondes couldn't find anything like it.

Obviously this was a bit of a  problem for the Scare Campaign. Much of the amplifying feedback created in the models also creates the hot-spot, so without any evidence that the hot-spot is occurring, there goes the disaster (and the urgent need for funding and junkets).

Douglass et al officially pointed out the glaring deficiency in 2007 by comparing tropospheric predictions from the models. They specifically used only models that had got the surface temperatures correct.

Santer et al replied in 2008 by discovering a lot of uncertainties, and stretching the error bars. Since the broad errors bars overlapped he could announce that the hot spot wasn’t really missing (even though he didn’t really find it either). He wrote this up in words effectively saying that the inconsistency in temperatures was not so inconsistent. (If the models can’t predict a very specific range and the radiosondes aren’t accurate to a very specific range, then they both agree!!) Many in the Big Scare Campaign got overly excited and declared that the hot spot was “found”.

Note that Santer et al did not limit themselves to the same model runs that Douglass et al used. While Douglass et al  insisted on only using models that at least got the surface trend right, Santer did not. The McKitrick paper used the same archive of model simulations as the Santer paper.

McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out these key Santer results which used data up to 1999 were overturned with the use of data up to 2009. Somehow, despite all the excitement over Santer et al 2008, the IJOC decided updating it and contradicting it was “not interesting” and it took months to reach that banal conclusion. The editors also wouldn’t reveal exactly what the anonymous unpaid reviewers said and instead suggested a range of time-consuming changes and conditions that would have tied the paper up even longer. (The full story is on Climate Audit.)

So Ross McKitrick, Stephen McIntyre, and Chad Herman took their critical work to another journal (say “cheers” for competition.) And the IJOC have missed out on what looks to probably be a very cited paper. But they did successfully delay it for 18 months, past the crucial Copenhagen conference, allowing Santer et al to be cited elsewhere and at length. Perhaps the IJOC got what they wanted, but it seems that what they wanted is not a full debate and discussion about climate science. This is the sad joke of relying on “peer review”.

A big step forward in this paper is the use of econometric statistical analysis. As Wegman found, the top guns in climate science relied heavily on statistics, but didn’t rely heavily (or at all) on expert statisticians. McKitrick et al bought in some cutting edge tools from economics, and did the-not-too-complicated-step of including the most recent data.

The end result is that where Santer et al found the error bars could overlap, McKitrick found that the models overestimated temperatures by 200 and 400% in the lower and mid troposphere respectively.

The observations don't match the predictions

David Stockwell sums up the importance of this new paper:

This represents a basic validation test of climate models over a 30 year period, a validation test which SHOULD be fundamental to any belief in the models, and their usefulness for projections of global warming in the future.

The results are shown in their figure:

… the differences between models and observations now exceed the 99% critical value. As shown in Table 1 and Section 3.3, the model trends are about twice as large as observations in the LT layer, and about four times as large in the MT layer.

…

But you can rest assured. The models, in important ways that were once claimed to be proof of “… a discernible human influence on global climate”, are now shown to be FUBAR. Wouldn’t it have been better if they had just done the validation tests and rejected the models before trying to rule the world with them?

As a final note, having produced a paper of such significance, it’s worth noting just how much Santer et al were keen to assist McIntyre and McKitrick in the interests of furthering science. There is nothing more important than understanding our climate, right?

Thanks to David Stockwell for finding some good quotes from McIntyre and McKitrick:

We requested this data from S08 lead author Santer, who categorically refused to provide it (see http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4314.) Instead of supplying what would be at most 1 MB or so of monthly data collated by specialists as part of their research work, Santer directed us to the terabytes of archived PCMDI data and challenged us to reproduce their series from scratch. Apart from the pointless and potentially large time cost imposed by this refusal, the task of aggregating PCMDI data with which we are unfamiliar would create the risk of introducing irrelevant collation errors or mismatched averaging steps, leading to superfluous controversy should our results not replicate theirs.

Following this refusal by lead author Santer, we filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) Request to NOAA, applying to coauthors Karl, Free, Solomon and Lanzante. In response, all four denied having copies of any of the model time series used in Santer et al. (2008) and denied having copies of any email correspondence concerning these time series with any other coauthors of Santer et al. (2008). Two other coauthors stated by email that they did not have copies of the series. An FOI request to the U.S. Department of Energy is under consideration.

Santer declared that McIntyre’ FOIA requests were just a fishing expedition, and not real science.

Ross McKitrick has set himself up with a new blog documenting his great work.

The short killer summary: The Skeptics Handbook. The most deadly point: The Missing Hot Spot.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[steelyourfaith]

Thanx !

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From the Comments to the article at Jonova:

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sunsettommy:
August 11th, 2010 at 3:42 pm

The observations don’t match the predictions

And when they are off by HUNDREDS of percent.They are not even close!

The models are clearly shown to be invalidated and therefore should be discarded.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

You will notice I didn't use the title of the paper....but here is an explicit link to the Pdf:

Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Series

[surfer]

and 1000’s of observation locations were purposely set up to maximize temperature. Add to the fact that they discounted almost 2/3rds of the observation locations because the temps were too cold...

THE ENTIRE THING IS A SCAM!!!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Pages 12 and 13 have some charts.....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

But the ends justified the means....onward to Global Governance funding.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

It is a very technical paper...but jumping to the conclusions :

****************************EXCERPT***********************************

4 Discussion and conclusions

Econometric tools are increasingly being used for climate data sets (see, e.g., Fomby and Vogelsang 2002, Mills 2010). We present two econometric methods for trend comparisons between data sets. Both add flexibility for multivariate comparisons and provide improved treatment of complex error structures. The multivariate testing method of Vogelsang and Franses (2005) yields the more robust estimator of the covariance matrix, but requires balanced data panels. Panel regression methods can accommodate comparisons of series of unequal lengths, but software limitations typically limit treatment of within- panel autocorrelation to the AR1 case. In our example the two methods yielded similar conclusions, indicating that the AR1 approximation in the panel model was likely not overly restrictive. In general, however, for the purpose of multivariate trend comparisons in climatology, we particularly recommend that the VF05 method enter the empirical toolkit.

In our example on temperatures in the tropical troposphere, on data ending in 1999 we find the trend differences between models and observations are only marginally significant, partially confirming the view of Santer et al. (2008) against Douglass et al. (2007). The observed temperature trends themselves are statistically insignificant. Over the 1979 to 2009 interval, in the LT layer, observed trends are jointly significant and three of four data sets have individually significant trends. In the MT layer two of four data sets have individually significant trends and the trends are jointly insignificant or marginal depending on the test used. Over the interval 1979 to 2009, model-projected temperature trends are two to four times larger than observed trends in both the lower and mid-troposphere and the differences are statistically significant at the 99% level.

Our methods assume trends are linear. We found no evidence for nonlinearity on the observed data, but some on modeled data in the MT. Also, the fact that the results are sensitive to the end date suggests that they might also be sensitive to the start date. Since the satellite data are unavailable prior to 1979 we cannot extend these series earlier. Interpretation of trend comparisons should therefore make reference to the time period analysed, which, ideally, should have some intrinsic interest. In this case the 1979-2009 interval is a 31-year span during which the upward trend in surface data strongly suggests a climate-scale warming process. As noted in the studies cited in the introduction, comparing models to observations in the tropical troposphere is an important aspect of testing explanations of the origins of surface warming.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From Anthony Watts website:

Gore concedes, National Wildlife Federation calls skeptics “bastards”

************************************EXCERPT****************************************

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Anthony Watts

Gore concedes on climate this year
By Steve Milloy GreenHellBlog, August 10, 2010

Speaking about the likelihood of climate bill being passed by Congress in 2010, Al Gore told a conference call of supporters tonight that, “this battle has not been successful and is pretty much over for this year.” Gore bitterly denounced the Senate and federal government stating several times, “The U.S. Senate has failed us” and “The federal government has failed us.” Gore even seemed to blame President Obama by emphasizing that “the government as a whole has failed us… although the House did its job. [emphasis added]”

Gore urged his listeners to take the “realistic view that they had failed badly.” Gore said that “Comprehensive legislation is not likely to be debated” and that a “lame duck debate” is a “very slim possibility indeed.” (N.B. We thought, because Gore told us, that “the debate” was over.)

…

Gore blamed the skeptics for “attacking science and scientists.” “They [the skeptics] did damage and cast doubt,” Gore said.

…

In a warm-up discussion before Gore addressed the call, National Wildlife Federation chief Larry Schweiger referred to the skeptics as “enemies” and that he hoped the alarmists would “outlive the bastards.”

Read entire story: Gore concedes on climate this year at Greenhell blog

[SunkenCiv]

It’s almost as if the whole works never had any science behind it in the first place, and was just a political scam. :’) Thanks Ernest.

[TheOldLady]

It’s almost as if the whole works never had any science behind it in the first place, and was just a political scam. :’) Thanks Ernest.

Oh no! It's been disproved for good? How are they going to get our taxes up to 90% without crap and tax? Oh, the hugh manatee.

[Marine_Uncle]

The ***t they have been allowed to get away with for so long is ... well rather alarming at best. But at least we finally are seeing how poor the science really was in describing what is known as global warming.