Global Warming Takes a Powder
A month ago (April 9) SOS Forests posted an essay entitled “Theory, Empiricism, Forests, and Global Warming Models” [here], in which I pointed out that global climate models are purely theoretical and based on zero empirical data. In contrast, I pointed out, weather prediction models are almost purely empirical.
The best weather prediction models are more empirical than theoretical. They look at current conditions (fronts, pressure gradients, jet streams, etc.) as they are cadastrally arrayed across the globe, and compare those to past dates when the same or very similar arrays occurred. Then the weather outcomes of the similar past conformations are examined, and used to predict the immediate future weather. Not much theory to that, more of a data mining of the past; hence the descriptor “empirical.”
That post was inspired by a discussion at William M. Briggs, Statistician Blog [here]. In the comments Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a contributer to Real Climate Blog (a extreme GW alarmist site [here]) stated:
First off, weather prediction models are not empirical searches for similar patterns in the past, instead they are very similar to climate models in formulation (though usually at higher resolution). The big difference is that they are run using observed initial conditions and try to predict the exact path of the specific weather situation. Climate models are run in boundary condition mode and try and see how the envelope of all weather situations is affected. The actual calculations are very similar and depending on the configuration, a climate model can do weather forecasts and weather forecasting models can do climate projections.
That statement is almost completely wrong. Weather prediction models are nothing like climate prediction models; the former are data-based, the latter are not.
The empirical/theoretical argument has been raised before, and to counter it climate modelers decided to incorporate some real world data, which they refer to as “initial conditions.” And what did they find using real data?
They found that their models predict that global warming is at least 20 years away!
An article in the latest issue of Science Mag reveals the recalculation.
Mother Nature Cools the Greenhouse, But Hotter Times Still Lie Ahead
by Richard A. Kerr, Science, Vol. 320, May 2, 2008
As climate-change skeptics like to point out, worldwide temperatures haven’t risen much in the past decade.
Actually, global temperatures have FALLEN since 1998. Kerr is mincing. He knows that temps have fallen. Everybody involved in or attuned to global climate knows that temps have fallen.
If global warming is such hot stuff, they ask, why hasn’t it soared beyond the El Niño–driven global warmth of 1998? Mainstream climate researchers reply that greenhouse warming isn’t the only factor at work. And in a new paper, they put some numbers on that rebuttal.
They show that regional and even global temperatures are being held down by a natural jostling of the climate system, driven in large part by vacillating ocean currents. The study “shows how natural climate variability can mask the global warming effect of greenhouse gases,” says climate researcher Adam Scaife of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K., “but only for a few years.”
What? Natural jostling and vacillation? That alone puts the hammer to the GW alarmist position that humanity is responsible for climate change, as well as being an admission that the IPCC predictions (forecasts, projections, scenarios, wild-eyed speculations, or whatever you want to call them) were dead wrong.
The latest reminder of climate’s confounding subtleties comes in climate forecasts that Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and colleagues published this week in Nature. Rather than simply predicting temperatures at the end of the century, as most modelers do, they ran their simulations only 10 and 20 years into the future. …
To take account of such ocean-driven natural variability, Keenlyside and his colleagues began their model’s forecasting runs by giving the model’s oceans the actual sea surface temperatures measured in the starting year of a simulation.
Get that? For the first time those wild and crazy guys, climate modelers, decided to use some real world data, just for funzies.
Providing the initial state of the ocean doesn’t make much difference when forecasting out a century, so long-range forecasters don’t usually bother. But an initial state gives the model a starting point from which to calculate what the oceans will be doing a decade hence and therefore what future natural variability might be like.
Usually they don’t bother using real world data. Why use empirical evidence when their models are entirely theoretical? That might spoil the party, and so it did.
The added observations did in fact improve simulations of past climate variations. Looking into the future, the model forecasts a slowing of heat-carrying Atlantic currents and thus a cooling over the North Atlantic, North America, and western Europe in the next decade. It even predicts a slight cooling of the globe. But by 2030, forecast global temperatures bounce back up to the warming predicted with greenhouse gases alone.
Kerr is mincing again. The newest latest climate models using real world data predict that the planet will be in a cooling mode for at least 20 years, the entire length of their simulation!
To repeat, climate modelers now conjecture that the Earth is cooling, not warming, and that this globe will continue to cool for 20 years!!!
Did anybody tell Al Gore?
The forecast is not the first to herald a slowing or even a temporary cessation of global warming. A study involving even more ocean observations inserted at the beginning of model runs reached similar conclusions last year. “The different approaches give slightly different results,” says climate modeler Douglas Smith of the Hadley Centre, who headed the earlier study, but “we do agree there’s a temporary offset of global warming due to natural variability.”
So if you’re a climate-change activist pointing to year after year of mounting climate crises, you might want to rethink your approach.
Kerr is mincing again. If you are a climate-change alarmist, you might want to go jump in a lake, or off a cliff, or do whatever those who are completely wrong do to achieve closure on their gross errors.
For starters, the Governor ought to rehire the State Climatologist and fire the Dean of the College of Atmospheric Sciences at O.S.U., since the State Climatologist was dead right and the Dean was dead wrong. In fact, Gov. Nitwit ought to fire himself.
The Nobel Prize Committee ought to jerk the Nobel Peace Prize (can you believe it!) from Al Gore and the IPCC. After all, they were wrong, wrong, wrong. They based their whole “peace” movement on defunct and proven to be goofy theoretical models that prognosticated immediate and happening today global warming, a finding that the climate alarmist modelers themselves now reject, along with everybody else. The DATA (empiricism) say the planet has been cooling for 10 years. The models (those silly models) now say the cooling trend will continue for the next 20 years.
It should be noted that the new models, even with oceanic “initial conditions,” still lack any computations regarding sunspots, cloud formation, solar irradiation, or orbital eccentricities, all of which provide more empirical evidence that the Earth will be cooling for the next 90,000 years or so.
Everyone who invested in Al Gore’s fanciful carbon scheme will get their just desserts; bankruptcy!
All the fascist, anti-free speech alarmist demagogues who declared “the debate is over” should be gagged for the next 20 years, or longer, since they tried to stifle the truth so very unsuccessfully. Put them in stocks in the public square where we can throw rotten fruit at them. Cane them. Hold Nuremberg-style trials and hang them for all I care; that was their suggestion a year ago for skeptics when the alarmists wanted to choke off scientific dissent.
All the “scientists” who joined the “consensus” should have their scientist licenses revoked, be fired from their cushy government jobs, and be forced to dig ditches for a living, since that’s all they are intellectually equipped to do.
The forest “scientists” who demanded that we burn all our forests down today because global warming was going to kill them anyway should forced to plant trees on chain gangs for their idiocy.
However, it is unlikely that any of that will happen. The wackos will continue to erupt with Chicken Little dire reports, the main thrust of which will be kill all the forests, children, elderly, poor people, etc. because humanity is strangling the planet. You just can’t keep those apocalyptic alarmists quiet, no matter what you do, and why bother?
The best thing is to do is to ignore them. And don’t vote for pea brains anymore. One Governor Nitwit is enough for my lifetime, and yours too.
Warmer is Better. Fight the Ice.
