Climate Models  by Roger King  

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Climate Model Issues
3. Conclusion

Introduction

Climate models are the main talking point of the Global Warming alarmists.  In the following section(s) you will see that not only are the climate models very dependent on inputs that are not fully understood but these models can't predict past events.   A small change in the input of these computer models makes a hugh difference in the output.   It is with this information that we are making decisions to spend billions upon billions of dollars.   Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" quotes the computer model with the most dramatic results to create a very emotion evoking but mostly false movie.

Climate Debate Rejects Science For Ideology  by Charles Krauthammer   May 29, 2008    Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands.

Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation.     Link

More Bad News for the Global Warmers by Michael R. Fox, Hawaii Reporter  July 21, 2008

1. Computer models do not consider variations of irradiance and magnetic fields of the sun
2. Computer models do not accurately model the role of clouds
3. Computer models do not simulate a possible negative feedback from water vapor
4. Computer models do not explain many features of the Earth’s observed climate.
5. Computer models cannot produce reliable predictions of regional climate change

Another Miss for the Modelers   by Chris Horner   July 31, 2008   The IPCC and the models on which it premises its version of reality are wrong on rainfall. They are wrong on GHG concentrations and behavior. Models are wrong on Antarctica, on Andean snowpack, on Bangladesh, on ocean temperatures, and wrong on the Northwest Passage. Roy Spencer's research appears to have affirmed that models are demonstrably and fatally wrong on the threshold question of climate sensitivity.  
 

Climate Model Issues

Scientists dismiss claims of runaway man-made global warming by Kirk Myers at the Seminole County Environmental News Examiner March 15, 2010  As Dr. William Gray, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, writes:

“All the global General Circulation Models (GCMs) which predict future global temperature change for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They do not realistically handle the changes in upper tropospheric water vapor and cloudiness . . . They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.”

Gray also observes that models “failed to account for the weak global cooling over the last decade, ” so how can they be expected to make long-range predictions?

“It is also important to note that the GCM groups do not make official shorter-range global temperature forecasts of one to 10 years, which could accurately be verified. If they won’t do this, why should we believe their forecasts at 50 to 100 years?

Climate warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence: by EPW Blog  December 10, 2007 Climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia report that observed patterns of temperature changes (‘fingerprints’) over the last thirty years are not in accord with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability. Therefore, climate change is ‘unstoppable’ and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation.   

Myths / Facts COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING    at Is It Getting Warmer   April 13, 2007   Computer models can be made to “verify” anything by changing some of the 5 million input parameters or any of a multitude of negative and positive feedbacks in the program used.. They do not “prove” anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of properly including the effects of the sun, cosmic rays and the clouds. The sun is a major cause of temperature variation on the earth surface as its received radiation changes all the time, This happens largely in cyclical fashion.  

Global Warming, Global Myth  by Edmund Contoski   There are other examples where the computer models fail to agree with reality. According to the greenhouse hypothesis, the warming should occur equally during day and night. But most of the warming that has been observed has occurred at night, thus falsifying the models.

All of the models agree — for sound theoretical reasons — that warming from a greenhouse effect must be 2–3 times greater in the lower atmosphere than at the earth's surface. This is not happening. Both satellites and weather balloons show slightly greater warming at the surface. These atmospheric temperature measurements furnish direct, unequivocal evidence that whatever warming has occurred is not from the greenhouse effect. 

The Science Isn’t Settled - The Limitations of Global Climate Models  by Timothy F. Ball, Ph.D.  March 21, 2007

1. ...  understand that all of the forecasts of future climate are based on models, all of them. They are very simplistic models that basically guarantee the outcome because of the way the models are set up.

2. They attempt to predict future climate conditions based on a set of assumptions. Models, like theories, are only as good as the assumptions you make.

3. What data is used to create the model? Limited surface data, virtually nothing above the surface. Smoking Gun?
4. Caspar Ammann said that GCMs (General Circulation Models) took about 1 day of machine time to cover 25 years. On this basis, it is obviously impossible to model the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition (say the last 2 million years) using a GCM as this would take about 219 years of computer time.  Source: McIntyre, Climateaudit, 2005

5. You can put the same data into the same model seven different times and it will give you a different result each time. What they do is they average the results, or they will pick two that happen to agree and ignore five others out of the seven. But they don’t tell you that.

6. They have an inability to hindsight forecast. Hindsight forecasting is when you run the model from present conditions and have it going backwards and say, “How well does it recreate past conditions?” The models can’t do that. They can’t recreate the Medieval Warm Period of 1,000 years ago and they can’t recreate the Ice Ages. In other words, they don’t work going backwards, so the question then is how well they work going forward. The answer is, they don’t. Again, that is part of the problem with the models. The models have been wrong on every single forecast to date.

7. Surface weather stations: Note concentration in US and western Europe.  Vast areas of the world with no coverage. Ocean 70% of surface.

8. “It’s very clear we do not have a climate observing system… This may come as a shock to many people who assume that we do know adequately what’s going on with the climate, but we don’t.” Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric research Boulder, CO.
9. Goddard Institute for Space Studies ... is telling you that this is the temperature increase for 130 years, but how many stations are 130 years old and have a continuous record? Virtually none.

10. Sun-earth relationships and Milankovich effects are not even included in the computer models. Variation in corpuscular radiation, the solar wind are not even included in the computer models.

11. Climate changes significantly all the time and current changes are well within natural variability.
12. The models are built on a completely inadequate database.
13. Carbon dioxide is not a significant cause of global warming or climate change, yet it is the key element forced in models.
14. All models are based on the laws of physics but are unable to forecast with any acceptable of accuracy beyond 10 days.
15. All previous predictions have seen a steady decrease in the amount of temperature increase forecast.
16. The models are unable to recreate past known conditions (Known as hindsight forecasting.)
17. They are unable to reproduce other than a very large scale crude grid. Features such as thunderstorms are too small for the resolution.
18. The models fail to meet scientific rigor.
19. Models should not be the basis of any policy, let alone global energy and economic policies.

The green fervour: Is environmentalism the new religion?  by Joseph Brean, The National Post, Canada  Feb. 13, 2007  Dr. Orrell formerly of University College of London sees the same problems in the predictions of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which he calls "extremely vague," and says there is no scientific reason to think the climate is more predictable than the weather.  "Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of Co2," he writes in Apollo's Arrow.  And so scientists use theoretical concepts like "flux adjustments" to make the models agree with reality. When models about the future climate are in agreement, "it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modeling community than it does about global warming and the economy." 

Public Disservice: Melting Myths by Patrick J. Michaels July 26, 2006   Around the world, in Antarctica, for the last few decades, average temperatures across the continent have been going down. Snowfall has increased, resulting in more continental ice. In fact, every modern computer simulation of 21st century climate has Antarctica continuing to accrete ice.  

A Cloudy Mystery by Alan Caruba  August 22, 2007   How wide is the computer modeling gap when it comes to predicting the weather? The Economist reported that, "In a recent paper in Climate Dynamics, Mark Webb of Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change and his colleagues reported that clouds account for 66% of the differences between members of one important group of models and for 85% of them in another group." Clouds simply defy the logarithms of computer modelers.  In short, "Too much still remains unknown about the physical mechanisms that determine cloud behavior," said The Economist. 

World climate predictors right only half the time   by New Zealand Climate Science Coalition June 7th, 2007   The credibility of these computer model predictions took a significant hit in June 2007 when Dr. Jim Renwick, a top UN IPCC scientist, admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable. "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well," Renwick conceded.    

Climate is too complex for accurate predictions by Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker of the University of Washington in Seattle.  19:00 25 October 2007  Climate change models, no matter how powerful, can never give a precise prediction of how greenhouse gases will warm the Earth, according to a new study.  The analysis focuses on the temperature increase that would occur if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels.  "This finding reinforces not only that climate policies will necessarily be made in the face of deep, irreducible uncertainties," says Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US. "But also the uncomfortable reality – for climate modellers – that finite research dollars invested in ever more sophisticated climate models offer very little marginal benefit to decision makers."    

Inhofe Floor Speech on Global Warming: 2007 - Global Warming Alarmism Reaches a Tipping Point October 26, 2007 - Another high-profile UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, recently echoed Renwick’s sentiments about climate models by referring to them as “story lines.” “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios,” Trenberth wrote in journal Nature’s blog on June 4, 2007. He also admitted that the climate models have major shortcomings because “they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess."  

Viewer’s guide to rooting out propaganda in future CBC climate coverage by Dr. Tim Ball & Tom Harris  November 9, 2007   It is crucially important for viewers to try to discern if the information being presented is the output from a computer climate model. If it is, ignore it. All’predictions’ and rates of temperature and climate change are the products of computer models and they produce essentially meaningless results. As Professor David Deming wrote when discussing sea level changes, ”Projections of sea-level rise are based on projections of future warming, fifty or a hundred years hence. And these projections are based on speculative computer models that have numerous uncertainties...These models cannot even be tested; their validity is completely unknown. In short, predictions of future sea-level rise are nothing but sheer speculation.”

NRSP science advisor and official IPCC Reviewer Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand summarizes the models used by the UN, ”All [the UN IPCC does] is make ‘projections’ and ‘estimates’. No climate model has ever been properly tested… and their ‘projections’ are nothing more than the opinions of ‘experts’ with a conflict of interest, because they are paid to produce the models...There is no actual scientific evidence for all these ‘projections’ and ‘estimates’.”

Boston-based NRSP science advisor Dr Sallie Baliunas, a colleague of Dr. Soon (see part 4 of this series) and an expert at understanding the Sun’s impact on climate, summed up the situation well when she said that models are, ”not reliable as tools for explaining past climate or making projections for future trends”. Click here for more on models.

'Global Warming' as Pathological Science   by James Lewis  November 02, 2007  Freeman Dyson, one of the great physicists alive today, put it plainly enough in his autobiography:   "...all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. ... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. ... They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in." 

Public Misperceptions of Human-Caused Climate Change: The Role of the Media  by James Cook,  University, Townsville, Australia.   Testifying before the Committee on Environment and Public Works United States Senate Room 406, Dirksen Senate Office Building  9.30 a.m., December 6, 2006

1. A major problem with all General circulation computer models (GCMs) is that they rest upon the Kelvin fallacy, i.e. the assumption that the physics of the system is fully known. Though computer modelling and attribution studies are valuable heuristic tools, GCMs are not suitable for use as predictive tools for climate policy. 
2. The modelers themselves acknowledge that they are unable to predict future climate, preferring the term “scenario” to describe the output of their experiments.
3. Other empirical computer models have been trained using elapsed data up to the present. Such models have been constructed using the 150 year-long surface temperature record (Klyashtorin & Lyubushin, 2003), 3,500 year-long proxy records from a Sargasso Sea marine core and a South African speleothem (Loehle, 2004), and the 10,000 year-long Holocene proxy record from the GRIP ice core (Kotov, 2001). Virtually all forward projections using these fitted models project cooling during the early decades of the 21st century (e.g., Fig. 7).

Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictions  by David Bromwich  February 15, 2007   A new report on climate over the world's southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.  This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth's climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.  It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.   

World climate predictors right only half the time  by The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition  June 7, 2007   “The open admission by a climate scientist of the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), Dr Jim Renwick, that his organisation achieves only 50 per cent accuracy in its climate forecasts, and that this is as good as any other forecaster around the world, should be a wake-up call for world political leaders,” said Rear Admiral Jack Welch, chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.  

Computer modelling Is an excellent overview of Computer modeling and the uncertainties in their creation and results

Climate Models Overheat Antarctica, New Study Finds  ScienceDaily  May 8, 2008   Computer analyses of global climate have consistently overstated warming in Antarctica, concludes new research by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Ohio State University.  ...  The error appeared to be caused by models overestimating the amount of water vapor in the Antarctic atmosphere, the new study concludes. The reason may have to do with the cold Antarctic atmosphere handling moisture differently than the atmosphere over warmer regions.   

Is the Global Warming Alarm Founded on Fact? by Richard S. Lindzen    Although we are far from the benchmark of doubled CO2, climate forcing is already about three-fourths of what we expect from such a doubling.  Even if we attribute all warming over the past century to man-made greenhouse gases (which we have no basis for doing), the observed warming is only about a third to a sixth of what models project.  This raises two possibilities: either the models are greatly overestimating the sensitivity of climate to man-made greenhouse gases, or the models are correct, but some unknown process has canceled most of the warming.     

Conclusion