Climate models are the primary cause of unfounded alarmism. Bert Bolin, first IPCC chairman, created very primitive models back around 1957 and despite their crudity, the output was treated as gospel. They even played a part in creating the IPCC in 1988, and it to continued with making alarmist claims according to the output of crude models. In its 2007 report the IPCC shows us that knowledge of many climate factors is poor (WGI chapter 2, table 2-11, pg 201) and that models have known flaws (chapter 8), including the inability to properly model (i.e. describe and predict) natural climate forces such as the occurence of El Nino events.

I am baffled that anyone believes incomplete - and it logically follows, inaccurate - climate models. Sadly the pivotal chapter of the 2007 IPCC report was written by climate modellers who of course are reluctant to admit that their models aren't worth a cracker.

Dear Rob, on a recent thread we tried and failed, to break the assertion that the UN demonstrates the following three control mechanisms. It is these that make skeptics skeptical and maintains the single orthodoxy.

1. There is only one International, Global, and non-sovereign governance authority for AGW it is the UN (Through the UNFCCC or FCCC). It is a single entity for governance.

2. The UN has a “single” orthodoxy, which is”Global Warming caused by human C02 emissions.” There is no other orthodoxy from the UN; it is a singular “official” mandatory orthodoxy.

3. The IPCC does not, has not and will never include material from contrary science, only that which supports “their” singular orthodoxy; others may get a mention but no papers. For the UN to do otherwise would be contrary to self interest.

The IPCC’s “modeling” is just another example of “their science” supporting only “their” orthodoxy.

Contrary science has been asleep at the wheel for too long, this is where the challenge must come from.

The author wrote: "Without the large opportunity costs of climate modelling we might choose to invest more in surface and upper-air global observing networks."

I do not understand. I thought climate modelling is merely using the data from observations to make a coherent picture of what is happening to our climate. If we are not going to do any climate modelling I see no point in gathering data.

Very good idea

If models predict warming

We should ignore them

Shintaro

Gold!

Unfortunately the models come from the perspective that Carbon Dioxide produces the changes that occur in the climate. Therefore the models do not work. The point to modelling is that they need to work and clearly they do not. Anyone who wants to develop a model needs to start from scratch and take out the assumption that Carbon Dioxide is bad and then see if a model can be developed that actually does work.

predicting the future
of course we'll believe it
how silly not to
even better if we can waggle fingers at other people

let's all bet our future on current science and technology
what a safe bet
particularly since there is a consensus
what could go wrong?

Climate models were originally - 70s, 80s - designed simply to investigate the interaction of various aspects of climate. Someone got the bright idea to see what happened when the models were run decades into the future.

But they should have been ruled out as predictive models right from the start. For one thing they are far too complex to be reliable even over one or two years,let alone decades, for another they are sensitive to initial starting conditions. The confident lines you see on IPCC forecast graphs are, in fact, the result of multiple runs of the numerical model using different starting conditions. I'm fuzzy on exactly how it works but its something like the climate modeller then choosing the most stable of the results.

Further, they use a host of assumptions, particularly a crucial assumption concerning water vapour in the atmosphere.

Now you may still say everything is alright, and the assumptions are fine, but the strange part about all of this is that the public, the policy makers and even the vast majority of scientists who support global warming have no real idea of how the forecasts are derived or of the assumptions involved.

Nor has there been any proper review of any of this by a truely independent body. All we have is a form of "peer review" which is of no earthly use in checking forecasts.

The whole issue is completely wacked.

You just can't help it, can you curmudgeon?

One day this:
"the graphs have to be "adjusted" to make them say what the theory requires."

Next day this:
"the climate modeller then choosing the most stable of the results."

I agree, you are fuzzy - and you bang on about being professional?

Thanks Rob

WHAT IF....?

Is there any other profession - except perhaps astrology, astrophysics, economics, social sciences, theology, etc, - where one could (i) assume “….equal-weighted averages as best-guess results…”; while (ii) noting there is “….little agreement on metrics to separate “good” and “bad” models…”; (iii) etc ad nauseum (see abstract below); and yet claim its "what if" “projections” reveal such "science-is-settled" certainties about the future that economies and societies must be transformed immediately into a zero-carbon Ecotopia to ensure our survival?

Knutti, Reto, Reinhard Furrer, Claudia Tebaldi, Jan Cermak, Gerald A. Meehl, 2010: Challenges in Combining Projections from Multiple Climate Models. J. Climate, 23, 2739–2758. doi: 10.1175/2009JCLI3361.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009JCLI3361.1?prevSearch=%5Ball%3A+%5Bkeyword%3A+%22Climate+prediction%22%5D%5D&searchHistoryKey=

"Recent coordinated efforts, in which numerous general circulation climate models have been run for a common set of experiments, have produced large datasets of projections of future climate for various scenarios.... It is thus unclear by how much the confidence in future projections should increase based on improvements in simulating present-day conditions, a reduction of intermodel spread, or a larger number of models....Last, there is little agreement on metrics to separate “good” and “bad” models, and there is concern that model development, evaluation, and posterior weighting or ranking are all using the same datasets. While the multimodel average appears to still be useful in some situations, these results show that more quantitative methods to evaluate model performance are critical to maximize the value of climate change projections from global models."

Alice (wondering in Warmerland)

Very Interesting; so how do the models (correctly "scenarios") of the IPCC compare with the empirical evidence. Very well it seems.
For anyone who wants to take the time to find out and not rely purely on the "denialist" mantra of "models are bad".

That Snowman is sure getting sooty.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/2010-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/

Come on sillyfilly...you can't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

sillyfilly, it's not that "models are bad", rather, do we want to bet our entire future on a relatively new methodology developed by people who average what they don't know and adopt constants for what they don't understand .. or are you of the opinion that climate scientists currently know everything and there is nothing they don't know?

So you are so confidant in current climate science that you are willing to bet the entire future of society on current knowledge .. a consensus, a democracy of scientific thought?

Are you saying there is nothing left to learn and that everything about climate is now known to the point that any predictions climate science makes are absolutely true and accurate? (And you're willing to back them absolutely .. no denial of the current state of knowledge?)

Come on mate, step up and commit .. do you believe current climate science has nothing left to learn?

This should be good reading in 50 or 100 years .. the arrogance and folly of this age.

right, perfect, got-it

Seems rpg is another who thinks science has to be 100% perfectly accurate, with not even a tad uncertainty (there is and it is acknowledged).

Perhaps you really are an engineer who just doesn't get the science bit.

Corollary: You are sounding somewhat alarmist (from the other end).

No rpg, the world is not about to end anytime soon.

Oh, and science is never settled, you have misconstrued what the scientific process is, obviously.

sillyfilly - climate models are unable to retrospectively fit the climate record without a lot of very suspicious 'adjustments'.

bonmot - it would be helpful if the error margins weren't on the same order as the supposed trend.

QUESTION: What could have been achieved without climate models?

ANSWER: World peace and utopia.

I think Iam going to be sick!

BLUE

bonmot "a tad uncertainty" really?

We never seem to get that message here on OLO, or anywhere else for that matter .. or what the uncertainty or errors are. If you read some of the papers, the uncertainty is often larger than the predictions, but why ruin a good scare eh?

All we get is galloping hysteria, snide comments, insults, and of course you are now into trying to bait people you disagree with .. which seems to show you can't deal with adversity, but that's your problem.

When the media and politicians and climate sciencists go public, they never mention uncertaintly .. see Bob Brown claim the floods were because of coal burning, no mention of a possible error in his statements, when the UN science chief spoke on the ABC, he said skepticism was untenable .. no mention that their science was possibly not completely correct, or that there is a sound basis for skepticism.

So please don't come the raw prawn with doom laden statements then when poked with a pointy stick, say "of course uncertainty is always present".

It is never mentioned, and you all seem to slyly avoid it till pushed on the matter. Which says a lot about how current climate science is tricky and not well understood, but the bounty is enormous so that justifies the subterfuge.

No i don't expect science to be perfect, but you seem to expect that your current level of knowledge is sufficient for changing the world, even when many scientists disagree and constantly expose the climate science astrology for hat it is .. I do not agree.

Bon Mot - In an earlier set of posts I pointed out that the actual temperature results of the past decade had to be "adjusted" to make it look as they were going up. That wasn't relevent to the results from models, but you have hit on a point I forgot in my first post on this article.

That is, model runs can also be "tuned" to replicate historical results, although it is difficult as you rightly suggest. They have to run the model multiple times, with different parameters - lots of adjustments can be made - until they find a result that is stable (doesn't crash or give obviously wrong results) and is something like the historial line for a few decades.

They they have the front to suggest that the model, because it followed the historical line will then say something useful about the future. Right! Look at the graphs of model results in the 2007 IPCC report. They don't "hindcast" for more than a few decades because they don't hindcast the little ice age.. its not there at all in the models. They are, in other words, nearly useless. the report gets around that obvious problem by simply not showing model results back beyond a few decades..

The following extract from President Václav Klaus at the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Inaugural Annual Lecture.19 October 2010.

“To reduce the interpretation of the causality of all kinds of climate changes and of global warming to one variable, CO2, or to a small proportion of one variable – human-induced CO2 – is impossible to accept. Elementary rationality and my decades-long experience with econometric modeling and statistical testing of scientific hypotheses tell me that it is impossible to make strong conclusions based on mere correlation of two (or more) time series. In addition to this, it is relevant that in this case such a simple correlation does not exist.
The rise of global temperature started approximately 150 years ago but man-made CO2 emissions did not start to grow visibly before the 1940s. Temperature changes also repeatedly moved in the opposite direction than the CO2 emissions trend suggests.
Theory is crucial and in this case it is missing. Pure statistical analysis does not explain
or confirm anything. Two Chinese scientists, Guang Wu and Shaomin Yan, published a
study in which they used the random walk model to analyze the global temperature
fluctuations in the last 160 years. Their results – rather unpleasantly for the global warming alarmists – show that the random walk model perfectly fits the temperature changes.
Because “the random walk model has a perfect fit for the recorded temperature … there is no need to include various man-made factors such as CO2, and non-human factors, such as Sun” to improve the quality of the model fit, they say. It is an important result. Do other models give a better fit? I have not seen any.”