Global Warming Models Not Pretty
Dave Price
Uh oh.
A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.Yeah, that’s a problem. When you're proposing massive global energy taxes to address a problem based on computer models, it's a little inconvenient when they turn out not to work.
….
"The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth's climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic," said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. "Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? "It seems that the answer is no."
Interestingly, the CNS version of the story has much more entertaining quotes than the ScienceDaily piece:
"This means that the greenhouse effect - while real - is not very important in producing climate change," he said. "It's a lot smaller than what the models calculate."But non-skeptics like Bracken Hendricks are skeptical, and they have irrefutable evidence for their position:
Singer said the reason why the models "overestimate the effectiveness of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is that the models ignore what are called negative feedbacks which occur in the atmosphere, such as clouds, which reduce the effect of the greenhouse gases."
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not just a report. It's not just a random gathering of scientists. It's the largest scientific body ever assembled," he said.Apparently many scientific studies are "just reports" produced by totally random gatherings of scientists. Good that he clarified that the IPCC
"Their most recent assessment determined that there's 90 percent certainty that global climate change is happening and that it is caused by human beings."Of course, that also means this massive throbbing nonrandom superbrain of scientists admits there’s a 10% chance that they’re completely wrong and all this time and effort we’re putting into global warming is a gigantic waste of resources.
"We don't want to be gambling with the fate of the planet."...said the man proposing to gamble trillions on reducing CO2 emissions that may or may not have any positive impact on climate change, based on unreliable computer models that don’t even accurately predict the past.
Who’s ultimately going to be right on the climate science? Hard to say for sure. But Hendricks’ grasp of economic principles doesn’t inspire confidence in his camp:
Hendricks countered, saying that alternative energy will be a multi-billion dollar industry and "an opportunity to revitalize our global competitiveness" through innovation and job creation.Yeah, and if we pay little kids to break windows, then the glassmakers will have more business, and they will order more from their suppliers, and they’ll order more from their suppliers, and it will create this huge ever-expanding bubble of prosperity… what? What do you mean, broken windows fallacy?
Of course, what will actually happen is that China will chortle and build another thousand cheap CO2-spewing coal-fired power plants, and we’ll be stuck paying higher energy prices, thus further reducing our competitive advantage. But not to worry: we'll lead the world in the lucrative market for inaccurate computer models!
Just like Voltron!
The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom
OMG, ManBearPig has turned the Pope into a dog! I told you what would happen if you ignored the threat of ManBearPig!
I was being serial and you wouldn't listen. Now pay the price you ingrates!
-Al
The economics just do not make sense in the present political climate to continue to build coal fired plants. This will leave the rapidly growing west with a shortage of power within the next 10 years.
Lets go ahead and build new power plants, that use the best technology to release as few chemicals into the land and air as we can.
1. Climate analysis is incredibly complex and difficult.
2. We're not talking about the health of a single lake or island, etc. We're talking about the entire planet. Thus it should be taken seriously.
3. We are taking a lot of carbon out of the ground and transferring it into the air.
4. We should utilize the publics concern about this to get nuclear power as our primary power source.
5. What if it's a bit too late by the time we get the climate models dialed in?
6. A 90% confidence level is quite high, assuming it's truthful.
7. The climate has changed rapidly in the past without human intervention, so even if humans are not to blame we still need to take it seriously.
8. We can utilize the publics fear of climate change to break our addiction to oil, and thus help bankrupt the Saudi's and Iranians.
9. The Chinese might be motivated with tariffs on their imports. They are an export dependent economy (for now). Good luck getting the rest of the world to cooperate, even the Europeans.
People doing mathematical modeling of complex systems should draw some humility from recent experiences in the Collateralized Debt Obligation markets.
What if we're wrong the other way and by cutting CO2 emission we cause an Ice Age? That would be far deadlier and less reparable than warming.
6. A 90% confidence level is quite high, assuming it's truthful.
No, it isn't; it's actually the minimum test for statistical significance (and as Ron points out, arrived at pretty capriciously). By comparison, we know many quantum mechanical process models are accurate down to 99.999999999999999999999999999%
Your other points are all pretty valid, though.
I'd like to go through your points one at a time, if you don't mind. I don't so much have a quibble with the statements themselves, but with the implications/conclusions.
1)When dealing with such a difficult modeling job, backtesting (either testing your forecast against actual results or, more easily done, using past data to see if you can predict the present) is a fundamental part of proper scientific modeling. You should have validated backtesting prior to release. That, apparently, wasn't done. It's sloppy. You can get away with sloppy on easy stuff, but not on the difficult stuff.
2)Agreed, but just because it's serious does not mean doing a chicken little impression. It means it deserves rigourous attention (something many Warmists don't want you to do, as evidenced by their reluctance to share data).
3)True, but given results like these it's inconclusive that that is truly a significant issue. It may end up being a 'so what?' factor.
4)Nuclear power should absolutely be at the forefront of energy policy but there are so many reasons to support it we shouldn't need to resort to using spurious allegations about Global Warming to do so.
5) Assuming that Man can play a meaningful part in changing climate, what if we 'over-stear. If we think temps will rise 10 degrees, we take measures to reduce temps by 10 degrees. However, when the temp only would have risen 1 degree we are now 9 degrees colder than we should be. So not only have we caused a radical climate change, we've prepared for the wrong one.
Of course, 'because it's serious' we'll see what we are doing and bombard everyone with Global Cooling and over-stear the other direction.
Instead of adapting to the curves of the climate road, we fishtail ourselves all over the place because we panicked.
6) Studies like this are what calls into question the truthfulness of those confidence levels. Yes, the statistical formulas may yeild 90% confidence bands, but when you backtest them and 90% of your actuals don't fall within your forecasts, you can't honestly call them 90% confidence bands anymore. Yet, it seems, they do.
7) Again, seriousness is not a chicken little impression. And given a rapid climate change in the absence of humans in the past calls into question whether we have the power to effect change in the present. Perhaps instead of trying to stop the change it would be better to begin adapting to that change.
8) Like #4, we shouldn't have to lie to our people to do what we should be doing anyway. Energy independence is a worthy goal for numerous reasons.
9) China's a real problem. Even if you could get near universal compliance China may see it as less of a carrot and more of a stick. Given their militaristic outlook, I don't think the world is prepared to back up that stick.
I'm afraid China will have to be coaxed very subtly.
actually, the 90% confidence interval means that in performing the same experiment, you'd expect that you'd only get the same result by chance 1 out of 10 times. It's not the minimum test for statistical significance. You can test for significance at any level you like. It is usually the minimum /acceptable/ level of significance.
In fact, the level of alpha=X should be determined by the risk of being wrong. If the consequences of a false positive are low (you'll lose 5 minutes of work) then alpha can be raised, especially if the gain from being right is high. If there are very high consequences (you'll die) then alpha = 0.05 may need to be lowered to 0.01 especially if the gain is only marginal.
While that's true, it can also lead to "cherry picking" an alpha value to support a desired conclusion. When someone deviates from the common practice (alpha = 0.05), I'd like to see an explanation why they felt it was justified. In fact, usually I would want that decided before the experiment began, so there's no temptation to fudge alpha when the data aren't cooperative.
But I think the required confidence level depends on the issue... Is time on our side, or working against us? Is this an important or minor issue?
I know CO2 is a wimpy greenhouse gas, but there's a lot more to the story an CO2, such as NOx and methane. Plus there's possible feedback loops where we only need to make a small change, and nature takes care of the rest of it for us.
As for letting nature do its thing, I have to disagree because of the economic cost. We should control the environment if it's in our best interest.
Wish I could make a better post, gotta get back to work.
Small consolation when we're talking about multi-trillion dollar economic harm.
So complex and difficult, in fact, that we appear still not to know how to do it well. That doesn't stop one side of the debate from making incredibly simplistic warnings based on this complex and difficult discipline.
Yes. Never believe that anyone's not taking it seriously. Those who fear that this is a lot of fear-mongering which will damage our economy are just as serious. A strong economy is good for the health of every person on the planet, and even for the planet as a whole. (Rich countries can afford conservation and preservation. Poor ones can't.)
See Lomborg. There may be far better ways to protect the environment and the economy.
No. Sorry, no. I'm as pro-nuke as anyone you'll find, but no. If I have to use fear-mongering and bait-and-switch to promote what I see as a sensible energy policy, then I've failed.
Don't you see? That sort of thing -- with just a different goal -- is exactly what some are accusing the global warming community of? "Oh, they're just trying to hamper our economy to the benefit of theirs." "Oh, they're just trying to impose socialism on us."
I'll cite facts and figures to support nuclear power all day. But I won't play on people's fears.
What if our economy's trashed by the time people realize it's all smoke and mirrors? (Assuming it is, of course.) This "impending doom" argument isn't rational, it's fear-mongering.
Yet life survived those changes. Not all life, and not easily, but it survived.
If we knew conclusively that there would be a change of this much in that time frame, we would have to prepare for it, or face the consequences. But "conclusively" is key here. If the models lack predictive power -- and the Science News story seems to support that -- then we don't know which climate change to prepare for.
And we also don't know that climate change is necessarily harmful, on net. Again, see Lomberg.
Again: a worthy goal, but I'm not willing to stoop to deception to pursue it.
I've long since given up guessing what will motivate the Chinese. I'm pretty certain the leaders are motivated by gaining and protecting power. Beyond that, I'm not sure what's motivating the leaders, the army, and the people. I think the place may be too large to sum up as a single set of motivations.
There are several noncontradictory interpretations. Quoth Wikipedia,
Confidence intervals are generally a frequentist method, i.e., employed by those who interpret "90% probability" as "occurring in 90% of all cases".
...
"Were this procedure to be repeated on multiple samples, the calculated confidence interval (which would differ for each sample) would encompass the true population parameter 90% of the time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval
It's not the minimum test for statistical significance.
Actually, now that I think about it, you're right; it's below the generally accepted minimum test for statistical test for significance, which is usually 95%.
In modern applied practice, most confidence intervals are stated at the 95% level (Zar 1984).
And the answer is: it's just a number a bunch of politicians and scientists voted on.
you're right. I don't know why I was having trouble seeing that the two amount to the same thing.
but, as a purely pedantic point, i still believe that publishing at .05 and going back to the drawing board at .06 is idiotic.
Which, I might add, why I find the notorious Lancet study so amusing, as the actual range is something like 8,000 - 204,000 deaths @ 90% confidence interval. That's such a broad range it's statistically worthless.
This article brings up a major point which has bothered me for a while, now, and every time I've raised it here (and in other forums) I've never gotten a decent answer: have the climate models used by the UN and Company ever been validated? BK calls it "backtesting." He seems to be approaching this from a scientific POV, while I come at it from a Computer Science POV. Basically any computer model/simulation should be validated; i.e. feed in known data for a known environment (say a population growth model starting at year 1910, starting with 1910 data) and see if the model reproduces (say) 1930 population data successfully. If it doesn't, you need to refine the model.
It's a problem encountered by the military when they started using computer simulations. For some reason, their models never seemed to reproduce known historical outcomes, but that never stopped them from using these tools for wargaming Fulda Gap scenarios and such. Trevor Dupuy's Quantified Judgement Model (QJM) seems to be the definitive work. Dupuy frequently encountered resistance from those who preferred the standard Operations Research method with respect to combat simulation.
Simulations of combat and climate may be seen as analogous in that both are very complex, chaotic systems.
Sometimes I wonder if insistance on the viability of current climate models parallels the insistance on following OR methods in simulating war.
1) Alpha must be decided on *prior* to running your experiment. Be wary of any study that doesn't do that.
2) And you should always have a justification for the alpha you choose. Personally, I prefer to see justification for the 0.05 myself, as I know it's quite arbitrary already, but nobody seems to care what I think. :-( "We've always done it that way" seems to be acceptable to most people.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007JD008437.shtml
Agreed. But it has this small virtue: if most studies apply the same alpha (rigorously), then it's a little easier to compare results from different studies.
I'll admit to being a stats dabbler at best. About a decade and a half back, I was a bit more than a dabbler, in that my job required calculating the statistics for thousands of data sets. My code did the calculating, of course; but I often had to calculate them manually to check my code.
So while my stats theory is weak, I had some really strong practical experience with how data sets behaved. And I found therein another virtue of alpha = 0.05: if a comparison reached that value, I was confident of it, not just in the statistical sense, but in the "trust" sense.
What I saw was this. If the significance were in a middle range (say, 0.5), then the slightest change in sampling could produce wild swings in significance. I would see swings from 0.8 down to 0.3 and back, without seeing any change in how I had gathered my data. If I saw a middling significance, I had absolutely no confidence that it meant anything at all.
But if the significance were toward the extremes -- > 0.95, < 0.05 -- then I knew that the next samples from the same populations would have very close to the same significance. Between 0.05 and 0.1, I would see somewhat larger swings. Between 0.1 and 0.2, it got worse.
So at least with the data I worked with at that time, 0.05 "worked", in that it implied consistency in the result.
Which is actually done better if they would just publish the actual P-values.
There is quite a difference in P=0.049<0.05 and P=0.001<0.05. They are both significant at the 0.05 level, but the second is much stronger.
As for implied consistency that is somewhat the definition of a p-value: "The probability of getting a more extreme value by random chance". The smaller the p-value the smaller your chance of seeing an aberration that extreme.
The science, though, is interesting.
HB
However, I also see lots of liberal groupthink on the left which thinks global warming is the #1 issue we face, and these same people don't seem to have a problem with Iran getting nuclear weapons.
So, I jump into the conservative camp for many reasons, but science and religion isn't among them.
When people say CO2 is a wimpy greenhouse gas, they are correct. That's no different to me than saying 'if I give you one penny, it makes no difference'. However, if we dump LOTS and LOTS of CO2 into the atmosphere then we should get a warming effect. This warming effect can trigger more methane production, more ice sheet melting, and other things which really cause more warming. Just as if somebody gives me a penny, but they happen to give me one every second, it no longer makes no difference. Feedback loops are a very serious issue, and I understand the basic concept behind it (take a microphone and put it next to a speaker, both on the same amplifier).
When Martin said "Yet life survived those changes. Not all life, and not easily, but it survived. " to my comment about past climate changes, that makes me thing the following:
1. Of course life will survive, humans aren't going extinct even if the worst case models are correct.
2. This issue about our climate isn't about extinction, it's about our great grand children's quality of living.
3. If Mexico becomes too warm to grow enough food and the mexicans continue to ignore birth control, guess what will happen when they face starvation? They'll go north. And we just might have to shoot them at the border, since we may not have enough food to give them.
4. Scenarios like #3 will play out all over the world, just like it did on easter island. Wars will happen because of food and water.
5. The cost of switching to electric or hydrogen cars and nuclear power is going to be expensive, but dealing with #4 will be more expensive.
So in conclusion, when I see conservatives reject evolution (and thus science), and then reject climate change as an issue, it worries me. When I see liberals take climate issues way to far just because of what might happen according to some guy and his supercomputer, it worries me just as much. So I'm stuck in the middle, and my position on this issue is that so much is at stake we can't afford to be wrong, so we might as well play it safe.
Which means that MY OWN PERSONAL chances of making it to double or more healthy lifespan are thereby reduced.
I am curious as to how those in favor of "playing it safe" plan to convince me to agree to increase my risk of earlier death.
Let me answer it this way: Would you sacrifice the future health of the whole planet to live an extra 20 years? Nuclear energy didn't bankrupt the French, I'd like to point out.
I happen to think we are doing the financial equivalent of this too: running up a huge debt, ignoring social security problems, and handing these problems off to our kids.
I have no intention of letting the next generation face a nuclear armed Iran, so I'll sacrifice some of my standard of living to eliminate that problem. Same with the environment, same with social security. It's a long term perspective, something the Chinese are (somewhat) good at, and American's are not as good at (right now)... Ok, that's an oversimplification, but I still think I made my point.
You just have gross straw-man exaggeration, attempts at guilt-tripping, and the same old FUAD-mongering demogoguery used by dictators and tyrants throughout history to infantilize and manipulate the masses.
Which means you've only got force left as a course of action in the service of your goals -- without a sensible plan to persuade me, you'll have to force me to submit to your personal and subjective standards of secular asceticism and self-abnegation.
A good plan that places your interests above all else? No.
I'd make for a good politician, wouldn't I?
If 'force' means convincing idiot liberals to vote for nuclear power and a minimum price on gas and diesel so we can stop using oil, for the sole purpose of destroying the economy of Saudi Arabia and Iran, under false pretenses of actually caring about the environment which may or may not be in peril, then the answer would be a proud YES!
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.