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IPCC Models Exaggerate Effect of CO2 (2008)

Climate Models Fail to Predict Temperature Drop

World's climate could cool first, warm later
NewScientist 2009
Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it." Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.

Earth cools, and fight over warming heats up
Wall Street Journal 2009
Two years ago, a United Nations scientific panel won the Nobel Peace Prize after concluding that global warming is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by man. Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth's temperature was beginning to drop.

A few years of cooling doesn't mean that people aren't heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn't predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect. "There is a lot of room for improvement" in the models, says Mojib Latif, a climate scientist in Germany and co-author of a paper predicting the planet will cool for perhaps a decade before starting to warm again -- a long-term trend he attributes to greenhouse-gas emissions. "You need to know what you can believe and can't believe from the models."

The goal of climate models is to project how rising greenhouse-gas emissions will interact with natural forces to affect the global temperature. The models are technological marvels. Using supercomputers, they divide the world into grids of roughly 4,000 cubic miles apiece. The grids are stacked, one on top of the other, up through the atmosphere.

The models are only as good as the information they are fed. One big uncertainty is ocean temperature. Oceans trap huge amounts of heat, and they process by which they release it over time affects the temperature of the planet.

The success of the models also depends on the soundness of their assumptions. The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet. The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation -- and how clouds in turn affect temperature -- remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently.

Supercomputers Provide Simulation of Abrupt Climate Changes
Oak Ridge National Laboratory 2009
At the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world's fastest supercomputer for research is simulating abrupt climate change and shedding light on an enigmatic period of natural global warming in Earth's relatively recent history. The findings could provide great insight into the fate of ocean circulation in light of continued glacial melting in Greenland and Antarctica.

More accurately depicting the past means clearer insights into climate's outlook. "The current forecast predicts the ocean overturning current is likely to weaken but not stop over the next century," according to one of the researchers. "However, it remains highly uncertain whether abrupt changes will occur in the next century because of our lack of confidence in the model's capability in simulating abrupt changes.

 

 

Comment...

Computer Model Shortcomings

Nearly every week we hear a new alarming warning about our climate future. These warnings, however, are based upon climate models that even the scientists themselves say are significantly unreliable and incomplete.

Moreover, climate models cannot anticipate what has yet to be discovered. For instance, computer models in the 1990s did not anticipate the importance of the El Nino – Southern Oscillation that transfers heat between the oceans and the atmosphere and, as we now know, was probably responsible for the hottest year on record, 1998.

The bullet points that follow are concerns expressed in the climate model chapter of the IPCC's Climate Report 2007. After reading the scientists own words do you think we should restructure our energy economy based upon computer models?

  • ...important deficiencies remain in the simulation of clouds and tropical precipitation. (p591)
  • The shortwave impact of changes in boundary-layer clouds, and to a lesser extent mid-level clouds, constitutes the largest contributor to inter-model differences in global cloud feedbacks. The relatively poor simulation of these clouds in the present climate is a reason for some concern. (p593)
  • Climate models exhibit different strengths and weaknesses, and it is not yet possible to determine which estimates of the climate change cloud feedbacks are the most reliable.
  • Significant uncertainties...are associated with the representation of clouds, and in the resulting cloud responses to climate change. (p601)
  • Models continue to have significant limitations, such as in their representation of clouds, which lead to uncertainties in the magnitude and timing, as well as regional details, of predicted climate change. (p601)
  • Cloud processes affect the climate system by regulating the flow of radiation at the top of the atmosphere, by producing precipitation, by accomplishing rapid and sometimes deep redistributions of atmospheric mass and through additional mechanisms too numerous to list here. (p602)
  • Realistic parametrizations of cloud processes are a prerequisite for reliable current and future climate simulation (p602)
  • Outside the polar regions, relatively large errors are evident in the eastern parts of the tropical ocean basins, a likely symptom of problems in the simulation of low clouds. The extent to which these systematic model errors affect a model’s response to external perturbations is unknown, but may be significant. (p608)
  • Given that clouds are responsible for about half the outgoing SW radiation, these errors are not surprising, for it is known that cloud processes are among the most difficult to simulate with models. (p610)
  • ...many climate models overestimate surface absorption of solar radiation partly due to problems in the parametrizations of atmospheric absorption, clouds and aerosols. (p618)
  • The role of polar cloud feedbacks in climate sensitivity ...remain poorly understood. (p637)
  • Modelling assumptions controlling the cloud water phase (liquid, ice or mixed) are known to be critical for the prediction of climate sensitivity. However, the evaluation of these assumptions is just beginning (p638)

 

 

 

 

Global Warming:
Our Best Guess Is Likely Wrong
Rice University 2009
No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect.

The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well- documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past.

Uncertainties in Climate Model Cloud and Water Vapor Processes
Dr. Roy Spencer 2009
The climate model equations are only approximations of the physical processes that occur in the atmosphere. While some of those approximations are highly accurate, some of the most important ones from the standpoint of climate change are unavoidably crude. This is because the real processes they represent are either (1) too complex to include in the model and still have the model run fast on a computer, or (2) because our understanding of those processes is still too poor to accurately model them with equations. This is especially true for cloud formation and dissipation, which in turn has a huge impact on how much sunlight is absorbed by the climate system. The amount of cloud cover generated in the model in response to solar heating helps control the Earth’s temperature, so the manner in which clouds change with warming is of huge importance to global warming predictions. Climate modelers are still struggling to get the models to produce cloud cover amounts and types like those seen in different regions, and during different seasons. .