He attempts to discredit Judith Curry, and you’ll never guess what happens next!
There is one wonderful thing about Gavin’s argument, and one even more wonderful thing.
The wonderful thing is that he is arguing that Dr. Curry is wrong about the models being tuned to the actual data during the period because the models are so wrong (!).
The models were not tuned to consistency with the period of interest as shown by the fact that – the models are not consistent with the period of interest. Gavin points out that the models range all over the map, when you look at the 5% – 95% range of trends. He’s right, the models do not cluster tightly around the observations, and they should, if they were modeling the climate well.
Here’s the even more wonderful thing. If you read the relevant portions of the IPCC reports, looking for the comparison of observations to model projections, each is a masterpiece of obfuscation on this same point. You never see a clean, clear, understandable presentation of the models-to-actuals comparison. But look at those histograms above, direct from the hand of Gavin. It’s the clearest presentation I’ve ever run across that the models run hot. Thank you, Gavin.
Yes, thank you.
[Update a while later]
Semi-related: Chelsea HubbellClinton tweets about science, and you’ll never guess what happened next!
Absurd comment by Schmidt. The modelers admit that there is a problem of tuning. (Presumably Schmidt knows that.)
Doesn’t even show bad faith on their part; it is very hard to avoid using prior information in creating models. That’s why we insist on validating them. Here that is very hard, as we get _one data point per month_ on global temperature. Don’t be surprised if that takes a while.
We really need a better approach, but I’m not sure what it would be.
It appears the gist of his comment is that they are tuned for a different interval than for the modern era. The WUWT critique is that he has merely confirmed that they do a lousy job outside that interval.
Hardly surprising given that the system is underdetermined by its outputs and unobservable from a systems viewpoint. You can always adjust the parameters within an infinite subspace to match the output over a finite interval, but the parameterization is non-unique, and exceedingly unlikely to confer predictive skill beyond the training interval.
I have a strong impression that Schmidt is more the managerial type, and not very familiar with the nuts and bolts of modeling theory. He gets himself into tight corners frequently, from which he extricates himself by shutting down debate.
Chelsea
HubbellClintonI’m pretty sure she’s Bill’s. She looks just like him, poor dear. My antipathy toward her parents does not extend to her yet, though. She seems nice enough, just otnay ootay ightbray, if you know what I mean. Like other Presidential offspring that e.g., could have had the world at his feet, but instead plowed his airplane into the drink while night flying for which he was not rated.
The Warmist Cult is increasingly prone to such owngoals it seems. One of its acolytes I was disputing with on another forum posted a link to something I was told I should read. That source had a lot of other links in it. One was to a history of seawater chemistry research done by Dr. Roger Revelle, the former head of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
Seems that seawater is such a complex cross-buffered solution that it is virtually impossible to get it to change its pH. I thanked my opponent effusively for providing one of the best refutations of the widely repeated Warmist canard that the “oceans are rapidly acidifying” because of all the extra CO2 that I had ever seen.
Ironically, Revelle was, himself, an early Warmist. In the early days of Warmistry, it was skeptics who thought the ocean would soak up the extra CO2. Revelle’s seminal 1957 paper is an explication of seawater’s stubborn resistance to pH change. For this reason, he concluded, little if any of the atmospheric CO2 would be absorbed in the oceans but would, instead, stay in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.
” For this reason, he concluded, little if any of the atmospheric CO2 would be absorbed in the oceans but would, instead, stay in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.”
Does he? I read in the abstract that:
This means that most of the CO2 released by artificial fuel combustion since the beginning of the industrial revolution must have been absorbed by the oceans.”
I can’t really account for that piece of the abstract. Especially in light of what’s written near the bottom of column 2 on page 24 of the paper:
Because of the peculiar buffer mechanism of sea water, however, the increase in the partial CO2 pressure is about 10 times higher than the increase in the total CO2 concentration of sea water when CO2 is added and the alkalinity remains constant…
Here’s a description of the paper from Wikipedia, a generally Warmist-friendly site:
In 1957, Revelle co-authored a paper with Hans Suess that suggested that the Earth’s oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide generated by humanity at a much slower rate than previously predicted by geoscientists, thereby suggesting that human gas emissions might create a “greenhouse effect” that would cause global warming over time.[4] Although other articles in the same journal discussed carbon dioxide levels, the Suess-Revelle paper was “the only one of the three to stress the growing quantity of CO2 contributed by our burning of fossil fuel, and to call attention to the fact that it might cause global warming over time.”[5]
Revelle and Suess described the “buffer factor”, now known as the “Revelle factor”, which is a resistance to atmospheric carbon dioxide being absorbed by the ocean surface layer posed by bicarbonate chemistry. Essentially, in order to enter the ocean, carbon dioxide gas has to partition into one of the components of carbonic acid: carbonate ion, bicarbonate ion, or protonated carbonic acid, and the product of these many chemical dissociation constants factors into a kind of back-pressure that limits how fast the carbon dioxide can enter the surface ocean. Geology, geochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, ocean chemistry … this amounted to one of the earliest examples of “integrated assessment”, which 50 years later became an entire branch of global warming science.
There’s also this first paragraph from the Wikipedia entry on the “Revelle Factor”:
The Revelle factor (buffer factor) is the ratio of instantaneous change in carbon dioxide (CO2) to the change in total dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), and is a measure of the resistance to atmospheric CO2 being absorbed by the ocean surface layer.[1] The buffer factor is used to examine the distribution of CO2 between the atmosphere and the ocean, and measures the amount of CO2 that can be dissolved in the mixed surface layer. It is named after the oceanographer Roger Revelle, who was one of the first scientists to study global warming.
The paper also mentions that the rate of historical sea level rise is inconsistent with a putative rise of average ocean temperature as even a 1 degree C. rise in average ocean temperature would cause roughly six times the observed rise in ocean levels due to decreased water density. As Revelle died in 1991, seven years prior to the start of the now nearly two-decade-long pause in average atmospheric temperature rise, it’s a bit ironic that he also contributed a refutation of the latter-day Warmist pause-denial meme that warming continues, but the heat is all hiding in the deep ocean.