On the comparisons of Climate Models from Douglass et al here is a table showing how well(?) the CSIRO Mark 3 model performed.

In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs.

The raw data are from http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/Published%20JOC1651.pdf (2007).

Table II. (a). Temperature trends for 22 CGCM Models with 20CEN forcing. The numbered models are fully identified in Table II(b).

Pressure (hPa)–>Surface 1000 925 850 700 600 500 400 300 250 200 150 100 Model Sims.∗ Trends (milli °C/decade)

1 9 128 303 121 177 161 172 190 216 247 263 268 243 40
2 5 125 1507 113 112 123 126 138 148 140 105 2 −114 −161
3 5 311 318 336 346 376 422 484 596 672 673 642 594 253
4 5 95 92 99 99 131 179 158 184 212 224 182 169 −3
5 5 210 302 224 215 249 264 293 343 391 408 400 319
6 4 119 118 148 175 189 214 238 283 365 406 425 393 −33
7 4 112 460 107 123 122 130 155 183 213 228 225 211 0
8 3 86 62 57 58 82 95 108 134 160 163 155 137 100
9 3 142 143 148 150 149 162 200 234 273 284 282 258 163
10 3 189 114 200 210 225 238 269 316 345 348 347 308 53
11 3 244 403 270 278 309 331 377 449 503 481 461 405 75
12 3 80 173 114 115 102 98 124 150 161 164 166 142 4
13 2 162 155 170∗∗ 182 225 218 221 282 352 360 340 277 −39
14 2 171 293 190 197 252 245 268 328 376 367 326 278 69
15 2 163 213 174 181 199 204 226 271 307 299 255 166 53
16 2 119 128 124 140 151 176 197 228 271 289 306 260 120
17 2 219 −1268 199 223 259 283 321 373 427 454 479 465 280
18 1 117 117 126 148 163 159 180 207 227 225 203 200 16
19 1 230 220 267 283 313 346 410 506 561 554 526 521 244
20 1 191 151 176 194 212 237 254 304 387 410 400 367 314
21 1 191 328 241 222 193 187 215 255 300 316 327 304 90
22 1 28 24 46 73 27 −26 −26 −1 20 24 32 −1 −136

Total simulations: 67

Average 156 198 166 177 191 203 227 272 314 320 307 268 78
Std. Dev. (σ) 64 443 72 70 82 96 109 131 148 149 154 160 124
∗ ‘Sims.’ refers to the number of simulations over which averages
CSIRO are number 15, with results compared to average of 67 runs on the line below

CSIRO 163 213 174 181 199 204 226 271 307 299 255 166 53
AVERAGE 156 198 166 177 191 203 227 272 314 320 307 268 78
Std. Dev. 64 443 72 70 82 96 109 131 148 149 154 160 124

h/t Geoff Sherrington

Attributed to NEIL BROWN, December 26, 2009

UNLIKE most people, who think Copenhagen was a failure, I think it was a great success. It has preserved the golden rule of international diplomacy.

Years ago, when I was a young fellow and started to go to international conferences, an old hand who was about to retire took me aside. ”I’ll be shoving off into retirement soon,” he said, ”so I thought I might pass on the golden rule of international conferences.”

I was fascinated. I was sure he would say I should always pursue noble objectives, lift up the downtrodden masses of Africa and Asia, stamp out disease and poverty and generally bring peace to the world. Alas, no.

”The most important item on the agenda at any international conference,” he resumed, ”is to fix the date of the next meeting – and of course the location.”

However – and it was a big however – if a conference succeeded in wiping out poverty or pestilence, there would be no prospect of trying to go to another conference the following year on the same subject. Concentrating on the date of the next conference would guarantee poverty and pestilence would still be there the next year and would provide the excuse for another year’s travel, entertainment, spending other people’s money, passing pious resolutions and generally being self-important, all of which are the only reasons for being in politics or diplomacy.

I soon learnt that seasoned players on the international scene knew very well the vital importance of the golden rule. For example, Sir Owen Dixon told me that when he was appointed the first UN troubleshooter on Kashmir, he went to New York to recruit an assistant. Someone recommended a young man in the UN building who, believe it or not, actually had the job description ”to bring peace to the world”.

”Do you like your job?” Sir Owen asked. ”Well, at least it’s permanent,” he replied. This young man, who had a stellar career at the UN thereafter, was right, because the intractable problem of Kashmir has, by definition, still not been solved and in the intervening years has provided immense fodder for studies, working groups, theses, working breakfasts, dinners, lunches and, of course, international conferences.

Statesmen and politicians did not achieve all of this by solving the problem of Kashmir; they did it by failing and by making sure that next year the crisis would be the gift that keeps on giving.

There was also a secret protocol to the golden rule, shielded from the prying eyes of the public as far as possible – to make sure that the location of the conference was somewhere nice, for example, fleshpots such as Casablanca, holiday spots such as Bali or ski resorts such as Davos.

The proof of the pudding is, of course, in the eating. Thus, despite the fact that almost everyone says that Copenhagen was a success because it narrowly avoided being a failure, the cognoscenti know it was a great success because it was such an appalling failure.

First, climate change is as bad as it ever was. None of the weasel words of progress and achievement about keeping temperatures down can conceal the good news that the whole thing was a disaster.

If the alarmists are right, climate change can only get worse. If they are wrong, the issue still is likely to have such life in it that it could last as long as Kashmir before the truth dawns.

Second, since Kyoto and again since Bali, we were told incessantly that Copenhagen was the last chance to prevent the world being plunged into a watery grave. Everyone was going to Copenhagen in the belief that it was a last chance to save the planet.

When I heard this, I mourned for the international political and diplomatic brotherhood of which I was once a part; they clearly were not going to be able to stretch climate change beyond Copenhagen as the excuse for more conferences, new taxes, tougher and more complicated laws and the perpetual extortion of money from poor workers in rich countries to rich kleptomaniacs in poor countries that foreign aid has become. Some other issue would have to be found.

Fortunately, this has turned out not to be the case. Mercifully, climate change will be there for at least another year to take its vengeance on a profligate and decadent world. It will provide the excuse for conferences next year and for years beyond. So also is the secret protocol intact: conferences on climate change will never be held anywhere near Darfur or Bangladesh.

Neil Brown is a barrister and former member of Federal Parliament, h/t to Geoff Sherrington.

In the IAC Report released today, Working Group II comes in for particular criticism. Working Group II assesses the vulnerability of socioeconomic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change, and options for adapting to it. The vindicates what I have been saying, that the worst of climate alarmism comes from the climate effects people.

For fabricating evidence:

The Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers has been criticized for various errors and for emphasizing the negative impacts of climate change. These problems derive partly from a failure to adhere to IPCC’s uncertainty guidance for the fourth assessment and partly from shortcomings in the guidance itself. Authors were urged to consider the amount of evidence and level of agreement about all conclusions and to apply subjective probabilities of confidence to conclusions when there was high agreement and much evidence. However, authors reported high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach “high confidence” to the statements. The Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers contains many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly. When statements are well defined and supported by evidence—by indicating when and under what climate conditions they would occur—the likelihood scale should be used.

For using unpublished and non-peer-reviewed sources:

An analysis of the 14,000 references cited in the Third Assessment Report found that peer-reviewed journal articles comprised 84 percent of references in Working Group I, but only 59 percent of references in Working Group II and 36 percent of references in Working Group III (Bjurström and Polk, 2010).

Urban areas differ from rural areas in a number of well known ways, but the IPCC summaries maintain that these effects have been effectively removed when they talk about the recent (post 1960) increases in global surface temperature.

Continuing the series on how bad climate models really are, another paper is in the pipeline on the long-standing influence of urban heat effects (UHI) in the surface temperature data. Ross McKitrick reports that between 1/2 and 1/3 of the recent increase in temperature is due to this contamination (Ross’s website here).

The methodology uses the regression coefficients from the socioeconomic variables to estimate the trend distribution after removing the estimated non-climatic biases in the temperature data. On observational data this reduces the mean warming trend by between one-third and one-half, but it does not affect the mean surface trend in the model-generated data. Again this is
consistent with the view that the observations contain a spatial contamination pattern not present in, or predicted by, the climate models.

Note that this rather gross bias is not present in or predicted by the climate models, meaning the climate models do not have the physical mechanisms to model it. One consequence is that if the models are to fit the recent increase in temperature, some other (incorrect) mechanism must be used (such as H2O feedback perhaps – I don’t know).

Ross has written up the backstory of the all too common obstacles to publication of articles questioning the IPCC here:

In the aftermath of Climategate a lot of scientists working on global warming-related topics are upset that their field has apparently lost credibility with the public. The public seems to believe that climatology is beset with cliquish gatekeeping, wagon-circling, biased peer-review, faulty data and statistical incompetence. In response to these perceptions, some scientists are casting around, in op-eds and weblogs, for ideas on how to hit back at their critics. I would like to suggest that the climate science community consider instead whether the public might actually have a point.

Due to building the website for The Climate Sceptics I haven’t been able to post despite some important events. My site and other files were deleted in some kind of attack, so I have had to rebuild it as well. I now have the WordPress 3.0 multiuser system which enable easy creation and management of multiple blogs, so its an ill wind eh?

The important event I refer to is the release of “Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Series” by Ross McKitrick, Stephen McIntyre and Chad Herman (2010). Nobody is talking about it, and I don’t know why, as it has a history almost as long as the hockey stick on McIntyre’s blog (summary here), and is a powerful condemnation of climate models in the PRL.

I feel a series coming on, as these results deliver a stunning blow to the last leg that alarmists have been standing on, i.e. model credulity. Also because I have a paper coming out in a similar vein, dealing with drought models in regional Australia.

Using a rigorous methodology on 57 runs from 23 model simulations of the lower troposphere (LT) and mid-troposphere (MT) with forcing inputs from the realistic A1B emission scenario, and four observational temperature series: two satellite-borne microwave sounding unit (MSU)-derived series and two balloon-borne radiosonde series, over two time periods from 1979-99 and 1999-2009, they tested a mismatch between models and observed trends in the tropical troposphere. This represents a basic validation test of climate models over a 30 year period, a validation test which SHOULD be fundamental to any belief in the models, and their usefulness for projections of global warming in the future.

The results are shown in their figure:

… the differences between models and observations now exceed the 99% critical value. As shown in Table 1 and Section 3.3, the model trends are about twice as large as observations in the LT layer, and about four times as large in the MT layer.

Read the rest of this entry…

Excerpts from the three part series below.

A significant amount of evidence indicates that the global temperature did increase during the 20th century. For example, direct thermometer measurements indicate that the temperature increased by perhaps 0.8°C.
…
In summary, there is no direct evidence showing that CO2 caused the 20th century warming, or as a matter of fact, any warming. The question to ask is therefore can we point to some other culprit? If humans are not the only ones responsible for climate change, what else is responsible?
…
Moreover, when studying directly the total ocean heat content, it is possible to see that the amount of heat going into the oceans is at least 5 times larger than can be expected from just the changes in the total solar irradiance (e.g., see this blog entry and references therein). Thus, one can conclude that there must be at least one mechanism amplifying the link between solar activity and climate.
…
The fact that the sun plays a decisive role in climate change has important implications to the understanding of the causes of 20th century global warming and the expected temperature change in the coming century. The increased solar activity over the 20th century can be translated into a radiative forcing contribution. Since the solar/climate link was already quantified, it is possible to estimate the solar contribution, which turns out to be about half of the measured warming.
…
Thus, the warming component left to be explained by humans is much smaller than is often claimed by the proponents of the anthropogenic warming. However, if we are to predict the temperature change over the 21st century, we have to know what is the expected human contribution to the radiative budget, but equally important, also the climate sensitivity to these changes in the energy budget.
…
As we have seen above, the answer to the second question is that the sensitivity is most likely small. In fact, this sensitivity is about 1 degree increase per doubling of CO2.
…
The evidence shows therefore that even if we continue with “business as usual”, we will not cause a climate catastrophe. It is also possible to estimate the sea level increase, which will be of order 10 cm over the coming century, much less than the meters talked about in Gore’s movie.

Read the rest of this entry…

Ken Stewart has released his much awaited review of the Australian High Quality Sites. His conclusion:

The High Quality data does NOT give an accurate record of Australian temperatures over the last 100 years.

BOM has produced a climate record that can only be described as a guess.

The best we can say about Australian temperature trends over the last 100 years is “Temperatures have gone down and up where we have good enough records, but we don’t know enough.”

If Anthropogenic Global Warming is so certain, why the need to exaggerate?

It is most urgent and important that we have a full scientific investigation, completely independent of BOM, CSIRO, or the Department of Climate Change, into the official climate record of Australia.

I will ask Dr Jones for his response.

As I write this, my wife of 46 years is in intensive care fighting to live. She is there partly because of bad medical science and partly because of what had become a widespread syndrome in many scientific disciplines, the demonization of a person or a concept by people who can be wrong.

My wife does not provide the best example of demonization, but it is current, motivational and recent and on my mind. Please excuse me if I become too personal. The important part is not the personal part. It is the insidious danger of demonization.

I am a chemist, with a B.Sc. and part-time honours, chemistry major, from the University of Queensland, Australia. I also did a couple of years of aero engineering before a car crash curtailed further flying in the Air Force. My career covered many aspects of science, some engineering and much politics at the end. In retirement I can draw on a diverse set of experiences, but can also appreciate points of the philosophy of science. Mostly, that only comes with age and experience.

“Demonisation” is not my term. Maybe it originated with alcohol, the “demon drink”. It is now in fairly wide and expanding use. It was used a few years ago in climate circles to describe CO2 as a troublesome compound for all people, probably before the facts were complete. More recently, it has been used in a people context, as in the demonization of denialists.

Scientists to whom the demon label is attached can have a harder time than they should. In the case of Colleen, I was demonised by the general physician in charge and by senior nursing staff because I consistently told them that they should look beyond the easy diagnosis they had made. When you know a person for nearly 50 years, you can detect changes that are not so obvious to the casual observer, but then the doctor has the training and his word should be accepted. As it turned out, Colleen had a diagnosis of post-operative constipation following a repair of a broken hip – not an uncommon happening. What had really happened was that she had had an earlier colonoscopy where a cut had been made and marked with methylene blue die in case follow-up was need. This had weakened the bowel wall. Several days of large doses of morphine had dehydrated her and the combination resulted in a blocked and perforated bowel, the hole about an inch in diameter, with a couple of pounds of faecal material mingled with her other abdominal organs.

It was necessary for me to be quite forceful of expression for several days before the correct tests were done and the problem – perhaps then 6 days old – was rectified by lengthy surgery. This demonised me in the eyes of some of the medical profession involved. A lay person cannot diagnose, only a doctor can do that. But, unless I had persisted I would now no longer have a wife. Experience, observation, open mind, thinking about the evidence, reinterpretation, explaining every little observation, insisting on more data – these were the life-saving ingredients.

In my career I have met demonization several times. We inherited a site where lead batteries had been recycled and there was residual lead in the soil. We were told “authoritatively” that lead poising affects the IQ of young children. A “Team” has worked for years to prove this alarming hypothesis – but they have demonised the authors and the possibility of a simple and strong reverse causation explanation. See

http://www.mja.com.au/public/bookroom/2001/rathus/rathus.html

http://dnacih.com/SILVA.htm

Two comments follow about lead and children. First, in the mid 1980’s, when some intensive work was done, published estimates of the weight of daily soil ingestion by children differed by well over an order of magnitude. So the models had uncertainty – as do today’s global climate models. Second, this question is relevant to climate change because of the discontinuation of leaded petrol and the resultant increase of fuel use by cars and trucks. This affected the so-called GHG load on the atmosphere.

Another case from Australia, again medical, resulted in 2 Nobel Laureates, Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren. See

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/04/science.health

Barry Marshall in particular was demonised for his astounding proposition that ulcers were caused by bacteria and could be cured by antibiotics. He even self-administered a dangerous concoction to drive home his point. Personally, I feel that the “Team” opposition to their work should be documented better and spread more widely, so that those who demonise will know that they can be shamed in public when shown wrong.

Getting closer to climate matters, there was widespread demonization of the peaceful use of uranium for large scale electricity generation from the late 1960s onwards. From 1972 I consulted to and then joined the company which had discovered the immense Ranger uranium deposits in 1969. It was soon apparent that there were considerable learning curves for science sub-sets like radioactive decay, assaying, ore resource calculation and particularly radiation health measures. Well, the mines are still operating today and no person appears to have been harmed by them (though we did lose one employee to a crocodile attack).

The second steep learning curve for nuclear was to counter the demonization of radioactivity. You probably know that there are still many people today who have absolute belief that nuclear power generation wastes have to be managed for 250,000 years. This is simple psycobabble as can be shown in a few minutes. Of course, the future of nuclear electricity interacts with fossil fuel use and projections for atmospheric composition of GHG.

Almost by necessity, I lowered my involvement in geochemistry and increasingly went political about late 1980s to counter the anti-nuclear protest. Slowly but surely, the arguments put up in opposition were demolished by demonstration and logic, until no realistic viable case exists to further hold back on nuclear expansion. Demonisation has however resulted in Australia still having no nuclear power generators, despite a large output of mined uranium.

Demonisation has distorted the science, in a way costly to power users and the environment.

Demonisation is resurgent in relation to the Climategate emails and inquiries. Those who have submitted words critical of the science are not all extremists. There is a weight of experience and intelligence in these contra submissions, but those who make them are being ignored or derided. This is not a civil way to act. The inquirers have done shoddy work (with the exception of Graham Stringer MP from Britain; and now the penny is dropping for the Commons Inquiry leader Phil Willis.)

Wherever you look, it is not hard to find evidence of demonization in science. The anti vaccination movement is an example. There is widespread chemophobia, for example in framing where “organic” or “natural” methods are suddenly trendy, despite the certainty that many people would die of starvation if global organic farming was made compulsory. Ditto for genetic modification of crops, a human extension of a process of Nature. The demonisation of science is an insult to the truly professional scientist. I worked several years in the synthetic fertilizer industry in a very large new plant and mixed with people whose skill and dedication was too prominent to be insulted.

Recently was saw the terrible example of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences publishing lists of names of good people and demons with respect to attitudes, as they interpreted them, towards man-made global warming. This is ugly. . PNAS should take a long look at its charter, purpose and methods.

Deductions.

1. We frequent bloggers need to check if we are falling into the demonization trap ourselves. I am guilty, especially a few times when blogging was new to me.
2. Demonisation is antithetic to good science. Good science equates to open minds.
3. There are more effective ways to make an example than by demonising. Shaming is an acceptable alternative sometimes, but most effective of all is the dispassionate analysis that is done by people like Steve McIntyre and several others whom you know too well to need mentioning here. Lead by example.
4. Emotion and politics interact with science, but in an ideal world they are separate from it. It is harder to set out to do good science when you have made up your mind on the outcome.
5. Try to avoid making a mellow generalisation from data. In a surprising number of cases (well, surprising to me) the solution is in the exception to intuition. Data points that are averaged out of existence often take with little Rosetta stones.

It was the devil in the detail that led to intervention in the case of my wife, at the start of this essay. It was not helpful to be demonised for pointing out that misdiagnosis was possible.

There is more that can be written on this theme, more in the context of climate. Should our host feel that responses below warrant it, I would be honoured to write more.

• The Age reports that Climategate was a game changer. Judith Curry said Dr Jones had shown himself to be ”genuinely repentant, and has been completely open and honest about what has been done and why … speaking with humility about the uncertainty in the data sets”.

  So far its a case of the academic defense: “Oops, I lied.” Sir Muir Russell, the chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, notes that senior climate scientists say their world has been dramatically changed by the affair. We welcome senior climate scientists to the real world of professional transparency. Steve McIntyre has received overwhelming financial support from his readers for his trip to the Guardian’s debate in England.

• Senator Wong reminded a conference on the Gold Coast that scientists were responsible for this unpopular policy bind: “Remember why this debate started, why we all started talking about climate change and why people called for action?
  

  “It is because of you that we understand that climate change is real and it is because of you that we understand that climate change is happening now … and that it is caused by carbon dioxide emissions.”

  But she also challenged scientists to get their act together:

  … the science behind the political debate cannot be over-estimated. Unfortunately in the recent past, science has not been able to speak with one voice on climate change, making it impossible for politicians to enact practical measures to address the phenomenon.

  Reading between the lines, could it be that her political windsock no longer points towards the agenda of tenured liberal progressive moonbats and she is butching-up to the union bosses that put Ms Squiggle in command? Hmm…

• Lubos reviews a sloppy article by Rasmus Benestad on climate feedbacks. He explains the system as I see it, with many short run positive feedbacks in the atmosphere (and oceans) but stronger negative feedbacks in the long run, producing a “half-pipe” response profile.

Lubos makes me laugh:

Well, let me make it clear that there’s nothing controversial about negative feedbacks. In this battle between negative feedbacks and Rasmus Benestad, it is the latter who is an utterly controversial crackpot. The existence of crackpots may make basic concepts of science controversial among crackpots – and the remaining readers of Real Climate, if there are any – but it can’t make it controversial in the real science.

• CSIRO is making science more accessible to decision-makers by “trialling different ways of presenting climate information”. And if they couldn’t be more non-committal, they are presenting the regional forecasts of models that “are complex, and constantly being refined” in a slick interface. If as my upcoming publication shows, the model forecasts are worthless, then you have to wonder — What is the point?

  The rainfall simulations in the models are completely opposite to reality over the last 100 years. To make this clear to climate scientists, when rainfall decreases the models increase. When rainfall increases, the models decrease. The best way decision-makers could use CSIRO model forecasts is as contrary indicators, i.e. buy when they say “sell”, and sell when they say “buy”.

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For those interested in the theory that upper atmosphere inflow of moisture from the Indian Ocean is a major determinant of rain in Australia, check out the satellite loop for the last 4 hours right now.

Here is the development of the inflow over the last few days.

Note this is in the presence of a high pressure system with an upper atmosphere ridge and trough, as can be seen by the slight deformation of the isobars over Queensland.

Read the rest of this entry…