Climate science from climate scientists...
Our annual post related to the comparisons between long standing records and climate models.
As frequent readers will know, we maintain a page of comparisons between climate model projections and the relevant observational records, and since they are mostly for the global mean numbers, these get updated once the temperature products get updated for the prior full year. This has now been completed for 2022.
[Read more…] about 2022 updates to model-observation comparisonsA new paper from Scafetta and it’s almost as bad as the last one.
Back in March, we outlined how a model-observations comparison paper in GRL by Nicola Scafetta (Scafetta, 2022a) got wrong basically everything that one could get wrong (the uncertainty in the observations, the internal variability in the models, the statistical basis for comparisons – the lot!). Now he’s back with a new paper in a different journal (Scafetta, 2022b) that could be seen as trying to patch the holes in the first one, but while he makes some progress, he now adds some new errors while attempting CPR on his original conclusions.
[Read more…] about Scafetta comes back for moreI have a feeling that we are seeing the start of a new wave of climate change denial and misrepresentation of science. At the same time, CEOs of gas and oil companies express optimism for further exploitation of fossil energy in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at least here in Norway.
Another clue is William Kininmonth’s ‘rethink’ on the greenhouse effect for The Global Warming Policy Foundation. He made some rather strange claims, such as that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) allegedly should have forgotten that the earth is a sphere because “most absorption of solar radiation takes place over the tropics, while there is excess emission of longwave radiation to space over higher latitudes”.
[Read more…] about New misguided interpretations of the greenhouse effect from William KininmonthThe detection and the attribution of climate change are based on fundamentally different frameworks and shouldn’t be conflated.
We read about and use the phrase ‘detection and attribution’ of climate change so often that it seems like it’s just one word ‘detectionandattribution’ and that might lead some to think that it is just one concept. But it’s not.
[Read more…] about Watching the detectionsSome of the authors of a recent commentary on k-scale modeling respond to RealClimate.
[Read more…] about Overselling k-scale? Hmm
What’s good (and what’s not quite ready) about plans for ‘k-scale’ climate modeling?
[Read more…] about Mmm-k scale climate modelsA couple of weeks ago the EU announced that they were funding a project called DestinE (Destination Earth) to build ‘digital twins’ of the Earth System to support policy making and rapid reaction to weather and climate events.
While the term ‘digitial twin’ has a long history in the engineering world, it’s only recently been applied to Earth System Modeling, and is intended (I surmise, as does Bryan Lawrence) to denote something more than the modeling of either weather or climate that we’ve been doing for years. But what exactly? And is it an achievable goal or just a rebranding effort of things that are happening anyway?
[Read more…] about Digital TwingeEarlier this week, a new paper appeared in GRL by Nicola Scafetta (Scafetta, 2022) which purported to conclude that the CMIP6 models with medium or high climate sensitivity (higher than 3ºC) were not consistent with recent historical temperature changes. Since there have been a number of papers already on this topic, notably Tokarska et al (2020), which did not come to such a conclusion, it is worthwhile to investigate where Scafetta’s result comes from. Unfortunately, it appears to emerge from a mis-appreciation of what is in the CMIP6 archive, an inappropriate statistical test, and a total neglect of observational uncertainty and internal variability.
[Read more…] about Issues and Errors in a new Scafetta paper
There was an interesting workshop last week focused on the Future of Climate Modelling. It was run by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Core Project on Earth System Modelling and Observations (ESMO) which is part of a bewildering alphabet soup of various advisory committees that exist for mostly unclear historical reasons. This one actually does something useful – namely it helps organize the CMIP activities that many modeling groups contribute to (which inform the assessment reports like IPCC and various national Climate Assessments). They had a wide variety of people and perspectives to discuss the changing landscape of climate modeling and what people want from these models. You won’t agree with everything, but it was informative.
[Read more…] about The Future of Climate Modeling?We have now updated the model-observations comparison page for the 2021 SAT and MSU TMT datasets. Mostly this is just ‘another dot on the graphs’ but we have made a couple of updates of note. First, we have updated the observational products to their latest versions (i.e. HadCRUT5, NOAA-STAR 4.1 etc.), though we are still using NOAA’s GlobalTemp v5 – the Interim version will be available later this year. Secondly, we have added a comparison of the observations to the new CMIP6 model ensemble.
[Read more…] about Another dot on the graphs (Part II)