Perils of modelling: initial assumptions 1

I just thought I'd nick this quote from solar scientist Douglas Hoyt on another blog as it is a succinct summary of what can go wrong with models that have too many adjustable and vague parameters and relying on hindcasts as validations - which I touched on before with respect to fatigue calculations.

"The climate modelers introduced a large upward trend in global aerosols because, without them, their models ran too hot, predicting a global warming of circa 2C in the 20th century, as opposed to the observed 0.6C warming.

As I have pointed out, there is no evidence that the claimed global trend in aerosols existed. At best there were a few regional aerosol clouds covering less than 1% of the globe.

The proper solution to their problem would have been to lower the climate sensitivity to 1C or less. In fact. Lindzen has a convincing paper out recently showing the climate sensitivity is about 0.6C for a CO2 doubling.

The scientific solution to the problem: No large global trend trend in aerosols and low climate sensitivity.

The political “solution” is: Unsupported claims of large aerosol increases which allows the fiction of a high climate sensitivity to be maintained, leading to alarming and false predictions of catastrophic future warming."

Douglas Hoyt

I added. "I wonder if a 3rd party review might have fixed it. There are times when you get a weird modeling result and you can't find the problem so you rationalize it or add a fiddle factor. Only later do you see where the mistake was. Also sometimes throwing money at a group to investigate a problem can fail due to an over-riding need to justify the money and claim more of it."

There's no conspiracy here - just hubris, group-think and self-preservation. Normal science in fact. Just to be fair I'll pick on a few other fields later.

Update: Here is a quote from Lindzen on modelling where he describes the 0.5 feedback:

////////beginning of extract

"IPCC ‘Consensus.’

It is likely that most of the warming over the past 50 years is due to man’s emissions.

How was this arrived at?

What was done, was to take a large number of models that could not reasonably simulate known patterns of natural behavior (such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), claim that such models nonetheless accurately depicted natural internal climate variability, and use the fact that these models could not replicate the warming episode from the mid seventies through the mid nineties, to argue that forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man.

The argument makes arguments in support of intelligent design sound rigorous by comparison. It constitutes a rejection of scientific logic, while widely put forward as being ‘demanded’ by science. Equally ironic, the fact that the global mean temperature anomaly ceased increasing by the mid nineties is acknowledged by modeling groups as contradicting the main underlying assumption of the so-called attribution argument (Smith et al, 2007, Keenlyside et al, 2008, Lateef, 2009). Yet the iconic statement continues to be repeated as authoritative gospel, and as implying catastrophe.

Now, all projections of dangerous impacts hinge on climate sensitivity. (To be sure, the projections of catastrophe also depend on many factors besides warming itself.) Embarrassingly, the estimates of the equilibrium response to a doubling of CO2 have basically remained unchanged since 1979.

They are that models project a sensitivity of from 1.5-5C. Is simply running models the way to determine this? Why hasn’t the uncertainly diminished?

There follows a much more rigorous determination using physics and satellite data.

We have a 16-year (1985–1999) record of the earth radiation budget from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE; Barkstrom 1984) nonscanner edition 3 dataset. This is the only stable long-term climate dataset based on broadband flux measurements and was recently altitude-corrected (Wong et al. 2006). Since 1999, the ERBE instrument has been replaced by the better CERES instrument. From the ERBE/CERES monthly data, we calculated anomalies of LW-emitted, SW-reflected, and the total outgoing fluxes.

We also have a record of sea surface temperature for the same period from the National Center for Environmental Prediction.

Finally, we have the IPCC model calculated radiation budget for models forced by observed sea surface temperature from the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Program at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of the DOE.

The idea now is to take fluxes observed by satellite and produced by models forced by observed sea surface temperatures, and see how these fluxes change with fluctuations in sea surface temperature. This allows us to evaluate the feedback factor.

Remember, we are ultimately talking about the greenhouse effect. It is generally agreed that doubling CO2 alone will cause about 1C warming due to the fact that it acts as a ‘blanket.’ Model projections of greater warming absolutely depend on positive feedbacks from water vapor and clouds that will add to the ‘blanket’ – reducing the net cooling of the climate system.

We see that for models, the uncertainty in radiative fluxes makes it impossible to pin down the precise sensitivity because they are so close to unstable ‘regeneration.’ This, however, is not the case for the actual climate system where the sensitivity is about 0.5C for a doubling of CO2 . From the brief SST record, we see that fluctuations of that magnitude occur all the time."

Richard Lindzen

Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, MIT

/////////////////////end of extract

Now just to summarise:

1) It is universally agreed that basic warming from a doubling of CO2 should theoretically be 1 degree C.

2) Model runs say it could be between 1 and 6 degrees C. The extra above the 1 degree number is from a supposed positive feedback where evaporated water vapour from the sea adds to the CO2.

3) This extra warming was needed to match up the recent warming in the Hadley temperature graph with Hadley model output.

4) For this match-up, Hadley modellers had assumed that natural variability had minimal warming effect over the period of study, hence any remaining anomaly must be manmade warming. However they couldn't actually model natural variability - they just pretended that they could.

5) Subsequent non-warming has been blamed on natural variability by those same Hadley scientists which is an admission that the previous assumption has zero foundation.

6) So Lindzen finds out if this supposed positive feedback from water vapour is present in the real, measured satellite data. He finds a sensitivity of 0.5 C from real data, indicating that there must be a negative feedback, not a positive one. One might postulate that this is due to formation of clouds (as Lindzen suggested and as Dr Roy Spencer has obs and published papers to back up).

That's what the real science tells us, ie comparison of the theory with observations - remember that? It's how science used to work. It's not true to say that the models couldn't achieve the same result. In fact they could - all they need to do is adjust the natural variation to reflect real world observations.

However, the latter number implicitly assumes that extra warming is from the CO2 and it is not actually another long-term natural trend. This is fair but not necessarily so because there is a well known descent into a "little ice age" at least in Northern Europe which has not been adequately explained. If that cooling was natural and we started from that natural low point then the heating can be natural too. That said, Northern europe is quite tiny so it's politically correct and probably sensible to assume that man is warming the planet by a small amount. In any event the planet has warmed by mostly natural 0.4 degrees since 1950, the IPCC cutoff date. So what are the implications? For a future post.

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Where do we go from here?

Let's not get melancholy about what should have been done or about the grave injustices of the system. The revolution isn't coming to replace the stupid with the wise so we need to learn to adapt to continued stupidity. In times like this we really need to know where things are going so we can plan ahead. My only qualifications for this are that I managed to predict the crash was coming (and warned everyone I possibly could, some of whom are even grateful) which puts me well ahead of the worlds PhD economists who praise the god of the invisible hand and also seriously well ahead of Alan Greenspan, that latter-day Oracle of Delphi whose inscrutable pronouncements were enough to move entire markets. Mind you, I didn't manage to see then how exactly to prepare for it, apart from moving to a country that didn't see the boom in the first place. The plan was to hold up in this safe haven until other real estate markets corrected to a sensible level and then pick up a bargain. I really didn't expect France to nosedive as well because they had laws to prevent bank speculations. Those sneaky bankers got around the laws that were meant to protect them. Never underestimate the stupidity of the greedy! Happily it was only the big few. Unhappily they still don't quite realize the first role of a bank is to lend money to small businesses, not to gamble with their savers money. Sarko needs to step in here. From the rather pathetic selection of world leaders, he's likely the best man for the job.

Unlike our inglorious leaders I don't expect the dumb suckers who got us into this mess will be to be able to get us out of it so I need to look for guidelines elsewhere. A simple barometer to economic health is to look around and see who still has healthy manufacturing sectors or a lot of natural resources but without too many mouths to feed. We come up with Japan, Germany, France for the first part, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Russia for the second. China and India will be catching up with the rest of the world for a while and then they'll have to deal with a population who'll want unions, social security, pensions etc. The USA is a tricky beast to judge because with that enormous level of debt they really should have tanked by now just like Argentina did. That they haven't is entirely due to the worlds central bankers continuing to buy up US debt and continuing to use dollars as a reserve currency. This doesn't really make any sense but then central bankers never did. Clearly the rest of the world still looks to the USA to bring us out of the depression.

Yet the USA does have a lot of natural resources, and it does have the most encouraging entrepreneurial spirit backed by the best venture capitalist culture by far. They don't mind losing money on most things as long as they gain enough money from the few things that do work. So maybe they can do it after all. France doesn't work that way more's the pity. It's odd but there could be jobs for everyone here - the place is crying out for tradesmen of all sorts. We just can't get them. Every school-leaver wants to be a bureaucrat it seems. Yet entrepreneurs will need to lead the recovery. That there aren't enough small businessmen is due to a double whammy: too much unnecessary burdens placed on them by the state and too many of those bloody bureaucrats. Better said, too much government. It is true that the best thing a government can do for a business is to get the hell out of the way. I'd dearly like to know how to get my hands on this zero rate of interest that the European banks think will crank up the economy. Instead it's being used by big banks to participate in yet more dumb speculation. It just doesn't get to the entrepreneurs. I'm not that much in favour of nationalised banks but if that's the only way for us entrepreneurs to get the stimulus then let's do it.

Anyway here's the plan. Whatever you are selling, make it cheaper. People just don't have the cash just now. Downsize your expenses, so get a smaller house and factory. Take advantage of any zero percent interest schemes you can eg by swapping your credit card and getting eco-loans for insulation, geothermal heating etc. While it's not smart getting in debt it's necessary to smooth things over. Find out what buzzwords are likely to unlock the purses of these government grant agencies and redirect your business plan that way; it doesn't matter if the whole idea is dumb - most business plans stink anyway - just get the money and adapt the idea to something that people will want or need. Do not invest in dollar holdings; instead hold still for now and buy land in about a year. I already see some very tempting real estate that is an absolute steal. There are certain places in the world that will recover. eg Think Florida, not New Mexico.

Technology is our saviour. Anything that gets us to do the job quicker or otherwise saves us money. So any services run through the internet are good. If you can invent something to get rid of spam or protect against internet fraudsters then you've got it made. Robotics will be big and so will long-life batteries to run them. Look for the software that really costs too much and undercut the bastards. They deserve it. Don't worry about losing a customer who says he pays more for whatever reason; if your quality is good then you don't need him. Find someone smarter instead. Entire sectors of expensive software will soon be ditched by government departments in order to save money. That means more Openoffice and less Microsoft Office, more Alibre, less Inventor (I hope anyway). More Linux, less Windows. Games are still to the fore and they'll become more immersive and real, so look for things that'll cater for that: Virtual objects will need to break more realistically than before for example. Virtual offices will proliferate with net-meetings being the norm rather than the exception. Our cars will get lighter so carbon fibre will be popular and cheaper.

Don't listen to the born-again eco-freaks that say the warming planet will cause this or that because a) they are mostly abject hypocrites, b) they are guessing on the pessimistic side, c) we've seen this catastrophism before many times and it always smells the same way, d) the politicians are only paying lip-service to them now, e) the science behind it is pathetically poor f) the real-world observations say the hypothesis is far too simplistic and too dismissive of natural changes, g) models without validation are useless - if you need an example then look at the financial models that predicted unlimited growth; these were actually much better models and were created by far smarter people than climate scientists (similar hubris though). Hence business-wise don't trust any green-tech unless it is actually a good idea and can make a profit without subsidy. Do not buy carbon credits - they are run by conmen. Solar panels will be good if you are in a hot place. Geothermal heating will rocket in popularity. Smart-looking electric cars will be popular whereas the ugly ones just won't - look at Renaults new electric cars, heck I really want one of them and I don't care about the 100 mile range because I just never go that far. What I really want too though is an electric driver so I can relax in the back. I wouldn't plan on nuclear power coming out of the cold - despite all the current green-washing the real problem with it always was it's huge costs. Governments don't have the money. Coal to gas technology will however be popular - natural gas power is far more efficient than coal and needs far fewer moving parts. Crucially though, it can be privately funded and the buildtime is quick.

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