It would seem that all the current climate models are wrong according to this article

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/11/mexican_wave_climate_variability/

I'm no expert by far, just found it intriguing.

Note the source: The Register.

The article originates from Georgia Tech. If you think about it, we haven't been doing this very long and the models are only as good as the programing. That really surprises me coming from you Les, just because the Register links the article, doesn't mean it's been tainted, there's bound to be dozens, if not hundreds of variables that haven't been discovered yet. All the new ones discovered in the future may not be correct either, I just think it's arrogant of us humans to think we've nailed it as far as models go. I thought that's what this was all about, refining the models with newly discovered data.

http://www.research.gatech.edu/news/%E2%80%98stadium-waves%E2%80%99-could-explain-lull-global-warming

Perhaps I am missing something. If this, "mexican wave" accounts for the pause in global warming, doesn't that mean that when we reach the next peak of the wave things will be even worse?

That aside, is this article peer reviewed? Even if it is, the number of peer reviewed papers supporting the models leads me to think that statistically they are far more likely to be correct than the occasional outlier.

I am not familiar with, "The Register" so can't comment on it's reliability as a source.

If you think about it, we haven't been doing this very long and the models are only as good as the programing.

The models used here are versions of those developed by the UK Met Office over many decades, by lots of climatologists, and run on many different supercomputers, each getting more powerful than the previous generation.
And their main client is the UK military, who want accuracy over long periods of time.

We only use a couple of their models, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have some that can't be talked about without getting a visit from people in dark glasses. And then disappearing.

[Flashawk wrote:]The article originates from Georgia Tech.

... i.e. Judith Curry, so no surprises there then.

That really surprises me coming from you Les, just because the Register links the article, doesn't mean it's been tainted, ...

Yes it does. The Register has a long history of touting this kind of stuff.

... I just think it's arrogant of us humans to think we've nailed it as far as models go.

No-one who works in climate modelling thinks they've "nailed it": models in science and elsewhere are generally diagnostic, but sometimes they get good - landing a man on the Moon was very good modelling indeed.

The "don't be arrogant" argument is common among climate sceptics and sits rather oddly with a group who effectively believe that physics, chemistry and sometimes arithmetic are all wrong. It's also reminiscent of the much-lampooned creationist "argument from personal disbelief": climate models are not wrong because it would be arrogant to suppose that they were right any more than evolution is wrong because a creationist cannot believe that it is right.

Perhaps Curry's curve-fitting reveals something new or perhaps it just re-casts her well known prejudices. Better let the scientists decide rather than the cynics at El Reg.

A friend of mine sends me occasional emails about the stories there, I had never read it until a couple months ago, I don't pay attention to the rhetoric. Do you think the moon landings are fake? The Japanese got some pretty good pictures of the landing sites on the 40th anniversary of the first landing, I don't think they would cover it up for NASA. As far as arrogance goes, many scientists exude it, squabbling over funding and at times going so far as to call each other names and we've all heard of climategate.

If you would have told an astronomer that black holes existed 30 years ago, you might have inflamed them or an upper echelon anthropologist that two or more species of man existed at the same time, they would have tried to get your funding revoked. The same thing is going on in climatology and now we don't have time for it, there shouldn't be die hards that refuse to give new data a serious look just because the group that discovered it isn't well liked.

Look at the planet hunters, they were once considered the biggest clowns in astronomy, now it's a serious occupation where NASA is dumping billions in to it. Religion is starting to realize that evolution is part of gods plan, some scientists feel they are on the verge of proving that spirits do exist and that we do have a soul. It's been going on for hundreds of years but now I think time is in short supply. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and there are many crazies out there but if change and flexibility aren't part of our game plan, we need to rethink things.

I know you're an intelligent man so wouldn't you agree that reducing the planets population would solve about 75% of our problems? Do you think it might be easier and quicker too? The less people we have the less resources are consumed and that especially applies to developing nations like China and India. China wants to build 250 coal fired plants in the next 2 decades. I agree that were in big trouble and just about everyone knows it whether they agree or not, it always boils down to money. Well, I have a nice long response here, you should be busy micro-quoting.

... and that especially applies to developing nations like China and India.

I would disagree there. Per-capita, emissions are far high in the developed countries, and as a result, first world countries are the biggest culprits. If you want to start reducing population, you should be looking there first, I am curious to know why you are looking at the third world first.

... Well, I have a nice long response here, you should be busy micro-quoting.

Happy?

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"Better let the scientists decide rather than the cynics at El Reg."

I had never realised El Reg was a climate blog. Better known by my colleagues for rumour-mongering in the tech world.

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I'm going to attempt to take an objective look at this "stadium wave" hypothesis. I'm not a climate scientist, don't claim to be equipped to talk about the science and won't attempt to do so. I have a BSc in Computer Science and have worked as a software engineer in the telecommunications industry (signalling protocols and real time data logging) for over 30 years.

The hypothesis originates in the PhD thesis of Marcia Glaze Wyatt (abstract only, PhD awarded in 2012) who co-authored (with Judith Curry) the paper discussed in The Register. That paper was published online by Climate Dynamics in September 2013 (Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century) and has yet to be assigned to a printed edition of the journal (in common with 279 other "Online First Articles"). If you don't subscribe to the journal you have to pay for access to the full paper, but it is freely accessible from Judith Curry's website (4.9MB PDF). It isn't significant for this post, but a positioning problem with the figures on pages 50 to 61 has caused one image to obscure another on pages 52, 56 and 57.

I've found other 2 papers co-authored by Marcia Glaze Wyatt. Both appear to be based on her PhD thesis:

• Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Northern Hemisphere�s climate variability. published in Climate Dynamics Volume 38, Issue 5-6, March 2012, paid access to the full paper. This appears to be the Wyatt et al. (2011) paper referred to in the other papers and was produced prior to her thesis being accepted.
  
  
• "A secularly varying hemispheric climate-signal propagation previously detected in instrumental and proxy data not detected in CMIP3 data base". The full paper is available on SpringerPlus open access as an HTML or PDF (3.2MB) document.
  

The basic hypothesis is that there is strong statistical evidence of "a quasi-cyclic 50�80-year climate signal across the Northern Hemisphere, with particular presence in the North Atlantic". Wyatt and Curry have summarised this in a wheel image:

The outer green ring of the image gives the peak years for the 8 segments they have identified in the cycle (red for positive anomalies "I" to "IV" and blue for negative anomalies "-I" to "-IV").

The image indicates that they appear to have started with segment "-II" in 1895, but the question mark hasn't been clarified. Given that question marks are used for forward projections I can only infer that 1895 is a backwards projection. On that basis segment "-III" in 1904 should be considered the start point and segment "IV" in 1998 the end point. This means they are making a hypothesis for a 50 to 80 year cycle on the basis of 1.625 cycles over a 94 year period.

One thing worth noting is that the above image (used in this blog post on Curry's website and in The Register article) is significantly different from the one used in the published paper PDF on Curry's website.

The above image projects forward to segments "-I" (2010), "-II" (2014) and "-III" (2024). The image in the PDF has placed named proxies in the green ring, moved the peak years outside of the wheel, shifted the "-I" projection 4 years earlier (to 2006) and added projections for "-IV" (2031) and "I" (2036).

I'm sure other climate scientists will be dispassionately attempting to confirm (or otherwise) the hypothesis and that if it stands up to the scrutiny climate models will be modified to take account of it.

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"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

... and that especially applies to developing nations like China and India.

I would disagree there. Per-capita, emissions are far high in the developed countries, and as a result, first world countries are the biggest culprits. If you want to start reducing population, you should be looking there first, I am curious to know why you are looking at the third world first.

... Well, I have a nice long response here, you should be busy micro-quoting.

Happy?

I mentioned India and China not because of their per capita carbon foot print but because of the size of their populations (China is talking about repealing the one child law). In the US, if it wasn't for immigration, our population would be decreasing. I mention disadvantaged parts of the world because they have the fastest growing populations and we have to feed them. To me, that's not how you should solve your problems.

I don't have a collage degrees but I did go to collage, I dropped out in 1980 and joined the Marines, I stayed in for a little over 10 years and was hurt in the first Desert Storm (please don't thank me for serving, it was a privilege to become a US Marine). I didn't mean to upset you Mike, I have a lot of respect for CPDN and the people that run it (and you), if I didn't believe in what they are doing here, I wouldn't have put so much time and effort in to it. I also become very loyal to whom ever I throw in with and I think I've earned the right to say a thing or two about it.

I'm certainly not trying to upset folks here and let me say that I respect all of you for doing this project, it is not an easy project by far. It's hard to complete a model that takes 10 days or longer, the models are very temperamental and crash very easily, they have had server issue's and WU problems but every project has those and you need a very dependable computer too. There's nothing wrong with a healthy argument every now and then. I live in the central Sierra's and when I was a kid growing up here, we had "permanent snowpack" that was there over 9000 feet, now it's gone and it has really effected me (I drove a log truck for 23 years (wrecked 'em too)).

All this talk about reducing population is not really relevant. The people that are going to change the Earth�s climate in unpredictable ways have already been born. So unless you are planning to nuke someone we have to change the way we live.

If we are to prevent wholesale climate change, we in the developed world have to drastically cut the release of greenhouse gases while at the same time preventing the developing nations from following the same disastrous path that we did.

I am not saying that we could or should try to stop developing nations from developing, only that we need to help them break the lockstep between rising industrial output (and the rising standard of living that that brings to their people) and ever rising emissions of carbon into the atmosphere. Without this decoupling it is hopeless.

Raising the standard of living itself will tend to slow the growth in human population.

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I've come to this discussion rather late but have read all the comments with interest.

Last year I went to a Royal Society meeting on Handling uncertainty in weather and climate prediction:

http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/uncertainty-weather-climate/

You can click on the + next to each speaker's name to see their biography and listen to an mp3 recording of their talk. Unfortunately this doesn't include the PP visual presentations that most of them made but the recorded talks are still interesting.

You will see that there were two speakers from Georgia Tech: Professor Peter Webster and Professor Judith Curry. They sat together for the whole two days.

Peter Webster talked in detail about climate risks and climate mitigation work he's carried out in the Indian subcontinent. It was interesting.

On the second afternoon of the conference it was Judith Curry's turn. She spent almost the whole 20 minutes denigrating climate models and had several PP slides that included denigrating little jokes. Several times she repeated the phrase that climate models are 'not fit for purpose'. As far as I remember she mentioned no climate model type by name (there are half-a-dozen main types as well as our UK Met Office model types). Nor did she talk about specific lacunae or errors of fact or design.

When it came to questions I wanted to get up and say that I'm a moderator for climateprediction and could she please tell me whether I'm doing a useful thing or wasting my time helping volunteers to run climate models. Unfortunately I didn't dare as I was a non-specialist in a meeting where there were so many experts.

And then among the questions Peter Webster said that there are climatologists with a financial interest in running climate models. Yes, you read me right. The whole room was openmouthed with astonishment and then a general shocked buzz broke out. It lasted until Tim Palmer took the reins again and made a few conciliatory comments to get the meeting back on track again.

A few months ago I told our CPDN boss Myles Allen what JC and PW had said. He had a bit of a laugh.

I'm not a climatologist but I try to keep up-to-date with what's going on in climate research. I see no evidence that anyone in Oxford is amassing wealth on the back of the models we crunch. On the contrary, Andy has explained how the research grants never really include enough money for what the programmers need. I see that Myles is among the 20 most-cited climatologists world-wide. The attribution work of the CPDN team is held in high regard by Peter Stott at the Met Office who has command of a vast amount of data. All the climate modellers hedge everything they say with cautions about the probable range of uncertainties involved.

So I conclude that I am not wasting my time and that our models produce data for a lot of solid research. But the next time something like that happens at a meeting I will not hesitate to ask my question.

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Cpdn news

Drar Flashawk and Les

You say the models may be wrong. Of course the models may be wrong, but, for now they are the best predictors we have.

One thing to keep in mind. Most of the negative studies on climate change and our ability to predict the long term climate are produced by people who can best be called professional climate change deniers. They are essentially paid to be skeptical. They take money ( in the form of �research grants�) from those with a vested interest (read the oil, coal and the electric power industries) in doing nothing about the vast amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses that we put into the atmosphere every year.

This tactic of using paid �scientists� to do biased research was used very effectively in the United States for nearly 40 years by the Tobacco industry. There tame researchers produced scientifically worthless studies for no other reason muddy up the waters and provide cover for bought and paid for politician�s. The big CO2 producers doing the same thing.

These people have decided that we should just go on as we are, accept whatever comes and deal with it as best as we can. This view is made easier to sell by the fact that by the time global warming gets really bad and all the uncertainty vanishes (around 2060), most of us will be dead and it will be our grandchildren problem to deal with. By then there will so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it will also be much to late to do anything effective to stop it.

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