Discussion > Let's get real about climate models
Jan 18, 2016 at 4:01 PM Raff ... how many people no longer trust UAH and RSS now that they know their models have not been validated?
Raff, would you care to explain what you are on about?
Even a casual look at the literature throws up bags of information on how the satellite data has been calibrated and compared with other (eg sonde) data. For example: Assessing the value of Microwave Sounding Unit–radiosonde comparisons in ascertaining errors in climate data records of tropospheric temperatures
Martin A
Martin A
Does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle apply sufficiently to water molecules and larger particles to make them indeterminate?
I would accept that the principle applies to the position and momentum of an electron within an orbital of a water molecule, but would be surprised if it applies to the much more massive water molecules themselves.
I would certainly not accept that the HUP applies to pollen grains, fat particles or anything else large enough to exhibit visible Brownian motion.
Entropic man
Martin A
From the Mears et al abstract you linked
Multidecadal-scale changes in atmospheric temperature have been measured by both
radiosondes and the satellite-borne microwave sounding unit (MSU). Both measurement
systems exhibit substantial time varying biases
and
Given the data limitations it is
concluded that using radiosondes to validate multidecadal-scale trends in MSU data, or
vice versa, or trying to use such metrics alone to pick a ‘winner’ is an ill-conditioned
approach
Having spent years attacking all the temperature datasets for their unreliability, the sceptic community are suddenly keen on satellite datasets despite their unreliability. Oh the Irony!
Entropic man
You could count me as a sceptic, I suppose, but I have not “spent years attacking all the temperature datasets”, so your conclusions are already flawed, EM (unless you do not count me as part of the "sceptic community").
While I have always questioned the accuracy of the thermometers of old, from which the first premise I heard was that “temperatures have risen by more than 0.5°C in only a century!” the only questioning of datasets I have is the blatant fiddling of historical data to achieve the desired result – i.e. increasing the perceived rise (especially with raw datasets that have actually shown temperatures reducing).
Radical Rodent
Having spent years attacking all the temperature datasets for their unreliability, the sceptic community are suddenly keen on satellite datasets despite their unreliability. Oh the Irony!
Jan 18, 2016 at 9:50 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
EM - I don't think that "attacking" is an appropriate word. People have pointed out many issues with terrestrial datasets - and many have been sometimes unwittingly revealed by their guardians. But it's a delusion to imagine that more than a handful of dedicated people have been involved - not the entire community of people who are not sold on the CAGW hypothesis. Pointing out genuine issues is not "attacking" - unless your viewpoint and vocabulary is that of Professor Michael E Mann.
But please don't get me wrong.
Although the terrestial records seem to have suffered more ad hoc and apparently undocumented buggering about than the satellite records, plus horrors like measuring temperatures close to jet runways, loss of the original data in office moves, etc, I don't have confidence in *any* temperature datasets, for a bunch of reasons.
When your friend says "how many people no longer trust UAH and RSS now that they know their models have not been validated" I think it is reasonable for me ask him why he says such a thing if, in a few minutes while downing a coffee, I can come up with detailed papers - "peer reviewed" to boot - that seems to contradict what he implies about temperature data derived from satellite measurements not having been validated.
[Stuff about Heisenberg tomorrow (I hope).]
Martin A
Radical Rodent, Martin A
Since you accept RSS as validated temperature, you must also accept the 0.4C warming it shows since 1979.
That is a warming trend of 0.11C/decade.
Entropic man
Radical Rodent, Martin A
Data here
Entropic man
EM is a troll. If he were ever a teacher, all her students should have their qualifications reviewed.
diogenes
EM this is getting boring. If climate were understood, then runs of the various GCMs should show the same statistics. You know damn well that they don't. So why the pretence that climate is understood?
diogenes
EM: and who is denying that this has happened? I (and, it appears to me, most others who comment on this site) willingly accept that there was such a rise for just over 2 decades, just as I accept that there was a fall of about 0.3°C for three decades before that, and that there has been little rise for a little under 2 decades.
Diogenes: yes, it is getting somewhat tiresome.
Radical Rodent
The old, literal, "climate change denial" straw man argument that keeps on giving. Is there any Believers' argument that doesn't pivot, or even pirouette, on a logical fallacy?
It's REALLY boring. Honestly, playing whack-a-mole in the arcade was fun for a while when I was a kid, and it was good exercise too, but playing whack-a-mole with religiously devout climate believers' arguments, having to constantly shoot down their pseudoscientific fanaticism, just isn't as much fun as it should be. I think it's because it's interminable; an endless loop of the same horseshit recycled. I just wanna right-click on them and choose "End process" because I think they've crashed.
Simon Hopkinson
Martin, is either 'calibration' or 'comparison' equivalent to 'validation? My experience of calibration is of using something known to be correct as a reference to adjust something that might not be. So is sonde data widely acknowledged to be correct for use as a reference? I read that RATPAC recently differs significantly from the satellite series, so one of them must be wrong. If RSS or UAH is calibrated to the sondes maybe they should not be drifting apart.
Sonde data is sparse. Although UAH could calibrate its model using North American sonde data from, say 2000, that gives me little confidence that the calibration is still correct over Greenland in 2015. Or does it? And unless the calibration happens frequently, there could be changes in the satellites that invalidate it.
So are you really saying the models used by the satellite teams for turning a mass of MSU/AMSU readings into TLT/TMT temperatures have been validated? Your link makes that seem very unlikely. And if not, where's your objection to my question: how many people no longer trust UAH and RSS now that they know their models have not been validated?
--
EM, interesting links. Thanks.
Raff
(...) Martin A
Since you accept RSS as validated temperature, you must also accept the 0.4C warming it shows since 1979.
That is a warming trend of 0.11C/decade.
Jan 18, 2016 at 11:55 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
EM - Please re-read what I said. [I think I have made requests like that to you numerous times.] As so often, you imagine something, and then treat what you have imagined as if it were reality.
I said "I don't have confidence in *any* temperature datasets, for a bunch of reasons". If you think that amounts to my saying "I accept RSS as validated temperature" then I'm not sure what to suggest. A refresher course in English comprehension?
Martin A
The conversation has steered away from the fact that to get anything sensible out of climate models you need.....
1) The Model
2) Inputs, actual forcings (which can't be predicted).
The believers seem to think that there's intellectual value in optimising the models against past forcing values.
The rest of us realise that they are intimately linked, there is no worth in optimising the models against past forcing values if you can't predict what future forcings are going to be.
?
Nial
EM - I was really surprised that you think that Brownian motion can be considered determinstic. Really surprised is an understatment. I was staggered. A random walk (as a mathematical model of Brownian motion) is often used as the very first example of a random process in courses on probability theory.
Here is what Feynman (Lectures on Physics) says about Brownian Motion
41–4 The random walkLet us consider how the position of a jiggling particle should change with time, for very long times compared with the time between "kicks." Consider a little Brownian movement particle which is jiggling about because it is bombarded on all sides by irregularly jiggling water molecules. Query: After a given length of time, how far away is it likely to be from where it began? This problem was solved by Einstein and Smoluchowski. If we imagine that we divide the time into little intervals, let us say a hundredth of a second or so, then after the first hundredth of a second it moves here, and in the next hundredth it moves some more, in the next hundredth of a second it moves somewhere else, and so on. In terms of the rate of bombardment, a hundredth of a second is a very long time. The reader may easily verify that the number of collisions a single molecule of water receives in a second is about 10^14 so in a hundredth of a second it has 10^12 collisions, which is a lot! Therefore, after a hundredth of a second it is not going to remember what happened before. In other words, the collisions are all random, so that one "step" is not related to the previous "step." It is like the famous drunken sailor problem...
Does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle apply sufficiently to water molecules and larger particles to make them indeterminate?
I would accept that the principle applies to the position and momentum of an electron within an orbital of a water molecule, but would be surprised if it applies to the much more massive water molecules themselves.
I would certainly not accept that the HUP applies to pollen grains, fat particles or anything else large enough to exhibit visible Brownian motion.
Jan 18, 2016 at 9:33 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
The uncertainty principle is universal. Its derivation does not make any assumption about the mass of the object.
Although the uncertainty principle applies to all objects, the uncertainty becomes too small to be of any importance (compared with other sources of error) as soon as the object is sizable, because Planck's constant is such a small quantity. It's utterly irrelevant to air gun pellets, cars, guided missiles, planets. But it is most definitely significant in the dynamics of individual molecules.
But even if you *could* know the exact position and momentum of two molecules, could you calculate their positions and momentums after they collide? Unless you can explain how you could do that, then you have not explained how you can compute the precise future state of a system containing gas molecules even if the uncertainty principal was not relevant. The atmosphere contains gas molecules of course, so its future cannot be predicted precisely. And for fundamental reasons, not just 'practical' reasons..
If you can't say (even in principle) how you would do it, then *you cannot do it*. That's the operational philosophy in action. Saying that a thing is deterministic or would be if only we could make impossible measurements and make computations with impossible (infinite) precision, is another way of saying that it is not deterministic.
Martin A
I don't think there is any dispute that the system is deterministic. It clearly obeys the laws of physics. Jan 16, 2016 at 11:39 AM | Unregistered Commenter...and Then There's Physics
Again quite surprising that someone (who seems to boast that he understands some physics) equates obeying the laws of physics to being deterministic.
On a planetary scale and over geological timescale these processes are deterministic. Repeat the conditions and the physics produces the same equilibrium. This is deterministic.
(...)
Jan 16, 2016 at 1:13 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
EM - as I said, that seems to involve a load of implicit assumptions with no basis for believing they apply. Here are just a few for starters ...
- Would the climate have evolved as it has had life never originated on Earth? Was that a reproducible event?
- What would be the effect of a super nova within spitting distance? Is that a determinstic event whose effects are predictable?
- Are such things as "tipping points" possible in the evolution of climate? What does that say about the evolution of climate being dertemistic?
- Would the climate have evolved as it has had bacteria (or fungi or whatever) that can produce decay in wood never evolved? Was their evolution determinstic?
- What has been the effect of collisions with extraterrestial objects? Are such collisions deterministic and repeatable?
- Were whatever events caused the creation of the Moon in orbit around the Earth deterministic. Without such events, would climate have evolved as it has done/will do?
- Are changes in the Earth's angle of inclination determinstic/predictable? What effect would such changes have on climate?
- Are changes in the Earth's magnietic field deterministic/predictable? What effect would such changes have on climate?
Martin A
Simon, when it comes to logical fallacies you are hard to beat - claiming to see a "pause" without looking at the data. Bravo!
Nial, "optimising the models against past forcing values"? What makes you think this is what they do?
Martin, are the models use in satellite data processing validated? You and others are very that you wont accept a non validated model. So are they? Is calibration against sondes the same as validation?
Raff
EM, just one desciption of stochastic events that are considered to happen at scales much greater than the scale of a water molecule: The Role of Stochastic and Modal Gating of Cardiac L-Type Ca2+ Channels on Early After-Depolarizations
michael hart
Martin A, Simon Hopkinson plus others,
there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that some here are paid climatrollogists, collaborating in a mission to disrupt, dodge, weave, evade, divert, frustrate, annoy etc, whilst never conceding any fault or failure in approved climate science.
Tag team tactics, supplying dubious research data, discrete mutual self congratulations, subject changing, obfuscation, etc are all fair game, along with introducing philosophical arguments into a thread about the validity of climate models. It is all here.
Climate science can prove almost none of what is claimed, and denies scaremongering, but relies on collaborators at all levels, paid or not, to maintain the illusion of consensus to those who pay for it.
golf charlie
Here's how a group of highly trained scientists collect data for financial incentive and skew the results to fit the model: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/12108080/Dementia-diagnoses-rise-by-one-fifth-after-GPs-offered-55-bribes.html
david chorley
Golf Charlie
Allow me to correct your sentence.
Climate science denial can prove almost none of what is claimed, and denies scaremongering, but relies on collaborators at all levels, paid or not, to maintain the illusion of consensus to those who pay for it.
This is getting boring. You folk keep putting up the same old straw men and Raff and I keep knocking them down.
Entropic man
Somewhat off-topic, but highly relevant, and this does seem to be the only Discussion anyone is reading, at present – please go to JoNova’s site.
Radical Rodent
The models are broken because their predictions fail to simulate reality. I refer to the hotspot, troposphere humidity, temperatures and the pause.
EM do you agree or not?
Schrodinger's Cat
Golf Charlie
Allow me to correct your sentence.
Climate science denial can prove almost none of what is claimed, and denies scaremongering, but relies on collaborators at all levels, paid or not, to maintain the illusion of consensus to those who pay for it.
This is getting boring. You folk keep putting up the same old straw men and Raff and I keep knocking them down.
Martin A
It does not matter whether we can predict what is happening. Down among the molecules the energy flows and the particles interact in accordance with the laws of physics. That is what I mean by deterministic.
Entropic man
EM - if you think that Brownian motion is non-random, you are on your own in the world of physics.
It's inherently random because of the Heisenberg principle. It is fundamentally impossible to have complete information about the system (to know exactly the position and momentum of every particle) - it is not merely "impractical".