Climate Models Have Been Predicting Too Much Warming
John Christy has written a new report, The Tropical Skies: Falsifying climate alarm, published by the GWPF.
It’s based on a talk he gave recently in London to MPs and Peers.
There’s also a press release, in which Christy says, of climate computer models:
“They all have rapid warming above 30,000 feet in the tropics – it’s effectively a diagnostic signal of greenhouse warming. But in reality it’s just not happening. It’s warming up there, but at only about one third of the rate predicted by the models.”
And the latest generation of models, CMIP6, are even worse:
“An early look at some of the latest generation of climate models reveals they are predicting even faster warming. This is simply not credible.”
At the end of his report, he says that the IPCC tried to hide the problem in their 2013 AR5 report.
Climate Scepticism 
They seek it here
They seek it there,
They seek that Hotspot
everywhere.
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Paul, climate change fanatics have conveniently and quietly just shoved this very inconvenient fact to one side. It’s good that Christy is again giving it a public airing. A signature of CO2 global warming is accelerated warming in the mid-troposphere (particularly above the tropics) and cooling in the stratosphere. Unfortunately, AGW hasn’t signed in, even though in 2015 the BBC’s then landmark climate change program ‘Climate Change by Numbers’ insisted it had. I wrote this back then:
What this shows is accelerated warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere. The stratosphere has indeed cooled since the 1960s – though this cooling trend has halted since the mid to late 1990s.
Now, Fenton informs us that the that the models show that this pattern (tropospheric warming/stratospheric cooling) only fits well with anthropogenic CO2 being the principle cause of recent global warming. What he neglects to mention is:
1. The tropical mid-tropospheric ‘hotspot’ which we clearly see in his ‘actually happening’ representation above has actually failed to materialise, even though it is one of the key predictions of the climate models. There has been no observed accelerated warming of the mid troposphere over the tropics. So even though the troposphere as a whole has warmed and the stratosphere cooled, the mid troposphere has not warmed significantly compared to the surface.
2. There is an alternative (anthropogenic) explanation for stratospheric cooling and surface/tropospheric warming which involves CFCs. Basically, the hypothesis is that accelerated ozone loss caused by CFCs in the stratosphere has resulted in cooling of that portion of the atmosphere whilst, at the same time, UV energy which would normally be absorbed by stratospheric ozone (warming the stratosphere) has passed straight through to warm the lower troposphere. This might explain the ‘pause’ in global warming from about 1998 and the corresponding ‘pause’ in stratospheric cooling as a direct result of the decline in the concentration of ozone depleting CFCs in the upper atmosphere since the international adoption of the Montreal Protocol in January 1989.
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I’m wondering how the data on the ozone hole fit in with the hypothesis. It appears to neither have shrunk nor ozone concentrations really increased since records began. The hole is apparently as big as it’s ever been. Does this gel with the CFC hypothesis?
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Beth
I found a hole that was always there…
It was there again today,
I wish to gosh it’d go away.
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It’s interesting that in the US there are a few climate scientists prepared to speak up – Christy, Spencer, Curry, Lindzen, Pielkes Sr and Jr.
Here in the UK we don’t have any.
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Modellers versus observation, that inconvenient data.
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Paul:
We do however have this guy:
The data could be wrong, which, as JJ also says, is still vaguely plausible. But not the idea of what science is. It is striking and sad that there is no UK ‘climate scientist’ willing to face such facts.
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One thing I miss about not being on Twitter is JJ’s calm, unassailable logic in the face of climate science weirdness:
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Yep, I almost included those ones too. He’s a great asset.
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Here is my synopsis of Christy”s latest. The key points:
At the global level a significant discrepancy has been confirmed between empirical measurements and computer predictions.
Almost all climate models have predicted rapid warming at high altitudes in the tropics due to greenhouse gas forcing.
The next generation of climate models show that lessons are not being learned.
Post with charts: https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/05/26/its-models-all-the-way-down/
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For me, the central issue here is whether, according to the models, accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere is a unique signature of GHG warming. If it is, and the warming is significantly less than predicted by the climate models, does this then ‘falsify’ – i.e. invalidate – the models as tools for projecting future GHG-induced warming? Christy addresses the first question:
“Almost all of the models show such a warming, and none show it when extra greenhouse gas forcing is not included. Figure 6 shows the warming trends from 102 climate models, and the average trend is 0.44C per decade.This is quite fast: over 40 years, it amounts to almost 2C, although some models have slower warming and some faster. However, the real-world warming is much lower; around one third of the model average.”
This makes it quite clear that a unique signature of GHG-induced warming according to the models is accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. No matter then the objections of Ken on my post who points out that Mears and Sherwood have said that accelerated tropical tropospheric warming relative to the surface will happen with any surface warming, also that its absence does not violate the laws of physics or necessarily imply that GHG induced warming is not happening. We are talking here about the climate models. They do uniquely predict accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere due to the accumulation of GHGs.
So, to address the second point, if this accelerated warming is not happening, and indeed it appears not to be happening – despite the protestations of some scientists that the balloon data and satellite data are not sufficiently accurate to demonstrate this – then the model projections of tropospheric warming are falsified. To argue, as Richard Betts has done, on Twitter, against Jonathon Jones, that because they fail in one region of the atmosphere doesn’t mean they are ‘wrong’ is plain silly. A vital, key prediction of the models is just not happening, which implies that the models have something very wrong in their basic architecture and that therefore they are not to be relied upon as tools for estimating future GHG warming. That is science and that is the scientific method. Until climate modellers can demonstrate that their models perform reasonably well in all areas of the real world, then we cannot be expected to have faith in their overall estimates of future GHG-induced surface warming (which is where we all live, as NASA points out to me, bot 30-40,000 feet up in the air).
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