Science Magazine Reveals Implausibly Hot Climate Models

Leading climate scientists conceded that models used to estimate how much the world will warm with rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are running too hot.

It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Science ­magazine.

The admission is seen as a significant development by scientists who argue that not enough attention has been paid to natural ­cycles in the earth’s climate.

It puts another question mark over the use of the most extreme scenarios generated by models, RCP8.5, to estimate what could be expected in a warming world.

The concession has been made on the eve of this month’s release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on the science of climate change.

That report, delayed a year ­because of Covid-19, is due to be released on Aug­ust 9 and will outline what can be expected with different levels of warming.

It will play a major role in ­preparations for the upcoming ­climate change summit in ­Glasgow, Scotland, in November.

A Science article published this week said climate scientists faced the alarming reality that “climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist.

Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, ­including the model makers themselves, believe are implausibly fast”, the article said. “In advance of the UN report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers.

In the past, most models projected a “climate sensitivity” – the warming expected when atmospheric carbon dioxide is doubled over pre-industrial times – of ­between 2C and 4.5C.

Last year, a landmark paper that used documented factors including ongoing warming trends calculated a likely climate sensitivity of between 2.6C and 3.9C but many of the new models from leading centers showed a warming of more than 5C – uncomfortably outside these bounds.

The models were also out of step with records of past climate.

According to Science, the IPCC team will probably use ­reality – the actual warming of the world over the past few decades – to constrain model projections.

The IPCC report is also likely to present the impacts of different amounts of warming – 2C, 3C, 4C – rather than saying how quickly those impacts will be felt.

Steve Sherwood from the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre said “while it is true some new climate models have surprising climate sensitivities and predict very high future warming, what doesn’t always come through is that most new models have sensitivity values within the range estimated from observations.

Those models still predict substantial future weather and climate changes due to carbon dioxide, similar to predictions made by the science community for many years,” Professor Sherwood said.

US climate scientist Judith Curry said the IPCC report would certainly discuss the problem with climate models: “The elephant in the room for the IPCC is they are heavily relying on RCP8.5 emissions scenarios, which are now widely regarded as implausible.

Michael Asten, an expert reviewer of the IPCC’s AR6 report, said the admission that climate models were running hot was a significant concession.

See more here: climatechangedispatch.com

PSI editor’s note: Alabama State Climatologist John Christy produced this chart in April 2019 to show how much in error the climate models are at predicting any future warming:

The only model that matches observations remains the Russian INM CM5, which has low ‘climate sensitivity’, but whatever the climate models predict in terms of CO2-forced warming are wrong, as carbon dioxide does not drive temperature.

Header image: Yale Environment 360

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Comments (4)

  • Avatar

    Roger Higgs

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    CO2 is irrelevant to climate.

    Government agency NASA and UN agency IPCC perpetuate the ‘man-made’ warming fraud. It’s another myth aimed at population control by keeping the public constantly afraid, exactly like the covid myth (the WHO is another UN agency).

    Here are the 2 keys to climate. 1. If you want to know what Earth’s climate is going to do in the next few decades, look at how the Sun’s magnetic output varied in the LAST few. 2. The Sun’s effect on climate is delayed decades by the ocean’s vast thermal inertia (‘ocean memory’), likewise ignored in computer climate ‘models’ …

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350726458

    Of COURSE Earth is warming (for now). The Sun did it (again).

    Please see my 1st August invited letter to John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate …

    https://www.aaeprototype.com/337-environment/man-made-global-warming-skeptical-of-serious-anthropogenic-global-warming/europe/2707-global-warming-and-cooling-mimic-sun-s-magnetic-activity-not-co2

    You’re being played. They’re stealing your freedom. Correction: they’ve STOLEN your freedom. A few of the more alert sheeple are beginning to wake up. Too late?

    Reply

    • Avatar

      Andy

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      Well said Roger!

      Reply

  • Avatar

    Alan

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    Seeing your comment makes me feel guilty. I found some of your publications a while ago and was impressed when I scanned through them, but I haven’t gone back to them. It really is as simple as your two points. I always say there are two ways to increase temperature – adding thermal energy or doing work. Thermal Inertia is equally important and particularly the difference between water and air. The atmosphere cannot contain enough energy to any significant change to the sea temperature, but the sea can heat the atmosphere. The minute amount of CO2 does not contain enough energy to do anything.

    Not recommended, but putting your hand in an oven at 200C will not burn you but putting it in water at 60C will give you an nastiy burn. It is all about energy.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      Herb Rose

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      Hi Alan,
      Temperature is a function of kinetic energy, which is a function of both mass and energy. In the troposphere the transfer of energy is done by collisions between molecules. Those collisuions obey the conservation of momentum (M1V1 +M2V2 = M1V3 + M2V4) where energy is transferred from the object with more energy (V^2) to the object with less energy, regardless of mass. If a light fast sports car runs into the back of a slower heavier truck in front of it, the sports car will slow down and the truck speed up even if the truck has more kinetic energy. The gas molecules in the atmosphere have greater velocity (energy) than the water in the oceans (where energy transfers fast) and those gas molecules will transfer energy to the water.
      Hotter air rises, so even though the air molecules at the bottom of the Grand Canyon receive less energy and are cooler than the air molecules at the top of the canyon, the temperature is 10 F hotter (more slower molecules (mass) transferring energy to the thermometer. Objects transfer energy (V^2) not temperature. .
      Herb

      Reply

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