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CarryOnRegardless

Listed below are comments made by CarryOnRegardless between Wednesday, 10th June 2009 and Monday, 29th June 2009.

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'Riots on the streets' 8:51pm on 29 Jun 2009 ch21ss wrote: " For one thing consider the last 15 years of Tory rule - only once did they get unemployment down to around the 2.5m mark - most of that time it was over 3m. Now it takes a global recession to make things as bad under the current government as the best of times under the previous one "

Oh come on, please. The government spinmeisters have changed the way unemployed are counted. These nulabour corrected figures don't include the economicaly inactive because they are not registered as job seekers. They would constitute about another 2.5 million, the so called underclass, on life time welfare, and they never show up as unemployed.

As your link shows, unemployment peaked in the early Thatcher years, and then bottomed in the late eighties as all the goodness of Maggie's medicine worked through the system. The rate was around 5% (a more meaningfull figure than absolute numbers) similar to the Broon boon years. The main difference was that the former was built on the base of prudent government spending whilst the latter was built on a crazed debt filled orgy.
US car industry right to sweat over Obama's new rules 3:05pm on 14 Jun 2009
Obama's policy of increasing engine efficiency sounds plausible on the surface, but ignores a simple economic principal. If something becomes cheaper, more is demanded. In other words, if driving becomes cheaper, more miles will be driven, negating most of the gain.
Electric cars? Take a look at the Tesla. According to specifications, the battery itself weighs 450kg (that's 990lbs to Americans). Think about it. That is the equivalent of 6 adults ( I have no idea of the amount of volume but it must be substantial). I know how expensive lithium ion batteries are when I visit my computer store, so I'm guessing that this 450kg gargantuan accounts for a large part of the $96,000 sticker price. How many have experienced rechargeable batteries that can't hold their charge after a couple of years? I have personally accumulated a pile of costly but now useless camcorder batteries gathering dust at the back of the cupboard. And indeed, the Tesla's batteries are little different. Imagine being told at your next service that your batteries need replacing. How much you ask? £xx,000.00? (Yes, I've also noticed how manufacturers seem to charge more for replacement parts then it costs in the original product).
But none of this compares with the sheer nonsense of putting millions of cars on charge every night. How much extra demand will this put on the grid? Where does all that electricity come from? (Don't say wind farms, because every wind farm needs a spinning backup constantly running, burning fossil fuels, in case the wind doesn't blow).
Unpredictable weather: why the climate is not a model citizen 2:26pm on 14 Jun 2009 XYZ999,
Thanks for the link. This does not look to me like a decade long period of non warming. What this shows is an upward trend from 2000 to 2010, with a series of higher highs at 2000, 2005 and 2010. This suggest that the models were written to reflect the well known at the time ENSO events of a year or 2, and definately not the longer term cycles such as PDO and AMO. Look, we've had a decade of non warming, and several years of cooling. Hadley are predicting another decade of cooling. This is nothing like the graph you posted.
The point I was trying to make in my last post is that projection of surface temps is a red herring itself, since this is a poor metric for measuring climate change. Let's get to the core issue. The fundamental core of the climate models is that there is an ongoing radiative imbalance. Hansen has stated (in 2003) that this should reach +0.85watts/sq. meter in 2010. This imbalance MUST result in accumulated joules of heat in the climate system. All I was trying to say in my last post was that this should be found in the oceans, but it isn't. Initially the argo network reported an apparent cooling anomaly since 2003 but this was later found to be the result of pressure sensor errors. This was corrected and the cooling disappeared. The argo readings now agree with gravimetric and altimetry measurements but still does not show the expected warming, as reported by Willis, Chambers & Nerem (2008) "Assessing the globally averaged sea level budget on seasonal to interannual timescales."
Thus since 2003, there has been little if any global warming as diagnosed using ocean heat content. Since ocean heat content change has been shown to be a robust metric of global warmng and cooling, then in this sense, the models are not in agreement with empirical data. And, as I've already said, the previously predicted ups and downs of a couple of years are nothing like the decadal divergences we are actually witnessing.
Unpredictable weather: why the climate is not a model citizen 8:29pm on 11 Jun 2009 xyz999,
the first link refers to a publication this year. Of course they will now say that models predict periods of cooling since they have to deal with that reality. My point is that I cannot find any such statements made before 2003.
The second link is actually a prediction, that half of the future years will be warmer than the warmest so far. That is itself is a cop out imo because they have a 50% chance of being right. The Hadley centre I believe have predicted a decade of cooling due to the PDO entering a negative phase, so if I were a betting man, I would say that the Met Office will miss even this prediction.
Climate models predict a continue storage of heat in the global system. Natural variations cannot alter this, they can only hide it. In other words a cooling of surface temperatures may occur due to a natual variation that sequesters heat energy. This has to be so because the radiative forcing mandates that more energy is currently entering the system than is leaving. Hansen himself has written:
"The decadal mean planetary energy imbalance, 0.75 W/m2, includes heat storage in the deeper ocean and energy used to melt ice and warm the air and land. 0.85 W/m2 is the imbalance at the end of the decade.
So we would expect to find this heat turn up in the deep oceans. Hansen wrote this in 2003 I believe. According to Pielke, heat should be accumulated at the following rate of joules:
2003 ~0.98 * 10** 22 Joules
2004 ~1.96 * 10** 22 Joules
2005 ~2.94 * 10** 22 Joules
2006 ~3.92 * 10** 22 Joules
2007 ~4.90 * 10** 22 Joules
2008 ~5.88 * 10** 22 Joules
But his observed estimation of accumulation of joules over the period 2003 to 2008 is zero. In other words the predicted sequestration of heat as mandated by the models has not materialised. The models are wrong.
Unpredictable weather: why the climate is not a model citizen 5:40pm on 11 Jun 2009 xyz999, Richard is not wrong. Your reasoning appears flawed. You say that the future climate does not care about today's exact conditions, which is true. However, you cannot conclude from this that the climate in 50 years time is predictable. Your logic seems to be: weather is unpredictable, but climate is not weather so therefore it is predictable.

The evidence you cite for their predictive skill comes solely from the historical runs from 1850. However, these runs, when we look a bit more closely, are no more than curve fitting exercises. A GCM has a large number of tunable parameters, and if you play around with the tuning long enough you can get a pretty good match to some dataset. This is a classic trap for backtesters of trading systems. They start with one sample of data and tune and tune the parameters until they acheive an extreemly optimistic outcome expectancy. If they don't then apply the run to a set of other samples they are in trouble as soon as they start trading with real data. The problem with the GCM's is the same problem as the backtester who uses only one sample. The backtester can correct by adding samples, but unfortunately for the modelers, there is only 1 sample available. The models are failing as soon as they try and project the future. None predicted the current decade of static then falling temperatures. And this is going to happen again and again because they have no predictive skill.

Roger Pielke sr has shown that the GCM predictions of stored heat in oceans have failed to materialize.
Climate change 101: why is carbon dioxide always the bad guy? 4:01pm on 11 Jun 2009 Re: #6
SheffTim, all these links seem to be variations of the same theme - changes in solar irradiance are too small to account for observed forcings. There is nothing here (unless I missed it) that examined the GCR theory which I'm sure you're familiar with. What makes this interesting is that it does not depend on solar irradience so those previous papers findings would not be relevant here. All the GCR theory requires is that the higher incidence of GCR's can act as cloud condensation nucleii. An attempt was made to refute this using Fuerbusch events, but they missed the point entirely. I believe some physicists at CERN are planning to carry out some experiments as soon as the large Hadron collider becomes available (after they've found the Higg's Bosun?). The results should be interesting.
Unpredictable weather: why the climate is not a model citizen 2:52pm on 11 Jun 2009 Sheffim,
Nobody (I think) is arguing that carbon dioxide does not lead to a warming. The question is to do with the temperature sensitivity. Your experiment would provide the sensitivity to say a CO2 doubling without feedback. Even this figure is not known exactly. For example, Lindzen gives 1 degree C for a doubling, and I believe the high end is around 1.5 degrees. No, the contention is over the way the models impute positive feedbacks.
The first feedback we can consider is low level cloud cover. All 23 models used by IPCC utilise a positive feedback - increased warming from CO2 leads to reduced cloud cover, which allows increased insolation which leads to more warming which leads to a further reduction of cloud cover which leads to . . . There is no proof that the world works in this way. The assumption (and that is what it is) comes from an observation that cloud cover is less when the climate is warmer. However, correlation does not imply cause and effect. It is equally plausible that the cloud cover decrease has another driver and which then causes the observed warming. If this is the case, then the models would have got cause and effect the wrong way round.
The other main feedback is increased water vapour which leads to more warming which leads to more water vapour etc. This sounds intuitive, and I suppose that's why it was included in the models. However, there is not any empirical evidence that this is what actually happens. Why do I say that? The Aquasat system, which is designed to detect just this increase in water vapour has so far not detected any, so this assumption is suspect. Further more, GHG warming predicts a decrease in outgoing long wave radiation emitted into space, since the greenhouse gases are effectively trapping heat. This also has not been observed since 2003.
If the models are programmed with the wrong assumptions, then their predictions will be seriously wrong. Whether climate is like weather or not (it isn't) doesn't matter a jot if the physics is wrong.
The prime minister is safe - for now 2:12pm on 11 Jun 2009 RE: 488
Denzil69, I understand your desire to help people by giving them the money directly, but this just would not have worked. The problem is that for a 5 year period until 2007, the economy grew at a very rapid rate due to a huge credit bubble. Basically consumers were getting themselves into debt above their eyeballs. The amount of private debt was enormous. By 2005 or 2006 I think it passed the £1 trillion for the first time ever. Then it went parabolic and hit something like £1.3 trillion. Now, all this spending sent price signals to industry to invest in production, and in property developers to open new malls, and retailers to expand their outlets. They were false signals because the increase in debt year after year is unsustainable. When the rug was finally pulled we were left with an enormous amount of overcapacity to produce, and this must be unwound to a level that is sustainable. It will take a year or two to do this. Giving people money would simply have postponed the inevitable contraction, because once the money is spent, we would be right back to where we were. This is why Darling's VAT cut was the wrong thing to do, because it does not address the problem. Brown was correct imo, to save the banks. If they had collapsed it would have taken everyones life savings with them, wiping out the accumulated liquidity of this nation. Don't imagine that deposit insurance would have worked - the funds wer enormous, trillions of pounds.
Unpredictable weather: why the climate is not a model citizen 3:48pm on 10 Jun 2009 agwbsdotcom:
Wind power - it's too cheap to meter init? Wind is free after all (lol).
Unpredictable weather: why the climate is not a model citizen 2:33pm on 10 Jun 2009 RE: 13
Because a computer can model nuclear explosions does not mean that by extrapolation they can therefore model everything and anything. Blog #5 hit the nail on the head when he wrote "the models themselves could actually work, if we knew everything we need to know to programme them properly - unfortunately we don't."
At risk of presenting myself as another one of those "clueless that simply parrot what they've read", I feel compelled to add that the biggest problem is the lack of understanding of how marginal warming effects clouds. It is ASSUMED by the models that warming leads to less clouds that leads to more warming and so on in an ever increasing cycle - the so called positive feedback. This assumption is in every one of the 23 models that the IPCC use in the storylines. This is despite the fact that the IPCC acknowledge that cloud behaviour is not understood. Does this make the models useful? If they model on faulty assumptions then no. For example, the only reason that the decreasing cloud model is assumed is because observations have shown that during the modern warming, cloud cover has somewhat diminished and the inference from this is that warming is the cause of the diminished cloud. However, this in logically fallacious since it is inferring cause from a correlation. It is equally plausible that something caused diminishing cloud cover and this has resulted in the warming. If this is in fact true, as it may well be, then the output from all 23 models will be erroneous. The storylines that result in predictions of 2.5to 6 degrees C of warming, may turn out to be less than 2 degrees. Therefore, the cloud sensitivity issue is of paramount importance. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

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