“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Dwight Eisenhower, from his final address as President, in 1961
Note: The surface global average temperature before 1920 is mainly from the U.S. and Europe, and shipping channels in the Northern Hemisphere -- not even close to being global coverage -- with far too few Southern Hemisphere measurements outside of Australia.
The main problem with every statement concerning temperatures is there's no accurate long-term, surface temperature record to be found. Even today. There are reasonable weather satellites, with near global coverage, but only since1979. Which means government bureaucrat "scientists" can state anything they want as the surface global average temperature before 1920, which they do, and completely ignore satellite data after 1979, which they also do. That's one reason this is junk science.
And the junk science is why this blog exists. I'm not here to deny climate change -- it always changes -- or to deny there has been warming for the past 325 years -- although it had been good news, in my opinion, because the 1690s were unusually cold. I am here to deny the coming global warming crisis predictions we have been hearing for the past 50 years. No humans have the ability to predict the future climate, and that's why their computer game predictions have been so wrong, for so long, to paraphrase my favorite country singer, Patsy Cline.
One climate computer game makes good "hindcasting" climate simulations, AND it's forecasting simulations have been more accurate than any other climate computer game. There are dozens of climate computer games, so you might think one of them is bound to APPEAR accurate just by chance. I would agree with that, but it is a Russian, Russian, Russian climate model, and I don't want to criticize it, and wind up poisoned by those pesky Russians.
Before you accuse me of colluding with Vladimir Putin, a very popular charge among Democrats in recent years, I COULD criticize the Russian climate model by saying it merely predicts "more of the same", based on actual global warming since 1975 -- the PAST 45 years .
Using the more of the same assumption for the NEXT 45 years, you could estimate the change in the global average temperature in five minutes, on the back of an envelope, with a $5 calculator. But I won't say that, because some of my grandparents were Russians, who got out of there when the Communists showed up, and maybe I still have some relatives living there?
SUMMARY:
The intent of a climate model is to dynamically represent the energy balance of Earth's climate system. A real climate model must be based on a very good physics model of exactly what causes climate change. Such a climate physics model does NOT exist yet, and in fact, the current hypothetical climate physics model has gotten worse in the past 50 years. All natural causes of climate change, both known and unknown, which caused all climate change for the past 4.5 billion years, have been dismissed as unimportant 'noise'.
"it is implausible that a system as complex as the climate system with numerous degrees of freedom should be meaningfully summarized by a single variable (global mean temperature anomaly) and determined by a single factor (CO2 level in the atmosphere)." Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., from "An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions" ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7520-70281
The United Nation's IPCC climate organization was founded in 1988 to IGNORE natural causes of climate change, and only focus on man made causes of climate change. Causes that remain assumed, not proven, although the assumption of some man made caused climate change is a reasonable assumption.
The IPCC started with an atmospheric CO2 concentration - global average temperature hypothesis from the 1970s -- doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration would cause +3.0 degrees C. of global warming, with a huge +/- 50 percent error range of +/- 1.5 degrees C.
... which most people state as +1.5 to +4.5 degrees C., per CO2 doubling, rather than +3.0 degrees C. +/-1.5 degrees C., per CO2 doubling.
That wild guess from the 1970s was adopted by the IPCC in 1988, and they still uses it, believe it or not. There is no evidence actual global warming has even reached the bottom of that range, even if you assume (a worst case) that ALL global warming is caused ONLY by increased man made CO2 in the atmosphere. Even the IPCC does not claim that -- they claim most of the actual global warming since 1950 (over 50 percent) can be attributed to man made greenhouse gasses.
There is NO real science to justify the 'over 50%' claim, although the actual percentage is between 0 percent and 100 percent, so the IPCC seems to have "compromised". But it is NOT a "compromise", in my opinion, when the correct answer is "We don't know". Most climate alarmists seem to think man made greenhouse gasses caused 100% of the global warming since 1975.
There is preliminary information the IPCC will be increasing the "4.5 degrees C." of their +1.5 to +4.5 C. range in their upcoming report, next year. Increasing the high end of the global warming from CO2 range estimate when, so far, the low end of the range estimate has been too high? That's politics, not real science. With such a weak, unproven foundation, a real climate model is impossible to construct.
What we call "climate models' are just very expensive computer games that state the personal opinions of the owners. And those owners consistently believe fossil fuels and CO2 are evil. But there is one computer game that has provided decent climate forecasts (mild, harmless, global warming), and doing that earns it the name "Real Climate Model" -- the only apparent climate model in the world. And it's from Russia, Russia, Russia !
An attempt to simulate Earth's climate system is a monumental task, and this latest version of the Russian climate model is another step in an iterative development. INMCM4 deserved to be called a Real Climate Model because it made reasonably accurate global average temperature predictions. No other computer game did that, so no others deserve the title: Real Climate Model.
INMCM4 was the only one of 42 CMIP5 "models" that came close to hind-casting PAST temperature fluctuations, and it projected a FUTURE mild +1.4C warming by the end of this century.
There have been revisions since then -- to INMCM5 -- by the modelers at the Institute of Numerical Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. INMCM6 is reported to be predicting even less future global warming then the prior two versions, 4 and 5, but that could change by next year's IPCC report.
DETAILS:
Promising results from simulations of observed climate changes in 1850-2014, using climate model INM-CM5, were published May 8, 2018 by Evgeny Volodin and Andrey Gritsun in Earth Systems Dynamics:
"Climate changes from 1850-2014 are modeled and studied on the basis of seven historical runs with the climate model INM-CM5 under the scenario proposed for Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project, Phase 6 (CMIP6). In all runs global mean surface temperature rises by 0.8 K at the end of the experiment (2014) in agreement with the observations.
Periods of fast warming in 1920-1940 and 1980-2000 as well as its slowdown in 1950-1975 and 2000-2014 are correctly reproduced by the ensemble mean. The notable change was the correct reproduction of the slowdown of global warming in 2000-2014 that we attribute to more accurate description of the Solar constant in CMIP6 protocol.
The model is able to reproduce correct behavior of global mean temperature in 1980-2014 despite incorrect phases of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation indices in the majority of experiments. The Arctic sea ice loss in recent decades is reasonably close to the observations just in one model run; the model underestimates Arctic sea ice loss by the factor 2.5. "
Experiments with the previous model version (INMCM4) for CMIP5 showed unrealistic gradual warming in 1950-2014. But four of seven INMCM5 model runs simulated acceleration of warming in 1920-1940, in a correct way, but the other three model runs produced warming earlier or later than in reality. This indicates that for the warming of 1920-1940, natural variability plays significant role.
Simulation of the present-day climate with the climate model INMCM5 by E.M. Volodin et al., from 2017:
"In this paper we present the fifth generation of the INMCM climate model that is being developed at the Institute of Numerical Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INMCM5). The most important changes with respect to the previous version (INMCM4) were made in the atmospheric component of the model.
Its vertical resolution was increased to resolve the upper stratosphere and the lower mesosphere. A more sophisticated parameterization of condensation and cloudiness formation was introduced as well. An aerosol module was incorporated into the model. The upgraded oceanic component has a modified dynamical core optimized for better implementation on parallel computers and has two times higher resolution in both horizontal directions."
The family of INMCM climate models consists of the atmosphere general circulation model, and the ocean general circulation model. Starting with the CMIP5 model INMCM4, the next version of the Institute of Numerical Mathematics climate model was developed (INMCM5).
The most important changes include new parameterizations of large scale condensation (cloud fraction and cloud water are now the prognostic variables), and increased vertical resolution in the atmosphere (73 vertical levels instead of 21, with the top model level raised from 30 to 60 km). In the oceanic block, horizontal resolution was increased by a factor of 2 in both directions.
Three features of INMCM4 differentiated it from other models at the time:
1)
INMCM4 has the lowest CO2 forcing (global warming) response at 4.1K for 4xCO2. That is 37% lower than the "model" average, including INMCM4.
2)
INMCM4 has by far the highest climate system inertia: Deep ocean heat capacity in INMCM4 is 317 W yr m^-2 K^-1, --- 200% of the average "model" (which excluded INMCM4, because it was such an outlier).
3)
INMCM4 exactly matches observed atmospheric water vapor (H2O) content in the lower troposphere (215 hPa), and is biased low above that. Most other "models" are biased high.
So the ONLY climate model that most closely reproduces the global average temperature history has high inertia from ocean heat capacities, low forcing from CO2 and less water for feedback. Why aren’t the other computer games built like this model ?
Evgeny Volodin leads the INM modeling program. In this recent paper he draws attention to changes in the solar constant parameter for all CMIP6 models, for next year's IPCC report, plus an improved aerosol block in INMCM5:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrey_Gritsun2/publication/328181512_Nature_of_the_Decrease_in_Global_Warming_at_the_Beginning_of_the_21st_Century/links/5bd360eca6fdcc3a8da91bff/Nature-of-the-Decrease-in-Global-Warming-at-the-Beginning-of-the-21st-Century.pdf?origin=publication_detail