Climate Models Forecast A Wicked Hot Winter For The Upper Midwest

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/

Looking pretty sharp so far! Only off by fifteen degrees or so, but they can forecast one hundred  years from now to within one tenth of a degree.

http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/MonthTDeptUS.png

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

62 Responses to Climate Models Forecast A Wicked Hot Winter For The Upper Midwest

  1. Paul Pierett says:

    Models are based on IPCC and Algorian politics.

    Brace for the worst and 30 years of it.

  2. Mike Davis says:

    ON Par with UK MET!

  3. Sense Seeker says:

    Funny blog. I get the game now. It goes like this:

    1. There is no such thing as global warming, and it certainly has nothing to do with CO2.

    2. Introduce news items that have to do with climate change.
    This gives two possibilities:
    a. The article supports the reality of global warming.
    b. The article does not support the reality of global warming.

    If a: This can’t be right. It’s a conspiracy by Hansen and Al Gore. It is ridiculous. What HAVE they come up with now.

    If b: See?! Toldya!

    3. Go to 2.

    Very amusing!

  4. Is this a government prediction? noaa.gov, oh, ya, it is.

  5. ‘Sense Seeker’ trolling away still?

    You wanted to know about whether or not the Mediaeval Warm Period existed or not, and whether ‘The Hockey Stick’ was correct, and that you think that present temperatures are hotter than 1,000 years ago (or words to that effect). And you wanted everything ‘served up on a platter’ (or words to that effect).

    OK – once again – download this: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QRCAX31M and then go to slides 48 to 52 for comprehensive information on this subject. Here is what you’ve asked for – served up on a platter!

    And since you are so keen on ‘Peer Review’ – that wonderful idea so beloved of the supporters of anthropogenic global warming/climate change/climate redistribution (or whatever is today’s politically correct name!) – go to slides 45 to 47 for lots of information on that subject.

    Your beloved ‘Hockey Stick’ gets a guernsey on slides 57 to 59. Be sure to check out the Finnish documentary so that you can be really impressed by good science!

    Finally, if you are so keen to argue the point, why don’t you go to slide 10 where there is a genuine challenge you can take up for real money. And it is genuine!

    Perhaps after that you might like to check everything else out from this vast information resource, and when you have done so and have some real rebuttals instead of arguing semantics, perhaps we’ll see you back sometime in 2011!

    By then perhaps you might have extended your education somewhat beyond the nit-picking that seems to exemplify your comments that I have seen …..

  6. Sense Seeker says:

    Amino, all the posts on this blog make an important point.

  7. I must be reading the graph wrong.

  8. Going to the link I see they forecast warmth in north central USA all the way until April 2011. I would consider firing the people responsible for these awful forecasts. In the real world if someone’s job depended on it they would be fired for this. But that’s the problem with the NOAA, it’s a government agency.

    • With forecasting this bad, if the NOAA was to tell me what will happen 100 years from now I would have no reason to believe them. Really I would only have evidence that shows me I should believe the opposite of what they tell me.

      • Tony Duncan says:

        So if they told you it was going to be cold and cloudy tomorrow and it was a warm sunny day, you would not believe them when they told you it was going to go average in the 70’s in july, and not rain as often as April?

      • Paul H says:

        Well would you?

        ( Silly question really- you believe all the scientists- well except for ones like this :-

        S. African UN Scientist Declares UN IPCC a ‘worthless carcass’ as Pachauri is in ‘disgrace’ and ‘fraudulent science continues to be exposed’
        By Professor Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Emeritus of the Dept. of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the U. of Pretoria in South Africa, and a former member of the UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters. ‘I was subjected to vilification tactics at the time. I persisted. Now, at long last, my persistence has been rewarded…There is no believable evidence to support [the IPCC] claims. I rest my case!)

  9. Sense Seeker

    Going through the comment thread I see not one of your comments is on the topic of the post.

    • Sense Seeker says:

      I’ll try to better my life, Amino.

      Here you go: I think it’s indeed risky business to forecast over the next few months, given the randomness in weather. However, that doesn’t mean climate models, which talk about much longer time spans, are equally wrong. Those don’t actually model the weather for each day until 2100, but take into account long term trends. Over the longer term, the stochastic error middles out, so results are more reliable.

      Are you happy now?

      • peterhodges says:

        stochastic error middles out compounds

        fixed it for ya!

      • However, that doesn’t mean climate models, which talk about much longer time spans, are equally wrong.

        You’re right. They’re not equally wrong. They’re worse.

      • Sense Seeker says:
        December 16, 2010 at 6:54 am

        I think it’s indeed risky business to forecast over the next few months…..until 2100

        The next few months will be wrong but 100 years from now will be right. What foolishness.

      • peterhodges says:

        goes to bed. geez, i was still awaiting an answer for this one…

        the specific heat of h20 is 4 times that of air. the mass of the ocean is 5 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE greater than that of the atmosphere.

        it is physically impossible for the atmosphere to heat the ocean. that is, our actual atmosphere, and our actual ocean.

      • Sense Seeker says:

        Peter, if you read this tomorrow morning, I thought I had answered that issue. It is very simple. If the atmosphere heats up it can, over time, give off enough heat to the ocean to warm it up. It’s slow, but why do you think it is impossible?

      • peterhodges says:

        in theory what you say is possible.

        however, the much larger mass of the ocean and the much higher specific heat of water make it practically impossible in this case

        the mass of the ocean is something like Nx10^23kg.
        the mass of the atmosphere is something like Nx10^18kg.
        and the specific heat of the ocean is more than 4 times that of the atmosphere. no amount of heat the atmosphere can hold will heat the ocean to any measurable degree. it is just physically impossible. that is why i said, prima facie. i did not believe it, even when i accepted the general AGW narrative.

      • Sense Seeker says:

        Well, I’m no expert on this, but would it help if we assume we don’t have to warm the whole ocean, but just the surface layer? Of course, currents would disperse the heat, but much of the deepsea might never notice.

      • peterhodges says:

        you still have the same problem. a huge difference in mass and specific heat.

        it is the ocean that heats or cools that atmosphere for this reason. we live on a water planet.

        think about the bathtub example- raise the air temperature .7 degrees and see how much the bathwater goes up! but on a global scale you are looking at vastly greater quantities of water than air.

  10. peterhodges says:

    and here is my survey answer…

    it’s getting colder!!

    buaaahahahahah……

    • Sense Seeker says:

      I retrieved the original publication by Alley – not the graph that says that it is based on the data from Alley, but of which the provenance is some dubious website.

      BTW The paper does appear to show that in central Greenland, is was warmer 1000 years ago than it is now. (But that’s not to say that the same was true for the world.)

      In the paper, the author draws a different conclusion from yours: “A simple picture emerging from these and other data is that the “normal climate” experienced by agricultural and industrial humans has been more stable in many or most regions than is typical of the climate system. Large, rapid, widespread changes were common in the pre-agricultural past, especially in regions near the North Atlantic, but apparently also in monsoonal regions affected by the North Atlantic, and likely elsewhere or even globally. Critically, the typically smaller (although still quite signicant!) climate changes experienced by agricultural and industrial humans have had dramatic impacts on many of them. Recurrence of a larger Younger Dryas type event is not impossible, and this possibility merits careful study.”

      Not very reassuring, given how we tinker with the climate with our CO2 emissions, if you ask me.

      • peterhodges says:

        i’ll agree that a location on an icecap anywhere on greenland is going to swing more dramatically than places where agriculture is possible. but to me that means only that the MWP was still globally warmer, just not as much as any of the icecores would indicate.

        there are literally 1000’s of published papers documenting the MWP globally: foraminifera from ocean core series, lacustrian deposits, speleothems.

        and the hockey stick has been proven a fraud. any analysis that matches it is also a fraud.

      • Sense Seeker says:

        You’re proably right about the MWP; I don’t doubt that it occurred.

        But I think you are wrong about the hockey stick. On WUWT they would have you believe it has been proven wrong, but in the science it is pretty much an established fact. As I mentioned earlier, it has been confirmed in many later analyses, but different research groups, with different data.

      • peterhodges says:

        well i will buy your hockey stick if it starts after the MWP….and i still believe the 30’s were warmer than the 90’s, and that it is now cooling again. a few more years and the long term trend on that hockey stick will flatten out, and turn down. we are after all, in an ice age!

      • Sense Seeker says:

        I hope you are right about temp leveling off, but I have little faith in your prediction.

        (PS: if anybody needs help with html tags, this is a helpful page.)

  11. Espen says:

    Sense Seeker:

    You’re proably right about the MWP; I don’t doubt that it occurred.

    But I think you are wrong about the hockey stick.

    I don’t think you get it: The whole point of torturing and molesting statistical methods to manufacture the hockey stick was to kill the MWP, despite all the evidence (even written history) that it occurred.

    Of course, the fact that the hockey stick is broken doesn’t mean that the current warm period is not man made (and just for the record: I think a fraction of the current warming is most likely due to CO2) – BUT it raises serious question about how likely the positive feedbacks of the climate models are (since the warming back then just faded away into and eventually turned into the deadly cold of the little ice age, instead of triggering water vapor feedbacks or the “methane monster”). In addition, the fact that temperature variations are much larger than the hockey stick showed, means that it’s entirely possible that almost all of the current warming is due to fluctuations occurring naturally (and possibly without any external “forcings” needed) within the climate system.

    About your “poll”: I believe the world average temperature is currently rising. Please reply with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or ‘don’t know’ if you must.

    It’s impossible to answer that without defining “currently”, so I’ll give answers for different values of “currently”:

    currently = a few months: Absolutely NO, it’s dropping like a rock! (UAH anomalies dropped like a rock from around +0.5 in the beginning of November to around zero in mid November, and have stayed around zero since then)
    currently = around 10 years: No, it’s staying about the same
    currently = around 30 years: Yes, it has risen sharply
    currently = around 70 years: Hard to tell, but most probably a slight rise
    currently = around 300 years: Yes, it has risen sharply (to the good of all mankind!)
    currently = around 1000 years: No, the current warming is just a blip up in a downward trend which may end with a glaciation
    currently = around 8000 years: Absolutely not!
    currently = the last 150,000-100,000 years: Sure, we’re lucky to be in a warm period!

    • Sense Seeker says:

      “The whole point of torturing and molesting statistical methods to manufacture the hockey stick was to kill the MWP”

      Mmm, that seems unlikely to me. Why would Mann want to kill the MWP? I could imagine it would mess up the pattern if he had decided that it would have to be a hockey stick, but otherwise I don’t see why he’d want to murder the MWP.

      “it raises serious question about how likely the positive feedbacks of the climate models are (since the warming back then just faded away into and eventually turned into the deadly cold of the little ice age, instead of triggering water vapor feedbacks or the “methane monster”).”

      I am not too worried about that threat to the climate models. After all, the MWP is thought to be due to solar and volcanic activity. When these stop, things cool down again. In contrast, now the warming is largely because of increases in atmospheric CO2 levels. And that CO2 is expected be around for a long time.

      I know not everybody here appreciates the site, but Skeptical Science offers the scientific view on the MWP.

      • Espen says:

        Sense Seeker, you have to decide for yourself why Mann wanted to get rid of the MWP, but it’s obvious they wanted to do that for a long time, see e.g. this statement.

        Your explaining away of the MWP as solar activity (and volcanic? You mean lack of volcanic?) is quite amusing, given that these factors are considered to not explain the current warming, despite a very active sun during the warming years.

        Anyway, it doesn’t worry me if it’s true that it’s currently +0.5C warmer than 70 years ago, and all that is due to man’s CO2 emissions, because that is still consistent with a very low sensitivity. So I say if that CO2 stays around for a few thousand years, we may be more lucky than we deserve – we may by pure luck be able to keep the world a more hospitable and plant-friendly place than it would have been without that CO2.

      • D Bonson says:

        Skeptical science is hardly scientific or skeptical. Its best not to link religious blogs as evidence for your beliefs.

        I find this link to be a handy one regarding the MWP and Mann’s statistical trickery.

        http://www.science-skeptical.de/blog/the-medieval-warm-period-%E2%80%93-a-global-phenomenon-unprecedented-warming-or-unprecedented-data-manipulation/001342/

        Also, how long do you believe CO2 will be in our atmosphere?

        http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7895f54970b-pi

      • DEEBEE says:

        I am sure you have the powers to divine Mann’s intentions, but successive corrections were always to “flatten” the past, when the reality might have been an inverted check mark. But then the argument would have been that it used to be as warm in the past but it is rising faster now. Not as dramatic as it is the hottest it has ever been.

  12. Sundance says:

    Steve brings up an interesting observation. We’ve seen in the UK how incompetent the MET has been with its new $33 million super computer. There is a need for for involving independent people to oversee temperature data and to measure the effectiveness and over time the validity of the models. Models in my business are used to forecast outcomes and those outcomes are tracked monthly and are public information under the law. Where are measured results of NOAA’s accuracy for long term forecasts? Is NOAA even accurate 50% of the time? Where are the consequences of poor performance that I face daily in my occupation? We need radical change in holding these agencies accountable. S. 4015, the Public Access to Historical Records Act is a good start but much more needs to be done to create separation of powers and independent oversight in these agencies. There should be complete independence between the people working on the temperature record and the people doing the models and forecasts.

    ‘The bill would also force NASA to make all of its raw historical temperature data available online to the public and would require the agency to compile an official U.S. historical temperature record with oversight from an independent council of appointed meteorologists and statisticians. The resulting temperature record would be routinely reviewed for accuracy by an independent auditor and would be required for use as a primary source by any scientists or groups accepting federal money for climate research.’

    Also needed is for more testimony under oath so that it is on the record. I am not interested in what a scientist “communicate” to a reporter to feed to the masses, and I’ve already seen the weak and dodgy responses given by scientists “communicating” for the benefit of the media. The addition of Chris Mooney to the AGU is a red flag for the politicization of science which is a huge step in the wrong direction for the USA and only serves to water down their credibility. It is funny how Mooney is often reminded by commenters at his Discovery blog about how his use of hurricane Katrina to elicit future doom was completely backfired. Why does the AGU want someone whose credibility is already shot?

  13. PhilJourdan says:

    Sense Seeker says:
    December 16, 2010 at 5:54 am
    Admittedly, you acknowledged the globe is warming. But I’d be curious for the results if a poll were held among the participants here.

    Well, first for ASSuming, you have made an ass of yourself. And second, you are wrong. Apparently you have forgotten how to think for yourself – if you ever knew how.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *