Over Parameterization
Posted by Jeff Id on May 14, 2011
Willis Eschenbach has an excellent post on climate models at WUWT. I would suggest people read it carefully. From reading through the CAM3 code, I’m not terribly surprised at the result, but a heck of a lot of alarmist climate scientists should be based on what they write.
Steve Short said
Not to belittle Will’s excellent work (as always) but this is of course rather similar to what Dr. Jeff Glassman did last year over at Rocket Scientists Journal (‘RSJ’) where he elegantly teased out the (amplified and lagged) solar signal in the official IPCC AR4 HadCRUT3 global temperature record of the last ~160 years.
Little known is that Jeff is the retired head of Hughes Aerospace Science Division and a world expert in signal deconvolution algorithms to whom, in a nice irony, every cell phone user owes an unconscious debt.
RSJ – the quietest sceptical blog in the world (and, again ironically, one of the very best).
Nothing anyone has said since (including most especially that solar dogma thug Lief Svalgaard) has invalidated Jeff’s conclusion.
Almost every month now we are now seeing mainstream literature papers which refine our understanding of the manifold ways in which solar forcing is amplified.
Brian H said
Trying hard to understand what this means: “a heck of a lot of alarmist climate scientists should be based on what they write.” Don’t make no sense to me nohow. Maybe if it was in German?
M. Simon said
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/
Carrick said
Lief is a “solar dogma thug???”
I’m sure he’d be pleased to know…just another street solar scientist out looking for trouble.
Steve Short said
Yeah sure, given the Svalgaard and Cliver (2010)so-called ‘consensus’ and the hundreds of super heavy blog posts by LS over recent years I’m very comfortable with applying the ‘solar dogma thug’ epithet, thus:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010JA016220.shtml
http://www.pages-igbp.org/download/docs/Steinhilber%20and%20Beer_2011-1%285-6%29.pdf
http://rocketscientistsjournal.com/2010/03/sgw.html
Jeff Id said
Brian, There is so much certainty from climate scientists in these over-hyped models, yet the answer is built into the assumptions. Willis reduced tens of thousands of lines of code to a few linear parameters having different weights and got the same answer.
If you don’t give the model the flexibility to represent unexpected situations, your result will be exactly what you anticipated. Fitting a global climate model to such a simplistic equation and getting the same result has a non-trivial meaning.
Brian H said
Re: Jeff Id (May 15 09:12),
You miss my point. The grammar of the sentence is incoherent, suggesting scientists should be based on something. Scientists are people, and are not “based”, unless you’re referring to geography or employment. Their conclusions may be based on something, however.
You’re missing a noun and a preposition. I suggest “conclusions of”, “assertions of”, or something like that.
Gary said
Another example of the 80:20 rule-of-thumb?
TimTheToolMan said
“RSJ – the quietest sceptical blog in the world (and, again ironically, one of the very best).”
Thanks for the tip. There a lot of very interesting analysis over there!