Greenland glacier hits record speed

Thundersmurf
reply to post by Rezlooper

 

Unbelievable weather we've been through? Mildest winter I've ever experienced in my 30 years on this planet. I went out the other day in just a jumper, and was almost too warm.

You guys claim weather is normal in Britian. Here's some more headlines to refute that.



Thames bursts banks as Cameron calls floods 'Biblical'

Exceptional floods as parts of southwest have been underwater since January

14 severe flood warnings remain in effect and a 'danger to life'

High waves continue to batter the coastline


I posted other stories earlier in this thread that state otherwise about the winters being normal. Last year it was continuous record snows and now this year its the wind and rains. Far from ordinary.

reply to post by talklikeapirat

Yes. I did misquote. I should not have said "proven wrong". And, indeed, one of the flaws of CIMP5 models is their inability to predict short term internal variability.

It's not an easy task to reconcile increasing discrepancies and uncertainties with the increased confidence in past and future projections. But they somehow managed it.

I'm not sure where you get "increasing discrepancies and uncertainties" from but yes, it says that some aspects of some models should be adjusted so that they better fit observations. That's the way computer models are refined. All computer models. As more real world data is obtained, the models are adjusted so that they can better predict outcomes. They "managed" it because the assessment is based on a variety of factors, because climate is a very complex system. They "managed" it because when all available information is considered, there is a warming trend and there is not evidence that there are factors other than increasing CO2 levels sufficient to account for it.

The models are improving.

It should be noted that there are no instances in the figure for which CMIP5 models perform worse than CMIP3 models (something that would have been indicated by the red colour). A description that explains the expert judgment for each of the results presented in Figure 9.44 can be found in the body of this chapter, with a link to the specific sections given in the figure caption.

So, yes, climate models are getting better, and we can demonstrate this with quantitative performance metrics based on historical observations. Although future climate projections cannot be directly evaluated, climate models are based, to a large extent, on verifiable physical principles and are able to reproduce many important aspects of past response to external forcing. In this way, they provide a scientifically sound preview of the climate response to different scenarios of anthropogenic forcing.

www.climatechange2013.org...

reply to post by Rezlooper

Why on Earth would you post that picture? You don't think it's real do you?
Posting that sort of crap really doesn't help your (our) credibility.

I'm not sure it the picture above is legit but this flooding is.

www.bbc.co.uk...

The possibility of 2014 being the hottest year on record due to the likelihood of El Niño raising its head

www.newscientist.com...

The last El Niño event we had gave us one of the hottest summers recorded with record temperatures, and the 'Black Saturday' bush fires, as well as an extended drought. This year again we are headed for another 'hottest summer' on record, and we are not currently experiencing El Niño. Funny that most of the hottest summers on record have occurred in the last 15 years, and this was predicted by some of those 'flawed' models.

reply to post by cuckooold

A strong El Niño would result in higher temperatures but I think the article got this wrong:

An El Niño occurs when warm water buried below the surface of the Pacific rises up and spreads along the equator towards America.

As I understand it, the El Niño phase consists of warm surface water moving east across the Pacific.

reply to post by Phage


Yes, you are correct.

Interestingly this regarding a brief hiatus in global warming and the reason for;

www.cbc.ca...

reply to post by Phage

I'm not sure where you get "increasing discrepancies and uncertainties" from but yes, it says that some aspects of some models should be adjusted so that they better fit observations.

This downward scaling is, however, not sufficient to explain the model-mean overestimate of GMST trend over the hiatus period.

The discrepancy between modelled and observed global mean surface temperature trends increases, as does the uncertainty as to what causes the mismatch between models and observations. There is no doubt about the first part, i'm open to discuss the second part of that statement.

Your request for a specification was more than valid. It was not directed at me, but i would appreciate it if we could keep that way and would ask you for the same in return. I do think it is essential to be as specific as possible exactly because the climate system is so complex.

Accepting certain premises as fact would be another basic requirement for a discussion.

They "managed" it because when all available information is considered, there is a warming trend and there is not evidence that there are factors other than increasing CO2 levels sufficient to account for it.

Observed global mean surface temperature show flat trends since 2001 in all (3) data sets the IPCC uses for model-data comparsions. GMST-trends are not statistically significantly different form zero at 95% confindence level in all data sets since at least 1998. Climate models, as used by the IPCC (either the multi model mean of the CMIP5 ensemble or the model spread of both, fully coupled Ocean-Atmosphere models and ESM's) show stastically significant warming of modeled GMST over the same period.

Of course there is evidence that a large (quantified) portion of the observed surface warming over the last 50 years is not caused by increasing CO2 emission. But we should discuss this separately.

reply to post by talklikeapirat

Observed global mean surface temperature show flat trends since 2001 in all (3) data sets the IPCC uses for model-data comparsions.

Yes I know, that's why I said this:

And, indeed, one of the flaws of CIMP5 models is their inability to predict short term internal variability.

Hiatus periods of 10 to 15 years can arise as a manifestation of internal decadal climate variability, which sometimes enhances and sometimes counteracts the long-term externally forced trend. Internal variability thus diminishes the relevance of trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years for long-term climate change (Box 2.2, Section 2.4.3). Furthermore, the timing of internal decadal climate variability is not expected to be matched by the CMIP5 historical simulations, owing to the predictability horizon of at most 10 to 20 years (Section 11.2.2; CMIP5 historical simulations are typically started around nominally 1850 from a control run). However, climate models exhibit individual decades of GMST trend hiatus even during a prolonged phase of energy uptake of the climate system (e.g., Figure 9.8; Easterling and Wehner, 2009; Knight et al., 2009), in which case the energy budget would be balanced by increasing subsurface–ocean heat uptake (Meehl et al., 2011, 2013a; Guemas et al., 2013).

The models can show the occurance of short term flattening of the trend, but they have hard time predicting them.
If the hiatus continues...we'll see.

reply to post by Phage

And, indeed, one of the flaws of CIMP5 models is their inability to predict short term internal variability

Here, short term internal variability is clearly defined; periods of up to 15 years of enhanced or suppressed surface warming.
It's a very loose definition within this context, but clear enough in regard to the expected time frames.

Compared to the current emission scenario, there was not a single other period in last 60 years with a flat surface temperature trend longer than a decade. According to the theory, once a detectable anthropogenic climate signal emerges from the 'backround noise', periods of more than 15 years without surface warming are excluded by model simualtions.

The inconsistency between observed and simulated global warming is even more striking for temperature trends computed over the past fifteen years (1998–2012). For this period, the observed trend of 0.05 ± 0.08 °C per decade is more than four times smaller than the average simulated trend of 0.21 ± 0.03 °C per decade. It is worth noting that the observed trend over this period — not significantly different from zero — suggests a temporary ‘hiatus’ in global warming.

The divergence between observed and CMIP5-simulated global warming begins in the early 1990s, as can be seen when comparing observed and simulated running trends from 1970–2012.

The evidence, therefore, indicates that the current generation of climate models (when run as a group, with the CMIP5 prescribed forcings) do not reproduce the observed global warming over the past 20 years, or the slowdown in global warming over the past fifteen years.

www.see.ed.ac.uk...

The models can show the occurance of short term flattening of the trend, but they have hard time predicting them.

If 'short term' in this context means periods of 15 years or longer, no they do not. Models and observations show exactly the opposite, specifically in simulations 'forced' with the closest possible approximation to reality.

Rezlooper

LMAO. Breaking News, Queen evacuated by QE2. (The ship, not quantive easing), ha ha. What a joke, thanks for making me laugh. Your all aike.

Phage
reply to post by Rezlooper

 

Why on Earth would you post that picture? You don't think it's real do you?
Posting that sort of crap really doesn't help your (our) credibility.

edit on 2/11/2014 by Phage because: (no reason given)

Just trying to highlight the story and the flooding, but didn't pay attention to photo for story cuz I was in a rush out the door right after making that post. Sorry about that, my bad. I see now the story has changed the pic as well.