Max Planck Institute For Meteorology: “Prognoses Confirm Model Forecasts” Warming Postponed “Hundreds Of Years”

Now that global temperatures have not risen in 15 years, a number of scientists find themselves having great difficulty coming to terms with that new reality.

MPI-M Photo MPG

The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) claims that the latest prognoses confirm the model forecasts. Photo source: Max Planck Gesellschaft

The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) in Hamburg is no exception. For years the institute insisted that the man-made climate catastrophe was real and happening now. Today it finds itself scrambling for a backdoor. “Otto et al” is that back door.

The MPI-M recently issued a press release with interesting revelations about the now famous “Otto et al” paper, to which its two directors contributed.

When we read the MPI-M press release, we quickly discover that this Otto et al paper is actually just the latest in speculative crystal-ballwork – the results have little value other than to provide a desperately needed face-saving opportunity for accepting a lower CO2 climate sensitivity.

The problem that climate science is having today is that it finds itself clashing with the fundamental rule of science itself. Richard Feynman once said on how science works:

1. Guess
2. Compute consequences
3. Compare to actual observations

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make difference how smart you are, the person who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, then it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

Today we know that warming has stopped, and so that means the computed climate consequences are in disagreement with the observations, thus showing that the MPI-M’s earlier “guess” is wrong. Do they accept that today?

No. The MPI-M refuses to admit that “the guess” is wrong. What it does instead that it redefines the scientific approach used in the Otto et al study and in its press release. For the MPI-M the new rule of science is:

1. Guess
2. Compute consequences (with computers)
3. Compare to other newly computed consequences

And you keep computing new consequences until you get agreement! This is what the 2 scientists at the Max Plank Institute together with the team of scientists led by Otto have done, and nothing more.

The MPI starts its press release by telling readers not to be fooled by the warming pause (my emphasis):

Global warming continues to baffle climate scientists, but one thing is sure: Over the next decades the average mean temperature on Earth will increase, even if the increase in the years from 2001 – 2010 was much slower than the decade before. This is backed up by prognoses from an international team of scientists led by scientists at the University of Oxford, of which both directors Jochem Marotzke and Björn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology were a part. Using the current climate data, the scientists have newly calculated how much the air and Earth’s surface will have warmed up as soon as the CO2 concentration in the air doubles.”

And later in the press release (my emphasis):

Jochem Marotzke is part of a team of the world’s most renowned climate scientists who have taken the most recent development of the surface temperature into account in order to forecast how the Earth will heat up from the greenhouse effect, foremost from carbon dioxide (CO2). These prognoses confirm that the climate models correctly forecast global warming trend over multiple decades, that is until the middle or the end of the 21st century. There is no wise reason for calling off the alarm.”

This is pure quackery. At the MPI, prognoses confirm forecasts?

MPI-M postpones warming, will take hundreds of years

The MPI press release also says that we are going to have to wait a lot longer than we first thought for the real warming to hit:

Because the climate has a very high thermal inertia and the oceans warm up only very slowly, it’s going to take some time before the effects of the greenhouse gases completely take hold. A warming from the greenhouse effect will be amplified by numerous feedbacks, and weakened by a few processes. Only when this complicated interaction quiets down will the climate come to a stable condition. This long-term reaction by the climate is called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ESC) and is calculated by climate scientists. It is the final temperature increase that comes from a doubling of CO2  concentration, and will probably occur first after a few hundred years.”

Remember that this press release was written by two scientists, Marotzke and Stevens, who participated directly on the Otto et al study.

So we are going to have to wait decades, maybe even centuries before the real warming hits. That’s what Otto et al says, they tell us. There aren’t any observations to check if that forecast is reliable, but the MPI-M says they have a new forecast, it agrees with the models, and so the theory is correct.

The press release adds:

Using these values, the scientists calculate with 90% certainty that the near-surface atmosphere will warm 0.9°C – 2.0°C with at doubling of CO2 content; most probable is a temperature increase of 1.3°C.”

They used the 90% certainty claim in the past, and wound up totally wrong. Now they are claiming it once again, based on computer prognoses, and not on observations. This is the SOP of charlatans, and not scientists.

There’s more in the press release, especially with respect uncertainty. Basically they are saying that the “90% certainty” is fraught with lots of uncertainty. More tomorrow.

 

27 responses to “Max Planck Institute For Meteorology: “Prognoses Confirm Model Forecasts” Warming Postponed “Hundreds Of Years””

  1. DirkH

    Max Planck institutes make tons of money with renewable energy research, often commissioned by renewable energy firms, topped up with EU money. The franchise needs CO2AGW as its major cash cow.

  2. mwhite

    I told my computer model that ice makes water boil. I’ve tweaked and adjusted the model an infinite number of times, but in the end the water always boils.

    1. chris y

      “Ice makes water boil.”

      I have performed this experiment by heating a cup of water in a microwave oven. If you are careful, it is possible to superheat the water but not have it boil. If you then drop a small solid into the water, it will initiate bubble formation on the surfaces of the solid, and the water will boil. I have tested this using, among other things, a small piece of ice 🙂

      So, it is *plausible* that ice makes water boil.
      Just like Mann’s paleo temperature curves are *plausible*.
      Just like Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-9 is *plausible*.

  3. Ulrich Elkmann

    “prognoses confirm forecasts?” Of course. Citig Feynman shows that you still apply the Old Ways of Thinking, But there has been a Kuhnian paradigm shift, applied to the very methology of scientific inquiry. It’s now called post-normal science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-normal_science – “methodology of inquiry that is appropriate for cases where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”” (“stakes high” = lots of money to be made). Of course, the guardians of the outmoded paradigm will steadfastedly cry “charlatanery” – which only proves how wrong they are.

  4. Richard111

    “A computer model is just a set of arbitrary rules, chosen by programmers.”

    James Gleick (I think)

  5. Leonard Weinstein

    I think the comments missed emphasizing an important part of their forcast. At the end, they predict the most likely effect of doubling CO2 would be only an increase of 1.3 C. This would be on top of natural variation, so might not even be detectable. This is well below the 3 C or more above the present that previous groups proclamed. It is also well below the 2 C increase that was considered the threshold of a problem. It is clear by putting in a delay that all alive today would not be present for, and making the expected increase much smaller, that they are trying to extricate themselves from their stupid past positions.

    1. DirkH

      Otto himself points out that the range of uncertainty is now BIGGER, and that the entire old range of the IPCC estimate is contained.
      “This latest research, including the decade of stalled temperature rises, produces a range of 0.9-5.0C.

      “It is a bigger range of uncertainty,” said Dr Otto.

      “But it still includes the old range. We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.””
      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567023

      The Otto et al study is a protective hypothesis to shield the core theory of the degenerative research program that is CO2AGW.

  6. Per Strandberg

    To link climate change with changes in solar activity is now a thoughtcrime!

  7. Juergen Uhlemann

    I love the sentence “The Final warming after a doubling of CO2 needs hundreds of years”. Nobody will ever find out. 😉

  8. Mindert Eiting

    ‘But one thing is sure: Over the next decades the average madness of climate scientists will increase, even if the increase in the years from 2001 – 2010 was much slower than the decade before. This is backed up by prognoses from an international team of psychiatrists’. Something peculiar about this statement?

  9. Jimbo

    It is the final temperature increase that comes from a doubling of CO2 concentration, and will probably occur first after a few hundred years.”

    Is it likely that we will still be using fossil fuels in 100 years i.e. 2113 let alone 2213? I doubt it. In 1900 who could have imagined the cars, flight to the moon, mobile phones with cameras, submarines, stealth jet fighters etc.? Furthermore the world population should plateau at the end of the century then very well could start to gently decline. If I am right then the alarm is over.

  10. Jeremy Shiers

    I believe there is a small typo in your Feynman quote

    how beautiful you get this

    should be

    how beautiful your guess is

    Apart from that for CO2 or GHG gases to control temperatures they have to be the dominant mechanism affecting temperatures. If they are not the dominant mechanism their levels can continue to rise but the more dominant mechanism (eg sun clouds) change in a way that brings cooling. If this is so it means studies of climate sensitivity, even the notion of climate sensitiviy, is rubbish.

    I have yet to see any sign warmists are ready to make this leap.

    No doubt it a short while they’ll all be saying it was obvious all along!

  11. Dr Norman Page

    The problem for the modellers is that, apart from the structural errors in their specific models, climate science is so complex that the modelling approach is inherently incapable of providing useful forecasts. All the IPCC model projections and the impact studies and government policies which depend on them are a total waste of time and money.The only useful approach is to perform power spectrum and wave analysis on the temperature and possible climate driver time series to find patterns of repeating periodicities and project them forward. When this is done it is apparent that the earth entered a cooling phase in 2003-4 which will likely last for 20 more years and perhaps for several hundred years beyond that. For the data and references supporting this conclusion check the posts “Open letter to Benny Peiser ” and “Climate Forecasting Basics for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists”
    at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com

  12. Fabius Maximus

    Is it odd that this press release does not appear in their English-language mirror website? The other recent ones do. And climate is a more high-profile issue.

    http://www.mpg.de/research_news?filter_order=L&research_topic=

  13. Addinall

    “climate science is so complex”
    I must be the ONLY software engineer on the planet to actuall download the source code to this wonders of computational science and ACTUALLY READ THE CODE.

    A few dozen VERY POORLY written snippets of FORTRAN and csh() tied together in a fashion that was popular in 1968.

    I don’t know where the BILLIONs of $$ are going, but it isn’t on computational power running that crap.

    The reason the code has no concept of OOD/OOP, any AI, any modern practice of method and property encapsulation, is the fact that the code being run was designed to run in 14KB of DRAM and has stayed that way for decades.

    What a SCAM.

  14. Edward.

    Marotzke says:

    “These prognoses confirm that the climate models correctly forecast global warming trend over multiple decades, that is until the middle or the end of the 21st century.”

    The press release adds:

    Using these values, the scientists calculate with 90% certainty that the near-surface atmosphere will warm 0.9°C – 2.0°C with at doubling of CO2 content; most probable is a temperature increase of 1.3°C.”

    If you marry the two statements, clearly we can note – Max Planck Institute For Meteorology, Otto et al……………

    The famous Max Planck Institute For Meteorology has confirmed that, “there is nothing to see here because CAGW is bollox and our computers show the prognosis to be correct…….”

    After that not wholly unexpected revelation, we have other problems to solve – the yearly hysterics and pandemonium of UN climate conferences needs ending and when it does the ‘noise’ of the CAGW scare will fade away for good.

    Thus – is it not time to BIN the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – shenanigans?

    Strewth and cripes – they’ve [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)] gone on for far too long as it is?

    Oh – yes indeed, lets bring an end to the tourist 5* star hotel junket for Greenpeace, FoE, WWF and all the dunderhead advocates running up enormous ‘hospitality’ bills [whores included] on the taxpayer – FFS we’ve had enough of being ransomed by shameless politicians on the make.

    Man Made global warming is a crock – we’ll actually Sherlock said it all along – CAGW is s7^&..

  15. PeterF

    “Prognosis confirms forecast”!

    That is a strong contender for not just Quote-of-the-Week, but up to Quote-of-the-Decade!

  16. Edward.

    PeterF
    27. Mai 2013 at 09:24 | Permalink | Reply

    “Prognosis confirms forecast”!

    Nice observation…………………………… blame it on the weather?

  17. Brian H

    Green jelly beans cause acne. xkcd proved it.

  18. tobyw

    If the climate has such inertia, then how the 30-year pauses and the minimal hysteresis between winter and summer between the warming side and the cooling side?

    T

    1. DirkH

      They argue with thermal inertia of the oceans. This WOULD make sense – if the warming of the oceans had not happened nearly exclusively in the 100 to 700 m depth. There is no way for LWIR photons to get there. A different sort of photon gets there; the UV photon.

      So changes in cloudiness and changes in the solar spectrum as they happen during every solar cycle can be reasons for such an OHC change. CO2 backradiation cannot.

      This warmist theatre is starting to become a very ragged parody of science…

  19. tobyw

    I see the max plank press release has not been translated to english yet.

    T

  20. Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup | Watts Up With That?
  21. tobyw

    Thanks for the en link!
    And apologies to Max for the typo of his family name.

    T

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