Max Planck Society Confirms Warming Pause! …Scrambles To Explain Widespread Model Failure

Max Planck Society: “Temperatures stagnant approximately since 1998, but at high level”

By Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt
[Translated/edited by P. Gosselin]

Attempting midterm predictions

The Max-Planck Society publishes the magazine “Max Planck Forschung” on a regular basis. In its 1/2015 issue beginning on page 68 one finds the article: “…and now on the climate of tomorrow”. The German language article is also available (pdf here). The article starts:

How will the climate appear in 10 or 15 years? Scientists have been unable to provide a satisfactory answer to this question – mainly because random changes play a large role in such mid-term time-frames. A natural fluctuation is likely also the cause of temperatures barely increasing over the past 15 years. Jochem Marotzke of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and his colleagues all over Germany are working intensively on a system that will deliver reliable prognoses for the coming years.”

Hiatus confirmed

In other words this is about the pause in warming since 1998 and the question of why none of the expensive climate models had correctly forecast the hiatus. Indeed this is a big problem, especially for the fraternity of the climate modellers, who in Germany are led by chief modeler Jochem Marotzke. His favorite excuse: “random changes”, which in his opinion are completely unpredictable. But that’s fatally wrong. His colleagues have long known better and have identified the 60-year ocean cycles as systematic climate drivers. See for example  here, here, here, here.

Scrambling to explain faulty models

First of all the Max Planck Magazine thankfully does confirm what all temperature curves now clearly show, but what a few climate activists clearly refuse to believe:

Another resaon was a phenomenon that at the end of the past decade it was visible that there was a temperature plateau, and this continues to occupy climate scientists today. The global warming that was in high gear during the 1980s and 1990s now appears to have been making a pause since the start of the new millennium. The temperatures have been stagnating since about 1998, but at a high level.”

Jochem Marotzke has recognized that this cannot continue on. Awhile back he launched the Project MiKlip with the aim of making more reliable prognoses. In the Max Planck Forschung (MPF) magazine it is stated:

Today, almost 10 years later, the science regarding decadal climate prognoses has come a long way. From 2011 to mid 2015 the German Federal Ministry for Science has financed the project MiKlip (Midterm Climate Prognoses), that Jochem Marotzke initiated and now coordinates as its director. In the meantime the application for the second phase has been made.”

Cooling Atlantic

We’ve reported on the MiKlip project before. The main result from the initiative so far is hardly known to the media because it is just too inconvenient. See our article “Over the midterm the climate prognoses of the BMBF MiKlip Projects: North Atlantic will cool down by several tenths of a degree by 2020″. Using a Google search, the environmentally activist Süddeutsche Zeitung has yet to report on this amazing prognosis. Activist climate website “Klimaretter.info” naturally has not done so either. Thus we are very curious on whether the Max Planck Magazine is now perhaps able to talk openly about this. In the article’s  title and introduction we see that this important information is absent. In England however, the University of Southampton recently came up with the same result but was much more transparent and proactive with the cooling finding. See our blog article “University of Southampton: Cooling ocean cycle will cause Atlantic to cool by half a degree Celsius over the coming decades, global warming hiatus continues and hurricanes will become less frequent“.

Max Planck Institute refuses to see ocean cycles

But instead of following the example from England, Marotzke continues to stick to his worn out chaos meme. MPF magazine writes:

Such forecasts however are still in the early stages. ‘There is still a lot of work that remains ahead of us,’ says the Hamburg-based scientist. Over the mid-term climate prognoses are burdened by a fundamental difficulty: the chaos of the climate system. As it is so with the weather, also the climate (the mean of weather) is also subject to natural fluctuations that more or less occur randomly. […] Climate scientists refer to these more or less random fluctuations as spontaneous or as internal variability. Due to such variations the global mean temperature can vary by 0.2 or 0.3°C from one year to the next. For scientists these variations are known as so-called ‘noise’ that superimpose the actual signal of global warming.”

Models’ hopelessly faulty assumptions

Here we would like to advise Marotzke: Try just once to apply the ocean cycles, like your colleagues in England are doing. Natural variability not only contains ‘noise’, but also quasi cyclic behavior that today are empirically well-known. However the sad truth is that climate models are unable to properly represent these known cycles. The problem is not with nature, rather it is in fact in the models. Also the weighting of the individual climate drivers is poorly understood. The IPCC table of radiative forcings for solar fluctuations has assigned a much too low value, one in fact that has absolutely nothing to do with the geological-empirically determined systematic impacts of the sun.

We suspect that Marotzke has painted himself into a corner and so has to continuously find excuses and ignore the ocean cycles that have been at play over the last 20 years, though many have long been aware of them (see our article: IPCCcofounder Bert Bolin had all along been aware of the climatic role of ocean cycles).

Marotzke refuses to acknowledge low climate sensitivity

In the second part of the article the Max-Planck scientists discussed various possibilities as to why a warming pause happened. It was considered that the CO2 climate sensitivity may have been set much too high:

One possibility would be that the climate change drive in the models has been falsely assigned – i.e. the amount of radiative energy connected with a rise in atmospheric CO2 that gets trapped in the climate system or that gets reflected back out into space from aerosols. The values that the various models calculate for this magnitude vary widely. Another possibility is that the models over-estimate how sensitive the climate reacts to a rise in CO2. Some models assume that the global mean temperature will rise only 2°C from a doubling of CO2. Others assume that it will be more than 4.5°C warmer.”

But then a few lines later Marotzke and Co. abandon the possibility and return to their wild chaos theory. The MiKlip recognition of a cooling North Atlantic gets no mention at all. Instead the article concludes with a prognosis that anyone could have conjured up without millions in research money. Eventually someday the stupid temperature plateau will end. But as to when, no one really knows. An embarrassing conclusion. In the MPF magazine we read:

The temperature plateau is going to end sometime in the years ahead, as most scientists are convinced of this. It is likely that the warming of the earth’s surface will then progress even more quickly. At the latest when the trade winds blow over the Pacific more weakly the pause will be over.”

Other research groups here are clearer and more solid on this because they have a better grip on the unpopular ocean cycles than than the scientists in Hamburg do:

17 responses to “Max Planck Society Confirms Warming Pause! …Scrambles To Explain Widespread Model Failure”

  1. benpal

    “The temperature plateau is going to end sometime in the years ahead, as most scientists are convinced of this.” Is this the 97% meme? Who are these scientists?
    Shouldn’t Marotzke’s model show him what’s going to happen, why does he need the confirmation by “most” scientists?

    1. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

      Yeah, that one is a real howler – as it’s completely unscientific. Someone being “convinced” that something just has to happen without any reason or evidence for this – that isn’t science at all. But this is what happens when collectivist politics tries (with some success) to turn “science” into a streetwalker for collectivism.

      These are also that sort of standards that apply in the “sciences” as opposed to the sciences – as in the “sciences,” since there is weak ability to use or impose rigor, just choosing “what sounds good” as “the truth” is regarded as “scientific.” But this is what the late, great Richard Feynman once referred to as “cargo cult science” – people mimic the attributes and call it science, but it’s just mimicking the outer manifestations (or affectations thereof) and isn’t science.

      The “separation of church and state” is actually more with regard to the state corrupting religion than the other way around. In a similar way, the states are corrupting science.

  2. Harry Dale Huffman

    “Atlantic will cool down by several tenths of a degree by 2020…”

    I have been posting this for a good five years, so it’s not new at all. It’s just a repeat of the 1940 – 1975 period, the last time we were in the same phase of the multidecadal oscillations. I pointed out, on this site, the work of Syun-Ichi Akasofu (here, 2 and 1/2 years ago), which I assumed, from the time I first saw it, must surely be known by anyone who had come across what I called the multidecadal ocean oscillations theory (to which several sites were devoted, with the theory attributed to others besides Akasofu, so I don’t know who was first with it). Silly me, no one was paying attention, so now we get this “new discovery”.

  3. Walter H. Schneider

    >>>‘There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know’.<<< — ‘Works of Thomas Chalkley’ (1713)

  4. Curious George

    Max Planck, that famous climatologist, is undoubtedly very proud of his Institute.

  5. Mindert Eiting

    If Gipsies with cristal balls would have done the predictions, fifty percent of them would have predicted the pause correctly. This is the base line. The models were not beaten by random changes. For 97 percent false predictions you must have done something wrong in an extraordinary sense. You may guess once what that is.

    1. DirkH

      Maybe the Pope has now come out as an ardent warmist so that, when the decline in temperatures happens, he can say that the prayers of his sheeple caused it. Good timing in that case.

  6. AndyG55

    “Max Planck Society: “Temperatures stagnant approximately since 1998, but at high level”

    Yes, they peaked…. and, No they are NOT at a high level!

    The current world temperature is only just above the coldest in the whole Holocene interglacial.

    1. AndyG55

      ps.. and unfortunately, it looks like that small amount of warming is all we are likely to get. 🙁

      1. Oswald Thake

        I fear you may be right, Andy. It seems to me that the temperatures of successive warming periods have been getting progressively lower. Still, at seventy-five years of age, I expect the current one will see me out before it gets colder!

  7. Rick W

    This link is a 2015 update from Murry Salby: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/13/new-video-dr-murry-salby-control-of-atmospheric-co2/
    He makes an interesting observation that atmospheric CO2 is increasing linearly over the past decades while man made CO2 emissions are accelerating. From that he derives the re-absorption of CO2 to be much faster than that estimated by the IPCC sponsored modelling.

    1. AndyG55

      Given more usable CO2 (usable = the amount above approx. 280ppm) plant life will gobble it up, in smart time. !

  8. edmh

    The overall millennial difference during the Holocene since ~8000BC has in total been a cooling of ~-1.8°C, but the bulk of that temperature loss ~-1.5°C has been in the last 3 millennia since 1000BC at a rate of ~ -.5°C / millennium.

    Judging from the lengths of past interglacial periods, after some 10,000 – 11,000 years the Holocene should be drawing to its close. A climate reversion to full, encroaching, glaciation is therefore foreseeable, if not overdue, in this century, the next century, or this millennium.

    Looked at from the point of view of the most recent 3 millennia which have experienced accelerated cooling, a continued natural climate change towards a colder climate is now more, rather than less, likely.

    Cooling would lead to more intense and adverse weather: there is good reason to expect this, simply because the overall energy differential between the poles and the tropics can only be greater with cooling and that in itself would lead to less stable atmospheric conditions. In addition to more adverse weather, any coming cooling will also lead to very serious deprivation for mankind and the biosphere as a whole. Growing seasons will shorten and less arable land will be capable of crop production.

    But all current Climate Change discussion and propaganda only concentrate on short term temperature variations since about 1850, (the recovery from the Little Ice Age), often with emphasis on very minor short term temperature increases. These always try to emphasise ever increasing global temperatures. But they are often measured in virtually undetectable one hundredths of a degree Centigrade.

    For further quantified information and illustrations see:

    https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/the-holocene-context-for-anthropogenic-global-warming-2/

    1. AndyG55

      Very useful graphs and explanations, Ed.. Thanks.

      I’ve been using on of them on another forum.

      Still not enough to get through the brain-washing of the below average alarmista troll, but they help. 🙂

  9. Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #184 | Watts Up With That?

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this. More information at our Data Privacy Policy

Close