If the Sulfur emissions policies were known for >5 years and discussed for >10 years why aren’t they part of mainstream climate models?
The best answer I could find was essentially that models use a proxy for aerosols and so including the new policy might cause “double counting” of this forcing. This ‘conservatism’ caused this effect to be left out of the models.
So the story is basically that current mainstream models underestimated warming due to them ignoring this effect. But if they are missing this forcing, what other “insignificant” forcings are missing? Are they positive or negative? Are there other observations that don’t match the models?
This has really shaken my faith in the climate science community. I’m starting to think ClimateGate wasn’t the nothingburger the media made it out to be.
The models have underpredicted the temperature rise throughout my entire living memory. Even the "pessimistic" scenarios of high-temperature-rise have been blasted right through on a yearly basis. The model is drastically, dramatically understating the natural feedback loops involved and the amount of temperature rise that's going to happen.
Feedback loops like methane release are likely also hugely understated, as another practical example.
A large amount of this is due to political manipulation and pressure. Researchers are afraid of the way the issue has been politicized, and generally don't want to go out on a limb for fear of personal reputational damage or consequences to the field of study as a whole. Even just 15 years ago, in the 2000s, conservative-dominated media was begging for someone to step over the line so they could cancel them Dixie Chicks style and pronounce the entire field of study as discredited.
People spend way too much time on "but what if the models are overstating the problem" and they don't, actually they aren't even centered on the actual rate of increase, we pre-manipulated the model by building in all these stabilizing assumptions and even the pessimistic scenarios are actually quite optimistic. And then people apply additional optimistic "cheater factors" on top of that, and we still can't get to a situation in which the climate is not drastically deteriorated in a hundred years.
As I said, we have blasted through the most pessimistic assumptions on a yearly basis, the models are very clearly not aggressive enough about the temperature rises that are going to happen this century.
I don’t disagree that there could be lots of other forcings/tipping points etc, but I hear lots of conjecture and don’t see the effect as much in actual predictions / models. I do disagree that if they are not included in our models, then we must be systemically underestimating warming.
Why do you assume the missing effects will make the situation worse?
If the model is missing positive forcings, what makes you so sure that they have included all the negative forcings?
> Why do you assume the missing effects will make the situation worse?
> If the model is missing positive forcings, what makes you so sure that they have included all the negative forcings?
I don't think they have included all the negative forcings, but I think that's irrelevant because the observed evidence is that the unincluded positive forcings are significantly larger than the unincluded negative forcings.
All that matters is the net balance, and the fact that the climate is systematically exceeding the most wildly pessimistic predictions our model provides, shows that the model is not neutrally-calibrated with the present assumptions. There is a significant positive net balance (including any negative forcing) that our model is understating.
At any given time that could be a lot or a little, but, right now it seems to be "a lot". And the fact that it's been that way for 30 years, says that this isn't a short-term thing. And in fact the rate of departure from the model is accelerating too - the second derivative and third derivates seem to be strongly positive. We are not just getting farther away from the model, we are getting farther away faster and accelerating as we do it.
Could that all change tomorrow when some other effect kicks in and plunges us into a nuclear winter or whatever? No, probably not, but that's the kind of hope that conservative media has been selling people for 40 years.
When scientists give a neutral "well, anything could happen but..." response, all the public hears is "you're saying there's a chance". Nope, we're blasting through all the guardrails of the model on a yearly basis, we're pretty fucked.
And yes, there's also the possibility that we've unintentionally been geoengineering something for a while and when we stop ships from putting out sulfur (because it causes acid rain) that we suddenly jump even higher.
Getting to the "disease, famine, endless wildfires (way too many to keep under control), storms with the power to level cities and blot out the sun" portion of the Toby Ruins It For Everyone video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U
And yes, it is absolutely too late to stop and the best we can do is try to limit the impacts... which will continue to worsen until we do (and then for about another 20 years after we cease net emissions). Which is why the conservative media will jump right from "it's not real/it's not human caused/it's not bad enough to do anything about it" right to "wow it's too late, let's do nothing". Which is the same thing they've wanted us to do all along, ofc...
The fact that we're continually exceeding the most pessimistic projections the models can produce on a yearly basis, even after repeatedly recalibrating it to build in even more pessimistic assumptions, and that we're tending to depart more strongly from even the pessimistic models.
This implies that the models are broadly understating these feedback loops, that they are net-balance in the positive-feedback direction, and that they are becoming more active in the current climate behavior regime.
If we continually exceed model predictions, it could be from underestimating known positive forcings, overestimating known negative forcings, or some combination of unknown positive/negative forcings.
Essentially I think continuous failed predictions are a red flag for any model, especially one as critical to us as the global climate models.
Strictly speaking that is not sufficient as it only holds for the current part of the climate evolution and not the future one. It could be that currently positive forcing is underestimated while in the future negative forcing is.
It’s a good summary but I don’t think the data actually support their conclusion that “While some models projected less warming than we’ve experienced and some projected more, all showed surface temperature increases between 1970 and 2016 that were not too far off from what actually occurred.” +/- 15 % over the last 3 IPCC reports is a lot of missing energy. The models are getting better but I don’t think matching 50 year trends that are essentially linear proves that they are accurate for long term forecasting.
I’d be interested to see a new comparison for this years heatwave. I don’t think models would fare as well.
> This has really shaken my faith in the climate science community
Are you kidding me?
Activist climate scientists (like James Hansen) have warned for decades that IPCC reports are likely too conservative, because they represent broad consensus of climatologists.
Yet climate deniers continued to decry IPCC (also for decades) as too radical, political organization.
And now that the conservativism of IPCC is finally coming to public consciousness, you decide to side with the deniers, as if they were right all along?
Yes, this is like my relatives who voted Tory because immigrants are taking their benefits away. Only to enter old-age with the Tories taking their healthcare and their benefits away. These are tragic and self-defeating people. It doesn't mean they aren't stupid or dangerous to the rest of us. Or that they aren't responsible for the consequences of their own actions. But that they do stuff which is illogical, self-harming, or counter-productive shouldn't be surprising.
I wouldn’t solely hold them to blame but also point to who manipulated them in the first place. While they are blamable through ignorance they are not the real culprits It’s known the masses are manipulable to do and think in certain ways, and almost always to their disadvantage
I can't take a normal person seriously who, with apparent (imagined) perfect awareness, talks about the masses as a blob of stupid individuals who can't think a critical thought.
The real reason the masses often act irrationally—counter to the manipulation that your brain has received—is that they have no power or coordination to act as a group themselves. It has got little to do with ignorance.
There’s no reason the IPCC can’t report on more conservative models whilst keeping all relevant effects in accurate models. Usually their conservatism is in choosing more realistic assumptions. In this case they ignored a realistic effect.
I’m not siding with anyone. I’m criticising a particular groups models which they have admitted to not contain critical effects and thus don’t match recent observations. I don’t deny climate change, I deny that the IPCC models are good.
Yes, that's precisely the sort of thing that would elicit flak. If they openly say "here is an under-egged model for the climate deniers, but here is the real, alarming model" which one do you think their climate-denying flack machines are going to take aim at?
"No, you think fox news would really do that? cherry pick data?!" :)
So just to clarify, you agree that “the models are inaccurate” is true, but that is is because of pressure from climate deniers and is systematically conservative.
So because of political pressure, the modellers didn’t include a well known effect and missed predicting the highest temperatures on record. A model confirming event which could have convinced millions that climate is worth worrying about.
But instead the IPCC listened to fox and neutered their models? I think that is a lot less likely than “their models aren’t very accurate, they simplified a part of the model which turned out to be very important.”
What? How are you equating a misinformation plot that at its core was promoting the lie that the climate wasn’t actually warming, but rather cooling with a web celeb alleging that models underestimated the amount amount of warming?
How are these even in the same galaxy, let alone the same thing?
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. ClimateGate was about the quality of evidence for early global warming studies. It claimed that scientists were hiding bad data and evidence that their models had problems.
This seems very similar: models missing data and forcing but not being criticised when they miss a once in a century confirmation event.
The hiding of cooling was implied in the problems in the data/models. It’s a moot point really, the scientists did some dodgy stuff, whether they were exaggerating warming or hiding cooling doesn’t make much difference to their integrity.
How could cooling be implied from climategate leaks, when climategate deniers where saying "There is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change."?
If the leaks show that some models and data were ignored that show cooling then you can imply that they were hiding cooling.
You can also imply that their warming models and data reconstructions were not very accurate. Either way many climate scientists have a history of shadiness, just look at all the Dr Mann lawsuits pending.
Climategate was definitely real even if it obviously does not disprove or relate to human-driven climate change.
Scientists are sometimes politically motivated and will resort to lying to push their point. This romanticization of scientists and scientific institutions as inherently above lying and fraud is mythological. I see it happening on engineering research that has zero political relevance, imagine research that does.
The way I see it is the media conflated “ClimateGate deniers think global warming is false” with “ClimateGate deniers think global warming models aren’t scientific.”
Any politicised science should be treated with extreme. skepticism
>Any politicised science should be treated with extreme. skepticism
Proximal Origin[1] and the deliberate manufactured narrative of conflating criticism of it's blatant flaws to a conspiracy theory[2,3,4] was diabolical, I personally hope Nature's reputation is destroyed because of it.
I find the Covid origin stuff weird because it seems so obvious that a lab leak was a possibility. Politicising the lab leak hypothesis did a lot of damage to institutional trust.
Covid origins, vaccine harms and global warming are just the most obvious examples of politicised science causing problems. It’s basically irreversible once sides have chosen their respective beliefs to include in their dogma. Take this thread as an example: I comment on accuracy of climate models and someone compares me to Trump.
I think you are miss remembering what climategate was. Climategate deniers where saying "There is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change" and they released some out of context emails to support their claims. How does finding out sulphur reduction was masking actual warming effect make climate science any wrong.
I read many of the emails recently so I don’t think I am misremembering.
The missing sulphur effect suggests mainstream climate models are incomplete, which makes one skeptical of their results. In the same way deleted data and other shadiness during ClimateGate made people skeptical of the science then.
If the Sulfur emissions policies were known for >5 years and discussed for >10 years why aren’t they part of mainstream climate models?
The best answer I could find was essentially that models use a proxy for aerosols and so including the new policy might cause “double counting” of this forcing. This ‘conservatism’ caused this effect to be left out of the models.
So the story is basically that current mainstream models underestimated warming due to them ignoring this effect. But if they are missing this forcing, what other “insignificant” forcings are missing? Are they positive or negative? Are there other observations that don’t match the models?
This has really shaken my faith in the climate science community. I’m starting to think ClimateGate wasn’t the nothingburger the media made it out to be.