Yet Another Problem with IPCC Climate Models

IPCC GCM climate models have poor results in the real world. Clearly there are many real-world climate forcings that go unaccounted for in IPCC GCMs. Yet another deficiency of IPCC models has come to light recently--biological particles that play a big role in cloud seeding.

"Our motivation was the inability of climate models to reproduce the climate of the supergreenhouse episodes of the Cetaceous and Eocene adequately," said Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. "People have tried increasing carbon dioxide in the models to explain the warming, but there are limits to the amounts that can be added because the existing proxies for carbon dioxide do not show such large amounts."

In general, the proxies indicate that the Cretaceious and Eocene atmosphere never exceeded four times the current carbon dioxide level, which is not enough for the models to create supergreenhouse conditions. Some researchers have tried increasing the amount of methane, another greenhouse gas, but there are no proxies for methane. Another approach is to assume that ocean currents changed, but while researchers can insert new current information into the models, they cannot get the models to create these ocean current scenarios.

... According to the researchers, changes in the production of cloud condensation nuclei, the tiny particles around which water condenses to form rain drops and cloud droplets, decreased Earth's cloud cover and increase the sun's warming effect during supergreenhouse events.

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Normal cloud cover reflects about 30 percent of the sun's energy back into space. Kump and Pollard were looking for a scenario that allowed in 6 to 10 percent more sunlight....When there are large numbers of CCN, there are more cloud droplets and smaller droplets, consequently more cloud cover and brighter clouds. With fewer CCN, there are fewer droplets and they are larger. The limit to droplet size is 16 to 20 microns because the droplets then are heavy enough to fall out as rain.

..."The model reduces cloud cover from about 64 percent to 55 percent which lets in a large amount of direct sunlight," Kump says. "The increased breaks in the clouds, fewer clouds and less reflective clouds produced the amount of warming we were looking for."
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The ad hoc nature of climate research is quite interesting. Try this model. Don't get the result you want? Tweak this parameter. No? Try this . . . Most fascinating. You may notice the veiled attempt to claim that biological seeding of clouds is no longer meaningful in the world of man. But that is yet another unproven assumption to add to a long list of unproven assumptions employed by biased bureaucrats and others with vested interests in maintaining liberal levels of funding for global warming catastrophe research.

We know that cloud feedback is a huge deficiency of IPCC models. Most of the alarmist predictions made by James Hansen and "colleague" Al Gore are based upon unproven assumptions about cloud and water vapour feedbacks.

Soot effects, land use effects, poorly placed ground station monitors providing biased temperature measurements--all of these and more can be added to the failure of the IPCC to properly account for cloud and water vapour feedbacks. The IPCC is clearly not ready for primetime.

Supplementary:

Why Climate Model Agreement is Not That Exciting
Flaccid Peer Reviewing in Climate Science

For the unfortunate people who put their trust in the integrity of the IPCC, the only cure is a harsh dose of a wake-up kick in the rump. If they are not willing to look more closely into the morass of the interlocking inner circle of "climate consensus", they probably deserve the greater shock they will eventually receive.

Update Supplementary Materials 12 April 08:

From ClimateScience blog:

What are climate models?
Climate Models are unfalsifiable

Climate models are not science. They are highly tunable tautological pieces of computer code that too often amount to nothing more than glorified circular jerkular hoopla.