A Few Ways in Which Climate Models Fail to Account for What is Happening in the Real World

Modern climate models are huge conglomerations of matched and mis-matched computer code. These models require powerful supercomputers and must ingest massive amounts of well-massaged data in order to regurgitate multi-decadal projections of global climate parameters.

But with all the sophistication and massiveness of these modern models, is it possible that they are leaving a few things out -- a few critical things which could make all the difference?

Here is a very short list of a few important omissions from modern climate models.

Climate Models Will Need to be Substantially Revised (cosmic rays and clouds)

Negative Feedbacks from Clouds (PDF)

Misconceptions in the models about Earth's radiation energy balance (PDF)

Underestimation by models of effects of ocean dynamics

Insufficient accounting of effect of ocean waves and storms

Insufficient testing of the models themselves against real world observations

There are also valid questions about the effects of black soot on climate, and a wide range of negative feedbacks which are being ignored.

Global temperature readings have diverged significantly from climate model temperature projections. This is a troubling phenomenon for more honest climate scientists. Fortunately for the field, there do not seem to be many climate scientists who fit into that category. Most of them are blissfully floating down a river in Egypt. It is a sad fact that climate modelers do not actually wish to take their art to its logical conclusion, because they are afraid of what they may find. Up until this point, carbon hysteria and greenhouse mania have been highly beneficial to any scientists and computer modeler who can tie himself to the global carbon crusade. Job security and remuneration will remain stable as long as politicians and funding agencies remain convinced that these models and modelers serve a useful political purpose.

As for the taxpayers in the developed world who are expected to foot the bill for what is turning out to be a multi-$trillion payoff to be channeled through the IPCC, governments and inter-governments have never particularly cared about them. So long as they pay their taxes, follow the rules, and don't make waves, they can be safely ignored by the higher powers.

Personally, like the wind, I have always enjoyed making waves. Particularly in the faces of arrogant policy makers, academics, and journalists who are steeped in ignorance and misinformation, and who seem determined to destroy the modern human world in order to save a fantasy utopia that never existed.

More -- Example of climate model fail: James Hansen 1988 misses target by 150%.

Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988. The various scenarios are 1.5% CO 2 increase (blue), constant increase in CO 2 emissions (green) and stagnant CO 2 emissions (red). In reality, the increase in CO 2 emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve. The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average). Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong. Figure supplemented by Hansen et al. (1988) ._WUWT

As long as no one calls the hucksters on their mistaken assumptions, sloppy methods, and outright fraud, they will continue escalating the grand and destructive utopian crusade.

Negative Feedbacks in Ocean Temperatures

Current GCMs fail to take into account the many negative feedbacks that influence climate. Given the importance of ocean temperatures, circulations, and oscillations on the climate, it is past time for the infant science of climatology to grow up and take them into account.

Natural processes may prevent oceans from warming beyond a certain point, helping protect some coral reefs from the impacts of climate change, new research finds. The study, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), finds evidence that an ocean "thermostat" appears to be helping to regulate sea-surface temperatures in a biologically diverse region of the western Pacific.

... The research will be published online Saturday in Geophysical Research Letters. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's primary sponsor, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy; the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology; and AIMS....The study lends support to a much-debated theory that a natural ocean thermostat prevents sea-surface temperatures from exceeding about 88 degrees Fahrenheit (31 degrees Celsius) in open oceans. If so, this thermostat would protect reefs that have evolved in naturally warm waters that will not warm much further... ___Source

Differential heating of land and ocean by the sun leads to varying winds across the globe. Oceans influence winds, so it should be no surprise that winds can influence oceans. It sounds like feedback to me . . .

Professor Ric Williams, from the University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, explains: "We found that changes in the heat stored in the North Atlantic corresponded to changes in natural and cyclical winds above the North Atlantic. This pattern of wind movement is called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which is linked to pressure differences in the atmosphere between Iceland and The Azores.

"The computer model we used to analyse our data helped us to predict how wind and heat exchange with the atmosphere affects the North Atlantic Ocean's heat content over time. We found that the warming over the mid latitudes was due to the wind redistributing heat...___Source

Of course, the authors pay liberal homage to the mantra of "global warming"--the god of research grants. If you can tie your grant proposals and research conclusions to "global warming", the god will smile on you and yours. The rest of us will need to read between the lines to relevant underlying mechanisms at work.

Climate models are only as good as the assumptions that lie behind them. If the assumptions are naive and incomplete, the results will be badly skewed.

Negative feedbacks are neglected by climate models--perhaps because including them might lead to undesired results.

Negative Feedbacks In Climate: Natural Cycles Dominate

A thermostat in a heating/cooling system is a good example of negative feedback. You set your desired temperature(s), and depend upon the thermostat mechanism to keep the system within set limits.

Earth's climate depends upon negative feedback mechanisms as well--otherwise, life would not be possible. Current atmospheric CO2 levels are low, in a true historical sense. During the age of the dinosaur, CO2 levels were up to 12 times higher than current levels. Other periods of massive vulcanism over the eons have led to much higher atmospheric CO2 levels. Why did CO2 levels moderate themselves? The answer lies in negative feedbacks. The earth possesses many methods of modulating levels of CO2.

In the introduction to their important new study published in the July 2007 issue of Limnology and Oceanography, Hutchins et al. (2007) note that Trichodesmium species and other diazotrophic cyanobacteria support a large fraction of the total biological productivity of earth's tropical and subtropical seas, and that they exert a significant influence on the planet's carbon cycle by supplying much of the nitrogen that enables marine phytoplankton to maintain a level of productivity that removes vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. Hence, they speculated that if either an increase in the air's CO2 content or its temperature led to an increase in oceanic N2 fixation, it could also lead to the biological extraction of more CO2 from the atmosphere and a tempering of the CO2 greenhouse effect via this negative feedback process.

CO2 Science
For life to have continued on Earth for so long, the climate--and atmospheric gas levels--must be dominated by negative feedbacks, rather like your thermostat. The earth's biosphere expands to compensate for increased TSI (total solar irradiance) during stronger sun cycles. A warming of the ocean leads to release of more CO2 which fertilises more ocean and land plant growth. During weaker sun cycles--such as the upcoming cycle 25--the ocean cools and absorbs more CO2, and the biosphere shrinks in response to less incoming energy and available CO2.

CO2 is a rather weak greenhouse gas, and its effect is eclipsed by solar variability and other greenhouse gases--particularly water. Now that we understand that most of the northern ice cap melting is due to changing wind patterns and soot effect from Chinese and other Asian coal burning, we can further understand the minor role CO2 plays in climate.



Given the poor understanding of the dominant factors in climate variability--negative feedbacks and solar influence--the dismal predictive abilities of current GCMs are not surprising. As long as much of the best funded climate research blindly follows the false belief that CO2 forcing dominates climate, we will waste a great deal of money on a futile pursuit. Should the carbon trading schemes of Al Gore and his cronies ever be instituted on the grand scale Gore desires, the resources of Earth will truly be squandered.

For fascinating further reading, see here.

Automatic Learning--It Came to Me in a Dream

Jeff Lieberman had a dream about ways of learning skillful physical movements without verbal coaching--pure tactile feedback. He went on to help develop a "haptics feedback suit" to study tactile learning. It is an intriguing idea.

MIT researchers Jeff Lieberman and Cynthia Breazeal have published the results of the study in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Robotics. The study presents a proof-of-concept wearable robotic system that provides real-time tactile feedback over every joint simultaneously.

“Oddly enough, the idea for the robot suit initially came from a dream,” Lieberman told PhysOrg.com. “The dream involved people who weren't physically able to express themselves, but who were mentally normal, who used a machine that aided them to get their inner feelings out. This ranged from people with muscular difficulties to even toddlers and 'untrained' people who do not know how to wield a paintbrush. Upon waking and thinking about that idea for about an hour, the idea for this project was born, and I started doing research that day; the overall project was about six months for software and hardware development.”

In experiments with arm motions, the researchers found that the suit increased students’ learning rates by up to 23%, and reduced errors by up to 27%, as well as enabling students to learn movements “more deeply” by affecting their subconscious learning of motor skills. The latter can be especially important for patients with neurological injuries who have lost the ability to form new long-term memories, but can still build new motor skills.

The suit works by optically tracking body markers for the teacher’s movement (or a pre-recorded ideal movement) and the student’s movement with a Vicon motion capture system, which has millimeter accuracy. The tracking data is fed to software that compares the teacher’s and student’s movements, and generates feedback signals to the suit.

Physorg

Imaginative persons can easily think of many uses for such a tactile feedback learning system. A large part of the widespread incompetence in society comes from the lack of practical skills with the hands and body. A sedentary society--forced to sit inactive for one third of the day from childhood to young adulthood, spending countless hours sitting watching television, texting, chatting, playing video games, etc--learns inactivity early, and neglects the body and the skills the body is capable of exhibiting.

The part of the mind that deals with banal, everyday things, or with abstract ideas, is well exercised by most children, teenagers, and adults. The parts of the mind that guide the body in skilled activities that make life more enjoyable, more workable, or more prosperous, are generally neglected.

Traditionally, fathers taught sons physical/tactile skills, as mothers taught tactile skills to daughters. Modern parents often do not have the time or spend the time to teach children practical skills. Such teaching requires patience and energy that may be lacking--not to mention the required skills that parents may never have been taught themselves. Now, these skills can be taught from tutorials online or on disk.

But the learning opportunities from such tactile feedback suits extends far beyond practical skills of modern life's technologies. Surgeons in training could learn from the deft, precise movements of the best surgeons. Pilots would learn firm, timely responses to unexpected emergencies in simulators.

It is one thing to teach the mind a skill. It is quite another to teach the body. Modern education neglects the body. (it also neglects the mind, but that is another story)

A deeper meaning behind such training is the fact that much of the cognitive strength of the mind derives from being "embodied." Our verbal and pre-verbal conceptual languages rest upon metaphors of embodiment. The sensory feedback from the body, as interpreted through embodiment metaphors, drives much of our thinking. More on this later.

The MIT research discussed in the Physorg article above promises important advances in a field of research that is not exactly brand new. But qualitative improvements in a pre-existing field can make the field seem new again.

Tactile feedback may just hold the conceptual key that has been missing from stonewalled efforts in machine intelligence, cognitive enhancement, and ultimately brain emulation and downloading. Stay tuned.

Neurofeedback: Will We Have to Wait for Video Games to Bring it to Us?

Will we have to wait for video games that incorporate neurofeedback, before this useful tool becomes commonplace and readily available?

The imaging company Omneuron wants to bring fMRI neurofeedback to the public, to aid in treating chronic pain.

But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.

Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.

A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.

Source

But these companies have to get past government regulatory agencies first. But the government is not the only obstacle to the widespread use of the promising constellation of technologies referred to as neurofeedback. EEG neurofeedback has been around for decades, and the potentials for this therapeutic modality are still being nibbled at around the edges.

It's not unusual to walk into Desney Tan's Microsoft Research office and find him wearing a red and blue electroencephalography (EEG) cap, white wires cascading past his shoulders. Tan spends his days looking at a monitor, inspecting and modifying the mess of squiggles that approximate his brain's electrical activity. He is using algorithms to sort through and make sense of EEG data in hopes of turning electrodes into meaningful input devices for computers, as common as the mouse and keyboard.

The payoff, he says, will be technology that improves productivity in the workplace, enhances video-game play, and simplifies interactions with computers. Ultimately, Tan hopes to develop a mass-market EEG system consisting of a small number of electrodes that, affixed to a person's head, communicate wirelessly with software on a PC.

...Tan expects the technology to be used initially as a controller for video games, since gamers are accustomed to "strapping on new devices," he says. In fact, next year a company called Emotiv Systems, based in San Francisco, plans to offer an EEG product that controls certain aspects of video games. However, the company will not discuss the specifics of its technology, and there isn't widespread consensus on the feasibility and accuracy of the approach.

The true challenge, Tan says, will be to make EEG interfaces simple enough for the masses. He and his team are working on minimizing the number of electrodes, finding a semisolid material as an alternative to the conductive gel, and developing wireless electrodes. A mass-market product could be many years away. But if Tan succeeds, getting a computer to read your thoughts could be as easy as putting on a Bluetooth headset.

Source

To keep up on some of the latest news on neurofeedback, check this link occasionally.

The EEG Spectrum newsletter comes out fairly regularly, and is another place to check for technology upgrades.

This link is another place for good information on neurofeedback.

Electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and real time fMRI, are different technologies that provide fast enough response for feedback purposes. Neurofeedback is vastly underused in Psychiatry, Psychology, Pain Control, recovery from brain injury, and other areas of medicine and mental health. Applications to sports training and personal coaching should be obvious.

A video search on Google Video, etc. will provide a large number of videos dealing with neurofeedback and other biofeedback technologies.

Certainly if you know anyone with disabling migraines, or with a child with ADD/ADHD, you should let them know about neurofeedback.

Sometimes it seems as if videogames and simulated worlds such as Second Life are driving a lot of business and technology in the real world. Neurofeedback may be yet another example of this.

Cooling the Earth: Mitigating Global Warming While Avoiding the Next Ice Age

There is a lot of recent interest in methods of cooling earth's climate, by reducing CO2 in the air, and other more direct means. The image above pictures an array of high-tech CO2 sequestrators, made to suck CO2 directly out of the air.

This NY Times article presents even more outlandish ways of cooling the earth:

The plans and proposed studies are part of a controversial field known as geoengineering, which means rearranging the earth's environment on a large scale to suit human needs and promote habitability. Dr. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist, will detail his arguments in favor of geoengineering studies in the August issue of the journal Climatic Change.

....Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding.

....The study of futuristic countermeasures began quietly in the 1960's, as scientists theorized that global warming caused by human-generated emissions might one day pose a serious threat. But little happened until the 1980's, when global temperatures started to rise.

Some scientists noted that the earth reflected about 30 percent of incoming sunlight back into space and absorbed the rest. Slight increases of reflectivity, they reasoned, could easily counteract heat-trapping gases, thereby cooling the planet.

Dr. Broecker of Columbia proposed doing so by lacing the stratosphere with tons of sulfur dioxide, as erupting volcanoes occasionally do. The injections, he calculated in the 80's, would require a fleet of hundreds of jumbo jets and, as a byproduct, would increase acid rain.

By 1997, such futuristic visions found a prominent advocate in Edward Teller, a main inventor of the hydrogen bomb. "Injecting sunlight-scattering particles into the stratosphere appears to be a promising approach," Dr. Teller wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "Why not do that?"

....Other plans called for reflective films to be laid over deserts or white plastic islands to be floated on the world's oceans, both as ways to reflect more sunlight into space.

Another idea was to fertilize the sea with iron, creating vast blooms of plants that would gulp down tons of carbon dioxide and, as the plants died, drag the carbon into the abyss.

The US Government has been making policies and plans for several years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to increase sequestration of greenhouse gases.

The reason the atmosphere of the climate is even more charged than usual, is the recent schizoid NAS Panel Report. Even Al Gore is rather steamed about the NAS report, among other things.

Although planting more trees would seem to be a more efficient and inexpensive way of reducing greenhouse gases than high-tech sequestrators, one must admit that sequestrators can be placed in areas where trees will not readily grow, such as arid deserts and above timberlines on mountains.

As for the futuristic orbiting lenses and mirrors, temperature control is not a bad thing to research. Clearly the earth has experienced times when it was both much warmer than at present, and much colder. Given human beings' love of comfort, it is only prudent to learn what methods of temperature control will work, and which methods will either not work, or be too dangerous to implement.

Anyone with an IQ above 50 should know that an ice age is a thousand times more lethal to human civilisations than the mild warming trends being experienced currently. Current warming has been mild and not without benefit. More concerning is the possibility of positive feedback warming or cooling. Humans need to be able to recognise early signs of feedback effects quickly, and be prepared to deal with them.

Too much current climate work is based on incompetent modeling and proxie work. The prediction of climate catastrophes based upon unprofessional and unethical quasi-science will only lead to the diverting of resources from projects that reduce poverty and disease, to projects that accomplish nothing productive. It is time for climate research to enter the big leagues, and begin to incorporate solar effects and the effects of water vapour and cloud formation.