http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11855579

Coldest November night on record in parts of UK

Northern Ireland hit a new low of -9.5C (15F) at Lough Fea, Co Tyrone, and in Wales, a record minimum of -18C (0F) was reached at Llysdinam, in Powys.

Met Office severe weather warnings for heavy snow and widespread ice remain in place for eastern and central Scotland, and eastern England from the Borders down to the East Midlands

Snow is also falling in Northern Ireland and north Norfolk, with some flurries possible in the southern-most counties of England.

BBC weather forecaster Alex Deakin said 10cm (4in) fell in Aberdeenshire in just two hours on Sunday morning, with a further 15-20cm (6-8in) likely in Fife, Perth and Kinross and Angus during the rest of the day.

Remember though, that this is just a blip. Last year’s cold winter was just a blip too /sarc

“I’ve tried my luck but many of you have far more understanding of computer modelling and the greenhouse effect than I do so hope you have time to give an answer”

Val, it’s not computer modeling knowledge that’s required, but physics and thermodynamics.

Willis Eschenbach has put up some good posts especially “The Thermostat Hypothesis”

But “People Living in Glass Planets” is not one of them. There is too much oversimplification and assumption to even begin to form a picture of the processes at work as many point out in comments.

The “greenhouse” analogy should be dispensed with completely, “blanket” would be a little better.

The less than helpful aspect is the lack of understanding of energy and its various forms: radiation. heat, chemical, mechanical, kinetic, potential etc. I have also found this at The Inconvenient Skeptic where John came out with “Heat and energy are the same thing”. If that were so then why is space so cold with all the energy in the form of radiation passing through it? This snippet from a comment at WUWT is a good counterpoint

“I read a story of some soaring pilots who flew their gliders in the Gobi Desert.
They needed oxygen to maintain their flight as their gliders were carried up to altitudes above 6.000 meters in thermals that allowed climbing speeds of 20 meters per second.
At high altitude they needed electric foot warmers to prevent their feet from freezing as their faces were burned by the sun coming through the perspex canopy measuring an outside temperature of minus 40 degree Celsius.”

A perfect example of the difference between heat and radiation. The rest of the comment is instructive also.

It would be better to take time to read basic energy then thermodynamics to understand the various energy transfer processes and heating effects e.g. the difference between reflection and re-emission of radiation and what that does to wavelength and therefore heating capability, also conduction, convection and how hydrological processes transport heat.

Learning the thermal properties of substances might be the key to thermodynamics. scienceofdoom has a table on the “Sensible Heat, Latent Heat and Radiation” page.

Compare specific heat capacity of water

To specific heat capacity of air

At different temperatures and pressures.

Also “Thermal Conductivity of some common Materials”

Then “The Adiabatic Lapse Rate: Why Air Cools when it Rises”

Once you’ve got a handle on those basics I’m sure you will then see how water in all its forms (vapour, clouds, droplets, precipitation, evaporation, ice i.e. liquid, solid and gas) is the big player in moderating the earths climate.

Then take a look the spectroscopy of H2O vs CO2

“Carbon Heat Trapping: Merely a Bit Player in Global Warming1″

“Are cold winters in Europe associated with low solar activity?”

M Lockwood1,2, R G Harrison1, T Woollings1 and S K Solanki3,4

Published 14 April 2010

Abstract. Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum (about 1650–1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK, we investigate the possible connection with solar activity. We identify regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England temperature (CET) record using reconstructions of the northern hemisphere mean temperature. We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic. We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect. Average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of a return to Maunder minimum conditions within the next 50 years (Lockwood 2010 Proc. R. Soc. A 466 303–29): the results presented here indicate that, despite hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold winters than during recent decades.

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/2/024001/fulltext

I turned up this paper “The early century warming in the Arctic – A possible mechanism” from 2003.

They looked at four possibilities either individually or in combination from anthro, solar, volcanic and internal variabilty, concluding after a 200 year simulation that it was internal variation in wind and sea ice cover and speculate that it was a random (stochastic) event.

I think they discounted solar too easily given the near perfect correlations over that time especially sunspot cycle length. There’s good correlation with irradiance in the Arctic too.

Those plots were from The Solar Evidence at appinsys.com.

I also turned up a paper “USE OF A STOCHASTIC WEATHER GENERATOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS” that I haven’t read yet but a brief scan seems to say that downscaled GCMs can’t mimic local variability but stochastic models can but not in timing, hence prediction problems but at least stochastic models toss up realistic alternatives (scenarios),

I think the first paper does show that if realistic drivers are sought and considered then parameterized appropriately then models can and do mimic climatic conditions of the past (hindcast). Not only that but highlight that CO2 isn’t the driver that it is made out to be in the face of non-existent correlations except for the apparent CO2/Temp correlation 1960 – 2000 that fools them all including the NZ govt.

More important globally is the solar – cosmic ray – cloud cover relationship shown on the appinsys page above. Another discounted driver that is known but not dealt with in model parameters along with magnetic flux.

So basically my point is that it is what is already known that is neglected so there’s no point in integrating much new knowledge and projecting until the models can hindcast what we already know.

ROFL! Things are worse than I thought.

I wonder how long before they adjust to the the new climate regime?

Or, how many years of unseasonal weather will constitute seasonal weather and therefore climate?

What is widely overlooked is that the model submissions for AR4 were rendered obsolete by model evolution even at the date of submission. The same thing is happening with AR5. For example NCARs submission to AR5 will use CAM4 but they have already moved on to next generation CAM5.

I have read other commentators (can’t remember who) who say that reports at six year intervals are meaningless due to the progression of understanding.

I agree that there is undue reliance on the supposed predictive skill of models. What has been exposed in Australia recently is that simple consultation of rainfall records for example was a better predictive method than the use of CSIROs supercomputed GCM output. The models there could not even beat the monkey mean (no change, do nothing scenario)

Simulations are basically “what if” exercises within certain specified parameters and that is where it all goes wrong in climatology. The initial parameters in the current configurations do not provide a realistic basis from which to project. Instead, the circular reasoning of AGW has been imposed and only the AGW “what if” scenarios are investigated.

When they do try to do a natural only “what if” the models fail in hindcast (as do the AGW hindcasts) because there is insufficient natural variability in the initial parameters. And that is the natural cycles that we know let alone what has yet to be discovered.

So basically my point is that it is what is already known that is neglected so there’s no point in integrating much new knowledge and projecting until the models can hindcast what we already know.

That there is no cool phase “what if” shows the CO2 bias in the IPCC scenarios. Even the most simple economic risk analysis would allocate a factor to “cool” to acknowledge the possibility e.g.

warm 0.6
no change 0.3 (plateaued temperatures as is the case now)
cool 0.1

Being a coolist/warmist, my economic risk analysis for the next 20-30 years is more like this:

warm 0.1
no change 0.5
cool 0.4

Because a cool phase can also present in a general warming trend as plateaued temperatures, this has happened in the SH last 100 years.

Then for 2040 – 2070

warm 0.8
no change 0.1
cool 0.1

Who needs a supercomputer for that?

There are not enough hours in the day to fill out all the acronyms – you either live in that zone or you don’t, it’s second nature for me fortunately. You get a feel for it after time in computing where even the smallest abbreviation can tell a story.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8165189/There-are-black-days-ahead-for-the-carbon-industry.html

Great first comment in that article by Piers Corbyn.

By the way, I phoned my mother in the SW of England this morning. The “English Riviera” is having an unseasonably early start to winter with snow and ice as far south-west as Cornwall.

The IPCC calls output from scenario (SRES) simulations “projections” – not scenarios. A scenario defines a simulation.

Thanks.

My knowledge of models is far inferior to yours, so the following comments are made in considerable humility. If they are wrong, they need correcting, and I trust you’ll do that.

The point I was making was this: the IPCC does not call the model outputs “predictions” or “forecasts” because they know the models are incapable of skilful predictions. (Our own Dr Vincent Gray was instrumental in compelling them to replace the term “prediction” throughout the draft Chapter 8 of AR4 with “projection”.)

The models don’t “know” any more about the climate than humans do. Crucially, there are important features of the climate we don’t or are only beginning to understand, such as the effect of water vapour, the genesis of natural climatic cycles, the details of thermal transport, especially in the oceans, and some important details of the carbon cycle.

If this was not the case we wouldn’t still be throwing up satellites and instituting further studies.

The discussions of whether water vapour feedback is positive or negative — never mind the size of it — reveal our ignorance, and the great oceanic cycles, which, as you said yourself, are absent or imperfectly modelled, surprise us, since we don’t know what makes them begin or end.

If your interesting and detailed comment were not quite so rich in unexplained acronyms which I cannot decipher (and if I cannot, others cannot), I might understand more about your conclusions. :>) Still, it would be great to contribute to a better understanding of the GCMs that (alone!) drive the climate scare business.

If that means giving up some obsolete criticisms of the models, I’m prepared for that.

Climate models limited by [CO2 distortion and natural variability omission].

Your rephrasing is appreciated for its extra detail, but the point remains: that human understanding limits the models.

I look forward to your further comments if you have time.