An Inadvertent Study Shows All 20 IPCC Models Flawed

There has been some criticism of the 20 global climate models (GCMs) relied upon by the IPCC, specifically that they deal poorly with clouds.  All 20 assume a positive feedback from warming - the warmer it gets, the better the greenhouse effect works.  (Simplified, the greenhouse concept is that visible light is reflected off the planet, and the infrared heat is captured by greenhouse gases, including clouds, water vapor and to a much lesser extent since it is a trace gas, CO2.  Positive feedback means that emissions into space should therefore decrease with warming.)  The IPCC admits it handles clouds poorly; if warming leads to more cloud formation, light is reflected before it ever gets to the planet, and the world cools.

Now a study for other purposes has shown a devastating flaw in all 20 models: where they predict lower emissions, recent satellite measurements show higher emissions with warming, sometimes as much as 7x the prediction.  See this chart, where the red line is the measured emissions in space, and the dotted line is the mean prediction of the models.  (The gray is the band of predictions around that mean.) 

Bottom line:  where the models predict a positive feedback (more warming leads to more greenhouse absorption of infrared), the satellite measurements show negative feedback - more warming leads to less greenhouse effect.  The climate sensitivity in the models to CO2 is much less than predicted.  As Dr Lindzen concludes (emphasis added):

The earth’s climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCMs) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself.

Comments

[miguel stone crow]

Meanwhile - the Global Warming Crowd (Gore, et al.) remains willfully ignorant of this type of evidence. Now controlling the legislative process, they will handicap our nation on the basis of very shakey science. If you try to engage them they will leave the table, or, if they are Al Gore, they won't debate you at all.

[Brenda Rosser]

I'd love to actually experience the negative feedback loop Lindzen refers to. Instead, where I live in South East Australia, our summers are getting much hotter and dryer. This summer (December-2009 - end of February 2010) is expected to be the hottest on record.
Last February set the record for daytime summer temperature, reaching about 114 degrees fahrenheit in Melbourne. Many people dying of heat stress. Trainlines actually warped in the heat. Fruit was baked on the trees. Agricultural production plummetted. Wildlife, such as koalas came out of their trees for the first time and approached tourists seeking drinks of water.

Our coastline is now eroding at an incredible rate! cycle ways washed away along with a light pole. The foundations of a highway bridge destroyed.

Theory is one thing. direct experience is another.

From Wikipedia:
According to Ross Gelbspan in a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine, Lindzen "... charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,[27] was underwritten by OPEC."[28][29] However, according to Alex Beam in a 2006 article in the The Boston Globe, Lindzen said that although he had accepted $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from "fossil-fuel types" in the 1990s, he had not received any money from these since.[30] Lindzen has elsewhere described the Gelbspan allegation as a "slander" and as "libelous."[31][32]

Lindzen has contributed to think tanks including the Cato Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute that have accepted money from ExxonMobil.[29]
[edit] See also

[yelnick]

Brenda, you are experiencing it. The world has plateaued in warming and appears to be cooling off, local conditions notwithstanding (US had one of the coldest summers ever this year for example). It is laughable to assert that Lindzen is somehow a tool of the oil companies. It is very difficult to oppose AGW in academic circles: you don't get tenure, you have a hard time getting published, you get mocked at conferences, and you have a really hard time getting government grants. The skeptics are heros for opposing the orthodoxy.

The AGW theory has huge scientific gaps, including its most core predictions: if there were warming caused by GHG, it would show up in the greenhouse layer as a hit spot. All models predict this. But there is no hot spot. Lindzen has produced a very sound explanation of why not based on real measurements not models.

The world has been warming for 300 years since the Little Ice Age. Al the anecdotal stories of polar bears etc come from a long trendline not a recent spike. Satellite measurements show little if any warming since 1979. It may be the 300 year trend is peaking. The data is becoming overwhelming against AGW. All that they have left are ad hominem attacks on scientists like Lindzen who are steadily doing good work against major hoots of derision. Sad that this is the best shot the AGW crowd can make. It would be better to stick to science not rhetoric.

[Glenn]

Brenda is typical of so many alarmists. She completely dismisses the incredible failure of all 20 IPCC models to predict near term temperature fluctuations - leading to necessary doubts about their validity - but bolsters her case with local subjective weather observations. She manages to ignore the fact that there has been no warming for 11 years and then bashes Lindzen for doing a very small amount of consulting work for an oil company 17 years ago - as though that fact has any bearing on his unquestionable academic standing at MIT as a world leading climatologist. It's like to trying to argue that the earth goes around the sun and them saying that look, I see it circling around us, you are wrong. Yes Brenda, you are that dumb. Btw, Lindzen doesn't argue that APGW doesn't occur - if you checked him out you'd be amazed at how brilliant and thoughtful he is. He's also equally critical of those are throwing around other theories based on solar events because their science is shaky too. The truth is that we don't understand the climate system well nor do we understand the impacts of climate change well either.

[Jordan 5]

I would like to live to study, and not study to live.