Facts and legends in climate modeling

In the motion picture, The Man Who SHot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor learns the truth about a legendary figure of the day, Ransom Stoddard, a truth that would destroy Stoddard's entire reputation. But he burns the only written account of the truth.

"When the legend becomes fact," the editor says, "print the legend."

When it come to climate modeling, it's important to remember that models work both ways - future and past. That is, models of today predict climate conditions (we mean, of course, temperature trends) for the years to come. But models of years past made climate predictions for the future, too - a future that is now our past.

How well did those predictions hold up? Not too well, as it turns out. But no matter: climate models are sacred.

Reading between the lines of the new Thompson et al. Nature paper suggests that once they get the details worked out, the “updated” observed global temperature history is going to fit climate model hindcasts even better than it does now, and embolden confidence in their future projections.

The majority of the alarm raised over global warming stems from climate model projections. And thus it is largely inconceivable that there is going to be a major finding published in a journal such as Nature that is going to call into question one of the fundamental results from climate models—that is, climate models accurately simulate the “known” temperature history. The “known history” may change, but you can rest assured that it isn’t going to change in such as way as to make the climate models look like they aren’t doing so well after all. ...

Ah, yes, not only are they going to tweak the mid-century temperatures, but they are also going to make recent temperatures warmer than they are currently being reported. This will kill two birds with one stone.

It will serve to (more than?) compensate for any mid-century temperature corrections, and it will take some of the wind out of the sails of the good ship “Global Warming Stopped 10 Years Ago.” Again, the models will come out of this like shining stars.

Call us skeptics, but we have grave doubts that the corrections to the observed global temperature history will result in a lessening in the overall confidence that is proclaimed that climate change is manifesting itself even worse than we imagined. After all, there is an overwhelming, odds-busting tendency for publications in the journal Nature to report that things are tending worse (rather than better) than we ever imagined. In an unbiased world, the expectation should be 50-50 that publications in Nature would find things either better or worse than the expectations. In reality, the publication ratio is about 10 to 1 for the worse side. We have a bad feeling, that despite the initial optimism, that the outcome of the Thompson et al. findings will ultimately prove to increase the tally on the worse-than-expected side of things.

Yes, indeed, when the legend becomes fact, stick with the legend. It no longer matters what is empirical, that is, what is scientifically factual. It only matters what people believe. But, as I have explained, we are no longer dealing with science now, we are dealing with religion.