We could spend hours analyzing the new IPCC report about the impacts of climate change. Or we could just point out:
Everything in the Working Group II report depends entirely on Working Group I.
( see footnote 1 SPM, page 3).
Working Group I depends entirely on climate models and 98% of them didn’t predict the pause.
The models are broken. They are based on flawed assumptions about water vapor.
Working Group I, remember, was supposed to tell us the scientific case for man-made global warming. If our emissions aren’t driving the climate towards a catastrophe, then we don’t need to analyze what happens during the catastrophe we probably won’t get. This applies equally to War, Pestilence, Famine, Drought, Floods, Storms, and Shrinking Fish (which, keep in mind, could have led to the ultimate disaster: shrinking fish and chips).
To cut a long story short, the 95% certainty of Working Group I boils down to climate models and 98% of them didn’t predict the pause in surface temperature trends (von Storch 2013) . Even under the most generous interpretation, models are proven failures, 100% right except for rain, drought, storms, humidity and everything else (Taylor 2012). They get cloud feedbacks wrong by a factor 19 times larger than the entire effect of increased CO2 (Miller 2012). They don’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale (Anagnostopoulos 2010 and Koutsoyiannis 2008). They don’t work on the tropical troposphere (Christy 2010, Po-Chedley 2012, Fu 2011, Paltridge 2009). The fingerprints they predicted are 100% missing.
..
Even the IPCC admits in the fine print that the models don’t work. Water vapor in the tropics is the most important feedback, yet the models get it wrong. See Chapter Nine “Evaluation of Climate Models”:
Most, though not all, models overestimate the observed warming trend in the tropical troposphere over the last 30 years, and tend to underestimate the long-term lower stratospheric cooling trend. {9.4.1, Box 9.2, Figure 9.8}
“…In tropical regions, the models are too dry in the lower troposphere and too moist in the upper troposphere,” (p763)
“Most climate model simulations show a larger warming in the tropical troposphere than is found in observational data sets (e.g., McKitrick et al., 2010; Santer et al., 2013).”
How vulnerable are we to a changing climate? As vulnerable as we’ve ever been (apart from having electricity, antibiotics, radio, helicopters, cars, boats, planes, 24 hour satellite coverage, and more scientists and engineers today than existed in the whole of previous history.)
REFERENCES
Anagnostopoulos, G. G., D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Christofides, A. Efstratiadis, and N. Mamassis, (2010). A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data’, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 55: 7, 1094 — 1110 [PDF]
Christy J.R., Herman, B., Pielke, Sr., R, 3, Klotzbach, P., McNide, R.T., Hnilo J.J., Spencer R.W., Chase, T. and Douglass, D: (2010) What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979? Remote Sensing 2010, 2, 2148-2169; doi:10.3390/rs2092148 [PDF]
Fu, Q, Manabe, S., and Johanson, C. (2011) On the warming in the tropical upper troposphere: Models vs observations, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 38, L15704, doi:10.1029/2011GL048101, 2011 [PDF] [Discussion]
Koutsoyiannis, D., Efstratiadis, A., Mamassis, N. & Christofides, A. (2008) On the credibility of climate predictions. Hydrol. Sci. J. 53(4), 671–684. changes [PDF]
Miller, M., Ghate, V., Zahn, R., (2012) The Radiation Budget of the West African Sahel 1 and its Controls: A Perspective from
2 Observations and Global Climate Models. in press Journal of Climate [abstract] [PDF]
Paltridge, G., Arking, A., Pook, M., 2009. Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Volume 98, Numbers 3-4, pp. 351-35). [PDF]
Po-Chedley S. and Fu Q. (2012) Discrepancies in tropical upper tropospheric warming between atmospheric circulation models and satellites, Environ. Res. Lett. 7 044018 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/044018) [Full text PDF (323 KB]
Christopher M. Taylor, Richard A. M. de Jeu, Françoise Guichard, Phil P. Harris & Wouter A. Dorigo ‘Afternoon rain more likely over drier soils’ will be published in Nature on 12 September 2012. www.nature.com DOI 10.1038/nature11377
Hans von Storch, Armineh Barkhordarian, Klaus Hasselmann and Eduardo Zorita (2013) Can climate models explain the recent stagnation in global warming? Academia