The science is settled, except when they need more money
Australia’s leading climate modeler wants a big new Climate Agency, and to make the case he admits the current models really can’t predict if rivers will rise or fall, if Antarctica will get bigger or smaller, if sea levels will rise much, or if El Ninos or La Nina will be more common or if the floods of Lismore will occur more often.
To give us some idea of how bad the current models are, he’s recommending we shift from models with 100 kilometer blocks to high resolution models with 1 km cells. These new models will be at least 10,000 times bigger than current ones, and if they increase the vertical slices, they could easily be one hundred thousand or even a million times bigger.
And if they get this super model, they’ll need 10,000 to one million times the energy. But now that we’ve wrecked the grid, good luck running those monster data centers off sunlight and breezes.
Full credit to Tony Thomas for digging through pages of turgid text and webinars to uncover the truth.
Andy Pitman, November 2024
Oh Boy it’s an eye-popping list.
In the past, Pitman has admitted climate change doesn’t necessarily cause more droughts. He’s also said he wouldn’t bet his superannuation (pension fund) on the climate models. This time Pitman admits the models are low resolution, have a lot of “critical gaps”, don’t resolve the oceans or clouds well, and that using the best CMIP6 models (the same ones the expert UN has beaten us over the head with) may risk “fundamentally wrong projections of future climate and its variability.”
Shouldn’t every Australian know this? I mean we’re spending half a trillion dollars to solve “climate change” but the models might be fundamentally wrong? Doesn’t that matter. The seas might not swamp us, the rivers might keep flowing. Antarctica might not melt?
Where was Andy Pitman when Australia was wrecking its grid, destroying jobs and our lifestyles? Where were any of our climate academics when leaders of our political parties were telling us that every drought, fire and storm was caused by climate change and would only get worse?
The Ivory Tower elitists sat silently by when the government forces bricklayers, farmers and children to solve a climate problem that might be just a modeling error?
And now they want more money — and I would say we desperately need models that work, but what’s the point, if we can’t trust the modelers to be absolutely, scrupulously honest with us?
Climate Science You Can Believe
By Tony Thomas, Quadrant
Pitman even concedes that current climate models can’t predict whether natural disasters will become more or less common in the warming era. Remember his words when you next hear the ABC or Climate Council claiming that such-and-such storms and floods are “climate-fuelled”.
Using current CMIP models, or indeed the regional models that rely on them, therefore risks fundamentally wrong projections of future climate and its variability. — P17 of “The Decadal Plan“
Now they tell us? Modelers don’t know if we’ll get more wind droughts or cloudy days?
Right after we built 12,000 megawatts of weather dependent generators, we find out that the modelers have no idea whether we will get more long spells of cloudy windless days which cripple our grid. This new vulnerability is buried under the label “High impact weather events”. As if windless nights belong in the same category as storms and floods.
It’s hidden in one of the Five Key Questions of National Significance:
5. Where will changes in high impact weather events support and/or undermine net zero ambition and where can associated risks be managed effectively?
Like the rest of the document the language is obtuse, convoluted, and speaks with a forked tongue. They don’t want to come out and just say Australia badly needs models a million times bigger so we can predict the climate.
Tony Thomas sums it up:
He [Pitman et al] also admits that he and fellow climate alarmists have no idea:
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- when and where so-called “tipping points” might arise (wow, so honest!)
- whether climate change will increase or decrease the Murray Darling water flows
- whether an increase in CO2 will cause more or less rain for a given location
- how climate change will impact cities and urban landscapes (Andy, stop upsetting the Melbourne and Sydney city councils’ climate crusaders)
- how wind droughts and heavy clouding might undermine renewables and net-zero targeting (via week-long blackouts).
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In a repudiation of the “settled science” notion the climate crowd has pushed for 25 years, Pitman now acknowledges that despite decades of study, the catastrophists still have no idea if Australia will see more El Nino, rather than La Nina, climate events, or even whether more vegetation will reduce or increase greenhouse emissions (so much for tree plantings offsetting emissions). “These are not easily solvable but offer profoundly different futures for Australia,” he admits (p13). Odd that we are to invest trillions in net zero when we have no idea what’s what.
We need models thousands of times better!
Pitman lays out many shortcomings of current “expert” climate models because he’d really like a much finer resolution models of just 1km2.
Ocean processes operate across many scales, and eddies in the Southern Ocean transfer considerable heat and nutrients14. These eddies are also crucial to the uptake, transport and storage of carbon15. Operating at scales of order 10 km, they are too fine to be resolved in ocean models used for climate projections. This means the role that oceans play in influencing climate are poorly resolved. – p17
As a result of their poor resolution, current climate models do not faithfully represent critical weather systems, and it is the amplification of extremes by weather system processes that cause the extreme events and consequential disasters we observe. For example, the Lismore (NSW) floods in 2022 were associated with multiple weather processes, initiated over the Southern Ocean and interacting with synoptic-scale processes and moist tropical air that led to a sequence of extreme weather events and catastrophic flooding. Global climate models cannot resolve these processes, and therefore cannot tell us if such events will become more common in the future. As the weather that produces extreme events is connected globally, downscaling using high-resolution regional climate models cannot overcome the limitations introduced in the global models, as downscaling relies on the global models for information at its boundaries.-p17
These transcripts come from Andy Pitmans speech in the launch webinar
The speech and documents make tough reading. You get the feeling they just didn’t want to tell us straight how bad the models are. I wanted to capture his exact words, for the record.
All those environmental sinks might becomes sources (so much for carbon farming, eh?) Shame about that business you set up…
7:30 [Andy Pitman] Some of these questions, you might think we have answers to….
For example, many people would recognize both terrestrial and marine as providing a critical ecosystem service, it takes up human emissions of CO2, and provides enormous support for Australians Net Zero ambitions … but there’s a little problem with this, we don’t actually know to what degree our terrestrial and marine systems will continue to support our Net Zero ambitions and positive environmental outcomes. They may turn into sources of CO2 and methane, in ways that really undermine our Net Zero ambitions.
We will definitely get more water or less water, more river, or less river, more plants, or less...
9:00 In addition Australia is demonstrably at risk of abrupt changes in weather and climate. Many of you would be familiar with tipping points… It matters a great deal if we could say things about when and where these things might be realized. At the moment we really can’t.
9:30 Water is obviously fundamental to the most arid inhabited continent on Earth. But we don’t actually know whether Climate Change will increase or decrease flows of water through systems like the Murray Darling. We don’t yet know whether changes in rainfall will be helped or hindered by the way ecosystems response under higher elevated CO2 concentration. Whether the higher water use efficiency of vegetation will help the flow of water through the Murray Darling or the vegetation will suppress the flow of water in the Murray Darling….
No we don’t know what will happen to the cities:
Urban Areas, it’ It might surprise a lot of you to know that the climate modeling systems we use internationally do not represent our urban landscapes.
From the PDF Launch document
Page 13: Plants, rain, El nino, who knows?
Some major challenges have been explored for decades — whether we will see a more El Nino or La Nina state in the future, or whether vegetation will help or hinder net zero ambition.
These are not easily solvable…
Page 17 We can’t predict extreme events, and they may not be getting worse, we don’t know:
The Lismore (NSW) Floods in 2022 were associated with multiple weather process, initiated over the Southern Ocean and interacting with synoptic scale processes and moist tropical air that led to a sequence of extreme weather events and catastrophic flooding. Global climate models cannot resolve these processes and therefore cannot tell us if such events will become more common in the future.
Further there is evidence the high-resolution coupled models simulate fundamentally different historical trends in tropical and Southern Ocean sea surface temperatures, reproducing recent observed changews which courses models cannot. They also exhibit greater low-frequency variability in midlatitude regions. Compare with Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)-class models. Using current CMIP models, or indeed the regional models that rely on them, therefore risks fundamentally wrong projections of future climate and its variability.
Page 22: The current models are low resolution and can’t do sea ice, clouds, storms, ice sheets, plants, cities and farms.
Projections on timescales of decades to centuries at low spatial detail using Earth System models. The low spatial detail is balanced by large numbers of simulations. The lower computational cost means the more components can be included (e.g. Chemistry, fire, nutrients,) but some processes which may be extremely important are difficult to resolve (eh, sea ice, topographic forcing of clouds and storms, cloud processes, some ice sheet dynamics, vegetation demography, urban landscapes, agricultural areas).
Page 25 contains Antarctic surprises like how 70 billion tonnes of snowfall accumulated across East Antarctica contributing to a net gain of mass in Antarctica — which was a reversal in the mass loss trend over the preceding 20 years..
A future with more ARs [atmospheric rivers] leading to a larger accumulation of snow on the Antarctic continent would be experienced very differently in Australia to a future with fewer ARS. Specifically projections o
The modelers didn’t see that coming either.
REFERENCES
A Decadal Plan for Australian Earth System Science 2024–2033, released November 25th, 2024
The launch webinar
— This one is for Julian. —
Turtle Model by SAIF 4 from Pixabay