Model Behavior: In Climate Science, It’s All About the Computers

Russ Steele

Warren Meyer has an essay worth reading on the problem of climate modeling, it was originally published in Forbes Magazine and is now available on his Climate Skeptic Blog.  I met Warren at an RCRC Conference held at Lake Tahoe several years ago, he was giving a presentation on global waming and I drove up to the lake to hear his presentation and meet him. Over the years I had been impressed with his level headed analysis of the AGW issues, and he makes his analysis is worth your time to read and comprehend.

Warren concludes his Forbes article:

This is why, when run forward, these models seldom do a very credible job predicting the future. None, for example, predicted the flattening of temperatures over the last decade. And when we look at the results of these models, or at least their antecedents, from twenty years ago, they are nothing short of awful. NASA’s James Hansen famously made a presentation to Congress in 1988 showing his model runs for the future, all of which show 2011 temperatures well above what we actually measure today.

Climate modelers will argue that their models have gotten better over the last 20 years. But I would argue that they, just like our economic models, still fall well short of accurately modelling tremendously complex processes. Worse, they continue to repeat the mistake of assuming their conclusion, choosing their constants in a way that guarantee certain warming answers. In the last 20 years they may have added a lot of lines of code, but have added little accuracy. After all, adding a few more special effects to the Wizard of Oz’s light show doesn’t make him a better wizard.