So Much for the Climate Models, Then

Yet again, the climate models are busted.

Yet we’re supposed to be crippling our industrial society and showering trillions of unearned dollars on grasping mendicant states, solely based on climate models. Models that are, yet again, humiliated by the real world.

One of the world’s leading climate scientists says the world could be in “uncharted territory”, with the researchers unable to fully explain why the world has been breaking heat records to such extremes for 10 months straight.

What they’re unable to explain is why their precious models were wrong. Again.

For about a decade, [NASA’s senior climate advisor Gavin Schmidt] and other climate science institutes have been making predictions of global temperatures for the year ahead […]

But all of those predictions for 2023 fell short of what occurred – the closest prediction was still almost 0.2 degrees Celsius off the mark.

We’re told, of course, that climate models have been uncannily reliable. Which is bollocks, because what climate scientists have done is ‘tune’ the model outputs: that is, look at the real-world data and then retrospectively tweak the models to make them fit.

Dr Schmidt said there was always room for error, but usually scientists could explain what occurred upon looking back at the data.

Only, this time, not even that little trick could pass muster.

He said this time it was not adding up. And the climate models were giving them no answers either.

“It means there’s something missing in what we’re thinking about here,” he said.

What’s missing is what so-called ‘deniers’ have been pointing out for years: climate models can’t model clouds for shit, which, as it turns out, is a rather big omission.

Research published in Science today suggests the missing warming mechanism from the prediction models was a low in “planetary albedo”.

That’s the amount of solar radiation, including heat, that’s reflected into space. The less radiation is reflected, the more it reaches Earth and warms the atmosphere.

In other words: clouds.

Study lead author Helge Goeslling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, said […] “What we find is it is quite obviously linked to cloud changes and, in particular, low cloud changes,” he said.

But what this decline in low cloud cover means for the future is uncertain.

What’s certain is that Japanese climate scientist and computer modeller Mototaka Nakamura was absolutely right when he warned that ‘Mickey Mouse’ climate models are ‘worse than useless’ for making real-world predictions.

We already know that models falsely treat solar output as a constant. Now we have empirical proof that models’ inability to model clouds is a pretty big deal.