Cloud guesswork is hindering climate models, therefore relying heavily on their outputs to decide policies must be risky. A professor commented that we may “need a Manhattan Project level of new federal funding and interagency coordination to actually solve this problem.” This can’t be brushed aside as a minor issue.
– – –
We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea, and ice says Eurekalert.
But how will it affect clouds?
“Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets,” says Michael Pritchard, professor of Earth System science at UC Irvine. “Or they could thicken and become more reflective.”
These two scenarios would result in very different future climates. And that, Pritchard says, is part of the problem.
“If you ask two different climate models what the future will be like when we add a lot more CO2, you get two very different answers. And the key reason for this is the way clouds are included in climate models.”
No one denies that clouds and aerosols — bits of soot and dust that nucleate cloud droplets — are an important part of the climate equation. The problem is these phenomena occur on a length- and time-scale that today’s models can’t come close to reproducing. They are therefore included in models through a variety of approximations.
Analyses of global climate models consistently show that clouds constitute the biggest source of uncertainty and instability.
RE-TOOLING COMMUNITY CODES
Whereas the most advanced U.S. global climate model are struggling to approach 4 kilometer global resolution, Pritchard estimates that models need a resolution of at least 100 meters to capture the fine-scale turbulent eddies that form shallow cloud systems — 40 times more resolved in every direction.
It could take until 2060, according to Moore’s law, before the computing power is available to capture this level of detail.
Pritchard is working to fix this glaring gap by breaking the climate modeling problem into two parts: a coarse-grained, lower-resolution (100km) planetary model and many small patches with 100 to 200 meter resolution. The two simulations run independently and then exchange data every 30 minutes to make sure that neither simulation goes off-track nor becomes unrealistic.
His team reported the results of these efforts in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems in April 2022.
Continued here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
They have no input data at such a resolution. They plan to predict the future without knowing the present.
‘Whereas the most advanced U.S. global climate model are struggling’
So even the ‘most advanced’ is junk.
And, again, their problem isn’t hardware, it’s software. They don’t know what they are doing. A bigger computer won’t make them any smarter. They just get bad answers quicker.
[…] A cloudless future? The mystery at the heart of climate forecasts […]
They don’t know the present and they’ve adjusted the past to fit their predictions and still cannot predict the future. And what about volcanoes? Recent events in eastern Australia suggest that these may have an effect.
And I don’t recall many claims about torrential rain coming for Queensland and NSW, nor “the Polar Blast” which has bought heavy rain and snow on mountains in the south in the last few days. MUst be due to Global Warming.
Cloudy ideology. Like London fog. Not just socked in….
Analyses of global climate models consistently show that clouds constitute the biggest source of uncertainty and instability.
‘Biggest’ implies there are other such sources. See IPCC reports – not the summary – for details.
One tragedy of climate science is that, although they realize the importance of clouds for surface temperature and precipitation, they only see clouds as a feedback parameter responding to a human-induced CO2 warming. Mainstream scientists are completely blind to, or deliberately dismiss the fact revealed by satellite data that clouds are the sole driver of climate change on decadal and centennial time scales.
No matter how big & powerful computers they use or how fancy data-processing techniques they employ, climate scientists would not let go of the ridiculous “greenhouse” theory or at least show willingness to honestly reevaluate its fundamental premises & assumptions… I find this situation really frustrating! 🙂
Oh dear, how many times must it be said?
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
So stated the IPCC’s Working Group I: The Scientific Basis, Third Assessment Report (TAR), Chapter 14 (final para., 14.2.2.2), p774.
Anyone who claims that a purported computer game / climate simulation of an effectively infinitely large open-ended non-linear feedback-driven (where we don’t know all the feedbacks, and even the ones we do know, we are unsure of the signs of some critical ones) chaotic system – hence subject to inter alia extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, strange attractors and bifurcation – is capable of making meaningful predictions over any significant time period is either a charlatan or a computer salesman.
Ironically, the first person to point this out was Edward Lorenz – a climate scientist.
Lorenz’s early insights marked the beginning of a new field of study that impacted not just the field of mathematics but virtually every branch of science–biological, physical and social. In meteorology, it led to the conclusion that it may be fundamentally impossible to predict weather beyond two or three weeks with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Some scientists have since asserted that the 20th century will be remembered for three scientific revolutions–relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos.
http://news.mit.edu/2008/obit-lorenz-0416
You can add as much computing power as you like, the result is purely to produce the wrong answer faster.
But for some climate “scientists” I suppose it pays the mortgage…
Climate models are for entertainment purposes, only.
Oh dear, how many times must it be said?
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
So stated the IPCC’s Working Group I: The Scientific Basis, Third Assessment Report (TAR), Chapter 14 (final para., 14.2.2.2), p774.
Ice core records, other records of sediment samples, recorded history, show that climate changes in regular, alternating, warmer and colder time periods. There is nothing chaotic about a system that changes in regular patterns. The length of the time periods and the upper and lower bounds of the temperatures have evolved over time, with the overall bounds of the temperatures lowering over fifty million years. Maurice Ewing and William Donn explained this correctly in the 1950’s. Russian Scientists told the early IPCC members that natural factors, other than CO2 controlled natural climate change. Sequestered ice in polar regions and high mountains in glaciers and ice sheets are not considered in Peer Reviewed, Consensus, Climate “SO-CALLED” Science. Climate Changes in Dynamic changing Cycles that are clearly self correcting. Ice core records show more snowfall on sequestered ice and more ice accumulation in warmest times and advancing ice pushing into the polar oceans to cool the turbulent salt water currents to form sea ice and turn off snowfall until the sequestered ice on land is depleted. Then it warms and the cycle repeated.
Many people and groups are fighting against the alarm-ism, OR, ARE THEY REALLY, they use their own Peer Reviewed Consensus Stuff, that never changes from actually learning something new from studying actual data and history. Most fight back with other, alternate studies that use CO2 as the only parameter that matters. The alarmists, the WEF, the other world leaders that are promoting the GREAT RESET, know they are still winning, no one is using honest climate science and knowledge to fight with.
Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Fuels have improved life on earth for billions of people. Now, in Western Countries only, everything that works is vilified and everything that does not work is put in place to replace it.
“Ice core records, other records of sediment samples, recorded history, show that climate changes in regular, alternating, warmer and colder time periods. There is nothing chaotic about a system that changes in regular patterns.”
I would counter by referring to one of the most popular images of chaotic behaviour, the Mandelbrot set.
There are an infinity of clearly identifiable, highly similar, regularly repeating images in the set, all different but all clearly identifiable as iterations of the basic Mandelbrot image.
The climate system may well demonstrate regular patterns on a variety of different time scales, but there will never be two that are identical.
The realisation of that I suspect was Lorenz’s “Eureka” moment.
I think the chaos is mostly in the minds of those, who cannot figure out, how the Nature works… 🙂
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
If they don’t have good quality real world data on clouds, models can’t have good cloud data either. Which leaves them trying to invent it.
If they are convinced it will be bad, what’s the point of this? They are delusional if they believe they will get a 70 year forecast for the entire globe that is usable on a small grid basis. Not only can they not produce such a model (starting conditions will never be sufficiently accurate) but they can’t model the dominant natural variability due to e.g. El Ninos, PDO and AMO because they don’t understand them.
So we have models that don’t start from reality, can’t model natural variability, can’t model clouds and which have to be artificially constrained in numerous parameters to even get close to a reasonable forecast.
“There is nothing chaotic about a system that changes in regular patterns.”
Chaotic systems can settle in to repeated patterns. The point is that very small changes in variables can then have extremely large effects on those patterns and push the system to a new “settled pattern”. “Chaos” isn’t chaos.
We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea, and ice says Eurekalert.
But how will it affect clouds?
Or, how will cloud changes affect the climate.
@oldbrew:
Yes indeed! In their obsession with the unphysical “greenhouse” theory, they cannot even see that they are asking the wrong question: Climate change does not affect the clouds. Cloud changes alter the climate!
@Phoenix44
You said: “… very small changes in variables can then have extremely large effects on those patterns and push the system to a new “settled pattern”.”
This is a theoretical statement that does not apply to the climate system, because the latter is governed by a multitude of negative feedbacks, which stabilize (buffer) the system response to internal perturbations.
The global climate is basically driven by 2 major forcings: (1) atmospheric mass & surface air pressure in the long term; and (2) cloud-albedo variations in the short term. That’s it! The problem is in our inability to predict changes of pressure over thousands to millions of years, and changes of cloud cover over decades to centuries.
From 2019…
NASA hides page saying the Sun was the primary climate driver, and clouds and particles are more important than greenhouse gases
https://joannenova.com.au/2019/02/nasa-hides-page-saying-the-sun-was-the-primary-climate-driver-and-clouds-and-particles-are-more-important-than-greenhouse-gases/
Clouds Haven’t Behaved the Way the IPCC Or the Models Say
2 days ago
Michael Jonas
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/31/clouds-havent-behaved-the-way-the-ipcc-or-the-models-say/
” we may “need a Manhattan Project level of new federal funding and interagency coordination to actually solve this problem.” This can’t be brushed aside as a minor issue.”
so then, another bloody fund raiser for the nearly out of work junk scientists
‘Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all’
Somebody had to do it.