By Andy May
David Calver has posted a critique of my seven-part series on Climate Model Bias. His critique is here.
The first problem in the critique, and one Mr. Calver often repeats, is his presumption that I did not properly identify my sources. I don’t know how he missed it if he read the posts through, but at the end of all seven posts, before the footnotes, there is this line:
Download the bibliography here.
This is a link to download a pdf of the full bibliography for all seven posts, the line is at the end of every post in the series. It could be that Mr. Calver did not read any of the posts through to the end and thus missed it. In any case, download the series bibliography now by clicking on the “here” above. The bibliography for this post is the same one.
Part 1
Beyond this oversight, Mr. Calver’s first criticism is about my complaint that recently discovered ocean oscillations are not reproduced properly by the climate models. This is important because the oscillations are closely related to climate changes (Vinós, 2022, pages 189). He then jumps from all ocean oscillations (there are many) to my one example that the North Atlantic Oscillation (the “NAO”) is indistinguishable from white noise in the CMIP climate models in Part 1 (Eade, et al., 2022).
He then launches into a long discussion of the NAO that is pointless, it was only one example of dozens of possible examples. The best discussion of the recently discovered ocean oscillations and their relevance to long term (>30-year) climate is Wyatt and Curry, 2014. Another good source is Javier Vinós’ book (Vinós, 2022, pages 181-190). A discussion of the various ocean oscillations is beyond this post or my series and is very well covered elsewhere. Suffice it to say ocean oscillations are very predictive of climate on the decadal timescale.
Wyatt and Curry’s “stadium wave” describes what happens during the Earth’s ~65-year climate cycle fairly well. The series of climatic events starts in the Arctic sea ice pack (their group 1) and then moves to what they call group 2, which is dominated by the Arctic Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), so while not at the beginning of the overall climate cycle the NAO is an early part of it. Like everything in Earth’s climate, the overall climate oscillation comprised of the individual ocean oscillations is complicated, but it is a fascinating story. I suggest reading up on it in Wyatt and Curry and in Vinós’ book.
One of the best indicators of the weakness of the CMIP climate models is the fact that they do not reproduce or include as input, these vital climate indicators. For example, see the discussion on the “AMV” (AMV is what AR6 calls the AMO) in AR6 WGI page 504. The “AMV-like” signal in the climate models is too weak, following is a quote from AR6:
“On average, the duration of modelled AMV episodes is too short, the magnitude of AMV is too weak and its basin-wide SST spatial structure is limited by the poor representation of the link between the tropical North Atlantic and the subpolar North Atlantic/Nordic seas. Such mismatches between observed and simulated AMV have been associated with intrinsic model biases in both mean state and variability in the ocean and overlying atmosphere. For instance, compared to available observational data CMIP5 models underestimate the ratio of decadal to interannual variability of the main drivers of AMV, namely the AMOC, NAO and related North Atlantic jet variations … which has strong implications for the simulated temporal statistics of AMV, AMV-induced teleconnections and AMV predictability.”
AR6, page 504
A point that I and others have made before is that if they can’t model these important oscillations correctly, their models are wrong.
Mr. Calver concludes that my part 1 was “a cherry-picked strawman red herring, presented with very poor scholarship.” Clearly, he cherry-picked an example, turned it into a strawman to attack, attacked it badly, and completely missed the obvious link to the bibliography at the end of the post, probably because he did not read the whole thing.
Part 1 concludes in part:
“All the models in AR6, both climate and socio-economic, have important model/observation mismatches. As time has gone on, the modelers and authors have continued to ignore new developments in climate science and climate change economics, as their “overelaboration and overparameterization” has become more extreme. As they make their models more elaborate, they progressively ignore more new data and discoveries to decrease their apparent “uncertainty” and increase their reported “confidence” that humans drive climate change. It is a false confidence that is due to the confirmation and reporting bias in both the models and the reports.”
Part 1
AR6 has made it clear that ignoring the model/observation mismatch is continuing and will continue (AR6, page 504).
Part 2
Mr. Calver’s criticism of part 2 revolves around his belief that the critical mathematical errors discovered in the AR6 calculation of the equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 are unimportant. He also believes the erroneous subjective IPCC calculation of a range of 2-5°C is not too different from Nic Lewis’ corrected and objective calculation of 1.75-2.7°C. We disagree on this point.
Mr. Calver seems to have a problem with my statement that the AR6 conclusion that CO2-caused warming feedback changes radically in the past 150 years is a very desperate reach (AR6, page 996). This is discussed thoroughly in Crok and May (2023) in Chapter 7 and the appendix to the chapter.
He also takes issue with my statement that the proportion of warming that is due to humans is unknown, but it falls somewhere between zero and 100%. This is the conclusion of two very important peer-reviewed papers, Connolly, et al. (2021) and Connolly, et al. (2023).
Part 3
His first complaint about part 3 is with my statement that the IPCC still assumes the Sun is constant and seems to think this is based on Bob Irvine’s work. He apparently has very poor reading skills. This statement is based on the AR6 quote right at the top of post 3 where they say it explicitly, the quote is from page 962. I never say anything about Bob Irvine in that context.
He goes on to say Irvine’s work should be discounted because it was not in a journal, which is not true, as the bibliography plainly states, Irvine’s initial paper was published in the peer-reviewed volume: Heat Transfer XIII: Simulation and Experiments in Heat and Mass Transfer.
Next, he says that the IPCC reports cover solar variability, cleverly changing the time period from 1750-2019, that I referred to, to “millennial-scale.” His quote says the same as my quote and my figure 2 (AR6 p 961, figure 7.7), the IPCC ignores potential solar influences on climate from 1750 to 2019. Mr. Calver does not seem to understand what I or the IPCC wrote.
Next, he lists various blog posts that criticize the peer-reviewed papers I cite in my bibliography, all the blog posts have been shown to be incorrect elsewhere and are not worth discussing here.
His conclusion on part 3: “smoke and mirrors, no credible evidence.” Considering most of my evidence was from AR6, he seems to be saying AR6 is not credible.
Part 4
He tries to discredit Chris Scotese’s many peer-reviewed publications with a blog post, from realclimate.org, a rather sleezy alarmist cite that has been heavily criticized (see here, here, and here). Chris Scotese is a leading geological researcher with many publications and 23,859 citations according to google scholar. Suffice it to say if you are relying on a criticism of an imminent scientist like Chris Scotese by realclimate.org, you are a gnat on an elephant. No one will believe you and I certainly do not believe you.
Part 5
He starts out by claiming the book that Marcel Crok and I edited, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, was not peer reviewed, which is nonsense, every part of the book was peer reviewed by at least two climate scientists and generally four.
Mr. Calver still has not found my bibliography, even though it is linked at the bottom of every post and claims he cannot find a paper I refer to by Yan. I cut-and-pasted the reference in my bibliography into google scholar, and viola! There it was! Here is the link.
He goes on to try and refute peer-reviewed research with alarmist blog posts, we will ignore that bit. He disputes my comments about there being a huge amount of evidence that solar variability affects climate, although it is certainly true, I refer the reader and Mr. Calver to Hoyt and Schatten’s book, Joanna Haigh’s excellent report, as well as Connolly, et al. (2021). All of these are in the bibliography that Mr. Calver couldn’t find for some reason.
As for the AR6 models running much too hot. That is straight from AR6, page 444, as quoted in part 5.
Mr. Calver’s reading skills are extraordinarily poor.
Part 6
Mr. Calver doesn’t like my criticism of the unsupported AR6 conclusion:
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”
Calver’s blog post and AR6, page 4
The bottom line is that there is no evidence for this conclusion by the IPCC other than their models, and my whole series is about how biased and unreliable those models are. Mr. Calver states with religious fervor that: “the basic facts of AGW have been established beyond any reasonable doubt (despite the attempted sowing of FUD by anti-AGW disinformation propagandists).”
There is plenty of doubt about the whole AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) idea, AGW has never been observed or measured, only modeled. We cannot even be sure it exists at all, it is just a reasonable hypothesis that humans might have some impact on climate, nothing more.
This is followed by bashing Bjorn Lomborg’s famous 2020 peer-reviewed paper with yet another alarmist blog post (the notoriously bad granthaminstitute). He then cites desmog and his own blog posts, nothing credible though. I’ll ignore all that.
He doesn’t have much to say about part 7, but Mr. Calver does trash the Nobel Prize winning economist William Nordhaus, just as AR6 does. Sorry, I think William Nordhaus is one of the best economists of our day. Nordhaus is sort of a lukewarmer and thinks that climate change should be dealt with, and I don’t agree with him on that, but he is a smart guy and he did win a Nobel Prize. Show some respect.
Summary
Mr. Calver clearly did not read my posts very carefully. I’m surprised he was able to read all seven and miss the link to the bibliography when it was at the bottom of every post! He should write less and read more carefully.
He complains that many of my claims are unsupported, but everything he complains about was supported in the footnotes and bibliography with peer-reviewed references. His contrary claims were generally from very biased and unreliable blogs, like realclimate and desmog.
I was unable to find even one of his claims that was credible.
Download the bibliography here.
