Climate Models - Tim Palmer - The Expert

Be warned: this is a nerdy impression about what is behind the scary graphs that are the main source of "information" behind the Climate Scare.

We have all seen graphs like this:

In an interview with Sabine Hossenflelder, Tim Palmer tries to explain the range of "predictions" at the right of the graph. Are they uncertainty inherent in the model? Uncertainty in the assumptions? A symptom of inherent chaos? I would ask why some models start at a very different point than the real world data - this didn't come up.

Tim Palmer, one of the major minds behind climate models gives an astonishing answer. The spread is political. It is the attempt to show everybody's "predictions", no matter the quality, to avoid people with big fast computers ("the rich") from dominating the picture. In other words, good models with thousands of iterations along with crappy models with arbitrary assumptions and one run. This comes from the open source nature of the MAGICC software. Anybody can make their own assumptions and come up with their own conclusions.

In another presentation, Palmer does a deep dive into the nasty math of climate models. Worth a listen if you have a strong math/physics background, which I happen to have.  Listening to Palmer was a little trip to academic heaven for this nerd. I'm left with some confusion after he shows quite clearly that the climate math is inherently chaotic (he gives a perfect example), yet shuffles away from this problem as if faster computers and more clever architecture can make chaos go away. The problem is in the actual physics, not the limitations of computers. Actually the computations themselves run up against physics - it is not currently possible to provide enough energy to fuel a computer that could theoretically provide the kind of precision we would like to see. 

The interview also reveals a chilling commitment by Palmer to the idea that modelling C02 "forcing" is the key to predicting the future. He quite frankly admits that choosing C02 emissions as the "independent variable" makes it easy to improve the "signal to noise" ratio. One cannot help but think that the real state of the world is the "noise" he is trying to eliminate.

The problem with this is that the climate was already warming before humans started pumping C02 into air In this and other talks, Palmer doesn't seem to factor in the mysterious factors that must still exist that warm the planet.

300 Years of warming compared to C02 emissions. 

Surely something else is going on. 

Palmer's opinion about what the world would look like at, say, 8C above normal are apocalyptic. But Palmer is a brilliant mathematician, not a historian. Humans evolved in an world 8C warmer than today. This illustrates a wider issue: that expertise in one field doesn't necessarily translate into another. 

Palmer also provides a sample of the apparently endless problems of producing a model that reflects the actual world. It's worth a listen.

It's hard to know what to do with these "predictions". I tend to put them off in "Earth 2" - the human and social reaction, rather than some trustworthy statement about Earth 1. 

I am totally sympathetic to Palmer's view. By his own admission, worries on Earth 2 pushed modelling science (totally theoretical) into the public view before it was really useful. As they say, you go to war with the army you have Palmer has been sent to the front lines with a butter knife.