Modeling

Today we cover the latest lawsuit against convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. This lawsuit was filed by Jane Doe 43 and accuses Epstein, Ghislane Maxwell, Sarah Kellen, Lesley Groff, and Natalya Malyshev, of being involved in a criminal sex trafficking enterprise. I talk mainly about the criminal complaint filed by Jane Doe 43 and what it reveals about Epstein and his operation. I talk about the hierarchical structure that Jane Doe 43 describes, and the various roles that the named individuals were tasked with.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been re-examining the long-standing dispute over the discrepancy between models and observations in the tropical troposphere.  My interest was prompted in part by Gavin Schmidt’s recent attack on a graphic used by John Christy in numerous presentations (see recent discussion here by Judy Curry).   Schmidt made the sort of offensive allegations that he makes far too often:

This is a guest post by Ross McKitrick. Tim Vogelsang and I have a new paper comparing climate models and observations over a 55-year span (1958-2012) in the tropical troposphere. Among other things we show that climate models are inconsistent with the HadAT, RICH and RAOBCORE weather balloon series. In a nutshell, the models not only predict far too much warming, but they potentially get the nature of the change wrong.

As many readers have already surmised, the “GCM-Q” model that visually out-performed the Met Office CMIP5 contribution (HadGEM2) originated with Guy Callendar, and, in particular, Callendar 1938 (QJRMS).

Anti-lukewarmers/anti-skeptics have a longstanding challenge to lukewarmers and skeptics to demonstrate that low-sensitivity models can account for 20th century temperature history as well as high-sensitivity models. (Though it seems to me that, examined closely, the supposed hindcast excellence of high-sensitivity models is salesmanship, rather than performance.)
Unfortunately, it’s an enormous undertaking to build a low-sensitivity model from scratch and the challenge has essentially remained unanswered.

In a recent post, I noted the discrepancy between the UK Met OFfice contribution to IPCC AR5 and observations (as many others have observed), a discrepancy that is also evident in the “initialized” decadal forecast using the most recent model (HadGEM3). I thought that it would be interesting to examine the HadGEM2 hindcast to see if there are other periods in which there might have been similar discrepancies. (Reader Kenneth Fritsch has mentioned that he’s been doing similar exercises.)

In yesterday’s post, I observed that Nature’s recent news article on Met Office decadal forecasts failed to show the most recent Met Office decadal forecast and that its inclusion would not have permitted the Nature headline. I also showed the large change from the Met Office submission to IPCC AR5 and their current decadal forecast. Asked to comment by Anthony Watts, Richard Betts of the Met Office did not explain why the Met Office either signed off on or had not objected to the omission of their most recent forecast.

Earlier this year, David Whitehouse of GWPF drew attention to a striking decrease in the UK Met Office decadal temperature forecast, that had been quietly changed by the Met Office on Christmas Eve. Whitehouse’s article led to some contemporary interest in Met Office decadal forecasts.