E_For_Me,
I don't think you are paying attention to what I was saying. I didn't say that climate change models are unreliable because they are a work in progress. What I was saying that all science is considered by all scientists to be a work in progress. So there is nothing unusual about the community of professional climatologists constantly working on and improving their models.
Anyone who thinks that science is completely settled on any particular issue is a crackpot. Anyone who thinks that this constant improvement in scientific theories and models is a sign of unreliability is also a crackpot. Can I make that any clearer?
Now, to the point of Mojib Latif and his recent paper he delivered at the
World Climate Conference #3 . This talk was reported on the
New Scientist article, which was then picked up by BBC and highlighted in a radio program called
BBC Today, where various climatologists were interviewed.
Notice that all of this noise is about Latif, who is one of the world's expert on climate modeling and one of the author's of the IPCC reports, delivering a paper as a professional climatologists to other climatologists at one of their most important worldwide conferences. Not surprisingly, Latif, who is an expert climate modeler was giving a talk on advancing the state of the art of modeling in a conference section called, Advancing Climate Prediction Science.
As scientific conferences usually go, there is a general call for papers on various subjects related to the conference's purpose. Chances are the Advancing Climate Prediction Science section was determined before hand and either Latif was invited to speak, because of his contributions to the field, or he submitted a paper into that call for the same reason.
Again, a crackpot might look at this and conclude that if scientists are meeting to talk about advancing something, then it must be broken. The reason why a crackpot might conclude that is because the crackpot has no clue that this is how science works day in and day out. One of the reason why the crackpot doesn't know this is because it interferes with his wingnut internal narrative that science is full of "orthodoxy" and "dogma".
Anyway, if one wants to listen to the section that includes Mojib Latif's presentation, one can go to this page of the Conference proceedings and fire up the MP3 file called
Advancing Climate Prediction Science. The section starts with an introduction of the two speakers, the first speaker goes, and then Latif goes as the last speaker.
If you don't have the time to listen to it, let me summarize it for you. Latif is not the lone iconoclast coming in to the scientific proceeding and smashing the orthodoxy of climate change. In fact, Latif is one of the premier workers in this field and if there were an orthodoxy on climate change modeling, Latif might be the head orthodoc.
What is going on here is that Latif is doing his job. Latif is earning his salary as one of the world premier climate modelers and he is moving the state of the art to the next step. You see, one of the main themes of the conference is that now that long term climate change is established as inevitable, it is time for climatologists to move their craft the next level where they can start predicting shorter term and regional variations in climate so that they can be a service to those regions in the world where there might be catastrophic effects. You can easily get that from the first part of the MP3 file.
So Prof. Latif has been working on improving his long term models so that they can be more accurate in the near term so regional problems might be better predicted in the near future by the models. In the various interviews on the BBC Today site, you can hear Latif and the other scientists reaffirm that the long term component of GW will be causing a rise in the temperature of the world as time goes on. But Latif, in considering the near term, understands as all the other climatologists understand that the near term climate is dominated by periodic natural changes that go in cycles that are decades long. There are three of them mentioned specifically as the North Atlantic Oscillation (abbrev. NAO), the Pacific Oscillation,and the Sunspot Cycle. All of these cycles are decades long so you will hear them talked about as decadal variations.
Now these decadal variations are superimposed on the long term global temperature rise, and over the near term, these affects dominate. A plot of the NAO can be seen here. Notice that the NAO is no shocking new discovery, and notice that there are
websites set up to show historical and present readings for the NAO. In other words, the decades long natural cycles when viewed over only decades of time or less overwhelm and obscure the unnatural affects of man induced global warming.
In order to improve the performance of his own climate models, Latif is now including some of the decadal affects so the models might be of service to us in the near term. Up until now, the models have been designed for the long term, since it is the long term problems that people have been concerned with. Not surprisingly, Latif has been able to demonstrate that the models now predict the near term much better than before and not surprisingly, the decadal cycles such as the NAO dominate the near term.
Also not surprisingly (just look at the NAO website) the NAO upswing causes an apparent exaggeration in global warming, and then over the next 10 years or so, the NAO downswing will cause an apparent leveling and possibly slight and temporary downturn in global warming.
If you watch the video, you will probably see a lot of climatologists yawning during the presentation because all of them are aware of the near term decadal effects and how they can obscure the systematic rising long term effects.
Again, anyone who thinks this is some lone ranger scientist challenging some kind of orthodoxy is a moron. This is what scientists do every day and it is the reason why you and I are not reading each other's communications on paper by the light of a whale oil lamp. It is the constant challenging of each others work almost daily, followed by refinement and expansion of existing theories that turn whale oil lamps into computers, not orthodox and not dogma.
I invite anyone to read the articles, listen to the audio of the interviews on the BBC Today link I cited, and even watch videos of the conference itself where Latif is simply delivering his latest work to his professional colleagues.
By the way, if anyone still thinks Latif is some lone scientific crusader challenging the orthodoxy, just take look at
his own website and note that Latif is not throwing out the book on climate modeling, he wrote the book.
Also note the list of his
refereed publications. For anyone unfamiliar with how this works, probably every one of these papers is a challenge to the existing state of the art, and how to improve it, or a response to someone else's challenge. This is how science really works, not by orthodoxy but by constant reexamination of one's own work and the work of others, and then publishing it for critical analysis by others in excruciating detail in professional journals.
One more thing, scan the list of his refereed publications and notice how far back in time we go and still see him publishing on decadal variations in climate. Latif has been publishing stuff about this in the professional journals for at least 10 years or more. I would be surprised if there is a professional climatologist who does not know his name and what he has been working on for the past 10 years.