UKMO Lowers 5-Year Global Temperature Forecast and Omits the Second 5 Years of the Decadal Forecast

UPDATE: I’ve added global surface temperature model-data comparisons to the end of the post.

UPDATE 2: In his January 7, 2013 at 11:36 am comment at Tallbloke’sTalkshop, Richard Betts of the UKMO clarified which model they now use for the short-term forecasts. It’s HADGEM3, not HADGEM2 that I presented in the first Update.

UPDATE 3:  Considering all of the recent discussions of precipitation for the UK and U.S., another post that may interest you is one I prepared on Wednesday, January 9th–Satellite-Era Model-Data Precipitation Comparison for the UK and US.

UPDATE 4: My apologies to Richard (“duwayne”) Smith. I failed to acknowledge him as the first person to discover and comment on the new UKMO decadal forecast. Thanks for the find, Richard. (And thanks for the link, DR.)

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Tallbloke presented the recent update to the UKMO decadal forecast in his post Major change in UK Met Office global warming forecast. Figure 1 is a gif animation comparing last year’s forecast to the newer one. The UKMO has lowered their short-term (5-year) forecast from a global temperature anomaly (relative to 1971-2000) from 0.54 deg C (90% confidence range of 0.36 °C and 0.72 °C) to 0.43 deg C (90% confidence range of 0.28 °C and 0.59 °C). They describe the change in forecasts as:

During 2012 our decadal prediction system was upgraded to use the latest version of our coupled climate model. The forecasts and retrospective forecasts shown here have been updated to reflect this change.

Additionally, the UKMO has failed to include the second portion (years 6 to 10) of their “decadal” predictions, even though the webpage is titled “Decadal Forecast”. They must not have too much confidence in the 90% confidence range.

Figure 1

The current version of the UKMO’s Decadal Forecast is here. The WaybackMachine (beta version) captured two of the earlier versions, which presented last year’s decadal forecast and a mid-year update. I’m surprised we hadn’t seen numerous blog posts about the UKMO forecast webpage from last year. (If there were posts that presented the following, please send me a link and I’ll add them here.)

TIME-SERIES GRAPHS

Tallbloke had eliminated the past decadal hindcasts/forecasts, which had been provided in red, see Figures 2 and 3, but I found them quite telling. The current values had been near the lower boundary of the most recent 90% confidence range, and looking at the multi-model mean, they were well below it.

Figure 2

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Figure 3

They recent version of the less-than-decadal forecast is shown in Figure 4. Not too surprisingly, the current hindcasts/forecasts, based on the recent models, (seem to) better capture the ENSO (El Niño and La Niña)- and volcano-related variations in temperature.

Figure 4

VERIFICATION MAPS

The most telling illustrations, however, were the maps under the heading of “Verification.” See Figures 5 and 6 for the older 5-year model-data comparisons. They showed (with stippling) that the sea surface temperatures for much of the global oceans and a good portion of the land surface temperatures were outside 5-95% confidence levels. The performances of the earlier forecasts were so poor they lightened the stippling.

Figure 5

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Figure 6

With the recent version, Figure 7, the 5-year forecast better captures the recent 5-years of observations. Note the stronger stippling.

Figure 7

UKMO STILL PROMOTING MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE

There are two words very obviously missing from the UKMO Decadal Forecast webpage: manmade and anthropogenic. But they do imply a distinction between a warming caused by Mother Nature and one caused by man. They write in their opening note:

Predictions account for natural variability and climate change as these are expected to be of similar size in many places.

Yet there is nothing in the satellite-era sea surface temperature records and the ocean heat content data since 1955 to indicate manmade greenhouse gases had any role in their warming. And that leads to…

SHAMELESS PLUG – INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE EL NIÑO AND LA NIÑA AND THEIR LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON GLOBAL SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES?

Sea surface temperature records indicate El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the warming of global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years, not manmade greenhouse gases. I’ve searched sea surface temperature records for more than 4 years, and I can find no evidence of an anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal. That is, the warming of the global oceans has been caused by Mother Nature, not anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

I’ve recently published my e-book (pdf) about the phenomena called El Niño and La Niña. It’s titled Who Turned on the Heat? with the subtitle The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña events and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 30 years. Because land surface air temperatures simply exaggerate the natural warming of the global oceans over annual and multidecadal time periods, the vast majority of the warming taking place on land is natural as well. The book is the product of years of research of the satellite-era sea surface temperature data that’s available to the public via the internet. It presents how the data accounts for its warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all.

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VIDEOS

For those who’d like a more detailed preview of Who Turned on the Heat?, see Parts 1 and 2 of the video series The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans. You may also be interested in the video Dear President Obama: A Video Memo about Climate Change.

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 In his January 7, 2013 at 11:36 am comment at Tallbloke’sTalkshop, Richard Betts of the UKMO clarified which model they now use for the short-term forecasts. It’s HADGEM3, not HADGEM2 that I presented in the following.

MODEL-DATA COMPARISONS

The climate models recently uploaded to the CMIP5 archive will be used in the IPCC’s upcoming 5^th Assessment Report (AR5). They are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer here. Included in the archive are the UKMO HadGEM2 family of models. The UKMO does not specify which of the scenarios (RCP2.6 or RCP4.5, both of which included 4 ensemble members) they used for their most recent decadal forecasts, so I plotted both, extending mine out for the full decade into the future. Curiously, even though I used the same base years for anomalies (1971-2000) as the UKMO, the outputs of the models (Figures 8 and 9) do not resemble what the UKMO has presented.

Figure 8

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Figure 9

Refer also to the longer-term hindcasts in Figures 10 and 11.

Figure 10

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Figure 11