Climate models “yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change”

As I blogged last year, temperature “predictions” by alleged climate scientists have failed over recent decades to match the measured surface temperature record. “Predictions” from 1990 for example expected a temperature trend of between 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade—a rate that has quite simply failed to materialise.

The record is even worse when compared to the satellite temperature record over the last 33 years—which, unlike the surface measurements, measures temperatures in the upper atmosphere, precisely where the “predictions” say most warming should occur. The thirty-three year temperature update, released in December, shows temperatures well below computer model predictions.

The end of November 2011 completes 33 years of satellite-based global temperature data… Globally averaged, Earth’s atmosphere has warmed about 0.45 Celsius (about 0.82° F) during the almost one-third of a century that sensors aboard NOAA and NASA satellites have measured the temperature of oxygen molecules in the air [explains John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, where the satellite record is recorded and maintained].

This represents a global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978 of just +0.14 C per decade. Says Christy:

   This is at the lower end of computer model projections of how much the atmosphere should have warmed due to the effects of extra greenhouse gases since the first Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) went into service in Earth orbit in late November 1978, according to satellite data processed and archived at UA Huntsville’s ESSC.
    “While 0.45 degrees C of warming is noticeable in climate terms, it isn’t obvious that it represents an impending disaster,” said Christy. “The climate models produce some aspects of the weather reasonably well, but they have yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change in upper air temperatures.” …
    While year-to-year temperature variations measured by the satellite sensors closely match those measured by both surface thermometers and weather balloons, it is the long-term warming trend on which the satellites and the surface thermometers disagree, [Christy’s colleague] Roy Spencer said, with the surface warming faster than the deep layer of the atmosphere. 
    If both instruments are accurate, that means something unexpected is happening in the atmosphere.
    “The satellites should have shown more deep-atmosphere warming than the surface, not less” he said. “Whatever warming or cooling there is should be magnified with height. We believe this is telling us something significant about exactly why the climate system has not warmed as much as expected in recent decades.”

“Something significant” for which climate models are signally unable to account.

Read the whole analysis here.

[Hat tip Jeff Perren]