Yes MOST Models Run Hot

... or, "Just what the world needs, another CMIP vs. Observation blog post".

Background

Arguments vary; this one touches on some of the common ones:

Peer-reviewed pocket-calculator climate model exposes serious errors in complex computer models and reveals that Man’s influence on the climate is negligible

Anthony Watts / January 16, 2015   

What went wrong?

A major peer-reviewed climate physics paper in the first issue (January 2015: vol. 60 no. 1) of the prestigious Science Bulletin (formerly Chinese Science Bulletin), the journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, as the Orient’s equivalent of Science or Nature, one of the world’s top six learned journals of science, exposes elementary but serious errors in the general-circulation models relied on by the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC. The errors were the reason for concern about Man’s effect on climate. Without them, there is no climate crisis.

Thanks to the generosity of the Heartland Institute, the paper is open-access. It may be downloaded free from http://www.scibull.com:8080/EN/abstract/abstract509579.shtml. Click on “PDF” just above the abstract.

That link is now broken; fear not, co-author Briggs generously hosts the paper for us ...

On Competing Mechanisms for the Observed Temperature Gradients Between Surface and Upper Air

... or in other words, is it the purported longwave radiative gradient due to water vapour, CO2, methane, and other so-called greenhouse gasses?  Or something else?  Is the "greenhouse" effect real, but presently saturated at present levels of GHG atmospheric concentrations?  Or is the planet self-regulating to an extent that climate sensitivity to increased CO2 concentration is smaller than the present IPCC-published range of 1.5-4.5 K/2xCO2?

I promise only strong and (sometimes) well-argued opinions, no definitive answers.

Earth's Energy Balance as Seen in Ocean Heat Uptake

 ... or, "is it plausible that the 'missing heat' has gone deeper than 2 km?"

Background

What follows is a post from WUWT in response to Chic Bowdrie about a number of different things which I reproduce here in full mainly because of the number-crunching I do to justify at least a portion of various energy imbalance estimates seen in the likes of papers such as:


Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl (2009), Earth's Global Energy Budget
Stephens et al. (2012), An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations