[Response: First off, he is confusing models that include the carbon cycle with those that have been used
in hindcasts of the 20th Century and are the basis of the detection and attribution of current climate change.
Uncertainty is propagated forward in time by assuming that the fractional error found in model
hindcasts of global mean temperature change will remain constant in projections of future changes.
The retrospective investigation consists of a model
hindcast for more than a half century using «reality - based» atmospheric forcing to drive the model.
Temporal evolution for three - year - mean anomalies of SLP (contoured) and total water storage (shaded; units are mm) in CTL and the ensemble mean of
hindcast run initialized in 240.
Well, the focus was on a 20y forecast, since that is the amount of data we now have for validation, but yes, we tried a range of different
hindcast periods for fitting the trend and for averaging for the sake of persistence - up to 30y, IIRC.
Even that least - case scenario is easily refuted
by hindcasting back to 1985 when GEOSAT was launched.
The present parameters do
not hindcast with enough accuracy to forcast with any confidence.
For reference, where is the GISS model
hindcast from 1950 onwards you're comparing this with?
For a very long
hindcast interval, you can't fit many instances into the data (and they all overlap, so are not independent).
Decadal
hindcast simulations of Arctic Ocean sea ice thickness made by a modern dynamic - thermodynamic sea ice model and forced independently by both the ERA - 40 and NCEP / NCAR reanalysis data sets are compared for the first time.
Using a total of 39 initial conditions chosen every five years on January 1st, we conduct 10 - year - long
ensemble hindcast experiments.
As I have noted from time to time, these interactions are frequently used to
tune hindcasts so that a better representation of the past response of the Earth's climate systems is obtained.
Finally, moving to the atmospheric response to the AMOC slowdown, you might want to be more careful and also quote other studies (including analyses of
decadal hindcast experiments) that do not find a strong or robust atmospheric response to the AMO SST pattern.
The
DePreSys hindcast starting from June 1985 correctly predicted a rapid warming during the transition from the weak La Niña of 1985 to the El Niño of 1986 1987 and correctly predicted the warming trend throughout the period until the eruption of Mount Pinatubo.
2) The models are run in different modes — either as an initial value problem (such as for a weather forecast), or as a boundary value problem (say a 2xCO2 climate, or a
historical hindcast).