RW said on Models, On – and Off – the Catwalk – Part Three July 6, 2011 at 10:54 pm

In response to scienceofdoom on July 3, 2011 at 12:07 pm:

In Frontiers of Climate Modeling, Jeffrey Kiehl says: The study of the Earth’s climate system is motivated by the desire to understand the processes that determine the state of the climate and the possible ways in which this state may have changed in the past or may change in the future.. Earth’s climate system is [...]

Frank,

To the best of my knowledge, the models don’t predict any aspects of the seasonal cycle.

As far as the halving of the 3.7 W/m^2, I suggest you do some research on that before you assume it isn’t true. Even some of the AGW believers at skeptical science (and even one of the authors) believes it is halved – they just think the 3.7 W/m^2 represents to downward half and 7.4 W/m^2 is the incremental absorption or the reduction in ‘window’ transmittance.

BTW, the most important graphs are the last two that show as the energy in each hemisphere from the Sun increases the gain decreases and vice versa. This is exact opposite behavior predicted by the climate models. All he’s really doing there is plotting measured data to see how the system responds to changes in radiative forcing – changes far greater than what would come from the doubling of CO2.

Badger, that guy is a walking advertisment for psuedo-scientific bafflegab. He's talking out of his arse. Models don't do seasonal cycles, and then they do seasonal cycles, but around the wrong way? Can't he make his mind up? 

It would depend on the time resolution of the model I would presume.

If you were modeling hundreds of millions of years, or just a few milion, it would be questionable if you would bother what happened in an individual year. If you modeled a few centuries or milenia then you might go down to months or days in time resolution.

The issue I would imagine is whether it is nessacery to model seasons, not whether it was left out due to a mistake or technical issues.

That's how I would consider the issue if I were building a model.

Added: Is the question that there is uncertainty about if the earths tilt is modeled in climate models?? That would be the only thing that would be an input for modeling seasons.

I encourage both of you to post rebuttals to RA on the SoD comment thread. Rabett has done so. i have done so.