A ridiculous paper on the uncertainty of climate models is under post-publication review at peerpub.com

What drives me more nuts is why everyone is trying to correct what a blithering idiot (P. Frank) is advancing instead of just solving the differential equations and modeling the climate variability. Does everyone think we will actually make any progress by correcting the poor sod’s freshman homework assignment?

Instead, let’s get going and finish off the tidal model of ENSO. That will do more than anything else to quash the endless discussion over how much natural climate variability is acceptable to be able to discern an AGW trend.

Recently two atmospheric scientists from The Ohio State University published a paper called Switch Between El Nino and La Nina is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing in Scientific Reports. This is the path forward that they recommend:

“Our findings suggest two possible ways to improve the current ENSO forecasts: (1) Adding the subsurface ocean wave to statistical ENSO forecast models and improving its representation in CGCMs, which may lead to an improvement of the 12-month ENSO forecast. Right now, none of the statistical models considers the subsurface ocean wave. In fact, the only two ENSO forecast models that can make good 12-month forecast, the NASA GMAO model and GFDL FLOR model (Supplementary Fig. 2), are assimilating carefully subsurface temperature. (2) Adding lunar tidal forcing to statistical models and CGCMs may provide important long-range predictability. Currently, the ocean-atmosphere coupled runs of climate models, such as the IPCC models historical runs and projection runs, are called “free runs” and are not expected to capture the timing of ENSO events in the real world. Adding lunar tidal forcing may help to simulate the correct timing of ENSO events, in addition to improving the simulated oscillation period and amplitude of ENSO. Recently, the ocean modelling community show strong interest in lunar tidal forcing because there are more and more evidences that tidal mixing plays a key role in global ocean circulation. “

We already have all this done via an analytical solution to Laplace’s Tidal Equations along the equator. This is described in several places:

• In Chapter 12 of our book : https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119434351.ch12
• In this ContextEarth blog which you are reading and which describes much of the effort leading up to the book
• In the more recent GeoEnergyMath blog, which continues with cross-validation of the book’s findings
• In the Azimuth Project forum thread, which is an ongoing discussion started by a group of scientists that actually wanted to understand ENSO.
• Twitter https://twitter.com/WHUT

So much effort is being expended in battling the purveyors of FUD instead of buckling down and getting to work validating the solution and forced response to these straightforward equations.