NIPCC’s flagship publication criticizing climate science methodology cites Sen Gupta et. al. (2012), who write that “flux adjustments are nonphysical and therefore inherently undesirable... [and] may also fundamentally alter the evolution of a transient climate response.[1]” Even the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report acknowledges that flux adjustments are “essentially empirical corrections that could not be justified on physical principles, and that consisted of arbitrary additions of surface fluxes of heat and salinity in order to prevent the drift of the simulated climate away from a realistic state.[2]”
What does it mean to say that flux adjustments are “non-physical?” How do we know that such adjustments shift the climate system away from a “realistic state?” It seems that the most plausible answer to this question is that, in contrast to the other components of climate simulations, the flux adjustment fails to correspond directly with quantities in the system being modeled. That is, while the parameters for (say) cloud cover, greenhouse gas concentration, and insolation correspond rather straightforwardly to real aspects of the global climate, the action of the flux adjustment seems more like an ad hoc “fudge factor” with no physical correspondence. The most forceful way of phrasing the concern suggests that by manipulating the parameterization of a flux adjustment, a disingenuous climate modeler might easily craft the output of the model to suit his biases or political agenda.
Is the inclusion of a flux adjustment truly ad hoc, though? Careful consideration of what we’ve seen so far suggests that it is not. Recall the fact that the patterns associated with coarse-grained climate sensitivity have been well-described since (at least) Arrhenius’ work in
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