As Essex and McKitrick (E & M) explain:
“at this moment, and at every moment, there are thousands of active thunderstorms in the hot, moist places of the planet. There are tens of millions of them in any year. It should be clear that this great and constant roar of atmospheric air conditioning is an important part of the global energy budget and should figure significantly into any model of the global climate. However the mighty creature overhead, along with all of its cousins, is too small to show up in even the biggest and grandest global climate models. They are in the jargon of the field, sub grid scale -computerese for” they fall between the cracks.”
The IPCC concede; “The spatial resolution of the coupled ocean-atmosphere models used in the IPCC assessment is generally not high enough to resolve tropical cyclones, and especially to simulate their intensity.”
There’s virtually no data from the vast oceans that dominate the tropics so the IPCC applied parameterization to create data. They use model output as ‘real’ data input for another model. The IPCC comment reveals the speculative nature of the process: “The differences between parameterizations are an important reason why climate model results differ.”
http://drtimball.com/2012/errors-an...te-mechanism-invalidate-ipcc-computer-models/
an important point. the oceans seldom get above 29C. there are negative feedbacks which dump excess heat, one of which is the thunderstorm. not in the climate computer models though.