Climate Audit

Dave L.

The Met Office is not being straight forward with its new model HadGEM3 — calling it an experimental “decadal” prediction system and claiming that it has better accuracy and reproducibility, but then only releasing a 5 year prediction. From the shape of the model’s 5 year prediction curve, I cannot refrain from speculating that there is an “obvious hide the decline” in the remaining 5 years of the decadal prediction.

Steve: I disagree. I’m quite confident that HadGEM3 extensions will also continued increased temperatures. The question is whether the increases are smaller than HadGEM2, thus less climate sensitivity.

• bmcburney
  Posted Jul 15, 2013 at 1:10 PM | Permalink

  Steve must be right. A GCM which failed to predict rising temps over a ten year period would be more than heretical, it would be an abomination (a thing contra naturam, so to speak).

  Nevertheless, you have to wonder what is going on with that curve and the 5 year prediction. It makes it look as though the Met is actually predicting that the “von Storch test” will result in “failure” (or, which is worse, “re-evaluation”).

  • Steve McIntyre
    Posted Jul 15, 2013 at 1:50 PM | Permalink

    For reader,s the von Storch test was reported by Judy Curry here http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/21/week-in-review-62213/

    SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven’t risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?

    Storch: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We’re facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.

    SPIEGEL: How long will it still be possible to reconcile such a pause in global warming with established climate forecasts?

    Storch: If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.

    • thisisnotgoodtogo
      Posted Jul 15, 2013 at 2:10 PM | Permalink

      Steve, when Storch said it would take 5 years to get to zero model runs, that’s only if it continues to plateau..but it could take a shorter time than 5 years.

      He seems to want to give some breathing room.
      
      Steve: Hmmm… out of 348 CMIP5 runs at KNMI, all but 6 were higher than HadCRUT3 in May and all but 23 higher than HadCRUT4. The differences in the hot runs, as others have observed, are very large.
      

    • Steve McIntyre
      Posted Jul 15, 2013 at 2:37 PM | Permalink

      For anyone interested in directly handling the CMIP5 GLB estimates online at KNMI without the extra handling from Java, here’s a download script:

      test=readLines("http://climexp.knmi.nl/CMIP5/Tglobal/index.cgi?email=someone@somewhere")
      test=test[grep("a href=",test)]
      n=nchar(test)
      id=substr(test,13,n-4)
      work=strsplit(id,">")
      id=sapply(work, function(A) A[[1]])
      
      
      out="d:/climate/data/models/cmip5/GLB"
      setwd(out)
      
      K=length(id)
      for(i in 1:K) {
       loc=paste("http://climexp.knmi.nl/CMIP5/Tglobal/",id[i],sep="")
       download.file (loc,dest)
       work=read.table(dest,skip=3)
       run=ts( c(t(work[,2:13])),start=work[1,1],freq=12)
       locout= gsub("dat","tab",id[i])
       save(run,file= locout)
      }
      

  • mrsean2k
    Posted Jul 16, 2013 at 11:44 AM | Permalink

    Why an additional period of 5 years, other than the fact it gives breathing space for repositioning?

    Why not 3, or 8? What threshold WRT physical processes / empirical evidence will have been breached? Or is it purely rhetorical / psychological?

    Have they, having lost the toss, proposed best out of three?

    • Bill
      Posted Jul 16, 2013 at 7:32 PM | Permalink

      My favorite quote from the last few weeks was that the flattening of temp.’s for 15 years only gave us an extra decade. I’m sure if it stays fairly flat for 20-25 years, it still will give us only another decade …….. 🙂

    • ianl8888
      Posted Jul 16, 2013 at 8:19 PM | Permalink

      My view, based on two quite recent published papers (much to my chagrin, I’ve lost the links), is that the model-assumed “nexus” between modest temperature rises from CO2(x2) of 1 – 1.3C and consequent increases in water vapour (increasing the temp rise to 5 – 6C) simply hasn’t happened

      The papers I refer to here were based on empirical satellite data and concluded that no significant rise in humidity has been observed over the data period (about 30 years)

      So the assumed dangerous amplification hasn’t happened

    • MikeN
      Posted Jul 16, 2013 at 10:54 PM | Permalink

      RealClimate hedged their bets a few years ago, and put up a guest post arguing for a 20 year pause in temperatures, at which point global warming would come back stronger than ever. That post was when I really started to think the ‘global cooling since 1998’ might be true.

William Newman

Thanks for the clear Figure 1. I’ve been curious about this kind of relationship between climate forecast-not-hindcast and observation for some time, e.g.,

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/models-v-observations-ar5-rcp4-5/#comment-117093

and while I can often get the basic idea by eyeballing a mixed-forecast-hindcast graph and using informed guesses at the forecast dates, I seldom get to see it so clearly presented.

None

If the latest model is showing less warming ahead, then this must be manifested within the model as some large scale PHYSICAL process change compared to previous model; energy previously manifesting itself as global warming can not merely have disappeared. According to the model, where has it gone ?

AntonyIndia

Reading the title in thought “Mother” Nature hides the temperature decline from casual observers. Only after reading further I see that you point at the publication Nature busy with their politics as they seem to be doing more and more.

michael hart

Whatever skill the models may display, I might expect such skill to be most in evidence during the initial few years of the predictions, before they leave the rails. The change to 5 year forecast suggests the Met Office thinks so too.

With this in mind, the initial rates of change show a huge difference between 2011 HadCM3 Decadal and 2012 HadGEM3 Decadal. I wonder what the given explanation is?

• oneuniverse
  Posted Jul 16, 2013 at 9:33 AM | Permalink

  Steve, may I ask whether the claim reported in your post above, that the increased computational intensity of the HadGEM3 runs informed the decision to switch from a 10 year to a 5 year forecasts, originated from the Met Office? It reads like it did, but it’s not clear, or substantiated in the Met Office link that follows it.

Ross McKitrick

This includes a comprehensive set of improvements based on the latest scientific understanding.

This is beginning to sound like a shampoo ad.

HadGEM3 has been thoroughly tested and has more accurately reproduced temperature variations over the past few decades,

and it has pro-vitamins!

suggesting it shows greater skill than was available from previous decadal forecast systems.

Way to set the bar low.

Ross McKitrick

The interval between HadGEM2, which was modern enough for use in an IPCC report that hasn’t even been published yet, and the new HadGEM3, is a mere nanosecond in science. Yet it is enough for near-term climate forecasts for drop by an amount comparable to the entire 20th century mean temperature change. And it all happened long after the science was “settled”.

The decadal forecast from Hadley is for the flatlining of the past 15 years to extend another 5 years or more. That puts us past a deadline by which, without serious warming, modelers (not merely von Storch) have said would point to fundamental problems with models, which embed all the main hypotheses of the scientific mainstream on this topic. Hadley is, in effect, predicting a crackup of the mainstream. And this happens just after the meme has been established that 97% of climate scientists are absolutely confident in the models and the science they embed, and 97% of climatology papers endorse the hypotheses. This is going to be good.

• pottereaton
  Posted Jul 17, 2013 at 12:56 PM | Permalink

  They will not admit they are retreating. They will say they are advancing to the rear.

Richard Betts

Hi Steve

Perhaps it would be helpful if I expanded on my twitter response to Anthony Watts asking me about your post. You asked:

Why are forecasts from the computationally-intensive HadGEM3 so much lower than the corresponding forecasts from HadGEM2?

The difficulty is that the question itself is not well-posed, because the HadGEM3 and HadGEM2 ensemble simulations are not “corresponding forecasts”.

[Background note: Both the HadGEM2 and HadGEM3 simulations are ensembles of several simulations with the respective model.]

The HadGEM2 simulations were started from a climatological mean state with near ‘pre-industrial’ (actually 1860) conditions, and then run through the late 19th & 20th Centuries and first few years of the 21st Century with observed changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, aerosols and land use, with the model simulating its own natural internal variability. Since internal variability is unpredictable after a few years, we don’t expect such simulations to capture the specific timing periods of relatively faster or slower warming. This is what I mean by an “uninitialised” simulation – the initial conditions are not for a specific date and/or are so far back in the past that they have no effect on the internal variability simulated by the model.

In contrast, the HadGEM3 5-year simulations were an intialised forecast, initialised with observational data in late 2012.

There are 2 reasons why this difference makes it not useful to compare the 2 simulations over a 5-year period of specific dates (in this case 2012-2017):

1. For any particular 5-year period, HadGEM2 doesn’t ‘know’ what climatic state it should be starting at (eg: 2012 in this case). It’s got it’s own simulated version of the 2012 climate, but we’d never expect that to correspond to the real 2012, due to chaos. Since the mean of the HadGEM2 runs does not include the ‘hiatus’ of the 2000s, the model’s 2012 is warmer than the observed 2012. In contrast, HadGEM3 does ‘know’ the real observed climate of 2012, so it starts at a cooler state than the equivalent portion of the HadGEM2 run.

2. The runs in the HadGEM3 ensemble are all initialised with observational data from 2012 so are simulating internal variability starting from the same conditions. If there is any signal in the internal variability, the different runs should agree to some extent. In contrast, the runs in the HadGEM2 ensemble all have their own individual versions of 2012 and hence their subsequent variability after 2012 will probably be very different. Use of the ensemble mean tends to cancel these out to just give the GHG-forced warming trend over the 5-year period.

So, with HadGEM2 being uninitialised, the ensemble mean starts at a warmer 2012 than in observations and then merely follows a GHG-forced warming trend until 2017, with internal variability in the different runs cancelled out. However HadGEM3 starts at a cooler 2012, as observed, and is able to capture internal variability better.

Hence it’s not at all surprising that 2017 in HadGEM2 started in 1860 is noticeably warmer than in HadGEM3 initialised in 2012.

5-year forecasts could well be dominated by internal variability so don’t particularly tell us anything about the long-term trend. We’ve not yet done future projections with HadGEM3 so don’t know how much warming it will project in the long term.

Incidentally, HadGEM2 was not the only model submitted to CMIP5 / IPCC AR5 by the Met Office. We also submitted initialised forecasts with HadCM3 – see here.

Hope this clarifies my tweet!

Cheers

Richard

• Ross McKitrick
  Posted Jul 22, 2013 at 6:42 PM | Permalink

  Richard, thanks for this. Given chaos, how can HadGEM3 “know” both 1850 and 2012?

  • Richard Betts
    Posted Jul 25, 2013 at 2:33 AM | Permalink

    Hi Ross

    It can’t (not in the sense I meant above). We don’t do initialised forecast runs from 1850 because we don’t have adequate data coverage, especially below the ocean surface – that’s critical for kicking off the model in, say, the right part of the ENSO cycle.

    When I said we start HadGEM2 with near ‘pre-industrial’ conditions, I mean we give it the GHG concentrations for that period and let it find it’s own equilibrium. The model is therefore trying to simulate the climatological state around that time, but not any particular year.

• Steve McIntyre
  Posted Jul 24, 2013 at 10:11 AM | Permalink

  Richard, thanks for commenting, but your comment is not responsive to the main points.

  First, I had taken particular issue with the failure of the Nature article to show the most recent decadal forecast, a forecast which contradicts their headline. I presume that the Met Office was given an opportunity to fact-check the Nature article. If so, the Met Office should have corrected Nature’s omission of the most recent data. If not, the Met Office should have submitted its own comment to Nature pointing out that their most recent decadal forecast had lower results. Your comment??

  Second, HadGEM2 comes in absolute temperatures. In the graphic, it was re-centered on the same centering as the Nature article (which was 1986-2005 following Smith et al.) The divergence comes subsequent to that recentering. Your comment misdirects attention away from this.

  Third, you did not respond on my observation that SMith et al 2012 had also compared “uninitialized” models with initialized models over a time period commencing in 2012. Do you acknowledge that they did precisely the same thing that you criticize me for doing? If not, what is the difference?

  • Richard Betts
    Posted Jul 25, 2013 at 3:05 AM | Permalink

    Hi Steve

    Thanks for your response.

    [SM]: First, I had taken particular issue with the failure of the Nature article to show the most recent decadal forecast, a forecast which contradicts their headline. I presume that the Met Office was given an opportunity to fact-check the Nature article. If so, the Met Office should have corrected Nature’s omission of the most recent data. If not, the Met Office should have submitted its own comment to Nature pointing out that their most recent decadal forecast had lower results. Your comment??

    Well we’d have to ask Jeff Tollefson about his own thinking (I’ll tweet him), but my guess is that he had seen the Met Office research news article pointing out that the 2012 5-year forecast ensemble suggests that:

    [Met Office]: the Earth is expected to maintain the record warmth that has been observed over the last decade, and furthermore a substantial proportion of the forecasts show that new record global temperatures may be reached in the next 5 years.

    and hence he realised that the 2012 forecast does not really make much difference to his story. You’ve shown the mean of the forecast ensemble, but if you look at the range, you’ll see that it overlaps with the range from the earlier forecast.

    [SM]: Second, HadGEM2 comes in absolute temperatures. In the graphic, it was re-centered on the same centering as the Nature article (which was 1986-2005 following Smith et al.) The divergence comes subsequent to that recentering. Your comment misdirects attention away from this.

    This doesn’t affect my argument, in fact it reinforces it. As your figure 1 above shows, the 2012 anomaly relative to the centring period in HadGEM2-ES is still larger than the 2012 anomaly in the observations. Yes, the mean of the HadGEM2-ES ensemble has indeed diverged from observations subsequent to the centring period, because the HadGEM2-ES ensemble does not show the hiatus of the 2000s.

    [SM: Third, you did not respond on my observation that SMith et al 2012 had also compared “uninitialized” models with initialized models over a time period commencing in 2012. Do you acknowledge that they did precisely the same thing that you criticize me for doing? If not, what is the difference?

    Please don’t take my remarks as criticism! In my eyes this is a scientific discussion. But no, Smith et al 2012 are not doing precisely the same thing as you, because they are comparing initialised and uninitialised forecasts over a longer period, enough to make the comparison meaningful. Comparing over just 5 years is not particularly useful, because a period that short is dominated by internal variability in the initialised HadGEM3 forecast, whereas internal variability is not intended to be predicted in the uninitialised HadGEM2 projection. When Smith et al compare over a longer period, they find that the initialised forecast eventually catches up with the long-term trend of the uninitialised run, even though it starts colder.

    So, there is a difference between what you did and what Smith et al did. But as I said, I’m not criticising when I tweeted that you were “wrong” I meant “technically incorrect”, and I tweeted in the spirit of making a scientific comment in response to Anthony’s question. It wasn’t intended to be pejorative. Apologies if this is how it appeared!

    Thanks for the interesting discussion.

    Richard

    • Steve McIntyre
      Posted Jul 25, 2013 at 9:41 AM | Permalink

      Richard,
      My original point remains: according to the ethical and legal standards that apply to businesses, Nature News should have shown the lower values of more recent decadal forecasts. Further the Met Office should have insisted that they do so either in fact checking if they had an opportunity or as a letter to Nature when it came to their attention.

      As to why Tollefson failed to do so, I’ve examined the Met Office article to which you directed me http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/decadal-forecasting and I agree that it is entirely possible that Tollefson drew from this article which nowhere provides a straightforward graphic showing the difference between the HadCM3 and HadGEM3 forecasts. On the contrary, its money graphic in the Conclusions section conceals this difference by focusing on the comparison between older and newer HadCM3 runs – a misdirection that is all too characteristic of climate science advocates. Thus, I advise readers to always watch the pea and this is merely one more example.

      The HadGEM3 decadal forecasts were conspicuously lower than the previous HadCM3 forecasts. That was the difference to which Whitehouse and others had drawn attention and which was invisible in the Nature News article to which I objected. The first graphic in the article showed the HadGEM3 results but did not show the predecessor HadCM3 results. The difference is shown in the graphic below.

      

      Now here is the image accompanying the Conclusions of the Met Office article – the “money” image and the one on which Tollefson appears to have relied, again shown as a blink image. Instead of showing the NEW HadGEM3 decadal forecast against the older forecast, it showed an updated version of HadCM3 and then arm-waved.

      

      When I plotted the newer decadal forecasts on the “money” image, I really had to scratch my head as to the difference. In re-examining the graphic, I could see that the Met Office had changed the comparison to a comparison between older and newer HadCM3 versions. I can see why Tollefson was tricked (TM – climate science) into thinking that there had not been a material change in the decadal forecast: that’s why I urge readers to always watch the pea. Unfortunately, this is merely one more example.

    • Richard Betts
      Posted Jul 25, 2013 at 10:30 AM | Permalink

      Steve

      Not sure if this will come in the right place as I’ve had to hit “reply” from my own post, but this is in response to your post of Jul 25 9:41am

      Well I still don’t think we can draw too many conclusions from a 5-year forecast, since this is dominated by internal variability and doesn’t tell us much about the long-term anthropogenic warming trend. What we really need to see is a 10-year (or longer) HadGEM3 run – this will be done in due course.

      The point of the final figure comparing the two HadCM3 5-year forecasts was to show that simply changing the start date made a difference, in a way which is consistent with the new HadGEM3 run starting in 2012. I don’t understand why you say the figure “changed the comparison to a comparison between older and newer HadCM3 versions”, as none of the previous figures compared HadGEM3 and HadCM3, so there was nothing to change *from*. The figure was clearly labelled as showing 2 HadCM3 runs – I don’t think it’s fair on Tollefson to assume that he can’t read 🙂

      Cheers

      Richard
      
      Steve: the Met Office article to which you linked was dated January 13, 2013 and was issued in response to considerable blog discussion, e.g. Whitehouse at GWPF and Greenpeace columnist Bob Ward. Obviously the Met Office itself did not show the comparison between HadCM3 and HadGEM3 in any diagram, but that’s what had been noticed and was being discussed by everyone else. Indeed, the Met Office’s failure to show the difference – in which Tollefson either wittingly or unwittingly participated – was my point. Only showing the older and more advantageous information would not be acceptable practice for any publicly-traded stock. This is immediately and intuitively clear to any professional in a financial industry. In the financial businesses, anyone who did what you and the Met Office did here would lose credibility – perhaps the most important asset of any business. That you do not see any problem with the sort of sharp practice shown here by the Met Office and Nature News is disappointing. You should have agreed that the article did not clearly show the most recent information and undertaken to ask the party responsible to issue an amendment/correction. Unfortunately, too many people in the climate community share your belief that this sort of sharp practice is acceptable and this diminishes the ability of the public to rely on statements from your community. I’m sorry to be so blunt since you’re a welcome participant here, but I think that you should understand why this sort of answer is perceived as weasely and inadequate.

    • Richard Betts
      Posted Jul 25, 2013 at 2:16 PM | Permalink

      Thanks for sharing your opinion so frankly.

      Why is the older information “more advantageous”?

    • thisisnotgoodtogo
      Posted Jul 25, 2013 at 7:04 PM | Permalink

      The more advantageous version allows for a Nature headline.

    • Richard Betts
      Posted Oct 15, 2013 at 5:37 PM | Permalink

      I’d forgotten about this conversation, but was reminded by being pointed here from another thread.

      It is not correct that the older information is somehow “more advantageous” for the Nature headline of “The forecast for 2018 is cloudy with record heat”. The HadGEM3 forecast still suggests record global mean temperatures in the next few years.

      Leaving aside the fact that the HadGEM3 forecast doesn’t actually extend to 2018 (it’s only for 2013-2017), the average global temperature in that period are still forecast to be most likely above the previous record (0.43C relative to 1971-2000, compared to 0.40C in 1998).

      But more importantly, this is the average over 5 years, and individual years will be warmer or colder than this. Look at the thin blue curve in the plot you have reproduced above – each curve is an individual model simulation (of which there were 10 in all). They wiggle around from year to year, and in some cases they reach an anomaly of around 0.6C relative to 1971-2000.

      The purple line in your figure above is not the forecast for how temperatures are actually expected to evolve – it is the average forecast for each individual year, with the expectation that some years will be above this average and some will be below it.

      So not only is the 5-year average predicted to be most likely above the previous record, some individual years could be well above the previous record.

      Consequently there was no reason to ask Nature to change their headline. The new information from HadGEM3 remains entirely consistent with the idea of record temperatures in the next few years.

    • thisisnotgoodtogo
      Posted Oct 17, 2013 at 12:26 PM | Permalink

      2018 is predicted to set a record?

    • thisisnotgoodtogo
      Posted Oct 17, 2013 at 1:36 PM | Permalink

      Richard, what I’m asking is if your statement indicates that you can be quoted as saying that the prediction is that 2018 will set a new global temp record.

      Can we take that as a firm statement?

    • Richard Betts
      Posted Oct 18, 2013 at 1:38 PM | Permalink

      @thisisnotgoodtogo

      No, there is no prediction specifically for 2018. It is not possible to predict whether any specific year in the future will set a record, only whether the chances of a record are changing over time. In this respect the Nature headline is using a bit of journalistic license, but I think people would realise this (I’m pretty sure Steve does). The issue is whether the newer HadGEM3 forecast still justifies the headline about “record heat” in general, irrespective of whether any specific date is mentioned. I think it does.

    • thisisnotgoodtogo
      Posted Oct 18, 2013 at 4:24 PM | Permalink

      Thank you, Richard Betts.

      It’s then safe to say that you do not support the statement made in the headline.

      Can we also say that The Met Office has never intimated the validity of such a declaration?

      Can we say that it’s total hogwash?

      Can we say that The Met or you, have done anything to have this seeming false attribution to The Met, addressed?

    • thisisnotgoodtogo
      Posted Oct 18, 2013 at 4:31 PM | Permalink

      Richard Betts,

      My understanding is that a record-setting year is, in theory, an open-and-shut case and would refer specifically to going higher than the standing record year’s temp.

      Is the Met or you personally saying that one of the years before 2019 is forecast to be a record-breaker?

      If not, why is the headline not an outright falsehood?

    • thisisnotgoodtogo
      Posted Oct 18, 2013 at 5:10 PM | Permalink

      Richard, Betts,
      Please excuse my need for reformulation. I did read your post, but didn’t respond in kind.

      Maybe this is better:

      Does the Met predict that a new record will be set before 2019?

      If it doesn’t, then to this reader, it means The Met should have a problem with the headline accuracy whether under the interpretation that you provided or whether under a different interpretation.
      As you used Steve as someone who you think should agree logically with your interpretation, you used someone who is cetainly not “Joe Average”.

      Does The Met have a responsibility to address misrepresentation of their material by media, when it comes from a widely-read scientific journal article? I’m referring to possible mandate to self-correct and explain fully to the very end, where there is any different and quite wrong interpretation to be extracted.

      Does this kind of mandate or instruction (for this question I’m presuming one does exist), extend to addressing high profile public misrepresentation by others through “journalistic licence”.

      Personally, I would always assume the headline intends to mean exactly what a responsibly behaving author or editor says!

      Thank you!

  • j ferguson
    Posted Jul 25, 2013 at 11:11 AM | Permalink

    Steve,
    Two peas appear to have found there way into your most recent comment/post

Skiphil

New Nobel laureate denounces Nature and Science mags. as distorting the scientific process, favoring flashy results over sound science:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals

• Skiphil
  Posted Dec 9, 2013 at 8:06 PM | Permalink

  Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

• Speed
  Posted Dec 9, 2013 at 8:33 PM | Permalink

  Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

  Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

  The emeritus professor at Edinburgh university, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers following his groundbreaking work in 1964 which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass.

  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/06/nobel-prize-winner-behind-higgs-boson-says-he-couldnt-get-an-academic-job-today/