Archives for May 22, 2008

According to Roger Pielke Sr, the answer is YES. He concludes: Thus the value of global warming of the last 4 years fails to agree with the IPCC projections (the values are not even close!). The agrument that this is too short of a time is spurious unless the modellers can account for where else in their model results the missing Joules went.

Moreover, this is not too short of a time period to compare with the models. Heat, unlike temperature at a single level as used to construct a global average surface temperature trend, is a variable in physics that can be assessed at any time period (i.e. a snapshot) to diagnose the climate system heat content. Temperature not only has a time lag, but a single level represents an insignificant amount of mass within the climate system.

The answer to the question on this weblog “Can the IPCC model projections of global warming be evaluated from just several years of observed data” is YES. The conclusion for the past four years is that the model projections are not skillful on this time period.

Roger Pielke Sr’s Climate Science Weblog: Can The IPCC Model Projections Of Global Warming Be Evaluated From Just Several Years Of Data?

“POLITICIANS seem to think that the science is a done deal,” says Tim Palmer. “I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain.”

Palmer is a leading climate modeller at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change. But he and his fellow climate scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC’s predictions of how the global change will affect local climates are little more than guesswork. They fear that if the IPCC’s predictions turn out to be wrong, it will provoke a crisis in confidence that undermines the whole climate change debate.

On top of this, some climate scientists believe that even the IPCC’s global forecasts leave much to be desired. …

A subscription is required to read the full New Scientist article: Poor forecasting undermines climate debate