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August 17, 2007

Global climate models fail yet another reality check

Marc Sheppard
Once again, computer-driven climate simulations have fallen short when measured against real-world scientific observations. That's right -- the very same climate models, on which  warming "experts" the likes of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and NASA's GISS base their catastrophic projections, have proven utterly unreliable once more.

In a piece entitled Trouble in Climate-Model Paradise, Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso, writing in  CO2 Science, tell the fascinating story of a recent attempt to harmonize the model / reality relationship that, instead, yielded "embarrassing results" for the researchers.

The mission was to verify an accepted prediction by the esteemed Coupled Model Intercomparison Project and others that for every degree centigrade of surface global warming, precipitation would increase by between 1 and 3%:
"Hence, they decided to see what has happened in the real world in this regard over the last 19 years (1987-2006) of supposedly unprecedented global warming, when data from the Global Historical Climatology Network and satellite measurements of the lower troposphere have indicated a global temperature rise on the order of 0.20°C per decade."
What they found by marrying satellite observations with rain gauge measurements was an actual precipitation increase of 7% per degree C [emphasis added],
"which is somewhere between 2.3 and 7 times larger than what is predicted by state-of-the-art climate models."
Baffled by the sheer magnitude of the inconsistency, researcher F. J. Wentz and company attempted to reconcile it to global wind speed variations.  They failed, forcing them to admit that,
"the reason for the discrepancy between the observational data and the GCMs is not clear."
Wentz confessed that the disparity his team discovered between the actions of nature and those of virtual simulations "has enormous impact."

The Doctors Idso agreed, adding:
"And until these ‘enormous impact questions' are settled, we wonder how anyone could conceivably think of acting upon the global energy policy prescriptions of the likes of Al Gore and James Hansen, who speak and write as if there was little more to do in the realm of climate-change prediction than a bit of fine-tuning."
Sadly, I don't wonder at all.

Hat Tip: Benny Peiser

Posted at 03:08 PM | Email | | Share Share
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