When sat in a heated and air conditioned office a gradual change to the thermostat of a couple degrees C might not even be noticed. Similarly, an average annual sea level rise of around 17mm doesn't sound particularly worrying.
UK Secretary of State for the Environment, Owen Paterson,from his comments on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Any Questions?' on 7 June 2013 appears to be a believer in many of the arguments put forward by climate change deniers. It is perhaps no surprise that his Department plans major major spending cuts on climate change initiatives.
No surprise that David Rose reporting in Mail on Sunday reported on a leaked copy of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report with the headline World's top climate scientists confess: Global warming is just QUARTER what we thought - and computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong. It also states Scientists accept their computers may have exaggerated as if the computers had minds of their own! A graph is labelled with The catastrophic errors: how 36 of 38 most important climate computers forecast doom that never was.
James Delingpole (who is right about everything) wrote in The Telegraph under the headline 95 per cent of intelligent people know the new IPCC report is utter drivel. No surprises that he states that global warming has paused for 15 years; that climate sensitivity appears to be far smaller than the scaremongering computer models predicted a common but misleading argument explained in The global temperature jigsaw.
Fortunately, Nick Collins, a Science Correspondent for The Telegraph produced a better balanced news report under the headline IPCC report: global warming is 'unequivocal' although someone, presumably a sub-editor, decided that unequivocal in the headline needed quotes.
The Guardian has a special section under Environment dedicated to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is a reliable source of news.
The Executive Summary in Chapter 9 - Evaluation of Climate Models states The ability of climate models to simulate surface temperature has improved in many, though not all, important aspects relative to the generation of models assessed in the AR4. There continues to be very high confidence that models reproduce observed large-scale mean surface temperature patterns (pattern correlation of ~0.99), though systematic errors of several degrees are found in some regions, particularly over high topography, near the ice edge in the North Atlantic, and over regions of ocean upwelling near the equator.
FAQ 9.1 in Chapter 9 - Evaluation of Climate Models states So, yes, climate models are getting better, and we can demonstrate this with quantitative performance metrics based on historical observations.
Broadly speaking, climate models are getting better and recent change in global temperatures reflect the predictions of climate models for almost all regions.
Great post. As climate models are getting better at projecting what might happen a great deal of our politicians and media seem firmly stuck in inflexible ways of thinking. Unwilling to do much else it seems apart from name call.
ReplyDeleteIf we are going to survive climate change we need people who are able to think more creatively and reflexively about what is happening.