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No scholars predicted the global warming hiatus was coming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatu

No scholars predicted the global warming hiatus was coming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus Is there reason to believe that rainfall predictions will be more accurate?

jessaustin 12y ago
Well, this time they've performed controlled experiments, and tied the models to lab-reproducible results, and used validation periods longer than their tuning periods, and the model range includes extreme rainfall points from the fossil record... Oh, wait. Never mind.
estebank 12y ago
From that very link: > "Globally averaged surface temperature has slowed down. I wouldn’t say it's paused. It depends on the datasets you look at. If you look at datasets that include the Arctic, it is clear that global temperatures are still increasing," said Tim Palmer, a co-author of the report and a professor at University of Oxford.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  The Arctic has actually warmed far faster than models predicted. The normal response in science to a model that gets things this badly wrong is, "Hey, that model isn't very accurate!" not "The models were right all along!" The debate about the hiatus is a political debate. "Worse" and "better" are political terms. "Accurate" and "inaccurate" are scientific terms. In scientific terms, the models are not very accurate. Much less accurate than most people appreciate. This does not mean we should now feel free to gather the entire world's supply of hydrocarbon fuels into a big heap in the midst of old-growth rainforest and set it on fire for the purpose of roasting endangered species. AGW is real and a real problem. It just means climate models are not very accurate. Unfortunately they have been sold as being very accurate, which is embarrassing now they are proving not to be. It's even more embarrassing when people point to their horrible accuracy in the Arctic as if it was somehow confirmatory of the model's predictions. That's only even remotely the case if you believe the Earth's climate system is a linear one-dimensional system, so you can meaningfully extrapolate an error into the future. You can't: if you could, we wouldn't need models in the first place.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Historically the Great Plains have been very dry. Well, pre-historically, from a European colonization perspective. There is a history of mega-droughts. If Europeans had arrived in the midst of the thirty-year drought in the 1700's the settlement of the West would have been quite different. So independently of the accuracy of climate models--and the hiatus is a real, non-cherry-picked feature of the Hadcrut data, which was everyone's gold standard until the hiatus showed up in it (http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1460)--there http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1460)--there is very good reason to be concerned about the Great Plains returning to what amounts to historical conditions. This is the general case for policy responses to AGW: climate models don't have to be very accurate (which is good, because they aren't) to justify a modest investment in climate robustness, because our economic systems are finely tuned for the modern climate and we know it isn't going to last. The things that someone who wasn't insane would to to reduce GHG emissions--building nuclear power stations, regulating thermal coal into oblivion, shifting taxes from incomes to carbon emissions, investing in solar and storage--are all things that also either increase economic robustness against climate variations or have other economic benefits (you'd have to be some kind of wealth-hating socialist to want to tax incomes instead of carbon emissions, since incomes are good and carbon emissions are bad, and an externality besides.)
- phaemon 12y ago
  > and the hiatus is a real, non-cherry-picked feature of the Hadcrut data, which was everyone's gold standard until the hiatus showed up in it The problems with HadCRUT4 are known: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract

jessaustin 12y ago

Well, this time they've performed controlled experiments, and tied the models to lab-reproducible results, and used validation periods longer than their tuning periods, and the model range includes extreme rainfall points from the fossil record... Oh, wait. Never mind.

estebank 12y ago

From that very link: > "Globally averaged surface temperature has slowed down. I wouldn’t say it's paused. It depends on the datasets you look at. If you look at datasets that include the Arctic, it is clear that global temperatures are still increasing," said Tim Palmer, a co-author of the report and a professor at University of Oxford.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
The Arctic has actually warmed far faster than models predicted. The normal response in science to a model that gets things this badly wrong is, "Hey, that model isn't very accurate!" not "The models were right all along!" The debate about the hiatus is a political debate. "Worse" and "better" are political terms. "Accurate" and "inaccurate" are scientific terms. In scientific terms, the models are not very accurate. Much less accurate than most people appreciate. This does not mean we should now feel free to gather the entire world's supply of hydrocarbon fuels into a big heap in the midst of old-growth rainforest and set it on fire for the purpose of roasting endangered species. AGW is real and a real problem. It just means climate models are not very accurate. Unfortunately they have been sold as being very accurate, which is embarrassing now they are proving not to be. It's even more embarrassing when people point to their horrible accuracy in the Arctic as if it was somehow confirmatory of the model's predictions. That's only even remotely the case if you believe the Earth's climate system is a linear one-dimensional system, so you can meaningfully extrapolate an error into the future. You can't: if you could, we wouldn't need models in the first place.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

Historically the Great Plains have been very dry. Well, pre-historically, from a European colonization perspective. There is a history of mega-droughts. If Europeans had arrived in the midst of the thirty-year drought in the 1700's the settlement of the West would have been quite different. So independently of the accuracy of climate models--and the hiatus is a real, non-cherry-picked feature of the Hadcrut data, which was everyone's gold standard until the hiatus showed up in it (http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1460)--there http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1460)--there is very good reason to be concerned about the Great Plains returning to what amounts to historical conditions. This is the general case for policy responses to AGW: climate models don't have to be very accurate (which is good, because they aren't) to justify a modest investment in climate robustness, because our economic systems are finely tuned for the modern climate and we know it isn't going to last. The things that someone who wasn't insane would to to reduce GHG emissions--building nuclear power stations, regulating thermal coal into oblivion, shifting taxes from incomes to carbon emissions, investing in solar and storage--are all things that also either increase economic robustness against climate variations or have other economic benefits (you'd have to be some kind of wealth-hating socialist to want to tax incomes instead of carbon emissions, since incomes are good and carbon emissions are bad, and an externality besides.)

phaemon 12y ago
> and the hiatus is a real, non-cherry-picked feature of the Hadcrut data, which was everyone's gold standard until the hiatus showed up in it The problems with HadCRUT4 are known: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract