A new article on the problems with the theory of man made global warming...
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/13/junk-science-week-climate-models-fail-reality-test/
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/13/junk-science-week-climate-models-fail-reality-test/
Junk Science Week: Climate models fail reality test
This reminded me of a presentation I’d seen years earlier about predicted changes in U.S. rainfall patterns under global warming. The two models being used for a government report again made diametrically opposite predictions. In region after region, if one model predicted a tendency toward more flooding, the other tended to predict drying.
Just how good are climate models at predicting regional patterns of climate change? I had occasion to survey this literature as part of a recently completed research project on the subject. The simple summary is that, with few exceptions, climate models not only fail to do better than random numbers, in some cases they are actually worse.
There are two reasons why this is important. First, it tells us something about our lack of understanding of the climate.
Second, when policymakers and scientists think about climate change, they are usually not interested in abstract global averages but in potential changes where people actually live, namely at the local level. To say anything meaningful about this requires models that make valid regional predictions.
We already had a clue that something is wrong with spatial details in climate models. Due to the water-vapour feedback, models predict rapid, amplified warming in the troposphere over the tropics. But data collected by weather balloons and satellites fail to show this, and the discrepancy between models and observations is statistically significant.
So how do models do at predicting the spatial pattern of warming over land? Though the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) devoted a whole chapter to model evaluation, it said almost nothing about this question. The IPCC talked mainly about static features, such as whether the model can make the tropics hot and poles cold, and so forth. But it was mostly silent on the spatial changes. A 2008 report of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program went a bit deeper, but only to report on tests of how daily and seasonal variations in models matched the real world (is winter a suitable amount colder than summer, etc.).