All around the globe talkfests have been convened to prepare the world for the forthcoming Olympian summit at Copenhagen. These are supposed to be preliminary events, warm-ups, dry-runs, practices--that sort of thing. But they are not going to plan.
The New Scientist has just reviewed the latest in the genre of choreographed cheer leading: the UN World Climate Conference at Geneva. Fifteen hundred of the world's "top" climate scientists gathered to attempt an orchestrated choral backgrounder for Copenhagen. This is propaganda on a truly global scale. The size, the scale, the effort, the money being expended is breathtaking. One wonders how much of our government extorted tax money is being wasted in NZ's support of UN goebbelism.
But things are not going to plan, exactly. One of the world's "top" modellers (no, not of the catwalk variety) warned the august gathered delegates that it looks likely that the world is going to experience two cold decades. Blast! The pesky climate is not co-operating. You can imagine how that went down like a cup of cold sick.
"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."
Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.
About fifty years ago, economists---purveyors of that dismal science--were pulsating with excitement at the prospect of building econometric models that would accurately predict how economies would work under various inputs. Central bankers and governments around the world were relishing the prospect of being at the doorway to a brave new world. Now the very idea is both embarrassing and laughable.
But the UN is a slow learner. It refuses to be confused with the facts. The Geneva Conference had been convened to enable mankind to take a quantum leap forward in predicting the weather and the climate.
The UN's World Meteorological Organization called the conference in order to draft a global plan for providing "climate services" to the world: that is, to deliver climate predictions useful to everyone from farmers worried about the next rainy season to doctors trying to predict malaria epidemics and builders of dams, roads and other infrastructure who need to assess the risk of floods and droughts 30 years hence.
Get this: the UN wants a climate and weather predictor that will enable skilled and effective planning and management of, well, the world. Did they learn nothing from the disaster of econometrics, these UN planners intent on saving us from ourselves. It would appear not. But irritatingly some of these "top" modellers are confronting the realities. (Their excommunication for heresy awaits.)
But some of the climate scientists gathered in Geneva to discuss how this might be done admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming. "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office.
OK. Have you stopped laughing now. Natural variability is making the models look stupid. That's got to be a bit disconcerting if you are a "top" modeller. Actually, Vicky Pope's claim about the verity of long term predictions is also laughably specious: the only reason they still appear truthful is because the weather and climate realities of fifty years out have not yet blown apart the predictions "certainties". Any "science" that claims verity because its prognostications have not yet been able to be tested should be promptly relegated to science fiction, not science itself.
But give Vicky her due. She is trying to be honest. She clearly has not read the script, admitting that "some" of the recent arctic summer ice loss could be explained by natural variability. One wonders why she made this concession.
Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.OK, got it. It's that hard pesky hard data again.
Moreover, some of the scientists had apparently swallowed candour pills.
In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. "Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.Well, guys, we admire your candour, rueful though it may be. We don't think you have done much to enhance your career prospects, however. Good luck with those. The goebbelistas at the UN an in national governments don't take kindly to pesky scientists who won't stick to their scripts.
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