[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnI3Hp0fJhE]
Both weather and climate models currently do a decent job. Weather can be predicted pretty accurately up to about four days ahead and the broad patterns of global climate are well replicated in climate models. That’s because over past decades a multitude of researchers have tested and refined the models, improving how they represent the atmosphere and oceans and their interaction.
When scientists talk about uncertainties, they are not saying they are clueless. They are saying they have a working explanation of the world which gives a range of answers, usually a usefully narrow range.
While it is true that snow is a thing of the past, I am not so sure about the barbecue summer prediction.
four days ahead
Now that’s funny. Even I can do that.
…but they need a multi-million dollar computer to do it
I can tell you accurately what the weather is right now by looking out the window and/or at the temperature on my car panel. Amazing that weather information, i.e. “the current temp. outside is …”, or “it is currently sunny/cloudy/sunny with cloudy periods ..take your pick” is often wrong. They have foregot how to look out side.
The Guardian’s New Clothes—oversize shoes and a red bulbous nose perhaps? Why do they keep squirting us with that computerized flower?
That’s the best hovercard I have seen yet. Love those wind powered cloud makers!
There is not a single climate model that can reproduce the start or end of a glaciation because no one knows why this cycling happens. Plenty of theories – a sure sign that no one really knows. The weather models do Ok because they use physical dynamics to extrapolate the current weather. The climate models do Ok in a limited sense since they have thousands of adjustable parameters that are twiddled to make them fit the data. All climate models are worthless since we clearly do not understand the basic drivers of climate, otherwise the models would not need all those adjustable parameters and we would understand why the earth has been in this cycle of glaciations for the past 2 million years.
“climate models currently do a decent job” — especially in the Bizarro Universe, where the planets are square and Blue Krytonite is deadly to Super-powered humanoids.
Their models can’t even predict the past! Well, at least they can’t explain the past:
http://thetruthpeddler.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/peak-temperatures-during-earths-present-interglacial-are-cooler-than-during-any-interglacial-of-the-past-half-million-years/
The climate models had no inkling of the infamous well documented warmcold phenomena even two years ago.
On are related note, Steig just got smacked down and exposed as a dishonest fraud by Ryan O’Donnell. Climate Audit and WUWT are carrying the post. The implications of the dishonesty are far reaching. Steig was a reviewer of a paper that critiqued his paper! And the paper still got through! Now Steig is criticizing a part of the paper that as a reviewer, he insisted upon!
Alarmist climate fraud ………exposed.
ClimateGate motto: You scratch my review I’ll scratch yours.
Or is it: One review washes the other?
The Guardian means they do a decent job of propaganda.