North Atlantic Oscillation
From Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group News, very much worth your time to read. I think it is fair to say Dr Henderson-Sellers has been a long term supporter of the IPCC and it is stunning news that she is publishing her reservations.
Contrast this with the evangelical certainty of the Rudd Government (Australia) rushing policy to save the planet, at colossal cost to all Australians. For what benefit ? I would say zero measurable effect on global climate.
The source article on the Pielke site includes:
The rush to emphasize regional climate does not have a scientifically sound basis
Until and unless major oscillations in the Earth System (El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) etc.) can be predicted to the extent that they are predictable, regional climate is not a well defined problem. It may never be. If that is the case then we should say so. It is not just the forecast but the confidence and uncertainty that are just as much a key.
Climate models need to be exercised for weather prediction; there are necessary but not sufficient things that can best be tested in this framework, which is just beginning to be exploited.
Energy budget is really worrisome; we should have had 20 years of ERBE [Earth Radiation Budget Experiment] type data by now- this would have told us about cloud feedback and climate sensitivity. I’m worried that we’ll never have a reliable long-term measurement. This combined with accurate ocean heat uptake data would really help constrain the big-picture climate change outcome, and then we can work on the details.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=474)
I think this is true for climate in general. Getting the temperature trend is meaningless without getting the regional climate correct. There are an infinite number of models that will get the temperature trend correct but the global temperature map wrong, but only one that gets both right. After all, there has been at least one climate model that got trends correct but would make the Pacific Ocean freeze at the equator.
A second point about the oscillations. The modelers seem to treat them as “noise” that’s averaged out by climate. It’s hard to understand that attitude when ENSO is known to have existed for at least 300 years, probably much longer. That’s a signal not noise.
Crikey Warwick, I thought you’d died in Canberra (its living there that does it). Welcome back to the Internet!