What You Won ' t Find in the New National Climate Assessment

Under the  U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990, the federal government has been charged with producing large National Climate Assessments (NCA), and today the most recent iteration has arrived. It is typical of these sorts of documents–much about how the future of mankind is doomed to suffer through i ncreasingly erratic weather and other tribulations. It’s also missing a few tidbits of information that convincingly argue that everything in it with regard to upcoming 21st century climate needs to be taken with a mountain of salt.The projections in the NCA are all based upon climate models. If there is something big that is systematically wrong with them, then the projections aren ’t worth making or believing. Here ’s the first bit of missing information:The chart shows predicted and observed tropical (20 ⁰N-20⁰S) temperatures in the middle of the earth’s active weather zone—technically the mid-troposphere, roughly from 5,000ft to 30,000ft elevation. The predicted values are from the 102 climate model realizations from 32 different base model groups. These models are from the most recent scie nce compendium of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and is the most comprehensive set available. Data for the chart were recentlypublished in theBulleting of the American Meteorological Society.The squares are the average of the three extant datasets for satellite-sensed global temperatures in the same zone, the circles are the average of...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs