Climate Data versus Climate Models

Why do climate change assessments overlook the differences between the climate models they use and the empirical data?

The U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990 created something called the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a 13-agency entity charged with conducting, disseminating and assessing scientific research on climate change. Every four years, the program is supposed to produce a “national assessment” of climate change.

[According to the CATO Institute,] the three national assessments suffer from common problems largely related to inadequate climate models and selective scientific citations.

– The most serious problem with the 2013 draft is the failure to address the growing number of recently published findings that suggest that climate sensitivity is much lower than previously estimated.

– The 2009 assessment used a very low significance criterion for the essential precipitation variable.

– The 2000 assessment used models that were the most extreme ones available and had the remarkable quality of generating “anti-information.”

– The second and third assessments suffer from discrepancies between model predictions and actual temperatures.

This discrepancy may be an indication that the “sensitivity” of temperature to carbon dioxide has been estimated to be too high. The absence of these lower estimates in the most recent 2013 draft assessment is a serious omission and, unless it is corrected, will render the report obsolete on the day it is published.

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