Climate recantation: IPCC models don't predict and are unscientific

Of course, his tail-covering assertion that the IPCC doesn't make climate predictions or forecasts anyway has to be taken with a grain of salt. In a paper being presented at the 27th International Symposium on Forecasting in New York this week, Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green audit the relevant chapter in the IPCC's latest report. They find that "in apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides 'projections' and not 'forecasts', the word 'forecast' and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and 'predict' and its derivatives occur 90 times" in the chapter.

Strange that the public has this misimpression that the IPCC predicts future climate, isn't it?

Having analysed the IPCC's approach in detail, Armstrong and Kesten conclude that "because the forecasting processes ... overlook scientific evidence on forecasting, the IPCC forecasts of climate change are not scientific".

Like Trenberth's advice, this also may well be news to some people.

In a third devastating blow to the credibility of climate forecasting, a lead author of the IPCC Working Group 1 science report, Jim Renwick, recently admitted "climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well".

Renwick was responding to an audit showing the climate forecasts issued by New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmosphere were accurate only 48 per cent of the time.

In other words, one can do just as well by tossing a coin.

These various criticisms of climate modelling can be summed up in the following statement - there is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified. Yet Australia has an Opposition and a Government that profess to set their climate policies on the basis of IPCC advice. Both also seem determined to impose an inefficient, ineffective and costly carbon trading or taxation system on the economy, for the aspirational absurdity of "stopping climate change".

Perhaps someone should tell Prime Minister John Howard that dangerous global warming has been called off.