Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Head of climate science advice at the Met Office: "there is no way to provide an accurate prediction of the future"

Beyond climategate: can we keep the politics and science of climate forecasting separate? - The Ecologist

[Vicky Pope, head of climate science advice at the Met Office] ‘These are projections – there is no way to provide an accurate prediction of the future – and their goal and that of climate science is to produce a risk assessment of what the science is telling us about how the climate will change. It is up to politicians and society to decide on a response. Our role is simply to supply objective evidence and to represent the uncertainty inherent in the scientific process. It isn’t a question of right and wrong, but of trying to give a balanced assessment of what is certain and uncertain.’

4 comments:

Harry Dale Huffman said...

"There is no accurate prediction" = There is no climate science.

She is sorry about that, I hope.

Anonymous said...

No, no, Harry. There is climate science. It's just that they are now acknowledging how difficult it really is to predict. To obtain the desired precision, they will simply need money. Lots and lots of money. Harumph, harumph, harumph.

Anonymous said...

The Met Office has also confirmed that snow is caused by cold not warm moist air.

Perhaps they forgot to ask Kevin for permission to contradict his theory.

http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/uk-winter-forecast-from-the-met-office/

DougCotton said...

Trends of best bit for the NASA sea surface data are curved (roughly sinusoidal) and have now passed their maxima - see two such plots here

Such trends certainly cannot be assumed to be about to turn upwards. The most likely event seems to be level or slightly declining temperatures until about 2028, then some small rise for 30 years, probably not much above 1999-2000 levels, then possibly long term cooling if there is any validity in apparent natural cycles.

There is no valid theory supporting necessary warming caused by carbon dioxide. Indeed, greenhouse gas molecules help to radiate away the thermal energy, thus cooling the atmosphere which would be a lot hotter if it were only oxygen and nitrogen.