2015-07-20

The same mechanism that got past Alberta droughts horribly wrong are invaluable to predict future Alberta droughts

Last week I posted an article about my 2002 prediction for rain, which was 100% accurate (because it always rains during Klondike Days).

During the course of that blogpost I linked to this page about the 2001-2002 drought. My interest for the K-Days rain article was about the economic impacts of the drought.

However, the article (which is "dated" 2015-07-06 but that's probably some silly Perl script just updating when somebody modified a .css file somewhere) does have a section relevent to the hilarious failures of climate models by fraudsters like Michael Mann.

From Christopher Monckton of Brenchly:

As it happens, I had first come across the problem of stimuli occurring not instantaneously but over a term of years when studying the epidemiology of HIV transmission. My then model, adopted by some hospitals in the national health service, overcame the problem by the use of matrix addition, but sensitivity tests showed that assuming a single stimulus all at once produced very little difference compared with the time-smeared stimulus, merely displacing the response by a few years. Similar considerations apply to the climate.

Besides, our model is just that – a model. If Mr Born does not like our values for the fraction of equilibrium temperature response attained after a given period, he is of course free to choose his own values by whatever more complex method he may prefer. But, unless he chooses values that depart a long way from mainstream climate science, the final sensitivities he determines with our simple model will not be vastly different from our own estimates.
From lessons learned about the droughts:
Drought causal factors are not well understood. The large-area atmospheric and oceanic patterns suspected to cause previous major droughts were distinctly different than those associated with these recent droughts. This suggests that a better understanding of the causal factors is needed to reduce our vulnerability by providing early warning.
The risk of drought is greater than previously thought. Indicators of this increased likelihood include the recent knowledge of great decadal droughts before 1900, the increasing societal demands for water and food production, preliminary understanding of drought causal factors, and climate change
Uh, climate change? You mean the kind predicted by the models of large-area atmospheric and oceanic patterns? The same ones you just admitted didn't seem to match reality?

Yeah, go with that.