But will it rain tomorrow?

FROM- Climate Science
Comments On A Nature News Article By Olive Heffernan “UK Climate Effects Revealed In Finest Detail Yet”

There is a news article

Heffernan, O, 2009: UK climate effects revealed in finest detail yet. 19 June 2009, Nature, doi:10.1038/news.2009.586, which presents detailed predictions for the United Kingdom in the 2080s. The abstract reads

“Scientists in London yesterday delivered unprecedented regional climate projections for the United Kingdom, detailing how the nation — piece by piece, in sections measuring just 25 square kilometres — will probably be affected by climate change. The projections, which update the findings of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) from 2002, are the first of their kind worldwide.”

See also: UK ‘must plan’ for warmer future [Thanks to Eric Gillies for alerting us to this article].
This study, which has not even been peer reviewed, is an embarrassment to the scientific method; e.g.

Short Circuiting The Scientific Process - A Serious Problem In The Climate Science Community
Nature clearly is using it to promote an agenda. The article includes the text

“Their main message is that without substantial efforts to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions, Britons could be in for a hard time by the 2080s. Although the risk of flooding will worsen in the North West of the country, the South East will face an anticipated 22% decline in summer rainfall. Depending on the rate of future emissions, London could see a temperature increase of between 2°C and 6°C, and as much as a 36-centimetre rise in local sea levels.”

There is some balance in the news article; e.g.

“Originally slated for release in November 2008, the projections were delayed by an independent review commissioned late last year to check the methodology. University of Oxford climatologist Myles Allen, who was on the review committee, worries that the results are ’stretching the ability of current climate science’”,

but the study itself is clearly a subversion of the scientific method. To state that that climate science is being stretched is quite an understatement. There is absolutely no multi-decadal prediction skill on the spatial scales presented in this study.

The scientists who present the viewpoint of skillful multi-decadal regional predictions to policymakers are deliberately and dishonestly misinforming the public and policymakers.



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