Not long ago California was in drought.
Senator Barbara Boxer famously told us, “In California, we can just look out the window to see climate change’s impacts.”
Sorry, Senator, science doesn’t work that way.
Since then, of course, El Niño / La Niña current and weather patterns kept right on naturally doing their thing and California and the West experienced tremendous precipitation and replenished reservoirs from deep snow melt.
Our weather, extreme or otherwise, remains well within the range of historic norms.
According to a NASA study released Monday, climate computer models have been predicting a drier Earth than real-world observations show.
We posted details at CFACT.org:
“NASA and four universities compared climate data from 1995 to 2005 to 23 climate model simulations for the same period. More than 70 percent of the climate models underestimated the amount of rain compared to real world observations.”
Although far from perfect, computer simulations can be very valuable for short-term meteorology, including such important applications as forecasting hurricane tracks.
The climate, however, is incredibly chaotic and complex.
Long-term climate simulations have never come close to being accurate.
Global warming politics makes them worse.
Computer simulations are currently not sufficiently reliable to be the main determinant of energy, economic or climate policy.
They may never be.
Unfortunately, speculative computer modeling has come to totally dominate climate science. There are more references to modeling in the tiny field of climate science than in all the other sciences combined. Truly nuts.
See my http://www.cato.org/blog/climate-modeling-dominates-climate-science.