Want to raise the blood pressure of an entire region? If you’re within a few hundred miles of Washington DC, just say “snow” to a TV camera. But if you’re more interested in planetary hypertension, simply substitute the words “global warming”.

It turns out that the forecasting methods for both snow and global warming are quite similar. And what happened with the Mid-Atlantic snowstorm of February 28 tells us much about the climate of the next 100 years.
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In the face of evidence resulting from their own research, some scientists refuse to abandon their preconceived idea: that computer-based climate models reliably forecast future climate.

We’ve come across research published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, the title of which pushes the limits of scientific acceptability: “Forty-five years of observed moisture in the Ukraine: No summer desiccation (yet).” It appears we have now entered a phase of the global climate change debate wherein scientists begin to trumpet their personal bias even if it runs contrary to evidence compiled by the scientific entity they represent or, even more astounding, if it runs counter to research results they themselves produce!
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Will future hurricanes will be stronger in a greenhouse-gas warmed world? A new climate model says yes, but (as usual) the observations suggest otherwise.

With all the hurricane activity as of late—both in the Atlantic Ocean and in the U.S. media—we’re starting to hear rumblings conflating hurricanes and global warming. Renowned hurricane experts say that notion is unfounded, given actual observations.
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Though the new U.S. Climate Change Science Program report concedes numerous climate modeling unknowns, a New York Times editorial misrepresents it as a “striking shift” by the Bush Administration.

Well, you can’t fault the New York Times for trying—that is, trying to move its global warming agenda forward by any means necessary. On August 26, a routine federal report on climate change research was hailed as “a striking shift” of the Bush Administration, and then used as the basis for a masthead editorial August 27 calling for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

In reality, the report, Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005 (OCP ) resembles a jillion other climate reports with interminable titles emanating from our Washington agencies. University faculty mailboxes groan with this overload. (Whatever became of the paperless office, we ask?)
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It’s increasingly difficult to keep a straight face while reading any global warming paper in a major scientific journal. Even by this standard, a recent article on deaths in California and destruction of its wine industry (of course, because of dreaded global warming) is a true belly-slapper.

The fact that it appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is a lot less funny. What on earth is happening to the peer-review process in science, and how are papers this bad getting through that process?
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Climate models generally depict global temperatures changes as smooth, nearly linear increases, in accordance with the relatively smooth increase in climate forcing agents. But real world observations show that climate change is not quite that well-behaved.
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Climate models are not capable of identifying the daily temperature range—as yet another new study demonstrates. So why are the world’s leaders willing to put so much stock into these models’ predictions of our future climate?

Climate models are unable to replicate the observed behavior in the patterns of changes in the daily temperature range. Instead, the models warm daily high temperatures too fast—probably because they don’t account properly for cloud dynamics.
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“Scientific research based on fact—not ideology.” That’s what Democratic hopeful John Kerry is promising. But there are some pertinent facts about global warming that Kerry will probably ignore.

Kerry has recently attacked President Bush’s record on science, including his actions on the issue of climate change. He accuses Bush of underplaying the threats climate change poses and the role humans play in it, and ignoring the scientific consensus on the issue.

Yet if Kerry his true to his word, it will only be a matter of time before Kerry stands alongside the President on the issue of anthropogenic climate change—for scientific facts stand in stark contrast to the climate-change-is-catastrophic ideology.
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Global climate models cannot predict impacts for even large regions accurately; yet a new study uses them to forecast a 30% drop in winter precipitation for California alone due to Arctic ice melt.

Time and time again, researchers publish papers that use global climate model output at the regional scale to make august pronouncements about our dire future. Yet, as we recently pointed out, scientists were quoted in Nature as saying “privately” that regional climate models—those applied to areas as big as, say, the lower 48 states—were “oversold.”
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The prestigious science journal Nature concurrently runs an article promising total melting of Greenland’s ice (applying climate models to this region) and another on how it is “next to impossible” to do accurate regional modeling.

Without acknowledging the incongruity, Nature’s editors include in their April 8, 2004, edition an article that relies on climate models to forecast certain elimination of Greenland’s ice-sheet a thousand years from now and another in which climate scientists say climate models applied at the regional level are not yet able “to predict what will happen in the next 20 years.”
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