Good Grief: Warmists Now Blame Difficulty In Predicting Storm Tracks On ‘Climate Change’

by William Teach | September 1, 2016 8:25 am

Let’s review: after the huge storm season of 2005, members of the Cult of Climastrology said it would be the new normal. Then, landfalling storms (tropical depressions, tropical storms, and full hurricanes) dried up almost immediately. They then stated that storms would be fewer but stronger. There’s been zero category 3 hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. since October, 2005, and few in the Caribbean and Mexico. So then we were told that anthropogenic climate change was causing this, but doom is right around the corner! They blamed Superstorm Sandy on AGW, and said there would be more coming. Nope. It’s always a prognostication followed by excuses as to why it failed, further followed by a prognostication of future doom. They haven’t been particularly good on this prediction, eh?

They’ve further stated that ‘climate change’ will cause all sorts of different weather in different places. More flooding, more drought, tornadoes, snow, etc and so on. Their predictions have been less than stellar. Remember all the calls that snow will be a thing of the past? That droughts will be the new normal, which are then soon replaced by a return to the normal weather or even wetter?

Which leads to

Climate change ‘tug of war’ keeps scientists guessing on storm tracks[1]

Storm tracks—regions where storms travel from west to east across oceans and continents driven by the prevailing jet stream—determine weather and climate in middle-latitude places like Chicago and New York.

“Changes in the position of storm tracks in response to anthropogenic climate change depend on how the equator-to-pole temperature gradient will change, and among the various factors affecting this gradient, cloud changes stand out as one of the important pieces of the puzzle,” said Tiffany S. Shaw, assistant professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. She is the lead author of “Storm track processes and the opposing influences of climate change,” a review of the latest research and current knowledge that was published Aug. 29 in Nature Geoscience.

In idealized and comprehensive climate model simulations, warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere leads the clouds in high latitudes to reflect more solar radiation, thereby cooling the earth’s surface in those regions and increasing the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles. In insolation (the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface) this would lead to a poleward shift of the storm tracks. Meanwhile, those same clouds tend to enhance the greenhouse effect, thereby warming the Earth’s surface in those same regions and decreasing the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles, producing an opposite shift (also, in insolation).

Ah. Computer models. They’ve worked so well. But, hey, let me ask: how have weather predictions worked out for, basically, forever? How often are meteorologists wrong? Take a look at your 10 day forecast, and see how it matches up with what actually happens. While it’s certainly better than 50 years ago, it’s certainly not perfect. Heck, look at predictions of tropical storms. Yesterday, the center track for Hermine put in on a line to go just east of Raleigh. That was around 6pm. Now, the centerline has it going through Wilmington, North Carolina. That’s a big shift. Remember, no one was really sure where Hurricane Katrina would land just 48 to 24 hours out.

But, of course, the CoC is telling us that because you drive a fossil fueled vehicle, predictions will get more difficult. Sounds more like they’re creating excuses as to why their current prognostications will fail in the future.

The most important message of this paper is that scientists are currently unable to satisfactorily project the response of storm tracks to anthropogenic climate change, said Edwin Gerber, associate professor of mathematics and atmosphere ocean science at New York University’s Courant Institute, who was not involved in the Nature Geoscience review.

See?

“This paper nicely sets forth the ‘state of the art’ in our knowledge of storm tracks, as well as some of our most promising ideas for making progress in the future,” Gerber said. “We need to know how the global circulation will change if we want to make accurate regional climate change predictions.

“I don’t like throwing the dice when it comes to my children’s future,” he added.

Yet, Warmists refuse to give up their own use of fossil fuels, which are explicitly blamed in the article, and go carbon neutral. Weird, eh? it’s almost like they don’t actually believe the stated causes are meaningful, and that there’s something else at play.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove[2]. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach[3].