Given the variability surrounding the accuracy of tropical storm season forecasts, I refer to them, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, as “random number generators”.
I wonder if I need to refer to the UK Met’s new toy as a “really random number generator”.
Climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre will unveil the first decadal climate prediction model in a paper published on 10 August 2007 in the journal Science. The paper includes the Met Office’s prediction for annual global temperature to 2014.
Over the 10-year period as a whole, climate continues to warm and 2014 is likely to be 0.3 °C warmer than 2004. At least half of the years after 2009 are predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.[...]
Actually, my cynical humor aside, when looking at season- or year-long weather forecasts, a significant amount of variability is to be tolerated when evaluating a prediction’s accuracy. So, I’m very willing to accept that my invocation of =RAND() as unfair, and assuming that researchers have done their jobs correctly and back-validated the model…it is troubling news indeed. Perhaps it’s time for the global warming debate to start putting more emphasis on “what should we be doing to prepare for generally warmer conditions” rather than just a presumably belated emphasis on “if it’s possibly going to occur what are some of the things we might consider doing to prevent it from occurring.”
However I can’t help but be afraid that popular media and skeptics will interpret data such as UK Met’s forecast in an overly precise way, criticize it when individual data points don’t line up as expected, and distract us from a real evaluation of whether the model is right (on average) and the implications of such a determination.