The answer is a categorical NO.
I have posted on (i) a naive understanding of the difficulty of predicting the Earth’s climate decades from now (e.g. see), and (ii) serious deficiencies in the IPCC models that are presenting their results to policymakers (e.g. see).
Today, I post on a financially wasteful and scientifically flawed argument that there is an “urgent need” to improve multi-decadal climate models and predictions. The article is
Goddard L., W. Baethgen, B. Kirtman, and G. Meehl, 2009: The Urgent Need for Improved Climate Models and Predictions. EOS. Volume 90. Number 39. September 29 2009. page 343.
The text in this article includes the statements
An investment over the next 10 years of the order of US$2 billion for developing improved climate models was recommended in a report (http:// wcrp .wmo .int/ documents/ WCRP _ WorldModellingSummit _ Jan2009 .pdf) from the May 2008 World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction,
held in Reading, United Kingdom, and presented by the World Climate Research Programme. The report indicated that “climate models will, as in the past, play an important, and perhaps central, role in guiding the trillion dollar decisions that the peoples, governments and industries of the world will be making to cope with the consequences of changing climate.”
……..Climate science already supports prediction- based decisions. What if, however, the biases or incompletely represented processes in the current generation of models give a false sense of the most likely outcome, or fail to capture very possible extremes? Many decisions are related to and
prompted by thresholds, and costs to adapt to anticipated future mean climate changes or to react to unanticipated impacts may not be linearly related to the climate. What is most needed, then, is for decision makers to learn how to treat information about future climate as a range of possibilities.
…estimates based on dynamical models that can capture details of the climate system that hold clear societal importance—such as precipitation
extremes, rates of sea level rise, hurricanes, and coastal processes—will better guide effective climate risk management and, incrementally, adaptation efforts.
While I support the need to improve our understanding of the climate system, including the role of humans in altering it, the approach urged in this EOS Forum article is overselling both our ability to obtain skillful probablistic climate forecasts for the coming decades, as well as why the policymakers even need further information from the models than what they already have provided. Policymakers recognize, correctly, based on the IPCC model simulations, that humans are adding CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that these are significant positive radiative forcings. Policymakers accept, incorrectly, however, that the multi-decadal climate models can provide skillful predictions of even the changes in the long term global accumulation of heat (in Joules; e.g. see), much less regional predictive skill on this time scale.
The policymakers would be providing a real contribution, therefore, if they reconsidered their focus and diverted it away from a reliance on the IPCC models. For example, society should prepare for drought regardless if the IPCC models claim their frequency in a given location will increase. We already know that droughts such as in the 16th century in the western United States exceed what the IPCC models “predict” for the coming decades (e.g. see).
The US$2 billion dollars could be much more beneficially spent on the reduction in societal and environmental vulnerabilities the important resources of water, food, energy, health and ecosystem function. As I wrote in a post on September 21 2009
There are 5 broad areas that we can use to define the need for vulnerability assessments : water, food, energy, health and ecosystem function. Each area has societally critical resources. The vulnerability concept requires the determination of the major threats to these resources from climate, but also from other social and environmental issues. After these threats are identified for each resource, then the relative risk from natural- and human-caused climate change (estimated from the GCM projections, but also the historical, paleo-record and worst case sequences of events) can be compared with other risks in order to adopt the optimal mitigation/adaptation strategy.
Lets spend the 2 billion dollars on this approach rather than waste it on a narrow focus using the multi-decadal global modeling predictions.
