It’s really hard to settle on the latest embarrassment for the climatistas (or “Thermageddonites”—hat tip to Lord Monckton).
On the technical side, there’s an interesting article by a team of Indian scientists in the current Journal of Geophysical Research about climate models and their ability to predict future precipitation amounts on a regional basis. This is important because it bears on the claim, repeated almost daily, that climate change will bring more less take your pick precipitation to your neighborhood or some far-away nation take your pick in the decades to come. Although the abstract of this study is written in the usual jargon, I think you can make out the relevant conclusion easily enough:
Extreme precipitation events over India have resulted in loss of human lives and damaged infrastructures, food crops, and lifelines. The inability of climate models to credibly project precipitation extremes in India has not been helpful to longer-term hazards resilience policy. However, there have been claims that finer-resolution and regional climate models may improve projections. The claims are examined as hypotheses by comparing models with observations from 1951–2005. This paper evaluates the reliability of the latest generation of global climate models (GCMs), CMIP5, specifically a subset of the better performing CMIP5 models (called “BEST-GCM”). The relative value of finer-resolution regional climate models (RCMs) is examined by comparing CORDEX South Asia RCMs (“CORDEX-RCMs”) versus the GCMs used by those RCMs to provide boundary conditions, or the host GCMs (“HOST-GCMs”). Ensemble mean of BEST-GCMs performed better for most of the extreme precipitation indices than the CORDEX-RCMs or their HOST-GCMs. Weaker performance shown by ensemble mean of CORDEX-RCMs is largely associated with their high intermodel variation. The CORDEX-RCMs occasionally exhibited slightly superior skills compared to BEST-GCMs, on the whole RCMs failed to significantly outperform GCMs.Observed trends in the extremes were not adequately captured by any of the model ensembles, while neither the GCMs nor the RCMs were determined to be adequate to inform hydrologic design. [Emphasis added.]
One sentence translation: the computer climate models are still crap.
But I think the winner of today’s climate embarrassment has to be this story:
Add another possible woe to the growing list of consequences of climate change: Kidney stones.A new study of American cities suggests that rising temperatures may increase the number of people who develop the painful urinary obstructions.“These findings point to potential public health effects associated with global climate change,” study leader Dr. Gregory Tasian, a pediatric urologist and epidemiologist at The Children’s Hospital ofPhiladelphia, said in a hospital news release.
Turns out the threat of increased kidney stones was already on The Warmlist, though their link seems to have gone dead. But it least it’s a comfort to know they’re recycling climate problems.
Climate change: is there anything it can’t do? Apparently no.
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