One of the things that stood out when reading the KNMI’14 report climate scenarios was how it was sold to the readers. The four scenarios of the report were brought as the summun of what we could get. We should have trust in them.
This new generation of climate scenarios are more detailed than ever, both in time and in number of climate variables. Data from fog, solar radiation, humidity, evaporation, drying, and air quality now are also available. Moreover KNMI’14 climate scenarios are regionalized so that the differences in the increase of the temperature between the coastal provinces and the interior are visible.
That is the first time that I heard someone praise regional circulation models! It is not because the models are made more detailed that the accuracy increases in the same way. I could agree with something like this in the hard sciences. But in a utterly complex and chaotic system like climate is, I am not really convinced. They are still trying to model an intrinsic chaotic system and by adding more details, they are also adding more degrees of freedom which make the results even more uncertain. Although the model is more detailed the issues with general circulation models still apply. The results depends on the understanding of the (many elements) of climate and their relations with each other and on the ability to correctly mold these elements in mathematical equations.
It continues:
They show how high the probability is of extreme weather conditions such as heavy rain and hail storms, heat waves and severe frost. In this way the KNMI’14 climate scenarios provide a coherent picture of climate change and the weather of the future.
Nice summery of extreme weather events. Heat waves and severe frost. Is there anything that global warming/climate change can’t do? That indeed will make it a very coherent picture…
The KNMI’14-climate scenarios show that the scientific foundation of 25 year research on climate warming seems to be solid.
Again the “our results confirm earlier research, so it is solid”. Well, yes, but with a standstill in temperature of a decade and a half, there was no increase in temperatures at all for more than half of that research period…
Trust, yet verify 