Are regional models ready for prime time?

This is one of those areas of study that is going in the wrong direction entirely (focusing on models instead of field research). Regional climate change (natural or otherwise) can best be detected using proxy measures. Bat populations, earth worms, grasshopper emergence, population, and size at end season, salmon runs, bud emergence, frost kill, wild game populations, snow melt dates in rivers, etc are all good ways to detect a trend and are useful 5 years out from the knee. They are less useful for predicting the next knee. These proxies are easily studied (though the researcher will get muddy) and are reliable. However, CO2 has such a small effect I wonder why people are studying it.

What warming?
It has been darn cool. The farmers here in NC FINALLY started planting crops this week, a month late. A couple of days ago we set a record with a temp of 36F (2.2C) Five degrees below the previous record. It is the middle of May for goodness sale. We normally have temperatures in the 90’s (above 32C) not in the 60’s (15C)
Don’t Climastrologists ever bother to go outdoors?

“Guest blog Roger Pielke Sr.
Are climate models ready to make regional projections? […] NO.”
http://www.climatedialogue.org/are-regional-models-ready-for-prime-time/
That sums it up. Nothing more need be said.
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I was willing to welcome Climate Dialogue and give it a chance when it appeared last year as I was hoping it might fill a gaping void in the climate discussion not filled by other climate blogs such as “Real” Climate, WUWT, “Open” Mind, & Climate Etc.
It took awhile due to the slow pace there, but I’ve now seen enough from Climate Dialogue to conclude that its administrators are (whether deliberately or inadvertently – doesn’t matter) driving it to generate nothing more than voluminous obfuscation. Disappointing but not surprising. Status I’m assigning Climate Dialogue in my books: Write-Off.

Is Mauna Loa the only source for the 400 ppm CO2 measurement or have I missed something?
I find it odd that only one “datapoint” is used if that is true. This can’t be representative of the global atmospheric CO2 concentration can it?

As a now retired Australian grain farmer I have been on the wrong end of far too many climate model predictions whose modellers and developers don’t ever appeared to have a real clue on what the real world weather and climate have been doing and are doing.
One of the most depressing episodes that I have ever sat through along with a couple of hundred other farmers was a few years ago in a seminar conducted by CSIRO climate modellers on the local region’s future climate.
Australia’s grain growing areas being deep inside of the continent are already very variable in weather, rainfall and climate and episodes of drought are quite common and always have been.
These CSIRO modellers stood up there on the platform with their power point presentations and showed as their models indisputably demonstrated, the whole of the eastern Australian grain belt was going to get drier and drier in the years and decades ahead.
No ifs or buts.! No hedging!. No caveats!
The pronouncements from the CSIRO climate modellers were delivered with great confidence, great panache, no ifs or buts and much of “this is what our models are telling us” and “so this is what will happen and be the future of this region” . Usually meaning that it was going to be drought, plague and pestilence for ever and getting worse, much worse and we would all be “rooned” all over again.
As a farmer, it was one of the most demoralising presentations that I have ever been to.
The ignorance of the real fear and despair those CSIRO modellers up there on that platform were creating was lost completely on them. In their complete hubris it was just another day to them away this time away from their normal comfortable university and well cocooned from the real world in their little offices, looking at computer screens, protected from the vagaries of Nature by their big salaries,
They gave no indication at all that they even cared.
Their models were the only real world that they knew and to them their models were reality and the models produced “predictions” .
And those models gave “predictions” no weaselling out claims of “projections” then, just pure and proper “predictions”.
Well some months went by and then it rained, it rained, it rained right across the whole of the eastern half of australia, There were floods from Cape York, the northern tip of Australia right down the 3000 kms to all of South Eastern Australia.
The amount of water that fell on Australia’s eastern regions over those couple of months amounted to a couple of mm’s evaporation from the all of the world’s oceans.
I have followed and been involved with Ag science researchers most of my 75 years on this earth and I had initially had and still have with some glaring exceptions , a great lot of trust in the integrity and honesty of scientists including climate scientists.
Now I have nothing but contempt for climate scientists and most of all for climate modellers and the modelled junk they collect their lavish salaries to produce.
My contempt for modellers, both global climate and regional, is further reinforced when I started to read some of the “Dialogue” and then gave up.
Much deep and earnest and completely useless discussion about the difference’s between “projections” and “predictions” when model results are published.
Through all these years of claims about catastrophic warming based on model PREDICTIONS , none of the miserable lot of so called climate warming scientists and modellers ever, ever made damn sure that everybody fully understood that what they were shouting from the housetops and in media interviews wasn’t worth a pinch of BS because it was all just “projections”.
So all those terrible things, the plagues and CO2 pestilence and the waters so high from melting ice that Moses would need a recall were all just “projections” airy fairly, maybe’s that were to frighten politicians and ensure future funding and actually were not to be taken by the public as hard and fast “predictions” that were an accurate description of the end of life as we knew it.
Now as it’s all coming thoroughly unstuck and none of those models regional or climate are even in the same ball park as Nature anymore, we have the weaseling starting from the modellers that they didn’t really mean what they said. It was all just “projections” and they were misunderstood by everybody who thought that all those news media releases and those pronouncements of catastrophic warming in a few years and this earth becoming a ball of flaming hot rock if we didn’t stop before we went blind, were all just airy fairy “projections” not to be taken too seriously.
Yeh! Right !
You modellers quite deliberately frightened the hell out of everybody and tried to gain power and influence by claiming your models were “predictions”, the reality of the future.
You have failed, miserably, totally and ignominiously.
You climate modellers have created immense despair, fear, pain and societal conflict with your “predictions”, never “projections, whatever that means in reality, reality being something climate modellers are not given over too.
Your claims of the veracity and validity of your catastrophic “predictions”,supposedly derived from your inept climate models, never ever “projections” until it all went wrong, have destroyed immense amounts of society’s wealth that could have been far better used elsewhere for the very significant betterment of our society.
You have and still are destroying the society’s trust in the truthfulness and impartiality of science.
You are destroying the very foundations of science with your lousy climate models predictions and most of all in the way you promulgated those models as the reality of the future.
Sorry, thats now “projections” But course “projections” don’t mean a damn thing or do they?.
Only climate modellers would know as the change is made suit the circumstances.
And for what? Nothing but to satisfy your own egoistic vanity that you like the shamans, the witch doctors of the more ignorant societies of this world, have successfully conned the science trusting people, the politicians and the world at large who have always placed great trust in science and scientists that YOU, the climate modellers, in your total arrogance and hubris, could PREDICT the future with your derisory climate models.

hmm … you MUST be joking, right ? ! ? !
in general, models MAY be useful, but models created by individuals or groups that have an agenda, even before the modeling begins, well then, NO, not so much …
now, your question regarding “regional models” is simply rediculous. when models fail ( and they are ) to show the future with some level of accuracy regarding the global climate – then how in the H can you even ask this question of “regional” models ?
here is my model for global climate warming :
#model sk1 :
while ( 1 )
{ printf ( “the climate is warming due to CO2″/n ) }
note to all and Mr. Gore : the above model may be freely distributed to all universities, colleges, agencies and other agendists, so as to further dupe the left of liberal media.
oh, and my apologys to the C programming language for not remembering syntax, if compilation shows errors.