Quote of the week – Nature on the failure of climate models

• “It’s fair to say that the real world warmed even less than our forecast suggested,” [modeller] Smith says. “We don’t really understand at the moment why that is.” “
• “Although I have nothing against this endeavour as a research opportunity, the papers so far have mostly served as a ‘disproof of concept’,” says Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt says that these efforts are “a little misguided”. He argues that it is difficult to attribute success or failure to any particular parameter because the inherent unpredictability of weather and climate is built into both the Earth system and the models. “It doesn’t suggest any solutions,” he says.
• “Because the climate does not usually change drastically from one year to the next, the model is bound to start off predicting conditions that are close to reality. But that effect quickly wears off as the real climate evolves. If this is the source of the models’ accuracy, that advantage fades quickly after a few years.”
• “Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, says that it could be a decade or more before this research really begins to pay off in terms of predictive power, and even then climate scientists will be limited in what they can say about the future.”

Limited in what they can say about the future?

Since when? Somebody please tell Jim Hansen he can’t say “the oceans will boil“.

The Nature article is here: http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2018-is-cloudy-with-record-heat-1.13344

h/t to the Hockey Schtick.