Missing News 2: The Australian's Graham Lloyd reports "Climate claims on drought debunked". According to a paper published in Nature it seems that "DROUGHTS have not changed over the past 60 years and predictions that climate change will make them worse are exaggerated"
"Researchers from the US and Australia found models that had been developed to assess regional drought assistance were too simplistic to be used to predict the impact of climate change on drought."
Seems this news is too much for ABC's fragile audience to bear.
(Update...ABC play catch up.... Drought 'overestimated by faulty index'). Includes the classic line "But, as ever in climate change science, he acknowledges there are "huge question marks" over all of this."
And I thought it was all settled! As ever if you want Yesterday's news tomorrow you can turn to the ABC.
While on Climate models, here's another report missing from ABC. Seems along with droughts, they also don't do so well in simulating cloud cover:
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L20803, 6 PP., 2012
doi:10.1029/2012GL053153
Key Points
- To evaluate the cloud vertical structure of models using CALIPSO satellite
- Five GCMs underestimate the total cloud cover at all latitudes except in Arctic
- Discrepancies are more pronounced in tropics and poles, and over continents
Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD/IPSL), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France
Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD/IPSL), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France
The Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite provides robust and global direct measurements of the cloud vertical structure. The GCM-Oriented CALIPSO Cloud Product is used to evaluate the simulated clouds in five climate models using a lidar simulator.The total cloud cover is underestimated in all models (51% to 62% vs. 64% in observations) except in the Arctic. Continental cloud covers (at low, mid, high altitudes) are highly variable depending on the model. In the tropics, the top of deep convective clouds varies between 14 and 18 km in the models versus 16 km in the observations, and all models underestimate the low cloud amount (16% to 25%) compared to observations (29%). In the Arctic, the modeled low cloud amounts (37% to 57%) are slightly biased compared to observations (44%), and the models do not reproduce the observed seasonal variation.
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