Science failed to predict flood and heat intensity, needs better computer – BBC

Weather forecasting technology

Maybe they need better ideas, not just more expensive modelling gear run by the same climate obsessives pushing worn-out theories that have never worked. Sales talk of ‘delivering the quantum leap’ sounds a bit thin after decades of posing as masters of climate understanding.
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Top climate scientists have admitted they failed to predict the intensity of the German floods and the North American heat dome, says BBC News.

They’ve correctly warned over decades that a fast-warming climate would bring worse bursts of rain and more damaging heatwaves.

But they say their computers are not powerful enough to accurately project the severity of those extremes.

They want governments to spend big on a shared climate super-computer.

Computers are fundamental to weather forecasting and climate change, and computing will underpin the new climate science “Bible” [Talkshop comment – give us a break], from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) next month.

But former Met Office chief scientist Prof Dame Julia Slingo told BBC News: “We should be alarmed because the IPCC (climate computer) models are just not good enough.

“(We need) an international centre to deliver the quantum leap to climate models that capture the fundamental physics that drive extremes.

“Unless we do that we will continue to underestimate the intensity/frequency of extremes and the increasingly unprecedented nature of them.”

She said the costs of the computer, which would be in the hundreds of millions of pounds, would “pale into insignificance” compared with the costs of extreme events for which society is unprepared.

Dame Julia is striving to promote this initiative at the COP26 climate summit in November.

She, and other scientists, agree climate change is an emergency. But Oxford Prof Tim Palmer told me: “It’s is impossible to say how much of an emergency we are in because we don’t have the tools to answer the question.

“We need a commitment and vision with the magnitude of CERN (Europe’s major physics research centre) if we are to build climate models that can accurately simulate the extremes of climate like the Canadian heatwave.”

Full article here.