Climate Predictions Predictably Failed

ESR on a recent climate change paper:

Here’s the money quote: “The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.”

That is an establishment climatologist’s cautious scientist-speak for “The IPCC’s anthropogenic-global-warming models are fatally broken. Kaput. Busted.”

Lorenz spawned Chaos Theory, which purported to tell us a lot about the world, yet it also told anyone who wanted to listen a lot about multi-variant computer models- indeed, it told us about multi-variant computerized climate models specifically. Nobody wanted to listen, and so the government has subsidized a massive amount of computer modelling. Additionally, we've got these hackneyed descriptions of the butterfly effect, which purports to tell us something about the world. Now, I suppose, on a simplistic level, a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere may have some effect on a storm somewhere else, but in the real world there are all sort of variables, systems, and reactions that simply aren't present in the computer model because the computer model necessarily has to be simpler than the real world. So the butterfly effect is deeply imbued into computer models, but may be all but non-existent, due to compensatory factors, in the real world.

But this doesn't matter much for subsidizers. Computer generated 'Science!' is big business, and it produces exactly the sort of sound and fury the politicians seem to enjoy. And when your researchers don't even want to show you their work...