Recently, the world's major climate agencies published their year-end empirical datasets for global temperatures.
How does actual climate reality compare with the IPCC's 2013 proclamation that their "extremely likely" predictions of global temperatures? With 95% certainty, embarrassingly bad. (click on chart to enlarge)
The chart on the left is a plot of the IPCC's RCP4.5 model output versus the climate reality, as represented by the UK's HadCRUT4 global monthly temperature dataset. The bright red and blue curves are simple 3-year moving averages that visually removes all the monthly gyrations.
It is clear that the IPCC's state-of-the-art 2013 climate models start diverging from climate reality around the 1995 period. And the divergence continues to widen to the point where one could conclude that any future output will be extremely unlikely to be of any value to policymakers.
Put another way, these billion-dollar, taxpayer-funded super-computer model simulations have performed atrociously, and are entirely worthless at predicting future climate scenarios.
How did this happen?
While the IPCC's associated climate "experts" are going through their own set of mental gyrations to explain the abysmal climate model and AGW hypothesis performances, two scientists explain how this failure was produced - article number one and article number two.
If you are curious as to the 'whys' of IPCC climate consensus failure, these articles are a must read. For those short on time, though, in a nutshell a compiled summary of reasons for failure:
- cloud ignorance
- ocean ignorance
- solar/cosmic ignorance
- natural climate variability ignorance
- chaos ignorance
- de-emphasis of large uncertainty
- dogmatic co2-AGW orthodoxy
- herd consensus
- hubris
- financial/security incentives
- political agendas
Until the above are adequately addressed and fixed, the probability that climate models will predict with accuracy that policymakers can actually rely on is extremely unlikely, with 99.9% certainty.
Previous climate model and modern temperature charts.
Websites to download HadCRUT4 dataset and RCP4.5 dataset. Don't know how to chart in Excel? It's easy. Go here to learn how.