New Study: 2000-Year Precipitation Reconstructions Expose Climate Models Still Of Junk Grade

A new study by Atwood et al (2021) published in the journal of Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology found there’s “poor agreement” between precipitation reconstructions and model simulations over the past 2000 years. This means future projections made by current models are unreliable. 

Die kalte Sonne here reports on a team of scientists who examined 67 tropical hydroclimate records from 55 sites around the world. The key points:

Models and reconstructions don’t agree

These comprehensive reconstructions show that from 800 to 1000 CE there was a pronounced drying event relative from the eastern Pacific and parts of Mesoamerica.

Also the period “1400–1700 CE is marked by pronounced hydroclimate changes across the tropics, including dry and/or isotopically enriched conditions in South and East Asia, wet and/or isotopically depleted conditions in the central Andes and southern Amazon in South America, and fresher and/or isotopically depleted conditions in the Maritime Continent.”

The study’s abstract also notes how there’s a glaring disagreement between the simulations done by models and what the reconstructions show: “We find notable dissimilarities between the regional hydroclimate changes and global-scale and hemispheric-scale temperature reconstructions, indicating that more work needs to be done to understand the mechanisms of the widespread tropical hydroclimate changes during the LIA.”

The problem, the authors say, is that “climate model simulations exhibit weak forced long-term tropical rainfall changes over the last millennium” and the reconstructions tell a different story.

Climate forcings not understood

The inability for the models to perform adequately are likely due to the “inaccurate” use of climate forcings and poor estimation of internal climate variability. Another remote possibility is that the proxy records are simply being misunderstood.

Models not reliable for forecasting

Die kalte Sonne comments: “Because the models do not correctly reproduce the past, their forecasting quality for the future must be taken very critically. Visions of future horror droughts or Biblical floods should be ignored until the models are able to successfully reproduce the documented global precipitation history.”

Many more precipitation and temperature proxy studies here.




3 responses to “New Study: 2000-Year Precipitation Reconstructions Expose Climate Models Still Of Junk Grade”

  1. Ulric Lyons

    “poor estimation of internal climate variability”

    An absence of the inverse solar forcing of ENSO and the AMO by changes in the solar wind strength.

  2. Yonason

    “ Visions of future horror droughts or Biblical floods should be ignored until the models are able to successfully reproduce the documented global precipitation history.”

    I think it’s stronger than that, and that even if we can reproduce the past, that is no guarantee that we can forecast the distant future.
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/04/chaos-climate-part-3-chaos-models/

  3. tom0mason

    The alarmist cult called the UN-IPCC plays down the Little Ice Age and all the people that suffered and died prematurely through it. The IPCC plays down the fabulous benefit that industrialization has brought mankind. Benefits that have allowed humans and animals and plants they depend on to survive cooler or warmer weather.
    The UN-IPCC cultists only screech unfounded alarmism about the correlation of the slight rise in both temperature and atmospheric CO2 as if it is a big catastrophe. There is little evidence that this correlation is truly meaningful. It is not catastrophic for the planet to warm; to warm-up as the planet leaves the cold of the LIA. As many historical proxy climate records teased out from geological data, ice data, stalagmites’ data, etc., show — during warm periods (especially if atmospheric CO2 is higher than during the LIA) all vegetable and animal life flourish, during cooler or cold periods life in all it’s forms dies back.

    Too many national government pay too much heed to this cultist’s organization. Too many government are led by fools who have surrounded themselves with UN-IPCC cult members.

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