Zero Hedge's market commentator Bruce Krasting has some notes about this past summer's El Nin~o forecasts in his latest missive - see the actual piece for the graphics:

[url=www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-11-18/bad-calls]Computers Gone Wrong[/url]
[quote]I’m always happy to see evidence that the collective “we” are not as smart as is thought. The best and brightest climatologists (and their big computers) missed a big call on global weather patterns this fall.

This chart plots the expectations for the progress of El Nino as of July. The spaghetti strings are all over the lot, but the consensus was for a return to El Nino conditions sometime in October.

The evidence for this developing shift gave cause for NOAA to issue alerts starting in July.

The news media jumped on the forecast:

The El Nino alerts continued through October:

But it did not happen. Mother nature fooled the computers. There is no El Nino, and the odds for one developing have fallen substantially. The latest status report from NOAA, and more spaghetti strings:

Does it matter if the scientist had it wrong? Not really. What has happened in the past month with weather would have happened regardless of the accuracy of the forecasts. But it would have (probably) made a very big difference if the forecasts had happened to be right.

When there are El Nino conditions, tropical storms tend have their “tops” sheared apart by winds that blow east. In addition, storms are pushed out into the Atlantic before they make landfall. This pic tells the story:

So if we had been in El Nino conditions on October 29, Sandy would never have gotten as big as it did, and might just have blown out to sea. What a difference that would have made.

++

I think that smart guys and gals should continue to use big computers to forecast the future. It’s helpful to look ahead with some rational expectations of what should happen next. That’s true for weather, stock prices and macro economic trends/performance.

But we should also look askance at what the computers and sages are telling us. The machines, and their operators, are consistently wrong. The bad news is that unanticipated events almost always have negative outcomes. The good news is that we can't foretell the future; if we could, it wouldn't be interesting at all.[/quote]
I blame excessive roundoff error - if they'd only used slightly-less aggressive compiler optimizations...

Same [i]Science[/i] perspectives snip PDF I posted in the News thread, but here the back-page piece on recent developments in climate modeling is of interest -- Note I had to use both the "reduce size" compression option in Mac Preview and save as b&w to get the size of this below the 244kB forum-upload limit:
[quote]Despite decades of improvements in computer models of Earth’s climate, estimates of the climate sensitivity—the change in global average surface air temperature in response to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration—remain uncertain (1). Much of the uncertainty results from radiative feedbacks that amplify or dampen climate changes. Particular attention has been given to the cloud feedback. Global warming is expected to change the cloud cover, but these changes and their effects on global temperature are very difficult to predict. On page 792 of this issue, Fasullo and Trenberth (2) present an observational test of the cloud feedback based on satellite measurements of relative humidity (RH) in cloud-free subtropical regions. The authors focus on environmental conditions that are easier to observe than the cloud properties themselves.[/quote]

[QUOTE]Aerosols: Airborne particles in Earth's atmosphere

A supercomputer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was used to map aerosols - particles suspended in the air - based on observations from August 2006 - April 2007. The result is surprisingly lovely. I've marked a couple of pints you want to pay attention to, like a volcanic eruption near Madagascar; the effect of the event is stunning.[/QUOTE][YOUTUBE]YtJzn8A725w[/YOUTUBE]
Hat-tip to Allen Knutson on Google+ ([URL="https://plus.google.com/u/0/102261756656790911682/posts/gWceDrW3trN"]link[/URL]):[QUOTE]Two things I took away from this amazing visualization:
1) Won't the Sahara completely blow away at some point?
2) China is seriously dirty. (The US and Europe too!)[/QUOTE]

OT
 

[QUOTE=only_human;319695]1) Won't the Sahara completely blow away at some point?[/QUOTE]Hm... Depends on the rate at which new Saharan sand is produced (through cracking of rocks into smaller particles ... or the mysterious way in which our new house's backyard sandbox, right next to the apple tree, was filled with nice, clean sand when I first saw it in 1953) versus rate of blow-away.

[url=www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/30/us-usa-dust-bowl-idUSBRE8BT05720121230?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]Storms on U.S. Plains stir memories of the "Dust Bowl"[/url]
[quote](Reuters) - Real estate agent Mark Faulkner recalls a day in early November when he was putting up a sign near Ulysses, Kansas, in 60-miles-per-hour winds that blew up blinding dust clouds.

"There were places you could not see, it was blowing so hard," Faulkner said.

Residents of the Great Plains over the last year or so have experienced storms reminiscent of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Experts say the new storms have been brought on by a combination of historic drought, a dwindling Ogallala Aquifer underground water supply, climate change and government farm programs.

Nearly 62 percent of the United States was gripped by drought, as of December 25, and "exceptional" drought enveloped parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

There is no relief in sight for the Great Plains at least through the winter, according to Drought Monitor forecasts, which could portend more dust clouds.

A wave of dust storms during the 1930s crippled agriculture over a vast area of the Great Plains and led to an exodus of people, many to California, dramatized in John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath."

While few people believe it could get that bad again, the new storms have some experts worried that similar conditions - if not the catastrophic environmental disaster of the 1930s - are returning to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado.

"I hope we don't talk ourselves into complacency with easy assumptions that a Dust Bowl could never happen again," said Craig Cox, agriculture director for the Environmental Working Group, a national conservation group that supports converting more tilled soil to grassland. "Instead, we should do what it takes to make sure it doesn't happen again."[/quote]
The "living within one's means" theme that pervades the econ. threads apparently extends to water usage. Here, tapping the Ogallala aquifer is the water-supply analog of using credit expansion to pull forward demand in the past 3 decades.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;323206][url=www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/30/us-usa-dust-bowl-idUSBRE8BT05720121230?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews]Storms on U.S. Plains stir memories of the "Dust Bowl"[/url]

The "living within one's means" theme that pervades the econ. threads apparently extends to water usage. Here, tapping the Ogallala aquifer is the water-supply analog of using credit expansion to pull forward demand in the past 3 decades.[/QUOTE]The "exceptional drought" phrase in the quoted article brought to mind conditions in southern England this last spring and early summer.

We experienced by far the wettest drought on record. The water companies imposed restrictions on usage for several months. Concurrently it hardly ever stopped raining.

It's barely stopped raining since. England has had the wettest year on record and there has been extensive flooding in a number of regions resulting in several fatalities and significant economic damage.

[url=http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-09/its-getting-hot-here-2012-hottest-year-record]NOAA: 2012 Hottest Year on Record for Contiguous U.S.[/url]
[quote]2012 was a historic year for extreme weather that included drought, wildfires, hurricanes and storms. But, as NOAA reported yesterday, 2012 marked the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States. The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, and 1.0°F above 1998, the previous warmest year. Rainfall was dismal also at 26.57 inches, 2.57 inches below average, making it the 15th driest year on record for the nation. NOAA also adds that the U.S. Climate Extremes Index indicated that 2012 was the second most extreme year on record for the nation, nearly twice the average value and second only to 1998. 2012 saw 11 disasters that reached the $1 billion threshold in losses. Climate Central also confirms that fully two-thirds of the lower 48 states recorded their first-, second- or third-hottest years, and 43 states had one of their top 10 warmest years ever recorded. Globally, 2012 appears to be the eight warmest on record.[/quote]
I link to the ZH version of the article because of the plethora of ensuing tinfoil-hattish reader commentary - one "reader" even invokes weather on such relevant places as Pluto and Triton to "demolish global warming". The same person also mindlessly repeats "skeptic arguments" such as this:
[quote]Earth in its early history, 385 million years ago, had an atmosphere with 10 times the present carbon dioxide levels. Those elevated levels did not produce runaway global warming then, so why should we theorize that it would today?”[/quote]
385 MYA is "early earth history"? What would that make the preceding 4 billion-plus years? "Pre-early earth history"? And while the greenhouse effect during the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleozoic]warm portions of the Paleozoic era[/url] may not have been "runaway" in the Venusian sense, it was still pretty frickin' warm. (Though CO2 was far from the only correlate - and there were some notable cool subintervals).

[url]http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/09/us-australia-wildfires-maps-idUSBRE90806V20130109[/url]

A [I]Scientific American[/I] article published today attracted (as usual) anti-AGW comments with an elementary oversight:

"Ice Core Data Help Solve a Global Warming Mystery

Why do some ice core samples seem to indicate CO2 spikes trailed increases in global temperature? It’s all about the way bubbles move in ice"

[URL]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ice-core-data-help-solve/[/URL]

Down in the comments:[quote]1. jtdwyer 04:06 PM 3/1/13

Great to have an apparently reasonable resolution to this issue!

I am not a 'denier', however, I had to chuckle at the statement:
"The idea that there was a lag of CO2 behind temperature is something climate change skeptics pick on," says Edward Brook of Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. "They say, 'How could CO2 levels affect global temperature when you are telling me the temperature changed first?'"

It's a shame this issue has produced so much polarization, but I'd expect any competent scientist to be skeptical of their conclusion when evidence indicates that the proposed cause lags its proposed effect! It's very good to have this issue reasonably resolved!

. . .

3. MadScientist72 in reply to jtdwyer 04:55 PM 3/1/13

"It's very good to have this issue reasonably resolved!"
It might be resolved, if it wasn't for that pesky bit about "Their results, published February 28 in Science, show CO2 lagged temperature by less than 200 years." So, even by the new method, the CO2 rise happened AFTER the temperature increase. Whether it's 1400 years or 200 doesn't matter, effect CAN'T follow cause.

. . .

7. ribwoods 05:48 PM 3/1/13[/quote]Yes, this is the comment I just posted there.

[quote]The posts by jtdwyer and MadScientist72 each illustrate a frequent flaw in anti-AGW arguments: failure to recognize (or admit?) that manmade burning of carbon fuels is presently the primary source of increasing atmospheric CO2. This circumstance, which never existed before the Industrial Revolution, does indeed cause the rise in CO2 to precede the rise in temperature _now_, whether or not it did in the pre-industrial past!

There is no inversion of cause and effect. There does seem to be widespread anti-AGW blindness to our historically novel circumstances.[/quote]

"How to Win Any Climate Change Argument

A flow chart for debating with denialists."

[URL="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2013/03/climate_change_flow_chart_how_to_win_any_global_warming_argument.html?wpisrc=most_viral"]www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2013/03/climate_change_flow_chart_how_to_win_any_global_warming_argument.html?wpisrc=most_viral[/URL]

[quote]If you’re exhausted by climate change shouting matches or so flummoxed by confronting scientific ignorance that you suffer in silence, this chart might be for you. It provides responses to three of the common stages of climate change disbelief: that climate change isn’t happening, that scientists can’t decide whether it’s happening, and that it’s happening but not caused by mankind.

Will this chart prevent your debates from devolving into fights over the “liberal climate change conspiracy” and the meaning of the words [I]theory[/I] or [I]climate[/I] or [I]change[/I]? There’s only one way to find out.[/quote]

[QUOTE=David John Hill Jr;105339]Wan't to argue against global warming?
Won't convince me.
I took the insert july 1963.
Mount Kilimanjaro.[/QUOTE]



A more interesting argument to have would be over the question:

Assuming global warming/climate change theory is true, is global warming/climate change necessarily a bad thing?