Briggs on Gore on snowstorms:
It takes no effort to point to untoward events after the fact and say, Jean Dixon-like, “See! More evidence that my theory is right!” If it is true that global warming will cause the Northern Hemisphere to experience cooler temperatures, then say so in advance. Don’t bustle to the camerasafter things go wrong if you did not, or could not, say that they would in advance.
Vague predictions like “There will be snowstorms and rumors of snowstorms” do not count and are not evidence that the end is near. Take heed that no man deceive you. It is, after all, perfectly possible to forecast that there will be, say, “15% more snowfall in the 2010-2011 Northern Hemisphere winter”, or that “There will be at least three more Pacific ocean typhoons in 2011 than there were in 2010″, and so forth.
What is absurd is to point to a typhoon/cyclone/hurricane/snow storm after it has occurred and say that, “I could have predicted that if I wanted to. I chose not to because, among other reasons, I was busy. But that storm certainly indicates that my theory of climate change is true.”
RTWT.
It’s worse than being trivial – they’re not doing science anymore. While they may be able to point out (correctly) the climate studies are not intended to give specific predictions on individual snowstorms, hurricanes, etc. (weather isn’t climate), it is supposed to provide general predictions about trends in temperature, rainfall, etc. The predictions made in those areas to date have been almost universally wrong. If you start the models in 1950, you do not get an accurate prediction of the climate today. None of the models predicted the flat/declining global temperature of the past decade. The models have predicted a rise in sea levels that has not occurred. And so it goes.
Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
The entire point of science is predictive power. A scientific statement with no predictive value is pointless and worthless. Scientists perform experiments precisely to test the predictive power of hypothesizes.
Meaningful prediction has always been the one thing missing from climate models. They have never been able to produce a single pattern of climate change that we can observe in the short term. More importantly, they’ve never been able to define a pattern that , if observed short term, would prove the models wrong. The later is the key test of scientific validity. It is called falsification and should be the main goal of all real scientist.
If the climate models do have the predictive power claimed for them, then they should be able to accurately predict general weather patterns, droughts, floods, unusually heat or cold, over wide areas e.g. North America, Europe, sub-Saharra Africa etc. in the short term. However, none of the four major models used have made such predictions and worse, the major models all make significantly different predictions.