ASK THE EXPERT

The Met Office were invited to answer questions from the public on any climate or weather related topics, so I gave them a question - see here for the question followed by their answer. Unfortunately there was no opportunity for a follow-up question, but some colleagues have made the following observations :- "From what I can see,
there's now so many climate models, each being
tweaked and run with different scenarios, that
the range of outputs is so broad that they
encompass the entire spectrum of possibilities.


Also being "consistent with" is not much better
than implying that correlation shows
causation. "Consistent with" suggests just one
explanation, which doesn't sit very well with the
IPCC 4AR table 2.11 (WGI, chapter 2, page 201) in
which the level of scientific understanding of 13
of the 16 listed forces is shown as on the "poor"
side of medium. To put that another way, if
science doesn't understand a bunch of natural
forces then it's deceitful not to say that
perhaps these forces account for some or all of the observed variation."