BRIAN KANTOR: The climate — just how predictable is it?
Society is being called upon to believe in the accuracy of uncertain climate models
Abundant summer rain in SA has taken the weather forecasters and climatologists by surprise. They did not expect La Niña to persist for a third successive year. La Niña (Spanish for little girl) describes an upwelling of cooler water in the Pacific Ocean that brings more precipitation in Southern Africa, and less to parts of South America. Its opposite is the little boy — El Niño — associated with warmer seas and a drier SA.
The quality of weather forecasts has been improving apparently, but predictions more than 10 days ahead can still surely not be described as confidently made with little margin for error. What confidence should we attach to climate forecasts 50 or more years into the future? Yet society is being called upon, vociferously, to believe in the accuracy of such climate models and their predictions of harmful global warming...
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