The Indepedent speculates today if the all changing weather patterns can be attributed to climate change.

“Wash-out summers, big chills, extreme heatwaves. Each time the weather goes mad, we’re given the same reason: climate change. Is that the whole story?”

We are being told that the world is warming. But at the same time new cold records are broken all over the world. How is that possible?

Roger Street, technical director of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), says that we understand the system better than we used to, “but knowing more doesn’t necessarily make things easier – it just brings to light more and more complicated things that are going on. We may actually increase the uncertainty.”

It’s like my Mom says: the more we know, the less we understand.

“Five years ago,” says Tom Clarke, gardener at the National Trust’s Trelissick Garden in Cornwall, “everyone was saying we’d all be growing olives down here. Well, that hasn’t happened. All you seem to be able to guarantee is that things will be changeable.”

Even though many scientists seem pretty certain that the planet is warming, they can’t say anything about possible climate changes on local basis.

Says Mat Collins, a climate scientist at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre: “There are just more competing effects at a local scale. There are more uncertainties, and the sources of the uncertainty change more.”

“We have a range of uncertainty,” says Kay Jenkinson, communications director at UKCIP, “and the next set of information will make it more apparent what that range is. But real life being what it is, it could be that the real answer lies outside that. And we won’t know what it is until we get there.”

How about that?

While most skeptics question the reliability of climate models used to predict our warmer future, even some AGW-followers now warn not to oversell model scenarios.

“To what extent should we accept these projections at face value?”, asks Steve Tracton in The Washington Post. “How certain is the stated range of uncertainty? Can today’s climate models provide credible predictions of the regional impacts of climate change (e.g., on the scale of U.S. states or most European countries)?”

Lenny Smith, a statistics professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science believes human activities are changing the global climate, but that climate scientists are “overselling” their results.

“…we must stop pretending that we know the details of how it will all play out,” comments Lenny, who points out that the estimates of uncertainty — based on the distribution of results from as many as 300 runs of global climate models — are themselves uncertain. This is especially true, he says, in the extremes (or “tails”) of the distribution, which are often particularly important for decision-makers. Thus, it’s quite possible that future warming could be significantly more or less than the range indicated by the models.

Read more in The Washington Post, or in New Scientist.

CNN reports that The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is installing a new IBM supercomputer in order to accelerate research into climate change. The supercomputer, known as a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, is the first in a highly energy-efficient class of machines to be shipped anywhere in the world, with a peak speed of more than 76 teraflops. Does that mean you can call it a “huge flop”?

UK Telegraph reports: “Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said. Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged. This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.”

The UK Telegraph article by reporter Charles Clover noted the significant deficiencies in UN climate models: “The IPCC currently does not include in its models actual records of such events as the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific, which are known to have been behind the warmest year ever recorded in 1998.”

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

But if natural variations are able to offset the man-made warming, is then our contribution to climate change significant? Also, if nature now (temporarily) cools the Earth, why shouldn’t the recent warming be natural as well?

I think that Al Gore should plan for an alternative occupation.

Bob Spicer et al, from Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, who has examined fern leaves from Central Siberia, says that this today rather unfriendly place 65 million years ago was a lot like modern-day Florida, with lush ferns and lots of rain.

Climate models for the same area had indicated temperatures around zero degrees Celsius (32° F). But Bob Spencer and his colleagues doubt model temperatures match reality. In the age of dinos the world was so different that the models we use for today’s atmosphere cannot mimic it. Go figure. Who said computer models are more reliable than observations?

Read the whole story in New Scientist. Or ask a dinosaur.