WANT to know what the weather will be like in a particular British town in 2080?
That’s what the , with climate projections made for areas just 5 kilometres across. Trouble is, some climate scientists think such predictions are worthless or worse.
“By focusing on that sort of detail you detract from the solid science of climate change,” says Leonard Smith, a mathematician at the University of Oxford. “At the local scale we can be almost certain that there will be big surprises, way outside what they say we should expect.”
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“We can be almost certain there will be big surprises, way outside what they say we should expect”
A key bone of contention is how the projections handle “blocking highs”. These prevent the eastward spread of Atlantic weather to western Europe, leading to heatwaves and droughts in summer, and long cold spells in winter.
of the projections by outside researchers warns that flaws in the way the projections handle phenomena such as European blocking “cannot be compensated for by any statistical procedures, however complex”.
