‘the models may with all likelihood be far from good at predictions, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t useful. Just developing an understanding of the drivers for prediction performance (while fully understanding the context of the model itself; being able to isolate physical processes from model and coding artifacts), will go a long way towards leveraging future research efforts. ‘
Maybe so.
But they shouldn’t be claimed to be predictive tools unless they have shown some abilities in those areas. And yet climatologists and AGW advocates are far too ready to seize upon model outputs and use them as dire warnings of ctastrophes to come. It’s just a reworking of the old 1970s idea ‘it must be true, it comes from a computer’
And after 30 years of throwing good money after bad to develop climate models that clearly can’t do any useful prediction now and have no hope of ever doing so in the future, I detect a groundswell of opinion that says there is little point in spending much more effort in this area,. Time to go and do something more useful instead.