De Ja Vu or Groundhog Day, call it what you will but all this has been done before. In fact 16 years ago and I alerted Judith to it about 12 months ago. (in fact I emailed Judith on Xmas day last year about it)
I came across this whilst taking part in Donna Laframboises Citizens Audit where I found numerous IPCC AR4 references to a CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Predictability). This is what it’s handbook states…
CLIVAR is a component of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), which was established by WMO and ICSU, and is carried out in association with IOC and SCOR. The scientific planning and development of CLIVAR is under the guidance of the JSC Scientific
Steering Group for CLIVAR assisted by the CLIVAR International Project Office. The Joint Scientific Committee (JSC) is the main body of WMO-ICSU-IOC formulating overall WCRP scientific concepts.
There we have the very same groups WCRP WMO ICSU.
What are the objectives of CLIVAR?
CLIVAR is an international research programme investigating climate variability and predictability on time-scales from months to decades and the response of the climate system to anthropogenic
forcing. CLIVAR, as one of the major components of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), started in 1995 has a lifetime of 15 years.
The specific objectives of CLIVAR are:
1. To describe and understand the physical processes responsible for climate variability and predictability on seasonal, interannual, decadal, and centennial time-scales, through the collection and analysis of observations and the development and application of models of the coupled climate system, in cooperation with other relevant climate-research and observing
programmes.
2. To extend the record of climate variability over the time-scales of interest through the assembly of quality-controlled paleoclimatic and instrumental data sets.
3. To extend the range and accuracy of seasonal to interannual climate prediction through the development of global coupled predictive models.
4. To understand and predict the response of the climate system to increases of radiatively active gases and aerosols and to compare these predictions to the observed climate record in order to detect the anthropogenic modification of the natural climate signal.
The CLIVAR website is…http://www.clivar.org/
It is a vast site that requires many hours of reading. I had done much of it before a change in personal circumstance caused me to abandon it.
CLIVAR was armed with a large team, many of whom are familiar names to us, and large resources such as fully equipped ships and planes.
The team was split into groups who studied various regions and various climate phenomena.
i.e. Atlantic Panel, Pacific Panel, Indian Panel, Southern Panel, American Monsoon, African Panel etc.
It had a lifetime of 15 years ending in 2010. What did they achieve? Are they able to predict any regional climate phenomena? The answers were no last year and I haven’t had time to go through the web site again, but judging by the fact that they have an overlapping 10 year strategy (2005-2015) I’d say their objectives haven’t been met as yet.
My feeling at the time was that the IPCC reports couldn’t just keep being republished as is without going stale and that something had to be changed. That something is prediction as opposed to projection. My immediate thought at the time was “OMG what if they even fluked a prediction of an EL NINO or a typhoon in Asia? Too traumatising to contemplate.”