Weather Models Failed Again

Washington, DC, January 25, 2000 – Over the weekend, local weathermen predicted that the East Coast, and probably Washington, DC, would be hit by a major storm – on Wednesday night. The excitement about the prediction was that it was based on computer modeling and forecasting, instead of actual observation.

The computer models used to predict global climate one hundred years from now are different, but are faced with the same handicap that caused the inaccurate prediction this week – weather is unpredictable because we still don’t understand every factor. Global climate is even more unpredictable because it is far more complex than predicting a local storm.

“After this week’s meteorological debacle, would you trust the predictions made by those computers at the weather centers? Would you base government policy on those predictions?” asked Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “That is exactly what Al Gore is asking us to do – but on a much greater scale. The Kyoto Protocol, endorsed by Gore and other radical environmentalists, bases all its science on speculative computer modeling – and calls for enormous economic sacrifices from the US.”

If Al Gore gets his way, we won’t have enough resources to plow the streets the next time we are facing an ‘unpredictable’ weather event,” concluded Ebell.

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