Peter Gallagher

In a review of the DECR report, Dr David Stock­well showed that the DECR results for rain­fall were sup­ported only by cli­mate mod­els that appear to have lit­tle skill in match­ing past rain­fall pat­terns let alone fore­cast­ing future patterns.

Fur­ther­more, the sum­mary assess­ment in the DECR, quoted by the Depart­ment of Agriculture’s press release and ampli­fied by the Prime Min­is­ter, mis­lead­ingly present only the lower tail (10^th per­centile) of the rain­fall out­look devel­oped by the CSIRO and Aus­tralian Bureau of Mete­o­rol­ogy for their report, Cli­mate Change in Aus­tralia. The mean results of those pro­jec­tions are a slight decrease in drought frequency.

The sum­mary of Chap­ter 5, Sec­tion 2.2 of that report says:

“The range of pre­cip­i­ta­tion change in 2030 allow­ing for model to model dif­fer­ences is large. Annu­ally aver­aged, the 10th to 90th per­centile range is around –10% to +5% in north­ern areas and –10% to lit­tle change in south­ern areas.” (empha­sis added)

David is pre­sent­ing his results in a series of posts at Niche Mod­el­ing.