Sir, – Your Front page article quoting an “expert” reports that Ireland will experience “huge temperature rises”, but fails to point out that these predictions were based on the output of 29 runs each of the RCP2.6 and RCP 8.5 scenarios of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project Model 5 (CMIP5) as part of a potential contribution to the upcoming IPCC Fifth assessment (AR5). A study of the underlying paper shows that only in one scenario is there any significant deviation of temperatures from historical temperature trends, and then only after the year 2040.
Perhaps you should have read the publication itself where caveats made by the authors are contained in its abstract and conclusions and say (inter alia): "widespread ESM-errors, like a systematic warm bias in the middle-troposphere, too-strong wintertime westerlies over Europe and a two-weak African Easterly Jet during the monsoon season, were found"; "significant distributional differences remain after correcting the mean error"; "the limitations and recommendations for working with GCM data in a downscaling context remain valid"; "The final message is that many of the errors found in the CMIP3-GCMs are still present in current model generation" and "the shortcomings remain valid for the new model".
Of course spectacular headlines sell newspapers better than the turgid prose of scientific publications.– Yours, etc,
DAVID WHITEHEAD,
BA(Mod),FIMMM,CEng,
Kinvara,
Co Galway.