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Failed forecasts
Fernando del Pino Calvo Sotelo
March 26, 2025
Except in the rainy north, most of Spain has such a sunny climate that as soon as we have a few weeks of rain in a row we start to complain, and when the sun comes out again — as always happens in life — our mood immediately changes.
The moaning is understandable and typical of our fickle human nature, but it is also frivolous: water is life, for agriculture, for nature and for mankind, and its ephemeral melancholic effects, or the incidents that the rain may cause, should not overshadow the enormous beneficial impact that we longed for so much when we suffered from drought.
As usually happens with the weather, short human memory and media sensationalism push us to label this succession of rains as “abnormal”, even if they irregularly happen every few years. On the other hand, given that rainfall has not shown a clear trend over the last century — slight growth worldwide[1] and an irregular and negligible decrease in Spain[2] — it seems logical that after a period of drought there should be a period of excessive rainfall to even things out, although the fact that it has all fallen in a few weeks does not necessarily mean that the current year will have an extraordinary rainfall.
In reality, the most worrying thing is not the rain, but the huge volume of water that could have been accumulated and stored but has been poured away and wasted due to a lack of adequate hydrological infrastructure. That
is the real problem.
That said, these rains are bad news for climate change propaganda, which prefers phenomena such as heat and drought that psychologically connect more easily with the suggestible “global warming” hype. I hope that, just as no one thinks that Spain has become like England because of a few weeks of rain, when opposite weather conditions occur no one believes that the Spanish climate is becoming like that of the Sahara.
The failure of the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET)
The AEMET failed to predict neither the beginning of the drought nor its end, and it was also wrong when it forecast a “dry” winter, for which it has been heavily criticized. Although I applaud the Agency being subject to constant public scrutiny, in the case of its failed winter forecast the accusation is slightly unfair, as the AEMET was very cautious and emphasized the enormous uncertainties of its prediction.
In reality, the Agency has no idea what will happen during the next quarter, as the longest forecast that can be made in meteorology is about two weeks, although in practice it does not exceed five days. Therefore, the only reason why the AEMET pretends to make impossible predictions, wrapped in a false scientific halo, can be none other than to fake a predictive capacity that it doesn’t have, that is to say, pure theater, and it adorns it with probabilistic ranges as broad as they are arbitrary.
What should be criticized of the AEMET is that it has corrupted its scientific character to become a cheerleader for climate propaganda, miniskirt and pompom included. Indeed, when it comes to meteorology, the Agency protects itself behind the great uncertainties and limitations of current scientific understanding of the climate. However, when it comes to “climate change” it makes prophecies with total certainty, and the previous
uncertainties and limitations disappear as if by magic.
In other words, with its weather predictions, whose accuracy is easily verifiable, the AEMET is playing it safe, but with its unverifiable climate predictions for a century from now, it is playing it very, very loose indeed.
Thus, the Agency pulls out of the hat dubious or non-existent cause-effect relationships that science handles with enormous caution, since the climate is a complex, chaotic, non-linear and multifactorial system about which we still know little. Let’s look at a few examples.
On its own website, the AEMET highlights “the close link between climate change and extreme weather events”. However, extreme weather events have not increased in frequency or severity over the last century. Even the IPCC acknowledges this in the scientific chapters of AR5[3] and AR6: “The evidence is limited or there is no signal” that rainfall, floods or droughts have changed significantly, so statements to that effect (such as those made by the AEMET) deserve “low confidence”[4].
We find another example of AEMET malpractice in the deceitful use it made of the high temperatures of the summer of 2023. At that time a spokesman declared that “we were going to have to add the term infernal nights to our meteorological dictionary”[5]. Obviously, such statements do not belong to the realm of science, but to that of sensationalism.
The rate of global warming over the last four decades has been less than 0.15ºC per decade[6], a rate at which it would take a century for temperatures to rise by just 1.5ºC (something that is otherwise unlikely). Furthermore, the planet’s current temperatures are similar to those it had 1,000 and 10,000 years ago (in the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Maximum, respectively), when CO2 levels were lower than they are today and when no factories, meteorologists or journalists existed.
The AEMET also misled by stating that “what we are observing [the 2023
summer heatwave] is a consequence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions”. Defending this cause-and-effect relationship is unacceptable. The World Meteorological Organization itself recognizes that “no specific weather event can be attributed to human-induced climate change”[7]. Furthermore, temporary local atmospheric conditions can never be extrapolated to the planet’s climate. In that same summer of 2023, Antarctica was experiencing an extremely cold southern winter with record low temperatures, but that did not lead the shivering emperor penguins to conclude that the planet was cooling[8].
The AEMET also omits that the temperature jump in 2023 has caused perplexity among scientists, who consider it “extremely unlikely” that it had anything to do with climate change[9]. As climate science is still in its infancy, there are a variety of opinions: some blame El Niño[10], others blame less cloud cover on the planet[11] and others blame the eruption of the Hunga-Tonga submarine volcano[12].
Finally, when another spokesperson for the Agency says that “temperatures are rising in line with what the climate models are saying”[13], he is demonstrating either great ignorance or a great capacity for deceit, as it is well known that the climate models have always been guilty of alarmism by predicting temperatures much higher than those actually observed[14].
Climate complexity
Given the absolute discrediting of the institution, I thought it would be appropriate to recall past times when the AEMET still tried to be faithful to science. To this end, I will quote extensively from the physicist Inocencio Font (1914-2003), a leading figure in 20th-century Spanish meteorology, whose great work Climatologia de España y Portugal (2nd edition) includes a pertinent appendix on what he called “hypothetical climate change”. Font worked for almost half a century at the Spanish National
Meteorological Service (later the National Institute of Meteorology, today AEMET), and was its director during the last years of his professional life.
As Font explains, since the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, the Earth has experienced several climatic periods lasting between 2,000 and 3,000 years, divided into episodes of a few centuries which in turn are subdivided into shorter sub-periods lasting decades. These show “marked fluctuations” of an erratic nature that make any selective extrapolation of the trend of short series, as climate propaganda does, misleading.
Regarding the causes of these “climate changes” (in the plural) “satisfactory conclusions have not yet been reached”, although the variables that influence the climate are known (but not their exact weighting or interaction).
The first variable is the amount of solar energy received by the Earth, the variation of which depends on solar disturbances and the “unpredictable” variations of ultraviolet emissions and electrically charged particles (solar wind). Although Font does not mention it, it also depends on the Earth’s translational and rotational movements described in the Milankovitch cycles, that is, on its orbital eccentricity, its axial tilt and its equinoctial precession.
The second variable is the naturally occurring variations in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases —whose variations are only significant in the very long term— and aerosols, whose main source are volcanic eruptions. These are “impossible to predict” and can have opposite atmospheric effects: surface eruptions (the most common) expel pulverized material and tend to cool the planet, while eruptions from underwater volcanoes can expel huge amounts of water vapor (the largest greenhouse gas) and have a warming effect (such as Hunga-Tonga in 2022).
A third factor is the changes in the oceans, which absorb half of the solar radiation and constitute the great reservoir of CO2. The oceans are
immense and mysterious: they cover 70% of the world’s surface, have an average depth of 3,700 m and have very special stratification of temperature, density, pressure, light and salinity, with their mysterious thermoclines and their horizontal and vertical currents. Despite their importance, many so-called climate “experts” lack oceanographic expertise.
The fourth factor is changes in albedo, which is the percentage of radiation reflected by the Earth’s surface and which depends on the nature of the surface: forests reflect little (5-10%), while ice and snow can reflect 100% of the radiation. The extent of the polar ice caps, which shows “very considerable differences, both from one year to the next, and between decades or centuries”, is particularly influential due to its positive feedback. For this reason, short-term variations should never be projected, as climate change propaganda constantly does.
The fifth variable is the impact of human activity on greenhouse gas emissions. Font makes it clear that the slight atmospheric warming measured in the 20th century “is still within the range of natural climate variability”. He argues that the likely cause is the burning of fossil fuels.
The problem of clouds
Global warming will lead to increased evaporation and cloud cover. Therefore, in addition to all the factors mentioned above, we have the ambiguous influence of clouds, the balance of which is almost impossible to model and quantify because it “depends not only on the quantity, but also on their types and geographical distribution”.
Clouds produce conflicting feedback. On the one hand, by “shading” solar radiation, they increase the albedo and cool; on the other hand, if we consider their greenhouse effect, they warm. In summer a cloudy day is cooler than a sunny day, while in winter it is usually the opposite: clear days
are usually colder than cloudy ones. The net probably contributes to the cooling, which explains why recent studies have linked the slight global warming of the last two decades to “natural variations [reduction] in cloud cover and albedo”[15].
Therefore, anthropogenic CO2 is only a small variable in a system whose fundamental characteristics are complexity, unpredictability and a geological timescale (thousands or even millions of years) that makes extrapolating trends over years or decades futile and misleading.
Climate models
Apocalyptic climate alarmism is based on unrealistic scenarios introduced as inputs into mathematical climate prediction models that Font describes with skepticism as “mere artificial simulations of a natural system so complicated and of which we still have such a precarious knowledge that the uncertainty of its predictions remains inevitable”.
Increased computing power does not imply greater knowledge of the climate; the computer has become smarter, but man has not. What’s more, the models suffer from a curse that perplexes mathematicians: the greater the number of variables they handle, the worse their predictive capacity. The greater the complexity and parameterization, the lower the accuracy.
It would be desirable for professional experts at the AEMET to emphasize the “inevitable uncertainty of predictions” not only when they make meteorological predictions, but every time they talk about climate change.
What to do about climate change then?
“Man does not have the power to prevent the atmosphere from warming up, much less to stabilize the climate.” This statement is possibly the most relevant of Font’s aforementioned work, which also rejects a sharp reduction in global emissions, as it would imply ‘the collapse of the world economy,’ that is, poverty, hunger, death, and war. That is where the suicidal European ‘zero emissions’ policy is leading us.
Likewise, Font shows little concern for the possibility of an uncontrolled increase in the Earth’s temperature: “Even if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow, global warming will have a limit, beyond which (…) the average global temperature would remain constant, regardless of any subsequent increase in the concentration of these gases”. This phenomenon is known as CO2 saturation, and means that, above a certain concentration of this residual gas, its greenhouse effect practically disappears.
Therefore, faced with these realities, “there is no other attitude than resignation, accepting climatic unpredictability as one of the many limitations that Nature imposes on our activities”. Man is not God.
The unsolvable problem of climate prediction
Today, the iron dictatorship of power and money has corrupted science, which was always a poor profession dependent on patronage. But a quarter of a century ago science was much freer, and that is why Font allowed himself to write something that today would have him condemned to the stake: “It could also happen that, in the long run, once the period of adaptation to the new climatic conditions is over, the final balance of the economic-social repercussions will be more beneficial than harmful for humanity as a whole”.
And it continues: “With regard to the attitude of climatologists, it seems to us that the most sensible thing would be that, instead of dedicating so much
effort and money to trying to solve the unsolvable problem of climate prediction, they should place greater emphasis on research into the nature and behavior of the Earth’s climate system, as well as into the causes of climate changes (…)”.
Amen.
[1] Climate Change Indicators: U.S. and Global Precipitation | US EPA
[2] Evolución de la precipitación anual y estacional en la España peninsular – Clima de la pasada centuria en España
[3] IPCC AR5, WG 1, Chapter 2.6, p.214-220
[4] IPCC AR6, WG 1, Chapter 12, p. 1770-1856
[5] Aemet lanza un mensaje catastrófico: “En breve ya hablaremos de noches infernales”
[6] Latest Global Temps « Roy Spencer, PhD
[7] Cited by S. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, BenBella Books, 2021
[8] Extreme Antarctic Cold of Late Winter 2023 | Advances in Atmospheric Sciences
[9] The jump in global temperatures in September 2023 is extremely unlikely due to internal climate variability alone | npj Climate and Atmospheric Science
[10] ACP – The 2023 global warming spike was driven by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation
[11] Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo | Science
[12] Hunga Tonga Volcano: Impact on Record Warming Explained
[13] Aemet: Es coherente un 2023 cálido y seco con el cambio climático
[14] New Article on Climate Models vs. Observations « Roy Spencer, PhD
[15] Millennium-Scale Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Soil Moisture
Influence on Western Mediterranean Cloudiness