Would that this were the case merely for the 48-hour forecast. Unfortunately, it appears that the same pathology has infected the 48-year projection. Just like weather forecast models, our climate simulations have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. And just like the situation with the recent snow, there has been incontrovertible and advancing evidence, this time over the course of the last two decades, that climate simulations are making a disastrous error, and it has taken forever for forecasters to acknowledge it. Every computer model predicts that the entire troposphere, or roughly the bottom 40,000 feet of the atmosphere, should be warming rapidly.
Most models even predict that much of the warming accelerates with height.
If that was the 1996 consensus of my profession, it was largely a consensus of ostriches, not scientists. Not very long. Here, for once, eyeballs have triumphed over the computer. Most people use weather forecasts to plan the future. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change was a response to a climate forecast.