The RC/CSIRO comparison strikes me as a strawman that’s neither internally consistent nor sufficient to prove the larger point about adaptation.

The Manabe & Bryan study was hardly a forecast of a cooling southern ocean. Judging by the description in Manabe & Stouffer (2007), it wasn’t even a 3D model, and I very much doubt the results were from an ensemble. The small degree of cooling mentioned by RC could be natural variability or otherwise spurious.

The other statements in the RC post mention a cold Antarctic, but this could mean a variety of things, including “cooler than before” or “less warming than elsewhere.” It seems from other posts (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/regional-climate-projections ) that they mean the latter, a position which is consistent with the IPCC regional results, e.g. AR4 WG1 Ch.11 fig. 11.21.

In that case, there’s no evidence here that the CSIRO results are warmer or cooler than one would expect given the global trend, polar amplification, and the Southern Ocean thermal lag discussed at RC.

Whether or not “climate scientists … steadfastly refuse to describe what observations over the short term … would be inconsistent with model predictions,” it would be straightforward to check for oneself by visiting the PCMDI CMIP3 archive to retrieve raw model results. Given the availability of vast quantities of output, it should be quite easy to determine whether “all observations are consistent with predictions of climate models” and why.

One need not invoke selfish or political motives to understand why there is predictive ambiguity on the adaptive time scale. That’s to be expected given small short-term signals, large variability, and uncertain measurement of the initial system state. See http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5835/207
It’s exacerbated by the fact that regional downscaling is difficult and not uniformly available.

Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change Page 239

Consistent with
observed changes in surface temperature, there has been an
almost worldwide reduction in glacier and small ice cap (not
including Antarctica and Greenland) mass

Page 247

If the GISS data for 2005 are averaged only south
of 75̊N, then 2005 is cooler than 1998. In addition, there were
relatively cool anomalies in 2005 in HadCRUT3 in parts of
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, where sea ice coverage (see
Chapter 4) has not declined

Page 248

Temperatures over mainland Antarctica (south of 65̊S) have
not warmed in recent decades (Turner et al., 2005), but it is
virtually certain that there has been strong warming over the
last 50 years in the Antarctic Peninsula region

Page 295

contrasting trends of strong warming in the Antarctic Peninsula
and a cooling over most of interior Antarctica

This observational data seems quite contradictory to your quotes and they are both from the IPCC. How can that be surely observations means the models are wrong. The parts they say are melting are up to 6500km from the pole so I hope they continue to do so.

On a separate matter, I am puzzled by the statement: “A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming. For a long time the models have predicted just that.” This statement is an amalgam of a straw man argument and revisionism. Regarding the former (i.e., straw man argument), as far as I know, no one has ever claimed that the Antarctica and the Southern Ocean wouldn’t be cold. The issue is whether these areas would be warmer than they were.

With regard to the revisionism aspect, it may be true that some models may have predicted that the Antarctica may cool, but this point was definitely not evident from any of the IPCC assessments. In fact, all the IPCC reports show the Antarctica warming:

1. IPCC’s 1990 Scientific Assessment notes that “All models show enhanced warming in higher latitudes in late Autumn and Winter” (p. 140). “Winter and annual warmings are largest in high latitudes” (p. 143). See also figures on pp. 140-142.

2. IPCC’s Climate Change1995, The Science of Climate Change. See Fig. 17 (p. 38), which compares the increase in temperature from 1955-1974 to 1975-1994 , and Figs. 22-23 which shows future temperature increases.

3. IPCC’s 2001 Synthesis Report shows model results indicating not only that that Antarctica would warm but that it would, by and large, warm greater than the average (pp. 65, 207, 208).

4. IPCC’s 2007 WG I Summary for Policy Makers also shows that the Antarctica would be warming (p. 15).

(1) Goklany, IM. 1995. “Strategies to Enhance Adaptability: Technological Change, Economic Growth and Free Trade.” Climatic Change 30: 427-449.

(1) Goklany, IM. 1995. “Strategies to Enhance Adaptability: Technological Change, Economic Growth and Free Trade.” Climatic Change 30: 427-449.

Glad I’m not a regional planner. Roger Pielke, Jr., speaks my mind in the comment just above.

But other contexts climate may prove decisive, e.g., for dryland farming. We’ve argued via our SPARC project that what needs to be done is a sensitivity analysis of impacts of concern to various factors that influence those impacts.

Too often the climate impacts literature holds everything constant and lets climate vary/change to assess the unique impact of climate. This is fine, as far as it goes, but neglects the sensitivity to multiple factors.

So yes we have to pay attention to climate change, but not climate change alone. This makes the job of the local and regional planner that much more difficult I fear.

As a person engaged in planning at the local and regional level, I don’t have time to keep up with the adaptation literature. Can I just fall back to the existing uncertainty in decisionmaking literature (scenarios, etc.) or is there something unique about uncertainty around climate change that is worth paying attention to? Do we know if people in the adaptation community are familiar with the existing literature on uncertainty in decisionmaking? Or are they possibly reinventing it?