Forecasting rain - Climate Change: The Facts - page 62

Ring, and at the expense of Australian taxpayers with the approval of both the Australian
government and the United Nations and the adulation of the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation.
Interestingly, POAMA also receives significant direct industry funding including from
the Grains Research and Development Corporation and Queensland Canegrowers Ltd.
Meanwhile, members of these organisations buy Ring's almanacs.
A test for the existence of natural climate cycles
In his topic Climate: The Counter Consensus , Professor Robert M. Carter laments that the
IPCC concentrates its analyses of climate change on only the last few hundred years, and
has repeatedly failed to give proper weight to the geological context of the relatively short
150-year long instrumental record. 6 Carter correctly draws attention to the natural cycles
thatspantensofthousandsofyearsincludingchangesaffectedbyEarth'stilt(41,000year),
eccentricity (100,000) and precession (20,000). Carter goes on to mention other cycles of
shorterdurationincludingthoseaffectedbyvariationsintheintensityoftheSun'smagnetic
fields in particular the Schwabe (eleven year), Hale (22 year) and Gleissberg (70-90 year)
periodicities and the effect of the moon and the sun through the 18.6-year-long lunar nodal
cycles which he states causes variations in atmospheric pressure, temperature, rainfall,
sea-level and ocean temperature, especially at high latitudes.
Long-range US weather forecaster Joseph D'Aleo uses changes in Pacific Ocean
temperatures associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and also the
multi-decadalPacificDecadalOscillation(PDO).HesaysENSOismodulatedbythePDO,
affecting spring floods and tornadoes in the US. Ring explains the southern oscillation in
terms of water 'sloshing' from one side of the Pacific Ocean to the other and back again,
depending on changing lunar declination.
While essentially ignoring the likely extra-terrestrial origin of the phenomena, the
mainstreamclimatesciencecommunitydoestakeakeeninterestinseasurfacetemperature
anomalies particularly in the Pacific and in particular ENSO. Recognising the global
impact of this southern oscillation, but not the moon as a driver, the governmentfunded
scientists have been attempting to simulate ENSO using GCMs. Despite a concerted
effort and thousands of peer-review publications on the subject, the skill of the GCMs
at forecasting ENSO remains poor; comparable to what could be achieved using the
simple statistical models popular 30 years ago. 7 Arguably, the best forecasts of ENSO
come not from GCMs or simple statistical models, but from artificial neural networks
(ANNs). 8 ANNs are massive, parallel-distributed, information-processing systems with
characteristics resembling the biological neural networks of the human brain. They are a
form of artificial intelligence and represent state of the art statistical modelling. In contrast