Extreme drought predictions little more than hot air

ABC once again push all the alarmist buttons with this headline "Earth could see extreme drought in 30 years" covering a study that reports on the findings of a new paper titled Drought under global warming: a review by National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai. Pity ABC did not spend the time to investigate past the press release. Roger Pielke Snr points out some items missing from ABC's coverage: 

The National Science Foundation Funds Multi-Decadal Climate Predictions Without An Ability To Verify Their Skill

"This UCAR press release and the article itself are not scientifically robust. Buried within this material are the significant cavaets:
1. “Dai cautioned that the findings are based on the best current projections of greenhouse gas emissions. What actually happens in coming decades will depend on many factors, including actual future emissions of greenhouse gases as well as natural climate cycles such as El Niño.”
2. “Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs.”

In other words, there is NO way to assess the skill of these models are predicting drought as they have not yet shown any skill in SST predictions on time scales longer than a season, nor natural climate cycles such as El Niño [or the PDO, the NAO, ect].

Funding of multi-decadal regional climate predictions by the National Science Foundation which cannot be verified in terms of accuracy is not only a poor use of tax payer funds, but is misleading policymakers and others on the actual skill that exists in predicting changes in the frequency of drought in the future."

Once again ABC miss the real story.