Coin Tossing: Cold or Warm?

Newscientist reports:

• Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference.
• "I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.
• "Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.
•  "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office.

The message is that global climate models cannot predict year or decade meanvalues, but can predict centennial meanvalues. How can this be? What is the mathematics behind such a belief? 

The first idea that come to mind is the law of large numbers of statistics offering prediction of the meanvalue 0.5 of many cointosses between 0 and 1, but no prediction of the meanvalue of a few tosses. But is climate modeling the same as coin tossing between cold and warm? 

Newscientist concludes:

• The world may badly want reliable forecasts of future climate. But such predictions are proving as elusive as the perfect weather forecast.
  

The future of mankind thus seems to lie in the hands of mathematicians running the climate models...but coin tossing statistics does not seem to be enough...what can be done or said? 

Well, let us recall that the 0.5 probability of heads in coin tossing is computed mathematically using the fact that a rotating coin has head up half of the time, that is using a short-time-accurate mathematical model, see the discussion in Chapter 13 Turbulence and Chaos in Computational Turbulent Incompressible Flow. Without a short-time-accurate model, nothing can be be predicted about long-time...Compare with the UK Met Office assurement:

• There have been major advances in the development and use of models over the last 20 years and the current models give us a reliable guide to the direction of future climate change.
• Computer models cannot predict the future exactly...
• Current models enable us to attribute the causes of past climate change, and predict the main features of the future climate, with a high degree of confidence.

What are "the advances in the development and use of models"? What is meant by "direction of future climate change"? Colder or warmer? Does "direction" indicate that the size of the change cannot be predicted? What is the meaning of "computer models cannot predict the future exactly"? That computer models can predict the future almost exactly? Who is the inventor of this form of newspeak? Note the clever construction of the following key statement by Met Office:

• As well as producing CO2, burning fossil fuels also produces small particles called aerosols which cool the climate by reflecting sunlight back into space. These have increased steadily in concentration over the 20th century, which has probably offset some of the warming we have seen.
  

Note the clever use of "probably" and "some of the warming". Very clever doublespeak: Clearly suggesting something, without saying anything! This is not the language of science. 

Can really these semantic tricks help save the World?