Don’t kid yourself. You do this, so it’s just natural for you. Hence, you project this onto everyone else. That is human nature.

Don’t kid yourself. Everybody spins. That is human nature.

That is a good question, but it might be harder to answer than apparent. Looking at long term trends, the records are not as good as one might like for the entire hemisphere.

It’s already happened, Greg. Yahoo runs this headline:

Climate forecasts may be flawed, says study

“Predictions of unprecedented rainfall extremes in the 20th century driven by global warming turned out wrong, a study said Wednesday, casting doubt on methods used to project future trends.”

https://in.news.yahoo.com/climate-forecasts-may-flawed-says-170007812.html

Turned out to be wrong. Wow. Who writes this stuff?

Professor Steven Sherwood Director of the Climate Change Research Centre at The University of New South Wales:

“Previous studies, based on models, have shown that warming-induced trends in regional precipitation have not yet emerged from natural variability (“noise”). This seems inconsistent with the paper’s claim that the changes predicted by these same models are unrealistic, since it should not yet be possible to tell even according to the models themselves.”

Dr Markus Donat:
“It seems to me that the researchers’ claim of discrepancies between climate models and proxies during the most recent century is based on an “apple-to-oranges-comparison”. They use proxies of water availability (that is affected by both precipitation and evaporation) but compare against modelled precipitation only.”

Dr James Renwick:
“I am not too surprised that there is disagreement for the 20th century as there is a strong component of random variability evident in the observational record. The picture of the “wet getting wetter and the dry getting drier” is one that is very likely to emerge over the course of this century but has not been evident, or expected, during the 20th century.”

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/wet-and-dry-models-on-climate-extremes-questioned

The most obvious limiting factor would be soil saturation/runoff.

How would you detect rainfall beyond that point through tree-rings?

But there are also going to be structural limiting factors, like available nutrients, operating in the longer term.

Perhaps that is why he published on Facebook?

More likely: this paper was just published? This comment was a first response to it. One cannot do the same thing on a publication’s website.

he discrepancy could arise, of course, from the opposite problem: that the paleoclimate proxy data are *underestimating* hydroclimatic extremes. In my view, that is a far more likely explanation.

If that were all he said your comment about the alternate interpretation being just as likely would make a little sense, but you leave out the reason for his comment: everything else after the word “explanation”. The comment is hardly an idle statement made in a vacuum.

It is not.

That was my point.