This is the problem in your question. Climatologists are not predicting what the weather is going to be like in the future. To put it very simply, the majority of climatologists are saying that an increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cause temperatures to rise. They then extrapolate that data to say that that will means more melting of sea ice, which can affect salinity of sea water, etc. Very far down the chain they say one effect of warmer oceans could be an increase in the magnitude of hurricanes (not in the number of them - that is a mischaracterization of what’s been said).
Again, climatologists are not predicting what the weather is going to be like at any time frame in the future. They are saying that sometimes and in some places things will be warmer, or cooler, or wetter or drier, but averaged out , things are going to be warmer.
If they made such a prediction, it’d sound foolish to me. It might be above average, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t normal. Actually, it would be very normal to be above or below. That’d be normal.
example: An average doesn’t imply that that is ‘normal’. If we average 25 storms, that means that 29 storms is incredibly normal. 14 would be normal.
Climatologists and meteorologists use fundamentally different methods to hypothesize about the future. In general, meterology has been strongly focused on historical records and using past experience to produce a forecast of likely futures.
If you look at 10-day weather forecasts today, the further out you get from the present, the closer the forecast is to the historical average regardless of what conditions are like today. For example, if December 16th tended to be rainy over the last 100 years, a forecast from December 6th would be likely to predict rain.
Climatologists generally use the opposite method. They take what is known about the physics, chemistry, and fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and build on present conditions to hypothesize about the future. Responsible climatologists will run many iterations of a model and determine from the most common set of outcomes what hypotheses about the future are likely to resemble the actual future.
A underlying difference, between these types of prediction is that meteorologists tend to assume that the past is a good guide to what the future will be like (certainly an assumption that I approve of in general, but becomes weaker when there are qualitative differences between the past and the present.) This has led to a lot of differences and disagreements between meteorologists and climatologists.
I have to disagree with the premise of your question. That is not actually what climatologists should do.
An inquiry for a meteorologist might be: What will the Atlantic hurricane season in 2051 be like? To which most meteorologists would probably answer “I don’t know.” The same question to a climatologist would probably also get an answer of “I don’t know.” A better question for a climatologist might be “What will Atlantic hurricane seasons look like in 2050-2080?” [sub](I don’t know what their answer would be.)[/sub]
Good inquiries for a climatologist would be: What is average rainfall over the Eastern US going to be like in 2050? What will happen to the timing of ENSO events in 2030-2050?
Media hype has focused on the question of stronger hurricanes, but I think there’s a false perception out there that climatologists are in the business of predicting the 2051 Atlantic hurricane season when that is not really their job.
Because they don’t use the same model - the models are built differently for completely different purposes. Weather can generally be only predicted in the short-term, while climate can only be predicted in the long-term.
I pity the fools.