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Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

sciencemag.org

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Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#181

Post by bitlax »

jellicle wrote: post #178
bitlax wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'll take that bet. Climate activists have advocated that precisely the opposite should happen: that they should maintain or even increase their growth since they are developing economies.

Climate activists have made the much more subtle point that it is unjust to expect nations which have never industrialized not to industrialize so that rich industrial nations can run their air conditioners with the doors open and their SUVs idling.

Right. In the case of China, they missed the boat on modernization when they instituted communism. Now the world can't afford their emissions.

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#182

Post by s1k3b8 »

jointpdf wrote: post #177
s1k3b8 wrote: post #173

There were dozens and dozens of "climate models" which predicted everything from global cooling to a fiery wasteland and everything in between. Of course you could go back and find a model that "predicted" correctly because every possibility was predicted. That's like dozens and dozens of "stock price models" predicting FB stock to go up, down and stay the same. Of course one is guaranteed to be correct. What is "sci…

This comment is just completely nonsensical and intellectually dishonest. This is not at all what this paper did, nor what any remotely credible scientific study ever does.

> This comment is just completely nonsensical and intellectually dishonest.

I'm sorry you feel that way. Would be interested to find which parts you felt was "nonsensical and intellectually dishonest" so I expand on it and clarify it for you. Hard to respond to an ad hominem.

> This is not at all what this paper did, nor what any remotely credible scientific study ever does.

It's exactly what it did. How about this. If a "anticlimatemag" opposed to the climate change agenda had an article titled "Even 50-year-old climate models were wrong about global warming", would you be defending it as vigorously?

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#183

Post by codingslave »

beatpanda wrote: post #82

"Well of course the models were right", you say to yourself. Who is still arguing about this? The evidence has piled up to the extent that being "skeptical of the science" is unacceptable in educated, elite spaces (such as Hacker News and the tech industry generally). But now, as you can already see proliferating in the comments to this piece, the new acceptable contrarian take on climate change is that of course its…

Science is not a religion, its continuing integrity hinges on unbridled skepticism.

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#184

Post by onhn »

masterj wrote: post #95
onhn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about ordering people like this, but to your underlying point: I would say that the evidence for Earth not being flat is directly and immediately observable in everyday life. Climate change evidence on the other hand, one has to either put in some effort in the form of research/reading, or, place trust in an authority or peers.

There are lots of people who can observe climate change in everyday life. Anyone who regularly spends time in mountains around glaciers can see this change with their eyes. Or people in Houston who see 500 year floods yearly. Or Californians breathing wildfire smoke. Or Hondurans suffering from drought. Or people in Miami wading through floods on sunny days.

I was referring to, and should have written explicitly: "anthropogenic climate change" -- this was the context of the parent's comment. I don't think your examples are immediately obvious as evidence for it.

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#185

Post by benmaraschino »

jointpdf wrote: post #172
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA article does say. They looked at 17 forecasts drawn from 14 models. You are the one who implicitly believes they are lying about that and only reporting 17 out of some huge unknown number. The reality is that the vast majority (>99%) of climate change research does not produce the type of forecast, or really any forecast at all, that one could do this analysis on. Therefore, the 17 forecast number is actually ver…

Simulation is one way to produce a numerical forecast, but the prediction of any forecast model would never be the result of a single simulation run. Model predictions are always (or should always) be reported as an expected value, or the average over many simulation runs. The expected value of a random variable (e.g. mode output) is probably the most fundamental concept in all of statistics/probability, and many min…

Agreed. The point of criticism that the authors didn’t include all relevant models is among the lowest of the low-hanging fruit I can imagine one picking. And while the process of peer review isn’t without its flaws, I can also imagine that fruit has long since been picked by the reviewers, who have far deeper knowledge of the published models than I or just about anyone else in this thread, save for the actual climate scientists among us.

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#186

Post by pstuart »

bitlax wrote: post #165
pstuart wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're betting that Trump is going to push policies that address climate change? The same individual who says that climate change is a hoax? Who praises clean coal and says that wind turbines cause cancer?

No, I'm betting that changes in U.S. production will have little to no impact on inspiring China and India to decrease their emissions.

My point was that our current approach leads to zero impact on other nations. How can we even ask of others when we can't do the needful ourselves.

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#187

Post by refurb »

henrifdrake wrote: post #164
starpilot wrote: post #54

It does seem like survivorship bias could be a factor. The article talks about how some of the old models were off until they "corrected" them. All right, and did they apply the same scrutiny to the apparently "correct" ones? "All of the models predicted this (except for the ones that didn't.)

The correction is based on physics is really quite straightforward...

If it's so straightforward, why wasn't it accounted for in the first place?

Honest question.

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#188

Post by pragmar »

henrifdrake wrote: post #160
jml7c5 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/12/how-go... >We gathered all the climate models published between 1970 and the mid-2000s that gave projections of both future warming and future concentrations of CO2 and other climate forcings – from Manabe (1970) and Mitchell (1970) through to CMIP3 in IPCC 2007. If you're a cynic or suspicious: "projections of future warming" means they intentionall…

We didn't find any quantitative and peer-reviewed projections of cooling, or we would have included them. If you know of any, please let me know and I'll publish an update to the paper.

I don't know if it helps, but these are the papers the media cooling stories came from. They are peer reviewed and quantitative, but perhaps not exactly what you need (that is to say, not sufficiently predictive).

Rasool and Schneider 1971 [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4db2/1045b17ebcdd6a8c6adeb1...

Earl Barrett 1971 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003809...

Hamilton and Seliga 1972 https://www.igsoc.org/journal/14/72/igs_journal_vol14_issue0...

Chylek and Coakley 1974 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/183/4120/75

Bryson and Dittberner 1976 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%28197...

Sean Twomey 1977 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%28197...

[1] edit: Schneider later retracted findings

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#189

Post by yters »

tzs wrote: post #101
yters wrote: post #79

What about the 50 year old models that predicted a looming global cooling? Why were they wrong?

Those predictions were based upon projections that we would not address the growing levels of smog and other particulates, and the cooling effect from those would be larger than the warming effect from greenhouse gases. We did address smog. Without growing smog, those models predicted warming.

Would increasing particulates be an effective way to stop global warming?

Re: Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

#190

Post by mturmon »

s1k3b8 wrote: post #173

There were dozens and dozens of "climate models" which predicted everything from global cooling to a fiery wasteland and everything in between. Of course you could go back and find a model that "predicted" correctly because every possibility was predicted. That's like dozens and dozens of "stock price models" predicting FB stock to go up, down and stay the same. Of course one is guaranteed to be correct. What is "sci…

Could you name the climate model that predicted a "fiery wasteland"? What exactly does this mean?

Also: as has been pointed out, in TFA and elsewhere in this thread, the authors of the linked study did not cherry-pick the models.

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