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

My link has dozens of papers that claim to explain the pause. It wasn’t we think there is a pause, they are already explaining why there was one.

I’d say a full issue Nature dedicated to exploring why there was a pause, suggests it was a broadly held idea.

That said, if there was no consensus, why is that? Why do some scientists believe there was a pause, while others disagree? Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward?

> Anyone involved with forecasting will know what I mean.

I'm not involved with forecasting, but am generally very skeptical of people 'debunking' climate science in non-scientific forums such as these. Can you back up your claim that these people haven't done their job properly? Have you read the article and their methodology? It seems to be behind a paywall unfortunately so I can't assess your claim right now.

Since you didn't point out any specific flaw in the study, but mentioned merely general biases which any scientist is aware of, suggesting they apply to the article but not really pointing out how, I really can't take this criticism of a peer reviewed article seriously.

Your comment doesn't match what the paper actually says[1].

Your claim that "The old studies didn't predict how much CO2 the world would emit" is directly contradicted on the first page. The paper begins by pointing out that "model projections rely on...accurate assumptions around future emissions of CO2". In fact, one of the criteria the authors used for choosing a model to include was that it came with a time-series prediction of "future projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations".

With that restriction, the authors found 11 papers containing a total of 14 models. Unless the authors of this paper left out other predictions from the original papers, the only papers included in the study that "predicted how much the planet would warm, for various amounts of CO2 emissions" were Hansen's, and the other 9 papers included in this study only made one prediction for both emissions and temperature.

This paper also points out that Hansen's 1988 "most plausible" model, which you described as "the one model that was presented to Congress", was not accurate under the usual definition of accurate: "H88's “most plausible” scenario B overestimated warming experienced subsequent to publication by around 54%."

Then how does this paper lead to the headline that "Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming"?

What the authors of this paper have done is to compare errors in the models' predictions of CO2 emissions to errors in the models' predictions of temperature. In other words, the models were wrong about both, but in the same direction. They overestimated both future emissions and future temperature.

Even so, the claim that the models were accurate is a linguistic trick. The table on line 326 shows what the authors are calling skill score: "A skill score of one represents perfect agreement between a model projection and observations."

Not a single model has a "skill score" of one, or for which one is within the uncertainty. In fact, all of the models are wrong in the same direction, even after this paper has attempted to correct for their incorrect assumptions about future CO2 emissions.

The linguistic trick is that this error is not, according to the authors, "statistically significant". But that's a tremendous abuse of the phrase. The authors are effectively saying: "The null hypothesis is that the models are right, and we've failed to disprove it." They've assumed the conclusion.

I suspect that this paper is being promoted for political, not scientific, correctness.

1: A PDF of this paper can be found at https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/tbp/inp_Hausfather_ha08910q....

If I undertand right, your proposed alternative solution to cutting carbon emissions is to let a few billion people die in famines and resource wars?

I kinda question that the living quality and wealth of the survivors ends up better in your scenario...

> Even if they said how many models they looked at before choosing 14 models (and explained why they chose those 14), conspiracy theorists and people skeptical of climate science would still argue that it is not legitimate because of survivorship bias and several other reasons.

Undoubtedly some would, but are you willing to consider the possibility that the number/percentage of people that would do so might be altered by the language used in articles on climate science?

> People can always suggest more tests you need to do or poke holes in any analysis.

Some analyses are easier to poke holes in than others. If this article was tightened up in the manner I describe, excluding the possibility of survivorship bias, then an entirely new approach to denial would be required. As written, survivorship bias is a very real possibility.

Wikipedia says: "Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias."

Survivorship bias is a real phenomenon, not a conspiracy theory. It is neither illogical or unscientific to consider the possibility that is might be in play behind the scenes here, and the article as written makes no attempt to rule it out.

> Overall it is impressive that different models made over 30 years can predict fairly accurate results. In my opinion that shows that the underlying physics of the models is correct and makes me trust the models even more.

I suspect this is because your mind does not consider it a possibility that the models discussed do not result from survivorship bias. A conspiratorial mind however, would most likely strongly consider that a possibility, and therefore compute a completely different level of trust.

Imagine for a moment how the human mind works when reading something. Typically, if the mind is primed with preexisting beliefs, it is going to be actively searching (interpreting) for confirmation of those beliefs, and this behavior will likely be stronger if the topic happens to be one associated with one's identity. So, your mind processes an article such as this optimistically (uncritically), whereas a "denier" or "conspiracy theorist" is going to read it pessimistically (critically).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_inter...

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-279...

Here is another interesting example. See this reddit thread on the article: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/e63ic5/of_17_clima...

The top comment is: (/u/aClimateScientist) "Hi all, I'm a coauthor of this paper (Henri Drake) and happy to answer questions."

Someone asks the question: "How did you account for survivorship bias of models? IOW how did you select the 17? I mean if I asked 1,000 psychics to predict GDP growth, I could probably find 10-20 who were pretty close and say that that proves they're clairvoyant."

As of when I'm writing this, neither /u/aClimateScientist nor /u/avogadros_number (the article submitter, who seems to have considerable background in climate science) have addressed this question.

(Or, same thread: a moderator [Removed] comment.)

My question to you is: do you think it is possible that the manner in which your mind evaluates this particular situation (an unanswered question, in a thread with 29 total comments) may differ from how the mind of a "denier" or "conspiracy theorist" might evaluate the situation, and how that evaluation may in turn be used (or not) to tune your respective mental models and subconscious heuristics?

A followup question is: do you believe this perspective is irrelevant (has no bearing on) the climate change dilemma?

------------------------------

I sometimes wonder if the climate change dilemma was reproduced in a sim-style video game, would the human mind be less resistant to recognizing and reacting to the behavior of their adversary? If the adversary is a machine rather than a human, might the tribalism component of subconscious decision making decrease? This is one of those things that seems so obvious, I wonder if there might be some studies on it.

As shocked as people here are at the continued existence of "deniers" (or more accurately, their mental models of deniers), I am similarly shocked at the psychological unwillingness of intelligent people to acknowledge certain unfortunate realities. It's kind of comically/tragically ironic if you think about it.