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This seems very hard to believe - mainstream science struggles to predict accurately even 5 years out. In 1982 they were predicting the ice caps would be gone b

This seems very hard to believe - mainstream science struggles to predict accurately even 5 years out. In 1982 they were predicting the ice caps would be gone by 2000, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer etc. But this one guy is the Nostradamus of climate and everyone ignored him? Note: I am not saying that climate change isn’t real. I’m just sceptical that someone in 1982 made accurate predictions of 2019. And all points in between? Without anyone noticing?

tozeur 7y ago
I’m also curious about this. Exxon being the most valuable company back then was basically the ‘Google’ of its time: they employed the smartest people and developed breakthrough technologies. I wouldn’t be surprised if their heavily funded scientists were able to make accurate predictions. There’s also the possibility that their predictions gave a wide range and we’re simply within that band today.
lucb1e 7y ago
> this one guy is the Nostradamus of climate and everyone ignored him? I have no trouble believing that. Given a thousand predictions, with two thousand possible outcomes you'll have someone guess right 50% of the time. These are educated guesses and no one knows the odds of guessing right, but I'm not surprised we can find a random person that made a prediction that fits a certain part of what we're seeing today.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
> In 1982 they were predicting the ice caps would be gone by 2000 Citation please. No one was predicting that. Edit: Also I have little problem believing that internal scientists knew the problem, and the extent, long before the outside world recognised the urgency. That also applied to tobacco, asbestos, leaded fuel - they had research showing issues decades before the wider world had the weight of evidence, or even recognised there was a problem to investigate...
luc4sdreyer 7y ago
> This seems very hard to believe - mainstream science struggles to predict accurately even 5 years out In general, this might be true. Predicting the future is harder than it seems. But it depends completely on the type of system (chaotic or not), and how well we understand it. We can predict the position of the Earth thousands of years into the future. Regarding climate models, you might be underestimating how good they were in the early 80's. Here are old models' projections compared with the actual temperature records up to 2017 [1]. I'm not an expert so I don't know if they excluded early bad models, but they included all the IPCC models. The graph that AOC showed was pretty small and grainy. It's also compressed along the x-axis (140 years), and has a high aspect ratio. It's possible that she, or her aides, picked the best one for the presentation. But given the performance of the models at the time, it's not unreasonably good. It actually seems worse than the 1990 IPCC model, but that's just my opinion. [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
- repolfx 7y ago
  The models used today have all predicted more warming than actually happened, so I'm very skeptical models got progressively worse over the decades instead of better. Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have been accurate because the temperature data for the past itself has been continuously adjusted by climatologists since then, so any models calculated back then would be using temperatures now considered wrong (and not by a small amount!). Either the old models are wrong or the old temperature records are wrong, but they can't both be true simultaneously.
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    > The models used today have all predicted more warming than actually happened Do you have a good source for this assertion? I mean, there are still people claiming that there is no warming at all, so "all" models seems like too strong a claim.
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    Your information on is out of date. None of the models predicted the big lag in temperature increase in the oughts but since 2015 air temperatures have jumped up to right where the consensus predictions said they would be. Yes, scientists have been busy trying to refine their models and understanding of temperatures. But my understanding is that, quantitatively, the inaccuracies in the old temperature data was pretty small compared year to year variation. No prediction is ever perfect, even in QED you have one part in a trillion error, but instead you look at whether the result is in the error bars and whether the error bars are narrow enough to be useful.
thrower123 7y ago
There were models in this era predicting that we were headed for disastrous global cooling. Ascribing any particular import to one of a thousand studies retroactively is just hindsight and survivor bias.
- ProfSarkov 7y ago
  This post is about what was believed at Exxon then. What are you on about?
  - thrower123 7y ago
    I'm commenting on a thread about how unreliable climate models are. What are you on about?
fnordfnordfnord 7y ago
>I’m just sceptical that someone in 1982 made accurate predictions of 2019. And all points in between? Without anyone noticing? The Exxon scientists' predictions were proprietary company information at the time. Exxon didn't publish this information, they used it to their advantage.

tozeur 7y ago

I’m also curious about this. Exxon being the most valuable company back then was basically the ‘Google’ of its time: they employed the smartest people and developed breakthrough technologies. I wouldn’t be surprised if their heavily funded scientists were able to make accurate predictions. There’s also the possibility that their predictions gave a wide range and we’re simply within that band today.

lucb1e 7y ago

> this one guy is the Nostradamus of climate and everyone ignored him? I have no trouble believing that. Given a thousand predictions, with two thousand possible outcomes you'll have someone guess right 50% of the time. These are educated guesses and no one knows the odds of guessing right, but I'm not surprised we can find a random person that made a prediction that fits a certain part of what we're seeing today.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

> In 1982 they were predicting the ice caps would be gone by 2000 Citation please. No one was predicting that. Edit: Also I have little problem believing that internal scientists knew the problem, and the extent, long before the outside world recognised the urgency. That also applied to tobacco, asbestos, leaded fuel - they had research showing issues decades before the wider world had the weight of evidence, or even recognised there was a problem to investigate...

luc4sdreyer 7y ago

> This seems very hard to believe - mainstream science struggles to predict accurately even 5 years out In general, this might be true. Predicting the future is harder than it seems. But it depends completely on the type of system (chaotic or not), and how well we understand it. We can predict the position of the Earth thousands of years into the future. Regarding climate models, you might be underestimating how good they were in the early 80's. Here are old models' projections compared with the actual temperature records up to 2017 [1]. I'm not an expert so I don't know if they excluded early bad models, but they included all the IPCC models. The graph that AOC showed was pretty small and grainy. It's also compressed along the x-axis (140 years), and has a high aspect ratio. It's possible that she, or her aides, picked the best one for the presentation. But given the performance of the models at the time, it's not unreasonably good. It actually seems worse than the 1990 IPCC model, but that's just my opinion. [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

repolfx 7y ago
The models used today have all predicted more warming than actually happened, so I'm very skeptical models got progressively worse over the decades instead of better. Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have been accurate because the temperature data for the past itself has been continuously adjusted by climatologists since then, so any models calculated back then would be using temperatures now considered wrong (and not by a small amount!). Either the old models are wrong or the old temperature records are wrong, but they can't both be true simultaneously.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  > The models used today have all predicted more warming than actually happened Do you have a good source for this assertion? I mean, there are still people claiming that there is no warming at all, so "all" models seems like too strong a claim.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  Your information on is out of date. None of the models predicted the big lag in temperature increase in the oughts but since 2015 air temperatures have jumped up to right where the consensus predictions said they would be. Yes, scientists have been busy trying to refine their models and understanding of temperatures. But my understanding is that, quantitatively, the inaccuracies in the old temperature data was pretty small compared year to year variation. No prediction is ever perfect, even in QED you have one part in a trillion error, but instead you look at whether the result is in the error bars and whether the error bars are narrow enough to be useful.

thrower123 7y ago

There were models in this era predicting that we were headed for disastrous global cooling. Ascribing any particular import to one of a thousand studies retroactively is just hindsight and survivor bias.

ProfSarkov 7y ago
This post is about what was believed at Exxon then. What are you on about?
- thrower123 7y ago
  I'm commenting on a thread about how unreliable climate models are. What are you on about?

fnordfnordfnord 7y ago

>I’m just sceptical that someone in 1982 made accurate predictions of 2019. And all points in between? Without anyone noticing? The Exxon scientists' predictions were proprietary company information at the time. Exxon didn't publish this information, they used it to their advantage.