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Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming
- minikites 7y agoPeople who don't believe in anthropogenic climate change at this point are no better than people who believe the Earth is flat.
- bagacrap 7y agoI watched the documentary about flat Earthers and I think they're just having harmless fun.
- jussij 7y agoI've watched quite a few of the flat earther videos found on youtube and at least to me, they seem to come across as genuine and sincere, yet very much misguided. I would say this is also a good description for todays climate change deniers.
- liability 7y agoOn the other hand, I have pretended to be a flat earther many times for fun and I've noticed there are some people who seem convinced you're genuine no matter how silly you make your arguments. That's kind of a sport in itself; seeing how ridiculous you can get before other people realize you're having them on. > "The earth used to be round but over a timescale of billions of years it slowly flattened out like a ball of silly putty left sitting on the table."
- p1mrx 7y agoIt's all fun and games until someone falls off the edge.
- huffmsa 7y agoTil a cat knocks you off the edge.
- lukifer 7y agoI found the same documentary instructive. I think there's an insight there into human tribal instincts, demonstrating that our epistemologies can't help be be socially mediated. It was flabbergasting how deeply intelligent some of the true believers were, and it's a little too convenient to label and discard them as crazies or outliers. They might be a little more representative of the human animal than any of us want to admit. What's most unsettling is, there's no reason to expect that the same psychosocial tribal mechanisms are not constantly active, even when the facts are on the side of one's tribal beliefs. This leads to any number of blind spots, not only in truth-seeking and self-correction, but in social dynamics (in-group vs. out-group). Our brains are exceptionally, insidiously good at working backwards, not just to convince others, but to convince ourselves. Those who can spin on a dime and update/discard ideas in the presence of new evidence are a truly rare breed. Two of my favorite books on motivated reasoning and self-deception: Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013827 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013827 The Elephant in the Brain, by Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler: http://elephantinthebrain.com/ http://elephantinthebrain.com/
- nickysielicki 7y agoWhat about the person who believes in anthropogenic climate change but doesn’t believe that humans will ever be able (or have ever been able) to cooperate to the extent that is necessary to prevent it, and questions whether required technological advances will ever be made? Asking for a friend...
- lallysingh 7y agoI believe it only takes a few changes to make sufficient difference. Changes that are already in action.
- rsynnott 7y agoThe goal is really no longer preventing it; that’s not realistic. The goal is keeping it at ‘merely very bad’ rather than extinction level.
- jessaustin 7y agoHas the updated goal made cooperation easier?
- guelo 7y agoHumans have cooperated plenty. Many universal or nearly- universal treaties have been signed by all nations. In fact humans already cooperated on an atmospheric pollution treaty when we prevented the destruction of the Ozone layer.
- eanzenberg 7y agoOr that: 1) Actual solutions to climate change are not taken seriously (nuclear power, natural gas) 2) Effect size is still unknown or small. 0.3C over decades is not much to write home about. 3) Solutions to climate change have to include developing / third world countries. And most importantly: 4) Oil/gas with capitalism has lead to the greatest throughput of innovation known to mankind, lifting billions out of poverty, medical and scientific advances, and allows 7B people to live on earth. Removing and replacing this will have consequences that IMHO go beyond a 0.3C increase in temp and a few cm increase in water level. Just MHO.
- huffmsa 7y agoSuch hubris. Since you've clearly got it all figured out, Tell me, how are we going to address China's runaway coal plant development? Bangladesh's rampant deforestation? Are you so bold as to say that you know what's best for the people in those countries?
- rsynnott 7y agoIt’s one thing saying “climate change is real, but we can’t realistically do much about it”. It’s delusional at this point to claim it isn’t a thing, tho.
- yaks_hairbrush 7y agoErm... I feel like you're maybe projecting and/or arguing a strawman. Acknowledging that humans are causing the climate to change is quite a far cry from demanding actions from China's population.
- huffmsa 7y agoChina isn't doing dick diddly squat to reduce emissions and "go green". If they're not optimizing and complying, nothing the rest of us do will matter.
- onhn 7y agoNot 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.
- masterj 7y agoThere 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.
- huffmsa 7y agoCalifornia is having fires because they have too many people living in areas which were miss"managed" by the government to prevent fires. In reality the government pushed no burn policies have let the underbrush build up to catastrophic levels. Same way they nearly tanked the Yellowstone ecology when they removed the wolves. But this time they _know_ how to stop the planet from getting too warm
- onhn 7y agoI 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.
- exclusiv 7y agoTotally agree. And you can still believe man is a contributor (though not the primary cause) and that the climate change doomsday that is pushed is completely oversold. The parent's comparison is not accurate at all.
- duckMuppet 7y agoI'm going to guess you're on the capitalism is the cause, true believer, scientism crowd.. Here's someone who can provide a healthy amount of skepticism.. https://judithcurry.com/2019/12/02/madrid/ https://judithcurry.com/2019/12/02/madrid/ Of course, don't let skepticism stand in the way of your belief system, but i highly suspect that'll be a problem for you.
- yesenadam 7y ago> I'm going to guess you're on the capitalism is the cause, true believer, scientism crowd.. > Of course, don't let skepticism stand in the way of your belief system, but i highly suspect that'll be a problem for you. Interesting article, thanks. Unfortunately your first and last lines are unkind, snarky name-calling, to choose a few of the ways they seem to break the HN guidelines. And "I'm going to guess you're on the X, Y, Z crowd.." seems close to Schopenhauer's Stratagem 32: If you are confronted with an assertion, there is a short way of getting rid of it, or, at any rate, of throwing suspicion on it, by putting it into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, "That is Manichaeism" or "It is Arianism," or "Pelagianism," or "Idealism," or "Spinozism," or "Pantheism," or "Brownianism," or "Naturalism," or "Atheism," or "Rationalism," "Spiritualism," "Mysticism," and so on. In making an objection of this kind, you take it for granted (1) that the assertion in question is identical with, or is at least contained in, the category cited - that is to say, you cry out, "Oh, I have heard that before"; and (2) that the system referred to has been entirely refuted, and does not contain a word of truth. http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/erist32.htm http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/erist32.htm
- jakeogh 7y agoIt's utility is not to convince you earth is flat. If you made a list of the uses of that term here, what would you find?
- phkahler 7y agoThen why were they raising the alarm about a coming ice age in the 70s? This is a rewrite of history.
- whatshisface 7y agoIs it really true that the scientific concensus was in favor of ice age in the 70s? I have heard people say this before but I have never seen the historical evidence.
- awinder 7y agoNo, it’s not. There were a small number of scientists that wrote about possibilities of global cooling, but vast majority of scientists were concerned with warming.
- huffmsa 7y agoCitation needed. Beyond the OP
- thinkingkong 7y agoThat's not how it works. You can't make a baseless claim then require everyone to prove you wrong.
- awinder 7y agohttp://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/11584/1/2008bams2370%252E1.pdf http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/11584/1/2008bams2370%252E1....
- rsynnott 7y agoIt’s _nearly_ an urban myth. Some people did say we were due an ice age, but in the “within the next few millennia” range of accuracy, not ‘any day now’. Basically, it’s a good story, but that’s all.
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- garchee 7y agoWe didn't listen.
- jml7c5 7y agoI'm not sure if he'll pop in here, but one of the co-authors (Henri Drake) has a comment thread on /r/science if anyone wants to ask any questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/e63ic5/of_17_climate_models_published_between_the_early/f9no11k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/e63ic5/of_17_clima... EDIT: Here is some of the code used in the paper: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels Here is a blog post on the paper, written by one of the authors: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/12/how-good-have-climate-models-been-at-truly-predicting-the-future/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/12/how-go... EDIT AGAIN: The "supporting information" .docx at the bottom of this page has a lot more detail, for those (like me) who can't get past the paywall ( :-/ ): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL085378 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...
- aidenn0 7y agoWhen Henri was suggesting to use specific models for specific predictions, he added this note: > Note to reader: I was going to use Arctic sea ice in 2100 as an example, but there probably won’t be any lol
- huffmsa 7y agoThere has been sea ice in the Arctic for well under 50% of the planets history. Life thrived The Sahara desert was a grassland 5000-10000 years Life thrived.
- svara 7y agoSvante Arrhenius got it basically right in 1896 [1]. There is no scientific controversy and there never has been. Unfortunately, arguing about this might just reinforce the mistaken view that there are different valid "sides" to this. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_... Edit: That doesn't detract from the article's more subtle point about the precision of climate models in the past, I was reacting to the comments here viewing this in the light of a fictive controversy.
- vmchale 7y agoSupposedly Fourier had some insight as well.
- Paraesthetic 7y agoCan we have climate change without it being based on humans? I mean what model was predicting the rise of china and india and the vast amounts of trash they burn or dump in the oceans?
- woodandsteel 7y agoStandard conservative responses: --The globe is not getting warmer --We don't know if the globe is getting warmer or not --We do know the globe is getting warmer, but we don't know why --We do know the globe is getting warmer, but it has a different cause than human activities --We do know the globe is getting warmer, and it is in part due to human activities, but any action to counter this would be more harmful than letting it get warmer. --We do know the globe is getting warmer and action needs to be taken, but it should all be voluntary actions by private enterprises, and no new governmental regulations. And let us not forget: increased atmospheric co2 is beneficial because it increases agricultural production. Have I missed any?
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago--We do know the global is getting warmer and action wasn't taken, and it's too late, but I'm in my compound with my guns and my family and we will shoot climate refugees and protestors if they get near. Tough luck, might makes right.
- bitlax 7y agoHow do we convince China and India to lessen their CO2 production in any meaningful way?
- pstuart 7y agoLead by example and institute policies that strongly support taking aggressive action. This won't happen while Trump is in office, unfortunately.
- huffmsa 7y agoIts almost like they're predicting that we're a few thousand years into the process of coming out of an ice age. More at 11.
- lukifer 7y agoI don't think there's any disputing the overall trendline, which far predates the Industrial Revolution. Yet that doesn't mean that human activity isn't also meaningfully impactful. Though it's hardly scientific, from a layperson's perspective, I find xkcd's climate history megacomic instructive: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/. That rapid-ish spike after 1900 is by no means a smoking gun, but it's a hint that there may be more going on than a ten-thousand-year gradual geological process (which I don't think any climate scientist disputes the presence of). I know of at least a few cases, where skeptics have changed their minds due to new evidence (Richard Muller [0] comes to mind). I'm curious if there are any instances of reputable scientists with sufficient training in the relevant fields, who went from true believers to significant skepticism of anthropogenic influence. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...
- huffmsa 7y agoI'm mostly concerned about the scale were looking at. A 50-100 year uptick is nothing on the timescales that the planet operates on. Even 20k years is miniscule.
- lukifer 7y agoNo dispute. And yet, I don't see any other instances of the a near-45-degree angle spike over the last 20k years (with the obvious caveat that our data on the past is imperfect). Like I said, not a smoking gun; just a clue that it's worth digging into. And from a Bayesian perspective, one must ask: what are the odds that that rising temperature would happen to correlate with CO2, for entirely unrelated reasons? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sme8WQ4Wb5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sme8WQ4Wb5w Don't get me wrong, I find Greta-style alarmism and claims of "extinction" to be counter-productive. But given how difficult it is to get nerds to agree on anything, the fact that there are so few credible scientists on the other side of the issue gives me pause. Pure groupthink? Maybe. Hardly unprecedented. But we've been examining the data and improving the models for decades (including from those with a strong financial incentive to debunk AGW), and yet the scientific consensus continues trending in one direction. Skepticism is a good thing, but the evidence for AGW can't merely be handwaved away by causal narrative.
- ekianjo 7y agoWhere is the story hère though? So they looked retroactively and found some models in the past that fitted with current observations even though they had no clue that China would become such a powerful force in terms of CO2 emissions? If you run random models and wait long enough you will always be able to find at least one model that predicted the current observations. That does NOT mean the models were right, it means that you are basically ignoring all the other models that made bad predictions. So in order to make a headline out of this you would need to make a extensive review of all the models we had back then and found out HOW MANY were actually not bad. Would not make that much of a headline because you would find most models were bad. Anyone involved with forecasting will know what I mean.
- starpilot 7y agoYeah, this could be survivorship bias: https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/03/selection-of-climate-model-survivors.html https://motls.blogspot.com/2017/03/selection-of-climate-mode... As someone who's written basic fluid dynamics codes, I'm blown away by the complexity of climate models. The errors I ran into in debugging my relatively straightforward codes were incredibly subtle. Like pressures, velocities still "looking right" but still being wrong, due to numerical viscosity and other artifacts of the inexact solutions to Navier-Stokes. This is for flow in a box in a steady state. For an entire planetary atmosphere at a time scale of decades, I can't even imagine how they can track down every error without duct taping "corrections" (overfitting) on everything.
- IanCal 7y agoDoesn't this partly fall into the weather Vs climate difference? I can't run fluid dynamics in my head but no matter how much you shake up the box once it's on the table I can say "I think the water/oil/honey will end up at the bottom". But also yes, it's complex, that's why independent groups dedicate huge amounts of time researching and building them and then models are compared against each other.
- telotortium 7y ago
- metasj 7y agoThe clearest models should be: what the world looks like when all ice and permafrost are melted, and how we plan now to be able to cope then.
- starpilot 7y agoIt 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.)
- henrifdrake 7y agoThe correction is based on physics is really quite straightforward...
- refurb 7y agoIf it's so straightforward, why wasn't it accounted for in the first place? Honest question.
- chrisbrandow 7y agoThe only correction I see referenced was the amount of CO2 produced by people after the papers were written. Annual CO2 emissions from human industry is an input to the model, rather than the model itself, but it does affect the result and can only be estimated when the models were published. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Unless I overlooked other changes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 7y agoThese climate models can also correctly predict the climate on other planets. Planetary scientist use the same models, modified to it to match conditions in Mars, Venus and run them to get more coarse but essentially correct climate.
- yters 7y agoWhat about the 50 year old models that predicted a looming global cooling? Why were they wrong?
- tzs 7y agoThose 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.
- yters 7y agoWould increasing particulates be an effective way to stop global warming?
- hatmatrix 7y agoThat's one proposal for geoengineering (either sulfate particles in the stratosphere, or marine particles over the oceans). More for a "pause" or slow down rather than a solution to stop it.
- pragmar 7y agoDefinitely, there was an "albedo yachts" solution that was floated a while back. Basically kicking up mist from the oceans. It's all just theory, and the repercussions are probably not well understood, but the idea is out there and implementation would be relatively inexpensive.
- chrisbrandow 7y agoThere weren’t any.
- ltbarcly3 7y agoThis reminds me of the models I made a few years ago to predict where a Frisbee will land after you throw it. I made about 14 different models, some of them correctly predict where the Frisbee will land. That's right, I have a model that can tell you where the Frisbee you are about to throw will land, it correctly predicts Frisbee throws. Here is how it works: You input all the factors of your Frisbee throw. Then you throw the Frisbee, and that's it! Well, I guess there is one more step, since all 14 models make wrong predictions about where the Frisbee will land. But you can just go back and adjust the models and input better data after you already know where the Frisbee actually ended up, and then some of them correctly predicted where it will land! Don't down-vote me, this is definitely what the phrase 'correctly predicted' means, and I'm not being misleading at all.
- beatpanda 7y ago"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 happening, but since life thrived on the planet during other climactic conditions there's nothing to worry about. The message is the same as it's always been: trying to do anything in response is foolish, and we should all continue to just focus on making as much money as possible. But the real issue with climate change is and has always been that it will socially and politically de-stabilize the planet, because quite a few people live in places that will become less livable in the near future, and those people will want to go somewhere else. Those people will have a quite strong claim on land and resources in wealthy countries that emitted most of the pollution and have lots of mostly empty and more habitable land. This will cause global conflict on a scale beyond any that exists in living memory. Yes, "life" will survive. Our societies in their current configurations will not, and decisions we make now will determine how messy or violent (or not) that transition will be. Pedantic retorts about geological time should embarrass you in the face of the leaders of the tech industry evidently using their immense wealth to prepare for social collapse[1]. And although these people are clearly willing to spend money to prep for climate change, I still can't get a single one of the recruiters who cold-call or email me about HOT NEW SILICON VALLEY OPPORTUNITIES to find me a single credible company working on anything climate or energy adjacent. I can just hear their jaws slackening every time I bring it up. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
- codingslave 7y agoScience is not a religion, its continuing integrity hinges on unbridled skepticism.
- tamaharbor 7y agoStock market predictions are sometimes correct also.
- m0zg 7y agoThat's not "prediction". Prediction is when you say something will happen and then it does, at least somewhat reliably. Better yet, if you have some skin in the game, such as your scientific reputation. I.e. if you say there won't be any polar bears by 2020, their population better not quadruple to thwart your prognostications. https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-population-is-declining/ https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-popula... It's very easy to find a model that predicts this retrospectively. It's also completely worthless. Predicting the future is much harder. That's my main beef with climate science: not only do they do this kind of hand picking retroactively and claim they're able to "predict", they also sometimes go back and _tweak the input data_ to fit the models better, or make it up entirely where coverage is inadequate. This is not how science is done in any other field. This also doesn't feel like it's being treated as an existential threat would be treated, in terms of scientific rigor. I understand it's a very complex problem, sure, but that doesn't give you a license to take arbitrary liberties with scientific method or ground truth data.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y agoAnd yet other 50-year-old climate models in-correctly predicted global cooling.
- hcknwscommenter 7y agoNo. No they did not. This is wrong.
- sambull 7y agoThey aren't wrong technically, but the papers relied on key mechanisms that no longer are as big of a issue thus negated. Particulate matter, the effect is now actually being considered as a method of 'geoengineering' a cooler climate to combat the warming by businessmen like Bill Gates [0]. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/07/bill-gates-funded-solar-geoengineering-could-help-stop-global-warming.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/07/bill-gates-funded-solar-geoe...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- RickJWagner 7y ago50 years ago Time and Newsweek famously ran stories predicting another ice age. Of course they had scientists behind the claims. So I guess some scientists of the age predicted cold, and others heat?
- mysterydip 7y agoWhen I was growing up we had a set of encyclopedias from the 70s. They were predicting a new ice age coming if we didn't change our ways. Anyone else remember this? I doubt I can find them online but I'll look.
- pragmar 7y agoThere was a paper by Rasool and Schneider in 1971 that was behind this, I think. "Our ways" would've been industrial particulate pollution, where a 4x increase, sustained, risked kicking off a new ice age. Schneider later retracted the findings in 1974.
- mysterydip 7y agoAh, thanks for explaining the (possible/likely) origin!
- s1k3b8 7y agoThere 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 "scientific" about this? It's simply people who want to prove something and then narrowly searching for the data to prove that point and ignoring everything else. This is so disappointing coming from something calling itself a sciencemag.
- jointpdf 7y agoThis 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.
- s1k3b8 7y ago> 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?
- jointpdf 7y agoNo, that was a statement of fact. The core problem is that your comment (ironically) commits the very offense that you are falsely projecting onto the authors. Namely, you are redefining concrete terms to fit the meaning that you want them to have (=nonsense) and generating your own set of easily-disprovable "facts" and stating them as truth (=intellectual dishonesty). I feel exasperated and exhausted from spending my evening responding to shallow anti-science trolling (note: not an ad hominem since I'm addressing your words and not you as a person), which led to my response. But since you asked politely, let's walk through a fiery wasteland of mangled logic. >There were dozens and dozens of "climate models" which predicted everything from global cooling to a fiery wasteland and everything in between. > What is "scientific" about this? It's simply people who want to prove something and then narrowly searching for the data to prove that point and ignoring everything else. The paper clearly states their methodology, which included a literature review to find all published climate models that produce a numeric forecast for future average temperatures. I quoted the relevant section in a different comment. If they missed or ignored dozens and dozens of other published climate models, then find them and show us. Otherwise, you're explicitly accusing the authors and publishers of peer-reviewed science of committing research malpractice. >Of course you could go back and find a model that "predicted" correctly because every possibility was predicted. The output of a climate model (in this context) is an expected value (i.e. a single real number) of the global mean temperature at time t (in years). It is true that if the support of a random variable is the real numbers, then every outcome in (-inf, +inf) is weighted by some probability density (and yet any particular outcome in the set of reals occurs with zero probability!). But it is decidely untrue that the model predictions analyzed by this study (or produced by climate scientists in the time period considered by the study) contained the set of all possible outcomes. It data evaluated is one temperature value per model per year are published right here--take a look: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels/tree/master/references https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels/tree/master/references >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. Effectively the same fallacy as above, but with a discrete number of outcomes. The point of probabilistic forecasts is not to be correct (this goes against the definition), it's to estimate the likelihood that a certain outcome will occur in the future given information known up until the current time (ideally--but not necessarily--so that some rational decision can be made). Laypeople often incorrectly redefine prediction to meaning the black-or-white selection of a particular future outcome. I could go on, but I suggest you read this masterpiece instead: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probability-problem/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probabi... (or Thinking, Fast and Slow for the human psychology lens on this problem of misunderstanding the nature of uncertainty). >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? Um, no? I do not and will not defend blatantly false anti-science regardless of the source or agenda. That is extra true of anti-science that supports an avoidable existential threat to half of all species, countless current and future human lives (especially in the developing world, who bear most of the costs while contributing a negligible amount to the problem), and perhaps to civilization and the era of an inhabitable Earth itself. But as the essential quote goes, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". It's always possible for disingenous headlines like the hypothetical Climate models are useful because they enable us to (quite accurately, it turns out) estimate risks to our single most precious resource, which then allows us to take rational action to minimize that risk (and other models, e.g. those produced by environmental economists, suggest ways to balance the costs of mitigative action). Your comments, on the other hand, are not useful (so far...).
- refurb 7y agoI’m confused as hell to be honest. A few years ago they said there was a global warming pause.[1]. They seemed so sure it was happening that Nature devoted a whole issue to it. Then they came back and said “actually it never happened”.[2] Shouldn’t it be pretty straightforward to tell whether there was warming or not? [1] https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp [2] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18122018/global-warming-hiatus-pause-never-happened-studies-explain-climate-change-risbey-oreskes-mann https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18122018/global-warming-h...
- virmundi 7y agoNot if they keep changing the data to fit a need. Check out Tony Heller https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUprclkVrNPls7PR-nHhf1Ow https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUprclkVrNPls7PR-nHhf1...
- chrisbrandow 7y agoMost scientists didn’t think much of the idea of a pause, but skeptics started beating the drum so consistently and loudly after a few years after 2001 that the media began asking the question pretty consistently, and the climate science community had to spend time answering the question. There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused.
- refurb 7y agoMy 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?
- moultano 7y ago> Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward? Not exactly. There are two ways that it can be ambiguous: 1. We don't measure the entire earth to measure its temperature, and combining the sensor readings from various sources to get a calibrated total energy content can be difficult. 2. It is difficult to take a time series, and with a short history, decide whether something is a significant deviation from the trend or just random variation. Humans instinctively underestimate how often a random sequence of coin flips will have consecutive strings of heads of a given length, and the same tendency causes us to see a "pause" as a deviation from the trend, when it's really just random variation causing a bunch of consecutive heads.
- nanis 7y agoSome time ago, I got curious about the sources of data in the period where humans were measuring temperature using thermometers. When we talk about predictions from fifty years ago matching today (also I read the linked article and I didn't really see proof that a model that was specified at that time being explicitly benchmarked), it matters how the distribution of sources of surface temperature data varied since then. I haven't been motivated enough to do another one of these animations, but this video[1] shows locations of all temperature stations in GHCNv3[2] (I see that GHCNv4[3] is out). Notice how where humans measure temperature depends so much on what living conditions humans seek or find acceptable. I find this visualization interesting in terms of the number of modeling questions it poses. If you are interested, it shouldn't take much to replicate something similar with current hardware/software. As another note, it makes little sense to say model predictions are not statistically significantly different from each other. What is the population from which these models are being drawn? What is the measure of variability among models? The article[4] is behind a paywall, so I can't see what they did. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg [2]: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data/land-based-datasets/global-historical-climatology-network-monthly-version-3 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-dat... [3]: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data/land-based-datasets/global-historical-climatology-network-monthly-version-4 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-dat... [4]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2019GL085378 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2019...
- acje 7y agoI never doubted our capability to predict short term (10s of years) temperature change from CO2 levels. I'm also 100% sure we aren't capable of predicting the consequences of these temperature changes, because they are going to be complex. This will be an interesting ride and the train has left the station. We may want to find more diverse controls than just the CO2 emissions. How about manipulating not just land but also the oceans to run more efficient photosynthesis? Dangerous perhaps?
- ev0lv 7y agoI find it absolutely disastrous that we spend more time talking about the environmental impacts of humans, than we do about the inevitability that one of the Sun's CMEs completely decimates our power grid and can cause warming of several orders of magnitude higher than the human footprint.