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> their own random guesses about the climate have equal footing to those of career climate scientists. Notwithstanding that climate models improve with time, i

> their own random guesses about the climate have equal footing to those of career climate scientists. Notwithstanding that climate models improve with time, is the percent of climate scientist guesses that have come true over the last 50 or so years - at least the "alarmist" ones, which are the ones that climate deniers take issue with - better than chance? It seems the consensus were calling for global cooling in the 70s and then warming disaster around the turn of the century, both of which didn't happen

gjm11 4y ago
"Global cooling" was never an expert consensus, so far as I can tell. It was a thing some people thought might happen and would probably be bad, but the idea that in the 1970s everyone was confidently predicting that the climate would cool and it would be a disaster appears to be a thing made up by the boo-to-climate-science lobby. (In the 1970s some journalists were confidently predicting disastrous cooling. Journalists gonna journalist.) Some people have in fact looked at the question "how do historical climate-science predictions match up with reality?" and the answer is "rather well". For instance: https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/historical-climate-models-accurately-projected-global-warming https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/historical-climate-models-... "Our survey began with a literature review of every peer-reviewed reference we could find." "The first result we found is that all of the 17 models correctly projected global warming (as opposed to either no warming or even cooling). While this is so unsurprising to climate scientists that it is not even mentioned in the paper, it may be surprising to non-experts. The second result is that most of the model projections (10 out of 17) published between 1970 and 2000 produced global average surface warming projections that were quantitatively consistent with the observed warming rate." "To account for differences in emissions between the simulations and reality, we calculated the warming rates with respect to anthropogenic radiative forcing, the rate at which human emissions trap energy at Earth’s surface, instead of calculating them with respect to time. Using this novel metric of the warming rate, we found that the model projections were even more consistent with reality (14 out of 17 models captured this)."
suture 4y ago
- hammock 4y ago
  You mean asking a question?
  - suture 4y ago
    I refer to the belief you have that global cooling had consensus status in the 1970s. Edit: I don’t recall any predictions of imminent disaster that would occur at the turn of the century. All predictions I recall were always to occur well into the present century. Your question also reads as a rhetorical one. Your post came across to me as one that (confidently?) purports that climate scientists don’t do better than random chance.

gjm11 4y ago

"Global cooling" was never an expert consensus, so far as I can tell. It was a thing some people thought might happen and would probably be bad, but the idea that in the 1970s everyone was confidently predicting that the climate would cool and it would be a disaster appears to be a thing made up by the boo-to-climate-science lobby. (In the 1970s some journalists were confidently predicting disastrous cooling. Journalists gonna journalist.) Some people have in fact looked at the question "how do historical climate-science predictions match up with reality?" and the answer is "rather well". For instance: https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/historical-climate-models-accurately-projected-global-warming https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/historical-climate-models-... "Our survey began with a literature review of every peer-reviewed reference we could find." "The first result we found is that all of the 17 models correctly projected global warming (as opposed to either no warming or even cooling). While this is so unsurprising to climate scientists that it is not even mentioned in the paper, it may be surprising to non-experts. The second result is that most of the model projections (10 out of 17) published between 1970 and 2000 produced global average surface warming projections that were quantitatively consistent with the observed warming rate." "To account for differences in emissions between the simulations and reality, we calculated the warming rates with respect to anthropogenic radiative forcing, the rate at which human emissions trap energy at Earth’s surface, instead of calculating them with respect to time. Using this novel metric of the warming rate, we found that the model projections were even more consistent with reality (14 out of 17 models captured this)."

suture 4y ago

hammock 4y ago
You mean asking a question?
- suture 4y ago
  I refer to the belief you have that global cooling had consensus status in the 1970s. Edit: I don’t recall any predictions of imminent disaster that would occur at the turn of the century. All predictions I recall were always to occur well into the present century. Your question also reads as a rhetorical one. Your post came across to me as one that (confidently?) purports that climate scientists don’t do better than random chance.