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My understanding is that the predictions have been reasonably accurate. It's just that they have been saying for 50 years that things will be a disaster for us
by TaylorAlexander 4y ago
My understanding is that the predictions have been reasonably accurate. It's just that they have been saying for 50 years that things will be a disaster for us in 50-100 years and people who did not notice any problem after 20 years have declared that all the predictions were false.
But recent scientific papers that do a meta-analysis of past scientific papers have found that the original predictions got pretty good by about 1970, accurately predicting the change we have subsequently observed.
See here:
"Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming"
https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-cli...
- cryptonector 4y agoThey have have not been accurate in the least. I remember when they predicted ridiculous warming of like 7C/century. I remember when they failed to predict the Pause.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoAccording to the article, of the 17 scientific papers they studied from 1970 to 2001, 10 of them were completely accurate and the other 7 were only slightly off, but that error was due to the fact that human emissions did not follow the predicted patterns - when correcting for actual emissions using the original calculations, those models were accurate too. Are you remembering scientific research papers? Or TV news reporting that claims to cover what the scientists are saying? Because the news often lies about science, but that’s not the scientists fault.
- cryptonector 4y agoI'm referring to the various IPCC reports from the 00s and teens. They have wildly wrong models.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoHmm. I’d love to see which IPCC reports have been found to be wildly wrong if you’ve got any links. Otherwise this just kinda sounds like hearsay to me.
- ncmncm 4y agoIt is hearsay. The IPCC reports predicted a range of possible outcomes, depending on what we did. We did the things that implied the results they predicted and we got.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoYeah. It sounds like they’ve misunderstood the worst case scenario presented in the reports as a single prediction of fact. Sigh. It is extremely discouraging that people continue to misunderstand even basic concepts around climate change.
- ncmncm 4y agoI have come to doubt that they misunderstand, but rather they choose to misrepresent. To lie. Why people want to lie about an existential threat to civilization is another matter. We know that many who do, via millions of sock puppet accounts on twitter and fb, are paid to do it, but that only defers the question to whoever is paying them. Surely the corporations paying them do not expect to benefit from worldwide collapse. But I doubt many are paid to sock-puppet HN.