After years of hearing critics blast the models' accuracy, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather decided to see just how good they have been. He tracked down 17 models used between 1970 and 2007 and found that the majority of them predicted results that were "indistinguishable from what actually occurred."
[...] Ten of the 17 were close to the temperatures that actually happened, said Hausfather, lead author of a study in Wednesday's journal Geophysical Research Letters.
[...] Climate models are based on two main assumptions. One is the physics of the atmosphere and how it reacts to heat-trapping gases. The other is the amount of greenhouse gases put into the air.
A few times, scientists were wrong in their predictions about the growth of carbon pollution, saying there would be more of the gases than there actually were, Hausfather said. If they got the amount of heat-trapping gases wrong, they then got the temperatures wrong.
So Hausfather and colleagues, including NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, looked at how well the models did on just the pure science, taking out the emissions factor. On that count, 14 of the 17 computer models accurately predicted the future.
The scientists also gave each computer simulation a "skill score" that essentially gave a percentage grade to each one. The average grade was a 69%.
One of the earliest computer models, made in 1970, got a 91%. What's so impressive about that is that at the time, climate change wasn't noticeable in the yearly temperature records like it is now, Hausfather said.
Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who wasn't part of the study, called the work creative and the results striking.
"Even without knowing what the current level of greenhouse gas concentrations would be, the climate models predicted the evolution of global temperature quite well," Diffenbaugh said.
More information: Zeke Hausfather et al. Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections, Geophysical Research Letters (2019). DOI: 10.1029/2019GL085378
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @06:54AM (1 child)
So, this is NOT a Runaway1234 submission? Actual objective science and shit? Wow! Maybe SoylentNews is worth reading once in a while. Still, could use more aristarchus submissions, just saying.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 06 2019, @01:04PM
Yes. Aristarchus' factual and philosophical submissions are quite good, whether on the main page or his own blog.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @08:02AM (9 children)
It was more than a few times, but this actually vastly understates the problem. For instance the 1990 NOAA predictions were horrifically wrong, and they're going to fall under this category. This article implies the issue is that they made a mistake on an unknowable - exactly how high our emissions would be. That's not what the problem was. The problem this refers to (and one numerous models have had) is them suggesting that a given amount of CO2 emissions would lead to a substantially larger atmospheric concentration of CO2 than it actually has. This is a fundamental aspect of climatology, and we continually get it wrong.
However, another thing this paper fails to mention, is that even after adjusting for atmospheric forcing (the above stuff) the models were wrong. For instance taking the 1990 NOAA model, the predictions provided then fall just below their "low" emissions model. And some articles have tried to claim that therefore this means it accurately predicted the change in temperature. The problem is that there's no justification for even using the low model. Our emissions increased even more than expected by their "business as usual" model. You have to engage in some procrustean mental gymnastics to support using the low model.
As an aside, I have obviously become some skeptical of climate science. This is not because I don't understand that the climate is changing nor that humans are affecting it. The reason is because of stuff like this. Proper science inherently relies on accepting when you are wrong, learning from it, and improving. Climate science today has increasingly become more of a cult than an actual science where things we got very wrong in the past have to be hand-waved into being correct, for otherwise it would reflect poorly on our hyperbolic predictions of today. I also don't think this is because of any conspiracy or anything like that, but rather that there are a whole lot of people who need to get published and preaching doomsday guarantees grants, publication, and positive reception. By contrast critiquing errors of the past or mistakes we may be making today is poorly received, difficult to publish, and not likely to elicit much interest in funding - and what funding it does elicit (e.g. - fossil fuel industry) is perceived to be tainted anyhow.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @08:59AM (7 children)
Well, it sucks to be you, then.
So reassuring! AC with a PhD in Gaslighting from Evil University, in Belgium! [zapatopi.net], tells us it is not the case that he does not understand climate change. Very reassuring.
On the other hand, "proper science" is not being bowled over by conspiracy theorists and shills from petroleum companies (Hi, khallow!) who merely suggest that there is some ulterior motive to actual, proper science, and launch crackpot accusations of cultish behavior based solely on findings the crackpots disagree with. Crackpot, meet crack-kettle. You forgot to reference "Climategate". Oh, to well refuted? Too bad.
And god knows, AC, how many times you have tried! All the rejected papers to scientific journals! All the times you have been laughed off the podium at conferences! They laughed at you at the Royal Academy (and the NATO summit), but you will prove them right in the end, eh, Dr. Anonymous Coward?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @09:47AM (5 children)
Out of curiosity, why waste your time with comments like this? This does not necessarily just refer to you, but people in general. I mean presumably you would like to convince people who do not agree with you, to agree with you. And this is entirely possible as views on things do change over time. But the sort of childishness you're engaging in just further evangelizes most people in their own worldview. It is very much like we are world driven by emotion and tribalism over logic and data. People pick sides and then just hurl ad hominem at strawmen at each other from one side or the other, and then wonder why other countries are starting to pull ahead of us.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @10:09AM
I would add that tactics such as ad hominem and strawmen attacks are a strong indicator that we should be very, very suspicious of dogma-looking ideas that need verbal aggression of the other point of views. In itself, it's not enough to reveal the bullshit, but... Scientific truth doesn't need any of those. If you raise valid points and get abuse, there's probably a 90/10 chance that you've been bullshitted.
2c
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Friday December 06 2019, @12:11PM (2 children)
I think AC is trying to make a sarcastic joke with VERY dry English sense of humor with quotes like this whopper:
There is NO public discussion of climate change that isn't just a technique for leftist politics.
Its too bad; there are realistic right wing reasons to oppose climate change (assuming it were a serious and high enough priority issue to pay attention to). The cost of F-ing everything up would be quite high, and the purpose of a culture is to perpetuate itself not destroy itself, so there's a pretty good argument that if anything needs regulating its environmental issues like climate change, and the cost and destruction and waste of human capital to enforce that is so high that right wing leaders would be well advised not to push it. This is aside from more religious type of arguments that usually coincidentally skew pretty right wing like "God said we're stewards of the land which would not include shitting on it so as to ruin it" and so forth.
The only public discussion of climate change is "we need a marxist 1917 revolution in the USA because climate change, and oh god I hope the proletariat doesn't notice the actual historical horrific environmental record of the USSR which would be the actual result."
Because its all lying political, the actual effect of a USSR/USA communist revolution would be pollution and environmental destruction beyond all imagination.
All politics is the opposite, its all about the big lie. As an unrelated example, look at womens rights vs which parties leaders rape and molest women personally while encouraging policies resulting in more rape and molestation of the general public?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:01PM
Well you're frequently a public racist and climate denier, your credibility is about as low as it can go. Either one of those makes you a dummy, together they show a complete lack of critical thinking.
(Score: 4, Touché) by aristarchus on Friday December 06 2019, @04:47PM
Oh, look! VLM is doing it, too! As Spock would say, "Fascinating."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:45PM
Shut up! You stupid climate-denying NPC! Why don't you go fire a die?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 07 2019, @12:37AM
As to the subject of the story, others have different opinions [rossmckitrick.com] on the accuracy of those models.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @10:23AM
Wish there was an edit at times like this. The 1990
NOAAIPCC predictions were horrifically wrong(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday December 06 2019, @08:22AM (5 children)
Conspiracy theorists approve your study.
Because it does not deny decades of climate alarmism, it merely proves that the predictions upon which the documented alarm stemmed from were heavily cherrypicked.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by qzm on Friday December 06 2019, @10:06AM (4 children)
Out of hundreds which have been published over that time.
I think we are supposed to think that those 17 were the only models, and they were pretty much all right (given a bit of a squint and some 'adjustments')
The problem is that is not actually true. There are literally hundreds of published (serious) models.
Not only that, but each model almost invariably provides several different sets of outcome, often saying 'we made a few different assumptions as to our forcing values, and we dont know which one may be right'
This report has then chosen the output that came closest to reality, and called THAT one 'the model'
Unfortunately, this is not science. the models are good(ish, forcing constants are always highly questionable, and they tend to use dozens) attempts at theories, however they dont prove anything in the way they are being used.
The thing that surprises me is that they are not working to fix the models, they are working to adjust historical readings to FIT the models.. THAT is highly bogus, to say the least.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @01:37PM (1 child)
That would be, indeed.
Can you point to where in the paper it states that this is what they are doing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @02:26PM
This is what is being discussed above. What do you think of the lines:
If you read this as a layperson you probably assume it's saying that we ended up with greater emissions than expected, which the papers could have not have predicted. And that's what they're correcting for. That's not what it's saying, and it's hard not to think that the misleading phrasing was intentional. One of the numerous reasons the temperatures are so far off is because the climatologists were assuming that a certain amount of emissions would lead to a much higher atmospheric concentration of CO2 than it actually did. So in other words you don't need to just correct an unknowable (exactly how much we'd end up emitting) but completely change the entire assumptions that climate science was based upon.
And even then, after adjusting what the currently believed 'atmospheric forcing' to be, the observed temperatures end up well below the expected temperatures! So you now need to fiddle with the numbers again. So you end up with rather esoteric arguments proposing that, even though we ended up emitting even more than the business as usual (as opposed to low) emissions category (referring to the 1990 IPCC paper here), that we should actually use the low emissions category. And all of that fudging is just to get the observed temperatures to even fall within the predicted range. You end up just barely within the predicted emissions of the 'low' category.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 06 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
If there's hundreds of them you should have no problem providing citations for, say, ten of them, right?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 06 2019, @06:12PM
(10 that were wrong, I mean... Obviously the article provides 17 that were right)
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Username on Friday December 06 2019, @02:48PM (5 children)
We all know where the results should be based on temperature history, sediment, ice cores and other geological evidence of glaciation. Since nobody would really care about their research if they just said, "well, we're right on track for the end of our interglacial period." They had to tailor their data to indicate alarmist bullshit to get more funding. Or worse, to get people to buy from green companies with which they bought stock.
The entire climatechange hoax is a conspiracy designed to increase wealth or notoriety. None of the climatechange activist actually care what is best for humanity.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @04:06PM
I now use SN as a sneak view into the minds of MAGA morons. It is distressing to see common sense applied only in favor of crackpot theories.
Cherry picking parts of a theory is not how you science. The pace of ice melt, glacier retreat, and temperatire rise is so much higher than the historic data shows yetp you try and call it normal.
So. Fucking. Dumb. We have these fancy satellite images and everything these days. Hell, just paying attention to the weather patterns over the last ten years it is clear things are very abnormal.
(Score: 4, Informative) by cmdrklarg on Friday December 06 2019, @04:50PM (3 children)
Bullshit, indeed.
The climatechange hoax is coming from the moneyed interests that want to keep their gravy train running (IOW Big Oil). The money they stand to lose is orders of magnitude more than science funding will ever have.
The same thing happened with Big Tobacco, and also when the dangers of leaded gasoline were apparent. Deny, deny, deny that a problem exists, because our immense profits may suffer.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @08:04PM
You are right! Lets save the planet! Recycle! Yes put it in the blue can on wedesday and black on Monday and Friday. Yes it's picked up by same people in same truck, but trust us it's not hoing to the same place!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 07 2019, @04:27AM
Well, where's the fingerprints of the "moneyed interests"? There's many trillions of dollars in fossil fuel revenue, but there's not a propaganda effort worthy of the alleged money at stake. Instead, there's a vast propaganda effort to hype climate change and its supposed catastrophic, near future risks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 07 2019, @08:30AM
As with climate science, you need to test your hypothesis against reality to see how it measures up.
There are many trillions of dollars at play in fossil fuels. For instance a single fossil fuel company, BP / British Petroleum, generates revenue that's comparable to the combined worldwide revenue of Apple and Google. Where are the multi billion dollar campaigns being run? Why isn't the fossil fuel industry just buying media companies to spew their messages like other special interests? Instead you get isolated every once in a blue moon type thing like Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon. By contrast there are indeed billions of dollars being spent on climate science. Observation tends to contradict the hypothesis. How appropriate.
Beyond this there's also another issue. What is going to replace fossil fuels? In my opinion solar is, by far, the most logical choice. It can be heavily decentralized (meaning ultra-high stability), has no dependence on any limited resource, can be scaled up in theory to an effectively unlimited level - easily many orders of magnitude more energy than we generate today, and the technology is constantly improving meaning we're going to see even greater gains from it over time. Only downside is the time limitation (no solar at night) but that can be resolved through things like artificial hydroelectric (fancy way of saying push water up an incline during the day, use the power generated as it comes back down during the night), batteries, or even distributed high voltage direct current lines spread globally along the same lines as the internet such that there is effectively never a 'night time' in terms of the grid.
But nope, instead there is extensive astroturfed lobbying for nuclear. Why? Because it's dependent on a rare resource and extremely unstable which both combine to create hyper-centralization which is another way of saying hyper-profitable. And guess who's in a perfect position to put themselves in control of nuclear should such a shift start to occur? Profits from nuclear at scale, which would likely involve ultra expensive saltwater uranium extraction would likely dwarf profits from fossil fuels and without the worry of facilities being set up in the middle of Aloha Snackbar land.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday December 06 2019, @05:45PM
So the linear trend of about 0.15 C/decade continues. Meanwhile, graphs like Figure 1 here [remss.com] show the models running warm even though CO2 emissions have followed the highest scenarios. Note that the graph's source, RSS, are not global-warming skeptics.
(Score: 1) by lcall on Friday December 06 2019, @06:26PM (1 child)
We don't have to be surprised about some of these events, since they have been predicted in the scriptures, for now, for a long time (ice melting, storms, quakes, waves of the sea heaving themselves beyond their bounds, fires/smoke, and other significant catastrophic events--not just the usual levels of them).
I do appreciate the science and am glad for progress in our efforts. But it seems to me we are not competent to solve such things when we have largely rejected the instructions given by the earth's Creator (like, honesty, the Golden Rule, etc, etc): we have a hard time trusting each other even when we say we agree. I'm glad we can share our own thoughts. We need His help both to address important issues globally, and in our personal lives.
And we can be OK. Related thoughts at http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html [lukecall.net] , a simple site w/ no javascript or sales).
(Score: 1) by lcall on Friday December 06 2019, @06:41PM
(forgot my sig: free(AGPL)/fast personal organizer for touch typists, comments welcome: http://onemodel.org [onemodel.org] .)