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1981 Paper's Predictions for Global Temperatures Spot-On
Layzej writes "The Register reports on a paper published in Science in 1981 projecting global mean temperatures up to the year 2100. 'When the 1981 paper was written, temperatures in the northern hemispheres were declining, and global mean temperatures were below their 1940 levels. Despite those facts, the paper's authors confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions.' The prediction turns out to be remarkably accurate — even a bit optimistic. The article concludes that the 1981 paper is 'a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test.'"
I'm not commenting on the climate one way or the other, but when you have dozens of different predictions over the years is it really surprising that a couple of them happened to hit the mark? Don't forget the Global Cooling sentiment which was around just a couple of years before this article came out...
Care to cite one? Since it sounds like you're so well-informed.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The eighties was 30 years ago?
Shit I'm old.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Tells you about the rigor of climate science, that's for certain.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I am very far from being a specialist in this topic. The The Register article seems to imply that global warming must be true, given that there was ONE paper in 80s already anticipating it. That is not necessarily true. The prediction can be result of pure chance in a possibly erratic research study (I have no clue if that is the case or not). One could perhaps make an stronger statement in that direction if MANY papers anticipated global warming (possibly using different models).
And if you take pretty much the same data, over time, and show when the sunspot activity grew & shrank, I bet you would show that the temperature rise pretty much is spot on with the rise in geomagnetic activity from the sun, which is what heats & cools this rock we call a planet! But, considering the stupidity of "modern" man, the only thing they will read out of this is that temperatures are rising! Back when I was in high school in the 70's, they were talking about a mini ice age....but unless you read into the article, they finally mentioned the LACK of sunspots & the cooling of the sun at the time.
So, in yesterday's story about predicting the collapse of civilization, multiple posters snarked about how convenient it is to make predictions about what will happen 30 years from now, 'cause no one will remember you made those predictions--so you'll never be called to account for your oh-so-incorrect doomsday predictions.
I now calmly await for yesterday's posters to issue "I can see now that I was wrong" statements.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
I wish coversation around this topic would shift from debate about whether or not the climate is changing and may in fact change dramatically over the course of several decades, and whether or not humans activities have an impact on the climate to a productive conversation about how to best react to changing climate and use it productively. It is obvious to me that where I live (Minnesota), the mean temperatures are rising and the growing seasons are getting longer. Shit, I had my vegetable seeds sprouting and even had them outdoors some days, early in March, in Minnesota! I am also growing a dwarf bananna tree that has made it through two winters here. I guess my point is, I think it would be great if people would quit arguing about empirical facts (such as there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than ever before during modern human civilization); and start wondering about how to react to the changes that might be brought about in this altered environment.
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
From the Hansen study:
"Political and economic forces affecting energy use and fuel choice make it unlikely that the CO2 issue will have a major impact on energy policies until convincing observations of the global warming are in hand."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
"a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test."
Just wait till we finally reach a double of atmospheric CO2 values, at which point we'll get to see if the predictions Svante Arrhenius made in the late 19th / early 20th century pan out.
If the quantity of carbonic acid in the air should sink to one-half its present percentage, the temperature would fall by about 4 degrees; a diminution to one-quarter would reduce the temperature by 8 degrees. On the other hand, any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth's surface by 4 degrees; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8 degrees.
Although the sea, by absorbing carbonic acid, acts as a regulator of huge capacity, which takes up about five-sixths of the produced carbonic acid, we yet recognize that the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.
So about 8 years ago I moved from Minnesota to Northern Virginia for work. And one of the aspects of culture shock was that I was now living with, befriending and enjoying my time with folks from all over the country who had moved to the DC area for work. Many friends from Texas and Pennsylvania specifically. I even roomed with several of them and one thing really bothered me: they did not recycle. So I kept doing my own recycling and trying to help them out to no avail. This was quite different from Minnesota where it was stressed when we were young that it was important. You might call it common sense or indoctrination or nanny state or whatever your political views tell you to but that's just the way it was largely. And the reason was that the Earth is a precious resource.
So, being an avid Slashdotter, I was fairly in tune with the Global Warming debate and would often talk to my new friends about it. Every single one of them either didn't want to hear it or thought I was an idiot. They seemed to only listen when I would bring up news items lending credibility to the absence of climate change. Then they asserted there was climate change but it is natural and so on and so forth. To this day, my friend from Texas does not recycle in his home. His Korean wife has asked me not to discuss global warming around her and continually asserts it was proven wrong years ago. My friend from Texas, being quite a bit smarter now likes to talk about what we can do about it without him having to alter his lifestyle at all. The reason for it is unimportant to him, now he just accepts that it's happening for some reason and how can we put something in space that can block the sun partially while maintaining a synchronous orbit around the sun between it and Earth. It's not that that is a simpler solution than reducing your personal carbon footprint but instead it's one that doesn't require government intervention (which he views as the ultimate evil) and doesn't require him to change.
So what do you do when you read news about this, do you whip out your biggest "I told you so" font and e-mail it out to your friends until they get tired of it? I mean, I can't even politely offer to collect the cans and bottles from one of my friend's parties and take them to the local recycling center. He's almost proud of his freedom to be able to send it to the dump. So I have two options. One is silence and apathy and the other is not having any friends in this area. Silence and apathy it is.
My work here is dung.
That's great work, you've shown that complex, data-based mathematical modelling by NASA scientists is just like someone drawing a line between points and cheering when it later turns out to match some data. And you did so with a cartoon!
I'm sure NASA will be pleased to learn that they can forget all that tiresome building of models and instead base all future rocketry on connecting-the-dots. I thank you, good sir.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Just adding a somewhat related anecdote (not my own) -
A Message From a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-douglas/republican-climate-change_b_1374900.html
Noting that the real world observations *didn't* match Hansen's predictions (they were higher than expected at first, and then plateaued), what can we conclude?
1) Oh noes! It's worse than we thought!
2) The model, including its central conceit, is wrong. Back to the drawing board.
Or:
3) Hansen's climate model was right but his emissions projections were wrong.
4) The model was "wrong", in the sense of having a climate sensitivity different from the real world, which is unsurprising because climate sensitivity was uncertain by about a factor of 50% before Hansen's paper. This observation cannot "invalidate the central conceit" (i.e., falsify the greenhouse effect) if it's consistent with the expected error bars.
5) You're an idiot, given all your moronic blathering in this threads about how modern climate change is indistinguishable from natural variation. That might be true if we had no observations of the sources of natural variation. But observations of cosmic rays and solar activity exclude a solar cause of the recent warming, observations of ocean heat uptake exclude an oceanic cause, etc. Saying "it's just an expected recovery from the Little Ice Age" is profoundly stupid, when you ignore what factors caused the LIA and its recovery, and whether they are acting today in the same way.
I would also be interested in knowing about other predictions, in particular predictions with specific numbers backed by plausible theoretical models
Here's one from the same researcher, from 7 years later, after spending half a decade of super-computer time simulating the warming.
.3 degrees Celsius.
To understand the graph, the red line (Hansen A) was calculated assuming and annual increase of atmospheric CO2 of 1.5% per year. The orange line (Hansen B) was calculated assuming that the annual increase of atmospheric CO2 would be constant, and the yellow line (Hansen C) was calculated assuming CO2 output would decrease so much after 1990 that by 2000 it would cease to increase. He was optimistic in the scenario.
You can also look at the first IPCC report from 1990 which predicted a rise of
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd wager you would fall into one of those believe-anything groups, tmosley. Every comment you make bets on a world of endless oil and no climate change. Let me make some verifiable predictions about you based on your commentary:
1) You drive a big, gass-guzzling pickup or SUV
2) You live in a predominantly rural state like Texas or Montana -- definitely not East Coast or West Coast
3) You believe Obama is a socalist and suspect he's secretly a muslim
4) You generally vote Republican or for whoever's right of them (e.g., David Duke)
5) You ardently believe that predictions of climate change are just a fraudulent racket so people like Al Gore can make money
Do you ever given any though to the geopolitical ramifications of oil addiction? Or the fact that the Chinese demand for oil has grown so much that PetroChina now produces more oil than Exxon? Just so you know, if those tree-hugging, pinko liberals do manage to get their electric cars and alternative energy sources working, it means that the price of oil and electricity will be that much lower for you because they won't be buying any. However, you will still be funneling money straight to terrorists and camel jockeys in saudi arabia. As a liberal, I applaud your generosity for helping those poor arabs. Without your petro dollars, their nations would collapse and then they would likely mobilize for war against us infidels. Lord knows we can't have that. Fighting a Billion muslims is way more expensive than fighting 20 million here and 20 million there. It's cheaper just to pay them off.
Until then, you've got no reason to believe that modern observations aren't within the bounds of natural variation.
You keep repeating this fallacy. You seem to believe that just because the climate varied naturally in the past, present variation cannot be distinguished from natural variation. Natural variation isn't some unexplained statistical process, and attributing climate change doesn't arise from comparing current ranges of variation to past ranges of variation. Natural variation comes from physics. There aren't very many places where atmospheric heat can come from, and we can look in those places. Natural variability is due to specific mechanisms such as solar variations, ocean cycles, volcanism, etc. We have observed all those things during the modern global warming period, and all of them fail to explain the warming during that period, regardless of what past variations they can explain.
If one looked at a whole bunch of models from the 80s, and saw how they did on average, then you'd be looking at the typical assumptions that models made in the 80s, and how well those assumptions panned out. It is reverse cherry-picking and shifting the burden to instantly assume that the study was exceptional compared to the predictions of peers at the time. Basically you are saying that, to convince you, someone has to find all the models done in the 80s, and score them all. (I assume that "skeptics" wouldn't listen to the results of such a study, since they he who doesn't listen doesn't hear.)
The NAS report in 1979 was very clear -- an academic review done two years earlier, and whose predictions have also born out. Considering this is an academic review article of the science at the time, the burden of proof is on "skeptics" to show that the NAS report was actually an aberration. (Plausible, but also somewhat ludicrous, since that would imply that the NAS got the prediction correct, despite gross incompetence in analyzing the literature of the day.) As for the prediction of temperature rise from CO2 -- that was made over a hundred years ago, and nothing has changed except that the error bars have gotten a lot smaller, and alternative hypotheses for current warming have also been ruled out.
I'm sure some "skeptic" somewhere will be able to find some paper from the 80s whose predictions have not been born out, and thereby cast a pall over the entire climate science establishment -- but only because "skeptics" are really believers. Only "skeptics" peddle certainty in this debate -- along with extreme environmentalists.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This is James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been awarded more honours for science than almost anyone else I can think of... and produced this report when very few scientists were even looking at climatology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#Honors_and_awards
I'm by no means an expert on climate science but I do know enough to know that the denialists are full of it. In fact, the US seems to be the only place in the world denialism is an accepted position.
And even on a basic level, the greenhouse effect is as proven as any science. It really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that if we pump CO2 into the atmosphere the planet will get warmer.