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How Two Scientists Accurately Predicted Global Warming in 1967 (medium.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the seeing-the-future dept.

Slashdot reader Layzej shares an article from this spring marking the 50th anniversary of the first accurate climate model: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel looks at a climate model (MW67) published in 1967 and finds "50 years after their groundbreaking 1967 paper, the science can be robustly evaluated, and they got almost everything exactly right."

An analysis on the "Climate Graphs" blog shows exactly how close the prediction has proven to be: "The slope of the CO2-vs-temperature regression line in the 50 years of actual observations is 2.57, only slightly higher than MW67's prediction of 2.36" They also note that "This is even more impressive when one considers that at the time MW67 was published, there had been no detectable warming in over two decades. Their predicted warming appeared to mark a radical change with the recent past:"

5 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Except of course not by Megol · · Score: 1, Informative

    1. Not really.

    2. CO2 (It's carbon dioxide not cobalt gas) increases after warming from several sources, yes. But adding CO2 by burning fossil fuels also increases warming.
    Not really worth arguing but correlation is often an indication of causation. That is one can't just use this phrase to disprove causation unlike some idiots think.

    3. Ice age argument again? Really. Learn to troll noob.

  2. Re:Except of course not by Sique · · Score: 5, Informative
    ad 1st: 2.36 and 2.56 are better than 0.1. For a simulation of the last 50 years, that's impressive. (And much better thant any denier would give credit to any climate model).

    ad 2nd: CO2 did raise far before the warming. The numbers were 270 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere in 1899 (Anatole Leduc, Nouvelles Recherches sur les Gaz, 1899), 330 ppm in the 1970ies, and are 400 ppm now. Warming took of in the 1970ies, when half of the CO2 increase until now had happened already.

    ad 3rd: The global temperature level of the Eem Interglacial (the last warm period before the last Ice Age) is already reached.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  3. Re:Actual science by plopez · · Score: 3, Informative

    The difference here is that there is a mechanistic explanation, the physical properties of CO2, while in trading you just have people twiddling knobs getting functions to fit or AI to converge. That is what makes climate research science and trading voodoo.

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  4. Re:Except of course not by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's a nice demonstration how the greenhouse effect of CO2 works:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  5. Re:Now we just need one more thing by Uberbah · · Score: 3, Informative

    Okay and what about all the climate models that are "called science" that were very wrong?

    Okay and which ones would those be. The climate cooling myth doesn't count for obvious reasons.

    https://skepticalscience.com/i...

    His point is that there are many competing models and almost none of them were correct.

    His point is an uncited tautology.

    We only know this one was correct in hindsight.

    "Scientists pull random theories out of their butts and decades later pick and choose the ones that were correct" isn't how science actually works.