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

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:"

Comments

Looking backwards is no way to predict the future

[petes_PoV]

If you collect every predictive scientific paper published this year and fast-forward 50 years, a proportion of them will turn out to be correct, simply due to sheer dumb luck.

However, there is no way of knowing now, in 2017, which ones will be correct. Or which ones will be right for the wrong reasons. Neither can we say today which ones look plausible but have missed an important point, could not possibly have foreseen something unimaginable that hasn't happened of just happen to have lucked out and pick the few truly significant causes / relationships / equations out of the mass of conflicting opinions circulating at present.