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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:"

26 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Now we just need one more thing by elrous0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

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    1. Re:Now we just need one more thing by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 3, Funny

      Depends on how you throw the banana.

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    2. Re:Now we just need one more thing by ClickOnThis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

      We have that. It's called science.

      And while we're on the subject, science does get things wrong despite its best efforts. But the most important thing about science is that it is in a constant state of trying to correct and improve itself.

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      If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
    3. Re:Now we just need one more thing by whyyisthissohard · · Score: 2

      Okay and what about all the climate models that are "called science" that were very wrong? His point is that there are many competing models and almost none of them were correct. We only know this one was correct in hindsight.

    4. 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.

    5. Re:Now we just need one more thing by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

      Start with the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and we know precisely how much of it is emitted when fossil fuels are burnt. We've known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas for a lot longer than 50 years.

      http://www.climatechangenews.c...

      1856, we've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas for over 160 years now!

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    6. Re:Now we just need one more thing by dryeo · · Score: 2

      Is it that science is wrong, or that people are wrong? Science is science. People have foibles, flaws, misinterpretations, lack of imagination and hidden agendas.

      Science is a process that depends on amongst other things, correct data.
      A famous example is the ether theory. Made perfect sense as light obviously had the properties of waves and in the experience of people, waves need a medium to travel in.
      Eventually the measurements got better and showed that light traveled at the same speed no matter what, which was unlike anything people had experienced. After checking and rechecking their measurements, the theory of ether was thrown out.
      The science was limited by the data the tools gathered and the limitations of people. The important thing was that the science improved, though it took a genius to think far enough out of the box to come up with relativity.
      People are limited and our tools are limited.
      Now climate science is much simpler in some ways, trap more energy in a system, temperatures, on average will raise and the arguments are more like arguing about the shape of the Earth. The flat Earthers are wrong, and so are the round Earthers, but one of them is much less wrong then the other.

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    7. Re:Now we just need one more thing by KeensMustard · · Score: 2

      A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

      You mean predictions like:

      "It's not warming"

      "It's warming but it's the sun/moon/jupiter"

      "It's a something something natural cycle! Natural!"

      "It's warming but it's good somehow (mumble mumble)"

      Predictions like those?

  2. Actual science by jandrese · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This paper is arguably the origin of the modern disinformation campaign against carbon pollution. This is the point where politically powerful interests realized that their core business model was in danger and that they needed to do something to stop it. Now we have an entire political party who's official position is to ignore the blatantly obvious and to be actively hostile to the kind of research that produced this paper.

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    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:Actual science by microbox · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've lived in houses for 42 years, and have yet to have one burn down on me. As a rough approximation, we could say that the probability of my house burning down next year is less than 1 in 42, or less than 2.4%. Yet I have fire insurance, because it is worth it.

      Same thing with climate change. The chances of catastrophe are small, but the best estimates put it about 2.4%. And real world experience has shown that the cost of doing something is, net, almost nothing. Sure there are winners and losers, and the losers are big carbon companies, who are behaving exactly like tobacco companies when faced with the same calculus.

      --

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    2. Re:Actual science by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've lived in houses for 42 years, and have yet to have one burn down on me. As a rough approximation, we could say that the probability of my house burning down next year is less than 1 in 42, or less than 2.4%. Yet I have fire insurance, because it is worth it.

      Must be liberal arts grad. Your neighbor too lived for 40 or 50 years without burning down a house. Now suddenly your upper bound drops to 1%. And then add more and more people and you will find a few who lost houses to fire. Your sample might eventually include Betram Wooster who burnt down two houses, (or was it three?). Pretty soon you can get a very good estimate of actual likelyhood of you losing a home to fire in the next one year. The insurance company has this actuarial statistic and priced you insurance premium accordingly.

      The actuarial science actually dates back to 1700s when the mortality of the priests in England was calculated with surprising accuracy.

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    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.

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      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    4. Re:Actual science by Uberbah · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Anytime we think there is a mechanistic explanation for events in a complex system -- such as the Earth and its biosphere is -- we're probably wrong.

      Definitely denialist handwaving. When even Exxon-funded scientists admit that climate change is being driven by humans, why insult your own intelligence with the "gosh this is toooo hard to understand!" shtick.

      As for me, I'd rather trust a trader's ability to observe patterns than the climate researcher's because the shirt on back of the former literally depends on that ability.

      Traders who make money on fees whether the market goes up or down. A market driven by human psychology, something climate DGAF about.

    5. Re:Actual science by riverat1 · · Score: 2

      Anytime we think there is a mechanistic explanation for events in a complex system -- such as the Earth and its biosphere is -- we're probably wrong.

      The Earth's climate doesn't change for magical reasons or as in the case for economic models for human psychological reasons. It changes for actual physical reasons, IOW mechanistic reasons. The complexity may make it difficult to determine those reasons but they definitely exist.

      Also, a scientists reputation depends on the quality of the science they do and I think most scientists care quite a bit about their reputations. If they cared more about money they're smart enough to go into another field that pays more.

  3. 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.

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    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  4. Fake news! by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Funny

    [sarcasm]Clearly there is no way that scientists came up this research with decades ago and that they debated it for decades before consensus. No this was all invented by China recently to cover up their involvement with the Kennedy assassination and the Lindberg kidnapping.[/sarcasm]

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  5. Re:Except of course not by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 2

    NASA wants to set max CO2 levels in the ISS at ~13X what it is on Earth right now. I think they have a bit of an interest in keeping astronauts clear-and-level headed, and apparently levels around 5000ppm are acceptable. Given most navies allow up to 8000ppm long-term in their submarines, it's probably a safe level for critical thinking,

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  6. Re:The coming Ice Age by hey! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes. Because science doesn't dabble in truth, it deals with evidence, and likelihoods. Truth may be unchanging, but the most probable scenario has to change as you obtain more evidence.

    From the 1940s to around 1980, the globe actually cooled because of industrial aerosol emissions, which reflect solar energy back out into space. From around 1910 to around 1960, CO2 mediated warming was believed to be impossible because (a) atmospheric CO2 was mistakenly believed to be in a stable equilibrium with ocean dissolved CO2 and (b) CO2's emission spectrum was mistakenly believed to overlap that of water vapor, which is much, much more common.

    In the 1950s both those beliefs were disproven, by Roger Revelle's study of ocean CO2 chemistry and by more precise spectrographic instrumentation. This meant CO2-mediated warming was physically possible, however in the 1960s cooling was still the consensus because at that time scientists thought aerosol cooling would outpace CO2 warming. That was easy to believe, because the Earth was cooling before our very eyes.

    In the 1970s measurements of increasing CO2 along with newly available computer modeling techniques tipped the balance of scientific consensus toward warming in the upcoming decades even though we were still in a aerosol-mediated cooling phase.

    This is about as robust as a scientific result gets: an accurate prediction of a reversal of current trends. Were the predictions being made perfectly precisely correct? Of course not. But on the whole the prediction of a reversal of current temperature trends was correct. There was still significant dissent about the direction of future climate in the 80s, but by 1990 it was clear to virtually everyone in the climate research field that CO2 warming was overwhelming aerosol cooling.

    Again, that's how science works. It's about reasonable extrapolations from evidence, not eternal and unassailable truths.

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  7. Re:The coming Ice Age by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

    Yes, because high school science teachers are such vanguards of scientific knowledge...

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  8. Suggestion: RTFA by Kludge · · Score: 2

    The medium.com article is very good by the way. Read it!

  9. Re:Except of course not by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 2

    Maybe... it is around $500 million to send a person into space, and about $30,000 per pound of supplies they need. So whilst it may be a few dozen at the ISS, the cost per person is easily in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year per person.

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  10. Re:The coming Ice Age by bjdevil66 · · Score: 2

    Or he did hear that being taught, just like I did in the late 70s and heard the exact same thing being taught - even in the Weekly Reader (those under 40 or so probably have no clue what that even is). The last theory I heard before the "next Ice Age" theories died out was that cooling was going to be caused particulate pollution in the atmosphere keeping sunlight from hitting the ground. Looking back it doesn't make a lot of sense, IMO, but that was the theory.

    Weak trolling attempt, dude...

  11. Re:Throw enough studies against the wall... by hyades1 · · Score: 2

    You're either very badly mistaken or flat-out dishonest. Most of the studies in the 1970's predicted warming. The few that didn't have been discredited or retracted.

    Read and learn:

    https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm

    --
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  12. 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?...

  13. Re:The coming Ice Age by WindBourne · · Score: 2

    They hysteria about it lasted less than a month, and then other scientists had come forward saying that it was the opposite.
    IOW, it was not during the 60s and 70s, but about 1 month in the 70s and then it disappeared, and instead, scientists were saying we do not know, but it looks more like a major warming.

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  14. Anonymous Cowards might be GOOD (but I doubt it) by XXongo · · Score: 2

    These arguments always tend to revolve around whether global warming is real or not. That is not the right question.

    Let us assume that global warming is real. The fallacy is when people assume that global warming is BAD.

    Yes, but that is a different question.

    The relentless assault on climate science and on climate scientists-- using words like "hoax" "scam" and "fraud" in referring both to the science and the scientists-- is still continuing. But now the attack has forked, with attacks on the scientists continuing, but now another branch of the attack saying "well, but maybe warming is good."

    I'd pay more attention to them if they weren't pretty much the same people (and funded by the same oil companies) who were saying "climate science is a hoax and climate scientists should be put in jail."

    I notice you don't sign your name, Mr. Anonymous Coward. So, to be clear: do you accept the evidence that global warming is real, and anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are the major contributor? Or are you just doing a new attack on a new front?