| HN Mirror

No, that was a statement of fact. The core problem is that your comment (ironically) commits the very offense that you are falsely projecting onto the authors. Namely, you are redefining concrete terms to fit the meaning that you want them to have (=nonsense) and generating your own set of easily-disprovable "facts" and stating them as truth (=intellectual dishonesty). I feel exasperated and exhausted from spending my evening responding to shallow anti-science trolling (note: not an ad hominem since I'm addressing your words and not you as a person), which led to my response. But since you asked politely, let's walk through a fiery wasteland of mangled logic.

>There were dozens and dozens of "climate models" which predicted everything from global cooling to a fiery wasteland and everything in between. > What is "scientific" about this? It's simply people who want to prove something and then narrowly searching for the data to prove that point and ignoring everything else.

The paper clearly states their methodology, which included a literature review to find all published climate models that produce a numeric forecast for future average temperatures. I quoted the relevant section in a different comment. If they missed or ignored dozens and dozens of other published climate models, then find them and show us. Otherwise, you're explicitly accusing the authors and publishers of peer-reviewed science of committing research malpractice.

>Of course you could go back and find a model that "predicted" correctly because every possibility was predicted.

The output of a climate model (in this context) is an expected value (i.e. a single real number) of the global mean temperature at time t (in years). It is true that if the support of a random variable is the real numbers, then every outcome in (-inf, +inf) is weighted by some probability density (and yet any particular outcome in the set of reals occurs with zero probability!). But it is decidely untrue that the model predictions analyzed by this study (or produced by climate scientists in the time period considered by the study) contained the set of all possible outcomes. It data evaluated is one temperature value per model per year are published right here--take a look: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels/tree/master/references

>That's like dozens and dozens of "stock price models" predicting FB stock to go up, down and stay the same. Of course one is guaranteed to be correct.

Effectively the same fallacy as above, but with a discrete number of outcomes. The point of probabilistic forecasts is not to be correct (this goes against the definition), it's to estimate the likelihood that a certain outcome will occur in the future given information known up until the current time (ideally--but not necessarily--so that some rational decision can be made). Laypeople often incorrectly redefine prediction to meaning the black-or-white selection of a particular future outcome. I could go on, but I suggest you read this masterpiece instead: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probabi... (or Thinking, Fast and Slow for the human psychology lens on this problem of misunderstanding the nature of uncertainty).

>If a "anticlimatemag" opposed to the climate change agenda had an article titled "Even 50-year-old climate models were wrong about global warming", would you be defending it as vigorously?

Um, no? I do not and will not defend blatantly false anti-science regardless of the source or agenda. That is extra true of anti-science that supports an avoidable existential threat to half of all species, countless current and future human lives (especially in the developing world, who bear most of the costs while contributing a negligible amount to the problem), and perhaps to civilization and the era of an inhabitable Earth itself.

But as the essential quote goes, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". It's always possible for disingenous headlines like the hypothetical Climate models are useful because they enable us to (quite accurately, it turns out) estimate risks to our single most precious resource, which then allows us to take rational action to minimize that risk (and other models, e.g. those produced by environmental economists, suggest ways to balance the costs of mitigative action).

Your comments, on the other hand, are not useful (so far...).