dang has been the community manager of hn for almost a decade. i'm going to bet you that he knows what a throwaway account is, and has already thought about what it means to ban them
Once you’re out of the mid-1970s, the accuracy has been good - especially for the serious IPCC reports which were based on many studies in different fields, all pointing in the same direction. Unfortunately, the late 70s is when the fossil fuel companies started funding a lot of fake science skepticism and, ultimately, capture of the Republican Party to delay or prevent regulation. For example, many people have heard that “scientists” predicted a global ice age — that narrative has been expensively circulated by the fossil fuel industry and their political allies but they’ll never mention that it was a) never anywhere near a mainstream consensus or even a majority position and b) was rejected by follow up research by the end of the decade. What you especially will not hear is that the predictions made by the papers which rejected that theory have in fact held up well despite the science being far less precise in the 1970s:
If you read the IPCCs first assessment report[1] (from 1990/92) and look at the business-as-usual scenario, it was pretty much spot on.
Since the IPCCs assessment is pretty much the (conservative) consensus of the climate research community, I'm going to equate this with "almost all of them came true".
That's the depressing thing. We knew what was coming. We know what is coming next. We just choose to ignore it, because something decades down the line really doesn't matter this election cycle/fiscal quarter.
This kind of validation is not very meaningful since most climate predictions make a consistent trend assumption. But even fairly old climate change models work pretty well.
"When Hausfather's team set pollution inputs in Hansen's model to correspond to actual historical levels, its projected temperature increases lined up with observed temperatures."
I don't know because I don't keep much track, but genuine question on my part, do you think that there has probably been no progress in climate sciences during the last 30 years and thus predictive power is at the same level?
Are there any other branches of science commonly in the news not progressing over the last three decades?
> do you think that there has probably been no progress in climate sciences during the last 30 years and thus predictive power is at the same level?
I agree there will have been lots of progress. However, 30 years from now people will probably say that the same thing to excuse todays predictions if they were wrong.
In case you are actually wondering and not just JAQing off, climate models have been very accurate, even from 50 years ago:
"""Overall the majority of model projections considered were consistent with observations under both metrics. Using the temperature versus time metric, 10 of the 17 model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four project more warming than observed—N77, ST81, and H88 Scenarios A and B—while three project less warming than observed—RS71, H81 Scenario 2a, and H88 Scenario C."""
which call out dozens of warnings over the past 50+ years, and seemingly didn't come true. Now some are still years off being 'done', but the tone of the piece (and many others like it) is that this is basically all a hoax to 'control' us. I disagree with that notion, but it does demonstrate that whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you.
Of course there will be misses or extreme predictions. However, the fact remains that climate and environmental scientists, among several others, have been warning about these things for going on a century now.
The detrimental effects of a technocratic-oriented society have been predicted since Lewis Mumford to the publishing of Limits of Growth and onward. The effects are social, economic, and environmental, and the general gist of the predictions has come true. Actions have consequences and we're at the point where we can't engineer our way out of our problems.
That's a really round-about report - why not link directly to Hansen's published statements? And the rebuttal on that realclimatescience page is weak. It gives a chart for Lincoln, VA, as "in the DC area". But, Lincoln is 45 or so miles away and at 475 ft elevation - why not give the numbers for DC?
Perhaps because those numbers are different? Realclimatescience says "The number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since", which appears to be true for Lincoln in the graph given.
> The number of hot days per year in D.C. has increased in recent decades. At the turn of the 20th century, the annual average of 90-degree days was about 25. In the mid-1970s, D.C. might have expected about 33 days so hot. From 2010 to 2020, the 90-degree average is about 49 days.
Hansen's prediction seems to be on track. While Realclimatescience seems to pull a slight-of-hand and not address the actual prediction.
So was Hansen's sea level rise prediction from the same source, saying 1-6 feet between 1988 and 2050. The current prediction is a foot of rise between 2020 and 2050 - on top of the rise from 1988 to 2020. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
Does that really count as a failed prediction?
The "Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past" is a newspaper headline contradicted by the content, which says 'within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"' and 'Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.'
Headline writer are the clickbait of newspapers. The real question is, was the content wrong?
I noticed that several referred to Paul Ehrlich ("Dire Famine Forecast By 1975", "Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989", "America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980", "Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide", "Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980", "Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century", and likely more).
Isn't it rigging the numbers to cite the same person so many times?
The 1970s cooling papers (Rasool, Schneider, etc.) appear to be the ones warning that greatly increased aerosol production would provide a cooling effect more powerful than the CO2 warming effect. We reduced aerosol production (because "acid rain", above), so this didn't happen.
> An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
If you look carefully, you'll see most of the links are to newspaper articles, not scientific publications. Most seem to be essentially sensational press reporting.
So it's not even a "whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you" but rather that places like the AEI manufacture doubt out of whole cloth.
To echo other posters, in most cases the predictions underestimated the impact - sometimes significantly so.
This makes sense when you think about it. Most climate reports that are requested are for disinformation campaigns, so the entity paying for them REALLY* wants it to say there’s no problem or the problem has been exaggerated, putting financial pressure on the researcher publishing the report to fudge the numbers or massage the implications.
(* Impartial climate reports aren’t needed in the private sector as the science is settled and the reality is not in dispute).
It's definitely alarmism to some extent, you're right. On the other hand, if you don't claim that the sky is falling, then there will be no urgency and nothing will ever get done. Proof? NASA hasn't accomplished much of anything since the space race ended and their funding dried up.
Please don't create accounts to do those things with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html