30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on

[joshcryer]

30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on
In the ongoing debate over climate change, it's at times a good idea to check in with historial predictions made by climate modelers and see how well they have been able to predict global warming – which is exactly what a pair of researchers at the Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI) have done.

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein Haarsma "stumbled across" – their words – a paper in the August 28, 1981 issue of Science, written by a septet of climate modelers, which modeled a number of scenarios that projected global mean temperatures up to the year 2100.

The lead author of that paper, "Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide", was the now-famed and/or now-reviled James Hansen, currently working at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

"It turns out to be a very interesting read," Oldenborgh and Haarsma say of the paper in their blog post on RealClimate.

Real Climate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/

The paper itself: http://thedgw.org/definitionsOut/..%5Cdocs%5CHansen_climate_impact_of_increasing_co2.pdf

Unsurprising. Hansen is a modern day prophet.

[Viking12]

1. He's a great scientist.

Let's can the "prophet" nonsense.

[joshcryer]

2. Bah, he probably wouldn't like me using that term either.

But I think it riles up the fundies, so boo to you for ruining my fun.

[pscot]

3. "modern day" is a qualifier that suggests the term "prophet"

is not to be understood in the biblical sense. Just sayin'.

[XemaSab]

4. I figured it was used in the ancient Greek sense

[joshcryer]

5. Yeah, I didn't intend it in a biblical or religious sense.

It was purely meant to convey that he predicts stuff that no other scientists dare approach (see his sea ice predictions, ie, Scientific reticence and sea level rise).

And he's remarkably accurate.

Even his other models which were off were surprisingly accurate given that 1) there existed no signal of global warming when he made them and 2) the models ran on computers that were magnitudes weaker than those that exist today.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. After reading one of his papers, I turned a bottle of wine into water

Does that count?