I have looked at many charts and they mostly look like this:
Global avg temp going up and to the right. Now some people will say these are just random fluctuations that have happened over the millennia. That’s where we need scientists to study the trend to see if there is any secular warming trend vs just cyclical, natural fluctuations and what are the causes.
People also claim climate science is fake and climate models are grossly inaccurate. Well, are they?
After years of hearing critics blast the models’ accuracy, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather decided to see just how good they have been. He tracked down 17 models used between 1970 and 2007 and found that the majority of them predicted results that were “indistinguishable from what actually occurred.”
“By and large our models have gotten it right, plus or minus a little bit,” said Hausfather, a UC Berkeley scientist who is climate and energy director at the Breakthrough Institute. “If they get it wrong, it’s slightly on the warm side, but I wouldn’t read too much into that.”
Ten of the 17 were close to the temperatures that actually happened, said Hausfather, lead author of a study in Wednesday’s journal Geophysical Research Letters.
But scientists actually got the physics right even more than that, Hausfather said.
Climate models are based on two main assumptions. One is the physics of the atmosphere and how it reacts to heat-trapping gases. The other is the amount of greenhouse gases put into the air.
A few times, scientists were wrong in their predictions about the growth of carbon pollution, saying there would be more of the gases than there actually were, Hausfather said. If they got the amount of heat-trapping gases wrong, they then got the temperatures wrong.
So Hausfather and colleagues, including NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, looked at how well the models did on just the pure science, taking out the emissions factor. On that count, 14 of the 17 computer models accurately predicted the future.
Models are continuously being improved. Older models are less accurate than newer ones. We understand the science better over time. Our computing power has also grown leaps and bounds which would help model accuracy.
It looks to me climate science is just like any normal science field. Researchers and their PhD students all race to put out more accurate models. There is an objective test at the end: does your model match observed data? I don’t see how all this can just be fake science.
