Published on Monday, December 10, 2012 by Common Dreams
New Study: Scientists' Early Climate Predictions Prove Accurate As politicians continue to neglect challenge, scientific work on global warming increasingly vindicated - Jon Queally, staff writer
Leaders of the world's nations keep getting it wrong even as study after study and analysis after analysis show that climate scientists have been long getting it right on climate change.
The latest scientific report, which comes on the immediate heals on what campaigners called a "sham" of a climate summit in Doha, shows that the climate study released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990 has proved remarkably prescient more than twenty years after its initial release.
The research contained in the report, which appeared Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, compared those early IPCC predictions with real-world data gathered since. Despite the enormous room for error and unknowable variables, what researchers found was a high level of accuracy and many reasons to celebrate what is now considered a seminal study for the international climate science community.
"What we've found is that these early predictions seem pretty good," said co-author of the study Professor David Frame, Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University.
Considering the use of relatively simple computer models and that a number of important external forces could not have been predicted, the researchers said the quality and accuracy of the IPCC should be given special note.
As Wynne Parry writes at LiveScience:
The accuracy of the 1990 predictions is notable because scientists, 22 years ago, relied on much more simplistic computer models than those now used to simulate the future, said one of the researchers behind the current analysis, Dáithí Stone, now a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He worked on the analysis while at the University of Cape Town and University of Oxford.
What's more, two decades ago, scientists could not have anticipated a number of potentially climate-altering events. These included the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, which spewed sunlight-blocking particles into the atmosphere, as well as the collapse of industry in the Soviet Union or the economic growth of China. . . . .
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/12/10-2 Nature study - unfortunately only short abstract avialble http://www.nature.com/nclimate/index.html
Off topic, but have a read of what Hansen wrote in 1999. You will be surprised. Notice the big difference between the US and global charts. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/
