Pirate's Cove

Of course they did. Strange how they weren’t telling us about this earlier

(UK Independent) Nearly 30 years ago, scientists developed a computer model of the Earth’s climate that predicted the level of global warming – to the ridicule of ‘sceptics’ at a time when there still seemed to be a debate over the issue.

Now two leading researchers have compared the model’s results with what actually happened over the last three decades and, to their surprise, found they were “very similar”. (snip)

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Dr Ronald Stouffer, head of the climate and ecosystem group at Princeton University, and Dr Syukuro Manabe, a senior meteorologist at the same US college, said they had not expected the model to be so accurate.

The model is strictly looking at what can happen from CO2, and ignores natural processes like volcanoes, solar forcing, and other things like man made aerosols. It includes areas that would have had not true hard data for temperature, and wouldn’t have seen satellite cover early on.

That said, it is interesting that it suddenly pops up on the radar.

And, perhaps it is a good model. The vast majority of models are failures, having failed to account for the statistically insignificant warming since 1998. Perhaps this model continues to perform. The authors, though, do a good job at the end of their short paper in hedging their bets, stating that more research needs to be done. They seem to be more interested in the science, rather than advocacy.

The advocacy is apparent in the media articles on the paper, of course.