I follow several
climate change blogs and two of them recently published some
interesting articles on what we knew about global warming back in the
early 80's and how the models of that time predicted the changing
climate of the past 30 years.
From Climate
Denial Crock of the Week, by Peter Sinclair, comes the following
video:
In that video we
get to see how the scientific predictions from 1982 have been
validated. What I found really interesting in that video was the
explanation of the "fingerprint approach", which is the
method used to distinguish warming caused by carbon dioxide from
warming caused by other factors.
On
the Real
Climate blog, two contributors wrote
a post about a paper by James Hansen and co-workers (here's
the pdf) that was published in 1981. The real eye-opening part of
that post is a graph (click
here for a direct link as I'm not sure about permissions for
reproducing images) where they superimpose the temperature data of
the last 30 years over the model predictions by Hansen et al from
1982. The correlation is astounding! It's not perfect, but I can tell
you from experience that in science, such an agreement between two
curves is considered a home run. If I could get experimental data
that fitted just as well with models, then publishing science papers
would be a breeze!
References
- J. Hansen, D.
Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell,
"Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide",
Science, vol. 213, 1981, pp. 957-966.
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