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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

> not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data

Like the LHC or einstein's predictions, consensus was built for them when after high precision predictions of their models became observed in the real world. That established that correlation was causation. Climate scientists can convince skeptics if they make such detailed predictions. But to be fair, the scientific message is muffled by popular scaremongering.

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Climate science suffers from the same problem as weather science, the models are essentially giant monte carlo simulations. i.e the results aren't precise.

But that is ok, because precision isn't and shouldn't be the goal. What is important is the direction, we need to know whether or not heating is occuring, roughly the rate of change and if there is anything we can to do stop it.

None of these require hard "X *C by Y year" and not being able to make such predictions shouldn't invalidate the rest of the evidence that says it's happening.

Climate science has made many predictions with a lot of success. Read the IPCC reports - read the older ones if you want to see the older predictions.

With global warming, the problem is that if you wait for the 6° warming by 2100 predictions to come true, billions are already dead.

Let’s not be hyperbolic. Without even getting into the futility of predicting something as complex as future mortality rates, the worst case projections go into tens of millions additional deaths due to climate change over the century (if that sounds like a lot, global deaths per _year_ are on the order of 50 million, so this is a few percent increase).

https://impactlab.org/research/valuing-the-global-mortality-...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w

I expect many wars caused by famine and mass migrations. India and Pakistan will fight over water and they both have nuclear weapons.

It's very well possible to have the right conclusion ('climate change is man made') while working with imprecise data and models. High precision is not required for consensus about cause and effect to be established, merely that within the boundary of error no other explanation is viable.

They have.

Exxon's 1982 predictions about the global average temperature in 2022 are pretty spot on.

https://xkcd.com/2500/

I'm afraid that is not a good argument. There are many historical predictions that didn't come true [1]. In 1970s, there were concerns about extensive glaciation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling. I think it is fairly uncontroversial that it is very hard to make detailed predictions about climate. This Bloomberg article discusses a recent relevant issue: https://archive.ph/FMOn5

I think a better argument would be to say that we certainly know more about climate now, and we have a lot more computational power to construct more detailed models.

[1]: There is a positive side to wrong historical predictions: that people actually dared to make concrete assertions, instead of waving hands.

> Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.

Well, unfortunately the lead line from the Wikipedia article is a bit misleading, as it makes it sound like it was merely a bunch of sensationalist news stories. That is not true. There were genuine concerns by climate scientists about that (apparently they were misled in part becauase of low time resolution of paleoceanography studies). Check out the references and the rest of the article.

It is probably true that there was no consensus about it back then though. (I do not know enough about it to be completely sure.)

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