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Comment by splitrocket | Hacker News Reader

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splitrocket·

They have.

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

https://xkcd.com/2500/

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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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