Lost in the flood of words Lawyer assured me that none of the climate models have accurately predicted anything. Yet the truth of the matter is that many predictions have been made and come to fruition. These predictions regard fundamental understanding. Hello Lawyer, ignoring it, doesn't make the reality go away!
In any event, I want to share something Lawyer ignored. It's an excellent summation put together by Professor Steve Easterbrook based on a talk given by Dr. Pierrehumbert. He has given me permission to reprint his entire article unaltered.
I thank Dr. Easterbrook and I hope this summary may come in handy for you. Dr. Easterbrook assures me copying and sharing this information is A-okay, but please show both the courtesy of giving them credit.
Last week I was at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. I plan to blog about many of the talks, but let me start with the Tyndall lecture given by Ray Pierrehumbert, on “Successful Predictions”. You can see the whole talk on youtube, so here I’ll try and give a shorter summary.
Ray’s talk spanned 120 years of research on climate change. The key message is that science is a long, slow process of discovery, in which theories (and their predictions) tend to emerge long before they can be tested. We often learn just as much from the predictions that turned out to be wrong as we do from those that were right. But successful predictions eventually form the body of knowledge that we can be sure about, not just because they were successful, but because they build up into a coherent explanation of multiple lines of evidence.
Here are the successful predictions:
