I don't know because I don't keep much track, but genuine question on my part, do you think that there has probably been no progress in climate sciences during the last 30 years and thus predictive power is at the same level?
Are there any other branches of science commonly in the news not progressing over the last three decades?
> do you think that there has probably been no progress in climate sciences during the last 30 years and thus predictive power is at the same level?
I agree there will have been lots of progress. However, 30 years from now people will probably say that the same thing to excuse todays predictions if they were wrong.
Thank you for the warning. As a member of the community for 10 years it saddens me to see sock puppets profilerate and derail the conversation here.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect us to respond seriously to every throwaway account's "benign questions." It puts too much burden on the rest of us. On the other hand, leaving them as-is inevitably means conversations get derailed. This is their goal, after all.
I'll opt for option B in the future and cross my fingers that I'm still able to enjoy the community in 10 more years.
People make all kinds of judgments about what accounts are sockpuppets (or bots, or trolls, or shills, or foreign agents, etc.) and in my experience they're usually wrong, not to mention usually driven by strong passions on divisive topics. So it's generally best for discussion if we just don't go there.
I do believe there has been an increase in throwaway accounts in recent years as lots of users have gotten more sensitive about privacy, but that's not quite the same thing. Also, a username containing "throwaway" or similar isn't necessarily a throwaway account, since sometimes people end up keeping them for a long time.
which call out dozens of warnings over the past 50+ years, and seemingly didn't come true. Now some are still years off being 'done', but the tone of the piece (and many others like it) is that this is basically all a hoax to 'control' us. I disagree with that notion, but it does demonstrate that whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you.
Of course there will be misses or extreme predictions. However, the fact remains that climate and environmental scientists, among several others, have been warning about these things for going on a century now.
The detrimental effects of a technocratic-oriented society have been predicted since Lewis Mumford to the publishing of Limits of Growth and onward. The effects are social, economic, and environmental, and the general gist of the predictions has come true. Actions have consequences and we're at the point where we can't engineer our way out of our problems.
That's a really round-about report - why not link directly to Hansen's published statements? And the rebuttal on that realclimatescience page is weak. It gives a chart for Lincoln, VA, as "in the DC area". But, Lincoln is 45 or so miles away and at 475 ft elevation - why not give the numbers for DC?
Perhaps because those numbers are different? Realclimatescience says "The number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since", which appears to be true for Lincoln in the graph given.
> The number of hot days per year in D.C. has increased in recent decades. At the turn of the 20th century, the annual average of 90-degree days was about 25. In the mid-1970s, D.C. might have expected about 33 days so hot. From 2010 to 2020, the 90-degree average is about 49 days.
Hansen's prediction seems to be on track. While Realclimatescience seems to pull a slight-of-hand and not address the actual prediction.
So was Hansen's sea level rise prediction from the same source, saying 1-6 feet between 1988 and 2050. The current prediction is a foot of rise between 2020 and 2050 - on top of the rise from 1988 to 2020. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
Does that really count as a failed prediction?
The "Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past" is a newspaper headline contradicted by the content, which says 'within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"' and 'Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.'
Headline writer are the clickbait of newspapers. The real question is, was the content wrong?
I noticed that several referred to Paul Ehrlich ("Dire Famine Forecast By 1975", "Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989", "America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980", "Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide", "Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980...
In case you are actually wondering and not just JAQing off, climate models have been very accurate, even from 50 years ago:
"""Overall the majority of model projections considered were consistent with observations under both metrics. Using the temperature versus time metric, 10 of the 17 model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four project more warming than observed—N77, ST81, and H88 Scenarios A and B—while three project less warming than observed—RS71, H81 Scenario 2a, and H88 Scenario C."""
It's definitely alarmism to some extent, you're right. On the other hand, if you don't claim that the sky is falling, then there will be no urgency and nothing will ever get done. Proof? NASA hasn't accomplished much of anything since the space race ended and their funding dried up.
This kind of validation is not very meaningful since most climate predictions make a consistent trend assumption. But even fairly old climate change models work pretty well.
"When Hausfather's team set pollution inputs in Hansen's model to correspond to actual historical levels, its projected temperature increases lined up with observed temperatures."
dang has been the community manager of hn for almost a decade. i'm going to bet you that he knows what a throwaway account is, and has already thought about what it means to ban them
To echo other posters, in most cases the predictions underestimated the impact - sometimes significantly so.
This makes sense when you think about it. Most climate reports that are requested are for disinformation campaigns, so the entity paying for them REALLY* wants it to say there’s no problem or the problem has been exaggerated, putting financial pressure on the researcher publishing the report to fudge the numbers or massage the implications.
(* Impartial climate reports aren’t needed in the private sector as the science is settled and the reality is not in dispute).
If you read the IPCCs first assessment report[1] (from 1990/92) and look at the business-as-usual scenario, it was pretty much spot on.
Since the IPCCs assessment is pretty much the (conservative) consensus of the climate research community, I'm going to equate this with "almost all of them came true".
That's the depressing thing. We knew what was coming. We know what is coming next. We just choose to ignore it, because something decades down the line really doesn't matter this election cycle/fiscal quarter.
Once you’re out of the mid-1970s, the accuracy has been good - especially for the serious IPCC reports which were based on many studies in different fields, all pointing in the same direction. Unfortunately, the late 70s is when the fossil fuel companies started funding a lot of fake science skepticism and, ultimately, capture of the Republican Party to delay or prevent regulation. For example, many people have heard that “scientists” predicted a global ice age — that narrative has been expensively circulated by the fossil fuel industry and their political allies but they’ll never mention that it was a) never anywhere near a mainstream consensus or even a majority position and b) was rejected by follow up research by the end of the decade. What you especially will not hear is that the predictions made by the papers which rejected that theory have in fact held up well despite the science being far less precise in the 1970s:
Maricopa County, the largest in Arizona at 4.4m pop, almost seems like it could become unlivable. Under some "worst case" models, the county could expect to see "temperatures above 95 degrees for half the year" by 2040.[0]
If you started right now with a civil defense-level mobilization to replace every shitty building in America with something that will survive this future climate, you might just barely get it under the wire.
I'm pretty sure it's possible. I think it could be done in 20 years, but instead what happens is that every year we have this debate between
a) liberal arts people who think nuclear power is really scary because they don't understand it, and they saw that HBO series and it got even scarier
b) engineering people who know that nuclear power is the solution and what happened in Chernobyl was an abberation, and it didn't even kill a fraction of the people that coal power has killed, anyway.
And every year, nothing happens, because of this stalemate.
Of course it’s my attitude that’s going to hold us back, and not the extreme cost and the sheer time required to build and fuel enough nuclear facilities to handle our projected energy needs.
Energy needs which must also include the increased demand from our migration off all gas or coal based heating and cooking.
My bad.
EDIT: To accommodate the total projected energy demands for the US alone, we would need to build around 600 new reactors (fewer if solar and wind take off well beyond projected values), while also ensuring that the existing reactors continue to operate (or are replaced). Each reactor costs in excess of $20B to build. As for the time required, it's been documented to take anywhere from 10 to 25 years each.
Yes, it will take some time. If we stop doing oneoffs and start thinking of them as products to be massproduced it will go faster and cheaper (but still take at least maybe 15 years).
After first 10 years we should be able to stop repeating the same mistakes. And keep sufficient standards. Just stagger the building in start with 1 year intervals and then when working processes are found ramp it up.
It's hard to assembly line the on-site construction, materials, and labor (building the containment vessel, steam generator building, cooling towers), which accounts for about half of the costs of a modern nuclear facility.
The meaning of "soon" changes with context, though. On a cosmic scale, "soon" could be measured in millennia. On the scale of a global problem with civilization-level policy decisions required to avert it, a few decades seems within the scope of "soon."
Right, but we get closer to that ever year. And we can probably assume a linear progression. So if you have a child right now, we will be more than half way there by the time they get into college.
I find the map that colors purely by "Will it be 125 in 30 years" vs. not is a hilarious concept. Very misleading to think you might be ok if not in red
Somewhat surprisingly, McDonough and Schuyler counties in northwestern Illinois, as well as a few others near Burlington, IA, are listed as already experiencing 125 F (52 C) heat-index days. I would not have guessed that a city in Iowa has more oppressive heat waves than nearly all of the South.
I'm still not sure why the (unmeasurable) heat index is preferred over the (measurable) wet-bulb temperature, aside from using bigger numbers that sound more intimidating.
I'm not a climatologist or meteorologist or anything of the sort, but how does this metric of 125° for >= 0.5 days reach as far north as Minnesota and central Wisconsin, yet southern counties bordering Mexico escape it? I assume it has something to do with spikes - the average summer temp of those AZ/NM/TX counties is almost certainly dozens of degrees higher than Minnesota and Wisconsin, where perhaps MN/WI have isolated days that are somehow hotter? Something to the effect of an AZ county averaging 120 but staying pretty consistent while a WI county averages 100 but could spike to 130? What causes that type of discrepancy over such a large geographic area, and is it coinciding with the Mississippi River just a coincidence?
Edit: This article - https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/ - posted by a sibling comment makes me think exactly that. The southwest gets very hot and generally just stays that way. That midwest region has very large temperature swings which can surpass the hottest in the southwest. It also tracks with my experience since moving to southern Wisconsin a few years ago. Bitterly cold winters but also surprisingly hot summers with several 100+ days being pretty common.
Nor am I a climatologist nor meteorologist, but this looks like it's related to the dry line
> A dry line (also called a dew point line, or Marfa front, after Marfa, Texas)[1] is a line across a continent that separates moist air and dry air. One of the most prominent examples of such a separation occurs in central North America, especially Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where the moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets dry air from the desert south-western states. The dry line is an important factor in severe weather frequency in the Great Plains of North America. It typically lies north-south across the High Plains states in the warm sector of an extratropical cyclone and stretches into the Canadian Prairies during the spring and early summer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_line
at what is culturally referred to as the 100th meridian.
> In the central Great Plains, the meridian roughly marks the western boundary of the normal reach of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and the approximate boundary (although some areas do push the boundary slightly farther east) between the semi-arid climate to the west and the humid continental (north of about 37°N) and humid subtropical (south of about 37°N) climates to the east. The type of agriculture west of the meridian typically relies heavily on irrigation. Historically the meridian has often been taken as a rough boundary between the eastern and western United States. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100th_meridian_west
The 125° is for heat index, which combines temperature and humidity. The humidity in that region is more variable than the humidity in the desert south-west.
St. Louis has pretty crazy weather fluctuations sometimes with occasional hot days in the middle of winter and cold days in the middle of summer. One day the temperature dropped from 60°F to 0°F over the course of something like six hours IIRC - I was actually out walking throughout.
63 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadGenuine question. How many climate predictions from 30 years ago came true today?
Are there any other branches of science commonly in the news not progressing over the last three decades?
I agree there will have been lots of progress. However, 30 years from now people will probably say that the same thing to excuse todays predictions if they were wrong.
That said, why bother looking back 30 years?
https://twitter.com/CaiParryUK/status/1547826248549691392
And yes, I know the temps aren't exactly the same.
The internet does as the internet is. The only good options are to either (a) engage within the rules of the site, or (b) not post.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect us to respond seriously to every throwaway account's "benign questions." It puts too much burden on the rest of us. On the other hand, leaving them as-is inevitably means conversations get derailed. This is their goal, after all.
I'll opt for option B in the future and cross my fingers that I'm still able to enjoy the community in 10 more years.
PS Thanks for your hard work.
I do believe there has been an increase in throwaway accounts in recent years as lots of users have gotten more sensitive about privacy, but that's not quite the same thing. Also, a username containing "throwaway" or similar isn't necessarily a throwaway account, since sometimes people end up keeping them for a long time.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-e...
which call out dozens of warnings over the past 50+ years, and seemingly didn't come true. Now some are still years off being 'done', but the tone of the piece (and many others like it) is that this is basically all a hoax to 'control' us. I disagree with that notion, but it does demonstrate that whatever you say publish/post can be weaponized back at you.
The detrimental effects of a technocratic-oriented society have been predicted since Lewis Mumford to the publishing of Limits of Growth and onward. The effects are social, economic, and environmental, and the general gist of the predictions has come true. Actions have consequences and we're at the point where we can't engineer our way out of our problems.
Some of those doomsday events were averted by prohibiting certain kinds of pollution, after these doomsday scenarios were understood.
"Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life" didn't happen because CFC emissions were mostly banned internationally. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Public_policy
"Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes" didn't happen because of laws passed to reduce SO2 and NOx emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#In_the_United_States
Kinda makes me think that prohibiting CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions might work too.
Then there are ones which seem to shoot itself in the foot.
"1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s" points to https://realclimatescience.com/2019/05/hansen-got-everything... , which in turn cites a Gannett News Service article about what Hansen reported to Congress.
That's a really round-about report - why not link directly to Hansen's published statements? And the rebuttal on that realclimatescience page is weak. It gives a chart for Lincoln, VA, as "in the DC area". But, Lincoln is 45 or so miles away and at 475 ft elevation - why not give the numbers for DC?
Perhaps because those numbers are different? Realclimatescience says "The number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since", which appears to be true for Lincoln in the graph given.
But https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/24/heat-dc-90... says:
> The number of hot days per year in D.C. has increased in recent decades. At the turn of the 20th century, the annual average of 90-degree days was about 25. In the mid-1970s, D.C. might have expected about 33 days so hot. From 2010 to 2020, the 90-degree average is about 49 days.
Hansen's prediction seems to be on track. While Realclimatescience seems to pull a slight-of-hand and not address the actual prediction.
So was Hansen's sea level rise prediction from the same source, saying 1-6 feet between 1988 and 2050. The current prediction is a foot of rise between 2020 and 2050 - on top of the rise from 1988 to 2020. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
Does that really count as a failed prediction?
The "Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past" is a newspaper headline contradicted by the content, which says 'within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"' and 'Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.'
Headline writer are the clickbait of newspapers. The real question is, was the content wrong?
I noticed that several referred to Paul Ehrlich ("Dire Famine Forecast By 1975", "Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989", "America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980", "Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide", "Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980...
"""Overall the majority of model projections considered were consistent with observations under both metrics. Using the temperature versus time metric, 10 of the 17 model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four project more warming than observed—N77, ST81, and H88 Scenarios A and B—while three project less warming than observed—RS71, H81 Scenario 2a, and H88 Scenario C."""
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08...
This kind of validation is not very meaningful since most climate predictions make a consistent trend assumption. But even fairly old climate change models work pretty well.
Please don't create accounts to do those things with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The account has throwaway in the name and is <2 months old. I'm going to bet you that you've banned this guy before, and will again in the future.
This makes sense when you think about it. Most climate reports that are requested are for disinformation campaigns, so the entity paying for them REALLY* wants it to say there’s no problem or the problem has been exaggerated, putting financial pressure on the researcher publishing the report to fudge the numbers or massage the implications.
(* Impartial climate reports aren’t needed in the private sector as the science is settled and the reality is not in dispute).
Since the IPCCs assessment is pretty much the (conservative) consensus of the climate research community, I'm going to equate this with "almost all of them came true".
That's the depressing thing. We knew what was coming. We know what is coming next. We just choose to ignore it, because something decades down the line really doesn't matter this election cycle/fiscal quarter.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/climate-change-the-ipcc-1990-and-...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
By the 1990 and 1992 IPCC reports, predictions were quite well supported and the trajectory was unambiguous:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/how-well-have-climat...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
[0] https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
Right?
People who work outdoors will transition to working 03:00-11:00 shifts rather than the more typical 07:00-15:00 that's common now.
2053 is 31 years from now.
I'm pretty sure it's possible. I think it could be done in 20 years, but instead what happens is that every year we have this debate between
a) liberal arts people who think nuclear power is really scary because they don't understand it, and they saw that HBO series and it got even scarier
b) engineering people who know that nuclear power is the solution and what happened in Chernobyl was an abberation, and it didn't even kill a fraction of the people that coal power has killed, anyway.
And every year, nothing happens, because of this stalemate.
Energy needs which must also include the increased demand from our migration off all gas or coal based heating and cooking.
My bad.
EDIT: To accommodate the total projected energy demands for the US alone, we would need to build around 600 new reactors (fewer if solar and wind take off well beyond projected values), while also ensuring that the existing reactors continue to operate (or are replaced). Each reactor costs in excess of $20B to build. As for the time required, it's been documented to take anywhere from 10 to 25 years each.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=1-aeo201...
Yes, it will take some time. If we stop doing oneoffs and start thinking of them as products to be massproduced it will go faster and cheaper (but still take at least maybe 15 years).
Honestly it doesn't seem so bad. There just isn't political will to force decisions through and then force the invesment.
Yes, you are technically correct.
For many of us, our children will be entering middle-age.
If that isn't soon enough to cause major concern, we'r truly fucked as a nation and as a species.
I'm still not sure why the (unmeasurable) heat index is preferred over the (measurable) wet-bulb temperature, aside from using bigger numbers that sound more intimidating.
Edit: This article - https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/ - posted by a sibling comment makes me think exactly that. The southwest gets very hot and generally just stays that way. That midwest region has very large temperature swings which can surpass the hottest in the southwest. It also tracks with my experience since moving to southern Wisconsin a few years ago. Bitterly cold winters but also surprisingly hot summers with several 100+ days being pretty common.
> A dry line (also called a dew point line, or Marfa front, after Marfa, Texas)[1] is a line across a continent that separates moist air and dry air. One of the most prominent examples of such a separation occurs in central North America, especially Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where the moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets dry air from the desert south-western states. The dry line is an important factor in severe weather frequency in the Great Plains of North America. It typically lies north-south across the High Plains states in the warm sector of an extratropical cyclone and stretches into the Canadian Prairies during the spring and early summer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_line
at what is culturally referred to as the 100th meridian.
> In the central Great Plains, the meridian roughly marks the western boundary of the normal reach of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and the approximate boundary (although some areas do push the boundary slightly farther east) between the semi-arid climate to the west and the humid continental (north of about 37°N) and humid subtropical (south of about 37°N) climates to the east. The type of agriculture west of the meridian typically relies heavily on irrigation. Historically the meridian has often been taken as a rough boundary between the eastern and western United States. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100th_meridian_west
The 125° is for heat index, which combines temperature and humidity. The humidity in that region is more variable than the humidity in the desert south-west.