Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.
The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.
Interesting. Do you mind sharing some of the predictions you have been revisiting?
This sounds neat...I'd love to do it as well. Any past predictions vs current conditions tools or datasets that you're using?
There have been a lot of published retrospective cohort climate model studies, ex https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08...