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maxwells-daemon | 4 years ago

A friend who works in climate modeling recently told me that the best models currently in use pretty much all agree about the next few years, but they seriously diverge after a couple of decades because that's when the emergent effects we're worried about are predicted to show up. I'd caution against projecting the "We were right!" stance to the general public, since it breeds skepticism when some of the models inevitably turn out to be inaccurate. I think this kind of underreporting-of-uncertainty was the source of a lot of public distrust during COVID. The right approach to modeling -- creating multiple models and combining them to get mean and uncertainty estimates -- is what the modelers are doing, but I think it's important to do more nuanced reporting on what makes a climate model "correct" or "useful."

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