[jtolds]

When someone says "20 years of doom predictions haven't come true", I charitably assumed that claim was about scientific consensus predictions, but perhaps I can't assume that everyone shares knowledge of what that is.

So far, all data says that the climate scientists are dead on and have been very accurate: https://eps.harvard.edu/files/eps/files/hausfather_2020_eval...

What doom predictions from the last 20 years haven't come true? If someone says that doom hasn't happened yet, I guess what I want to say is that they haven't waited long enough.

I think the climate scientists are frustrated and giving up. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/climate/ipcc-climate-scie.... My initial link was an attempt to show where the Overton window is regarding the experts in this field, more than anything else. This comment is probably not the right place to bring someone up to speed with the climate science field when they can Google it themselves.

[mike_hearn]

Although it's not well known, you unfortunately can't use temperature data to judge whether climatological predictions are correct. That's because the databases of temperature data that are presented as "global temperature" (a fundamentally statistical product) are themselves maintained by climatologists. It's a bit like asking a CEO whether his products are good, and he cites his own private data on customer happiness to prove that it is. Lots of people wouldn't accept this as evidence because it's not independent. The data might be correct, but his salary is at stake and so there's the risk of shenanigans. You'd want a truly independent assessment.

Climatologists like to claim that they are of course far better than that and would never abuse their monopoly position on such data, but they also regularly change those databases in ways that retroactively make failing predictions correct. Like here [1] where they declared a new record-breaking temperature that was lower than their previously announced record. They didn't mention that anywhere but the previous press release was still on their website and somebody noticed.

Anyway, you're right, let's Google things. Here are a few failed predictions from 20 years ago that can be judged without using temperature databases:

• Dr David Viner, climatologist, March 2000. "Children just aren't going to know what snow is". David Parker, climatologist, same article. "British children could have only virtual experience of snow." [2]

• "Australia faces permanent drought due to climate change", 2003 [3]. Dr James Risbey, Center for Dynamical Meteorology and Oceanography at Melbourne's Monash University, says "the situation is probably not being confronted as full-on as it should". Current data shows no drought [4]

• Pentagon report, 2004 [5]. By 2020 the weather in Britain "will begin to resemble Siberia", by 2007 violent storms have rendered parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable. "A ‘significant drop’ in the planet’s ability to sustain its present population will become apparent over the next 20 years". "Immigrants from Scandinavia seek warmer climes to the south." None of that is even close. "Senior climatologists, however, believe that [the author's] verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon."

There are hundreds more like this. It's inevitable that people take this history into account, and kinda unfair to demand that people don't. If there had been rigorous investigations of what went wrong in these cases, and clear evidence of learning or regulation of the field in the same way as happens in other areas of life after big failures, then people's confidence might be higher.

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[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150114205355/https://www.indep...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200825073015/https://www.wired...

[4] http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/maps/rainfall/?variable=rainfa...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...