Note: I am not saying that climate change isn’t real. I’m just sceptical that someone in 1982 made accurate predictions of 2019. And all points in between? Without anyone noticing?
Citation please. No one was predicting that.
Edit: Also I have little problem believing that internal scientists knew the problem, and the extent, long before the outside world recognised the urgency. That also applied to tobacco, asbestos, leaded fuel - they had research showing issues decades before the wider world had the weight of evidence, or even recognised there was a problem to investigate...
In general, this might be true. Predicting the future is harder than it seems. But it depends completely on the type of system (chaotic or not), and how well we understand it. We can predict the position of the Earth thousands of years into the future.
Regarding climate models, you might be underestimating how good they were in the early 80's. Here are old models' projections compared with the actual temperature records up to 2017 [1]. I'm not an expert so I don't know if they excluded early bad models, but they included all the IPCC models.
The graph that AOC showed was pretty small and grainy. It's also compressed along the x-axis (140 years), and has a high aspect ratio. It's possible that she, or her aides, picked the best one for the presentation. But given the performance of the models at the time, it's not unreasonably good. It actually seems worse than the 1990 IPCC model, but that's just my opinion.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have been accurate because the temperature data for the past itself has been continuously adjusted by climatologists since then, so any models calculated back then would be using temperatures now considered wrong (and not by a small amount!). Either the old models are wrong or the old temperature records are wrong, but they can't both be true simultaneously.
Do you have a good source for this assertion? I mean, there are still people claiming that there is no warming at all, so "all" models seems like too strong a claim.
Yes, scientists have been busy trying to refine their models and understanding of temperatures. But my understanding is that, quantitatively, the inaccuracies in the old temperature data was pretty small compared year to year variation. No prediction is ever perfect, even in QED you have one part in a trillion error, but instead you look at whether the result is in the error bars and whether the error bars are narrow enough to be useful.
If I remember correctly, the lag was likely caused by not correctly accounting for deep ocean heating. That's a huge missing piece of the simulation, so how could the models from back then possibly have been accurate?
But honestly it's the inaccuracy of current climate models that make me so concerned about global warming.
Or the lag was a minor factor that only briefly overrode the primary drivers of climate change, which have since reasserted themselves. I think we both know what the smart bet is.
The oceans are now significantly warmer than earlier models predicted. There's no way that doesn't impact the outcome.
Instead what happened is they decided the temperature records that showed a pause were wrong, went back and adjusted them so there's no longer any real pause if you look at the latest temperature datasets. The entire thing was written off as a giant measurement error.
> That is to say that the current alignment is just coincidental.
Sort of. The model is (heatIn - heatOut - seaAbsorption) = surface weather. They got the seaAbsorption wrong, something they later figured out with the Argo network as you noted. But that means they got the primary driver of global warming, heatOut dropping as CO2 increases, right. Which sadly means if you wait long enough, their predictions were always going be right because in the end heatIn - heatOut is all that matters.
Source? Although all of this depends on what you mean by "more", as in what you assume the error bars on the models are.
> temperature data for the past itself has been continuously adjusted
Source?
> Also note it's impossible for models in the 80's to have been accurate
It's not actually. Models don't depend on the temperature. The models could have been (and in fact, were) accurate despite the alleged wrong inputs.
> Either the old models are wrong or the old temperature records are wrong, but they can't both be true simultaneously.
It doesn't really matter in the context of the legal argument about what Exxon thought to be true in 1982.
There’s also the possibility that their predictions gave a wide range and we’re simply within that band today.
I have no trouble believing that. Given a thousand predictions, with two thousand possible outcomes you'll have someone guess right 50% of the time. These are educated guesses and no one knows the odds of guessing right, but I'm not surprised we can find a random person that made a prediction that fits a certain part of what we're seeing today.
The Exxon scientists' predictions were proprietary company information at the time. Exxon didn't publish this information, they used it to their advantage.