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Comment by monoideism | Hacker News Reader

> climate models appear to be more conservative than reality

I've read this sentence multiple times and still not sure what it means. Would you please expound?

“Conservative” here is being used to mean “marked by moderation or caution”, rather than the set of political positions called conservatism.

The poster is saying that global climate change is probably even worse than people think. Often, the reporting around climate change focuses on the best case, the average case, or what could be achieved with an immediate strong response. But the actual paths we are on seems to track some of the worse, more pessimistic cases.

I wouldn't blame the reporting... the scientists are also very conservative, because they're afraid of being labeled doom-sayers by deniers.

If they are worried about being labeled doom-sayers by deniers then they aren't very good scientists.

Or they’re worried about losing their source of income with which they feed and house themselves and their families. Because the leaders of the US have explicitly threatened them.

It's not clear to me how anyone can make a judgement about whether models are more conservative than reality. We have no ability to independently measure climate change within our tiny data point of existence. Even a decade of observing it being hotter than it was in your younger years is not any sort of indicator of climate change.

Unless you're reading the entirety of academic research yourself and able to critically judge the validity of that research (by being a climate scientist yourself) it seems like you're always depending on someone else's biased interpretation.

To clarify: not disputing climate change. Only the ability for someone to make judgement calls on whether the reporting is accurate.

Of course, and I apologize that it was not more clearly stated. (1) climate models project changes in climate, (2) a body of evidence is emerging that climate volatility is greater in reality than predicted by those models, eg we are on track to hit 1.5 degrees of warming in 5 years time instead of 50, (3) therefore the models were too cautious or conservative in their projection of the rate of change.

Thank you. After reading a few explanations, I think the phrase was fine. I was just parsing it in a political context, as opposed to the original meaning of the word "conservative".

Where can you find up-to-date temperature readings (as up-to-date as possible)? Are there public datasets available?

There are a range of projections among climate models, and as we learn more it seems that on average the consensus models have been too optimistic.

I.e., things are even worse than we thought.

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