In a feature article in this issue, veteran climate scientist Tom M.L. Wigley evaluates the performance of climate models—two of them his own—asking how the models’ predictions made thirty years ago stand up today. They have performed remarkably well, he concludes; they’ve stood the test of time.
Now a new study has been published evaluating the predictive performance of climate models all the way back fifty years, when the models were then still rudimentary. The conclusions are similar: Even fifty-year-old climate models, basic as they were, correctly predicted current global warming.
The researchers compared annual average surface temperatures across the earth today to the surface temperatures predicted in seven-teen forecasts drawn from fourteen separate computer models released between 1970 and 2001. Most of the models accurately predicted recent global surface temperature observations. For ten forecasts, there was no statistically significant difference between their output and historic observations.