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How Have Contrarian Climate Predictions Performed?

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If you follow popular discussions about AGW, you'll likely see many claims that climate scientists have been making terrible predictions and climate models invariably run too hot compared to observations. If you investigate these, almost all of so-called "predictions" of climate scientists turn out to be some combination of misinformed assessments by media personalities, reporters and politicians or claims by scientists that have been misread by contrarians. And while it's true that some climate scientists have said some things that have not panned out, this is clearly the exception, not the rule. In fact, overall, climate scientists have been slightly conservative with their predictions, and climate model have performed quite well.[1] In fact, Zeke Hausfather has done a pretty good job of tracking how model predictions compare to observations, and overall, they've done quite well. So given all the rancor from contrarians about the predictions of climate scientist...

Updating the Lewis & Curry Estimate for ECS

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One of the most common studies cited in favor of a low equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) was published by Lewis and Curry in 2018 (LC18).[1] Their paper used the standard energy balance equation I've used in previous blogposts to estimate both ECS and TCR. They arrived at median estimates with 95% uncertainties of 1.66 C for ECS (1.15–2.7 C) and 1.33 C for TCR (1.0–1.9 C). These values are significantly below the range estimated by the more recent IPCC assessment reports. Since the publication of this paper, Sherwood et al 2020[2], published what may be the most comprehensive assessment of ECS and found a 95% range of 2.3–4.7 C. Argument of LC18 So I thought it might be interesting to do a back-of-the-envelope style update to LC18. I think there are several reasons why this can be valuable. Since the publication of this paper, a number of new insights have been published: The publication of HadCRUT5 had significant improvements over HadCRUT4, even the dataset with kriging to li...