So-called ‘experts’ have made ‘doomsday’ predictions in the past, and these have not come to pass. Examples include the likelihood that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation, the notion that the ‘millennium bug’ would disable computers and the fear that the nuclear arms race would lead to nuclear holocaust. Predictions about climate change will prove no different.
Fact:
This is faulty logic. The fact that one threat doesn’t come true doesn’t mean that others won’t. The coronavirus pandemic is an excellent example. Many prominent climate sceptics also denied the seriousness of the pandemic when it first emerged. Some of those people still don’t take it seriously.
Climate models have been amazingly accurate over the years. In 1906, Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would result in global surface warming of about 4°C. That is amazingly close to modern day predictions – and Arrhenius had only rudimentary laboratory equipment and a slide rule to do his calculations.
Modern climate models have predicted global warming since the 1960s and have been proven remarkably accurate. In 1967, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald calculated that a doubling of CO2 would cause about 2.4°C of warming. [Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in this area.] In 1981, James Hansen projected that between 1981 and 2015 the planet would warm by 0.6°, which is just 0.1° more than actual observations.
Nobel Prize winner Syukuro Manabe [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
In the 1970s, Manabe and Wetherald also predicted that CO2 emissions would cause the lower atmosphere to warm and the upper atmosphere to cool. Another of their predictions was that the Arctic would warm faster than the rest of the planet, in part because of decreased reflectivity due to melting ice. Both these predictions have been confirmed by scientific observation.
In 1989, Roland Stouffer, Syukuro Manabe and Kirk Brian predicted that CO2 emissions would cause the land surface to warm faster than the ocean surface – something which has subsequently proved to be true.
Even in the 1970s, when the climate had not warmed much for two decades, climate scientists were still predicting future warming, due to the physics of CO2. Time would prove them right. The climate pause of the 1950s and ‘60s was found to be due to increased particulate matter in the atmosphere. Once this was reduced by legislative action, global warming resumed.