RealClimate: Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection

[Sam Wormley]

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/#bib_1

> Sometimes it helps to take a step back from the everyday pressures of research (falling ill helps). It was in this way we stumbled across Hansen et al (1981) (pdf). In 1981 the first author of this post was in his first year at university and the other just entered the KNMI after finishing his masters. Global warming was not yet an issue at the KNMI where the focus was much more on climate variability, which explains why the article of Hansen et al. was unnoticed at that time by the second author. It turns out to be a very interesting read.
>

[Sam Wormley]

> To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science.
>

[Desertphile]

There is an excellent YouTube video on the subject. Thirty years
ago Dr. Hansen corectly predicted what we now see around the
world; much of what he predicted he also testified to the USA
Congress about. More than 30 years, and the USA still has done
almost nothing about the problem.

[Desertphile]

Callendar thought he had demonstrated the fact that human-caused
global warming had already been observed by year 1937, and he
wrote a famous paper on the subject in year 1938. He data may have
shown expected variation instead of human-caused warming.

http://www.rmets.org/pdf/qjcallender38.pdf