I am cheered to see that we are applying the fundamental test of good science to a very political topic.

Are we, though? I'm not at all sure that we are. Actually climatology seems to be ridden with disturbing and unscientific practices that somehow they get away with, although it would all be totally forbidden in other fields.

Two huge problems.

Firstly, no, the models didn't correctly predict future temperatures. The prior predictions were wrong. What's actually happening is that climatologists have gone back and adjusted old models to take into account what actually happened, and are now claiming they were making accurate predictions all along:

"This study’s accounting for differences between the projected and actual emissions and other factors allowed a more focused evaluation of the models’ representation of Earth’s climate system"

Not just adjusting for lower levels of CO2 emissions but also, note, "and other factors". That's not how predictions and models work, is it? You can't just go back and edit your old predictions to make them accurate and then claim you were super good at forecasting. The whole point of forecasting is to make predictions about the future. "I would have been right if only I'd known that ...." is the same thing as being wrong.

Secondly, this type of rewriting-the-past is happening here because climatology keeps getting away with it in other contexts. The worst by far is the way temperature records are constantly rewritten in ways that not only create warming where prior timeseries didn't have them, but which routinely invalidate decades of prior climatology.

Look at that temperature graph in the story. The observations line shows a steady upwards trend: the world has been getting hotter at a steady rate since 1970.

But this time series for temperature directly contradicts the global temperature time series from very recently, which showed a "pause" or "haitus" in global warming. Huge amounts were written about this completely unpredicted, unmodelled and difficult-to-explain near 20 year period of flat temperatures. For instance:

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...

"Abstract: The IPCC has drawn attention to an apparent leveling-off of globally-averaged temperatures over the past 15 years or so."

Where has this leveling off gone? The graph on this web page shows no levelling off anywhere.

Here's the New York Times in 2014:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/science/in-the-ocean-clue...

"As many people know, the warming of the earth’s surface has slowed sharply over recent years. That slowdown did not match past computer projections of what the climate was supposed to do under the influence of greenhouse gases, and scientists have been struggling to explain it."

So six years ago "many people know" that warming of the Earth's surface has slowed sharply and that this "did not match past projections". Now look at today's story in 2020. It shows a graph of observations since 2004 with no sharp slowing, and apparently most of the model projections were right.

Here's a temperature graph from 2011, via the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2011/09/august-global...

The pause the NYT is talking about is clearly visible.

A similar graph from NOAA: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201001-20...

The combined Land/Ocean graph is flat at an average annual anomaly of 1 degree farenheit between 2000-2010.

Now look at that graph vs the one on the "Study confirms" page and you can see they don't match: they both claim to be global records of average temperatures but the shape is different. It's logically impossible for both graphs to be right.

This happens because climatologists edit old temperature datasets in ways that bring the data in line with their models. They then present the edited graphs of long term temperatures without mentioning that this has happened. This graph starts in 1970 although records go back much longer because at the start of 1970 scientists were talking about global cooling, why, because the global temperature graphs they had showed the world had been getting cooler for 30 years. The decline was steep enough to create great concern, there were international collaborations between the USSR and USA for instance. Nowadays that 1940-1970 period of decline is gone. It looks either flat or just slightly climbing on modern graphs - and thus nobody can understand why global cooling was ever something scientists worried about.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted to hell for all this but people need to know. Scientists who have doubts about their data should either show error bars or simply discard the data and refuse to make predictions based on it. They shouldn't edit the data to remove deviations from models and then present it as evidence they were right all along. It's quack science.