Climatologists like to claim their models are or were accurate, but such claims have no real meaning because they change the temperature databases to make them right retroactively. It's hard to believe I know, I struggled to accept this at first, but they do it and they do it aggressively. It seems to have started around the year 2000 but the practice might date to earlier.

To wit: what they label as "observations" are not actually thermometer readings as they may at first appear, but rather data points after a complicated adjustment process. The averaging process then adds many more sources of modeled adjustment, so they keep changing the methodologies of both the individual weather station readings and also the composite averages post-hoc. About half of all warming visible in the (current) temperature record for the 20th century actually derives from administrative adjustments made after 2008.

You therefore cannot actually say how hot a particular year was, as far as climatologists are concerned. The past is not fixed. To make a claim about how hot it was in city X on date Y you must also reference dataset version Z.

This has a lot of strange effects. For example we often read about record setting temperatures. These records can be "unbroken" [1]:

"NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet."

Temperature datasets are like software (actually they are software). Some do occasional releases that make big changes. Others are actually continuously 'deployed'. As they explain:

"NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values."

For many years climatologists debated the nature and causes of the "pause" in global warming that started around the turn of the millennium. Many papers were published on this e.g. by the UK Met Office [2], many newspaper articles were written [3] etc. Temperatures had stopped going up and nobody knew why. No problem. The pause and all the many barrels of ink spilled on it, was simply written out of history. It was all just a big data mistake, they concluded.[4] Actually the pause never happened at all, and they proceeded to edit it out of the temperature databases.

They started removing the pause around 2015. By their own telling they can't even accurately measure trends in temperatures in past 20 years, but, for sure, they know what will happen in 80 years. It's not rational to treat a community that behaves in such a way as if they cannot make mistakes. They have repeatedly done so in the past, by their own admission!

[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...

[2] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24173504

[4] https://nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700