Successful Predictions

Here is a talk given by Ray Pierrehumbert at the recent AGU conference.

Steve Easterbrook discusses the talk here. He summarises the talk as follows:

Ray’s talk spanned 120 years of research on climate change. The key message is that science is a long, slow process of discovery, in which theories (and their predictions) tend to emerge long before they can be tested. We often learn just as much from the predictions that turned out to be wrong as we do from those that were right. But successful predictions eventually form the body of knowledge that we can be sure about, not just because they were successful, but because they build up into a coherent explanation of multiple lines of evidence.

For a post explaining the multiple lines of evidence for global warming click here. This talk lists many successful predictions by climate scientists (and also some unsuccessful ones by contrarians) it also provides a useful summary of the development of climate science.