Quote (fender @ 19 Jan 2023 10:21)
your specific line made me curious though, and i couldn't find it on any of the usual sources that you normally get your talking points from: where did you read that? the UN issued so many reports, funded so many studies, consulted so many scientists, so what's that "more technically sound than what the UN produced" claim referring to specifically?
i mean, i also read that one iteration of exxon's prediction model was surprisingly accurate, but is this just an X's best against Y's worst scenario, or what is the deal? did they have access to data that others didn't? did they factor in variables that other scientists simply overlooked? is there anything today's climate scientists can learn from them to improve their models? if you leave dumb partisan gotchas out of this, it becomes a rather interesting angle imo...
Look, for example, at a vey recent
Science article titled "Assessing ExxonMobil's Global Warming Predictions":
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063#sec-2Quote
We also calculate skill scores for the temperature-versus-time and iTCR metrics (Table 1). A skill score of 100% indicates perfect agreement between projections and observations; a score between zero and 100% indicates some degree of skill; and a score less than zero indicates a performance worse than a zero-change null hypothesis (16, 20).
With respect to temperature change versus time, we find the average of the median skill scores of all 16 reported projections to be 67 ± 7%. Across projections modeled by ExxonMobil scientists themselves, it is 72 ± 6%. These scores indicate highly skillful predictions. The highest-scoring projection was a 1985 peer-reviewed publication [Hoffert and Flannery (1985, nominal CO2 scenario)], with a skill score of 99% (38). The 1982/1984 projection discussed earlier (Fig. 1, panel 3) has a skill score of 82% [although it marginally failed the consistency test (Fig. 3 and fig. S1)]. Only three of the 16 projections have skill scores below 50%. For comparison, NASA scientist James Hansen’s global warming predictions presented to the US Congress in 1988 have been found to have skill scores ranging from 38 to 66% across the three different forcing scenarios that he reported (16, 20).
Using the iTCR metric, the average skill of the 16 projections is 67 ± 9%. Among projections modeled by ExxonMobil scientists themselves, it is 75 ± 5%. Seven projections score 85% or above. Hoffert and Flannery (1985, high CO2 scenario) is again the highest scorer (92%), closely followed by two projections scoring 90%, which are featured in three internal reports in 1982/1984 and 1985, respectively (38, 39, 41, 42). Only four projections have skill scores below 50% for the iTCR metric. Again, for comparison, Hansen’s 1988 projections had skill scores in terms of the iTCR metric ranging from 28 to 81% (16).
The bottom line is that at the time, ExxonMobil's predictions of climate change were at least as good, and probably even slightly more accurate, than those of public scientists.
It you reeeeeeeally want to nitpick, I will admit though that my initial wording ("technically sound") was suboptimal and I should have used "more accurate" instead. (Which can be caused by a more scientifically sound approach, but also by access to better data/funding/etc.)
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 21 2023 01:59am