If you are vague enough, any prediction can come true.

1. So what. The price of haircuts has also gone up, along with chewing gum. I had no idea that the rise in CO2 levels could cause so many things to go up!

2. We've been seeing changes in Earth's climate all along since emerging from the Little Ice Age. And since even before the Industrial Revolution.

3. They never say how much today, but that the prediction is between 7 to 23 inches by 2100.

4. False. How about Antarctica?

5. False. We have many more people living on the coast where indigenous North Americans knew better to build on so the cost of such ignorance is higher, not the strength of the storms.

6. Species are being born and going extinct all the time. Survival of the Fittest.

7. No objection.

8. The population rises, disease rises.

9. Where exactly?

10. Yawn.

The only one they listed which has any direct link to CO2 is that the ocean pH is decreasing.

And some of the "facts" are just flat out incorrect, like polar ice diminishing and hurricane intensity increasing.

Scary item from the UK Telegraph this morning. 1984 has arrived -
"70 per cent agreed that the Government should ... (use) the law to change people's behaviour"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/07/03/eawarm103.xml

Brett,
This Times Online Article is silly. First of all, most of these predictions have not quite come to pass, and for those that did, it is difficult to say how long term they will be.

An example is Austrailia. Since 1998, sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) across the middle and south Pacific have remained above the 60 year average, with the MEI(Multi-variate ENSO(El Nino Southern Oscillation)) above normal. That is, Austrailia and all of Oceanea have had El Nino induced droughts for almost a decade. When Pacific SSTs are above normal (warm), large pools of warm tropical air traverse poleward keeping the Maritime Polar Air masses well south of Austrailia.

What the article failed to mention is the fact that the MEI has slowly begun to go down as Pacific SSTs begin to cool. This slow cooling, which began almost 2 years ago (with a short interruption last summer and autumn) is beginning to break the Austrailian drought. Frigid polar airmasses have plagued Austrailia since last April, and June of this year was the coldest June ever recorded for many Austrailian communities. Thier citrus crop lays in ruins as a consequence.

The cooling in the Southern Hemisphere in general has been under reported. For 2 winters in a row, South Africa has gotten extensive snowfalls (extremely unusual), South America has been so cold in many places (Chile, Bolivia, southern Argentinia) that the power companies cannot keep up with demand for heat; in the southern Indian Ocean, polar air masses how come within 10 degrees of the equator.

For long term climate change to occur, one must look at not just multi-decadal changes but centuries. For 35 years the Pacific has been generally warm -very warm. Since 1995, the North Atlantic Basin has been warm (positive AMO). This indicates an excess of warm tropical air through out the globe, which in turn get transported poleward. A general warming of the globe results. Changes in the ocean's gyre -which no understands-causes excess warm waters to surface over a large area, which in turn vents excessive heat and heat energy (think of El Nino) into the atmosphere.

The last time the ocean's went relatively cool was the period 1940-1975. The early to mid 40s, the early to mid 60s and the mid 70s were some of the coldest periods of the 20th century. In 1976, the Great Pacific Climate Change began, and we've enjoyed a temperature optimum ever since.

This article highlights changes that are not neccesairly long term ( 50-100 years). Just 2 winters ago, Europe suffered through its worst winter in 30 years (5000 froze to death in Russia alone, and there was so much snow in Central Europe that roofs collapsed). Last winter was one of the warmest in memory. However, this summer Canada continues to produce polar air masses that are keeping the mid-latitude's cold fronts well south of where they should be (Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma; the fronts normally do not penetrate the Northern Plains). As a consequence tropical type rain fall and flooding are occuring in the Southern Plains, and the Grain Belt remains cool and very dry. Last year the Southern Plains was suffering through a 2 year drought.

I suppose later this summer, Time will blame both droughts and floods as well as blizzards on AGW.

As much as I may agree that the evidence points towards supporting the predictions of AGW, the piece cited in the thread-starter is just book-seller's hype.

Cherry-picking ten "predictions" that have "come true" is cheap grandstanding. Pieces like this do more harm than good.

The most obvious question, unasked in this piece, is "How many predictions have been made by climate scientists, and how many have come true."

The second even more fundamental question is "Why does this matter even a little bit?"

Science is not baseball. Success in science is not measured by batting averages and RBIs. The predictions of physicists about the behavior of light and gravity were dead wrong until physicists discovered and corrected fundamental misunderstandings about quantum mechanics and the nature of electro-magnetic radiation. That string of failed predictions did not make Newton or Maxwell worse physicists than Einstein or Pauli, and it did not discredit the field of physics.

A theory must make predictions in order to qualify as a theory. Those predictions must be falsifiable. The science that proves a prediction false is just as good as the science that proves a prediction true. When searching for a needle in a haystack, knowing where not to waste our time is crucially important.

There are more problems with at least some of these "predictions". I don't believe that science has yet demonstrated that the intensity of hurricanes is, on average, increasing. There seems to be increasing evidence that changes in ocean currents have a far more profound influence than atmospheric temperature. I don't know that anyone has proven or disproven correlations between AGW and those changes in ocean currents.

The prediction that species will start going extinct as a prediction of climate change presumes the answer it is attempting to prove. There is certainly evidence that there has been a dramatic increase in extinctions. There is overwhelming evidence that those increased extinctions are the direct result of human activity. AGW and the increased acidification of ocean water may be one contributor. It is surely not the only, or even the largest.

All in all, I think this piece is primarily intended to promote sales of the author's book. No more and no less.

The problem with his predictions is that some of them are already being contradicted by newer research.

1. The jury is still out. There's evidence on both sides of the fence as to whether CO2 leads or lags (or maybe it leads under certain circumstances and lags under others!??!-GASP!!!)
2. They're noticing because they're looking now and technology actually allows them to see!
3. Newer interpretations of Satellite data is showing it may not have risen at all in recent years.
4.Depends where.
5.Again, the evidence for this is spurious and one supposed bad year has become a trend for AGW folks. My friends in the Dominican Republic have been waiting to over a year now for a decent storm.
6. You can't draw this correlation because species are going extinct all teh time because of variations in micro climates that may or may not be tied to global climate.
7. It is and the correlation is strong.
8. The extent of tropical diseases has really yet to extend appreciably. More people getting tropcial diseases can be due to increased travel and increased population.
9. Not sure where.
10. Tis true.

The good news about all this hype and focus on climate change is that REAL science is being done on climate change at an unprecendented pace (Which incidentally was predicted would happen whenever politics goes to bed with science) and new discoveries and AGW CONTRADICTORY information is begining to pop up all the time. Unfortunately the new stuff doesn't get as much press and it doesn't sell papers to not be alarmist.

Hi Guys,

My ten predictions about the weather and conditions for the 4th.

1) it will be sunny
2) it will rain
3) it will be cloudy
4) there will be thunder storms
5) it will hot
6) it will be windy
7) it will be humid
8) it will be cool
9) there will be surf
10).........it will be night

I bet it will be ten for ten. If you are vague enough then you you be right more often.

Tim Flannery is, like psychic, I mean he must have a crystal ball or something. I think Tim Blair says it better than me so:

PREDICTIONIST CLAIMS ACCURACY

A column by Tim Flannery in the London Times appears below this headline:

Ten predictions about climate change that have come true

All are so vague and non-proveable (�species would start going extinct�) they might have been written by a carnival psychic. As for Flannery�s more precise predictions, check this, made in June 2005:

The ongoing drought could leave Sydney�s dams dry in just two years.

Well, Flannery�s wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. Oh, last month he also predicted:

Brisbane and Adelaide - home to a combined total of three million people - could run out of water by year�s end.

Again, Flannery is wrong. Yet he�s sticking to his guns. And from the Times piece linked above, Flannery�s seventh prediction about climate change he claims has come true: �That Australia would start drying out.�

Wrong.

(Via Graham B., Murph, and Andrew R.)
Posted by Tim B. on 06/26/2007 at 11:44 AM
(59) Comments � Permalink

http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/predictionist_claims_accuracy/

Adittedly the list is nearly useless, or worse than useless. Book authors seem always to be in the press hyping the selling points of their books. It needs some sort of disclaimer, but it is no worse than dumbed down lists in nearly every other news paper. If viewed as trends or general summaries some points seem to be borne out; polar ice mass reductions in toto are down, especially if one includes nearly unprecedented iceberg calving along Antarctica.

My main observation is that much of the list has a huge statistical component, such as hurricane activity. Rates of formation of massive hurricanes (and droughts for that matter) is largely governed by extreme value statistics, and my feeling is that, although not well evaluated, the tail distributions have fattened. This follows from the fact that CO2 enters general circulation models (GCM) as a parameter, (as opposed to water vapor, which needs to be computed) which tends to enhance heat forcing terms. Although solar heating is fairly constant, the coupling to heat forcing becomes more efficient over short terms. Solidifying climate research should really be a national (funding) priority; the current administration seems to disagree. My view is that not recognizing the C02 driving contributions is like letting dwi offenders drive city buses, they probably won't kill somebody, but the expected damage (risk) is higher than the cost of not letting them drive.

Also SSTs can be a bit misleading since they only include the top few cm of water. The overall energy of the warm water layer will vary tremendously with thickness (in depth). This has consequences for hurricane season duration. Also a thick layer would allow the recovery time between hurricane spin up to abbreviated.

Brett,
In the article about predictions that have come true- maybe you need to clue in the author that he contradicts himself on the species going extinct when he talks about the 30 new mammals including two species of tree Kangaroos that he discovered and named.