Back in the day, before really good computer programmes, scientists had much less to go on when they made predictions about the future. Sometimes, though, relying on what they had then was basically enough.

Well, almost enough. They still needed to make a few adjustments here and there, but “good enough” seems operative.

An analysis that compares global warming predictions from 1990 with now has proven that scientists had enough to go on back then to accurately predict how things have thus far turned out.

Notes Business Insider:

The predictions in question come from the first climate assessment report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990. The IPCC is an internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change, drawing on the expertise of thousands of scientists, so its reports carry special weight. The most recent assessment report came out in 2007.

The accuracy of the 1990 predictions is notable because scientists, 22 years ago, relied on much more simplistic computer models than those now used to simulate the future, said one of the researchers behind the current analysis, Dáithí Stone, now a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He worked on the analysis while at the University of Cape Town and University of Oxford.

What’s more, two decades ago, scientists could not have anticipated a number of potentially climate-altering events. These included the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, which spewed sunlight-blocking particles into the atmosphere, as well as the collapse of industry in the Soviet Union or the economic growth of China, Stone and David Frame, of Victoria University Wellington in New Zealand, write in work published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The two scientists found that the “1990 report offered a best estimate of an increase of 1,1 degrees Celsius by 2030, which at the halfway point in 2010, translates to warming of 0,55 degrees C. Stone and Frame compared this expected increase to two sets of temperature records for 1990 through 2010, which showed increases of 0,35 degrees C and 0,39 degrees C, respectively.”

Not bad, science, not bad.

[Source: BusinessInsider]