[Lewis Thomson (OP)]

Donald has presented this topic of discussion.

"There were a lot of climate change predictions that never came true. And they can easily be found in films, news articles, magazine covers, and government documents. What measures have climatologists taken to eliminate reckless or sensational predictions? And where should the lay person search to be informed about the debates within this subject."

What findings have you found? Place them in the comments below...

[alancalverd]

What measures have climatologists taken to eliminate reckless or sensational predictions?

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Ascribed to many sources, almost certainly without corroboration, but very true.

The problem is that if you say everything is going to be OK, you won't get any research funding. Or if you say that we are headed for an inevitable disaster, nobody wants to listen. People want to hear that we can avoid unpleasantness by making sacrifices: it's the history of religion and the essence of COP conferences. So you have to predict something between anodyne and armageddon, (a) blaming everyone except yourself and (b) suggesting a sacrifice they might make.

The fashionable climate disaster of the 1960s was an impending ice age. That was well chosen because the last one happened within the span of human existence, the species survived, we are much better at keeping warm nowadays, and no immediate sacrifice was called for. When it didn't happen,the debate turned to "nuclear winter" - a brief, manmade ice age that could be blamed on science by politicians, and on politics by scientists. But the laws of physics tend to dominate what happens on this planet, and it got hotter instead.

I always worry about "scientific debates". If it can't be settled by experiment, it isn't science. During my lifetime, broadcast "news" has changed from reports of what has happened, to speculation about what might happen. Being very old and cynical, my advice as to where to look for information about the future climate is in geological history, not crystal balls.

[evan_au]

What measures have climatologists taken to eliminate reckless or sensational predictions?

With modern supercomputers, it is possible to run "attribution studies", which might be dubbed "postdiction".

The idea is that you select some significant climate event (eg hurricane hits New York, lethal heatwave in Europe, coral bleaching in Australia's Great Barrier Reef).
- Then you run a bunch of computer simulations of the climate, starting with different random-number "seeds"
- The simulations are in two groups: One that includes human-increased CO₂, and the other doesn't. All other factors remain the same.
- Then you count how many times a hurricane hits New York per decade in each model.
- You do a bit of statistics, to say that "The probability of event X is increased by Y% due to human-caused CO₂ emissions since the industrial revolution".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_of_recent_climate_change