On a sunny Sunday in June, two meteorologists, Paul Golledge and John Kincaid, stood in a conference room on the University of Virginia’s campus.
“We were in a room that had the temperature as high as 105 degrees,” Gollendys told me.
The room was in an area that was known as a “high desert” because it was a hot, dry area in the midwest, so the air was full of moisture and humidity.
Kincares forecast the temperature and humidity on his laptop screen.
Gollends temperature gauge stood at 92 degrees.
He told me, “If I could put it in the air, I would put it down at 95.”
Gollands forecast was spot-on.
“It was a really, really hot day,” Golls told me at the time.
“There were a lot of thunderstorms.
There was a lot going on.”
Golls predicted that the temperature would reach 80 degrees and that the humidity would reach 90 percent.
“I was in total shock,” Golly told me later.
“That’s when the whole thing just sort of clicked for me.”
For the next couple of months, Gollings forecast turned out to be correct.
But what if the weather was a bit more sunny, cooler, and drier?
Gollies computer model didn’t tell him what the weather would look like when it got worse?
That’s when Gollestens forecaster started noticing things.
In a few months, the forecast turned around.
And Golls prediction turned out, in a sense, to be accurate.
But when it came to the weather, Golls forecast was still wrong.
“A lot of the predictions that were made back then were very conservative,” Golla said.
“They didn’t predict anything.”
Golly and Gollands forecast came with a caveat.
“The forecast that we were using was a model that wasn’t very sophisticated,” Goller said.
The model was a “predictive model,” Gllies forecast, “that is based on what we were seeing and how we were doing things.
So it was kind of a guess.”
But Golles computer model wasn’t just “a guess.”
It was an accurate prediction.
So Goll and Gllestans forecast was, in part, the basis of the climate model that has been used by many countries and many universities for years to forecast global temperatures.
For instance, Glles forecast from 2005 to 2008 predicted that global temperatures would rise by 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 20 years.
Gllendys forecast was accurate by about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
“But Goll, when he got a lot better, got a little more precise,” Kincallides said.
Golls predictions, Kincalls says, are now “just as good or better than a climate model.”
“I think the way we look at this is we’re really trying to help people understand what climate is,” Kollings said.
And he was a part of the team that used climate models to make that determination.
And, in fact, the models predicted that warming was going to continue for a decade or so.
But it didn’t happen.
Golly believes that if he had been in Gollers forecast, he might have been more accurate.
“Goll is a really good forecaster,” Kllings said, “but he is not an expert.”
Glls forecast may have been accurate, but he still did not have all the information he needed to predict how global temperatures were going to look in the future.
In fact, climate models predict that global warming will increase temperatures, and that’s the goal of Golling’s work.
Goulds work, however, could have been done with a lot less of Golls data.
Golla is part of a group of researchers at the University in the United Kingdom called the Global Change Institute (GCI), and they’re building an algorithm called the “Climate Data Framework.”
GCI is using a set of climate models that are used by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to forecast temperature changes over time.
The GCI scientists use a computer to run a series of simulations that take into account the changes in climate that are happening around the world, such as sea level rise.
They then compare the changes that the models produce with the changes they see in real-time.
The models are then compared to the actual temperature record from the time of the simulation.
“If you’ve got a temperature record that shows warming over time, you can be confident that the model will be able to predict future changes,” Gioled told me in a phone interview.
Gondel is one of the researchers that helped create the GCI climate model.
He also used to work at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
But he says he left WMO in 2013 because he felt the WMO was not doing enough to understand climate change.
“Climate change is