RE: Don’t Tell Anyone,
I know the models have almost all hugely underestimated things, which is why I said, "Maybe in this prediction only, the climate models did not underestimate things," the implication being that most models did underestimate. The issue is the reliability of the science when the predictions based on the science are way off.
How long did it take to develop the science of thermodynamics for example? Fifty, sixty years is nothing. Though, to be more precise, I think climate science is beyond its infancy. Last month a method for measuring ocean temperatures was finally developed, and this is after all those decades of temperature measurements which we were pretending were accurate.
Now thermometer accuracy is not what I mean by accuracy here. I'm talking about how thermometers are not placed in any systematic way as to give a thoroughly comprehensive picture of temperature variations round the globe. If you had only one thermometer in the Gobi desert how useful from a scientific perspective is that? Or if you had a thousand in the Atlantic Ocean but none located on the ocean floor?
Your points are valid, but I think you greatly overestimate them. Measurements are not the problem, it are the processes we still don't know about. THAT is the core of "underestimation".
But even that get's outnumbered by orders by the simple fact of how humans behave (or not).
For example I just read that somebody is producing the ozone layer destroying FCKWs again - somethign that did not happen for decades. Somewhere in east asia.
That is not predictable. (Yes, this is not climate change, but easy example.)
Also you forget that the scientists are making literally thousands of models, each with slight differences and often starting way in the past. The models that are closest to what we observe after they have run a few decades are likely to be the most exact for the future too, right?
I have been running those models on my home computers for a decade now through climateprediction.net I know a bit about that part ;)
It's good of you to help with climate modeling.
I'm try not to be hyperbolic in stating how things stand. At this point in time, I would agree, the measurements have gotten sufficiently good - but only very recently - so that now the scientific understanding of what's going on remains the only big hurdle for climatology.