--- title: "Their Own Scientists Drew The Curve In 1982. It Was Right." dek: "Nobody had scored the old projections, so three researchers did. Average skill 72 per cent, the best of them 99, and 0.20 °C per decade. The data and the code are in a public repository." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Suppressed Science author: Dr. Ilse Vantongeren and Harriet Kwon-Massey (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T14:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/curve-drawn-in-1982 tags: projections, skill score, internal research, 1977–2003, replication genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Their Own Scientists Drew The Curve In 1982. It Was Right. *Nobody had scored the old projections, so three researchers did. Average skill 72 per cent, the best of them 99, and 0.20 °C per decade. The data and the code are in a public repository.* Somebody finally scored them. That is the news, and it is not what most accounts say the news is. The internal memoranda had been read, quoted and argued about for years. What nobody had done was the boring arithmetic: take the projections, line them up against what the temperature actually did, and grade them the way a meteorologist grades a forecast. Three researchers did it in 2023. > **Figure:** How well the old internal projections did — see https://theyburied.com/article/curve-drawn-in-1982 ## What the grading found An average skill score of 72 per cent, plus or minus six. The best single projection scored 99. Between 63 and 83 per cent of the projections were consistent with what was subsequently observed. The average projected warming was 0.20 °C per decade, which is — within the uncertainty — the same number the independent academic and government models of the same period were producing. ## What a skill score is, corrected Our first draft called it a measure of accuracy. Professor Ansgar Beaulieu-Ndiaye read that and told us it was wrong, and he was right, and his correction is the most useful paragraph in this story. A skill score asks whether a prediction beat a *trivial alternative* — usually, assuming tomorrow will be like today. You can be accurate and have no skill at all, if the thing you were predicting was never going to change much. Skill is the part that is not free. Seventy-two is therefore not a mark for effort. It is a statement that these projections were doing real work against a baseline anybody could have used, across decades. > You can be quite accurate and have no skill. Skill is the part that is not free. > > — Prof. Ansgar Beaulieu-Ndiaye ## We ran it ourselves The assessment's authors put their data and their code in a public repository. This desk downloaded both and re-ran the computation. Our numbers matched theirs. That is the least surprising sentence in this story and the most important one. Then we varied the choices — different baselines, different intervals — to see whether the answer moved. It did not move much, which is what a robust result looks like, and everything we ran is listed with this story. ## What this is not It is not a discovery of hidden documents. The memoranda were internal, which is not the same as concealed, and several of the underlying projections were published at the time in the open scientific literature under their authors' own names. Anybody could read them. Some people did. The new thing in 2023 was arithmetic, not archaeology, and this desk thinks the distinction is worth the paragraph. ## What our correspondent could not establish Who read them, and what they did. The assessment scores projections. It does not establish an internal chain of decision, and neither can this newspaper. We spent three weeks trying and have nothing. A retired research manager from an entirely different industry — he asked us to say that twice, and we have — described the ordinary mechanism without being asked about any company in particular. "Research goes up. Positions come down. They are different pipes and they do not have to meet. Nobody has to decide anything for an organisation to say a thing its own laboratory does not believe. That is not a defence. It is worse, because there is nobody to sack." ## The scientist's own ending Professor Beaulieu-Ndiaye's full statement runs at the foot of this page and it takes the story somewhere this desk did not expect. The people who produced this work, he says, were not doing anything unusual. They were doing competent atmospheric physics with the tools of their period, and getting the same answers everybody else was getting, which is what competent physics looks like. He asked our readers to notice how *ordinary* that is — because the story is nearly always told as though a secret was being kept. The physics was not a secret. It was in journals. What differed was what an institution said in public. That is a question about institutions rather than about science, and he said plainly that he is not qualified on it and neither are we. ## Sources (invented) - The 2023 assessment, Peer-reviewed; published in a general science journal — Read in full, including the supplementary material (2026) - Its public data and code repository, Open — Downloaded; our own data desk re-ran the skill-score computation (May 2026) - The internal memoranda and their graphs, Archival; reproduced in the assessment and in the repository — Read; the graphs redrawn for our own engraving (2026) - Prof. Ansgar Beaulieu-Ndiaye, Climate scientist; not an author of the assessment and has not collaborated with them — Interviewed by video call twice (May 2026) - A retired industrial research manager, Named in our notes; worked in a different sector — Interviewed at length about how internal research reaches, or does not reach, an external position (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2155: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2155 ## What we could not confirm - Who read the memoranda, and what they did about them. The assessment scores projections; it does not establish an internal chain of decision, and this newspaper cannot either. - Whether the divergence was policy or incoherence. Large organisations routinely hold contradictory positions without anybody deciding to. Which this was is not established by anything we have read and we are not going to guess. - How the scoring would change with different choices. Skill scoring involves choices about baselines and intervals. The repository lets you change them; we changed several and the picture did not move much, which is what a robust result looks like. ## Right of reply **Prof. Ansgar Beaulieu-Ndiaye, climate scientist** (Asked to correct a thing our first draft got wrong about skill scores, and then to add something. Printed unedited.): > Your draft described a skill score as a measure of how accurate a prediction was. That is not quite it and the difference matters. > > A skill score asks whether a prediction did better than a trivial alternative — usually, better than assuming tomorrow is like today. You can be quite accurate and have no skill, if the thing you were predicting was not going to change much anyway. Skill is the part that is not free. > > So a score of seventy-two is not a mark out of a hundred for effort. It is a statement that these projections were doing real work, against a baseline that was available to anybody, over decades. > > Now the thing I wanted to add. > > The scientists who produced this work were not doing anything unusual. They were doing competent atmospheric physics with the tools of their period, and their results agreed with the results everybody else was getting, which is what competent physics looks like. Some of them published in the open literature under their own names. > > I would like your readers to notice how ordinary that is, because the story is usually told as though a secret was being kept. The physics was not a secret. It was in journals. What differed was what an institution said in public, and that is a question about institutions rather than about science, and I am not qualified on it and neither are you. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.