Good in depth response.
There have been many, many models, and the best summation is that they were about right. But there have certainly been ones that "ran hot" and others that underestimated warming.
Briefly, this article (
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming) outlines some models and finds:
A 1975 model that overestimated warming compared to observations by about 30%
A 1981 model that underestimated by about 20%
A 1988 model that overestimated by about 30% (this is probably the one most talk about, as it was the famous 1988 "Hansen" model that was deceptively shown by famous deniers to be 300% wrong by using misleading data)- there are a number of caveats to the "overestimation" by 30%, but in general, it was pretty good for a model that tried to account for a broad range of human responses to global warming. Warming, and our actions, definitely fall between the minimum warming we do everything we can scenario, and the maximum warming we geometrically increase CO2 emissions, models.
A 1990 model that overestimates by 17%
A 1995 model that underestimates by 25%
A 2001 model that underestimates by 14%
A 2007 model that overestimates by 8%
and a 2013 model that overestimates by 16% or 9% depending on which factors you agree ameliorate the overestimating.
Of course long term models are not 100% accurate. Some confounding factors include solar output (which has reduced recently, but no one can predict that at present), volcanic activity (which is hard to predict), increase use or aerosols (which had not been predicted), and the precise levels of greenhouse gasses produced (even events like our last election, which was not well predicted the day it was run, can affect our greenhouse gasses).
But they are all pointing in the same direction. In 30 years, if you are lucky enough to be alive, and lucky enough to have grandchildren, you are going to be very embarrassed by your Ostrich behaviour when they ask you what our generation did about global warming.
And the s&*t won't really hit the fan for many more years after that, but in 30 years only anti vaxers and creationists will be the sorts of people dumb enough to deny climate change as the world average temperatures will be 1.5 to 2 degrees warmer if we don't do much/anything about greenhouse gasses (assuming we don't have a nuclear winter, massive volcanic disruption etc- the climate models can't predict those things).
