evidence: As the technology progressed and demand for more policy-relevant climate information grew, climate modelers shifted away from these hypothetical "instantaneous doubling" scenarios and developed plausible scenarios for the amount of future emissions in a given year. They then used their models to estimate the corresponding future global warming. [...] Our survey began with a literature review of every peer-reviewed reference we could find. For each reference, we either tracked down the original model data, reproduced the data from text, formulas, and tables, or, as a last resort, we used digitized the data the figures. Then, we compared the projected warming rates from the models against several estimates of historical warming from a dense global network of temperature measurements with excellent coverage over the past fifty years. We also recorded the rate at which greenhouse gas concentrations (and other human-emitted climate agents) changed in both the model projections and reality. [...] When conducting our comparison, given this information, it became clear to us that simply comparing the warming rates between simulations and reality could be misleading, if the simulated emissions scenario and historical emissions were dramatically different. To account for differences in emissions between the simulations and reality, we calculated the warming rates with respect to anthropogenic radiative forcing, the rate at which human emissions trap energy at Earth’s surface, instead of calculating them with respect to time. Using this novel metric of the warming rate, we found that the model projections were even more consistent with reality (14 out of 17 models captured this).