evidence: "The real message is that the warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago," he said. "This really gives us more confidence that today’s models are getting things largely right as well." [...] Hausfather and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies evaluated the models based on how well they predicted the actual global mean temperature — Earth’s average temperature — based on the levels of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are responsible for a rise of nearly 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in global mean temperatures since 1880, two-thirds of that since 1975. [...] One of the iconic climate models, and one that first brought the issue of climate change to broad public attention, was published by James Hansen of NASA in 1988. However, his predictions for temperatures after 1988 were 50% higher than the actual global mean temperatures in those years.