>>>Despite all the work on sensitivity, no one really knows how the climate would react if temperatures rose by as much as 4°C. Hardly reassuring.<<<
No one knows how the climate would react if temperatures stayed the same for the next century, either. It’s a dynamic system. Simply keeping the temperature the same, while the Earth’s orbit shifts and changes, and solar radiation rises and falls, would still mean that changes would happen that we can’t predict.
Despite the fearmongering, I can’t figure out how a warmer and wetter planet would be bad for people, either. (All the screaming about “drought” misses the point that severe global droughts last occurred at the height of the Ice Ages, when much of the water was taken up as ice in contintential glaciers. Warmer air holds more moisture.)
My own theory about all this - and much of the social sciences - is that we tend to see patterns in everything. It’s our nature. Even in places where no patterns exist. We’ve become so good at measuring every little nuance, every speck of group behavior and dynamics, every little molecule of air, that we’re imposing our own biases and beliefs on the patterns that data creates. Global warming is a great example of trying to extrapolate future trends from current data, but there are many more examples, from disparities in women’s and men’s pay to differences in statistics based on race to links between substance exposure and cancer. We love to find the pattern in everything. It’s a strength sometimes and a weakness, too.
God help us.
May God help us, but we must help ourselves when we can.!
Whether its title or its subtitle is A sensitive matter, this admission by The Economist that, "If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch. But it would not yet be downgraded..." was the kind of story that I made a list for every state and then some.
It's been referenced by a few essays so far:
Michael Barone: The Economist's Emily Litella moment on global warming (Barone thought it was the title too.)
CLIMATE CHANGE ENDGAME IN SIGHT?
The Economist essay is worth the read and wide dissemination by email, not just a few echo chambers on the right. The Economist was always hawking global warming alarmism!
FReepmail me if you want off of my list.
AGW is a classic case of the correlation equals causation fallacy. The world started industrializing and dumping carbon into the air around 1850 and the Earth began warming about then. Therefore carbon caused the warming. They then began building computer models to "prove" their theory.
Only problem is the Earth is not acting per their models.
Interesting that you would describe "climate science" as a "social science".
While it is nominally concerned with the study of physical effects, "climate science" is best described as a "social science" because it is actually driven by political agendae.
There are patterns, but our computers are orders of magnitudes from analysing them, and they are transient as Rirschach’s mask.
How great the mind of God is, to design this and the Natural Law which governs it.