Do you feel stupid? It could be catastrophic climate change

[ding]

That argument only works if attribution depends entirely on perfectly modeling paleoclimate transitions. It doesn’t. Current anthropogenic warming is identified through multiple independent observations.

And yet we are to believe there is no natural climate variation despite a 3 million year record of empirical evidence to the contrary.

The disagreement is over causality hierarchy.
In the mainstream framework, AMOC changes are a major internal feedback and amplifier, but not the long term pacemaker. Orbital forcing changes high latitude summer insolation first, which alters ice sheet stability; AMOC then responds within that changing climate state and can greatly amplify or accelerate transitions.

Or you are looking at it wrong. The surface of the earth isn't heated evenly and salinities are not uniform. Currents and current changes is how equilibrium occurs.

They are part of the mechanism.

The disagreement is whether ocean circulation is the primary independent driver of the glacial cycle, or whether orbital forcing first alters high latitude summer insolation and ice-sheet stability, with ocean circulation then amplifying and propagating those changes through the climate system.

It's pretty easy for me to connect the dots for the largest collector and storage of solar energy being the primary driver when considering the unique landmass configuration of the northern hemisphere; ocean parked over the pole with surrounding lands limiting thermal transfer of warm marine currents and surrounding lands for ice sheet growth. It's harder for me to accept a thousand year process when all it takes is a couple of consecutive hot summers or mild winters to upset the process. The change in cycle length is a smoking gun. I can totally picture a cycle in ocean currents for a given landmass configuration that is not like orbital clockwork.

That analogy only works if AMOC changes are fully self initiating and independent. The mainstream argument is that AMOC is a powerful mechanism that responds to broader boundary conditions.

Nobody denies AMOC changes can strongly drive glaciation/deglaciation dynamics once triggered. The disagreement is over what repeatedly pushes the system toward those AMOC state changes on orbital timescales instead of the circulation behaving more irregularly or randomly.

Salinities and temperature differences and nature abhorring a vacuum so to speak.

The “2C away from AMOC collapse” idea isn’t a reliable metric. AMOC stability depends on regional salinity, freshwater input, wind patterns, and density structure in the North Atlantic, not just global average temperature compared to past interglacials.

Past warm interglacials don’t directly tell you how close we are to a threshold today. Orbital forcing being weak now doesn’t change that; it just means current changes are being driven mainly by greenhouse gases rather than orbital cycles.

Neither are the cycle times apparently for OF.

If I follow your logic to its logical conclusion GHG will save the planet from the next glacial period. If I follow mine, GHG will slightly speed up the time to the next glacial period. But in either event, the AMOC is collapsing and that will be catastrophic. So why wouldn't we want more atmospheric CO2? Not to mention the last glacial period came close to the planet having too low of an atmospheric CO2 level to support plant life. And then the last reason is quality of life for humans.

Orbital forcing refers to a very slow long term trend, not the current short term energy balance. Right now, greenhouse gases dominate and are driving warming despite a slight orbital tendency toward cooling.

I'm not skipping anything. Different forcings operate on different timescales, and the current state is an interglacial being modified by a much faster, stronger forcing.

Or I'm right and they are attributing natural warming to feedbacks.

Global warming can’t be explained by AMOC changes alone because AMOC mainly redistributes heat regionally in the Atlantic, not increase total planetary energy.

What we observe instead is a measured positive energy imbalance and rising ocean heat content, which requires a net external forcing. AMOC can shape where warming shows up, but it doesn’t account for the global increase in stored heat.

I'm going to go back to the empirical data and argue we don't know what the "normal" temperature of an interglacial period should be. The data we have shows that the planet was NATURALLY warmer.

The 1–1.2C per CO2 doubling number is not a hard physical limit. It’s the no-feedback baseline from radiative transfer physics.

The higher IPCC range comes from adding feedbacks, which are where most of the uncertainty and disagreement actually sits.

Yes, I know. That's the part I disagree with. Given the empirical data that we have and given the climate fluctuations within glacial and interglacial periods and given the complexity of the system, I don't believe we should be jumping through hoops to save the planet from something that isn't even catastrophic if it were true. Which I am not convinced it is.

The 1–1.2C per doubling is the physics only baseline from radiative transfer.

Feedbacks are real and expected, and the second law doesn’t prevent them; it just ensures the system balances overall energy. The real uncertainty is how strong net feedbacks are, not whether they exist or cause instability.

Again I'm just going to point to the empirical evidence from the geologic record which shows a cooling planet with considerably higher levels of CO2 and the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and associated temperature.

Clouds and water vapor are the main uncertainty in feedback strength, but they’re constrained by observations and paleoclimate data.

Past periods with higher CO2 were cooler because climate is also driven by other factors like geography, oceans, and long-term changes in greenhouse gases, not CO2 alone.

I would argue the paleoclimate data does not support the feedbacks.

Convection doesn’t cancel greenhouse forcing; it just moves heat around within the atmosphere.
CO2 reduces outgoing radiation to space, creating an energy imbalance. The system warms until balance is restored, and convection is part of that process, not a way around it.

Convective currents significantly limit the amount of surface warming that greenhouse gases (GHGs) cause. Convection transports heat from the surface to higher altitudes, where it can be radiated into space.

Convection doesn’t reduce climate sensitivity in the way you’re implying. It just redistributes energy vertically and horizontally while the system is still constrained by the top of atmosphere energy balance set by radiative physics. Surface temperature ends up higher because the whole column must warm enough to restore outgoing infrared radiation.

I wasn't saying it was. My point was that convective currents limit the amount of surface warming that greenhouse gases (GHGs) cause such that only 44% of the atmosphere's theoretical GHG effect is realized at the surface. And I was using that to contrast what I find to be an unreasonable estimate of feedbacks which far exceed the GHG of CO2 by itself.

The “CO2 was higher and Earth was cooler” argument doesn’t isolate CO2 as the control variable. Those periods also had very different continents, ocean circulation, ice states, and long-term carbon cycle conditions.

Actually not. We're only talking about 50 million years.

Ice cores actually do show the Holocene as relatively stable compared to glacial periods. Variability exists, but nothing like the large, global, sustained swings of ice age transitions.

But there's no variability today, right?

Yes, warming started after the Little Ice Age, but that early rise was small and likely driven by natural factors.

Sharp, sustained global acceleration in the mid–late 20th century lines up with greenhouse gas increases and shows patterns that aren’t explained by the earlier natural recovery or orbital forcing.

Again... it comes down to attributing all warming to CO2 and none to natural variability and the reasonableness of having feedbacks which are significantly larger than the GHG effect itself.

 

[ThunderKiss1965]

Anything can be a pollutant if it's out of balance.

A pollutant is context dependent. Oxygen keeps you alive, but too much oxygen becomes toxic. Nitrogen and phosphorus are essential nutrients, but excess runoff pollutes waterways. Even water is deadly in excess.

The more C02 the more plant life. Inhale C02 exhale O2. There where times during the past when C02 levels where many times the level they are today and life thrived.

This whole thing isn't about the planet it's about wealth transfer. Do you actually believe the elites supporting climate change are going to give up the things they are asking everyone else to give up. These are the people who fly private jets to climate change conferences and cut down rain forest to build roads to them.

 

[Deplorable Yankee]

That argument only works if attribution depends entirely on perfectly modeling paleoclimate transitions. It doesn’t. Current anthropogenic warming is identified through multiple independent observations.


The disagreement is over causality hierarchy.
In the mainstream framework, AMOC changes are a major internal feedback and amplifier, but not the long term pacemaker. Orbital forcing changes high latitude summer insolation first, which alters ice sheet stability; AMOC then responds within that changing climate state and can greatly amplify or accelerate transitions.


They are part of the mechanism.

The disagreement is whether ocean circulation is the primary independent driver of the glacial cycle, or whether orbital forcing first alters high latitude summer insolation and ice-sheet stability, with ocean circulation then amplifying and propagating those changes through the climate system.


That analogy only works if AMOC changes are fully self initiating and independent. The mainstream argument is that AMOC is a powerful mechanism that responds to broader boundary conditions.

Nobody denies AMOC changes can strongly drive glaciation/deglaciation dynamics once triggered. The disagreement is over what repeatedly pushes the system toward those AMOC state changes on orbital timescales instead of the circulation behaving more irregularly or randomly.


The “2C away from AMOC collapse” idea isn’t a reliable metric. AMOC stability depends on regional salinity, freshwater input, wind patterns, and density structure in the North Atlantic, not just global average temperature compared to past interglacials.

Past warm interglacials don’t directly tell you how close we are to a threshold today. Orbital forcing being weak now doesn’t change that; it just means current changes are being driven mainly by greenhouse gases rather than orbital cycles.


Orbital forcing refers to a very slow long term trend, not the current short term energy balance. Right now, greenhouse gases dominate and are driving warming despite a slight orbital tendency toward cooling.

I'm not skipping anything. Different forcings operate on different timescales, and the current state is an interglacial being modified by a much faster, stronger forcing.

Global warming can’t be explained by AMOC changes alone because AMOC mainly redistributes heat regionally in the Atlantic, not increase total planetary energy.

What we observe instead is a measured positive energy imbalance and rising ocean heat content, which requires a net external forcing. AMOC can shape where warming shows up, but it doesn’t account for the global increase in stored heat.


The 1–1.2C per CO2 doubling number is not a hard physical limit. It’s the no-feedback baseline from radiative transfer physics.

The higher IPCC range comes from adding feedbacks, which are where most of the uncertainty and disagreement actually sits.


The 1–1.2C per doubling is the physics only baseline from radiative transfer.

Feedbacks are real and expected, and the second law doesn’t prevent them; it just ensures the system balances overall energy. The real uncertainty is how strong net feedbacks are, not whether they exist or cause instability.


Clouds and water vapor are the main uncertainty in feedback strength, but they’re constrained by observations and paleoclimate data.

Past periods with higher CO2 were cooler because climate is also driven by other factors like geography, oceans, and long-term changes in greenhouse gases, not CO2 alone.


Convection doesn’t cancel greenhouse forcing; it just moves heat around within the atmosphere. CO2 reduces outgoing radiation to space, creating an energy imbalance. The system warms until balance is restored, and convection is part of that process, not a way around it.


Convection doesn’t reduce climate sensitivity in the way you’re implying. It just redistributes energy vertically and horizontally while the system is still constrained by the top of atmosphere energy balance set by radiative physics. Surface temperature ends up higher because the whole column must warm enough to restore outgoing infrared radiation.

The “CO2 was higher and Earth was cooler” argument doesn’t isolate CO2 as the control variable. Those periods also had very different continents, ocean circulation, ice states, and long-term carbon cycle conditions.

Ice cores actually do show the Holocene as relatively stable compared to glacial periods. Variability exists, but nothing like the large, global, sustained swings of ice age transitions.

Yes, warming started after the Little Ice Age, but that early rise was small and likely driven by natural factors.

Sharp, sustained global acceleration in the mid–late 20th century lines up with greenhouse gas increases and shows patterns that aren’t explained by the earlier natural recovery or orbital forcing.

Uh boy
Muh xsphurts

It's okay to admit you might of been led astray ...
They've been pounding this nonsense into your heads for decades now

Unless it's all about the money for you? .....than ... I guess suck on leech

 

[Anomalism]

And yet we are to believe there is no natural climate variation despite a 3 million year record of empirical evidence to the contrary.

Nobody serious argues there is no natural climate variation. The attribution argument is narrower. Natural variability alone has not been shown to explain the magnitude, pattern, and sustained global energy increase observed in recent decades, especially alongside rising greenhouse gases and measured radiative imbalance.

 

[Anomalism]

Or you are looking at it wrong. The surface of the earth isn't heated evenly and salinities are not uniform. Currents and current changes is how equilibrium occurs.

The disagreement is whether circulation changes are the primary autonomous driver of glacial pacing or whether they are a powerful response mechanism operating within externally paced boundary conditions. Mainstream paleoclimate theory says currents matter, but that the long term timing still tracks orbital geometry strongly enough that you can't reduce the cycles to ocean dynamics alone.

 

[Anomalism]

It's pretty easy for me to connect the dots for the largest collector and storage of solar energy being the primary driver when considering the unique landmass configuration of the northern hemisphere; ocean parked over the pole with surrounding lands limiting thermal transfer of warm marine currents and surrounding lands for ice sheet growth. It's harder for me to accept a thousand year process when all it takes is a couple of consecutive hot summers or mild winters to upset the process. The change in cycle length is a smoking gun. I can totally picture a cycle in ocean currents for a given landmass configuration that is not like orbital clockwork.

Internal ocean variability alone doesn't explain why the timing still shows strong orbital structure across millions of years, even if imperfectly.

 

[Anomalism]

Salinities and temperature differences and nature abhorring a vacuum so to speak.

That explains how circulation operates, not why the major transitions repeatedly cluster around orbital periodicities over millions of years.

Temperature gradients, salinity contrasts, and density driven circulation absolutely govern AMOC behavior. The remaining question is whether those internal dynamics alone naturally produce the observed long-timescale pacing, or whether orbital changes act as the slow external nudge that biases the system toward certain states repeatedly over geological time.

 

[Anomalism]

Neither are the cycle times apparently for OF.

If I follow your logic to its logical conclusion GHG will save the planet from the next glacial period. If I follow mine, GHG will slightly speed up the time to the next glacial period. But in either event, the AMOC is collapsing and that will be catastrophic. So why wouldn't we want more atmospheric CO2? Not to mention the last glacial period came close to the planet having too low of an atmospheric CO2 level to support plant life. And then the last reason is quality of life for humans.

Mainstream theory actually does imply that elevated greenhouse gases could delay the next glaciation substantially by overwhelming the weak long term orbital cooling trend. That part is not controversial.

Where the disagreement comes in is your assumption that more CO2 is therefore broadly beneficial because an eventual glacial state would be worse. The relevant timescales are wildly different. A possible glacial onset tens of thousands of years away versus rapid warming, sea level rise, ecosystem disruption, and agricultural stress occurring.

Also, AMOC collapse is not viewed as a guaranteed near term inevitability in mainstream models, even though weakening is considered plausible.

While low CO2 during glacials approached stressful levels for some plants, Earth was nowhere near total biosphere collapse. Modern CO2 levels absolutely enhance plant growth under some conditions, but that benefit competes with heat stress, drought shifts, changing rainfall patterns, ocean acidification, and ecological disruption. So the debate is really about net effects and timescale tradeoffs, not whether CO2 has any positives at all.

 

[Anomalism]

Or I'm right and they are attributing natural warming to feedbacks.

Your position is essentially that a significant portion of modern warming is still natural interglacial/ocean-driven warming, and that climate models are over attributing that warming to greenhouse gas feedback amplification.

Observed modern energy imbalance, ocean heat accumulation, atmospheric patterns, and timing align too strongly with greenhouse forcing to explain most of the warming as natural continuation alone. So it ultimately comes down to attribution magnitude and feedback strength, not whether natural variability exists at all.

 

[Anomalism]

I'm going to go back to the empirical data and argue we don't know what the "normal" temperature of an interglacial period should be. The data we have shows that the planet was NATURALLY warmer.

Attribution is not based only on “Earth is warm.” It’s based on the rate, timing, global energy imbalance, and specific atmospheric/oceanic signatures of the current warming. Past warm interglacials had different orbital configurations and evolved over much longer timescales, whereas modern warming is occurring unusually fast alongside a directly measured increase in greenhouse forcing.

 

[Anomalism]

Yes, I know. That's the part I disagree with. Given the empirical data that we have and given the climate fluctuations within glacial and interglacial periods and given the complexity of the system, I don't believe we should be jumping through hoops to save the planet from something that isn't even catastrophic if it were true. Which I am not convinced it is.

The concern is not that Earth will become Venus, but that even moderate warming sustained globally can produce large downstream effects on agriculture, coastlines, water systems, ecosystems, and extreme weather patterns over time. The consequences of possibly underestimating it could be large.

 

[Anomalism]

Again I'm just going to point to the empirical evidence from the geologic record which shows a cooling planet with considerably higher levels of CO2 and the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and associated temperature.

Geologic examples don’t overturn the basic point. They sit in a different system context. Over millions of years, CO2 can be high while global temperature trends downward because other forcings dominate. That doesn’t show CO2 is weak; it shows it’s not the only driver in a coupled Earth system.

For the modern period, attribution isn’t based on CO2 alone or on geologic analogs. It’s based on the observed measured radiative imbalance, ocean heat uptake, and characteristic atmospheric fingerprints. Those patterns are what distinguish current warming from long-term tectonic or orbital scale climate evolution.

 

[Anomalism]

I would argue the paleoclimate data does not support the feedbacks.

Paleoclimate doesn’t reject feedbacks. It’s one of the main reasons we know they exist. Ice age transitions are far too large to be explained by orbital forcing alone; the initial solar shifts are small, and the observed global temperature and CO2 swings require amplifying processes like ice albedo feedback and greenhouse gas feedbacks.

CO2 changes lag orbital forcing in ice cores, which is consistent with CO₂ acting as an amplifier rather than the initial trigger.

The “CO2 was higher but cooler” examples don’t undermine feedbacks either. They show that CO2 is one factor in a system with multiple competing controls. That’s why attribution studies don’t rely on single variable comparisons across deep time, but instead on constrained energy balance and observed radiative response in the modern system.

 

[Anomalism]

Convective currents significantly limit the amount of surface warming that greenhouse gases (GHGs) cause. Convection transports heat from the surface to higher altitudes, where it can be radiated into space.

Convection does move heat upward, but it doesn’t limit greenhouse warming in the sense of reducing the final equilibrium temperature change.

Greenhouse gases reduce outgoing infrared radiation at the top of the atmosphere. That creates an energy imbalance. The system responds by warming until outgoing radiation matches incoming solar again. Convection is one of the pathways that redistributes heat vertically during that adjustment, but the required end state is still higher surface temperature, because the whole atmospheric column has to warm enough to restore radiative balance.

Convection changes how heat is transported internally, not how much total energy the planet must shed to space. It’s part of the mechanism, not a constraint that cancels the forcing.

 

[Anomalism]

I wasn't saying it was. My point was that convective currents limit the amount of surface warming that greenhouse gases (GHGs) cause such that only 44% of the atmosphere's theoretical GHG effect is realized at the surface. And I was using that to contrast what I find to be an unreasonable estimate of feedbacks which far exceed the GHG of CO2 by itself.

Convection doesn’t impose a fixed 44% cap on surface warming. There’s no physical basis in radiative convective theory or observations for a universal fraction like that.

What convection does is set the vertical temperature structure while the top of atmosphere energy balance determines how much the entire surface atmosphere system must warm after CO2 reduces outgoing infrared radiation. That constraint still propagates to the surface, because the atmosphere and surface are coupled. Warming the column necessarily raises surface temperature.

Also feedbacks aren’t assumed to exceed CO2 forcing.in a free form way. They are quantified from observations and paleoclimate constraints, and their combined effect is why equilibrium climate sensitivity is higher than the no feedback response.

 

[Anomalism]

Actually not. We're only talking about 50 million years.

“Only 50 million years” is still more than enough for the exact point being made.

Within that window, Earth went through major reorganizations that directly control climate sensitivity to CO2. Opening/closing of ocean gateways, long term decline in atmospheric CO2 due to silicate weathering, growth of large permanent ice sheets in Antarctica and later the Northern Hemisphere, and major shifts in ocean circulation regimes.

Those aren’t minor background details. They are first order boundary conditions that determine how strongly CO2 maps to temperature. That’s why you can’t treat CO2 vs temperature in deep time as an isolated two variable system. It’s always CO2 interacting with a changing Earth system, not CO2 acting alone against a fixed baseline.

 

[Anomalism]

But there's no variability today, right?

There is variability today, just not on the same scale or pattern as glacial–interglacial transitions.
In the Holocene, climate varies on decadal to millennial scales. Things like El Nino/La Nina cycles, volcanic cooling events, solar variability, and regional shifts like drought regimes or Arctic amplification. Ice cores and instrumental records both show that, but the amplitude is relatively small compared to ice age swings.

What is different today is the presence of a strong, sustained warming trend superimposed on that variability. So the system is not non-variable. It’s variable plus a directional forcing that is pushing it upward faster than natural Holocene fluctuations would alone.

 

[Anomalism]

Again... it comes down to attributing all warming to CO2 and none to natural variability and the reasonableness of having feedbacks which are significantly larger than the GHG effect itself.

That framing isn’t quite accurate in either direction.

No serious attribution study says all warming is CO2 and none is natural variability. Natural variability is explicitly accounted for and separated in the analysis. The key finding is that natural drivers cannot reproduce the persistent, global, multi decade upward trend in observed temperature and ocean heat content.

Feedbacks are not assumed to be larger than CO2 forcing in isolation.in an arbitrary way. They are emergent responses of the climate system to an initial radiative forcing, and their magnitude is constrained by observations. CO2 sets the initial imbalance; feedbacks determine how far the system ultimately moves in response.

The split isn’t CO2 vs natural variability vs feedbacks as separate competing buckets. It’s given measured forcing from CO2, how large is the system’s response once all feedbacks and natural variability are properly accounted for?

 

[Anomalism]

The more C02 the more plant life. Inhale C02 exhale O2. There where times during the past when C02 levels where many times the level they are today and life thrived.

This whole thing isn't about the planet it's about wealth transfer. Do you actually believe the elites supporting climate change are going to give up the things they are asking everyone else to give up. These are the people who fly private jets to climate change conferences and cut down rain forest to build roads to them.

This is the first time I've ever seen this argument. What an interesting and original post. Thank you.

 

[Anomalism]

Uh boy
Muh xsphurts

It's okay to admit you might of been led astray ...
They've been pounding this nonsense into your heads for decades now

Unless it's all about the money for you? .....than ... I guess suck on leech

The grownups are talking.