Time to drop a brick of epistemology on a table full of vibes. - Climate change

[Anomalism]

The climate models are a joke.

Tell you what, go back and find the actual report from an actual climate model thirty years ago. And tell me how close it was to actually predicting what the climate is currently.

Or better yet, take a blind data set from any time in the past and plug it into those models. And see how close it comes to actually predicting the climate of the historical record that followed.

Replicating your findings is an absolute first step of any kind of science if it is going to be taken seriously. And these are two that should be obvious but I have never seen done.

Or even better, what caused any of the climate optimums and minimums in the past 12 ky. The simple fact is, nobody knows. And we know for a fact the climate changed radically and abruptly in under five decades. Because the planet went from one of the warmest periods in the past 5,000 years to one of the coldest where glaciers once again started expanding on five continents.

And that was within a human lifetime. That was how fast and radically things changed from the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Hell, I still often laugh when I bring up the fact that the youngest glacier known on the planet is less than 50 years old and still growing.

Climate scientists routinely test their models against paleoclimate and modern records. Early models from decades ago were necessarily limited by computational power and data availability, but even then they captured the broad trends of warming from greenhouse gas increases. Modern models have far more detail, incorporate convection, evaporation, and ocean-atmosphere interactions, and are continuously validated against observed temperatures, ice cores, and satellite data.

Regarding past abrupt climate shifts, yes, the planet has experienced rapid changes over decades or centuries, and scientists study those events. The causes often involve a combination of solar variability, ocean circulation shifts, volcanic activity, and feedbacks, not CO2 alone. What makes today different is the speed and scale of anthropogenic CO2 increase overlaying natural variability, which is why modern climate change is treated as a distinct phenomenon.

 

[ding]

You’re correct that convection and evaporation move heat away from the surface, and that’s built into climate models. That doesn’t negate greenhouse forcing. It just changes how that energy is distributed vertically in the atmosphere. Climate sensitivity calculations explicitly account for convective heat transfer, ocean mixing, and other energy fluxes when estimating surface warming from CO2.

The fact that CO2 alone produces ~1°C per doubling is the baseline; feedbacks are what drive the higher projected warming in the 3–4.5°C range. Convection doesn’t short circuit the greenhouse effect. It’s part of the system that redistributes energy, but the net effect still results in surface warming consistent with observations over the last century.

I never said it negated GHG forcing. I agree that CO2 has a logarithmic relationship with surface temperature. For every doubling of CO2 we can expect - at most - 1C of surface temperature which is what we are measuring and what the IPCC is forecasting.... surface temperature.

You have yet to explain to me how the planet cooled for millions of years with atmospheric CO2 concentrations which were 600 ppm and greater (1000 ppm). If the climate is so sensitive to 420 ppm, how did the planet ever cool with 600 ppm? Or 1000 ppm?

 

[Anomalism]

Tell me, do you even known when that happened? Or are you simply contradicting what was said without even knowing the timeframe that is being discussed?

Yes, I do know the timeframe you’re referencing. The cooling occurred gradually and was driven by factors like continental drift, ocean circulation changes, and the uplift of mountain ranges, which affected carbon sequestration and albedo. Elevated CO2 alone doesn’t dictate instantaneous global temperature; it interacts with a host of geophysical processes.

The point remains that CO2 is a forcing agent, not the only factor controlling climate. Past periods show that the Earth system responds to multiple influences simultaneously. Today, however, the rapid CO2 increase is acting on top of the natural baseline, producing warming at a rate far faster than any natural process observed in the paleoclimate record.

 

[ding]

...feedbacks are what drive the higher projected warming in the 3–4.5°C range.

I understand that. That's the part I am disagreeing with. Maybe you can explain how you think they arrived at that from calibrations of their models. Do you understand that they arrive at that by assuming there is no natural warming whatsoever?

 

[ding]

but the net effect still results in surface warming consistent with observations over the last century.

Only if you assume all warming is from CO2 which is the flaw in their assumption and why they are CALIBRATING such ridiculous feedbacks. It's idiotic to believe that feedback is 3.5 to 4.5 times the effect that caused the feedback. That would have a death spiral effect that would never allow for the planet to cool with elevated CO2 levels. Which we know did not happen. Because we know the planet cooled for millions of years with elevated levels of CO2.

 

[Anomalism]

I never said it negated GHG forcing. I agree that CO2 has a logarithmic relationship with surface temperature. For every doubling of CO2 we can expect - at most - 1C of surface temperature which is what we are measuring and what the IPCC is forecasting.... surface temperature.

You have yet to explain to me how the planet cooled for millions of years with atmospheric CO2 concentrations which were 600 ppm and greater (1000 ppm). If the climate is so sensitive to 420 ppm, how did the planet ever cool with 600 ppm? Or 1000 ppm?

The key is that CO2 is a forcing, not a sole dictator of climate. During the past 50+ million years, CO2 levels were higher, but other factors, such as continental positions, ocean currents, ice sheet formation, orbital cycles, and tectonics, dominated the global energy balance. For example, the uplift of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau increased rock weathering, which draws CO2 out of the atmosphere over geologic timescales, and altered circulation patterns. Ocean gateways opening or closing (like the Drake Passage) changed heat distribution between hemispheres, influencing glaciation.

So the Earth cooled even at high CO2 because these geophysical and orbital processes counteracted the greenhouse forcing. Today, human emissions are adding CO2 on top of a system that is already near interglacial equilibrium, without the slow geological checks that previously modulated CO2. That’s why the rapid increase from has a measurable effect on global surface temperatures. Past CO2 highs don’t invalidate its forcing role; they show that climate results from multiple interacting factors, not CO2 in isolation.

 

[ding]

1°C per CO2 doubling is the radiative forcing without feedbacks,

Yes, I know that. I already addressed that here and here.

so in that sense it does capture the baseline response of the climate system.

Correct. Unless of course you assume there is no natural warming which is idiotic and attribute all warming to CO2 which is disingenuous.

Convection and evaporation move much of that energy upward, which is why only a fraction directly impacts surface temperatures.

I understand this, this is why it's even more ridiculous to have feedbacks that are 3.5 times the direct radiative forcing of CO2. Which in and of itself is ridiculous.

Feedbacks modify the total warming, but the underlying forcing is still rooted in the physics of greenhouse gases. The point is that convection redistributes heat. It doesn’t eliminate the effect, and when combined with feedbacks, it aligns with observed warming trends.

Never said it didn't. But what you are failing to understand is that the reference point is the surface. So when they claim 1C of direct radiative forcing and 3.5C of feedbacks, they are referencing the surface of the planet. So in effect they aren't adjusting for convective currents.

 

[ding]

Assumptions about feedbacks aren’t arbitrary. They are based on decades of observational data. Water vapor amplifies warming because warmer air holds more moisture, which is itself a greenhouse gas. Ice-albedo feedback accelerates melting as reflective surfaces shrink. Ocean heat uptake and cloud dynamics are measured and parameterized from real world observations. Individually and together, these feedbacks account for the difference between the basic radiative forcing and the higher multi degree projections. The amplification is not a guess. It’s an emergent property of the coupled climate system as captured in both models and historical paleoclimate records.

I never said their outrageous feedbacks were arbitrary. But what you don't seem to understand is that they are coming from their models which assumes all warming is from CO2. So they are lumping in natural warming which affects all of those non-arbitrary concepts like water vapor and albedo and overestimating feedback from CO2 because they are attributing all warming to CO2. It's a flawed and fatal assumption which creates a self fullfilling prophecy that has no basis in reality.

Yes, the amplification is a guess as it is based upon the flawed logic that all warming is from 120 ppm of incremental CO2 which results in having to argue ridiculous levels of feedback.

 

[Anomalism]

I understand that. That's the part I am disagreeing with. Maybe you can explain how you think they arrived at that from calibrations of their models. Do you understand that they arrive at that by assuming there is no natural warming whatsoever?

That’s the part where your premise is off. The higher climate sensitivity estimates aren’t derived by assuming no natural warming, they’re derived by explicitly including natural forcings and then seeing what’s left over. Models are calibrated and tested against past climate states where we know the forcings. If you remove CO2 from those reconstructions, the models fail to reproduce things like the warming since the Little Ice Age or the temperature swings between glacial and interglacial periods. In other words, natural variability is already in the baseline.

The 3–4.5°C range comes from multiple independent lines of evidence, not just models. Paleoclimate data (last glacial maximum to Holocene transition), instrumental records from the last 150 years, energy balance calculations from satellites, and physical feedback mechanisms we can measure directly. You can reject the models if you want, but then you also have to reject ice cores, satellites, and basic thermodynamics at the same time, because they all converge on the same sensitivity. That convergence is the real reason the high range exists, not some hidden assumption that nature does nothing.

 

[ding]

The key is that CO2 is a forcing, not a sole dictator of climate. During the past 50+ million years, CO2 levels were higher, but other factors, such as continental positions, ocean currents, ice sheet formation, orbital cycles, and tectonics, dominated the global energy balance. For example, the uplift of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau increased rock weathering, which draws CO2 out of the atmosphere over geologic timescales, and altered circulation patterns. Ocean gateways opening or closing (like the Drake Passage) changed heat distribution between hemispheres, influencing glaciation.

So the Earth cooled even at high CO2 because these geophysical and orbital processes counteracted the greenhouse forcing. Today, human emissions are adding CO2 on top of a system that is already near interglacial equilibrium, without the slow geological checks that previously modulated CO2. That’s why the rapid increase from has a measurable effect on global surface temperatures. Past CO2 highs don’t invalidate its forcing role; they show that climate results from multiple interacting factors, not CO2 in isolation.

Everything you have mentioned is why the planet is configured for colder temperatures (i.e. thermal isolation of polar regions and the establishment of modern ocean currents). So if the planet is configured for colder temperatures because of the landmass configuration and resulting ocean currents - such that it cooled the planet for millions of years with atmospheric CO2 levels greater than 600 ppm - then why do their models predict the planet will warm with 420 ppm of atmospheric CO2 with the same landmass configuration and resulting ocean currents?

 

[ding]

So the Earth cooled even at high CO2 because these geophysical and orbital processes counteracted the greenhouse forcing.

So the earth cooled for millions of years with elevated CO2 levels because geophysical and orbital processes counteracted the greenhouse forcing but these geophysical and orbital processes - which are still in effect today - won't counteract greenhouse forcing with significantly less CO2 today?

Doesn't that sound dumb when I say it?

 

[Anomalism]

I never said their outrageous feedbacks were arbitrary. But what you don't seem to understand is that they are coming from their models which assumes all warming is from CO2. So they are lumping in natural warming which affects all of those non-arbitrary concepts like water vapor and albedo and overestimating feedback from CO2 because they are attributing all warming to CO2. It's a flawed and fatal assumption which creates a self fullfilling prophecy that has no basis in reality.

Yes, the amplification is a guess as it is based upon the flawed logic that all warming is from 120 ppm of incremental CO2 which results in having to argue ridiculous levels of feedback.

This is where the logic flips on its head. Climate models do not assume all warming is from CO2 and then back fit feedbacks. They start with all known forcings. Those natural drivers are explicitly included. When you run models with only natural forcings, you cannot reproduce the observed warming of the last century. When you add anthropogenic CO2, suddenly the trajectory matches. That’s an attribution test: remove a cause and the effect disappears. The residual warming isn’t being lumped into CO2 by assumption, it’s what remains after natural factors are already accounted for and still fall short.

The feedbacks aren’t guessed into existence to save a theory, they’re constrained by independent physics and observations.

 

[ding]

That’s the part where your premise is off. The higher climate sensitivity estimates aren’t derived by assuming no natural warming, they’re derived by explicitly including natural forcings and then seeing what’s left over. Models are calibrated and tested against past climate states where we know the forcings. If you remove CO2 from those reconstructions, the models fail to reproduce things like the warming since the Little Ice Age or the temperature swings between glacial and interglacial periods. In other words, natural variability is already in the baseline.

The 3–4.5°C range comes from multiple independent lines of evidence, not just models. Paleoclimate data (last glacial maximum to Holocene transition), instrumental records from the last 150 years, energy balance calculations from satellites, and physical feedback mechanisms we can measure directly. You can reject the models if you want, but then you also have to reject ice cores, satellites, and basic thermodynamics at the same time, because they all converge on the same sensitivity. That convergence is the real reason the high range exists, not some hidden assumption that nature does nothing.

Clearly you don't know what they are doing. Their models 100% assume no natural warming. They history match assuming no natural warming and use the direct radiative forcing of CO2 as their baseline and then attribute everything else to feedback from CO2 which is why they are getting such ridiculous feedbacks that are 3.5 times the GHG effect of CO2 by itself.

 

[ding]

This is where the logic actually flips on its head. Climate models do not assume all warming is from CO2 and then back fit feedbacks. They start with all known forcings. Those natural drivers are explicitly included. When you run models with only natural forcings, you cannot reproduce the observed warming of the last century. When you add anthropogenic CO2, suddenly the trajectory matches. That’s an attribution test: remove a cause and the effect disappears. The residual warming isn’t being lumped into CO2 by assumption, it’s what remains after natural factors are already accounted for and still fall short.

The feedbacks aren’t guessed into existence to save a theory, they’re constrained by independent physics and observations.

Incorrect. They are history matching past data of a warming planet. They routinely recalibrate their models to remove drift. Can you point to this graphic and show how much natural warming these models contain? Because it looks like zero to me.

 

[Anomalism]

So the earth cooled for millions of years with elevated CO2 levels because geophysical and orbital processes counteracted the greenhouse forcing but these geophysical and orbital processes - which are still in effect today - won't counteract greenhouse forcing with significantly less CO2 today?

Doesn't that sound dumb when I say it?

It only sounds dumb if you flatten time and scale into a single bucket. The mistake is treating millions of years and a century as comparable situations with comparable forces. They aren’t. In deep time, orbital shifts, continental drift, mountain building, and ocean gateway changes operate on timescales and magnitudes that can absolutely overwhelm CO2 forcing. Today, none of those slow geophysical levers are changing fast enough to counteract a radiative forcing that we’ve injected in about 150 years. You’re comparing tectonic and orbital bulldozers to a system where those bulldozers are essentially parked.

The key point is not that CO2 always wins, it’s that what dominates depends on timescale and rate of change. In the past, slow but massive boundary condition shifts (plate tectonics, seaways, long-term orbital configurations) drove climate and CO2 followed as a feedback. Right now, those boundary conditions are basically static, while CO2 is changing at a rate that is geologically absurd. So yes, the same processes still exist, but they’re not moving the needle on human timescales. Slow forces can dominate over millions of years, fast forcings dominate over decades.

 

[ding]

This is where the logic flips on its head. Climate models do not assume all warming is from CO2 and then back fit feedbacks. They start with all known forcings. Those natural drivers are explicitly included. When you run models with only natural forcings, you cannot reproduce the observed warming of the last century. When you add anthropogenic CO2, suddenly the trajectory matches. That’s an attribution test: remove a cause and the effect disappears. The residual warming isn’t being lumped into CO2 by assumption, it’s what remains after natural factors are already accounted for and still fall short.

The feedbacks aren’t guessed into existence to save a theory, they’re constrained by independent physics and observations.

"...In the global climate models (GCMs) most of the warming that has taken place since 1950 is attributed to human activity. Historically, however, there have been large climatic variations.Temperature reconstructions indicate that there is a ‘warming’ trend that seems to have been going on for as long as approximately 400 years. Prior to the last 250 years or so, such a trend could only be due to natural causes..."

"...GCMs are not sufficiently reliable to distinguish between natural and man-made causes of the temperature increase in the 20th century. Some of the predictions from GCMs are accompanied by standard errors, as in statistical analysis. But since the GCMs are deterministic models one cannot interpret these standard errors in the same way as in statistics. GCMs are typically evaluated applying the same observations used to calibrate the model parameters. In an article in Science, Voosen (2016) writes; “Indeed, whether climate scientists like to admit it or not, nearly every model has been calibrated precisely to the 20th century climate records – otherwise it would have ended up in the trash”. Unfortunately,models that match 20th century data as a result of calibration using the same 20th century data are of dubious quality for determining the causes of the 20th century temperature variability. The problem is that some of the variables representing sources of climate variability other than greenhouse gases are not properly controlled for during the calibrations. The resulting calibration of the climate sensitivity may therefore be biased. Further critical evaluations are given by several authors, such as Essex (2022)..."

https://www.ssb.no/en/natur-og-milj...594b9225f9d7dc458b0b70a646baec3339/DP1007.pdf

 

[Anomalism]

Incorrect. They are history matching past data of a warming planet. They routinely recalibrate their models to remove drift. Can you point to this graphic and show how much natural warming these models contain? Because it looks like zero to me.

View attachment 1217258

What you’re calling history matching is exactly how every complex physical model is validated. You tune parameters so the model reproduces known behavior, then you test whether it predicts out of sample data. Weather models, orbital mechanics, fluid dynamics, even engineering simulations all work this way. Recalibration to remove numerical drift isn’t cheating, it’s correcting for known computational artifacts so the physics doesn’t slowly blow up. If you didn’t do that, the model would literally become less physical over time, not more honest.

And the idea that natural forcings are zero in those graphics is just a misread of what you’re looking at. The standard attribution plots explicitly include solar variability, volcanic aerosols, orbital forcing, internal variability. You can run the same models with only those natural terms turned on. That’s a published experiment, not a hidden assumption, and they produce roughly flat or slightly cooling trends over the last century. The fact that the natural only line is near zero isn’t because nature was deleted, it’s because the measured natural forcings over that period are actually small compared to the anthropogenic radiative forcing. That result isn’t assumed, it’s the outcome of plugging in the observed solar output, volcanic activity, and orbital state and letting the equations run.

 

[ding]

It only sounds dumb if you flatten time and scale into a single bucket. The mistake is treating millions of years and a century as comparable situations with comparable forces. They aren’t. In deep time, orbital shifts, continental drift, mountain building, and ocean gateway changes operate on timescales and magnitudes that can absolutely overwhelm CO2 forcing. Today, none of those slow geophysical levers are changing fast enough to counteract a radiative forcing that we’ve injected in about 150 years. You’re comparing tectonic and orbital bulldozers to a system where those bulldozers are essentially parked.

The key point is not that CO2 always wins, it’s that what dominates depends on timescale and rate of change. In the past, slow but massive boundary condition shifts (plate tectonics, seaways, long-term orbital configurations) drove climate and CO2 followed as a feedback. Right now, those boundary conditions are basically static, while CO2 is changing at a rate that is geologically absurd. So yes, the same processes still exist, but they’re not moving the needle on human timescales. Slow forces can dominate over millions of years, fast forcings dominate over decades.

Actually saying... the earth cooled for millions of years with elevated CO2 levels because geophysical and orbital processes counteracted the greenhouse forcing but these same geophysical and orbital processes won't counteract greenhouse forcing today with significantly less CO2... is extremely dumb.

 

[ding]

What you’re calling history matching is exactly how every complex physical model is validated. You tune parameters so the model reproduces known behavior, then you test whether it predicts out of sample data. Weather models, orbital mechanics, fluid dynamics, even engineering simulations all work this way. Recalibration to remove numerical drift isn’t cheating, it’s correcting for known computational artifacts so the physics doesn’t slowly blow up. If you didn’t do that, the model would literally become less physical over time, not more honest.

And the idea that natural forcings are zero in those graphics is just a misread of what you’re looking at. The standard attribution plots explicitly include solar variability, volcanic aerosols, orbital forcing, internal variability. You can run the same models with only those natural terms turned on. That’s a published experiment, not a hidden assumption, and they produce roughly flat or slightly cooling trends over the last century. The fact that the natural only line is near zero isn’t because nature was deleted, it’s because the measured natural forcings over that period are actually small compared to the anthropogenic radiative forcing. That result isn’t assumed, it’s the outcome of plugging in the observed solar output, volcanic activity, and orbital state and letting the equations run.

So how much natural warming does this show?

 

[Anomalism]

"...In the global climate models (GCMs) most of the warming that has taken place since 1950 is attributed to human activity. Historically, however, there have been large climatic variations.Temperature reconstructions indicate that there is a ‘warming’ trend that seems to have been going on for as long as approximately 400 years. Prior to the last 250 years or so, such a trend could only be due to natural causes..."

"...GCMs are not sufficiently reliable to distinguish between natural and man-made causes of the temperature increase in the 20th century. Some of the predictions from GCMs are accompanied by standard errors, as in statistical analysis. But since the GCMs are deterministic models one cannot interpret these standard errors in the same way as in statistics. GCMs are typically evaluated applying the same observations used to calibrate the model parameters. In an article in Science, Voosen (2016) writes; “Indeed, whether climate scientists like to admit it or not, nearly every model has been calibrated precisely to the 20th century climate records – otherwise it would have ended up in the trash”. Unfortunately,models that match 20th century data as a result of calibration using the same 20th century data are of dubious quality for determining the causes of the 20th century temperature variability. The problem is that some of the variables representing sources of climate variability other than greenhouse gases are not properly controlled for during the calibrations. The resulting calibration of the climate sensitivity may therefore be biased. Further critical evaluations are given by several authors, such as Essex (2022)..."

https://www.ssb.no/en/natur-og-milj...594b9225f9d7dc458b0b70a646baec3339/DP1007.pdf

What that quote is really saying, once you strip the academic fog, is just “models are calibrated.” Which…yes. That’s not a scandal, that’s literally how modeling works in every field that deals with complex systems. You calibrate on known data, then test whether the model reproduces independent phenomena. Climate models are not judged solely on “does the global mean line up with the 20th century” they’re judged on whether they simultaneously get hundreds of physically independent features right. A model can be forced to match one curve by cheating, but it cannot simultaneously reproduce Arctic amplification, stratospheric cooling, tropospheric warming, ocean heat uptake, glacier retreat, ENSO statistics, and volcanic cooling unless the underlying physics is roughly correct.

The deeper flaw in their argument is logical, not technical. They’re claiming models assume all warming is from CO2, but attribution studies explicitly do the opposite experiment. You run models with only natural forcings and they fail to reproduce post-1950 warming. You add anthropogenic forcing and they succeed. That’s not backfitting a narrative, that’s causal testing. If natural variability alone were sufficient, the natural only runs would already match observations and CO2 would be unnecessary. They don’t. So the accusation that feedbacks are inflated because “all warming is assumed anthropogenic” is backwards. The conclusion that most recent warming is anthropogenic comes after natural drivers are included and still fall short. They’re mistaking “calibration exists” for “calibration proves nothing,” which is basically saying no complex physical model can ever be trusted, a position that would also delete weather forecasts, satellite orbits, fluid dynamics, and most of modern engineering along with climate science.