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One swallow doesn't make a summer. One paper (by a non expert) doesn't invalidate an entire field of experts.
I think looking at proposed answers to climate change is what turns evaluating the climate change hypothesis form a reasoning exercise into an emotional/political endeavour - and it cuts both ways. This is the only way I can explain all the special pleading for climate change as uniquely suspect for decades, despite being a bland, intuitive hypothesis. I think it's helpful set aside looking at proposed answers before thinking about the hypothesis.
We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic. We've known the atmosphere:earth is roughly proportional to apple:apple-skin for a fair bit too. I'd be shocked if adding ~1 quintillion Kg's of CO2 to the atmosphere had precisely no effects. Measuring CO2 in ppm is trivial. Measuring temperature is trivial. Even if climate change isn't human caused, it'd still be worth investigating so we can engineer around it.
This is also a dubious line of thinking (its something like the appeal to ridicule). Chess computers, controlled flight, weather prediction, gene editing, nuclear fission, were all once claimed to be too outlandish to be possible. They still feel outlandish, but all can be done by hobbyists.
Most of those things are much easier to model than the climate because there are thousands and thousands of inputs into the climate. GIGO
This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.
All of those are discrete (except manipulation of genomes), chess has an finite number of movements and we are barely understanding the genome; grouping it with something simple as chess is disingenuous. By contrast the climate has a number of inputs that can't even be comprehended, are analogue in nature and affect it in variable ways, from mayor ocean currents and wind fronts to cow farts and the movement of people. We can't even predict the weather from one day to another, just forecast it with probabilities.
As an aside, I still think chess fits. I don't even think we know how many games of chess are possible. Humans recently approximated a Go engine - something people long claimed was too complex to ever be done, much like chess. Models + compute can beat humans at games of unimaginable complexity.
Regardless, even if chess is a bad analogy, admitting that doesn't gets me out special pleading that climate science is not only special in its complexity, but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.
What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics, or the improvements seen in weather forecasting? I'm trying to argue myself into climate science skepticism inductively and/or by way of inferences. A strong quantitative scientific consensus about cause and effect is usually a good bet. What makes climate science different?
The only thing I can come up with is that climate science is more akin to a year-long weather forecast (ie cannot be computed in P time because well understood chaotic conditions). But then why do such a large amount knowledgeable keep spending money on the practical applicability of climate models? I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.
Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?
that they at least produce the predicted results, be it a bleeding edge chip or a failed attempt at one, weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.
That is trying to understand a really complex system, that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places, and that the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.
not this case in particular, you can add Psychology with its replication crisis to the pile and whatever the COVID clusterfuck was.
This is practically a definition for 'science'.
This is largely true for most fields of science.
Similarly, this is also true for most of science.
I can't find anything that makes these arguments apply to climate science, but not biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.
Eg. Do we really know bacteria cause disease? Researches have a vested interest in continued research, but the proposed mechanisms are beyond complex, based on biology that began over a billion years ago.
Apparently climate models have been, on average, predictive. But this is not the kind of inductive claim I'm searching for.
Apparently, these are accurate 75% of the time inside of 5 days. This would be easy to disprove. Again, not an inductive claim. As an aside, if interested I'd be willing to bet money that weather forecasts are about as accurate as 30 sec. of googling led me to believe they are.
I'm extremely mindful of this regarding climate policy.
The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not. Climate is plausibly across the line to intractably complex.
This could be said in response to innumerable scientific claims. Climate science is plausibly knowable enough to model well. But I'm not making any claims what climate science says. I'm asking what, at a general level, is unique to climate science that garners a special amount of skepticism?
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