You have, quite obviously, created a straw man. ("Tweak computer model until catastrophic outcome emerges.") This is not how influential climate science resea

You have, quite obviously, created a straw man. ("Tweak computer model until catastrophic outcome emerges.") This is not how influential climate science research works. Here's a paper (~200 citations) in JGR-A, by a colleague, to illustrate how it really works: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008JD010015/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008JD010015/full Briefly, it's well-known that model representations of cloud ice are a significant source of uncertainty in climate modeling. This is because the ice scatters light upward out of the atmosphere, and can also trap emerging long-wave radiation from below. Cloud ice is hard to represent for many reasons - to mention just two, the particular form of the ice crystals (spherical or planar, termed "microphysical properties") matters, as does the vertical profile of the ice/water mixture in the cloud. How to improve their representation? One way is to measure cloud properties over years-to-decades time scales (which is now being done - no accident) and use this data to introduce the right cloud-process components into climate models. The paper surveys the measurements, proposes specific model improvements, and model-vs-data checks. As I said, I happen to work with the lead author of the paper above (although I'm not a climate scientist at all). He is, in fact, not twiddling knobs until catastrophic outcomes emerge. Sure, that's a logical possibility, i.e., someone could do that, but it does not correspond to reality by any stretch. Honestly, the notion is ridiculous, the gap between that notion and reality so large as to be hard to convey. Probably, at macro scale, the difference is that your straw man is purely open-loop (no checks on the knob-twiddling) whereas the one in the paper is brutally closed-loop (we will identify and make independent satellite measurements to quantify your model's accuracy). The paper describes working with others to design new measurements to get information about the key processes driving climate, so that the models can be improved and we can see what large-scale human forcing is doing to the climate system. Humanity is not a bit player any more, we're a driver, and we have to own up to that role.