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Have you considered that the Dunning–Kruger effect might be in play here? You're making lots of big claims and insisting everyone who disagrees with you doesn't

Have you considered that the Dunning–Kruger effect might be in play here? You're making lots of big claims and insisting everyone who disagrees with you doesn't understand physics. I have a degree in astrophysics and I've worked quite hard to get through thermodynamics courses. I'm quite confident that I do understand the thermodynamics involved here. Your argument seems to boil down to: - The fact that you don't understand the mechanism through which CO2 would heat the atmosphere, and therefore you think it isn't happening. - You reject every single climate model because of the simplifying assumptions and "bad code". Given that simplifying assumptions are necessary to do modeling and the amount of conspiratorial thinking in your other comments, I suspect that there aren't any assumptions you would agree with. - You admit that warming is happening, but don't consider that to be evidence in favour of the models (even though they fit the data quite well). You claim they fit it poorly, well, let's see that study then! > You skipped the part where I explicitly concluded that the effect comes from the difference in temperatures. I don't ignore it, I first understand the zero order - at uniform temperatures, there is no effect of CO2. Which leads to an understanding that if CO2 does indeed make a difference, it is the result of the temperature differences. This is a vacuous statement. > Then the part where I'm not at all certain about which direction the effect should be, is because while CO2 decreases thermal conductivity by radiation, it increases thermal conductivity by convection because the heat capacity is higher for CO2. Which is actually a much better intuition if you want to understand how does water vapor seems to have such negligible effect despite the fact it is a "greenhouse gas" and "absorbs much more heat". Your lack of understanding is not a flaw in climate science. > You want me to point out bugs? There are like 20 different climate models. I've seen heat capacity being constant independent of pressure, temperature, CO2, density, etc. Not just heat capacity, but also other "constants". Not in a single place because the code is a mess, they actually have several different modules with different constants, so say the radiation simulation is extremely detailed mess that's completely unreadable, and the cloud simulation just starts all over with their own different constants. This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug. > I'm sorry, but it is your thermodynamic intuition that's completely wrong. Equilibrium to you means "things stop moving". That... not how thermodynamics works at all. The reason that ordinary things look like they are "not moving" in equilibrium in your everyday life is because they do move, but at scales much smaller than you. Do the Brownian motion experiment. I never made any such claim, nor did I imply that. Strawman argument. > The models don't have any significance beyond this bit or maybe two bits if you try to be generous about their abysmal performance regarding temperatures. What do you mean by this? Many of the models fit the warming in the recent past quite well. This process is called hindcasting.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago
Again I understand the mechanism, but I still claim it's not enough to wave your hands and tell the story, calculations matter, and in this case, the quality of calculations is extremely important. You are used to astrophysics where the standard is simply much higher, and you project that onto climate science. There are no error boundaries or even attempt at giving meaningful estimation of the error in these calculations, in fact, the various models disagree quite wildly in the sense that after accounting for variation between models, you're left with barely a weak directional claim. There's also a significance difference between predicting global climate, and estimating with accuracy the CO2 forcing. While the global temperature is at least measurable, nobody has any way to test CO2 forcing meaningfully. Which is the entire claim. The reason for the decision to move trillions of dollars is the prediction about CO2 forcing, but if it is wrong and we're going to rely on "renewable energy" a.k.a. wind and sun when we are currently forecasting they are going to be unreliable, that's suicide. You can even worry about whether it is the correct decision even if the entire uncertainty was geopolitics by the way. In fact, just the unpredictability of China alone is enough to put the entire policy of the west in huge doubt, but that's something else. > This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug. I literally just pointed out several bugs. These things are not constant, they depend on these parameters, you're going to accumulate huge errors if you don't take them into account, and even worse, you're going to completely miscalculate CO2 forcing if you have entire sections of your code which ignore CO2 forcing (by having "constants" that aren't constants at all but depend on CO2). And again, you're projecting from a real science (astrophysics) where you can point your telescope anywhere you wish and collect data, which is worth millions of bits, to climate science where the only "data" is very few temperature measurements which need to be averaged to retain a very weak signal. But on the other hand, nobody dies because they got astrophysics wrong (except in "Don't look up" movie) It's not science. They hardly have any data points fitting their models compared to the size of these models and the variation in their results, and most importantly, they don't have any data on the central claim (CO2 forcing) at all. My argument is basically, nobody can trust the story because stories are misleading, you need a detailed calculation. Not misleading in a conspiratorial way, misleading in that this is numerical question which we humans suck at estimating narratively. And again, those calculations could and should be much less of a dumpster fire if we're going to trust the future of humanity with them. Another example of "simplifying assumptions" blowing up in the face of the economy was 1987 stock crash where "simplifying assumptions" in modelling option prices blew up in everyone's faces and led to multi year recession. And another "simplifying assumption" in the coronavirus response led by misleading infection models and proceeding ahead out of pure cognitive dissonance. I'm sure the climate modelers are doing the best they can, but the best they can is not enough. This dishonesty about the certainty of models, which usually results from a broken telephone where the honestly and articulated science claims are transformed into propaganda that misleads even the leaders is a bigger problem than what these models claim to solve. If this blows in everyone's faces and "moving to renewables" turns out to be a complete disaster, they will be hanging scientists in the streets and I won't blame them. Everyone's maximizing for the "scientists were extremely accurate in their predictions and we listened to them and got it right" scenario and it's because in everyone's mind the probability the scientists are right is like 90% when in reality it's more likely 10%. I don't want to convince you it's wrong. I want to convince you it's very non-trivial calculation to understand whether the problem is CO2, that framing it as "scientists always knew that and it's basic physics" is extremely misleading about the certainty, and that the narrativistic mindset is extremely dangerous.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago

Again I understand the mechanism, but I still claim it's not enough to wave your hands and tell the story, calculations matter, and in this case, the quality of calculations is extremely important. You are used to astrophysics where the standard is simply much higher, and you project that onto climate science. There are no error boundaries or even attempt at giving meaningful estimation of the error in these calculations, in fact, the various models disagree quite wildly in the sense that after accounting for variation between models, you're left with barely a weak directional claim. There's also a significance difference between predicting global climate, and estimating with accuracy the CO2 forcing. While the global temperature is at least measurable, nobody has any way to test CO2 forcing meaningfully. Which is the entire claim. The reason for the decision to move trillions of dollars is the prediction about CO2 forcing, but if it is wrong and we're going to rely on "renewable energy" a.k.a. wind and sun when we are currently forecasting they are going to be unreliable, that's suicide. You can even worry about whether it is the correct decision even if the entire uncertainty was geopolitics by the way. In fact, just the unpredictability of China alone is enough to put the entire policy of the west in huge doubt, but that's something else. > This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug. I literally just pointed out several bugs. These things are not constant, they depend on these parameters, you're going to accumulate huge errors if you don't take them into account, and even worse, you're going to completely miscalculate CO2 forcing if you have entire sections of your code which ignore CO2 forcing (by having "constants" that aren't constants at all but depend on CO2). And again, you're projecting from a real science (astrophysics) where you can point your telescope anywhere you wish and collect data, which is worth millions of bits, to climate science where the only "data" is very few temperature measurements which need to be averaged to retain a very weak signal. But on the other hand, nobody dies because they got astrophysics wrong (except in "Don't look up" movie) It's not science. They hardly have any data points fitting their models compared to the size of these models and the variation in their results, and most importantly, they don't have any data on the central claim (CO2 forcing) at all. My argument is basically, nobody can trust the story because stories are misleading, you need a detailed calculation. Not misleading in a conspiratorial way, misleading in that this is numerical question which we humans suck at estimating narratively. And again, those calculations could and should be much less of a dumpster fire if we're going to trust the future of humanity with them. Another example of "simplifying assumptions" blowing up in the face of the economy was 1987 stock crash where "simplifying assumptions" in modelling option prices blew up in everyone's faces and led to multi year recession. And another "simplifying assumption" in the coronavirus response led by misleading infection models and proceeding ahead out of pure cognitive dissonance. I'm sure the climate modelers are doing the best they can, but the best they can is not enough. This dishonesty about the certainty of models, which usually results from a broken telephone where the honestly and articulated science claims are transformed into propaganda that misleads even the leaders is a bigger problem than what these models claim to solve. If this blows in everyone's faces and "moving to renewables" turns out to be a complete disaster, they will be hanging scientists in the streets and I won't blame them. Everyone's maximizing for the "scientists were extremely accurate in their predictions and we listened to them and got it right" scenario and it's because in everyone's mind the probability the scientists are right is like 90% when in reality it's more likely 10%. I don't want to convince you it's wrong. I want to convince you it's very non-trivial calculation to understand whether the problem is CO2, that framing it as "scientists always knew that and it's basic physics" is extremely misleading about the certainty, and that the narrativistic mindset is extremely dangerous.