I am not using an "appeal to authority" argument, but I figure the HN readership would have pointed out my errors. (It's certainly happened before :-) ) We do

I am not using an "appeal to authority" argument, but I figure the HN readership would have pointed out my errors. (It's certainly happened before :-) ) We do not understand even the basics. For instance, we do not fully understand how the Gulf Stream works. The problem is that we can't just sum or multiply the uncertainty values and try to arrive at a consensus. Perhaps an analogy can be made to trying to model the US or Europe's financial system - clearly even the largest banks, spending large amounts of money on IT systems and modeling over the past number of years, have grossly mis-calculated things. And the financial world is arguably less dynamic than Earth's climate system.