You wrote so much, it’s a shame you insist on claiming the models are not wrong.
The right answer is that, just like COVID models, of course the climate models will turn out to be completely wrong in the exact details, in the scale, in the timeframe, and possibly even in the endpoints.
COVID is actually supremely easier to predict than climate. The two fundamental problems with most COVID models are that 1) the positive test counts don’t mean what you think they do, and 2) because of that, everything that is based on positive test counts being relatively meaningful is therefore totally wrong.
The climate models, since they were created by humans and not God, will likewise have almost innumerable errors which will cause all sorts of problems both minor and major with their predictions. This is universally true with all models of complex systems, and therefore should be totally uncontroversial, unfortunately the models have become like sacred cows.
Personally, just like I was with COVID, I am confident that paradigm-shifting events will intercede that will totally invalidate the model one way or another.
For COVID the paradigm shift was that the majority of cases are asymptomatic. Most people are still coming to terms with this. I heard it recently best described to think of SARS-CoV-2 as actually two viruses. One, much less prevalent, is serious and deadly. The other, much more prevalent, is mild to the point of being unremarkable. Getting one confers immunity to both. This is, I stress, a mental model, not a scientific explanation of what’s actually happening (which does not presently exist).
The point is that the things that make models wrong are often “external” to the model, the unknowables. For Kelvin it was radioactivity. His model was total “sound” just like the climate models are “sound” in terms of everything that is presently knowable. But complex systems, particularly ones with humans in the loop, have a way of surfacing curveballs the model did not, and could not, anticipate which have outsized effects in the endpoints.
The lesson with climate, just as it is being shown with COVID, is that dramatic action to address the problem (“flatten the curve”) with almost incomprehensible direct costs does not pay off.
With climate, just like with COVID, a less blunt instrument will achieve a better outcome for orders of magnitude less cost.
The sad part is that the top 2% couldn’t give a fuck about the cost either way. It’s the bottom 75% which will suffer from terrible policy.