New ice age? Don't count on it
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it?
For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why.
I hope that this article's right and being New Scientist I have a lot more faith in it. I just wish I had more time to understand all the factors of climate change for myself.
It's propaganda versus propaganda now. I will never forgive whoever has made global warming a political issue, because it means debating rationally about it has become impossible.
Climate is a very complicated thing, especially when studied on a planetary scale. It's a bunch of chaotic parameters, and any prediction about it is likely to be wrong, or imprecise.
Much of science works that way, but problems arise when you need to make political decisions about such matters. You can't make large-scale decisions that will affect millions based on flimsy predictions that may turn out to be wrong.
That's right. Want to see the real stuff with your own eyes? Revisit the glacier you have have been at 10 years ago. If you you are not into mountaineering, use historical pictures.
Obviously, i'm being unrealistic. Once it's become politicized, it's already too late.
What do to about it is a political decision.
Deciding to actually do what the engineers say is the best way to deal with the problem, based on the science, is the only political decision.
The problem is that science doesn't matter in politics. A majority could vote that the laws of thermodynamics don't hold, if they wanted to.
Some scientist asked the question "Since we know climate changes, is it changing now? And if it is changing now, how is it changing?" And in response to that question lots of great research was done to look at factors which could affect climate.
Generally the science has always started with a basic model describing net energy, energy added to the planet minus energy radiated from the planet. The theory being that the laws of thermodynamics tell us that if the net energy was positive the overall planet would get warmer over time and if the net energy were negative it would get cooler over time.
Once that was established as the basic framework, people set out to try to identify every way in which energy is 'added' to the planet (sources) and every way in which energy 'leaves' the planet (sinks). Each of these sources or sinks have an unknown contribution to the overall equation.
Many of the sources and sinks are variable, which is to say they change in magnitude over time. So a sub-problem that people have invested a lot of time and energy in trying to identify 'proxies' or direct ways to identify variability. The classic example is of course CO2.
CO2 is a 'greenhouse' gas in that it traps energy because it is opaque to infra-red light. Higher frequency light passes through it and is absorbed or reflected by what that light hits. Light that is reflected returns to space, light that is absorbed is re-radiated as infra-red light (black body radiation). CO2 in the atmosphere prevents that radiation from leaving the planet. So like a car with the windows up, or a green house, the infra-red light is ‘trapped.’ The amount of infrared light that will be trapped (and its energy content) is proportional to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. More CO2, more energy is trapped, less goes to space.
Once you have a bunch of sources and sinks, and measurements of their variability over time, and measurements of the temperature over time, you construct a 'model' for how they all contribute to the climate. The model is a series of coefficients to attach to each source or sink based on its relative contribution to the other sources and sinks.
You pick numbers kind of out of the air as to the co-efficients to give each source or sink, and you use the measurements you've taken and put them in your model and get back a predicted set of temperatures. You compare that to the temperatures that were actually measured and look to see how well they correlate.
You continue to measure these things, you feed your new measurements into your model, and you predict future changes. Then when the future becomes the present, you look at what you predicted and compare that to what the model said would happen and if they don't agree you go back and fiddle with the co-efficients until they do.
That is all good solid science. But in climate science something unfortunate happened.
Of all the things folks were putting into the models, the one that had the biggest co-efficient (which defined it as the greatest overall contributor to the climate) has been 'greenhouse gases' (which includes CO2 and Methane). Scientists being scientists identify all the sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And one of them, CO2, is a byproduct of 'industrialization' (aka human activity).
That observation, created a religion. The religion's first principles were:
) The climate is changing. (remember this)
1) Greenhouse Gas is the biggest factor affecting the climate.
2) CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
3) Human activity creates CO2.
4) Human activity is the* dominant factor in the warming of the climate.
5) If Humans would apply themselves to eliminating the production of CO2 the climate will stop changing.
The first tragedy here is that science didn't "discover" the climate was changing, they knew the climate changed, they were only trying to figure out if the current change was a warmer period or a colder period. That green house gases was the dominant factor was a surprise because it creates a new question “What are all the factors that change the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?” One of the things the science agreed on was that the climate changes whether or not humans are present, so the religious tenet that we can control the climate by eliminating our production of CO2 is false.
Several people did however recognize that the religion met the model for enacting large scale changes. That model is :
1) Find a really big threat, explain how the threat will kill you.
2) Describe how only by following the religion can the threat be averted/met.
3) Explain that people who aren’t part of the religion aren’t just stupid, they are threatening our ability to meet the threat and should be eliminated/marginalized.
This scheme works and so people use it. Whether you’re un-american for not agreeing that Communisim will destroy life as we know it, or that your un-american for not reducing your carbon footprint and averting the coming flood of rising seawater, if you’re not fighting with us against the boogeyman, you are the Enemy.
So the science of climate change is still working on their models. This solar minimum will give us new data to update our models and co-efficients. If it exposes the Global Warming religion for what it is, then I don’t think Al Gore will take the fall, I think science will, and that makes me sad.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/climatologists-f...
And btw its 'not some dreadlocked hippie' (what a horrible generalization) its people like you and me.
If you were talking rationally, you wouldn't need to do that.
I get angry with people who hijack legitimate scientific enquiries to manipulate others into doing their bidding. And I get frustrated with people who argue conjecture and theory as fact.
There is great science in climatology. Its fascinating and we learn new things every day. None of it suggests that any actions humans take will change the fact that the earth's climate is changing. Just like you can't simulatenously both believe in the science of evolution and that it no longer is a factor in humans.
So its scientific to say that our models show that CO2, as a green house gas, has a significant influence on climate. Its not scientific to say if humans make less CO2 the climate will stop changing. It is perfectly reasonable to say that if humans reduce their CO2 generation it will change the rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere.
A great web site which focuses on the science is Skeptical Science [1]. I like it because they are pretty aggressive at seeking out all the journal articles and papers and seem to be pretty good about even talking about papers they don't agree with.
A recent article they posted talked about the PETM extinction event [2]. In that event, where there were no humans present, CO2 levels on the planet shot up, the planet warmed and lots of things died off. The study is great, the science is sound, and I'm sure the paper is cited often. Unfortunately nobody has yet figured out why the CO2 shot up.
So when you read this, on the one hand you can say "Look it doesn't matter why, human activity is causing a similar jump in CO2 and it killed lots of stuff then we need to address this." I don't disagree with that statement at all.
I disagree with the non-scientific statement "if we address human CO2 generation this won't happen." Is that a subtle difference? I don't think so. What ever caused CO2 to spike without human help could happen again, and if it does we're in a world of hurt. So people who approach this issue less emotionally talk about both changing how much CO2 (or any other green house gases) we liberate into the atmosphere and ways to survive climate changes. When people try to tell me that if I do what they say it will "help stop climate change" I get irritated with them.
[1] http:://skepticalscience.com/
[2] http://skepticalscience.com/co2-rising-ten-times-faster-than...
I say go with your gut and do what's right. We know that burning gasoline and coal releases carbon and are dirty.
We know we should be clean.
Strip mining, not clean. Recycling, clean. Wind looks cleaner than a smokestack, go wind. Solar, well, if the panels are made from plastics are they really cleaner than gas? I think so, go solar, etc. etc. etc.
It gets confusing when you get down to the level of ethanol, but I think for the most part you know in your gut what's right.
Solar? Not clean at all. (For photovoltaic which is what most people mean. Solar thermal is good though.)
And just because they are made from plastic means nothing. Plastic is cleaner than wood you know (i.e. uses less energy to make and use).
There is a fact that no one wants to acknowledge: In timeframes of under 20 or so years there are NO energy technologies that are clean. None. For timeframes longer than 20 there is exactly one: Nuclear. There is nothing else.
A solar cell will probably fail before it manages to return more energy than it took to make (it's hard to say for sure though how long they will last, none have been around long enough yet). Wind can never be more than a minor part of the energy supply. Hydro is fully tapped out. Geothermal causes earthquakes. What else is there? Maybe solar thermal, but that requires a huge amount of electrical wires (the energy source is very far from the consumption point), too much apparently since no one is doing it except for some tests.
Also, don't discount wind that fast. The typical "it will have to whole country with these 1-2 MW turbines" line of argument is old. Modern offshore turbine designs are 6MW, getting to 10MW by 2012 and 20MW designs are in the works now. Advances in the field have been massive just in under a decade, with higher output efficiency (gearless designs) and less overall maintenance effort.
It takes time for the other generators to change output levels, so during high speed wind turbines tend to get disconnect from the grid because of the harmful effects they have on it.
The net result is that they don't produce out as much energy as expected.
Traditionally, a wind turbine generator works only in narrow range of speeds (say, 2000 rpm). In older designs the variable speed of wind was addressed by using a (massive) gearbox, not unlike what you have in your car. The newer designs (e.g. what Siemens Windpower is churning out now) are gearless, don't suffer from that problem, and have in ballpark of 40% better energy efficiency.
The cap/penetration effects of wind power on the grid are being studied, but on levels below 1/5th of total consumption it is believed to not cause any substantial problems. Most of the existing grids can accommodate that. I think no country approached the 20% wind power penetration yet.
Now imagine that the outlets for charging those batteries were connected to a wind-powered grid, where the power company charged a lower rate in exchange for less reliable availability. That kind of service would suck for running, say, an Internet data center, but it would be adequate to make sure that all the batteries that came in by 6:00 pm were fully charged by 6:00 am.
Voilà! Two problems solving each other.
Yes, we need a smarter grid, we need a breakthrough in battery technology, etc., etc. The way forward is going to be hard and take serious investment in technology, but what else is new?
It seems like so many people want everyone else to be clean while being dirty themselves.
Well, recycling might use too much energy to be clean (depending on how we get the energy), but using too much water doesn't seem a useful complaint, since cleaning and reusing water is just a matter of more energy.
I'm skeptical of this figure, but it's not particularly relevant. The issue is whether directing energy towards renewable energy production has a better environmental impact vs directing that same amount of energy towards fossil fuel energy production.
Total evaluations of the costs (in dollars, to the environment, etc.) are extremely important in comparing energy production methods, but your 20 year figure is fairly meaningless on its own.
For complex issues, that is the worst advice possible. Humanity is barely rational as it is. The last thing we need is politicians (and those who elect them) 'going with their gut'. This really is an anti-intellectual stance.
Well, yes it is, by definition.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Anti-intellectualism is a mistrust of intellect, and the derision of science as impractical. Gut feelings are emotional reactions, generally regarded as not modulated by conscious thought, and as a reflection of intuition rather than rationality.
That seems pretty clear to me, so I will gladly call this advice to follow the gut anti-intellectual.
Furthermore, I think it's to be actively opposed in the public sphere. Politics in general is all about the gut feeling, and favouring non-rational solutions to complex issues is simply dangerous, especially far-reaching ones like this one. If that is 'ranting' to you, then so be it.
Lastly, I am not disagreeing with his opinions (I agree with several of them, though that's not relevant), I am disagreeing with the 'go with gut feeling' stance.
Just in case you were not trolling...
For 'wind looks cleaner' - the Register argues that mostly it'll end up making energy more expensive without being much cleaner (in this one case in the UK), due to perverse incentives: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/national_grid_2020/
I think 'gut feeling' is exactly what we don't need. Things are not always intuitively obvious.
There isn't much complicated about it climate change: the full consensus is that it's happening because we're burning too much oil.
The politics? Less than 10 years ago, the world's largest industry was oil when the price was roughly stable at around $20 a barrel.
Today a barrel costs $100. For something the world consumes at a thousand barrels a second, that's huge. At the price a couple weeks ago, it was a better investment to buy the world's biggest commodity than Google when it IPO'd. You might want to read that again.
Climate change is a force of urgency in the switch away from oil to green energy. You can be sure it will be fought every step of the way with every tool available.
And green energy does not exist, so good luck switching to it.
People tend to assume "it will be fought every step of the way" because they refuse to believe the truth: it does not exist.
If by “green energy” you are referring to energy production that is renewable or doesn’t produce significant CO2 emissions, then it does exist.
Here are some examples from Sweden:
District heating systems in Sweden has switched from being nearly entirely fossil fuel based (oil mainly) in the early 70s (15 TWh) and following decade (35 TWh) to be nearly entirely renewable energy in 2009 (59 TWh total of which biofuel, waste, peat, heat pumps and waste heat make up more than 45 TWh). [1]
District cooling has gone from zero in the early 90s to supply 800 GWh in 2009. This includes using sea or lake water in district cooling systems, where the system in Stockholm makes up for nearly half of that production. [2]
Swedish total energy use in 2009 is about 568 TWh. [3] Sweden has increased its renewable energy use from about 34% in 1990 to 44% in 2009. [4]
Electricity production in Sweden is about 49% large hydro, 1.9% wind, 37% nuclear (adds up to about 89%), most of the rest comes from combined heat and electricity production, which uses primarily biofuel, but also some coal, oil, gas and peat.
Sweden has a policy to promote renewables and over the years this has paid off. You can do the same.
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[1] Department of Energy, Energy in Sweden 2010, Figure 30, page 87. http://webbshop.cm.se/System/TemplateView.aspx?p=Energimyndi...
[2] Department of Energy, Energy in Sweden 2010, Figure 31, page 90.
[3] Department of Energy, Energy in Sweden 2010, Figure 8, page 53.
[4] Department of Energy, Energy in Sweden 2010, Figure 11, page 58.
[5] EkonomiFakta, Electricity production in Sweden, http://www.ekonomifakta.se/sv/Fakta/Energi/Energibalans-i-Sv...
Edit: layout and one missing reference, grammar
They have only one advantage: No litter.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/10...
I personally use very few bags as I have cloth bags with me when I am shopping for food etc. A nit, paper bags can certainly be reused, I do it all the time for our recycling, which is kept in paper bags i the garage and sometimes for shopping.
More energy and water use in Sweden is less of a problem, as our energy is largely biofuel, hydro or nuclear, but of course it is better to use less energy. Water we have quite a lot of.
Plastics isn't biodegradable and paper is, but yes, you are right, this is not an easy good/bad choice.
Which green energy choices are economically feasible is much more controversial - there's counterintuitive things like - is it better to subsidize solar/wind while not really feasible to subsidize technology development or build natural gas plants (which are proven to be economically feasible and cleaner than oil I believe - but obviously still a fossil fuel).
Edit: tried googling for gas-is-cleaner-than-oil citation, and found - http://www.propublica.org/article/more-reasons-to-question-w... saying earlier studies may be wrong and it's actually dirtier than coal.
Regardless of how you work out the proportions, there used to be a homeostasis, where the biological and physical processes that put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere balanced the processes that took them out. The additional CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O from human activity is upsetting that homeostasis.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
When you take water vapor into account, man-made greenhouse gases only account for 0.28% of all the greenhouse gas in our atmosphere.
I don't know if that's the bes term, since I think you'll find it's the same as the evolution crowd and heliocentric crowd.
Your argument is specious -- we're also only talking about it getting a few degrees warmer. If you investigate, you'll find why that's a problem.
It's unlikely you can understand all the factors of climate change since there's far more variables of Earth than most scientists can comprehend so they could only study and make scientific theory based understandings. I think it's best to leave it to the academics.
It seems to me that nobody can show particularly convincingly that current/historical CO2 emissions are affecting the climate, hence why it's always 'the consensus is that....' rather than 'paper X conclusively showed that...'. But starting from an already shaky premise, we then move on to far shakier territory. Predicting how much the climate will warm, how much we'll have to reduce emissions by to stop the warmth, things which rely on dubious computer models. And then we get to what the effects will actually be, where the basic assumption that rising sea levels will cause more catastrophe than cap&trade etc is the just the beginning. Global warming becomes a sort of bogeyman, in which any and every undesirable environmental affect can be attributed to AGW. It's like someone just looked through a list of possible warming side-effects and wrote down any imaginable connection they could have to environmental trouble. Mooses disappearing in Canada? Warming. Hurricanes in the carribean? Warming. Famine? Disease? Drought? Overpopulation? Third world poverty? Colder weather in Britain? (we'd really love warmer weather) Warming.
Throw in the whole climage-gate scandal ('we admit that we no longer have the original data to show') and the usual 'recursive' nature of public-sector activity ('give us money to do research, and we will get results that show you need to give us more money to do research, and we will get results that show...')
It stinks. They want us to globally embrace the arbitrary for policy making. Which, AGW aside, is a horrible precedent to set for the future.
There are numerous studies establishing that the globe is warming with > 95% confidence.
The greenhouse effect as a phenomenon is also not debated, nor is the amount of CO2 we've put into the atmosphere.
None of these thing above are contested, they're all established facts.
It's possible that some other mysterious force is causing the warming, but if that's not the case, then greenhouse gasses are the most reasonable conclusion. I'd posit that advocates of a mysterious other force behind warming have the burden of explaining what it is.
It lists all the skeptic questions, and investigates the science that relates to each one in some depth - at either "Basic" or "Intermediate" levels.
The main argument against it being a chaotic system is that the climate is a boundary condition system, determined by it's input and output energy. This does not satisfy me as an explanation because the sun, being the main input, is chaotic in it's energy output, as demonstrated by the unpredictability of the current lull. So if we can't predict the main input, why do we think that we can predict the behavior of something that has a chaotic input? It does not compute.
All of these discussion really miss the point though, which is that pollution of our environment is generally a bad idea. In other words, I agree with the sentiment but not the rationale.
What is in dispute are the reasons why, and what to do about it, if anything.
To be honest, I don't think sun spots were exclusively to blame for Dickens era of cold weather in Europe. Wasn't there some talk about the Atlantic belt faltering as well? Perhaps the jet stream moved too.
It started out as an interesting speculation and has remained there.
This was earlier than Dickens' time -- it was mid 1600s. Galileo and others first saw and drew sunspots in 1610 (due to the invention of the telescope). So their disappearance happened very close in time to their first definitive sighting (they had been seen earlier, but only huge ones, and not clearly, so it was not systematic at all, they were confused with planetary transits).
The original article in the Register was trash, actually. Utter trash.
You can really only know who is right after the fact, before that its all 'my model is more accurate than your model' bullshit.
I always feel like the 'rational' view point is that the climate will change for any number of reasons, some we control and some we don't. We should be prepared.
But folks who have bought into the Global Warming religion (which is to say they stepped away from the science and turned it into a political crusade) if this Solar event causes severe freezing across the northern hemisphere for decades it won't be the political zealots who get hung, it will be innocent bystander scientists, and science in general.
"I've received yet another email indicating that the author thinks I don't believe man is responsible for global warming. This comes about because of an insidious sort of tribalism that has turned conversations about climate change into a 'you're either with us or against us' situation."
This has been my experience as well when I try to discuss the science. People want me to come out as either 'pro-Warming' or 'anti-Warming' and I'm not either. I'm interested in the systems problem that global climate represents.
So in all my postings here, and when I talk with folks in person, and at conferences and the topic comes up. I start with "The climate changes, we know it changes because we have lots of evidence in the geologic record that it has been very different than today, both colder and hotter. This process is continuous."
And yet you, MaysonL ask "What evidence do you see that it isn't happening?"
When I had stated categorically that it was happening. The only solid difference between my position on global warming and the 'alarmists' that I can find is that I don't believe that humans can control the global climate. I agree we can change our contribution to its change, but I strongly disagree that if we eliminate our contribution that change will stop happening.
I'm a strong supporter of climate science, and I try to keep an open mind to avoid confirmational bias and I seek out conflicting data in an effort to 'keep myself honest' that I'm looking as all the data and not just data that supports my point of view.
And still in some groups if I ask "what is your opinion of this conflicting report?" or "what do you think of Boyd's iron hypothesis?" or any question which reveals that I don't think humans can control the climate, the cry 'Denier! Denier! Denier!' is raised with metaphorical pitch forks and clubs.
Its unsatisfying to just shrug my shoulders and leave but my experience is that anything said once the cry goes up is effectively white noise. So if you have any suggestions on how I might state my position without triggering the 'denier! denier!' mode I'm all ears.
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In computer science, no one seems to say "This is a fact" unless they know (or can prove) it is. Doesn't seem to hold true for climate change, which is what frustrates me.
If you mean theoretical papers and such, you're probably right. But that's not the case for practical work. Take a look to the "ORM is an Antipattern" story, currently in the front page..
Funny, that's exactly how I feel about global warming.
The scientific consensus is that humans have had a significant, adverse impact on the global climate -- this conclusion is presented with scientific certainty.
There is a complete lack of significant dissent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...
Everybody can agree and still be wrong. Einstein's work is a good example of that.
In the absence of any better way of ascertaining objective truth about the world than the scientific method, I choose to accept the fact of consensus -- that a large number of scientists have failed to falsify the theory -- as being a meaningful indication about the truth of global warming.
EDIT -- I assume with your reference to Einstein, you mean that the whole world was wrong about the motion of physical bodies, with their notions from Newtonian models, until relativity came along? If so, you may care to read this: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
It's about the difference between a wrong theory and an incomplete one.
So the only way to falsify it is if new data comes out? But for something so complicated, future data is likely a crapshoot? We can only estimate future data based on current models, which may or may not be able to model reality well, given how complex and nonlinear the entire system is?
It seems really difficult to falsify the idea of global warming.
I'm not sure how the concept of a theory being falsifiable applies when you can't really run repeated controlled experiments.
The letter is s, the one that changes model into models. If the science were settled, there would be precisely one model, and it would be in agreement with measurements.
Alternatively, one may ask which one of the twenty-some models settled the science so that all the rest could be discarded along with the research funds that have kept those models alive.
We can take this further. Not a single climate model predicted the current cooling phase. If the science were settled, the model (singular) would have predicted it."
http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Ha...
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When you say "irrelevant," do you mean to say that the attempts of thousands of scientists to use the scientific method to repeat findings which constitute the body of research -- and consequently fail to falsify the theory of anthropogenic global warming -- do you mean to say that this is irrelevant?
Consensus is not merely opinion -- it's opinion informed by the results of experimental and observational science. I'm not sure what else you consider to be "hard" science.
EDIT: okay, this guy mrvc deleted everything he posted here, which were quite a few comments to the effect that the theory of global warming is comprised of guesses, drastic underestimation of uncertainty in the data, and propaganda.
The moderation is not symmetrical - it only goes to -4, but has no limit in the other direction.
And it doesn't matter what you think it implies. The reality is that the custom here is not to downmod comments you disagree with. It wasn't always so, even pg at one time thought differently. But experience shows that the discussion is much better when this custom is followed.
I've also had downvotes like that - it doesn't make it right.
A lot of the political and societal measures are aimed at making energy more expensive, reducing consumption and promoting a rather righteous view of how people should live. Why not spend the same effort to promote technologies that allow people to live however they want in a way that is sustainable regardless of the environment?
What kind of tech promotion do you imagine, other than more efficient energy production and consumption?
I'd love to see more promotion given to sustainable agriculture that's tolerant of temperature drops or rises, city-structures that re-use the heat that they give off for something productive, research into how to build and live effectively in regions subject to hurricanes or earthquakes that don't come down to rebuild-everything-every-30-years, flood defences that are something more than 'build-a-wall', etc. I'm not saying that these things don't exist, but we spend so much time talking about how to change societies (unfeasibly, in my opinion) so as to mitigate climate change and not very much on what to do to mitigate that change into sustainable habitats.
Except that is probably part of the strategy - FUD. If you give up, the people in control are free do act as they please.
How do you propose to give incentives for development of those things you suggest? Don't you think more expensive energy would make people build more efficient things, recycle better, create cleaner energy?
Yes, expensive energy may do that - but is it the best way to do it? I would have thought that anyone who manages to do those things would probably make money from it regardless of whether the government takes a cut or not.
Let's stop and think about that for a minute. We're still pretty darn ignorant of the climate. Look at a plot of temperature over the last mere million years. Climate scientists will at this point tell you they know all about the variation over the last few decades. But point to the huge swings that occur on ten-thousand-year timescales and periodically freeze the entire Earth over and they'll say "Yeah, well y'know, that could be a number of things..."
Climate science is a dodgy form of science. Too many model parameters, too few observations.
When you can't--like with climate studies--you rely on intuition instead. That's a social science.
It's all well and good to come up with a model for what the climate should do based on basic physics. The main trouble with climate prediction is that we don't have enough data points to check whether the models are really correct.
I do physical modelling for a living, but I know not to trust a fitted-but-untested model any further than I can comfortably spit a rat.