If our models were really accurate enough to be useful guides, should we have seen a change like this coming or at least be aware of what modelled as a less likely scenario that would lead to this outcome?
Instead the atmospheric and oceanographic modellers managed to identify their extremely fallible models with climate change as a thesis, and now half the population trusts those models far too much, and the other half is far too skeptical of global warming generally.
I'd expect a model that is expected to be accurate over a handful of decades would in fact be predictive on the scale of a year or a few years.
I also specifically left open the avenue that a model didn't predict this as a likely outcome but did have smaller probability outcomes that would have predicted a temperature decrease.
Its reasonable enough that the model may have found this as unlikely, but unreasonable if the model was so wrong that it wasn't even aware of this as a possible outcome in the first few years of the model. The data simply can't be useful 30 years out when it has such blind spots only a year or a few years out.
For clarity, when I mention models here I mean all recent environmental models attempting to predict global climate or specifically ocean temperatures. If we have no idea why the temperature has dropped then every model failed to provide any scenarios where that would have happened.
If you dig into what those models do, well... cover your eyes. Some frequently run off the rails and predict a climate like Venus or Pluto. They're non-deterministic and don't always do this. Obviously that's due to bugs but the bugs don't get fixed. Instead they just do lots of runs and pick the ones that don't go crazy.
More importantly, because models are iterative the data becomes more and more useless as time goes on and predictions are missed. In this case, any model that expected the Atlantic to increase in temperature this year will likely be even less accurate for next year's prediction. Sure the models can be re-run with the latest climate data, but that just moves the goal posts and raises the question of when we realize the models aren't predictive.
"Could be" is the real key there in my opinion. We simply don't know.
And I don't mean that in any kind of climate change denial sense, those arguments fall into the same trap as anyone arguing that we definitely know how and why climate will change and why it is changing.
We don't have the data for it, and a system on the scale of the entire planet is simply too complex to be able to predict.
My big worry when it comes to climate isn't what mass extinction events could be coming, its the fear that potential creates. Fear as scale always leads to bad outcomes. Fear gives us authoritarians, bigotry, wars, and on and on.
We need to recognize that society is almost certainly drastically outstripping planetary boundaries. Once we accept that we need to move towards simple changes we can make like reducing consumption, and we need to focus heavily on embracing the uncertainty of life rather than fearing it.
Fear can be an excellent motivator, but its only useful when you can actually do something about it.