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Comment by pinkmuffinere | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but internet opinions are a dime a dozen -- do you have some special experience / credentials in this area? The arguments you provide are all just the sort of thing that PhD students would study, and incorporate into their models. I'm inclined to believe the experts, but if you _are_ one, and are saying with authority that these effects are missed, that is a much more interesting story.

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The question is not if the commenter is an expert, but if they are correct.

The claim that some models didn't take larger systems into account is also because an expert in the arctic wasn't an expert in oceans. And the expert in biodiversity isn't an expert in food supply chains. Expertise isn't the question. Instead it is - do all of us who are non experts (all of us) have enough expert data to have a systemic understanding of an accelerating trend?

Ya, I agree, but I am not familiar with the intimate details of present climate models, nor am I planning to be. I can't/won't directly evaluate whether the argument they present is correct. But if _they_ are familiar with the intimate details of present climate models (ie, if they are an expert), I will tend to trust them more.

I’m not a modeler but I have directly asked modelers if clathrates, permafrost melting, wildfire incidence and ocean drawdown responses to warming was incorporated in the major models. 5 years ago the answer was no. Today the answer might be yes, but this is not really the point I’m trying to make. It’s really that we should expect to see acceleration in warming as the natural environment responds to anthropogenic (“forced”) climate change.

The models don't consider these because there's considerable uncertainty as to the size of these effects and potential countervailing forces of similar magnitudes.

The fact is, for all of these other secondary effects etc... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.

So as a result, we've got a prediction of something between "somewhat bad" and "catastrophically-is-an-understatement bad" with a maximum likelihood estimate of "really really bad."

> ... we just don't know. It's too complicated of a system.

I wish this comment was higher up.

The big thing under-discussed about climate change is that the deeper we get into it, the harder it is to predict and understand.

I recall Dr. Richard Alley discussing how Thwaites Glacier collapsing wasn't factored into any IPCC reports; but ultimately pointed out it was for good reason because it's simply not possible to model these things and their consequences accurately.

I don't do any climate modeling, but I do a lot of other modeling and forecasting: the biggest assumption we make in all statistical models is that the system itself more or less stays statistically similar to what it currently is and what we have seen in past. As soon as you drop that assumption you're increasingly in the world of wild guessing. If you wanted me to build you a RAM price prediction model 2 years ago, I could have done a pretty good job. Ask for one today and your better off asking someone with industry but no modeling experience what they think might happen.

This is the hidden threat of climate change most people are completely unaware of: we can know it will be bad when certain things happen, we know they will happen in the nearish future, but we can't really say exactly how and when they'll unfold with any meaningful confidence.

And yet we can still say something simple that is true: warming will accelerate due to non-human greenhouse gas emissions as the planet continues to warm, due to feedback loops and tipping points in the natural carbon cycle. This is an unassailable statement.

> This is an unassailable statement.

No. I believe what you're saying is very likely to be true, but we know there's both positive and negative feedback and we don't really know how they really will interplay and where all the tipping points are.

There may even be significant phase delay in these mechanisms and so we could even get oscillation.

Over time periods in excess of 10K years this is a reasonable caveat. For more human-oriented timelines, there's no negative feedback mechanism I'm aware of that would do anything close to producing an actual oscillation.

Edit: I'd be happy for you to educate me how I'm wrong btw, since that would mean I've missed something significant, which would make me happy! So please do tell me if you know of such a mechanism.

I really meant to say that there's no way to really know of any region of the CO2 vs. temperature graph if there's positive or negative feedback dominating. You're proposing it all runs away in one lump, and I'm saying that there can be chunks of runaway and then damping. An extreme case would be if things are really underdamped somewhere and we spiral down to one of these points.

There are all kinds of things that have time lags from years to centuries, though, that could cause ringing (ocean heat uptake, rates of carbon uptake as the biosphere adapts and shifts, etc).

Indeed, we have evidence of ringing in the geologic climate record-- like Dansgaard-Oeschger events. We also live with ringing in weather systems like El Nino. Warming intensifying or creating new modes of oscillation would not be that surprising.

On the internet the default pisition is not true/untrue; its, why should I acknowledge you?

If you are still trying to gauge truth before this, you are poisoning your mental heuristics. Thats why propaganda are ao effecfive: you can be told something is either, and it can still be effective.

Humans and LLMs are similar: the separation between input and commands is not a hard barrier.

So, back to GP: CLIMATE CHANGE is reversible. It just depends on whether we are talking about socipecnomics or physical processes.

2 years ago this was hard won knowledge, searching for papers and then putting it all together in survey form for analysis. Today I can tell you: feel free to ask Deep Research or another LLM you trust to do that work for you, generating citations along the way. You can convince yourself vs me having to convince you. It will take about 15 minutes.

I do not trust any LLM. But I am with the other person, the intention is not to discredit you or make you convince us - you are doing exactly what a comment section is designed for. Your comment is so good, in fact, that we want to trust it more than a comment in general deserves to be trusted.

while i agree its better to go off and prove it to ourselves, there is merit in having a conversation here

For better or worse, I don't trust an LLM to give me a correct answer in this space. But you've kindof dodged the question by recommending LLM's -- do you have special experience / credentials in this area?

I answered elsewhere. I’ve been doing research on this topic for about 10 years, but I am not a climate modeler. I have spoken to people who are climate modelers and, at the time, these non-anthropogenic factors were not controlled for. They acknowledged that this was a blind spot that needed more research. At the time Arctic warming was only just beginning to be recognized as happening more quickly than the rest of the planet and the implications of that were concerning but unclear. There is still some acknowledged lack of understanding for just why the polar regions are warming so much faster (it’s not all melting / albedo feedback, because it’s happening in Antarctica too). What is less debated at this point is that permafrost comprises a truly mammoth proportion of CO2/CH4 reserves that are on an accelerated melting path (~1000Gt was the last estimate I saw, although it’s not all likely to go up at once of course).

If they said yes, would you blindly trust them? They told you to "do your own research" effectively and you punted. That would arguably be a more reassuring path for you I assume.

Truthfully, because they dodged the question I am now a bit suspicious of everything they say. It just seems a bit deceitful. I explicitly called out the dodging not because I wanted to hear from them after they'd dodged it, but because I want to make it clear to GP that their answer is not sufficient, and highlight to others that they maybe shouldn't trust GP.

If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.

I don’t type fast on my phone, so you’re getting responses as I can give them. I think I’ve answered your questions sufficiently to draw your own conclusions at this point. Feel free to ignore me. Physics doesn’t care.

The people who say the Earth is flat have been "searching for papers" too.

No offense, but you sound like an oil shill.

Surely the children churning out papers in a memey field, with no real special insight into computational modeling, are the real ones to trust! Their papers are in Nature!

Ridiculous take, and you’d know that the OP was correct if you cared enough to know what researchers were actually saying.

Climate arguments devolve into appeals to impact claimed by authorities rather than any examination of what they’ve said.

Would a PhD student incorporate something into their model that flipped their results from agreeing to disagreeing with the premise that has not only practically become a religion, but forms the foundation for more and more funding flowing into their field each year?

Would they really want to risk being basically excommunicated from their area of research for daring to provide ammo to “climate change deniers”?

This is rather disingenuous. It can be hard to overcome momentum in research, but most researchers would be giddy with excitement if they could show our (extremely disturbing) forecasts regarding climate change are wrong and that things are much rosier than expected.

I also suspect you would find easy funding from existing climate change deniers. There is no shortage of well-heeled folk in that space.

Do you have a chip on your shoulder regarding research? You're begging the question by stating it is conducted in a "practically religious" way. Ask whether that's true before you question the effect it would have on somebody's behaviour.

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