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Comment by aethertap | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your points here. The thing that struck me as more interesting about this case is that it seems like it should lead to a more concrete testable prediction, with a deadline. If this is right, we should see a rapid increase in temperatures when the cycle that's currently pumping heat to the bottom of the ocean starts to pump it back up to the top.

If it's as they say, then it seems to me like the next oscillation should be much more dramatic (for some measurable definition of dramatic) than the historic ones because most of that "stored warming" will come up in a rush. On the other hand, if we get to the time when the cycle reverses and it's no big deal (after giving it time to get into full swing), perhaps we should reconsider our premises.

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This also makes it much more of an interesting bet as in survival terms it has actual teeth, especially since the cooling period hasn't really cooled but has stayed pretty flat instead. I suggest at least hedging that it might in fact rise, given the loss if it does. Nothing wrong with making some hedge funds after all, honest foundation of the economy and all that.

Besides, other than saying that the climate is just too complex to make these predictions, I haven't ever heard a plausible argument against extending the simple observation that a volume of air enclosing an absorbing and emitting solid when exposed to a wideband source of light (the sun being a good example) will trap heat in different amounts dependent on the concentration of the gases in the volume and that CO2 is one of the gases that increases this effect if you start with a mix the same as our atmosphere.

Yes, that's all true. But I've also never heard a plausible argument against the simple observation that if I kick a football it will accelerate away from me. F=ma and all that... Unless I'm standing at the bottom of a hill, in which case it will roll straight back to my feet. See, the wider system may be more complex, and have negative feedbacks that overwhelm any perturbation you introduce. The onus is on the climate scientists to show that the system as a whole will behave as they've predicted, which is a great deal trickier than your simple observation... since it's just about the most complex system imaginable. I model for a living, and I'd dead-set rather model the human brain than the climate of our entire planet. At least you've got 6 billion of those to gather data on. Or experiment on. They've got one.

If you kick a football it will accelerate away from you, but only while you are kicking it and it does that in both cases. And if you have got as far as F=ma then you will presumably be bright enough to apply it to gravity and the shape and material of any hill as well as the action of your foot.

Besides, the people who are saying that the system is too complex to make a prediction are not saying that there will be no effect. There is an increase in the energy going into this system and saying that things are so complex that we should bet on there being no effect is not saying that there is no global effect, but that there is a global effect that more or less exactly counterbalances the initial effect and that to me sounds like wishful thinking from the viewpoint that nature is somehow magically in balance.

I haven't ever heard a plausible argument against extending the simple observation that a volume of air enclosing an absorbing and emitting solid when exposed to a wideband source of light (the sun being a good example) will trap heat in different amounts dependent on the concentration of the gases in the volume and that CO2 is one of the gases that increases this effect if you start with a mix the same as our atmosphere.

Things that come to mind immediately:

1. The solid can change colors (amount of vegetation, amount of snow/ice cover).

2. Cloud cover at various altitudes. (I think I heard this one tends to annoy the model-makers, since they don't have a good way to predict it yet.)

3. How much of the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs, is already at 100%? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_band has a picture that seems to imply "most of it".

Item #1 I've heard should make the effect stronger than your simple model, #3 would probably make it weaker, and #2 I doubt anyone knows.

ok, ok, this I have thrown into the basket marked 'complexity'.

I think it is unlikely, but definitely not that unlikely that reality will nicely balance for a wide range of values of CO2. I would like us to plan against that but it would be nice if it were so.

We are probably somewhere near a local minima, in terms of temperature stability, however we have no fucking idea really where the edges are or how deep the next valley may be.

The future doesn't have to be like the past, especially if we kick it.

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