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Comment by SV_BubbleTime

14 hours ago

[flagged]

models are only as good as our understanding. From the abstract:

> Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.

All of these events are decades-long (or longer) cycles that don't have a substantial amount of data points... Sure, solar cycles seem to be 11 years, but we don't have a lot of scientifically usable (for forecasting) data points on that -- maybe 8 cycles? less? And the cycles are not consistent. It's not like Year 4 of one cycle is like year 4 of another cycle, we just determined there's a period of about 11 that looks significant.

Same with El Niño -- it's not like its 'true' or 'false', there's degrees of it.. and when it starts, and if other conditions are right to make additional hurricanes that year, and how much cloud cover that generates, etc. etc. a lot of which we don't have data on past 1960 when we launched our first weather satellite ...

As for volcanos... there's lots of them, and we are not great at predicting the high-impact events... we certainly don't have sufficient data to accurately predict what happens if we had a huge eruption on an El Niño strong year during the height of a solar cycle.

Your comment seems to assume that this is somehow counter to the modeling; what models in particular do you think this contradicts?

The article doesn’t present any hypotheses regarding this, and I suspect we simply don’t know yet.

But if true presumably it’s one of the usual reasons for observing data with low likelihood according to a model: misspecification or statistical bias/variance.

Modeling is hard. Some did, some didn’t. Generally we have historically underestimated climate change.

Models point to ranges of scenarios.

When they say worst case, it means it’s possible. And only worst case within a percentage (like 95%) certainly, and based on known effects.

Worst cases are not some obligatory pessimism to scare people into accepting the mean probability case. They are serious warnings.

Given we are playing roulette with our planet’s climate stability, any major unaccounted for factors that reveal themselves are most likely to result in worse outcomes.

There have been people trying to bring attention to this sober information since the 80’s. Welcome to 2026. There will still be people complaining predictions are too dire.

Your attempts at derailing the discourse is not only frustrating – in the case of climate change it might just kill us all. You're a danger.

  • I don't know what bothers me more, the guy trolling or you calling people "a danger" for posting literally a single question.

    • It's a bad faith question or one so deeply uninformed that parent is correct. It only takes a couple clicks to see the ideas of the people who are "just asking questions".