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[Psst: The "blind men" trying to understand the "elephant" are actually also elephants, but don't even know it.] :-)

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And then smart social people are throwing quick solutions to control, calm and manage the elephant in the room/planet, out of quick excel calculations: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/we-can-already-stop-climate-change

But Ugo, you're right, the most important may well be to ramp up global peaceful way of cooperation while globally we're having more and more constraints and troubles ahead...

"Don't look up"? Extrapolations? Effondrement (the French TV série)?

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Pueyo? Oh, my gosh...

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Jan 2·edited Feb 22

Hi, nice t houghtful article. I have one critique re 'models are always better than no model at all'. It is that a wrong model is certainly NOT better than none. eg is earth surface temp a linear or an exponential function of atmospheric carbon? IPCC chose linear, others like Hansen have always said exponential. And we can find examples where it takes time to discover that a model is wrong. Another example: fossil fuel combustion is prime GHG which in turn is prime cause of climate change. That reductionistic model is simple and wrong: it totally leaves out the causative effect of vegetation and landuse.

This essay says a lot more about that.

"It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus [ie models] within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities. "

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-year-that-expertise-collapsed/

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Jan 2·edited Jan 2Author

I wouldn't pay too much attention to this story. The gist of it, anyway, is that the standard line of most climatologist is "thou shalt not scare people," because otherwise their run away plugging their ears with their hands while singing "la-la-la." Which is not wrong, it is what normally happens. Hansen, instead, wants to tell people what he really thinks, at the cost of taking the risk of being branded as a catastrophist. But this has little to do with the question of the linear or exponential growth of temperature with time. As I say in my article, there is no absolute truth that models return to you. Exponential growth will boil you faster, but even linear growth, at the current slope, will nicely cook the human species to extinction. The story has been amplified beyond its real significance.

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Dear Ugo, maybe my example was off base but I don't think so. It matters a lot if the models using linear trends show 'boil' in 50 years and the exponential ones show 'boil' in 10. The urgency of action is diluted .

I have also added a bit to my first post, taking issue again with your general assertion that 'models are always better than no model at all'. I thank you for responding.

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