May I suggest you study the concept of a complex system a bit more? Oh -- and may I suggest you study earth's history with regard to CO2 and global average temperature a bit more?
> I don't care who caused things. I just don't want things to change.
Ah, now we're really getting down to it. The issue is that you don't like what earth does, but you're trying to sell it as humans did bad stuff. You don't like what this planet does? Fine -- find another planet, or at the very least, be honest and call yourself pro-climate-meddling in order to preserve the climate you prefer, regardless of what nature seems to have in mind.
> What are you people really afraid of exactly? What kind of fearmongering have you been exposed to?
Get it right. You're fearful, and projecting it onto others. You've accepted huge amount of fearmongering, while I'm rejecting it.
I completely agree. It's so large that it's expected that any near-term predictions will be false, and that's what we see. By now there's a huge graveyard of false climate doomsday predictions that are swept under the rug by the media, seemingly because it's so useful for them to have something scary to talk about.
We know that the atmosphere's temperature goes up and down, and does not require human activity to do that. It has ranged from about 10C to 25C over the past 2B years (obviously with no human intervention). Earth has been about as cold as it ever gets recently, so even if there were no emissions by humans, it wouldn't be surprising to see the earth heating up. That's what it's done many times in the past.
We're being told that it's definitely due to CO2 emissions, when we lack the computational ability to prove such a thing. Because of this insistence on the CO2 hypothesis, all talk is about ceasing emissions. If we thought the earth was heating up of its own accord, all talk would be about configuring society to have huge amounts of reliable clean energy, which pretty much means nuclear, rather than solar and wind.
Note the same anti-human pattern as in the case of sea-level rise: it's fine for nature to add e.g. 2000 ppm CO2, but it's evil, wrong, and potentially disastrous for humans to add 100.
> No, but they definitely have the scientific knowledge to understand the scale at which they pump CO2 into the atmosphere and the first-order consequences this has.
Check your hypothesis. There have been times in the past when CO2 went from, say, 3000 to 4000. Did the global average temperature do what you think it should?
> It's like when you fly a plane
I'm not seeing a number of correct predictions out of total predictions. What do we usually think when somebody has a hypothesis, and based on that hypothesis they make some testable predictions, and the predictions don't come true?
> as well as knowledge of the issue among oil companies
Oil companies don't have any special ability to predict the future state of a complex system.
> So, you'd expect a 2000-dated discourse to be slightly more alarming, yes.
Actually, the UN said in 1989 that whole nations might be wiped off the map if we didn't reverse global warming by 2000, so I might expect a 2000-dated discourse to have some humility, considering that the doom prophecy totally failed to materialize.
I doubt the movie expressed absolute certainty, but it was indisputably meant to be alarming.
> the sea also could rise
It wouldn't be surprising, since they've been rising for 20,000 years. The strange thing about sea rise is that the tens of meters of rise from before the industrial revolution were good and natural, whereas the centimeters since are evil, and definitely due to CO2 emissions.
> I’m not aware of any system with a track record of predicting climates that far out.
This is right. Nor is there going to be any such system. The climate is a complex system, meaning it's fundamentally not amenable to simulation. All the models are toys compared to the reality. None of them even attempt to actually simulate what's going on. Not only is it impossible because we don't even know what the phenomena are, it's extra impossible because there's not enough computational power. I doubt humanity is capable of accurately simulating the sugar in a stirred cup of coffee, much less figuring out what's going to be happening with the atmosphere tomorrow, much less 30 years from now.
The models are (unavoidably, necessarily) just toys. They don't predict the future. Anyone who tells you that they are predicting the future with them is malicious or extremely naive. The models just masquerade as science to support political goals.