Yeah I hear you loud and clear. I get it. You believe this to be true, and/or that the confidence interval is very tight. I think the confidence interval is large enough that "warming is caused by CO2 and we gotta stop" is plausible but not proven yet. How on earth do I have the arrogance to say this?
1. I'm trained as an engineer and a scientist. I've read a lot of papers and I've got a good grasp of significance.
2. I've seen experts be wrong before and I understand a lot of psychology to where I understand how they can be both wrong and fervently believe they're not. It took me two days to convince a biology professor (PhD) that he was performing a simple calculation incorrectly and that it was skewing all his results. He was doing log(A)/log(B) instead of log(A/B). It's the first rule: https://www.biogazelle.com/seven-tips-bio-statistical-analys...
3. Big models of big complex systems can have lots of interlinkages that aren't always apparent. If I let you analyze a Honda engine and come up with a model for it, if the engine never revved above I think 3000rpm you'd make a great model and have really high confidence that it was highly predictive. Then when revved to 6k and the engine diverged from the model you'd flip out and not understand what's going on until I told you that the engine has two different camshaft profiles and it can change between them. To you, who has only ever known that an engine has one camshaft profile and that it's fixed, this is madness!
I hope this analogy makes it clear that I don't think there's a big conspiracy but rather than a lot of people who are very earnest and very well meaning can get the wrong result through systematic problems that aren't immediately apparent.
I also think that some of those people might in their head say "look even if this isn't true, the risk that it COULD be true is so great -- I mean it's the whole planet! -- that we need to solve this problem anyhow" and then go ahead with that. And then they'll get extra impassioned because now they're on a mission to save the world! Can you imagine how motivating that would be?
The problem is that it seems like there's no downside: we fix CO2 and everything's great even if we didn't strictly speaking need to. The problem is that there is in fact a downside, a huge burden on everyone on the planet because we don't yet have cheap, reliable alternative energy sources. The first world only developed because of energy and it seems pretty shitty to deny the 3rd world the chance to develop because we don't want Venice to sink.
Personally I think that if you gave me the choice, to sink Venice and a few other cities and to bring the whole developing world up to developed world standards, that's a very tough choice. Is our art and investment in buildings more important than their lives?
Further the idea that tipping points exist which will catastrophically damage the climate is fair, but nobody's looking at it the other way either. Maybe there's some other linkage which will actually start to make the Earth shed heat faster once the temperature goes up three degrees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/...
If these are accurate, then the Earth's climate is actually VERY stable and there must be restraining forces as well as tipping points.
