Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

1. You aren't allowed to go around announcing you fully understand the mechanism at play until you have successfully validated your hypothesis via enough correct predictions being generated by it.

2. You aren't allowed to team up with others, make every possible prediction and then when one of them ends up right by chance, claim credit for the entire group. That's the same thing as if a single person made dozens of predictions and then cherry-picked one to claim understanding.

3. You aren't allowed to change the data to fit the theory. You have to derive the theory from the data.

Climatologists and really quite a few other fields don't work this way. Because they make predictions with a 20 year horizon but want fame, glory and funding before then, they make an endless series of predictions that can't be validated until the end of their career, and then immediately skip to the announce stage. They do it over and over. When after a decade or two it becomes clear their predictions were wrong, they point at predictions they made last year - not yet validated - announce them as correct and state that their earlier incorrectness was just science at work. Or they decide it must be evidence of an error with the data and go fishing for reasons to change/ignore it. There's endless examples of this, and Climategate revealed not only them doing it but literally stating to their colleagues they were going to do it because otherwise the skeptics would win, and far from scientists embracing skeptical review they actually turned out to hate it and call it things like "Lord Voldemort".

Re: global cooling. The Ars article wriggles around and omits a lot of relevant evidence, but I find actually the top comment to be the clearest example of how it all goes wrong. It's by a climatologist who worked on modelling during the 70s. He says things like:

- "I found him [Schneider] to be an excellent scientist, but also a political creature, and thus a funding magnet."

i.e. so-called "excellent scientists" were corrupted by a desire for political influence and money, exactly what skeptics argue today

- "various senators wanted to show off these models to prove they were worthy of the huge federal funds to build them."

i.e. the science became a circular process of justifying prior funding grants, exactly what skeptics argue today.

- "the early models were pioneering efforts on overburdened (slow) computers, so oceans were ignored"

i.e. the models were known to be inaccurate but presented to the public anyway, exactly what skeptics argue today.

- "The answer we got was predictable: Meh, can't tell. But the additional funding sure helped."

i.e. politicians weren't told the models were useless and so the money kept flowing, exactly what skeptics argue today.

- "For a while we didn't know for sure. We simply laughed at the simplistic articles that appeared in the press"

And finally, another lie. Why do climatologists lie so fucking much, all the time? This guy claims he worked directly with Stephen Schneider who, apparently, was one of those who "didn't know for sure" and they "simply laughed" at the "simplistic articles". So why did he write a whole book about global cooling?

https://www.amazon.com/Genesis-Strategy-Climate-Global-Survi...

If they were "simply laughing" at the press, why was he giving interviews to the New York Times to tell them all about the threat of global cooling? Why did he tell them that this was a consensus position and why, when apparently they didn't know and the models didn't really work, did none of these people who were being mischaracterized stop laughing for a second and object?

"they [climatologists] are predicting greater fluctuations, and a cooling trend for the northern hemisphere [...] the news for the future is not all good. The climate is going to get unreliable. It is going to get cold. Harvest failures and regional famines will be more frequent"

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/18/archives/the-genesis-stra...

But it's a rhetorical question. We know why the press reported these views as the consensus of all climatologists, it's because none of them actually objected to it. They didn't object for the same reason they don't do that today: they love presenting a united front, and threatening that would have endangered their prestige and funding, which they care about much more than truth. Nothing has changed and nor will it until we stop listening to these people.

There is disagreement about when the peak will be reached. As your link shows, the UN puts it in 2086. The Global Burden of Disease Study published an article in the Lancet putting in 2064. The UN projection is solely based on current demographic trends and assumptions regarding life expectancy are quite optimistic. I have seen at least one study put the peak in the 40s while arguing that the rate of decrease in the total fertility rate is underestimated which while not likely is not impossible - historically predictions of variation in the TFR have not been very accurate.

Generally, the impact of potential feed back loops including climate change are understudied. There is a convincing argument to be made than worsening conditions could lead to the peak happening sooner.

At the end of the day, models remain models. They are not exact forecast. It's important to keep in mind when people argue we are doomed based on them.

What is the degree of human causation? How much can be imputed to solar cycles at any given moment of time? What % of CO2 is produced by humanity? Is there a possibility of actual catastrophe? Should pollution reduction and cleanup be prioritized over carbon capture/reduction?