I have a problem with coming up with accurate long term climate projects because of the following ...

If you look at the history of how chaos theory was developed, you can get a good grasp on why projecting and extrapolating long term temperature trends is an asinine task.An early pioneer of the theory was Edward Lorenz whose interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction in 1961. Lorenz was using a basic computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run his weather simulation. He wanted to see a sequence of data again and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course. He was able to do this by entering a printout of the data corresponding to conditions in the middle of his simulation which he had calculated last time.To his surprise the weather that the machine began to predict was completely different from the weather calculated before. Lorenz tracked this down to the computer printout. The printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, but the computer worked with 6-digit numbers. This difference is tiny and the consensus at the time would have been that it should have had practically no effect. However Lorenz had discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome.

first of all we need all of the variables that go into climate change (impossible)

then we need to know the exact initial conditions of all variables (impossible)

then we need to know how a change in one variable affects ALL of the other variables and to what extent (impossible)

furthermore, each variable has a differnt lagging effect both on other inputs and the final output itself (the observable climate change)and every little decimal point we are off in ANY of these gets further magnified by time and the extent to which we are off in the first place

Surely, what we are doing is not helping the Earth. The fact of the matter is that the Earth was warmer during the Medieval Warming Period, and other planets are undergoing strange atmospheric changes. Could there possibly be another more "big picture" origin? Another question to ask is how human contribution is changing the climate in the midst of what the naturally occuring trend is.

" If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

there were snow flurries in my backyard in the DC suburbs in July. Go figure...

I think speed is something that is underestimated often by science and, in particular, in relation to global warming. The only thing that could save us from it, as I see it, is the counter-effect which is built in to the equation at some point, as in the disruption of the conveyor belt in the ocean that drives our seasons. On this point one fascinating program I watched on TV was about the Scablands and disputes as to whether the strange topography formed suddenly, or, over thousands of years. I couldn't remember the name of the theorist, but Wiki says there were two - first Bretz and later Pardee - who believed they were formed suddenly as opposed to over millennia. The scientific community rejected this vociferously, apparently, until eventually somehow an accepted theory developed that made it plausible. That theory is that "super cool water" (water which is below freezing, but still a liquid) got into the fissures within the ice damn holding back a nearby glacial lake and caused the ice damn to explode with a sound and fury unfathomable and the lake to drain over the land in a matter of hours creating the strange topography just as quickly. I remember the program also related this to some recent shifts that have taken place in Iceland, although I do not remember much about that specifically. I wonder if this phenomenon might account for the surprising-to-scientists sudden loss of large ice masses at the poles. Anyway, I think that speed is likely to be underestimated, particularly because it is damned scary to do anything else, but, in relation to it. Who wants to think about Pompeii perhaps happening today?