Is climate change real?

Climate change models have proven very accurate

Question: Is climate change real?
Position1 of 3›: Yes, climate change is real
Argument‹2 of 4›: Climate change models have proven very accurate

Scientific predictions about human emissions and the rise in global temperatures have proven very accurate. If anything they have been too conservative, underestimating the impacts and speed of climate change.

The argument

The argument rests on the maturity of the method rather than on any single result. Scientists have been gathering facts about climate change for years, and the models built on that data are not a recent innovation: computer models have been in use since the twentieth century, which means the approach has a long track record behind it rather than a short one. What those models do is specific. They calculate the rise in CO2 levels and, from that, determine the rise in temperature to be expected in future. The two quantities are linked by physical relationships rather than by extrapolated trend lines, which is why a model can say something about conditions that have not yet occurred. The claim being made for them is not that they predict weather but that they track the relationship between atmospheric composition and temperature. The argument's central point concerns the direction of travel. Because the models have been running for decades, each generation of them has been built on accumulated data and computational capacity the previous generation lacked. As technology advances, so does their accuracy — more observations to constrain them, finer resolution, more processes represented explicitly rather than approximated. A method refined in that way over that length of time is in a different position from a new one. That is why proponents treat the modelling as evidence rather than as speculation. Whether climate change is real is not being settled by a projection about the future alone; it is being settled by a body of work developed, tested and improved across generations of researchers and equipment, which continues to point in the same direction as it becomes more precise. On this reasoning the models have proven accurate enough to rely on, and what they show is that climate change is real.

Premises

[P1]Scientists use computer models based on long-gathered data to project CO2 levels and future temperature rises. [P2] These models, refined since the 20th century, have proven accurate and continue to improve with advancing technology. [C] Therefore, the accuracy of climate models confirms that climate change is real.

Counter-arguments

Models can only show theories and predictions made by scientists. Models don’t always go according to plan. Computers aren’t perfect either. They could malfunction. Plus, human error could affect the outcome of the models.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Computers aren’t perfect and could provide false data.