The system is hugely complex and in many cases chaotic. Most of the variables are unknown or poorly known. Or in some cases, very wrong. It's the scientific process to try to measure everything as accurately as possible, then come up with a model that tries to explain what happened (diagnostic analytics), what is happening (explanatory analytics), and what is going to happen (predictive analytics). Then there's prescriptive analytics that suggest what we should do to get a result. There's greenhouse gasses, the absorptive capacity of the oceans, the greening (and desertification) of land masses, ice melting and not melting, the variability of the sun, the shifting of the magnetic field, humans putting out various gasses and planet-forming, cow farts, and on and on.
It's a hugely dynamic, complex, poorly understood system. Things happen very slowly over millions of years, or very quickly over days and even hours. We can peek into what happened in the past, and maybe even measure what's going on now.
It's great to try to say "X then Y", submit your analysis, and see what happens. That's the scientific process. But when politics gets into the act with people screaming "But we don't want Y so we must change X", or saying that "we don't agree with your analysis so it must be suppressed", that's when we get into trouble. Especially when money is involved.
There are few things we know for sure. I think it boils down to: The climate is changing. It seems to be warming. Now: Is that good or bad? (It's both good AND bad.) Should we try to stop it from warming? Why or why not? CAN we stop it from warming? Can we stop the climate from changing? If we try to stop it from warming, what should we do? Is that thing we do good or bad? What are the direct and indirect consequences?
I suspect that there are no good answers to these questions. Our discussions here are good ones, and I think that we are all in violent agreement, although it doesn't seem so sometimes.
Good analysis. The one point I would question is whether the *climate* is chaotic. It's generally accepted that *weather* is chaotic, but climate refers to the average of weather over a region over timescales of years and decades rather than hours, days, or even months. When I was studying climate science more seriously 10 years ago, the paradigm was that climate is NOT chaotic and can be treated as an energy balance problem, albeit a very complex one.
In some ways it was thought that the simplest aspect of this was the energy balance that determines the average global temperature: the Sun delivers a certain amount of energy to the Earth that depends on its distance to the Sun, and the Earth also radiates a certain amount of energy that depends on its temperature. The balance between those two processes determines the temperature at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). The average global temperature at the surface is determined by the way the temperature changes with height, which is affected by many factors including the Greenhouse Effect. Among those factors is how much heat is being stored in the oceans as opposed to being released into the lower atmosphere - and that's one of the wildcards right now. But other factors include feedbacks like the ice-albedo feedback - the polar caps tend to reflect rather than absorb sunlight, and as they melt, more surface is exposed that is better able to absorb sunlight. Or the water vapor feedback - the warmer the surface layer, the more water evaporates from the oceans and the more water vapor the atmosphere can hold, but water vapor is also a GHG so it contributes to the warming of the surface layer. These are ALL wildcards that we still don't have a great handle on, as recent research makes clear.
The energy balances that determine which locations on Earth get warmer and which get colder with global warming, and how precipitation patterns change, is a much tougher modeling problem. 10 years ago the models really sucked, and I'm not sure that they've gotten much better since then.
Although there isn't universal agreement on what to do about it, I think we here are in pretty good agreement that trying to stop climate change by abandoning fossil fuels is not going to work until we have alternative sources available that market forces can sustain without government subsidies. And we're just not there yet, for better or for worse.