frmrCapCadet wrote:The science of the gigantic ocean currents goes back and forth on this. I understand there are no adequate mathematical models, and even data is more sparse than needed. Lots of work being done on this, of course.
I'm not specialized in climate change, but in science there is usually little debate. There's only "back and forth" on a topic when two schools of thought have comparable methods and databases to put their hypotheses on. This happens for example in archeology, where you want to find out more on the lifestyle of a prehistoric group of people. True, you can identify isotopes that remain in bones and teeth. You can say where somebody has grown up with an astonishing accuracy. But what if you've only found one skeleton...?
Climate science? You have one big body, IPCC, which can shove a lot of resources into computational models, which improve year for year. Also, we get better measurements every year - for example, every year we use more robotic probes that float (and dive) in all the oceans to measure temperatures, drift and salinity.
In science, we are never not 100% sure, but from good methods and high-quality data springs predictions we can pretty much trust.