My only real claim is that we don’t know shit.

This is partially true. But I want to stress partially.

We do have very robust models of climate, of exchange cycles, of how chemicals and atmospheres and heat and cold and life all interplay, if we didn’t have these models we wouldn’t be aware of the impending danger and we would be saying “wow this hot spell sure is lasting” so let’s give science some credit here.

And that’s MY only position and reason for pushback. There STILL can be things done to avert the worst-case models, it’s going to be bad but it could also be a lot worse if no action is taken, and more likely than not, our species is going to slide through this one like Indiana Jones grabbing his hat behind the lowering stone block, but it’s not going to be without a lot of suffering and sorrow and loss of life.

But if this science denial/doubting continues, we might not gain enough traction and momentum in our education and outreach efforts to ensure actions are taken to reduce the amount of harm coming. The harm coming is going to be worse than anything we have imagined in Humanity’s long history, but we CAN get through it, we may even fix it if enough people can start working together. Maybe a few more degrees and people’s discomfort will finally drive our species to avert course at the last second like we tend to do a lot.

But science denial has been an agent of chaos that has put us here to begin with. I don’t like using science to predict the near future and then abandoning it when we need to make educated speculation on what can and cannot happen. If you truly believe that this trend is going to lead to iron boiling on Earth’s surface, that’s fine and you can believe that and it’s not a hill worth a fight much less a death, I’m just telling you that’s not what’s going to happen. Life will survive us.

The “exponential” heating curve you’re seeing on the graphs is a measurement of rates of change, NOT a measurement of maximum possible heat indexes or a prediction of long-term climate models, because Earth’s climate is complicated, it tends to change itself over long periods of time.

The most extreme instance we can see in the fossil/geological record was the Permian Extinction, where Earth lost 96% of all life, this was due to the Earth basically disemboweling itself across what’s now Russia and Siberia. This was a lake of fire that covered a sizable portion of Earth and gases and ash that plunged the Earth into a runaway greenhouse with deadly acid oceans and then eventually back to frozen snowball as the greenhouse gases began to stabilize (most greenhouse gases don’t have geologically long lifespans unless some process is replenishing them like Venus’s volcanic activity, even Carbon will eventually react or bond with things and over vast stretches of time be pulled back into the Earth from a variety of biological and abiotic processes.)

It’s also speculated that life was already thriving while Earth was undergoing the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period of around a billion years where Earth was just getting pummeled by everything from space debris to small planetoids, this was the period of time that saw the formation of the landscape of the Moon, and Earth didn’t look too different, with seas of molten lava and craters everywhere.

While sure it’s possible for a runaway greenhouse to create sterilizing conditions, there is just no scenario where we can see that as an outcome from human activity based on what we know.

And speculation does have its limits, we’re just all trying to be smart here and show we understand those limits. Just because there are gaps in our knowledge, we don’t need to summon Russel’s Teapot.