re: #1062 Pythagoras

No, I didn’t mean X as a threshold. Maybe I should have said, “any X.” My point is that for any intermediate X, the CO₂ will hit that value both on the way up and on the way down . Does it, at level X, contribute positively to dT/dt or negatively? How can this answer reverse depending on whether you’re on the way up or on the way down?

As for your exponential result, that is the right solution for the DiffEq you present. However, the blackbody radiation formula (which has T⁴ in it) is a big term too. That is, in the limit, dominant over all lower order terms so we know the instabilities can’t go off to infinity. Still, there can be regions that are locally unstable.

My point is NOT that there’s no feedback — there most definitely are some positive feedback terms in the equation. My point is that the video did not address this well.

Publish and request your peer review, then post your links. Thank you.