Thank you for this wonderful response. You communicate so many important ideas. I am a philosopher, not a scientist, but sometimes that can be an advantage because from outside of the house you can see things that people inside the house cannot.

I am firmly convinced that systems tend to be more complex than science thinks they are; that includes the social sciences. I hear scientists say they want to simplify things, but seem unwilling to admit that some things cannot be simplified. That desire, among others, is warping scientific perception and causing it to miss what is evident int he world.

What you say about climate science does not surprise me. Of course the systems are complex, of course there are forces at work that are not described by simplistic theories. I really like your analogy of stairs instead of ramps. It reminds of when an evolutionary theorist came up with the idea of punctuated equilibrium, and the paleontologists, engaging in the group think of Darwinian gradualism, resisted the idea fiercely. But the theorist, I forget his name, was looking at the fossil evidence rather than simplistic theory, and he has been vindicated.

Scientists need to stop being enamored with charts and graphs and care more about seeing that is there. The world effects us not math and graphs.