Reddit reviews A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Infrastructures)

Look at the land versus the oceans. Ocean observations are quite sparse, especially back then. There is less confidence with the ocean predictions.

So your conclusion that the ocean model is incomplete is quite true. But it does predict the last 50 years quite well, where we had better data. Land data is much more complete (to a point) and there is higher confidence.

I see your reasoning a lot. It can't reproduce this particular aspect, so it must be all wrong. I can understand it, and see where it's coming from, but in the realm of science, this reasoning doesn't make sense. It means that we've missed something, but we've captured most of it. Most of it means a lot. Most of it means that large portions of it are understood. As for the parts that aren't understood, grants and research focuses on those, on the places of high uncertainty, of incompleteness, of doubt.

If you really want to delve in deep, I'd recommend this website and this book.

:* From "The Discovery of Global Warming, Ocean Currents and Climate"
>Through the 1950s, few scientists found much reason or opportunity to study the slow circulations in the depths. Oceanography was a poorly organized field of research. There were only a few oceanographic institutes, jealously isolated from one another, each dominated by one or a few forceful personalities. The funds for research at sea were wholly inadequate to the vast subject. The economics of shipping and fishing supported only studies of practical interest such as surface currents; little data had been gathered about anything else. The field as a whole scarcely looked like solid science. Theories about ocean circulation had what one expert called "a peculiarly dream-like quality."