Climate Feedback Phase Portrait

Every climate model — from a back-of-envelope energy balance to a full general circulation model — reduces to the same bookkeeping: a forcing pushes the system away from balance, and feedbacks decide whether it settles at a new equilibrium or runs away. Rather than painting that outcome onto a 3D globe, this view puts the state directly in its own phase space: a CO₂ radiative-forcing slider and three feedback-strength sliders (water vapor, ice–albedo, cloud) feed the same live energy-balance ODE, and a dot sliding along its dT/dt-vs-T line shows convergence — or runaway — exactly as it happens, alongside a scrolling strip of the resulting warming trajectory.