This simple script gives you full control over your thinkpad's noisy fan curves. This is a small project I dug up from a while ago. Open to bug fixes and improvements. (Credit to Kodehawa https://github.com/kodehawa for significant help). Its also based off of some other thinkpad fan control scripts (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed) like this, however I always struggled to get them to work on modern versions of linux. So this is updated to work with the latest kernels. Tested on Manjaro and Ubuntu 18.04.
I have only tested this on a Thinkpad T420s, but it should work on most older Thinkpad laptops. I haven't had this laptop in about 2 years so I have no way to test if this program still works.
git clone https://github.com/aaron-dev-git/thinkpad-fan-control
cd thinkpad-fan-control
chmod +x fancontrol.sh
You can also modify your /etc/bash.bashrc to start this on boot. It does require root.
There are a minimum -ge and maximum -le temperature for each level of fan speed. The lowest is level 0 with no fan. The maximum fan speed is level 7, critical speed. The temperature is measured in celsius.