Not news of course, but worth restating. Credulous 'scepticism' about the fundamentals of the climate collapse threat has been largely driven by corporate propaganda campaigns. Those campaigns were themselves constructed by people who weren't 'sceptics' -- they believed AGM was happening -- but considered their short-term profitability more important. Climate collapse 'sceptics' were nearly all gulls.
My view is that climate change is a world problem. Governments will not oblige their citizens to make steps on their consumption if it means reducing their comfort and their economic power.
Steps should be taken in advance so that once green deals are put in place, countries can implement those effortlessly.
We often hear that some countries don't make enough efforts, but
1. Other countries import carbon emitting products
2. The developed countries of today have emmited greenhouse gases for decades, which allowed them to become developed countries.
The geopolitics of climate change are extremely difficult. I don't think the UN is up for it.
Although a better scenario would be to enact tight regulations on a country basis, but it's a political minefield. Imagine riots because people want to keep using their cars and trade goods that have become illegal, or vendettas against people who emit co2.
> Governments will not oblige their citizens to make steps on their consumption if it means reducing their comfort and their economic power.
Here is the catch - efforts to reduce overconsumption mean slowing economy and lower tax base. No goverment can afford that.
> Imagine riots because people want to keep using their cars and trade goods that have become illegal, or vendettas against people who emit co2.
I believe we are on a verge of Millenial movement of some sort that will make a matter of enviroment a quasi religion of sorts. That would change the attitudes.
For a long time, the only times pollution reduced was during economic slowdowns. Lately, these movements have become separate. Measures to make our consumption cleaner means we can reduce our pollution without having to reduce our consumption, and that's basically what we need. Cleaner energy production, electric cars, better insulated houses, etc. It's happening way too slowly, but it is happening. We can absolutely do this if we put more effort in phasing out the old technologies.
The superstition that so-called 'economic growth' (which is actually not growth at all, but just a global entropy increase) can be decoupled from physical dismantling of ecosystems is a faith-based initiative of consumer-fundamentalism. There's no evidence that it's possible, and even the best approaches we can make would take centuries of technological advance - each decade destroying more of our living home.
> I believe we are on a verge of Millenial movement of some sort that will make a matter of enviroment a quasi religion of sorts. That would change the attitudes.
So did everyone in the 60s and at other periods. The world changes, but it’s no revolution. I’ll believe it when I see it, I remain cautiously optimistic but have my doubts as to whether the ‘millennials’ will be able to pry themselves away from their self interest for long enough
And the world will be a different place in another 50 years, but did the golden age that all our parents thought was coming in the 60s materialise to their expectations? let's temper ours lest we grow disappointed and jaded.
Change is slow when viewed in a small timescale, and massive when viewed on a large one. I hope we sort our shit out, and I will contribute to the best of my ability to bring this about if at all possible. But, you know, history.
The birth of the first Green movement in the 70s was very much revolutionary. The cultural memory of just how bad things used to be has unfortunately already faded, to the extent that reactionary forces are endeavoring to bring back the bad old times.
I'd like to add, in case you don't know what I'm refering to:
There is a large movement widely called "Fridays for Future" going on lots of european cities (large and small) in which students will go on a school strike to demonstrate for sensible climate policy.
Sure, and there's the Extinction Rebellion stuff in the UK. Here in Australia we're kind of complacent/lazy, not often giving a stuff about anything except sports, celebrities, and limitless acquisition of consumer crap. But there is a bit of the school strike stuff happening.
It's all a bit marginal though, isn't it?
People might object to the 'quasi religious' aspect of what you're talking about. I'd make the point though that any culture which acknowledges even minimally the true nature of the living planet that is our home would appear mystical or religious to the deathly bloodless denatured worldview that so ruthlessly holds power now. The latter is either going to give way to something that is a better fit for physical reality, or it will destroy itself by soiling its own nest, largely in hapless ignorance regarding what's at stake.
I can only speak out of my bubble here, but I believe the Fridays for Future movement and resistance against the copyright reform really shook the German youth and the whole country as a consequence.
I have a feeling things are actually moving: A few days ago a mid-sized German YouTuber has published a 1 hour long video harshly criticizing the major German party CDU, not for its support of the copyright reform, but largely on economic and ecologic grounds. Everyone, from younger friends to older coworkers are talking about it, sharing how far they have watched it so far, pledging to watch it ...
I don't think it would have spread this rapidly and far (it was at 2.4M views the last time I checked) without the already tense climate.
Maybe this movement is not a "quasi-religion" (though it might become so), but environment-politics are finally a major, widely discussed point.
>I'd make the point though that any culture which acknowledges even minimally the true nature of the living planet that is our home would appear mystical or religious to the deathly bloodless denatured worldview that so ruthlessly holds power now.
I call it the 'Global Non-Denominational Death-Cult'. Ultimately it favours no particular group, but the tithe is very high.
> Governments will not oblige their citizens to make steps on their consumption if it means reducing their comfort
It's interesting though that they will oblige them to wars.
This is generally not a true statement. Government is not entirely segregated from the citizenry. It is, in some form, representation of society (even in a dictatorship).
It isn't necessarily denialism nor shilling to question the validity of predictions. It's a good thing.
Unfortunately the whole topic has become breathless "99% of scientists!" and tied in with social economic programs to the point I'm not convinced any more. To say nothing of failed predictions.
Ya, I believe C02 _should_ warm the earth based on the science. But this whole world is ending thing I'm waiting to actually see something.
For the record, I've been hearing this for over 30 years as an adult and so far not much. Perhaps one day it will all catch up, but I'm skeptical at this point.
I think it's more about the way we communicate model results. In the media, it's communicated as absolutes like "The ice caps will be gone by 2100!"
In reality, the model results are communicated in uncertainty. More akin to "There's a 70% chance the ice caps will be gone by 2100 if the current level of CO2 emissions are not abated." That's a much less sexy headline to say nothing about the fact that most people wouldn't be shocked if a 3 in 10 chance event actually happens. Nate Silver does a much better job explaining this in his book "The Signal and the Noise"
> better scenario would be to enact tight regulations on a country
Here, I am less convinced.
Globalisation came about in good part to move from the places with tighter regulation - on pollution, on employment, on finance - to those without.
It is the same way that offshore finance came about by trading each regulation against each other. The net result is there are fewer controls everywhere, despite a few headline money laundering regs. The history of this is fascinating.
I find it difficult to imagine how solutions to climate change, that don't rely on improvement in technology, won't result in authoritarianism. I don't think that all the world governments will accept limitations on their people freely.
The clean air acts, the banning of freon and other CFCs, and other public health measures like treated water and ending leaded fuel required regulation not authoritarianism. All placed limitations on their people.
Why would this be any different?
We don't need to replace political choice, or freedoms with repression to bring in carbon taxes and start banning plastic, coal or gas.
Because those limitations are minor compared to "eat less meat", "don't drive a car" and "food will be more expensive in general". These are going to be very tough sells among populations that are not rich. Look at the Yellow Vests in France.
Goods were more expensive in general when a sales tax or VAT was brought in. Without riots or oppressive regime.
If taxes and regulation penalise meat, people will buy less meat - just as taxes and regulation have changed the town landscape from cigarette butts everywhere, to remarkably infrequent. When I was at school pretty much everyone smoked. Now it's really uncommon to see a smoker. Again, there were no riots or oppression.
Considering the clear majority on both sides of the political map in Europe are convinced by AGW, rich and poor alike, I don't think it as tough a sell as you make out. Inequitable solutions will, rightfully, be a tough sell among populations.
None of those things are even remotely comparable to eating meat. Meat is the easiest way to have a balanced diet in terms of nutrition. When you increase the price then people will simply pay more. Besides, VAT and other such taxes are only around 20%. You need far more than that. Look at the Yellow Vests if you want to see what happens when prices go too high. We even have instances of political parties being voted out because they increased alcohol taxes too much. What do you think would happen with meat?
Any nutritional argument is moot unless you are thinking of outright blanket ban, which is a completely different proposition.
We were not generally malnourished in the West during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, despite consuming far less meat. Though we were far less obese and there was far less type 2 diabetes. A chicken was more a tasty, luxury treat than the tasteless, textureless rubbish readily available everywhere today. Most ate meat, but far less in each meal.
Doesn't seem enough to bring down governments by itself. Defining party by single issue is downright dangerous. Particularly when the popular mood seems to increasingly be "fix the damn climate". The Tories - now polling 9% - probably wish they'd never even thought of mentioning the Brexit they are incapable of delivering.
p.s. The Yellow vests seem to be about the inequality of action rather than prices. French fuel prices are amongst the lower in the EU.
Meat is easiest because it's sold everywhere. Where I live, someone makes a variety of vegan convenience food that they've managed to get stocked in 7-11s all over the place. The food is all comparably priced to meat-based equivalents (this is stuff like "vegan bbq pulled meat hand-pie") but completely plant-based.
If you ate one of those, you'd find it as filling, tasty, and satisfying as something meat-based.
In fact, eating those (just out of curiosity) was the thing that even opened me up to a meat-free diet, because before that, I'd had friends serve me tempe, tofu, etc., and man that stuff is a bad introduction to a plant-based diet.
If you added a tax on meat to where the tasty, high-quality plant-based thing being sold at the 7-11s was now 20% cheaper, people would switch and not even think twice about it.
The problem is that, up to now, people package plant-based food as part of a lifestyle, and not just something tasty to stand alone on its own. Hopefully the impossible burger and beyond meat close that gap, too. You shouldn't need to be a straight-edge hardcore vegan to eat only plants 6 out of 7 days of the week.
So that the masses can't have it, but anybody making over say $100K year (or $1M year) it's a non issue ("yeah, burger went from $5 to $20, still hardly a dent to my finances").
We can either make things more expensive now with a tax that we can structure so that poor people are hit less hard, or we can wait until catastrophic climate change makes everything expensive and there is nothing we can do to help the poor because even the rich are struggling.
Because nobody cares about "freon banning" with plenty of alternatives, or treated water, and leaded fuel had a long runway letting people the time to replace cars etc.
It's the actual "hard" bans and lifestyle change requiring laws that people would complain about.
And doubly so corporations and private interests making money off of them.
I don't know about the solutions - my view is that the die is cast.
> My view is that climate change is a world problem
That's undoubtedly true, and the fossil fuel companies clearly acknowledge this - their 30 year anti-science propaganda campaigns have been waged across the world.
"You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and 𝙀𝙭𝙭𝙤𝙣. Those are the nations of the world today."
It's interesting how much has changed since that movie came out. What was then shocking, now is mundane. Watching it now it's hard to see what the fuss was about. We've just all gotten used to it.
there has been plenty of genuine scepticism from within the scientific community (as there should be). what has happened is that it has become politicized such that the science is suffering for fear of being labeled a heretic. much of the research is published via the intergovernmental panel on climate change; well it's right there in the title. none of this is to say that there aren't also entities pushing propaganda (exxon, etc)
Unless you literally don't believe the raw numbers coming from sensors all over the world there is no room for doubting that the climate is changing.
There can, and has been, plenty of discussion as to the reasons, but for at least thirty years now the consensus has been that human activity is responsible for the vast majority of the effects we've seen.
Following the consensus is a fine choice if you're trying not to get lynched by the mob, but it really has very little to do with science. The scientific method does not say, "get everyone you think is smart to vote on it, if they all agree, it must be true". I really wish lay people would quit turning science into a religion and scientists into priests.
I'm not a climate scientist, so I let the experts battle it out and then look at the scientific consensus. I trust experts in all areas of my life, because I don't have the time to become an expert myself. Following the consensus is a fine choice if you're a politician and your task is to ensure that future generations have a chance to live a more prosperous life.
That's a very reasonable position, and I won't argue with you there. Many times you need to make a decision with imperfect or incomplete information.
However you go one step further and attack anyone who dares question that view, and you do it with the a sense of righteousness as though you did understand the topic and applied the scientific method to get there. That's just bullying, but you get away with it because you're part of a mob. I mean it's one thing for an expert to claim certainty and argue their point of view, but you aren't actually certain - you just picked the safer bet.
To be clear, I think the world would be a lot better place with less burning coal. I care a lot about the poisoning and pollution in the oceans. I think smog is disgusting. I probably have one of the smallest "carbon footprints" of any adult you know. However, I know a fair amount about programming, math, and simulations, and I don't trust anyone who says they can predict a chaotic system 50-100 years into the future.
And concensus doesn't compel me much at all. Once upon a time in America, you could probably get a concensus (even among scientists!) that God was real.
The very fact that the climate is hard to predict and the models we use probably linearize a lot of nonlinear systems is what scares me most. The further we depart from normal average temperatures, the more likely it becomes that we hit some scary feedback loop the models don't account for and enter a hothouse Earth climate with palm trees at the poles.
"A lot" maybe, but I suspect the majority would do the opposite and deny/understate the problem.
Also the parent comment is more about risk management. The sensible thing to do in the absence of information is precisely to imagine the worst outcomes and act with them in mind. The precautionary principle is a statutory requirement in law in some jurisdictions to help avoid the worst outcomes.
> I suspect the majority would do the opposite and deny/understate the problem.
I don't know. I've seen so much fear-mongering in my life. We're all going to die from zika, n1h1, ebola, killer bees, aids, mrsa, terrorists, and so on. In each case, there's something to be afraid of, and you might actually know someone who died in one those ways, but the media and the lay people blow it way out of proportion. The people I've know who died have been from drugs, suicide, heart failure, stroke, and car accidents.
> The sensible thing to do in the absence of information is precisely to imagine the worst outcomes and act with them in mind.
I can't accept that as sensible. It's easy to contrive unacceptable courses of action by applying that rule: "The police don't know who the murderers are, so they lock up everyone to avoid the worst outcome." "The doctor isn't sure how bad the infection is, so we amputate all the limbs just in case."
America has an apocalyptical culture. Probably from the cultural imprint of our end times themed christianity during the early years. That whole book of revelations madness. (The Puritans who first colonized the New World were fruitcakes, even back then.)
But we did come very close to snuffing ourselves with nukes a few times.
And ever since I started paying attention to ecological collapse, mid 1980s, pretty much all the predictions have come true. (The only confusing bit there is we've also had amazing technical progress, masking the underlying destruction.)
I so hope that I'm just being an alarmist and it's all going to work out. I have kids, and hopefully grandkids one day. Yet I remain concerned.
Very often the reason we don't die from these things is because we take precaution. Imagine we had done nothing against ebola or aids, we'd have millions of deaths by now. (In the case of aids, not all places were so lucky [0].)
Same for the ozone hole, or dying trees from acid rain. When the source of the problem is identified, we can fix it, and that's the case for greenhouse-gas-caused climate change.
Risk management has a cost. The question is what is the price? What are you willing to pay for being "safe". What are you willing to risk?
Are future generations worth more than current? Should we militarily prohibit poor countries from using fossil fuels which they use to better their lives?
You can say worst outcomes with other things too, meteor, nuclear war, pandemic, terrorism, etc. you always have to find a balance.
With the climate change debate, this balance is completely ignored and people are seriously suggesting making fundamental changes to society without having any ability to know what the consequences of those will be.
Climate catastrophism is itself a potential danger.
Wind and solar constitute less than 1% of world energy consumption and doesn't have all the other properties and uses that makes oil such a fundamental and necessary ingredient for modern living. Hopefully overtime we will find something that's better, for now it's hard to find as amazing and flexible a resource as oil.
I like this particular comment because you've stated what you're for, versus what you're against.
There is a lot of daylight between our respective positions. I don't agree with most of your assumptions, or statements of fact. So of course I don't agree with your conclusions. Alas, our realities are so far apart, there's zero profit in trying to find common ground.
I do have a request, a suggestion: Make some predictions. Set some arbitrary horizons. Guess what you think will happen. Write it down. (No need to share with me.)
I used to be very bullish on both algae for biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol. Much disappointment. As a layperson, I don't know enough to know the why nots and what ifs. Or if those two techs can ever be viable.
Likewise, I totally didn't foresee solar doubling every 30 months. Nor the rise of the wind juggernaut.
I was wrong. I usually am. So with new data, I reluctantly have updated my worldview.
I've made several predictions in this thread and I have been making others through the years I have a pretty good intuition about what to worry about and what to now, historically.
I'm from Denmark originally I grew up with wind and understand the pros and cons pretty well and I know the reality of wind and solar which isn't what you seem to think it is.
Furthermore, now I am investing in interesting energy companies doing anything substantial and I can just tell you that it's a much harder problem than most thing and is solved by neither sun nor wind.
I am wrong about a lot of things and I will change my position when I am, however, this is not an area I am wrong about but an area I predict you will realize in 10 years from now that I was right about.
This is why I say there is no scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change we can't deal with and I have yet to hear anyone able to refute that. Climate catastrophism is going to be a joke a decade from now and we won't be leaving oil anytime soon, it's simply too valuable for human life and the ability to live with nature.
Furthermore, I seem to be one of the few people who actually care about the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion which is how much do humans affect the climate. What's the number? Where is scientifically demonstrated proof?
If you can give me that and show me it's high then you have convinced me. Until you do that then you are asking me to act on something there is no scientific evidence for.
Anyway, thank you for at least being civil about it and not (I assume) downvote me like more or less anyone do on anyone who dares say anything that isn't part of the normal spiel.
> Nuclear would probably win out, then oil and coal
Possibly, but it doesn't seem likely. In most parts of the US, it's cheaper to build new solar or wind than any of the fossil fuels. In some areas, I've read that it's cheaper to build new solar or wind than to run existing fossil plants. I don't know what the rest of the world looks like though.
No, it's not cheaper as you have to factor in the backup energy you have to build to support when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.
I would urge you, if you are really interested in the truth and a rational position on this, to go and do the research. |
I did which is why I am very very aware of the difference between speculation and demonstration and how much of the claims of wind and solars ability to power most of the worlds energy needs are a completete utopia.
Again less than 1% of the world's energy is the consumption of solar and wind, and that's with all the political tailwind it has gotten.
A lot of the cost of building nuclear is extreme bureaucracy and the kind of security metrics are being asked, yet it's still much better than solar and wind in the long run, much safer, more stable, cleaner, scalable and cheaper.
So yeah lets remove the subsidies. Wind and solar will fall apart.
Because there isn't any reason for me to jump to a conclusion. For other reasons, I already have a carbon footprint and voting record almost anyone in that consensus would approve of. Is it really important that I "believe" all the things people are afraid of? I'm pretty content to leave some topics unresolved until I get more information.
I am not a fan of "believe" or dogma of any kind myself. I tend to go on likelihood. I ask myself is it more likely that the 97% are correct or the 3%?
I think Bayes theorem might be worthwhile here. Besides, going with the majority or authority as a principal is almost the definition of dogma. That's not likelihood in any rigorous sense.
When weighing up the likelihood of something it is valid to consider the opinions of experts. Dogma is believing what an authority says is incontrovertibly true. I am not saying that man made climate change is incontrovertibly true, only incontrovertibly highly likely. It is true that the view of the great majority of the experts in a field has authority, particularly in regards to science, but it is an justifiable authority, not one for example one built solely on tradition.
"Bottom line: What the 97% of climate scientists allegedly agree on is very mild and in no way justifies restricting the energy that billions need...But it gets even worse. Because it turns out that 97% didn’t even say that..."
The Forbes article describes how the "97%" value was fabricated:
"Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t."
"The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested..."
Your source for that article is a man named Alex Epstein, who is paid by coal industry figures to advocate for a "new industrial revolution".
> In a September 11, 2018 piece at the CIP website, Epstein disclosed “proudly” that one of his industry clients was Tyler White, president of the Kentucky Coal Association. [22]
Also interesting:
> Alexander Epstein planned to release his “Energy Liberation Plan” for consideration by 2016 political candidates. According to an article by Epstein in Forbes, the Energy Liberation Plan seeks to combat “backwards energy and environmental policies that are anti-development, not anti-pollution.” He contends that we are “squandering the opportunity of a generation, through blind opposition to our three most potent sources of power: hydrocarbon energy (coal, oil, and gas), nuclear energy, and hydroelectric energy.” [15]
I am reading, and I am neither weeping nor laughing, because this is exactly what I expected to see.
If this is someone you expect to accurately represent climate science, I think you are mistaken in holding them in that regard.
As a counterpoint, here's another take on the "97%" figure, a review of the several meta-studies that have been done on climate science:
Their conclusion is that between 90 and 100% of climate science papers agree that 1) climate change is occurring and 2) it is caused by human industrial sources.
Of course, the man paid by the Kentucky Coal Association would disagree, but in this case I would defer to Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Because that consensus is trivial. Probably 100% agree that the climate is changing which is the question people agreed on. Even so-called skeptics agree on that. It's all the other questions that have much more uncertainty and less consensus.
The use of that number is the kind of outright political manipulation that's so prevalent in this debate.
Keep in mind we aren't even talking about scientifically demonstrated conclusions, we are talking about speculated conclusions. The IPCC doesn't do any research themselves and don't check the data, its a meta-study.
What started my skepticism was when I realized they don't actually know how much human co2 emissions affect the temperature. Go try and find that number, you won't find it cause we don't know. Once I realized that and started understanding how the climate models work and saw how much interpretation and fitting and vague language was being used to obstruct the actual science, I realized that worrying about the environment was more rational. There is very very little actually demonstrated science in the climate debate it's almost entirely ideological and used by politicians to gain more power and create something to rally up voters around. In 10 years the climate catastrophism we see today will be laughed at. Just wait and see.
The scientific consensus is that climate change is happening and that it is human caused. Being "skeptic" about this is like being a flat earther. Baseless skepticism is not any better than blind faith.
Not that's not the scientific consensus but thanks for proving my point by arguing in blind faith.
The scientific consensus which EVERYONE agrees about even the so-called skeptics is that the climate is changing.
There is no consensus that it's human-caused, there are some indications that humans have an effect but you won't find any actual scientific proof of how much.
So the real question here is why you blindly believe something that you haven't even understood. You are literally just repeating the media not actually science which is a much more subtle discussion.
Actually, yeah, something like 99% of working scientists in climate-related fields agree it's human-caused. There've been a number of meta-studies about this.
If you want to know more, you can google this. It's a discussion that, if not for the fossil fuel money being pumped into stirring up controversy (also well demonstrated, also google-able), would have been settled long ago.
As a depressing parallel, there are also HIV deniers, too. There's one prominent scientist, I think the guy who invented PCR, who claims that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, and he's got a small following. It's dwindled over the years, but he's still out there, trying to raise doubts despite the mainstream science on HIV leading to treatments and even possible cures, while his work leads to nothing.
Edited to mention: of course! There are also evolution deniers! Why does everyone dismiss them, but open their arms to skeptics of human-caused climate change? What's different about human-caused climate change and evolution?
And I don't need to google it I actually spent years looking at the material and methods. You on the other hand cause if you had you wouldn't claim things like 99% and you wouldn't actually believe consensus was science.
Not a single concrete piece of evidence for your position just claims.
Where is the scientifically demonstrated number that shows how much humans affect the climate?
"Google it".
Couldn't find it? Of course you can't cause we don't know what that number is because we haven't actually demonstrated it. Instead we are speculating that because we can't find other reasons and CO2 emissions correlate with the temperature increase then it must be that.
Yet how do you explain the 0.5 degree increase from late 1800- mid 1900 were we didn't do any significant CO2 emissions and how do you explain that the temperature haven't gotten up much more than the same 0.5 from the mid 1900?
Yes humans probably have some effect but we don't know how much.
If 100% agreed that it was humans caused that doesn't change anything unless they can scientifically demonstrate it which they can't.
All you have is namecalling. No science, no data just an attempt at bullying without anything to back you up.
I can back my beliefs up scientifically, you can't. Yet you call me the denier.
> The IPCC doesn't do any research themselves and don't check the data, its a meta-study.
The people writing the chapters are involved in doing the research. (It's not like doing that is a full-time job, mind.)
> What started my skepticism was when I realized they don't actually know how much human co2 emissions affect the temperature. Go try and find that number, you won't find it cause we don't know.
Short answer - doubling the atmospheric CO2 should lead to an increase between 1.5 and 4.5°C, though more current work I remember narrowed the range down somewhere around 2.3°C-3°C. There is a lot of work down to narrow it down further.
I understand how it works and I assume you can see the problem with this. The IPCC report is there to prove human impact on the climate it's not there to show IF humans have impact on the climate.
I remember science bloggers complaining that the recent IPCC report didn’t predict enough doom and gloom to get political results.
They may well be right, but they weren’t saying that they had reason to believe the IPCC had understated the influence carbon dioxide, methane, or some other gas has on the climate, or that predicted emissions where wrong, etc. They were complaining that the report didn’t have enough scare mongering. That’s not science, and it could easily lead to a big overcorrection in a few years.
Not really once you realize how much of the fearmongering is completely baseless.
There is literally no scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change that we don't know how to deal with today let alone in 10-40-100 years from now.
> I know a fair amount about programming, math, and simulations, and I don't trust anyone who says they can predict a chaotic system 50-100 years into the future.
Then you obviously don't know basic physics. The average temperature is much easier to predict (if some worse feedback doesn't get involved to make the development even worse, that is) than the microscopic "chaotic movements." I rather believe that what's behind your statement is that you just don't care what is going to happen in 50 or 100 years.
Ugh, if you're going to just attack me, why not jump to the big guns and call me a shill for the oil company or some other cliche.
> The average temperature is much easier to predict
If you do enough averaging over a long enough period, this can be true. I mean, we can all tell the average position of a double pendulum. I'm guessing you think 1, 10, or 100 years is enough time to average temperature. Try looking at the last 400,000 years and tell me how well you can predict those swings.
> I rather believe that what's behind your statement is that you just don't care what is going to happen in 50 or 100 years.
You can believe anything you want, but I doubt you used the scientific method to get there.
> Try looking at the last 400,000 years and tell me how well you can predict those swings.
Actually if we had so reliable measurements for that period like we do for last hundred years, it would not be hard.
Your arguments have no basis, just an attempt to distract from the facts by grasping for what is not being discussed (e.g. 400 thousand years precise inference). Given the information we do have we have very good understanding of the relevant phenomena.
the scientific method is about hypotheses and experiments. we're running a global experiment now, with potentially disastrous consequences, which can't be repeated, and you're saying you're fine to wait for its outcome because it's unscientific to do otherwise, basic thermodynamics notwithstanding, and you dare to tell others that science is turning into a religion, where in fact you have an irrational approach to the problem at hand which you're rationalizing as 'scientific method'.
i'm afraid that in fact your stance on climate warming is a question of your identity instead of logical thought.
the scientific method DOES say that a result should be reproducible. and in this case it is reproducible beyond what is required for it to become accepted
I'd believe the simulations are reproducible. However, re-running the atmosphere of the earth is certainly not an experiment anyone has reproduced. There's at least some room for questioning whether the simulations have sufficient fidelity to predict a chaotic system 50-100 years into the future.
Arguing this topic doesn't do me any good. It's like trying to tell a devout christian you think there's room for doubt and uncertainty about whether the apocalypse is coming. Most people just lock their heels and reinforce their current beliefs. This message will probably fade away into a light shade of grey, making me wonder why I even bothered.
However, every time I see someone trot out the word "concensus", as though that's relevant to good science, I grind my teeth.
It would be really interesting to know if the research/models have been verified by any independent researchers not employed in academia - ideally from the world of finance, where evaluating correctness of methodology and models is absolutely crucial. Ideally they would also be highly sceptical of the predictions and have a pro-economic growth bias.
Sarcasm? Forgive me, but it's honestly tough to tell.
Amusingly, I think anyone who can make a model of the climate which can predict 100 years into the future really should make a model of the stock market a modest 1 year into the future instead. Having done so, they could make enough money to buy whatever technological or political change they think would solve the climate problem.
No - I think having a pro-economic growth bias would be helpful, because they would likely have a higher hurdle for being convinced that we may indeed need to sacrifice economic growth to change the course of humanity's future for the better.
If they do their research and are convinced, it would mean a lot more to me than if someone who supported the conclusions of environmentalists' policies apriori reaches the same conclusion.
If there is any such bias among climate scientists (e.g. people that go into climate science already hold certain beliefs about what should be done politically, and inadvertently favour the models / parameters / methodology that support their beliefs), this would help mitigate it to some extent.
> No - I think having a pro-economic growth bias would be helpful, [...]
I like how that sets the bar higher for extraordinary claims and extraordinary proof. Although honestly, I'll always be skeptical about extrapolation and predicting the future more than a few cycles out.
> If there is any such bias among climate scientists [...]
I agree. It seems fair to ask who goes into and gets accepted as a PhD in that field. It's pretty easy to imagine there could be a selection bias, and "science advances one funeral at a time".
Much of the world was under ice 20K years ago. And the earth has generally warmed since then and melted much of the ice ( with occasional refreezes ).
And the "consensus" that human activity is responsible is utter nonsense. Feel free to research where the "consensus" came from. Also, whenever "science" relies on "consensus", you have to start wondering because real science doesn't rely on consensus - it relies on hypothesis and experimentation. The speed of light isn't derived from "consensus" but rather experiments. Science isn't politics, people don't vote for what the facts of science are.
You talk of 30 years of consensus. Do you know what the consensus was before the consensus on global warming? We had 30 years of consensus on global cooling. And before then we had decades of consensus of malthusian collapse. And before then consensus on social darwinism. Strange how all these "consensus" driven science has been debunked as pseudoscientific nonsense.
We are in many millenia long global warming period. This trend started long before humans started using oil. Thinking humans are responsible for global warming is like thinking humans are responsible for the rise and decline of tides because we drink water.
Your comment seems completely rational but ignores that we have science refuting your opinion. Not only that, the research on this comes from different branches of science that all converge on the same conclusions.
I suggest you do a little more reading on the topic. Storms of My GrandChildren is an easy place to start.
And as always if you have a good source that disputes climate science I would really appreciate a reference.
The book is Storms of My Grandchildren, I mis-remembered the title. It's written by James Hansen a NASA scientist. So, don't dismiss it as mass market rubbish.
The book does address each and every point that you've made in this discussion. I recommend you give it a read.
Elsewhere you speak of the "propagandists". Who are these people? When I've dug into this I found 2 groups. Scientists that speak in dense terms and explain evidence. And people linked to industry funding that speak in generalizations and easily refuted science. I'm very curious to see who you consider a climate propagandist.
I'm always changing. But you could point to a moment before and after I hit puberty, or, on a long enough scale, the period during which I morphed from teenager to adult.
This "the climate is always changing" was just classic anti-intellectual rhetoric spread in response to changing the name from "Global Warming" (Oh but the Earth isn't warming during winter!) to "Climate Change". Be careful. Don't let yourself be swayed by those who only wish to harm you.
No one denies that the climate changed before and that it's a natural thing. The problem is that in 100 years we went from slow changes to 10 times the amplitudes ever recorded.
The questions isn't "Do these cycles exist ?" it's "Are we sure we want to trigger one early ?"
Greenhouse effect is a very well studied effect. CO2 / other gases level are a very well studied field. CO2/other gases dramatically increased since the industrial revolution. Are you also denying that ?
When you study something you have to look at the settings in which it happens and look at the time frame. Sure changes happened 10k+ years ago, that's not invalidating anything related to our role in the current change.
> Thinking humans are responsible for global warming is like thinking humans are responsible for the rise and decline of tides because we drink water.
You won't win anyone over with such nonsensical arguments.
> 10 times the amplitudes ever recorded? Or are you just conveniently only looking at the past 150 years?
Look at the units. 15c in 1000 years is less than what we're expecting if we continue on our trend (+2 to +5c by 2100, probably more after that once the reinforcement loop kicks in properly).
> The industry of climate fearmongering has more to do with politics/geopolitics than climate or science.
Yet the vast majority of deniers are politicians or people with no scientific credentials, and the extremely vast majority of scientists recognise that humans play a role in the current climate change.
> We don't know ... we don't know ... we don't know ...
Yeah sure, there are many things we don't know. But the things we know all point toward the same conclusion: the current change is at least partially man made and it'll suck balls if we continue on the trend.
> Yet, you are absolutely sure of man-made climate change.
Alright, let's say, for the sake of argument, that I'm wrong; what then ? We can start mining coal again and stop investing in green energies I guess. Everything we do to curb down climate change, consuming less, polluting less, &c. is a net positive even if climate change isn't man made.
> We don't definitely know why we had a "little ice age" in the last millenia.
Yeah but what we definitely know is that it was not even -1c globally, over 200 years. For comparison we gained 1c between ~1910 and 2010, we expect 2 to 5 more by 2100.
> When we modeled that to the earth, it predicted much higher temperatures than we have.
Source?
I did find one a year or so ago (from a site like 'skeptical science' or similar name), but when I dug into it the author cherry picked data to make his conclusion accurate and left off recent data. But, when I went to the author's own publications with current temperatures the model was accurate over the full time period. Merely the skeptic simply choose a time period ending that showed a short term divergence.
You are mistakenly conferring the correlation between long and short term trends I think. The reason for long term trends is (as far as I know) somewhat uncertain and might be having an effect, but the short term trend is mostly attributed to humans doing things and can be shown to massively correlate to events (like the industrial revolution in the UK, massive oil consumption etc).
The consensuses you mention were in their time not a 'consensus' and dubious at best and already recognized by the contemporaries of the time.
> This trend started long before humans started using oil
Correct to a certain extend (see other post for sources), they started using (very broadly as greenhouse gas emissions concern) agriculture/herding first, wood, and coal. Oil as a source of greenhouse gasses is mainly 20th century thing.
um, "climate changing" is uncontroversial. the question that science is trying to answer, is "why". one hypothesis being fossil fuel emissions. you will note even the IPCC does't claim to have a definitive answer. yet a bunch of programmers and entrepreneurs on HN have no doubts.
Sorry, but that's just not true anymore. Fossil fuel emissions causing climate change has been proven pretty conclusively at this point. Anyone saying otherwise is either misinformed or is intending to misinform others. I do agree with you that the issue has been overly politicized though, which has taken something that would be simply taken as fact given the weight of evidence otherwise, and somehow made it controversial.
sorry it wasnt clear from my comment, but mainly that a governmental panel == politicized, and also that the IPCC reports to the UNFCCC, whose mission is to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference with the climate system". in other words, it assumes the hypothesis that the science should be testing
It's not a hypothesis. That greenhouse gases affect heat retention can and has been directly observed. That the rise in greenhouse gases is mostly human-induced can also be pretty directly shown by isotope analysis, which can distinguish CO2 that comes from burning fossil fuels or burning forests from other CO2 sources.
it's politicized in the other direction. the ipcc reports have to be approved by all the member countries, many of whom (like the good 'le USofA) really don't want to take action on climate change. this results in IPCC reports that are watered down. for example:
> Political influence on the IPCC has been documented by the release of a memo by ExxonMobil to the Bush administration, and its effects on the IPCC's leadership. The memo led to strong Bush administration lobbying, evidently at the behest of ExxonMobil, to oust Robert Watson, a climate scientist, from the IPCC chairmanship, and to have him replaced by Pachauri, who was seen at the time as more mild-mannered and industry-friendly.[142][143]
There is no accurate number not even a range which can be scientifically demonstrated.
The data is not showing what you think it is and it's not the data you are getting served. You are getting served interpretation of that data which is very very very different.
The reality is this:
Temperature increased 0.5 degree celcius from late 1800's to 1950 before there were any significant CO2 emissions. Then it took a break and continued with about the same up until today.
How much of those last 0.5-0.6 are caused by humans?
That would be science. What we have today is mostly political and ideological and only a fraction of it is actually scientific by any reasonable interpretation of that word.
You might have a point if we were just taking temperature readings and guessing about the cause. However, the greenhouse gas effect is known, and can be easily demonstrated. Likewise, we can measure the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and see it rapidly rising[1]. We also know all the many human activities that release CO2 into the atmosphere. So there's a pretty clear causal chain here.
It can be demonstrated but that does not mean the entire system can be.
There is as an example negative feedback effects too in the system.
The temperature hasn't increased significantly from 1960's til today relative to CO2 more than it did from late 1800 to mid 1900.
So the question still becomes if the temperature increased 0.5 degrees while we weren't emitting that much co2 and it's done more or less the same in more or less the same timeframe with us putting much more co2 out there. How big a part is really humans and how much is natural variation.
If you want to convince me you provide me with actual scientific demonstration that aligns with the claim.
If we know how much humans are actually affecting due to CO2 then we can figure out what we can do about it. But as long as we don't know how much humans affect it I don't see any scientific foundation to go into the kind of panic we have seen the last 20 years really getting into the extremes these days.
> The temperature hasn't increased significantly from 1960's til today relative to CO2 more than it did from late 1800 to mid 1900.
> So the question still becomes if the temperature increased 0.5 degrees while we weren't emitting that much co2 and it's done more or less the same in more or less the same timeframe with us putting much more co2 out there. How big a part is really humans and how much is natural variation.
The increase has not been proportional to the increase in C02 in the atmosphere, but that is expected. Temperature is not directly proportional to atmospheric greenhouse gasses. Rather, heat loss is dependent on them (and on other factors like surface color, which is affected by ice melting, to name one. The main one that has changed thus far though is atmospheric C02). Just because the earth is trapping more heat though, doesn't mean that the temperature will make a large change instantaneously. Instead, the change in temperature over time will be proportional to the difference between energy in from the sun, and energy out in the form of emitted heat. By increasing greenhouse gasses, we reduce the latter, causing temperature to rise over time.
Since heat emission is proportional to temperature, eventually (if we stopped emitting CO2) we would reach a new equilibrium at a higher temperature. In order to get back to a lower temperature, we need to eventually actually remove C02 from the atmosphere.
This is precisely why climate change is currently such a crisis: even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emission now, which is obviously impossible, we would still see a significant further increase in temperature due to the imbalance in heat transfer that already exists due to past emissions. The more that is added, the greater that increase will be.
Everything I've said is backed up by clear science, so if you're really looking at this with an open mind, please tell me what part you disagree with or are unsure about, and I'll be happy to provide supporting evidence.
No, I'm not. CO2 has increased more than temperature, but both have increased, as you can see from the graph on the link I included next to that statement.
But temperatures haven't increased significantly and especially not when you compare from late 1800 to mid 1900 thats almost the same increase around the 0.5 long before any significant co2 emissions from us.
You're saying a 1 degree increase over a hundred years is not significant? That's an unprecedented rate of change.[1] And again, most of the effect from the greenhouse gasses released over the past 50 years hasn't been seen yet, because it affects the rate of change of temperature, not the instantaneous temperature. Unfortunately by the time the effect is impossible for you to ignore, it will be too late to prevent massive damage. Also unfortunately, that damage will impact all of us, not just those who don't believe climate change is an issue.
Anyway, this will probably be my last comment in the thread, since I'm getting the impression you're not really open to this information, but hopefully you'll prove me wrong.
1-degree increase first 0.5 from late 1800 to mid 1900 when we didn't emit much CO2 second 0.5 degree where we emitted a lot.
You were the one claiming your graph illustrated something.
You have no basis for this claim:
"And again, most of the effect from the greenhouse gasses released over the past 50 years hasn't been seen yet,"
Of course, it has and as we have learned it doesn't have as big an impact as we thought it had which is why they had to adjust it down.
By your logic, the increase in temperature from the first half of the last century was also then delayed from earlier in the 1800s where we used even less.
So perhaps you should consider if it's you not me who should be open to new information.
The relationship between greenhouse gas concentration and heat transfer is logarithmic, not linear, so it's not surprising that we don't see a linear relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature rise. Also, once again, greenhouse gasses affect heat transfer, which affects the rate of change of temperature, rather than temperature directly. That's my basis for the claim that the full effect of the gasses being released now is yet to be seen. Finally, temperature is noisy and in the short term is impacted by many factors, so looking at a short term (in geological terms) graph, an increase may not seem large compared to the noise. However, if you look at the recent increase on a longer time scale, you can see that it is unprecedented. And it is entirely consistent with what is scientifically expected based on atmospheric CO2 levels. If you'd like to understand why more deeply than my outline here, this is a good primer: https://skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enha...
I'm always open to new information. I'm no expert in this stuff, so I can certainly learn more—learned a couple of details while reading to try to fully answer your question actually. And it's a reasonable question why the temperature increase over the past 100 years (in particular broken into two periods) isn't proportional to the C02 increase over the same time. I think I've fully answered it now though; is there anything specific that I wrote above or that's included in that link that you dispute?
No it doesent explain it. I know the answer but its not convincing and no the models so NOT actually predict anything without the curve fitting. They are more wrong than right. Yes its logaritmic but question is how much of the increase is man made how much is natural. This is the question we cant answer. If 10% of the change is caused by humans its a very different thing than if 90% is human as one scenario means we can do something and should, while the other mean its waste of time. As long as that number isnt clear i wont loose my sleep over it.
OK, I'm not sure why you're not convinced. It seems to me that at the heart of it, if we massively increase atmospheric CO2, we know that atmospheric CO2 causes a greenhouse effect, and we do indeed see temperatures rising, then by far the most likely explanation is that the CO2 is causing the warming. We should require good evidence to the contrary to not accept that as at least a working theory. What's more, reducing the atmospheric CO2 will decrease warming, even if there is some other, unknown factor that is also contributing. And given that just a couple degrees of warming will cause mass extinction as well as likely significant human suffering, it would be prudent to act to counter it, even if it were actually unlikely that humans were the cause (which again, I have no reason to suspect).
So, as someone who seems eloquent and informed, your position is truly perplexing to me. The only explanation I can think of is that you have some vested interest in believing as you do, be it conscious or otherwise. Do you feel that accepting human-caused climate change would be betraying your political affiliations? Or is your livelihood, or those of close friends or family tightly coupled to the fossil fuel industry? Do you tend to distrust scientific evidence in other areas?
You don't need to answer these questions, but maybe ask yourself if there might be another reason why you're resistant to the most likely explanation here.
And yes I have vested interest. My children who I don't want to grow up in a world that is based on hysteria and so I do what I can to teach them not to just be reactive and listen to the media without understanding the underlying data and to make sure they ask the right question.
The right question is to figure out how much humans affect the climate.
The fact you are being downvoted really makes the case that any dissent on climate change makes you a heretic.
And before I'm downvoted, note that you don't know my position on climate change: all I'm against is punishing people for genuine disagreement of thought.
all I'm against is punishing people for genuine disagreement of thought.
I'll down vote you for the straw man. You have no idea why parent is being down voted, but a top runner on my list of guesses is that "scientists want to disagree, but they don't for fear of speaking up" is a pretty weak argument.
One of the more famous cases recently was Peter Ridd. He just won a court case against his university after being sacked for questioning the climate consensus.
He said the Great Barrier reef will profit from climate change and not die off because of it, is that the issue you mean?
Sooo - if it's true, great, one problem less! Regardless, there are still many other problems caused by climate change that he did not dispute and that we still have to fight. So the best course forward is still to reduce emissions, and keep an eye on the reef to see what's true.
---
Googling around I found the statement that
“Dr Ridd was not sacked because of his scientific views. Dr Ridd was never gagged or silenced about his scientific views, a matter which was admitted during the court hearing.” [0]
(But if that's true or not.. hard to say from here. The court recordings would have evidence.)
He's a physicists. Why would he have any idea about climate?
He's just a person with an opinion not a dissenting scientist.
And if his work suffered as a result of voicing such opinion then it was only to be expected.
If you voice stupid opinion regarding domain you know almost nothing about and prop it up with your work reputation it's only fair if that reputation takes a hit.
Everything in existence is a physical phenomenon. That doesn't mean physicists have authority on everything.
You might as well consider every philosopher an authority on everything because every problem ever solved was solved by thinking and that's what philosophers do. While in reality philosophers are only authorities on (the history of?) philosophy.
that's too harsh. philsophers are experts at a particular way of thinking: logic. it is surprisingly powerful for clarifying ideas and advancing knowledge, in much the same way as mathematics or the scientific method are. we would not say mathematicians are only experts on "numbers"
Logic is actually part of math. There are even few different logics math worked out.
Some philosophers follow logic but apply it to unanswerable questions. Some can't even do the logic part rigorously enough. Personally I have no respect for this field of culture and humans that pursue it. All of them are not even wrong.
The “97% consensus” number is based on surveys of scientists in general, not just climate scientists. Including scientists when they agree with a position, but not when they disagree (because they aren’t real climate experts) is a very strange debate tactic.
"Among the most-cited is a 2013 study of nearly 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate science published since 1990, of which just over 4,000 papers expressed an opinion on the cause of recent global warming. Of these, 97% agree, explicitly or implicitly, that global warming is happening and is human-caused."
This is not a well supported position. There are numerous well established scientists who have expressed concern and criticism on the current 'consensus' in regards to climate change. These include for instances Richard Lindzen [1], a member of the National Academies of Science, an MIT atmospheric physicist, and also a lead author on one of the scientific sections of IPCC climate report. Appeals to authority are foolish, but I think his credentialing is relevant to this discussion.
Beyond that, one major issue is that the extreme politicization of this issues makes it difficult for people to speak freely. Anybody who speaks their mind on this topic, when such view doesn't abide the 'proper' view is labeled, attacked, and ostracized when and if possible. So you end up primarily with radicals, fools, and a handful of people with extremely thick skin willing to speak. A similar treatment was given to those who, for instance, suggested that leaded fuel might indeed be harmful - the official government and 'consensus' position for decades was that it was safe or posed negligible risk.
I am not, in this posting, thus taking any side. But I do think if you ever want to achieve progress on any topic, people being able to speak freely is critical to progress. Only weak or poorly supported ideas need fear 'contrarian' views. And even in the rare case where those weak or poorly supported ideas happen to be the truth, they invariably become stronger over time (due to the accumulation of validated falsifiable evidence) while, vice versa, alternative views become weaker.
But perhaps more importantly, I think the desire to squash contrarian views has a paradoxical effect. The idea is of course to try to prevent the spread of these ideas, yet in reality there never works - even less so now that we've entered the era of the internet. See: China + Winnie the Pooh for an amusing example. But far more critically, I think efforts to avoid discussion are often seen as an inability to compellingly respond. Once ideas reach a critical mass, they will spread unless compellingly challenged. Refusing to challenge these ideas in a fair and impartial way only strengthens them.
Lindzen doesn't dispute that CO2 warms the atmosphere! The vast majority of "skeptics" seem to think it's all a fraud, and that CO2 does nothing.
There is zero support for that position.
If you would like to debate the merits of Lindzen's views, feel free to do so: he thinks there will be less warming than existing models predict. He doesn't deny warming!
Meanwhile he retired in 2013, and as far as I can tell has produced no active research in this field since 2011. And his 2011 paper was widely panned including by reviewers he selected. He had to correct numerous errors in the paper. According to wikipedia, he eventually argued that at least 75% of predicted warming was happening.
So, a 25% margin off a catastrophic level of warming. And that's the very best name you can produce. And this info is all in the link you sent. And that's apart from the question of whether he was right in his argument in 2011, which is a factual answer we can measure with temperature sensors. (IIRC, warming has progressed faster than expected instead)
Contrary to your point, there is tremendous economic incentive to prove that fossil fuels are safe, cause us no trouble, and can continue to be used. Anyone who decisively proved that would be a hero, as fossil fuels are very useful indeed. The absence of such a person suggests that this view is mistaken.
You're fighting against strawmen, which is understandable when everybody is afraid to talk unless it's to repeat the 'right' thoughts. It's quite obvious that greenhouse gases can increase temperatures. A basic understanding of how high frequency energy is converted into low frequency energy as is absorbed/emitted by the Earth and how the greenhouse gases react to both forms of energy is sufficient to prove this.
Lindzen's main issue is that the models are completely broken. As one example of this there is the 'Holocene temperature conundrum.' If you run our models on all data we have from around 10k to 6k years ago they all show there should have been significant warming. Instead we know there was significant cooling. And the reason for this remains completely unknown. In effect we are trying to forecast many decades into the future using models that break, even on their training data! This is a major problem.
And your perception of warming increasing faster than expected is once again being driven by the media. Our warming has lagged far behind models. For instance the first major climate report was the IPCC's report in 1990. That's nice because it forecast out to 30 years, which is just about now! They predicted a global warming of 0.3C per decade with an uncertainty of 0.2C to 0.5C on the 'business as usual' forecast, which is what we have followed. In reality, we haven't come anywhere near that. You can find various global temperature data, but here [1] are NASA's data. In particular (going decade by decade):
- 1990 = starting point
- 2000 = -0.04 'increase'
- 2010 = 0.3 increase
- 2019 = 0.1 increase
The IPCC was expecting an increase of 0.9 by 2020, with a minimum increase of 0.6. We've increased a bit less than 0.4 degrees. We're not even falling within the bottom end of their rather generous interval. That's, again, a major problem.
You're also misunderstanding that 75% comment. What Wiki (and he) was saying is that the temperature response is nonlinear. He is arguing that there will be a fraction of the expected heating due to a nonlinear response. In particular CO2 concentration levels have increased by about 30% and are at 75% of his expected temperature increase for a doubling of CO2. Does this mean his predictions are wrong, or does it mean the heating will slow? And similarly, we are only 15% of the expected heating for IPCC predictions, which are going in the opposite direction. Are the IPCC wrong, or will the rate of heating accelerate? This is an extremely critical distinction because if it turns out that increasing levels do not result in accelerating heating, then there's basically no problem whatsoever. Note both sides agree we'll continue to see 'the hottest year on [modern] record' for the foreseeable future. This might be what drove you to believe we were seeing more heating than expected.
All this said, I somewhat tend to agree that this is a dumb experiment to be running. I'd much rather roll back emissions, but I think the current science surrounding the arguments for such is running in an increasing number of problems as we start to be able to falisify or validate predictions. They're mostly turning up false (or at the very bottom of ranges), yet the media continues running sensationalized fearmongering nonethless. I think this is irresponsible, at best.
> Contrary to the IPCC's assessment, Lindzen said that climate models are inadequate.
> According to an April 30, 2012 New York Times article,[67] "Dr. Lindzen accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point "nutty." He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate." He also believes that decreasing tropical cirrus clouds in a warmer world will allow more longwave radiation to escape the atmosphere, counteracting the warming.[67] Lindzen first published this "iris" theory in 2001,[9] and offered more support in a 2009 paper.[51]
Hm.. So he has a diverging view on the consequences of warming on the tropical cirrus cloud coverage, and thinks the models are not good enough to reproduce the real climate. That's disagreement about the projections, not the basics, with most of the community, and that's ok, we can research more and figure out the truth. The problem is, we don't have that time (unless he's right).
Only reality will really tell. Let's hope he's right (not that probable), but act as if he wasn't, and see what else we can learn about the system to improve our understanding.
