
Former climate change deniers, what changed your mind? - carlosgg
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5zvuxx/former_climate_change_deniers_what_changed_your/
======
valuearb
When I first heard about climate change, I knew that there were essentially
three things that needed to be proven.

1) That climate change is happening, i.e. the world is getting warmer. 2) That
it's not a natural phenomenon, i.e. driven by human behavior. 3) That it's a
bad thing, i.e. not a positive thing for the world.

Fairly quickly I accepted 1) based on the evidence. Over time I accepted 2),
again based on evidence, but mostly on CO2 levels which I knew were well
correlated with warm periods historically and logically should be, given it's
a green house gas.

Much later I started to accept 3). I still think the negatives are over-done,
an ice age is far worse than global warming and we have no idea how close we
are to the next one. But species extinction simply can't be fixed after the
fact, so preventing it trumps all.

------
bantunes
I think we're being naive over most climate change 'denial'. These people are
not dumb, they just want to keep the debate going while being fully aware
climate change is happening.

By delaying society's mustering of will to face it, they a) confirm their
notion that we can't do anything about it (because in their minds, fixing it
requires the kind of kumbaya UN cooperation they loathe) and b) cash out while
there are still profits to be made in dirty industries and practices. And
we're enabling them by continuing to make this a debateable matter.

------
brianmurphy
I'm not a denier by thinking no change is happening. However, I do deny the
more aggressive estimates are true. This is easily fact-checked by going back
20 years and see who predicted 2017 correctly.

It just seems fishy that the most vocal proponents of global warming are
always pushing models that overestimate the amount of change. That kind of
constant inaccuracy needs to be questioned.

[http://www.snopes.com/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/](http://www.snopes.com/ice-
caps-melt-gore-2014/)

------
lighttower
I'm not convinced that the climate model is accurate - ​ climate modeling is a
billion times more complex than a 3 body problem which we can't solve. Nor am
I convinced that the increase in co2 is human driven. Or that we know how the
atmosphere will react with such increase

~~~
snowwrestler
Computer global climate models are not accurate. They are the best
approximations we can do today given the theoretical knowledge and data we
have available.

This often trips up engineers, who associate computer modeling with the
concept of a known system. But climate models are scientific, not engineering.
They exist to explore uncertainty.

The theory of anthropogenic climate change does not depend on global climate
models. If they did not exist at all, we would have the same concerns about
climate change.

The models are based on the theory, not the other way around.

~~~
jamez1
The feedback loops that cause everyone to worry come from global climate
models.

How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without
studying the local effects? The world is full of positive and negative
feedback loops, discussing linear effects on the earth without taking into
account these loops won't get us very far.

~~~
snowwrestler
They mostly don't. The models help us make detailed predictions, but you don't
need a computer model to know that warmer air holds more water vapor, or that
reducing snow cover reduces albedo.

A lot of the biggest questions about how climate change will play out can't be
well-modeled yet--like cloud formation, methane deposits in deep ocean or
permafrost, etc. We need to learn more, and as we do, we feed that into the
models and they improve.

> How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without
> studying the local effects?

We know that plants aren't absorbing all the excess CO2 because we directly
measure CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and they are going up.

------
jressey
tl;dr: "I had a cultural bias that I overcame with critical thinking."

