
NYT op-ed claiming scientists underestimated climate change lacks evidence - sohkamyung
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/new-york-times-op-ed-claiming-scientists-underestimated-climate-change-lacks-supporting-evidence-eugene-linden/
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missosoup
Scientists didn't get climate change wrong. Once modelling began in earnest,
the results of the models were so extreme and alarming that scientists were
ignored/silenced and only the milder scenarios were made visible to the
general public.

Now evidence is making it impossible to pretend any longer that those mild
scenarios are playing out. The opposite is happening, the most pessimistic
models have turned out to still fall short of the mark due to the number of
positive feedback loops involved in global warming.

Scientists didn't underestimate anything, they were told to shut the fuck up
and stop inciting mass panic if they wanted to keep their jobs. The fact that
mass panic might have been justified didn't cross the minds of the politicians
involved.

Climate change is a hard, perhaps fatal, lesson that society cannot be
governed by career politicians. Opinions don't matter, election cycles don't
matter, personal beliefs don't matter, 'this will ruin the economy' doesn't
matter. What matters is an existential threat has presented itself and the
scientists best placed to address it have been suppressed by the political
technically ignorant ruling class so that it can continue its existence
unimpeded for just a little bit longer.

~~~
kgwgk
> only the milder scenarios were made visible to the general public.

The public has been given all kind of predictions, some were quite extreme (
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”) and have failed to
materialize.

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itcrowd
There's a difference between scientific predictions and popular-press
predictions. Your example (“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”)
is not a scientific one, but one spread by popular press with no scientific
research to back it up.

The difference is important, because inaccurate reporting by the popular press
undermines science.

~~~
kgwgk
The question then is why Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the
climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, was saying such
things to newspapers twenty years ago.

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thomasedwards
I cancelled my NYT subscription because of that article last week, and cited
it as the reason. Might have to take something for my schadenfreude.

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yodsanklai
I usually don't read news article about climate change, because 1. I don't
expect any breaking news on this subject, 2. I rather read what has been
written and validated by an assembly of international scientists.

Everything is synthetized and well-written in the GIEC report.

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Hitton
That's ridiculous. If anything, scientists overestimated the climate change.
There were predictions of climate change displacing 50 million refugees by the
year 2010, northern snow cap should have already melted and hurricanes should
have become more common, but none of that occurred.

~~~
itcrowd
Please cite the scientific articles (not newspapers) making such claims. I
don't think there is any credible report of these allegations.

~~~
larnmar
I couldn’t find that specific one, though I did find this article from 2007
predicting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2013...

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm)

Edit: Also I just found a brand new article predicting it’ll actually happen
by 2044:

[https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1205850/Climate-
chang...](https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1205850/Climate-change-news-
Arctic-ice-disappear-global-warming-human-blame-study-UCLA)

I wonder what the prediction will be by 2044.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Not really. That's a well known headline taken out of context. A model
predicted ice free _summers_ by 2013, and the article includes two scientists
discussing that they think the model overcooks the prediction, but both
thinking it will come far sooner than previously believed. e.g. the first

"In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early
as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040."

and from the second

"A few years ago, even I was thinking 2050, 2070, out beyond the year 2100,
because that's what our models were telling us. But as we've seen, the models
aren't fast enough right now; we are losing ice at a much more rapid rate.

"My thinking on this is that 2030 is not an unreasonable date to be thinking
of."

The Daily Express are a credible source for nothing since their purchase by
Desmond.

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RickJWagner
Reminds me of this recent article I found on RealClearPolitics:

[https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/11/14/the-ongoing-decline-
of...](https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/11/14/the-ongoing-decline-of-the-new-
york-times/)

