And yet the climate change deniers will find a way. I don’t see why this has to be made into such a political issue when we have hard numbers and objective facts to back up the claim that we are causing global warming, it’s clearly observable. The situation gets worse every passing year and we’re still trying to appease the “doubters”. Concrete and drastic measures need to be taken, it is high time.
In my experience, the reason climate change doubters are so opposed is because of the “concrete and drastic measures” proposed. It has very little to do with “hard numbers and objective facts”. People are reluctant to give up their lifestyle or lose a job for the sake of “global warming”, so they focus on the possibility of it not being real instead.
Identifying a phenomenon and its causes doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to address it. It's a common fallacy. Questioning prognostical conclusions and recommendations made based on not a single data point (we don't know of another planet that went through something similar) is a valid stance. Scientists have been wrong before. I remember Allan Savory confessing his regrets to the killings of thousands of elephants in an effort to prevent desertification, only for things to get worse. Later they realized that the ancillary effects of their grazing activities were actually contributing to slowing down and even reversing desertification.
Conversely, 31% of Americans don't believe in climate change, which would be over 100 million people. That's pretty concerning. Though I also completely agree that the division is further exacerbated by the media.
20% of Americans believe almost anything under the sun (although it’s a different 20% for each issue). Demanding 100% belief in climate change to accomplish something is not the best strategy.
That's fair, though you need people to understand the facts before you can even start the discussion. And it doesn't help that it's a partisan issue in the USA's broken two-party system, ensuring that the discussion gets nowhere.
I think climate change and the human factor are very easy to accept. Although, some years ago after listening to Freeman Dyson on the topic, I became aware that acknowledging the phenomenon doesn't imply that we necessarily also know where it will lead and what to do about it. Yet, many of the proponents are acting exactly as such, pushing their own agenda. Hence all the ensuing politics.
That's an overwhelming majority. The 'doubt' is media-created FUD being replicated to pretend to be an issue. The issue is not the population, who overwhelmingly agree this is a problem. The problem is the ruling class does not want anything sudden to be done that would endanger their investments, and rapid change away from fossil fuels and other climate-change causing investments is a danger to their interests.
A huge amount of issues in the world are manipulated to look like issues by the media. Don't fall for it!
But only 55% of Americans believe it to be human-caused. From the actual report [^1]:
> A majority of Americans (55%) understand that global warming is mostly human-caused. By contrast, only about one in three (32%) think it is due mostly to natural changes in the environment.
The remaining 13% presumably answered "don't know" -- so there's at least some hope of reaching up to 68%.
However, even if that 13% is won over, there's still another big barrier to meaningful legislation: Anthropogenic skepticism is over-represented in congress.[^2] Every state gets 2 senators regardless of population, and the more populous states tend to already have senators that believe it is caused by humans.
That's the evidence that the climate change "doubters" are really concentrated on the decision-making/ruling elite. But the reason for that is simple - if you don't support climate-change legislation you get more funding.
This is what I meant about the ruling class protecting its interests. It's not hard to see.
Before there was Climate Change, there was Global Warming.
Why was there a name change, a rebranding if you will? In some cases, there is conflation, but they mean very different things.
When it comes to Climate, scientists say that climate is in 30 year intervals. Day to day that is just weather.
> The problem is the ruling class
I would be much more inclined to believe that there was an actual problem if the ruling class was not gallivanting around on private jets to nonstop events to preach to us plebes about the evils of our fairly tame lifestyles in comparison.
Strangely, COVID has been great for driving down wanton energy use
> that would endanger their investments, and rapid change away from fossil fuels and other climate-change causing investments is a danger to their interests.
That sounds like one of the prevailing narratives in the media.
However, I think the truth may be complex than that. After all, it is Exxon that did invent the ubiquitous Lithium-ion battery.
If we are going to replace our oil-based economy I have little doubt that the innovation behind it will come from either Academia or BigEnergy, and market reasons will drive this change.
I don't understand how you can be this cocksure about being absolutely wrong when the first hit on google for "global warming vs climate change" leads to this page:
The term "global warming" doesn't capture everything involved in the climate change that is caused by global warming. This was already known as a myth almost a decade ago:
Responding to a discussion of climate with weather measurements is a non sequitur.
Our understanding of climate systems is actually in its infancy. We don't have the observing systems, at fine grained enough resolution, the accurate models, to actually understand what is going on, because in many cases, observations do not match models, or have huge gaps around inputs.
> You should not repeat "talking points"
The ironic thing about that website you linked is how far it is from the truth of what scientists in the know actually are talking about. We internally talk about the woeful accuracy of our models. "We were only off by 1.8 this year". We talk about the importance of correct siting for in situ measurements, and coming up with better fixes to build a reference system. This is also why our observing systems have changed since the 90s, and why there is an effort to ensure incorrect systems like ASOS do not enter the record, and things like HCN are improved.
Please refrain from an aggressive style of argumentation.
Climate is not weather, and weather is not climate.
I never said there was a sneaky conspiracy. There was definitely a name change, and my organization at the time (one of the leading data producers for what is happening) changed all of our naming at the same time this occured, in both the media, and other places.
Our models are wrong. Deeply flawed. We know this. Just like our HCN siting has been deeply wrong too (the data that is the premise for it occuring). We know that in certain cases ASOS data was incorrectly used in the climate record, and also, in the weather record. That is completely inappropriate use of a data set that was never intended for generalized observations.
The process of fixing these things, and making changes to improve them, and iterate upon them - we call that science.
This is why the legacy HCN now has been updated by the release of the reference network.
The crucial aspect you're missing is from the latter half of the skepticalscience.com link I posted above. Here is the particular graph that shows usage of "global warming" vs "climate change":
Both terms were in common usage, with "climate change" existing before "global warming". It's not "rebranding" to realize that of the various terms in common usage, one of them is more accurate. "climate change" started rising relatively in popularity around 1994 after being roughly equal to "global warming", a decade before Watts' conspiracy theories.
Anthony Watts dances around understanding here, and writes "It is an unequivocal fact that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” have both been in use for a long time." So he agrees with the link I posted above. The PDF doesn't disagree, much as he'd like it to. Saying "climate change might be a better labelling than global warming" isn't saying "therefore we should rebrand it". It's agreeing that "climate change" is better than "global warming", but then detailing why "climate change" doesn't even capture everything going on.
That's honestly just a bad title. The article can be summed up however by the last sentence: "Rebranding a complex issue that most people think has already been rebranded ...". In other words, it disagrees with you: there was no rebranding from "global warming" to "climate change".
Holdren is saying why "global warming" isn't a great term. He's not arguing for a rebranding, he's pointing out why it stopped being as popular of a term 15 years prior to his speech. He does argue for rebranding to "global climate disruption", but that's irrelevant to your claim about "global warming" vs "climate change".
This is a rebranding, from "climate change" to "climate crisis". We can argue about whether it's a good change, but it's irrelevant to your claim about "global warming" vs "climate change".
Almost all of the answers there point out that it's a myth, agreeing with the skepticalscience.com link I posted above. The few answers that try to push that myth are diatribes that don't cite any supporting evidence.
Am not missing anything, am well aware of when terms moved from lingua franca for insiders that work in the industry, to common vernacular for the general public. Those are two completely different things.
Of course, Watts is talking as an insider. He is not Everyman Joe listening to broadcast news. He has been exposed to all the terms.
The public branding has changed, and also, so has it too for the industry that is the key data producers. The producers of the data have moved terms also. And, I think that is interesting.
Just because you say something is a myth, and a partisan fact checker say it is, does not make it so.
If something gets posted to Quora, or another question site, it is likely that something is an open question. I am not the only one to ask this.
Good science is about asking questions, hypotheses, predictions, falsification, data gathering, theory development, observations, and iteration repeatedly. Data crunching comes in particularly handy for this. Data is not inherently partisan, nor is asking tough questions. That is science as a process.
I noticed you are not responding to any of the comments I have made regarding the actual observing systems (HCN, ASOS, etc). So, to bring up things likes discrepancies between things like HCN data and remote observing system data would be overkill.
I think you want to have a political/ideological debate and I am not on HN to do that.
I'm not responding to anything other than the rebranding myth, because that's what I originally responded about. Going beyond that scope would involve walls of text that HN is ill-suited for, as evidenced by the amount of text already written for a narrowly-scoped topic.
I'm here because I saw a comment repeating a falsehood, and wanted to call it out. I dislike seeing blatantly wrong things such as this:
The market won't be able to adapt fast enough, I think.
I don't think all prevailing narratives in the media are false. The idea that most of our industry benefits from climate change being considered an "externality" is true. Anyone who benefits from this unpriced "externality" has full interest in keeping it that way. And that's probably 90% of economic activity.
I have little doubt that the innovation will come from industry, but the issue is that as long as we consider all of this an externality the market has no forcing function to change.
On the Davos crowd who goes around talking about climate change while jetting around, that is a PR effort that's to be expected. In the end it doesn't matter. Since it's an economic externality to heat up the planet, we all benefit and get destroyed by it at the same time. A billionaire can be making great talks about climate change but it is impossible for him to achieve net-zero when so much of our economic activity relies on pricing climate change at 0$. The exception to this is literally 1 billionaire, who's invested humongous amounts of net worth into Tesla.
Either way, there is 0 ways for the market to solve climate change when it is obvious that climate change is not priced into economic activity at all.
> The idea that most of our industry benefits from climate change being considered an "externality" is true. Anyone who benefits from this unpriced "externality" has full interest in keeping it that way. And that's probably 90% of economic activity.
I do think there are benefits to change that include many things that are already in development, or working now, such as better use of CO2, rather than merely emitting.
Given how much of green energy is completely dependent on fossil fuels for initial bootstrapping, I don't see the status quo changing for many years. However, once an alternative energy source whether biofuel algae, or others, or a combination start to grow their benefits over present day pricing, I am certain we will transition. Not from pricing in externalities, but because of obsoleting and profits. Who'd care to dig up oil for 30% profits when you can generate an efficient biofuel for 75% profits? Not saying it will be anything of the sort, just providing an example.
> Either way, there is 0 ways for the market to solve climate change when it is obvious that climate change is not priced into economic activity at all.
Given the rise of ESG investing, and how it is now dominating portfolios as many funds altogether refuse to touch dirty energy/ Big Energy, there is already pricing power built in. Because Wall Street values ESG, therefore there is a "valuation tax" being applied to Big Energy. This outside of pure ESG funds too.
Even Exxon just got a more activist board thanks to a tiny fund.
This is tiny steps. I agree there is some evidence of movement in the right direction, but I can't agree that ESG puts a price on carbon - I don't know how much of an impact it has, but it's doubtful that it has the impact a carbon tax would.
Everything that you're saying is true but they are incremental changes. I would put a bet that within 10-20 years massive market regulation + carbon tax will be forced onto industries across the world - that will be because climate change will be such a huge multiplier of horrific things we'll be forced to. But by then it's likely too late for 1/2 of the world's population to escape unharmed.
In fact I increasingly suspect that climate change is already causing horrific events around the world that we are ignoring because we are in the first world. It would be interesting to go around agricultural areas in the hottest areas of the world and see if food insecurity is increasing. I would bet that we're already seeing huge changes, but because we're insulated from it, we're ignoring it.
Basically we're looking at the same facts, but I think you are a huge optimist.
So what about China and other Asian countries who demonstrate by their actions that they've 'found a way'? They say one thing but do another, using many means to encourage the West to adopt policies that will increase energy costs while continuing to build coal-fired power plants themselves. Now why would they do that? In 2020, China brought 38 gigawatts of new coal-fired power into operation, more than three times what was brought on line everywhere else.
Seems they're not quite on board with the idea that 'concrete and drastic measures need to be taken'. Clearly they don't think there is an existential threat. And they can hardly be accused of being ignorant of the science.
Many economies that were considered developing during the Kyoto accords are now large economies but still pretending that they need to be excluded from such climate provisions.
Why is this being burried? Is there even any doubt about China's edge had been and still is ignoring envorimental sanctions and outright denying workers rights?
There wasn't any doubt for decades. Normal thinking people understand cause and effect. Understand basic science of greenhouse effect. Understand if energy is not reflected to space it is stored and that you can't do that forever with impunity.
I mostly agree, but I think this falls under the Black and White fallacy. Just because we understand the mechanism doesn't mean that the magnitude is large enough to matter. It could be that clouds or normal volcano erruptions have such a large impact on trapping energy that greenhouse gases don't matter. What you also have to show is that the basic cause is actually sufficient to explain the effect, and that's difficult when it's on a (planet) scale most people never think about.
Many times I see experts spend lots of time explaining the simple casue and effect relationship, only to gloss over the large amount of work they've done to convince themselves that it actually is significant. University PR departments and ads-driven media aren't helping.
It's fun to be able to know if the cause is man made, or just bad luck (happening naturally), but what is more important either way is what can we do to reverse or mitigate the negative impact of the changes to the climate?
Now I don't think there's many left who deny that the climate is changing at all. But I think there are still some who aren't sure the changes to the climate will have a negative impact on humanity. I think this aspect I don't often hear discussed, after all, the climate changing could be good, or it could be bad, or it could be a mix of those in different places or different use cases.
And once we start to agree that some of the changes will be bad, it also becomes important to discuss what could be done to mitigate the negative effects?
The actual cause being man-made isn't that important, except possibly as a way to understand how to remediate the change. Like if we stopped all CO2 emissions would it really help?
Off course, this is where things will get political, because any policy to attempt to mitigate the negative effects (current or predicted) will inevitably affect someone's bottom line (their money). So expect a lot of push back from the people who'd lose money, and a lot of promotion from the people who would make money. That political dance will make it really hard to figure out which are the actually good solutions and which aren't.
Edit: It's true, beyond just financials, policies could also have an impact on people's lifestyles and life affordances and conveniences, that will also play a lot in the political dance.
You can’t “solve” climate change via mitigation as the simple act of building infrastructure has an associated cost. The only thing you can do is minimize cost. Canadians buying air conditioners for example would reduce the numbers of dead in coming heat waves, but they’re not free.
It’s not even just about economic impact. Mandating all roofs be painted white for example has a tiny mitigating effect, but while the economic cost is low enough to justify people don’t want to be forced to paint their roofs white.
Many houses in British Columbia still burn fuel oil so in that particular case if they all switched to reverse-cycle air conditioners it would be a net improvement
Mitigation means to reduce something. Building a taller levy reduces flooding associated with increased rainfall variability, but a taller levy doesn’t mitigate climate change as you still have not changed rainfall or climate.
In other words mitigating impacts isn’t (solving/reducing) climate change.
> Mitigation means to reduce something [...] mitigating impacts isn’t (solving/*reducing*)
I don't really understand what you're getting at, it seems you're contradicting yourself?
Mitigating the painful impact of climate change to humanity is what we care about. What we need are solutions that can help with that. What about this do you disagree?
Edit: Not sure, but after rereading you I think you're thinking by mitigating impact I somehow exclude options of the solution space that would be able to reverse, halt or slow down the change of climate? If so, I am not, stopping the change on climate or controlling how it changes in ways that reduce the negative impact of the current change in climate are definitely valid solutions if they can be implemented and work and have the right trade offs against others etc.
I really don’t think their are mitigation options.
The classic example of an attempt to reverse climate change is to put a large sunshade in space at L1. That sounds like a direct solution as it lowers the global temperature except climate is more complex than just average global temperatures. The ratio of energy released into space at the equator vs the poles changes as you alter the worlds CO2 concentration. A sunshade has a huge range of less obvious knock on effects due to this which alters jet streams, rainfall, etc. Thus, you still end up with a huge shift in climate even if the temperature is returned to normal.
Similarly, reducing the rate of CO2 release isn’t mitigation because there isn’t improvement. Gaining weight slower isn’t weight loss.
Now, reversing climate change by having net negative human CO2 emissions is an actual solution. Except to reach that point we would need to have zero net emissions at some point which on it’s own stops climate change. Personally, I wouldn’t call building a levy after a flood ends as mitigating the flood, but that’s more of a semantic argument.
PS: I know that seems silly, but consider this. Diversified investing is a risk mitigation strategy because risk is actually reduced. On the other hand if if your broke and don’t invest then there isn’t any investments at risk which IMO isn’t risk mitigation. Carbon capture after zero net emissions seems like that to me.
No, it would take a hundred year for CO2 concentrations in the troposphere to start going down significantly. Cutting all emissions today won't help us enough as thresholds are being triggered that will release more and more greenhouse gases, reduce earth's albedo and acidify the oceans.
Groups and people who oppose climate change apparently do so because their livelihood depends on fossil fuel being produced and sold without much restriction.
Then, there's too much money to be made from the effects of climate change. It's already a booming business. Supplying water and air purifying systems, sheltering, organizing future population movements, securing the affluent from the needy masses, etc.
While the naïve worry about saving the planet, most people just think about saving their own arses. And for the moment, they are winning.
One group of scientists, who can't imagine that their self invented model could be wrong, can't imagine any other reasons than man made changes for the results of their model simulation.
How you get from that to "removes almost all doubt" is beyond me. Such hyperbole does more damage than good.
I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions, so I am sorry, but for me it doesn't remove "almost all doubt".
It’s unfortunate when we glom onto the headline and start arguing from there, because (assuming that NBC follows the traditional newsroom workflow) the scientists didn’t write the headline, and the journalist didn’t write the headline, the news editor did, and the news editor wrote the most attention-grabbing (a.k.a. “clickbait”) thing they could.
Now maybe if we dig into the article and the paper we’ll see that the headline is really an honest reflection of the content, but I’ll bet it’s not.
Edit: The words “remove all doubt” do not occur in the article, just the headline.
I don't disagree with you, but but at the same time I think that if the editor used "Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance" as the headline, probably nobody would have clicked, let alone read it. Heck, it probably wouldn't have made HN either.
>I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions
So you didn't read the paper, you don't know who wrote it, and you're commenting on a paraphrase in the headline. What exactly are you contributing to the discussion?
This is how deniers argue - latch onto trivial language in the title, and spew doubt. Instead of trying to understand, which would probably scare the pants off of them. So they put blinders on instead.
This is how extremists argue - spew the most outrageous ideas they can get away with, and when they cross the line into obvious lies, they attack the other side for "latching onto trivial language."
The editorialization is patently false. You are wasting political capital by defending it.
Well... extremely difficult, since all known climate evidence directly contradicts your proposition. 420ppm is not super great, but to call it "unprecedented" takes a mind-blowing quantum of scientific illiteracy.
No need to project your hysterical fears unto others. Your unfounded claims have been thoroughly debunked by skepticalscience.com [1] [2], together with all the other arguments [3].
Literally nothing you posted supports your argument that 420ppm is unprecedented. Again, perhaps you should focus more on scientific accuracy and less on outrage and flamewar, or perhaps go to a different website.
400+ ppm is unprecedented since 800 000 years, and the effects are recognizable now by year-by-year changes that consistently break out of historical limits for both temperature and CO2 concentrations:
That effects of CO2 concentrations are different now than hundred million years ago is covered in this link that was provided (please see how solar forcing have increased over millions of years, lowering greenhouse gas thresholds): https://skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm
I see no reason to make false accusations and trying to bring the argument down to an emotional level. I suggest reading the links and debunking, and instead try to understand the scientific arguments first.
This post of yours reflect an arrogance that do not belong on HN (my response was to show you what you projected from yourself - this, since facts only enrage some people):
"May I suggest adopting a mental model where you care about accuracy more than outrage?"
Instead, may I suggest you provide real arguments, instead of unsubstantiated nay-saying, and avoid resorting to pure rhetorical tactics? I say this because you provided nothing of value to the discussion. Instead even your own link supports current model precisions, contradicting your own claims:
"There is good agreement between model simulations incorporating high CO2 concentrations and proxy evidence, providing strong support for the role of CO2 in maintaining the high temperatures of the Early Eocene."
Sorry for bringing out more of the same, but that was the emotional part of the argument. But shouldn't really be necessary to show, regardless wether we agree or disagree about data and models.
I present what experts in the field are saying (the references are more accurate, yes). Please see other posts in this parent thread for more nuances. Would love for real contradictory arguments to be presented!
Where are the credible peer-reviewed research that present contrary findings?
At this point, contrary views seems to boil down to: Putting the lid on a pressure-cooker will not lead to chaotic disturbances and rising energy imbalance inside the pot. While thousands of peer-reviewed papers all point in the same general direction. They credibly even raise concerns that above certain thresholds, hot house earth as shown by data from ancient times, may happen again and may happen faster/more robustly than expected.
I doubt facts are going to change minds, but it should be concerning that we're already witnessing all the signs after rising CO2 and warming since 1930's:
It is of course going to take a few more years for real devastation to occur, but the present condition is in-line with simpler models from 70's and 80's. It is just now that we're breaking out from historical envelope, so it is from this point onwards the effects turn more chaotic.
But of course, laymen and hobbyist working unrelated to climate fields know better.. Especially when fueled by money and special interests (billionaires). They somehow always manage to find any incredible argument for explaining away the effects of massive amounts of extra fossile mass having been released over the past hundred year.
Of course CO2 doesn't work alone, but triggers more greenhouse effects (H2O, methane, albedo, etc.) due to a new imbalance in the system compared to historical times of stable civilization and climate.
If we were hunter-gatherers, we would've not needed to be as concerned. But we're not, and not being hunter-gatherers we might just have a chance to avoid a possible "Great Filter" of our times.
There is a huge difference between "humans affect the climate" and "we are all going to die within a couple of years because of human's effects on the climate".
Unprecedented? When the dinosaurs evolved, there was 5-6 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as today, thanks to millions of years of volcanic activity.
"Another important factor is the sun. During the Ordovician, it would have been several percent dimmer according to established nuclear models of main sequence stars. Surprisingly, this raises the CO2 threshold for glaciation to a staggering 3000 ppmv or so. This also explains (along with the logarithmic forcing effect of CO2) why a runaway greenhouse didn't occur: with a dimmer sun, high CO2 is necessary to stop the Earth freezing over."
Civilization is dependent on the observed equalization of planetary energy input-output present for the past 10 000 years, along with stable CO2 levels. Both temperature and CO2 concentrations are breaking out of that envelope since 1930's, thus challenging poweful one-way threshold effects that will further release yet more greenhouse gases. Just this time without human intervention. It's kind of like lighting the fuse of a gigantic environmental bomb.
The hottest/coldest day matters but the timescale matters too. Ecosystems (and probably humans) can adapt when those changes happen slowly. But human-made climate change happens way too fast.
