I’m a physical oceanographer which means my job is to figure out how the water moves and delivers heat through things like math and models. Paleoclimate isn’t my expertise but I figured I’d chime in on some of the climate skepticism here.
Oceanographers would be the first to admit that modeling-predicting changes in the ocean is very hard. Especially more regional features like an intensified warming in the Labrador Sea. That is because even state of the art models have coarse resolution and our initial conditions for far in the past are poor. However, anthropogenic climate change is not a regional effect.
It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?
Also I’ve seen in this thread people saying that global climate change has been overhyped. From the science side this paper does a great job of evaluating our models from the past:
I am often shocked how a community like HN could have so many global warming skeptics. It doesn't make sense to me because people who deal with software should understand complex systems. Should understand how hard understanding complex systems are. And should understand how dangerous it is to disrupt complex systems so dramatically like we did the climate.
The skepticism isn't focused on whether it's happening (or even scientifically possible), it's on how much hyperbole is attached to the claims being made and how does that align with observed/measured reality. When the news is shouting "omg panic!! code red!!" based on the least realistic models in the IPCC reports, anyone who is intellectually honest says "well, wait...what aren't we being told here?"
Because that happens more often than not, skepticism is further excited when you get politicians who claim to be in favor of climate change policy, only to then go and fly private jets, buy ocean front property, etc. This gets conveniently ignored by folks who have turned climate change into a religion.
Every time you even begin to say "hey, we should consider this..." people sperg out and start calling you a "climate change denier" or some other disparaging term. Literally turning their brains off to counter argument because they can't handle the idea that they're living in an incomplete reality.
There is absolutely nothing controversial about saying "let's look at all sides and evaluate carefully" (the scientific process as we've agreed upon it for millennia). People have been radicalized and frightened to the point where they no longer think rationally about the problem (and solutions) and instead get hyper-tribalistic, shouting down any reasonable discussion that doesn't automatically agree with their point of view.
> "omg panic!! code red!!" based on the least realistic models in the IPCC reports,
You mean articles like this Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'? [0]
Because that specific quote, "code red" is not BBC editorialization. It is a direct quote from UN Secretary-General António Guterres [1]
> Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.
People accuse you ave being a skeptic not because you are saying "hey, we should consider this...", it's because, as exemplified by this exact comment, you are deliberately misrepresenting your position to make it seem more legitimate. "Code red" is not based on the "least realistic" models, they are based on our current pathway, that was what made the most recent IPCC report so alarming.
Climate change poses an extremely serious, near term threat to our very way of life. I know that this can be hard to accept, but it is important to, at the very least, not silence those who are pointing this out.
I'm honestly confused as to whether or not you are willfully trolling, tricking yourself, or just very scared. You're playing the exact tricks here that I just pointed out in the previous comment but I'm genuinely unsure of your motives. (btw, I don't think you're an idiot, I don't think most climate skeptics are idiots, I think they're terrified beyond what they themselves even realize)
The page you linked to says that RCP 8.5 is very unlikely, but none of the "code red" reports claim otherwise.
All of the "code red" reports claim that we are virtually certain to be unable to stay below 1.5 preindustrial. This is RCP 4.5 and above. Something that if we had this conversation 20 years ago was also viewed as very unlikely.
I think either you don't know or are wildly underestimating the severe impact that these alternative pathways will have on human populations. RCP 8.5 is as horrific as it is unlikely, but all the other pathways we are rushing towards are still absolutely "code red".
In the early 2000s most people earnestly thought we wouldn't get past 1C, now that is impossible.
It's not even worth getting into all the ways that many people agree the IPCC reports tend to be a bit conservative. I'm fine throwing out all of these concerns, and sticking with just the report, but even with just the report, even on RCP 4.5, we're in very real trouble. It is absolutely a 'code red'.
> I'm honestly confused as to whether or not you are willfully trolling, tricking yourself, or just very scared.
None of the above. I'm reading the report and forming my own opinion while factoring out the hyperbole and panic of the media, politicians, etc. My motivation is thinking for myself and considering whether all of the theatrics align with the reality in front of me (they don't).
To further elaborate on my skepticism, perfectly valid technologies that could have been implemented decades ago (while there was plenty of awareness of this problem, as well as "global cooling") like nuclear have been foolishly ignored, discredited, etc. The primary argument I hear is "too expensive" and "too long to build," yet somehow congress manages to find money for inanities to the tune of billions every year. You'd think if this was seriously catastrophic, we'd be going in to debt to finance better energy solutions.
All of what I said above combined with that tells me the motivation of the people trying to scare everyone is disingenuous. When someone's actions don't align with their speech, it's often indicative of dishonesty. Considering how much money is at stake, the probability of that is increased.
"yet somehow congress manages to find money for inanities to the tune of billions every year. You'd think if this was seriously catastrophic, we'd be going in to debt to finance better energy solutions."
I don't understand. The people in the US Congress are hamstringing themselves and can barely pass their own legislation, yet somehow that inaction and political gridlock, which existed and will exist regardless of climate change, is somehow proof that...climate change isn't as bad?
You know who else also has a ton of money and a willingness to be dishonest? Every company that produces or relies directly on coal, oil, and gas. They ensure Congress is useless and unable to act by funding a party that ensures nothing happens.
I don't understand this take. Those of us that want to solve climate change want nuclear, we want solar, we want it all. We want to give Hydrogen to Aluminum plants to supplant CO2 they release, we want to electricy cars, we want to feed seaweed to cows to stop their farts.
You might be arguing against a loud majority that is repeating dumb stuff, but surely HN attracts people that can ignore the bad policies and arguments and elevate the best?
> is somehow proof that...climate change isn't as bad?
This is a deliberate mischaracterization of my point. No. Read my initial comment. My goal isn't to say climate change isn't bad. You're doing exactly what I called out above.
"You'd think if this was seriously catastrophic, we'd be going in to debt to finance better energy solutions."
I suppose I could see this as saying "if it really were catastrophic, why aren't we acting like it" as opposed to "it can't be catastrophic if we aren't acting like it".
A subtle difference, but to say it is a "deliberate mischaracterization" is just not true. I read the whole comment chain and I think my initial view was an easy one to arrive at. I would avoid conflating too many things at once.
No. It's to stop psychologically abusing the population and scaring them and their children into thinking the world is going to end in ten years.
If you solve that problem, then we can actually focus on what matters: making sure there isn't a real catastrophe (implementing policies that don't destroy the economy, building alternative energy solutions, etc). If everyone is terrified and panicked, you're more likely to get the whims of a totalitarian authority accepted by the population (go figure).
Instead of having "climate anxiety," kids should instead be excited and curious about what they can learn to help reduce the effects (or mitigate them away entirely).
The goal of a lot of the people here seems to be hysteria.
"The goal of a lot of the people here seems to be hysteria. "
Hadn't you just accused others of mischaracterizing your views? Why are you doing the same to everyone arguing back?
I don't see anyone in this comment chain whose goal is to be hysterical or cause hysteria. We all simply view human caused climate change as obvious and want to solve it. I am quite curious as to how to solve climate change economically, quickly, without giving up too much way of life, liberties, or causing panic.
The public is not being hysterical. Rather the opposite, which is something you already admitted further up: people simply aren't acting at all.
> The primary argument I hear is "too expensive" and "too long to build," yet somehow congress manages to find money for inanities to the tune of billions every year.
Congress is full of corrupt people who can afford to move on a whim, are in the pockets of Big Oil, and plan on retiring and dying before the worst of it hits.
A lot of scientists believed we were on track for a new ice age in the 70s [1] (using the same media-driven fearmongering tactics back then, too).
The point being, don't just take what you're fed. If you dig around, you might find that a lot of the claims on scientific consensus are misrepresented (as dismissed by the quoted scientists) [2].
The consensus on climate change is not controversial. It's been studies many times in a multitude of different ways.
Peer reviewed scientific studies examining the level of consensus among climate scientists that Earth is warming and the primary cause is human activity:
Verheggen 2014 - 91% consensus
Powell, 2013 - 97% consensus
John Cook et al., 2013 - 97% consensus
Farnsworth and Lichter, 2011 - 84% consensus
Anderegg et al, 2010 - 97% consensus
Doran, 2009 - 97% consensus
Bray and von Storch, 2008 - 93.8% consensus
STATS, 2007 - 95% consensus
Oreskes, 2004 - 100% consensus
The Cook 2016 meta analysis of consensus studies finds the rate of consensus between 90 - 100% and that agreement with the consensus approaches 100% as expertise in climatology increases.
This list is probably outdated. I put it together 5 or 6 years ago.
Then theres that survey by Science where 60% of respondents said they expect us to hit 3C of warming because of intransigence by policy makers.
Climate change idiots are no better, relying on lies and bullshit "consensus" numbers that are selectively biased by their funding.
I'm sure you would find results that are diametrically opposed to climate change if you looked at studies funded by say, oil companies, and there is no doubt in mind as to the bias implied in that direction.
The harsh reality is that things are more nuanced than either side would have you believe, and throwing numbers like "90% consensus" is a fallacious way to bully an argument, and isn't at all scientific on its own.
Actually Exxon Mobil did have a privately funded climate science program during most of the 1970s and early 1980s. Those scientists published papers which agreed with what they described as the "Emerging consensus" that human emissions of greenhouse gasses are driving global warming. They even made projections that by 2020 with 420ppm of co2 we should expect around 1C of warming above preindustrial temps. Which is exactly what happened.
Eventually Exxon shut down the division and spent the next 35 years paying public relations agencies to spread misinformation and doubt about the science. Including the false narrative that scientists are being paid to manufacture global warming.
There have always been mercenary scientists like Willie Soon who solicite industry to produce shoddy science that protects their interests. The same thing happened with the lead, asbestos, and tobacco industries. The majority of scientists are not in it for the money. They became scientists to advance human knowledge. That's the entire point of being a scientist. Your conception of the field is cynical and not rooted in reality.
Why would a climate scientist in the 1970s join the small minority in publishing a paper predicting cooling?
1. They focused narrowly on studying the natural drivers of climate change without accounting for the affect of human beings on greenhouse gas concentrations.
2. They focused narrowly on the effects of human emissions of aerosol pollution without accounting for the effects of humans on greenhouse gas levels.
3. Bad science maybe.
Regardless the majority of scientists who accurately predicted warming did not just wind up on the right side of a 50/50 bet. They didn't just predict that there would be warming. They predicted the amount of warming that could be expected depending on the emission scenario that played out.
The planet is now hotter than it has been in over 100,000 years and it's also precisely how warm scientists said it would be at this time with this co2 level. It's one of the greatest predictions in the history of earth sciences and you disregard this because a different smaller group of scientists made a wrong prediction that got too much press. Makes sense.
While I think you underestimate what this means for a lot of 'other' people than 'us' (comparable rich people) it has hard/deadly affects already.
And even less human critical things are also dramatic just not for everyone. When you tell me all coral reefs are dying I really think this is very bad.
No, my opinion includes concern for developing nations. Not allowing them to access fossil fuels or other forms of cheap plentiful energy means they can't develop properly (i.e., permanent impoverishment).
This is silly. Wind and solar are cheaper than coal and in many circumstances cheaper than natural gas. Storage tech is also getting cheaper. The capital costs of decentralized renewables are also favorable to a lot of rural parts of the world VS building out transmission lines of hundreds of miles.
Africa never really built out an extensive land line telephone system, but most Africans have cell phones now. They do not need to move through an obsolete technology in order to adopt a new one.
Theres a nearly limitless number of ways to store energy. Plenty of them don't require cobalt. The cheaper renewables get the less efficient storage technologies need to be to be cost effective.
Anywhere pricing of electricity fluctuates with the intermittence of renewables there is opportunity to use storage to profit. The faster we drive the adoption of renewables in the 1st world the faster prices on storage tech will drop which will benefit the developing world. Especially the parts which will never have transmission lines built out from some centralized power plant 300 kilometers away.
There is something about software engineering, and I'm going to get hammered for this, that seems to convince people that everyone are idiots and doing it all wrong. It might be from personal experience explaining their field to family and friends, or perhaps it's brought about by constantly building things for themselves, idk. They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
I think the superiority felt by some software engineers stems from the simple fact that they are paid a lot and are seen as smart and valuable in the culture. They have economic power, and work on something that seems incomprehensible to many everyday people. The subject matter may also have something to do with it. We're taught that lots of problems can have their details reduced and abstracted away, and I think engineers can ignore the normal human elements of life that have a real effect.
This is more armchair Freudish, but I also think that a feeling of intellectual superiority makes up for other areas that are lacking in similar feelings of value and power. Life as a computer science student is not cool or fun or sexy, so you fall back on what gives you power in wider society. Sort of like the idea that poor whites fall back onto their whiteness. People jockey for position using whatever they have.
Not only are they paid a lot, but they basically start their careers being paid lavishly in places like the SF Bay Area. To a 22 year old fresh grad, what does it tell you when life immediately rewards you with a top 10% income bracket out of university?
This extends to the techno-elite as well. What drives the CEO of an electric car company to declare that the way to improve urban mobility is to build roads in tunnels underground? Well, clearly he must be doing something right, he's the richest man on earth!
> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
Doubly so for anything vaguely related to social sciences and other fields where theorising from first principles isn't the norm. "Historical" sciences such as astrophysics and epidemiology often get short shrift here as well. Engineers in general seem to be prone to opining outside of their area of expertise, the Salem Hypothesis that a creationist with an advanced degree was more likely to be an engineer than any other field was noted back in the early days of Usenet:
Well... there's computer science, and then there's computer science.
All (most of?) the stuff done on P vs NP is good science that will stand up.
Studies on which language features make it better for developers are social science, because they involve those pesky humans. That stuff is likely to suffer from a reproducibility crisis.
reproducibility in social sciences is usually a function of a)insurmountable costs of recruiting participants, b)complexity of the questions, and c) lack of standardization of humans. Sure social scientists would like to have N=1 billion, but they'd be lucky to get funding for 1,000.
can't win. If your sample isn't diverse enough it isn't representative. It it is representative, its likely too small to get a reliable effect due to the number of confounds.
> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
another reason could be that the level of reproducibility of results and openness and availability of sources (data, code, papers) in modern "science" branches is appallingly low for the software folks to take them (the scientists and their results) seriously by default.
The bottom line is that the real impacts of climate change strike real, existential fear in a lot of HNers and many of them simply cannot handle that cognitively.
People are drawn to tech in a large part because of their belief in the power of technology and the limitless possibility of the future. The very real potential impacts of climate change in our lifetime pose as serious threat to this.
Rather than struggle with this most people here (or maybe a few loud, happy to flag comments they disagree with people) find it much easier to simply dismiss everything as excessive hyperbole.
Climate change unquestionably posses a real threat to our way of life, and at this point mitigating it does as well. People in tech are used to only thinking in terms of optimism and finding a way to solve problems and really can't deal with serious problems that might not have a solution, but rather only different forms of compromise.
Unfortunately the skeptics here are very aggressive. I have had several comments this week flagged for no other reason than disagreement (I know this because they have all been unflagged upon review).
It's somewhat ironic because this bizarre extreme reaction from this community really makes it all the more clear that something is really wrong.
And what does it tell you that sadly there are bizarre extreme reactions elsewhere on this climate question? Before the British Government was forced to insist that the police use their existing powers to stop climate protesters preventing people from going about their ordinary business which including several people trying to get to hospital for cancer treatment, we learnt about non-climate-skeptic aggression on a physical level. The leader of their group famously declared he would not move even if the motorist was carrying a dying person to hospital. That's religious fervor of a kind reminiscent of the 14th C.
We do indeed need to find ways of presenting our ideas and thoughts non-aggressively because none of us know the final truth about the immensely complex system that is the Earth's climate.
> We do indeed need to find ways of presenting our ideas and thoughts non-aggressively...
Absolutely.
> ... because none of us know the final truth about the immensely complex system that is the Earth's climate.
Even if we did know, don't block people going to the hospital to try to prove your point. First, it's insanely un-empathetic, to the point of sociopathy. And, theoretically, you probably claim to care about the climate because climate change is going to hurt people. Second, it's not going to win friends for your movement or viewpoint. It's counter-productive, no matter how urgent you think climate change is.
"Global warming" in the United States is a political issue that has nothing to do with science. A lot of our news reporting has so many contrary "scientific" studies that the average person doesn't know who to trust.
Thus appeals to authority have no meaning if people don't trust that authority. The end result is anyone saying stuff they like is correct and anyone that isn't is wrong.
The US also has a problem with people active trying to cripple and downsize government because it steals their money and tells them what to do.
I don't see "many contrary 'scientific' studies" in the news. What I do see is almost universal consensus among climate scientists that humans are accelerating climate change, with a few news personalities criticizing predictions that were off by a few degrees or inches of sea level rise and pretending that those errors somehow invalidate the general consensus. It's disingenuous at the very least to suggest that these errors disprove anthropogenic climate change or that there are valid studies that support both sides.
US Citizen here -- I think that science plays an important role on both sides, but the cynical manipulation of news stories by the Oil and Gas industry and their well-paid allies, is backfiring finally. Please note that four prominent Republican Senators with Big Oil ties gave a press conference this year, and did not deny Climate Change.. this is news
They dont have to deny climate change, they just have to vote like it doesn't exist and blame things like government overreach or protecting jobs or energy independence. Best of both worlds, it allows them to come off as reasonable without losing any donors.
'"Global warming" in the United States is a political issue that has nothing to do with science'
Replace Global Warming with almost any other scientific concept and you would also be right. The fact we have politicized everything in this country is not a strength and is going to have negative long term knock on effects. I see the politicization of the covid vaccine giving general anti vaxxers validation now and would not be surprised to see a resurgence of measles in the near term (couple of years). I am completely comfortable with everyone making their own choice on the covid vaccine (I am vaccinated), I get the concern and there is enough noise that I understand their viewpoint. Politicizing it though has been the wrong approach, we cant let people have their own opinions anymore, everyone that disagrees is the enemy. This is the same with climate change, immigration and presidential elections. Issue is that the political parties know that doing this makes their base rally tighter and establishes a motivational us vs them narrative. Its not going to end well.
It might be true that tech people work more intimately with complex systems than people in most other fields, but that could also mean that there is more opportunity for getting away with obfuscation or representing a false level of confidence (and also dealing with people who do this).
Maybe that understanding of complex systems could be more of an unconscious understanding that talented people can act out intuitively, or compartmentalize for a specific domain.
Propaganda and hyperbole aside, it must be clear to even the most obtuse among us that the earth is a finite system sphere with finite system resources. Even if it isn't as bad as we're being led to believe, the steps we could be taking to mitigate a positive feedback spiraling collapse in the system loop are things we should be doing anyway. I don't see how anyone here can argue that generating millions of one-time-use plastic receptacles is a good idea in any system or in any way sustainable long term, so what is the harm in making the changes we should be making now, as if it were as bad as we're being led to believe?
Why do people conflate climate change with plastic? Does creating reusable glass or metal containers use less energy or create less CO2 than making things from plastic?
Plastic pollution (particularly in the oceans) is really disturbing, but other than burning it, I don't see what it has to do with warming.
Before we were concerned with the climate, we were with the environment. The amount of plastic pollution, especially the potential impact of microplastics, is part of that, like global warming. At least in my view, I see them all as negative impact on our environment. At minimum, negative for ourselves.
Mercury, pesticides, and plastics in the ocean are horrible in my opinion. However, I've seen more than one person who seems to think recycling is going to have an effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.
I would say it's the opposite - those who have experience with complex systems understand how hard it is to accurately model them. And the climate models have shown that - take a look at the "global warming hiatus" from 2015. Major journals published evidence to explain the hiatus, then a few years later the conclusion was "there was no hiatus". It's pretty clear we can't even accurately tell what level of warming is happening.
An understanding that dealing with super complex systems with lots of interacting variables are very hard to accurately model and prediction value is likely to be low?
Plus maybe just a general distaste for propaganda.
For my own part I believe humans are affecting the climate to some extent. I don't see how anything else would be possible.
But I'm early 50's and have been watching this closely for 30 years and don't believe the hype and doomsday predictions anymore. I don't think the models are good enough to say what will happen in sum. Should we get off fossil fuels and stop polluting? Yes as fast as practically possible. Is OMG the world ending oceans collapsing 12 years from now? Probably not and they don't actually know that.
> But I'm early 50's and have been watching this closely for 30 years
Likewise. And what I’ve noted is that the IPCC’s optimistic predictions keep proving far too optimistic, and their worse-outcome predictions keep coming true, sooner than predicted.
I also see corporations that are loathe to change suddenly make commitments to change, and to make those changes pretty quickly. To my eyes, that is a big indication that things have started going well off the rails.
I’m not looking forward to having to handle the wheels falling off of society in my senior years as crop failures, infrastructure collapse, and social unrest kick into high gear.
That's really strange, I'm curious what you have seen in the last 30 years that makes you feel catastrophe is more imminent (climate wise, not social or geopolitical, we probably agree that is off the rails lol).
The polar ice caps were predicted to be gone. Still there. Coral reef collapse. They are flourishing. Massive rapid sea level rise. Very small, unnoticeable without measuring equipment. Increase in extreme weather events. Hasn't happened.
In short, things aren't a whole lot different then they were 30 years ago. I realize 30 years isn't that long but still, there were some really extreme predictions (and I was worried) but they don't look to be coming to pass and I don't think they will for the next 30 either.
The polar ice caps were at the lowest volume ever in 2017, and have broken records continuously this past decade or so: “Still there” is a disingenuous dismissal of their morbid condition. http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger...
(btw this claims sea level rise is less then 1/10 of an inch year, not 1/8).
Great Barrier reef has record levels of coral this year.
I've personally observed many sections of the second largest reef in Mexico/Belize within the past few years and the corral are healthy with many young corral and look pretty much as they did when I first saw them 30 years ago.
The reefs are not collapsing. This is reality, not propaganda, not the output of theoretical models. How do you square this with some of the more extreme predictions? It is very interesting how we both have watched over the same time period and see different things apparently.
I don't believe I'm uninformed at all. I just don't believe the hype anymore.
Naw, these are facts and what I've observed. My position was implicit from the first and if you didn't observe it I guess I understand not observing what has happened in the real world as opposed to what was predicted to happen in 1991.
There is a lot hype and propaganda but hey, you have me neatly categorized as a denier, now you can safely ignore facts that don't square with your chosen ideology and go on about your week.
If you are really 50+ and have been paying attention the whole time I have no clue how you could not have some cognitive dissonance. The models weren't accurate. The extreme predictions didn't come to pass.
Catastrophe is not imminent and both of us will die with the earth pretty much as it is now to the naked eye climatewise.
* Scientific American: [Climate Science Predictions Prove Too Conservative
Checking 20 years worth of projections shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has consistently underestimated the pace and impacts of global warming](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...)
* Geophysical Research Letters: [Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...) — "We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations"
Wow, you managed to pack an appeal to authority, an appeal to ridicule and an ad hominem all in one sentence! Topped with a cherry of FO which I assume means "fuck off".
If you are actually any older than millennial (as you claim) I'd be very surprised but it doesn't matter.
You believe whatever you like. Swallow propaganda or not, google around for links that support what you believe, doesn't matter.
The experiment with fossil fuels is going to play out for now and we will see the results. Probably a warmer wetter world in some hundreds or thousands of years. And we as a species will be fine. But in your life, and mine, we are unlikely to see catastrophic climate change.
Oh, and the reefs will still be there as well. You can go see them when you are old which is probably a ways off for you.
By when? Lots of climate hyperbole is focused on the year 2100 for some reason so perhaps that's what you had in mind. Anyway, not completely gone yet, but I can point out the following since I have it handy here:
July 2020: The last intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic fell into the sea
> Increase in extreme weather events. Hasn't happened.
Are you just making shit up? According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, extreme events are up 74% for 2000 to 2019 vs 1980 - 1999. And "Much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters including extreme weather events: from 3,656 climate-related events (1980-1999) to 6,681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000-2019. And "The last twenty years have seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1,389 to 3,254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034. Floods and storms were the most prevalent events."
Also, shipping lanes opening up in the arctic for longer duration now. And of course Russia and US are considering more drilling now that it's feasible, in case anyone was confused about any real change in policy / mindset.
I don't see a clear trend in number of hurricanes. Sorry. I'd have to look at how "extreme events" were ascertained (hopefully not cherry picked) in the 2 20 year periods by the UN article you link.
I just don't see, from casual observation, an increase in floods and storms over when I was a child. Maybe it exists and I just am not picking it up but it's not "double" and the storms are certainly not worse.
I do understand the sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking for some time. Paradoxically it's not in the Antarctic. This could be partially due to warming (which I agree exists, no argument). It could also be due to dark soot accumulation on the snow/ice to some extent causing more rapid melting.
This is what I'm talking about. This kind of thing.
> This is what I'm talking about. This kind of thing.
I see. I suspect there would have been a lot of similar articles around that time.
Maslowski made that projection in 2007, a year when there was a huge drop in extent minimum over the previous year, and following successive years of lower minima before a recovery in 2008. He made the same mistake during the 2012 record minimum year (which is still the record minimum year), predicting ice free summers by 2016 if I recall correctly. He has since continued his research, but no longer makes these kinds of predictions.
So yes, sometimes there are overly aggressive projections and or outright mistakes, and on top of that there is hyperbole with the media going for the most extreme headline possible. But the fact that some predictions are overly aggressive doesn't mean the situation isn't serious. All trends based on measurement (not projection) are showing the cryosphere is in serious trouble. Glaciers are melting, permafrost is turning out to be not so "perma".
I once met a developer who claimed he didn’t believe climate change was real because the software used for modelling isn’t used by many people and probably has lots of bugs. I don’t agree, but it was an interesting take.
Bugs and grad student software aside, ask anyone who thinks they can rely on a model to predict the future to implement a model of: a simple pendulum, a double pendulum, the three body problem, the stock market, and then finally the climate.
Those are roughly in order of difficulty, and if they fail at an earlier one, you shouldn't trust the later ones. The first one isn't even chaotic, and I wouldn't trust a model built from first principles alone to be in phase past a dozen cycles or so.
You can curve fit things after the fact (interpolation), but extrapolation is always on shaky ground.
Large scale climate models are more like modeling the possible energy distributions of such pendulums into the future. That can be done analytically for pendulums. You can do it analytically for very simple models of climate, too, but more complex models that include enough of the forces to be predictive require computers.
I've heard similar arguments before, but the details really matter. The amount of heat and CO2 is going to rely on things like albedo on the ground and from cloud cover, as well as plant mass and more. I think it's a mistake to ignore feedback on any of that, and it doesn't take too many moving parts with feedback to create a chaotic system.
If nothing interacted with each other, I think you could make reasonable energy-in / energy-out models. However even looking at big low-pass averages, plants/algae use CO2, and heat creates clouds, and clouds block sunlight, and so on. Unlike a double pendulum that bleeds a small amount of energy to friction, the climate bleeds a lot of energy into space, and the amount of energy it loses is a function of clouds, plant life, etc.
Sure, but we know it's near equilibrium, at least on human time scales, or the climate would not be stable enough for humans to evolve. So it's not chaotic like weather is chaotic.
I politely disagree, but my non-expert arguments shouldn't carry much weight. Here's a quote from a 2018 IPCC document instead:
"The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system,
and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states
is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction
of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible
states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions." [0]
I'd kind of like to dive in to the topic of whether an "ensemble of model solutions" is a fair and sufficient sampling of the problem space to trust the statistics, but I don't have enough details. However, I have done particle filters before, and when you have more than a few parameters to estimate, you need a shit-ton of particles before you can trust the statistics you get out. And that's with well behaved and fairly linear systems.
We can't predict what will happen when tipping points are tripped, but while we're near the current (dynamic) equilibrium, we can use perturbative methods to predict what will happen with relative small forces, such as doubling or trippling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, i.e. global average temperatures will rise.
I'm not sure if you're the guy to ask, but I'm sure you're aware of the continuing acidification of the oceans via CO2 absorption. From what I've heard it's highly unpredictable as to how it will actually affect ecosystems, but supposedly some molluscs are already having reproductive issues as their shells tend to dissolve at some point in the growing cycle. The predictions I've read point to a likely oceanic food chain collapse in 15-25 years, not to mention the decrease in fertility that fish seem to be experiencing from higher temperatures.
I heard whispers of "its too late" in the early 90s, with respect to the top meter of ocean and the biological life cycles there being broken.. yet we had the international CFC ban and that was a success at breaking the Ozone Hole, which made things better.. Let's be eyes-open on every detail, but be aware of the despair aspect too .. "collapse in X-X+10 years" is overwhelming to many ears, and we do not know the future.. hth
Trolling. The "because as we know, only the capitalist societies damage ecosystems" was the giveaway.
Or perhaps not exactly trolling. Might be pointing out that this kind of thing is actually being seriously proposed as the solution in certain quarters.
Overfishing masks that effects also. There is not reason to think that fish fertility as a global concept would change. Some species would decrease and other increase but jellyfishes would be the real culprits in most cases if you see a big decrease or recruitment when the water is warmer.
> It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?
I don't like this analogy. A better example might be that if we set fire to all the forests, it's going to get hotter. It's true in the short term but the long term effects can be debated. And unfortunately there's a history of predictions that haven't come true to deal with.
There are a bunch of unanswered questions around rapid warming. Like the doom and gloom scenarios of a tipping point or runaway global warming. The obvious question I have is: if this is a real possibility, why hasn't it happened in the last several billion years? The Earth has been warmer than it is now.
Another is that rapid warming over short periods isn't that unprecedented [1]:
> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
To be clear, I'm not a climate change denier. I'm a climate change fatalist. By this I mean that whatever is going to happen is going to happen and there's really nothing you can do about it now other than finding cheaper alternatives to bad behaviours (eg solar becoming cheaper than fossil fuels).
If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let other people die rather than they being mildly inconvenienced. There's no way people are going to make their lives more expensive or more inconvenient for climate change.
Thanks for adding the further context here. I'd like to add context to your point:
> If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let other people die rather than they being mildly inconvenienced.
I don't believe that "anti-maskers", who you are probably referring to, are significantly more selfish than "maskers." If you understand that most of them truly believe masks are not helpful, and even some believe they are harmful, then to them it's more than just "I'd rather kill people than be inconvenienced." They don't believe they are killing anyone.
I don’t believe them when they say that. Based on the way they keep ending at the same conclusions with different reasonings as facts change, I think they don’t like being told what to do, and keep backwards-rationalizing reasons (“I read somewhere that masks actually _hurt_ people!”) in order to have something to tell people.
I get that, but I think you might also be missing something in the urgency to derive one particular meaning from the metaphor.
Imagine coming upon a window that was broken, and inferring that it must have been broken by "a thing". So you look for evidence - a rock, a hammer, something - all the while proclaiming that the cause was a given. All the while, you overlook that the initial fracture was there from the beginning and carried along every day by comparatively small amounts of thermal stress.
Could that also be a metaphor for some of the climate change hype? (I don't use the word "hype" to imply false. I use it in the context of "to promote or publicize extravagantly".)
He's not talking about the causes of climate change or anything like that. He's explaining a specific phenomenon using an analogy. Whether or not you believe climate change is anthropocentric is immaterial to how this phenomenon manifests. And to help people understand how this phenomenon works, he used the metaphor of the shattered glass.
It actually does not matter what shattered the glass. He said hammer because a hammer would work. It could have been smashed with a frozen, medium-sized cat for all it mattered.
The point is, once the glass is shattered, you cannot predict where each piece is going to fall.
> Isn't this more akin to saying, the window broke before the hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have been the cause?
Agree or disagree, it's an interesting thought exercise that took the original analogy in an interesting direction. Whether or not you agree about it being interesting or useful, it certainly wasn't "arguing the metaphor", just adding to it in a way that you may or may not appreciate.
That's what arguing the metaphor is. It's adding to it to change or subvert the meaning and change the direction of the conversation.
We don't appreciate it when politicians twist questions to give the canned responses they've prepared, why should we accept a similar tactic amongst ourselves?
> Scientists generally regard the later part of the 19th century as the point at which human activity started influencing the climate. But the new study brings that date forward to the 1830s.
As someone who does statistical modeling for a living (though not climate related), one thing I've found fascinating is that many climate skeptics, particularly on HN, will focus on the difficulty scientific models have in making accurate predictions about the near term impact of climate change.
While this is true (modeling a complex system such as the Earth's climate and all of it's positive and negative feed back loops is incredibly challenging), the implied assumption from people that use this critique is that uncertainty will always fall on the side of "better than expected".
People that have been closely following human ecology for the last decade or so have repeatedly found the opposite to be true. "Faster than expected" is somewhat of a joke in certain communities since it seems that the more we learn the more we realize how large the impact of rapid accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere really is, and how quickly this impact develops.
That's not to say model uncertainty == doom, but assuming that model uncertainty == "this is fine" is a more dangerous and naive assumption.
I've always been worried that estimates and predictions in the IPCC reports, for instance, are much too conservative. The reports are averages, in some sense, of thousands of peer-reviewed publications.
It's hard to get your publication accepted into the scientific mainstream if your predictions make you sound like an alarmist crank.
I've seen this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't make any sense to me. How can you "trust the science" and peer review, but only when it's scary? If it's not scary enough, you hypothesize it being biased?
How is that better than the crowd who thinks it's biased the other way? It's just as easy to imagine your publication won't get accepted into the scientific mainstream unless it conforms to the prevailing narrative.
What's the value of peer review if either of these biases (deniers or alarmists) is correct?!?
In the IPCC case, the report itself says the evidence rules out less than 1C of warming but can't rule out more than 5C of warming by the end of the century. My views are perfectly consistent with the science... it's simply that the science is very limited when it comes to analyzing "tipping point" scenarios.
But, yes, I also have some qualms about peer review.
If the science is limited in that area, why do you believe tipping points (positive feedback) will be horrific? There's just as much reason to believe that negative feedback (the good kind) will keep things from going off the charts.
Either way, it's not scientific thinking, and it isn't trusting the experts either.
I said “I’ve been worried…” not that the worry is necessarily rational. The worry is based in what I view as weaknesses in human organizations. But it is also based in scenarios outlined by IPCC, so I’m not sure why you’re going on about “trusting the experts”.
I hope you'll forgive me for lumping you in with the other comments I read along these lines, but exaggeration on this topic is a pet peeve of mine. I've read more than a few parts of the IPCC reports over the years, and they aren't as end-of-the-world as a lot of people claim. There's a whole lot of spots in the current document where it says, "2.0 degrees will be worse than 1.5 degrees" with repercussions like "droughts in some areas and extra precipitation in others", about 75 cm of sea level rise by 2100, and poor people will suffer more than they already do. There's no brimstone rains, no water wars, and no extinction of mankind mentioned in the document, but lots of people feel free to fabricate that.
And every time someone claims to be following the science, but discards it all with "Yeah, but everyone knows the IPCC is overly conservative", I wish they'd admit they're no more rational than "the end is nigh" religions. The documents are right there [0] [1]. It's a report specifically designed for policy makers and laymen, which states in plain understandable language what the risks are, and armchair experts think they can dismiss it because they know the term "clathrate gun".
I know standing up to this is pointless. People don't change their minds very easily. But at least you're willing to admit your worries aren't necessarily rational, so it's unfair of me to try and pin that on you.
No. Popular media. Scientists will say something like "wow, this particular study shows us hitting 1 degree of warming by 2010, and 2 degrees of warming by 2030 at the current rate, which would lead to gradual melting of the ice caps", and in the popular media that becomes "SCIENTISTS PREDICT ICE CAPS WILL BE ENTIRELY GONE BY 2010!" Because the nuance was not understood, and alarm gets readers/watchers.
I will also remind you the same people who would claim it's slower than expected because of what scientists have said in the past are the same people who will call out that in the 1960s scientists were predicting global cooling as evidence why the science is wrong. I.e., even though those positions are counter to each other, they both work in service to "the science is always wrong" narrative, and that's really the bias at play.
Can you give me some citations for this? I've looked around a bit and all I can see is "faster than expected"
In fact sea-level rise is another great example of what I'm talking about. Dr. Richard Alley gave a fantastic talk this summer about how we can expect very rapid, very sudden ice sheet collapse, and therefore should also experience potentially very rapid sea level rises[0].
However, as he repeatedly points out in the talk, because these sudden collapses are incredibly hard to simulate and predict they are excluded from all IPCC models. He doesn't deny that predicting when and exactly the impact is an incredibly hard modeling problem, but at the same time makes it pretty clear that this known unknown, so to speak, is very real and very likely to have a major impact.
Edit: you should watch at least the beginning of the talk because he explicitly mentions a 2008 piece in the guardian and other cases of "slower than expected".[1]
Definitely not. The 1990 IPCC report predicted between 2.0 and 7.3mm/year and satellite altimetry shows average of 3.4mm/year since then. This is an acceleration from 1890-1990 rate of 1.0-2.0mm/year. IPCC 1990 was right on the money.
As I understand it, human intervention is one of the biggest unknowns in any of these projections. Despite the inadequacy of the global response, there have been important human interventions since the 1960s. For example, in the US the EPA was created in 1970 and there were Clean Air Acts prior to that.
My bad, I was vague. It is *very* common to see one or two conspiratorial crazy "global warming is a hoax" comments that are just flagged and dead. It also definitely happens, but less reliably, to see "middle brow" "polite but trivially wrong" climate change denialism comments that are either downvoted or dead. I have also seen non-downvoted comments of that nature, but these were not what I was referring to (and they usually have well argued factual responses).
Ok but as a statistical professional don’t you thibk that all “X than expected” stories be written with a preregistered hypothesis from some earlier date which can be linked? Otherwise they are a press release.
So far over time the climate has been warming faster and there have been more problems consistently than the median of models up to that point predicted, so "And that's played out already" is very wrong.
“ In 2009, Al Gore loosely cited researchers and said there was a “75% chance” the ice could be gone during at least some summer months within five to seven years.”
If I told you “my model predicts a 50% chance you be diagnosed with cancer and a 50% chance you wont” how do you make a decision. When both are equally probable?
Other commenters are pointing out the logic issues with your question, but I would like to provide a direct answer.
If a number of people told me that there was a 50% chance I had cancer, then I would first check their qualifications to make sure their predictions were worth my time. Then, if I found them credible, I would be really worried about getting cancer and go through all the screenings and tests necessary to figure out which side of the 50% I was on. Would you not do the same?
When the options are keep smoking or stop smoking, the obvious choice is to stop smoking to improve your odds. The positive side effects are worth it on their own.
Except here the options are not as simple as "stopping smoking" which in this context would be "stop emitting co2" doing so would cause extreme economic harm, lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY, and be very regressive to the poorest people.
Smoking is not needed for life to function, energy production, food production, heating, etc is very much needed for life to function.
> cause extreme economic harm, lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY, and be very regressive to the poorest people.
Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?
"Extreme" economic harm? Define extreme, please. Also account for all the increased economic activity related to climate change mitigation (renewable energy, carbon capture, construction).
"lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY" - Climate change will do that too. Try cooling your house cheaply, or getting enough freshwater or fresh produce when the climate goes haywire.
"be very regressive to the poorest people." - Again, needs context. The "poorest people" are precisely the ones who will suffer the most if climate change isn't averted. The Indian subcontinent, to take one example, will have acute water shortages and/or sea-level rises (in Bangladesh) which will lead to crop failures and famine.
Put another way, ignoring the risks and contining our reliance on CO2 and methane and etc emissions has put our economy and living standards in jeopardy, especially for the poorest people.
It didn't have to go down this way but certain powerful folks have been more interested in maintaining the status quo than making improvements, and that pattern continues today. Even basic economic concepts like externalities are ignored because folks embrace thought-terminating terms like "job-killing policies".
> The researchers used geochemical and ecological data from ocean sediments to reconstruct the change in water column properties over the past 800 years. They precisely dated sediments using a combination of methods and looked for diagnostic signs of Atlantification, like change in temperature and salinity.
Then, from the original paper:
> Here, we use lipid-based water temperature proxies (UK37
U
37
K
and TEXL86
TEX
86
L
) and benthic foraminiferal data (distribution and δ18O) to reconstruct changes in water mass properties. Specifically, we examined anomalies in our proxy records to identify diagnostic signs of Atlantification. On the basis of a precise chronology, we combine our results with other local climate records to provide an integrated understanding of Atlantification and resolve its timing. Last, our reconstructions are compared with records of ocean and atmosphere circulation patterns to investigate the connections between the high Arctic and North Atlantic dynamics.
So the technique appears to be based on isotopic and lipid analysis of sediments deposited by certain organisms. If you can date the sediments and are confident in the link between analyte concentration and temperature, and correct for various factors, you can reconstruct a time/temperature plot.
Personally I am still not convinced climate change is completely caused by human activity. But I think we are accelerating a natural climate change.
“Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,”
My takeaway: because we still know so little about the mechanisms we should be more careful about our environment. It's very naive to pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere without knowing what will happen.
Do you consider yourself in agreement with scientists that focus on studying the climate, or in disagreement with them?
From what I understand, the scientific consensus [1] is not that climate change is completely caused by human activity, for the very reason you mention: it’s complicated. :)
But like you also mention, the consensus is that we are we are at least partially causing it, even if it’s not “completely.” If we’re not causing 100% of the change, but perhaps 50%, I’m not sure if that’s much of a distinction in terms of what policy to change. Do you agree?
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus - “Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” It does not say or imply 100% due to those human activities. The ACS says, “The Earth’s climate is changing in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and particulate matter in the atmosphere, largely as the result of human activities.” Even there, it’s not saying completely, although it’s saying largely, which definitely has a distinction.
I think it's interesting to consider the scenario that humans are not causing the climate to change, but it is changing catastrophically nonetheless. How is our strategy different? Is it at all?
Well lets say natural global warming will cause a rise of 5°C in the next 50 years. Then we have 50 years to adapt. But when we accelerate this change we might need to adapt in 5 years. And we might even cause a rise of 6°C instead of 5. I believe those are the big problems we are facing.
I think in that case we would focus on ways to cope with climate change. For example, air conditionning everywhere would make sense. What's difficult about the current crisis is that you can't use too much energy to fight it without making it worse.
Please elaborate how air conditioning is going to prevent a destabilization of democracy around the world as millions of climate refugees run out of places to flee too?
Let's just say for a moment that human-caused climate change is either minimal or even non-existent. At this point, would we even be able to admit that? So much political and scientific capital has been invested here that if we were to find out that maybe it's not what we think it is, it would do catastrophic damage to people's faith in science and institutions. And they are precariously positioned as is.
I think that the whole "Trust the Science" trope has already damaged people's faith in science and institutions.
If we had, instead, encouraged "Trust the Scientific Method" and taught people to think and replicate claims, we'd be in a much better place.
But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check scientist's work".
I've seen this trope of a lack of trustable science often here. But the people not trusting the science (that I've come across) would usually not have the ability to replicate science anyway, for a lack of education. The other group to not "trust the science" usually is making their money in some of the causes of global warming.
Just a few weeks back, Saudi Arabia (and some other countries I'm missing) insisted on weakening the claims made in a joint statement/study of the COP.
The lack of trust in science (imho) stems from the fact that pretty big news organisations (fox, Bild etc) are doing their best to ease the cognitive dissonance of their audience by claiming them unreliable. The ivory tower is just a propaganda trope at this point
I don’t think it’s a trope - unfortunately. There’s so many examples of people using “science” as a political football that they’ve undermined themselves. We’ve got public health experts encouraging people to protest racial justice in the height of a pandemic as if a virus cares about the nobility of your cause, and that’s just a most recent example. History is littered with us being wrong or just downright manipulative with data / science / experts.
Said to say that I think parent thread has it right - people need to have faith in the method - not the experts - and realize that the method does not yield infallible results. It’s simply the best mechanism for getting the truth with the data we currently have. And people need to be able to parse out when they are seeing data-driven conclusions over when experts are just saying dumb/political things. That can’t be a referendum on “science”.
Another significant factor is the belief we are in the end times and thus whatever we do doesn't matter (or worse, may delay the end). A large minority believes this[0], but they have outsized influence among politicians, at least in the US.
Further, they believe that their holy literature is perfect and because science changes, science must be wrong[1]. Therefore, we should just follow what the book says, which is that there will be a rapture.
The assumption of universal ignorance on the part of non-"scientists" is ... pretty amazing.
I think we'd be pretty amazed at what people can discover, when the raw data and the analytical procedures used to draw conclusions from that data are exposed to scrutiny.
I think you're confusing something here. I'm not claiming we don't need open data nor am I claiming that the non-academic populus would be unable to make interesting observations with open data. I'm saying that of those people that deny scientifically validated claims (like climate change or the efficacy of vaccinations) the majority would not be able to make interesting (and valid) observations, nor would it be in their interest to do so.
I know how to run climate simulations, given a huge dump of climate data I would _not_ be able to draw any new conclusions out of it, I can guarantee that to you.
My point is that this idea that distrust in science stems from a lack of open data is wrong, and instead product of concerted and ongoing effort of propaganda and defunding of academia. Climate change is at this stage more a political problem than it is a scientific one.
> instead product of concerted and ongoing effort of propaganda and defunding of academia.
I think that's certainly true, but it doesn't account of the scores of unforced errors that our institutions and academy's are making on an almost daily basis that has eroded any credibility. Here are just a few examples...
CDC tweets that masks are 80% effective at "reducing your chance of getting COVID" - which is highly selective and word smithed information AT BEST. The real number is more like 11% and only when it's surgical. CDC fails to mention at all the cloth masks are pretty inadequate - which would be actual helpful information for people...
https://twitter.com/cdcdirector/status/1456645731691925518https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02457-y
American Academy of Pediatrics pushes FDA to approve vaccines and decries FDA's request for 1K more subjects to add to the 1500 in the trial. Then goes on to say Delta is "very dangerous to children" even though there is still no evidence to suggest that Delta is any more dangerous for children and rate of hospitalized chidren with serious disease hasn't changed from 2 in 100,000.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-academy-of-pediat...https://apnews.com/article/delta-variant-coronavirus-kids-40...
We could go on and on. People are not stupid. They see this stuff, know that they are being misled and that erodes trust. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if the misleading is in good faith or not.
I think your statement "those people that deny scientifically validated claims (like climate change or the efficacy of vaccinations)" pretty much sums up why the general populous is done with "Trust the Science".
When you push wildly experimental things by calling them "Vaccinations", when they do not confer immunity (!) but primarily reduce symptoms, and hence are not a "public good" (protect the at-risk unvaccinated population), but are a "personal good" (reduce your individual risks) -- it is, in fact, you that are destroying the credibility of public vaccination programs! People aren't stupid. Avoiding a potentially risky genetic treatment that doesn't confer community protection, when I believe effective treatments are available, is sound logic.
Likewise, creating artificial markets that penalize highly efficient, clean and non-murderous producers of hydrocarbon products (ie. Canadian), while simultaneously giving a complete pass to murderous and polluting regimes (China, Middle-Eastern) is repugnant. A "solution" which is this terrible is not acceptable, and hence will be rejected (eg. by people, for example, that don't agree with tossing gays off roof-tops or harvesting organs from undesirable people groups)
So, until "those people" who conflate rejecting insane non-immunizing experimental treatments with denying "vaccine efficacy", or conflate rejecting ineffective transfers of wealth from law-abiding oil producers to murderous polluters as rejecting "climate change" -- we're not going to reach agreement on "trusting the science".
>But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check scientist's work".
Even if raw datasets were available, I suspect 95%+ of people lack the ability to draw conclusions from them.
A majority would fail simply in the step of opening a browser and navigating the internet to get to the dataset.
And then a sizable portion would fail at figuring out which programs to use to analyze them.
And then a sizable portion of those would not understand the math to be able to understand the measurements they would be making.
The emergence of certain mostly trustworthy organizations filled with mostly trustworthy people is what has gotten us humans this far. People do not have the capacity to be able to comprehend and analyze all of nature, they will have to rely on trustworthy specialists.
There was a time when you were meant to trust the church. You weren't allowed to read the bible or interpret it yourself, since that was the role of a priest.
It was not a good system, and the people who were in charge of interpreting the scripture for people used their station to enrich themselves and levy power over the people who had to come to them.
This was especially poignant in the spring of 2020 when scientists and health officials were telling people that masks were NOT effective at preventing covid-19 infection. ...and that such idiotic positions were amplified on social media and opposing opinions were silenced.
People forget this ever happened. Our memory is short. I would add to this that cloth masks barely work at all, and yet we’re still encouraging people to wear them (1). It’s this kind of thing that we need to stop doing. Just tell people the truth and encourage them to wear a surgical mask.
> Let's just say for a moment that human-caused climate change is either minimal or even non-existent.
But we know that this is not the case. To me, this exercise is along the lines of wondering what the universe would be like if the cosmological constant had a different value.
It's a discussion about a theoretical world which does not exist, isn't it? What is the point then?
grant that our certainty on AGW is whatever it is now.
be generous and call it 95%.
what would it take to prove to the scientific establishment that whoops, we're in that 5%!
Wrong after all.
Here's the proof, everyone can go home now.
Given the number of variables & the long timelines involved, and the depth of political entrenchment - that outcome of a widely accepted disproof seems basically impossible, doesn't it?
My biggest concern is the lack of attribution to earth’s orbit around the sun…
if our Goldielocks zone is so precious, then one would expect any deviation in the orbit to deliver measurable differences in effects caused by earth’s proximity to the sun, no?
The Goldielocks zone is not tiny by human standard. It's goes from about a third of earth orbit's radius, to 10x it's radius. However climate would be extremely different at 0.3x, 1x and 10x, which I assume is what you really meant.
The orbit of Earth is also extremely stable, barely changing, and with time the earth is getting farther from the Sun, not closer, as the Sun is slowing losing mass since it's burning fuel to produce heat and light. The speed at which we are getting further away is however ridiculously tiny: a few centimeters a year.
To give you a sense of perspective, earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest in July. It is ~5 million kilometers nearer in January, and that only amount to about 6 or 7% more solar energy received.
So, any deviation of earth orbit's over the past 100 years that would explain climate change would need to be massive. Not the kind of things we wouldn't notice, and also not the kind of things that would allow us to be talking about it today. If earth's orbit was changing that much, that would mean our solar system is not stable, probably making life impossible.
I used to think this until someone pointed out that the earth isn't a fixed distance from the Sun.. it varies throughout the orbit from a minimum of 91 million miles to a maximum of 94.5 million miles away.
So there's already a 3.5 million mile margin of error in our Goldilocks zone... we'd have to go way beyond a few miles of annual change to feel any impact.
All energy on Earth is derived from the Sun. The amount of radiation from the Sun, and the fact that it isn't constant nor uniform, is conveniently ignored in all the climate science I've seen.
It is also awfully very convenient to ignore the fact that Earth's climate has been ever changing since its beginning.
That XKCD concatenated data from different studies with different temporal resolution, so it's very misleading. Past data came from Marcott et. all, who said:
“the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of about 120 years on average.”
“no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1,000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2,000-year periods and longer.”
Recent data came from yearly measurements, so preserves variability on a yearly basis.
In other words, the way past data was determined, sudden changes would be hidden, like the temperature spike that it shows in the 20th century.
Do you ever wonder why that comic only goes back 22,000 years? If it had gone back just a little more, say 25,000 years (a rounder number), it would be much more complicated to explain what happened.
If it had gone back 400,000 years, which is basically nothing in geological scales, it would bring up some really interesting questions.
I agree that climate change is an issue, but I've become so disappointed in the environmentalists response to it. They simply resort to zealotry over their one "true" solution without any practical considerations. For example, the one "true" solution that they consider as only acceptable is replacing all cars with full EVs. Which is foolish considering the urgency (2050 according to IPCC is a tipping point). They ignore that the battery technology simply isn't there yet or the infrastructure. Instead of their plans, consider this much more quickly achievable alternative:
- Government policy should require a regular hybrid as the base minimum in all new cars. It's 2021, there's no excuse now for a car to be pure ICE.
- New policy to favor PHEVs. The battery in one full EV can build four PHEVs. A 50 mile PHEV gets most of the benefits of CO2 reduction of a full EV. Also no new infrastructure is required, overnight level 1 charging is good enough. The suburbs will buy PHEVs (since they have a garage), the urban areas will buy hybrids (which will now be the minimum).
- All utility type vehicles (mail trucks, garbage trucks, delivery trucks), must be full EV. These vehicles are the perfect fit for the current battery technology (overnight centralized charging, frequent stops on short routes).
- Slowly raise the gas tax. Slowly is important otherwise there will be riots. But the impact on low income population should be minimal with the increasing supply of used hybrid and PHEVs.
The key feature of this plan is that it's a fast way to reduce CO2. Instead, look at what the infrastructure bill and the proposed BBB is doing. Billions on new charging stations, current version of BBB would reduce PHEV tax credit. Is this really the best way to get quick action on reducing CO2 from cars? Aren't those billions better spent getting hybrids and PHEVs (which have none of the charging or range issues of full EVs) to the public as quickly and widely as possible? Why is the goal suddenly to make all cars full EV, isn't the actual goal to reduce CO2 as fast as possible?
> I've become so disappointed in the environmentalists response to it. They simply resort to zealotry over their one "true" solution without any practical considerations. For example, the one "true" solution that they consider as only acceptable is replacing all cars with full EVs
I don’t think you can consider the infrastructure bill to be a primarily environmentalist driven piece of legislation. The deciding vote is Joe Manchin, who gets most of his money from coal. And there are plenty of quotes from him on how he would never allow things like a C02 tax into law.
What percentage of housing stock today where you live is situated where being car-less wouldn't be a major handicap? Make sure to account for people with families, people with vision/mobility issues, people who need to move materials to/from worksites regularly, etc. even if those concerns don't apply to you personally. Reducing the number of cars on the road, and the environmental impact of those that are, is a fine goal over the long term. OTOH, extreme anti-car activism - especially that which is just a cloak for a phobia about driving - quickly makes a mockery of itself.
There are enormous amounts of hydrocarbons beneath the Artic Ocean and the world has known that for many decades. If those resources could be extracted without extreme complication and expense the world would have done so before now.
It makes me wonder whether the "normal state" of the Arctic is in fact lush and tropical and what we are witnessing is its return to that state, albeit accelerated by humankind's increasing presence and its invention of industrial processes that use those hydrocarbons.
Given the exploration that has already taken place over the past decades, one would assume there are core samples, or core sample data, located somewhere that indicate the true nature of the changes the Arctic Ocean has experienced and continues to express.
1. It doesn't touch on the Earth's natural absorption of CO2 - so we cannot conclude here that the additional CO2 emitted remains in the atmosphere (I mean we know that from other research, but this link is silent on that mitigation).
2. The cumulative numbers are pointless and misleading. CO2 is known to have a half-life on the order of under a century, so posting cumulative numbers gives the reader the misconception that the only way back is to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and that the situation is much more irreversible than it is in the long term.
None of the charts seem to take into account any absorption at all, regardless of the duration. Having a chart 120 years long, and not including absorption, means all the numbers are significantly wrong.
Also, 120 years is on the upper range of most estimates, and does not assume any increased absorption despite the fact that we've almost doubled the concentration of CO2.
I find the term "half-life" in this context misleading, possibly because I am coming from a nuclear science background where half lives are stable because they are the probabilistic result of nuclear decay. The chance of a given atom decaying doesn't change no mater how many you have or what you do.
With CO2, the absorption probability is flexible and can depend on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere (as well as a large number of other factors.) To me this makes "half-life" a poor metaphor for CO2 absorption.
The notion of half-life still works - but you are correct that the absorption is likely a product of the concentration. At any particular concentration, the half-life is still roughly representative.
A differential equation would be more accurate, but it's not as easy to convey.
Actually what I am saying is that the absorption rate does not scale linearly with concentration / quantity. While increasing the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere in many circumsyance will increase absorbtion, there is clearly an upper limit on how high that absorbtion rate can rise. In addition, the absorption rate also depends on how much has already been absorbed, ocean temperature, oceans currents, biosphere health and probably a number of factors of which I am unaware.
The half-life of an unstable element is a fixed property of that kind of matter everwhere. The absorption rate of CO2 is in no way a property of CO2 itself, but rather a dynamic characteristic of the complex system that is the planet we live on. Instead of trying to break that down to a single number, I think we need to pay more attention to the actual mechanisms involved and the numbers behind them.
CO2 gets sequestered into underground fossil duel deposits very slowly (and possibly not at all anymore given changes in the biosphere.) Vegetative matter is a very shallow reservoir that can only hold so much before the outgassing from decay wipes out the absorption from growth. The biggest source of absorption is (I believe) the oceans. We don't really know how much the ocean can absorb or how the global rise in tempuratures will effect that. I do think that you can't really view CO2 absorbed by the ocean as "gone" in the same way as with CO2 that is sequestered in fossil fuels. (or a decayed atom that has irreversibly become something else.)
Ah, the old “sea ice extent” bullshit promoted by deniers.
Extent means sweet FA: *volume* is what counts. And in volume, the ice caps have a fraction of their old volume. Here is the trend line, and it shows that Arctic ice is absolutely FUBAR.
What other suggestions do you have for what "we" could do? China won't do anything, neither will India or Russia, by the way. So what are we doing? It'll boil down to effectively taxing companies and people. I skipped ahead a few steps in the discussion. Sorry for spoiling it.
I'm surprised this is news to people. The earth (and Arctic Ocean) has been warming ever since the last ice age. Places like the Great Lakes used to be frozen glaciers thousands of years ago.
It’s news because it’s a more nuanced claim than your “general ocean warming has occurred over thousands of years” claim.
The claim is that the marked increase in warming in the 20th century began decades earlier than was previously believed, not just that there was once an ice age and it’s warmer now.
Your flippant comment unfairly trivializes the article; either on purpose or because you didn't read it.
From the article:
“When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.”
Dubai is in the desert and is more than thriving. On Average I was colder there than in Canada. Every indoor place has great Air Conditioning. Drinkable Water is converted from Ocean water. Its a model of what a future city could look like in the worst case climate change scenario, if human ingenuity is able to thrive.
Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
And the people fear mongering about the collapse of civilization to advocate for certain politics, should be more worried about the immediate threat from bioterrorism, COVID lockdowns, or even the type of civilization breakdown that is happening in South Africa.
I'm personally in support of a high energy future, and I think Nuclear Energy is
the most realistic way we will get there.
And all that heat has to go somewhere. And the hotter things get, the more those air conditioners will have to work: producing more heat. Implying air conditioning is the solution to climate change is kind of like suggesting we drop ice cubes in the ocean to cool it off.
> Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
The problem is that we honestly don't know what the effects will be. How disrupting those ecosystems will impact other areas. We've already learned the devastating effects invasive species can have on areas, on how improperly planned damming and levee construction can fuck up our coastlines, suggesting that making Northern Canada a temperate zone is no big deal is just willfully ignoring all the knock-on effects that will bring.
Also, North Canada wasn't always in the North. So the fact that palm fossils were found there isn't proof that the North was once tropical, it's just proof that palms once grew there. That area could have been in the tropics. I don't remember all of the continental shifts caused by plate tectonics, but things have moved quite a bit in the some 4 billion years the Earth has existed.
It's worth noting that thermal efficiency is dictated by the delta T, so an air conditioner pushing twice the temperature difference burns more than twice the energy and produces more than twice the heat.
And the more heat we drive into urban spaces, the bigger the Heat Island Effect will be. There are twenty variables we can be tackling here and we need people tugging at all of them. More trees, better albedo on built structures, retrofitting for energy efficiency, and and and...
So just curious, how does it compare bringing 40 degrees Celsius down to 21 degrees, vs 0 degrees upto 21 degrees. Is heating more energy efficient than cooling? My practical experience has been that AC costs less, than heating a home.
Considering that if anywhere Solor panels could work well, the Dubai desert is near tops for efficiency. This also offsets any deficit. And Dubai also has seasonal temperature variations, winter they are around 29 degrees.
I wouldn't be surprised that the total energy expenditure for a home in Dubai, is less than a home in Northern Canada .
> Dubai is in the desert and is more than thriving
I'm not sure why you think that. The amount of work and resources that go in to making it partly habitable is immense. Without oil money, it would be desolate and empty. Without it we would see the slave cities, surrounding the shiny buildings, completely swept away. As a city, it's an economic sinkhole not a prosperous one.
No one is saying fish don't have an impact on the environment. You're apparently arguing that they have an impact on ocean currents, which is a claim that is out there enough that people at least expect a source.
This is fascinating! We've always blamed climate change/warming on man-made activities, but this study is saying Arctic Atlantification predates the industrial revolution (or at least occurs at the same time). Not that I want to see continued use of fossil fuels in place of more sustainable options like nuclear and solar/wind. But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
> but this study is saying Arctic Atlantification predates the industrial revolution (or at least occurs at the same time).
No, it isn't. It says it starts at the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial revolution usually dated as mid-18th to mid-19th century. The former is neither before nor at the same time as the latter.
> Not that I want to see continued use of fossil fuels in place of more sustainable options like nuclear and solar/wind. But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
There is no good reason to think that they have, and this study does not at all contravene, or even call into question, the consensus on the causes of warming.
> There is no good reason to think that they have, and this study does not at all contravene, or even call into question, the consensus on the causes of warming.
From the article:
> “Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,” said Tommaso. “We rely on these simulations to project future climate change, but the lack of any signs of an early warming in the Arctic Ocean is a missing piece of the puzzle.”
I'd generally encourage people to be skeptical of everything, but I'd call this a really good reason to be skeptical.
Could be. If you're willing to admit that it might go the other way as well then I'm fine with being skeptical on either side (In fact I encourage it).
James Watt's first heat engine went online the same year as the American Revolutionary War. We might recall also that one of the uses of his machines was to keep coal mines from filling up with water (ie, increase coal production).
This has been going on for a long time, and steel production was a major factor long before Watt.
The article makes no mention of the warming predating the industrial revolution. Rather, the quote below indicates a marked change in temperature at the beginning of the 20th century.
When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.
> All of the world’s oceans are warming due to climate change, but the Arctic Ocean, the smallest and shallowest of the world’s oceans, is warming fastest of all.
The article talks about the Arctic Ocean. It is not denying the warming of the world's ocean due to climate change.
This article does not say global climate warming is not man-made, it just states that "Atlantification" is a process that warms the Arctic Ocean even more.
In William Ruddiman's Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum [0] he argues that even human agriculture has been enough to tip the CO2 scales in favor of not entering a new ice age.
> But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
This would require several, distinct and unrelated fields of science being wrong about the way CO2 and other GHG have in the past and currently regulate the Earth's temperature.
There is no question that CO2 in the atmosphere has been rapidly rising.
There is no question that humans have been the cause of this rise, it's just basic math given the wild amount of hydrocarbons we combust every year.
So while it's possible that scientists are wrong in the big picture sense it would require a sea-change in our understanding of climate from every perspective as well as being a remarkable coincidence that we are seeing the impact we are in correlation to our own CO2 emissions.
A far, far more likely explanation is that the Earth's climate is even more sensitive to small changes in CO2 on a small time scale than we have previously thought.
It potentially explains more/better/more fine-grained how our future will look like.this will not suddenly revert our assumptions on CO2 being the fundamental factor of man made global warming.
> But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
That is extremely unlikely. We can measure the spectrum and intensity of incoming solar energy and of outgoing radiation from Earth, and see that we are gaining. We can see that much of that gain is due to incoming energy heating things which re-radiate that energy in infrared which we can see gets trapped by CO2.
We can tell by looking at the isotope distribution of the C in the CO2 where it comes from. CO2 from still living or recently living (say dead for only a few hundred years) has a different isotope distribution than CO2 from long dead or never living sources. This lets us tell that most of the CO2 increase over the last couple hundred years is from burning fossil fuels or an increase in geological processes that release long trapped CO2 such as volcanic activity.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that we can tell from that did not come from living or recently living things matches fairly well with what we know of volcanic activity and how much fossil fuels we burn, giving us enough data to conclude that most of the warming due to CO2 is due to human emitted CO2.
For that to be wrong would require that we have massively overestimated how much fossil fuels we use and massively overlooked a large amount of volcanic activity.
Ok, but more heat means more water vapor which means more cloud cover which means less heat. More CO2 means more plant growth which means less CO2 as the carbon is tied up.
It's not one factor you can examine cleanly in isolation. There are many many interacting factors.
A bit terrifying that your other comment which was pointing out this "just asking questions" behavior[0] was immediately flagged and removed.
It's wild to me that a group of people that tends to be educated, intellectual, and curious about complex systems instantly starts to lose it's collective mind when faced with an existential risk. It feels like living in a Lovecraft story where the only response to horror is madness.
Exactly! The article mentions it’s been warming since 1900 which is a scant decade after industrialization began. It seems to suggest other factors are contributing to global warming!
for context, greenhouse effect was first described in 1824 and a good approximation of the warning effect of doubling of atmospheric CO2 was made in 1896 (+2.5~4 C) [0]
From 1800 to 1900, CO2 ppm rose from 280 to 300
Of course, from 1900 til today it has risen to over 400ppm
My point is, we were burning a significant amount of coal throughout 1800s - Acid rain was happening in the 1850s [1]
I guess I was quoting the source in saying the pencil and paper estimate is in line with modern climate models
edit: from a cursory googling, looks like 450ppm is in line with 2C warning while 600pm is the higher end at 4C warning
note also temperature lags behind co2 (since heat is captured cumulatively over time) so even if we stabilized now at ~412ppm we will continue to see warming
> See other reply that shows CO2 emissions were negligible until 1900?
Literally, no, where? Even if I did see one claiming that, I’ve also seen the charts of net atmospheric CO2 from human activity that show a sharp rise already in progress by 1800.
Just grasping at straws. Without taking into consideration, the magnitude of co2 getting emitted, we can even blame cavemen with their cook fires for global warming.
I’m a physical oceanographer which means my job is to figure out how the water moves and delivers heat through things like math and models. Paleoclimate isn’t my expertise but I figured I’d chime in on some of the climate skepticism here.
Oceanographers would be the first to admit that modeling-predicting changes in the ocean is very hard. Especially more regional features like an intensified warming in the Labrador Sea. That is because even state of the art models have coarse resolution and our initial conditions for far in the past are poor. However, anthropogenic climate change is not a regional effect.
It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?
Also I’ve seen in this thread people saying that global climate change has been overhyped. From the science side this paper does a great job of evaluating our models from the past:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288430943.pdf