Also, worth watching Attenborough's "A Life On Our Planet" released on Netflix a few years ago. It gives an overview of the threats earth faces in the next couple decades, and a testimony of the changes he's already witnessed.
Chinese and Indians don't need convincing, they are well aware. They just don't care. Or perhaps, feel less inclined to action when their first world contemporaries are still enjoying an orders of magnitude greater per-capita emissions.
That's true. Though the exact same thing is true of most westerners too.
The story of the global warming catastrophe is everyone wanting someone else to fix it. The third world blames the first, people now blame people in the past, everyone is very willing to cut emissions just not here or now or me.
Actually fixing it would have required everyone to act.
At this point I actually think the most interesting thing is the collective delusion that we will fix it (that time is long gone) or that someone somewhere IS acting (they're not). Everyone thinks that are on the right side when basically no one actually is. It's fascinating.
I think it's a fallacy to think everyone must act. The West, being major consumers in the world, has a lot more leverage in this area and also more funds to do so. One of the major contributors to third world emissions is that the west outsources a lot of their emissions to these countries.
One simple step forward is for the west to take a stance and pick "clean" manufacturers rather than "cheap" manufacturers. Tax corporations higher when they outsource or buy from lax countries. That will put a positive pressure on these countries to adopt clean energy instead of being continuously spurred to ignore emissions and keep costs down for exports.
Let's assume we could solve the whole problem just by making changes in the west. I don't actually believe that. But let's just agree.
So now what? You need to get 1.2Bn people to radically reduce their standards of living. You need them to do it immediately. You need to change EVERY aspect of people's lives, from transport to housing to jobs. And you need them to volunteer and like it and do it despite the fact others continue to increase their emissions. Whole regions, countries even, will have to radically change their whole economies (Norway will have to back to being a fish and mobile phone based economy?!).
Does anyone think that will happen? Anyone? Really?
Developed countries won't do it. Under-Developed countries wont do it. The Rich won't and neither will the poor. The young won't and neither will the old. And that's without getting into the fact you need Many If Not All of those groups, not just some.
Per capita CO2 emissions of most European countries (like the UK and France) are lower than China at this point. The US might be lower than China by the end of this decade too.
It's interesting to speculate what Attenborough would say if he realized the lecture he saw was built on a lie. The article makes it clear that what converted Attenborough was the NASA GISTEMP graph. It would never have occurred to him to ask whether this data was being manipulated.
Go to the NASA GISTEMP website (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/) and look at the same graph as it is today. There are differences between the two. For example in the graph he saw, the temperature anomaly in 1981 is about 0.21 degree C. In the current graph it's 0.32 degree C.
It's a little known fact that the organizations producing graphs of global temperatures continually rewrite the historical record and often do so silently. These rewrites create warming trends in the data where in the past no such trends were visible. This article proves the case beyond doubt:
It shows two different graphs claiming to be the same version of the same temperature dataset, both on the NASA website. One is no longer linked from anywhere and can only be reached because the blog author preserved the link in his records. They have different data in them - the newer one shows more warming during the 20th century than the older one.
The head of climatology at NASA was challenged on Twitter to explain why historical data was being silently rewritten. His only response was a clown face emoji.
As you go further back into the past the edits become ever more extreme. The lecture notes admit that there was a "slight cooling" between 1940 and the end of the 1970s. The NASA temperature graphs show that global temperatures went sideways during this time - something that makes no sense given that the climatology of the era was dominated by fear of global cooling, nor if all the increase is caused by CO2 because CO2 levels increased steadily during this era (the lecture says it's a mystery).
Newspaper archives show that in the past, scientists had a very different view of what temperature was doing. Back then the National Center for Atmospheric Research showed global temperatures experiencing a strong multi-decade decline from the 1940s to the 1970s, with the temperature in 1973 being no different to the temperature 1910. Nowadays climatologists claim that the early 20th century were some of the coldest years on record with 1913 being a full half a degree colder globally than in 1973.
Climatologists don't deny that they do this, but as NASA's reaction shows they don't like people knowing about it. Over the last 20 years the field's approach to data integrity has collapsed completely and with predictable results - nothing can now be said about global temperatures with any certainty. Even basic things like announcing record breaking temperatures is no longer possible because the past is always being rewritten:
This statement, like so many of the statements in your comment, is tired climate-denier rhetoric.
Past measurements are re-processed all the time, because the map from the measured quantity to the desired quantity needs to be re-calibrated.
The data you're pointing to is a binned temperature dataset (5-degree by 5-degree bins). The land stations change location and instrumentation over the time period covered, and you have to account for this. Over time, you learn more and more about these effects, so periodically you re-process everything with new calibration.
All this is documented in the papers pointed to by the website:
Please, leave the accusations of rhetoric to one side. Your post could equally be described as the tired rhetoric of climatologists but it's unproductive and shallow.
Also. Please think very carefully about what they are saying because it makes no sense.
If weather stations are moved today that doesn't change temperatures in the past.
Moving individual stations is rare and climate change is by definition a wide area phenomenon. Occasional station moves shouldn't be having any effect on general global trends, yet the data is altered in ways that change long term trends.
Recalibration means adjusting your instruments to improve the accuracy of future observations. It isn't a word that lets you arbitrarily change recorded data. By definition, if you believe your instruments were badly calibrated in the past, it means that past data is unreliable and shouldn't be used.
When scientists aren't sure a measurement is reliable they're supposed to add confidence intervals. If the dubious data was from the past they should then retract papers built on that data, as the foundational data is no longer trusted. Climatologists never do these things.
Temperature data is now being changed for every month in recorded history, every month. There is no scientific justification for that possible. If they can't be sure what the temperature is today, or last week, to such a great extent that historical documents about the past now completely contradict present claims, then they can't predict the future.
There is no methodological claim that can change these things. Science requires basic standards or else it is meaningless cultism.
You are hung up on the calibrations needed to turn a series of point-location sensor measurements into an estimate of an underlying quantity (temperature in a 5x5 degree box over time).
This kind of calibration is purely routine in any measurement problem, as I tried to indicate (and as the papers that I linked to demonstrate).
Any time you have a lab measurement, you have to try to calibrate it. You learn more about sources of bias over time, and you re-do the calibration, and regenerate the temperature estimate.
It seems like you haven't had a chance to work on a long-term measurement system consisting of real-world hardware, and you're proceeding on some kind of common-sense idea that the point measurement is an absolute read on the underlying quantity of interest?
They say that claims the temperature record was changed to exaggerate warming are false, whilst admitting that the record was changed and that increased the warming trend. Nice fact check.
The justifications they give don't change the outcomes: nothing claimed about temperatures or what they are doing can be trusted because they change every historical observation every month, in ways that create warming where previously none existed. No "science" that does this is worthy of the name because no claims it makes can be trusted to last.
OK have time now. I do know the reasons they give. But again we need to think carefully about this and not just blindly say it's OK because they have some clever sounding justification.
Observation 1: climatologists don't seem to care about raw data quality at all. Real scientists understand that high quality measurements are important and work hard to improve them. It's expensive and slow but it's gotta be done. Physics, cosmology are good examples of that. They need the data, they raise the money and make it happen.
Climatologists rely on volunteers and random weather stations run for other reasons to collect their data. It would be easy to collect their own data to a high standard because we're only talking about thermometers here, but they never do. Instead they gather data which they know is corrupted by large biases, and then try to "fix" it. But you can't turn corrupted and biased data into clean data by adjusting it. That is always scientific fraud and for good reasons: it's too easy to fool yourself into fixing the data to reflect your theory, instead of the theory being derived from the data.
Observation 2: The adjustments create almost all the reported warming in the USA! Think about that for a second. Over half of claimed global warming in the USA is created via one single administrative adjustment (TOBS), simply because climatologists couldn't be bothered asking a subset of the weather stations to stick with a consistent time of day.
Observation 3: It turns out some people actually do care about data quality - climate change skeptics. After they noticed how crap the weather station network was they ran to Congress and complained especially about urban heat bias and other problems. Because it's obvious to everyone that this situation is absurd, Congress tried to salvage it by funding a brand spanking new weather station network, the US CRN:
Climatologists don't use it perhaps because it shows no warming whatsoever in the USA for the entire time it has existed, nearly 17 years now. That should be impossible, right?
This is why it's so important to think carefully before just linking to their explanations:
1. They use garbage quality data that by their own telling is riven by biases as large as the ones they're trying to measure.
2. They didn't make any effort to improve this situation.
3. Other people did it for them and global warming can no longer be seen in the new higher quality data.
Any rational person would do a double take at this state of affairs.
Also, worth watching Attenborough's "A Life On Our Planet" released on Netflix a few years ago. It gives an overview of the threats earth faces in the next couple decades, and a testimony of the changes he's already witnessed.