The ice levels this year are definitely a cause for concern.
There's good evidence that 2023 is trending to be the hottest year on record because of reduction of sulfur in cargo ship fuels. Sulfur is a pollutant that reduces air quality but on the flip side, it can increase cloud formation (which prevents heat being trapped in the atmosphere).
Some folks see this as an argument in favor of continuing to use high-sulfur fuels, and perhaps, intentionally disperse sulfur in the atmosphere. That's a bad idea for a number of reasons, one of which is acidification of rain.
The biggest and most alarming takeaway imo, is that high-sulfur fuels have been obscuring the severity of climate change.
Others see it as an argument in favour of continuing to pump stuff into the atmosphere to increase the albedo of the earth, but using less harmful materials than sulfur.
That really seems like the obvious next step in my opinion.
Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”
Viewpoint: Without more research and guardrails, geoengineering is a costly gamble, with potentially harmful results
While theoretically capable of cooling the planet, solar radiation management could have drastic side effects by shifting patterns of global atmospheric circulation that can lead to more extreme weather events. It also does nothing to reduce harms of excess greenhouse gases, including ocean acidification. A 2022 study published in the scientific journal Nature predicted that stratospheric aerosol injection could alter global precipitation patterns and reduce agricultural productivity.
Beyond safety, another important question involves accountability. There's a good chance that geoengineering meant to help one region would harm others. That's because ocean and weather systems are globally interconnected.
As Riley Duren, a systems engineer from NASA, said in an interview with the space agency: "Geoengineering is not a cure. At best, it's a Band-Aid or tourniquet; at worst, it could be a self-inflicted wound."
You're aware, I'm aware, and they are too. The thing is, it's not a solution; it's just temporarily masking/hiding the root problem, allowing it to grow larger and larger until it may become unmanageable.
No, because a competing theory is that heat this year is due to the eruption of a large underwater volcano at the start of last year, which expelled a truly astounding amount of water vapor into the atmosphere. Water being of course, a greenhouse gas.
I have to assume good faith intention to these questions. Here’s literally the raw data showing high resolution temp data of temperature since 1850s. The heat island effect pushed by watt has been debunked since 2011.
It was never debunked. Like a lot of stuff in climate climatologists simply referred back to their own totally corrupted data and then asserted there was no problem.
You link to BEST, but BEST is a good example of their strategy. BEST's list of "very rural" weather stations include weather stations in the middle of international airports and cities. Climatologists don't collect their own data, they just scrape stuff from the internet and whatever other random datasets they can OCR so their data is often GIGO.
Obviously if you classify weather stations as rural when they're not, you will conclude UHI isn't important, but this just means you're bad at science, not that the effect doesn't exist. Anyone who has ever driven through a city into the countryside knows that UHI exists and has a significant effect.
The Berkeley classification in Thailand also looks very suspect. As in Peru, many of the “very rural” sites are small cities. Some locations look suspicious. “Bangkok Pilot” is shown as “very rural”, but when googled is associated with Suvarnabhumi, the name of the very urban Bangkok airport (data is sparse, so it may be something else, but anything associated in any way with Bangkok can hardly be “very rural”)
This isn't the only example either. They loooooove to pretend that weather stations sited right next to jet aircraft engines reflect the temperature in the nearest tiny village.
But objectively now the burden is to prove two anecdotal points are enough to disprove the entire dataset which has not been done yet to my knowledge
As with anything if there’s enough evidence it’s a working theory that has to be disproved
Moreover statements “like a lot of stuff…, totally corrupted” makes me suspect you have a bias.
I used to follow watts blog and esp curry at georgia tech when I was briefly a student there (not in climate). It’s a lot of cherry picking. Overall I’m glad they exist of course, but they didn’t convince me.
My favorite was aa doctor in his 50s who had an engineering degree from rice claim that it’s all bogus because Ice cores in the arctic are managed by Russians and he didn’t trust Russians
Don't you have this the wrong way around? UHI definitely exists and has a significant effect. This is observable by anyone. Climatologists claim it hardly affects anything and doesn't matter. This is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence. When their presented evidence immediately fails numerous spot checks, we revert back to the initial assumption: UHI is in fact important and climatology isn't serious about data quality.
Although we keep hearing of the unimportance of UHI, Bangkok has increased 0.24 deg C/decade relative to Mae Hong Son.
The US CRN which is sited away from any potential UHI corruption shows no warming across the entire USA since it opened in 2005. Implication: UHI corruption is significant.
So what? It's been a cold wet summer where I live. Guess that disproves everything. This sub-thread is about UHI anyway.
Look, climate fanatics are constantly latching onto random natural events and claiming it proves the world is doomed. They're always wrong and when they get proven wrong they just ignore it and pretend it never happened. Or they change the historical record to make it look like they were correct all along.
On the polar theme, look at all the stupid claims about polar bears from some years back. Polar bears became the face of climate change where I live, they appeared on adverts by the electricity company. Polar bears turn out to be doing fine and the self-proclaimed academic "experts" who claimed they were in mortal danger were all proven wrong, yet again, just like they always are, and yet again there were no consequences for their failure, just like there never are.
And how many times have they claimed all the ice would be gone at the poles by now? They claim this so often it's a meme. Search this page for "ice":
If these guys were doing science in the private sector they'd all have gone bankrupt/to prison a long time ago. Only very naive people keep believing claims from a culture so thoroughly discredited as them.
I have a dark fascination with the inevitable industry-friendly responses you find on a post like this. I always wonder if the people know that the industry says very different things behind closed doors than they do in congress.
It's the other way around. Huge quantities of climate related claims and journalism are bought and paid for. Supposedly "non profit" organizations are the most corrupt of all.
The Associated Press said Tuesday that it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues, in the news organization’s largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants.
The announcement illustrates how philanthropy has swiftly become an important new funding source for journalism — at the AP and elsewhere — at a time when the industry’s financial outlook has been otherwise bleak.
For many years, Journalists and philanthropists were more wary of each other. News organizations were concerned about maintaining independence and, until the past two decades, financially secure enough not to need help. Philanthropists didn’t see the need, or how journalists could help them achieve their goals.
Nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica and Texas Tribune led the way in changing minds
Both sides had things to learn.
For Carovillano, it was getting used to the idea that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve. “This is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he said.
Note that all 20 of the new hires are tasked to "focus on climate change’s impact" - i.e. impact is assumed, and then they go looking for stories to support this narrative. Something they explicitly aren't funded to investigate: whether the science is robust.
As always, the loudest shrieking about corruption comes from the most corrupt people.
Sure it does. Most of the responses on posts like these are simply aping industry talking points, where the "industry" in question is the academic/philanthropic complex. They spend vast amounts on propaganda to ensure public support for their work.
I wouldn't say most. And I'm no fan of echo chambers. We have to expect a certain amount of industry support in any mainstream social context.
The notion that the problem is the "academic/philanthropic complex" comes directly out of the same industry imagineering and is a common misdirect providing talking points that lead away from industrial disruption.
In other words, it sounds to me like you (or to be fair and more accurate: people who use similar arguments) are critical of mainstream misdirection but possibly unaware that they've also been just as duped.
In basic terms this point works, otherwise it wouldn't be a good ruse. The academy is easily corrupted and non-profits are mostly total shit. These are not trivial points to make in the picture. But they aren't paramount at all. They are not the cause and changing them will not solve our problem.
I made that term up on the spot, but you seem pretty sure I must just be mentally Xeroxing things I heard elsewhere. But it's not the case. I reached my conclusions based on my own research and by discovering things like the AP story, where the AP themselves express extreme discomfort with the level of corruption the org has stooped to. It wasn't an oil company that told me that.
Any suggestions? I found my current job on climatebase.org but am interested in other ways to help. I would love to be able to directly quantify my work's impact on the planet.
The deviation in sea ice extent from previous years is terrifying. I've been watching lines be slightly lower than previous years my whole life but it seems like the ice loss has accelerated dramatically.
Antarctic sea ice extent had been rising from 1979 (when satellite data started) to 2015. It regressed for a few years and then expanded again in 2020 and 2021 and then regressed again. There's a lot of causes of this and there are studies looking at it going back many hundreds and thousands of years, but they aren't as accurate as satellite data. Additionally, different seas in the antarctic have had different behaviors. Some have regressed and some have expanded at different times.
> ...changes in atmospheric circulation, wind stress and thermodynamic processes linked to the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
>...Thus, projections of future Antarctic sea-ice extent and the associated climate implications are highly uncertain.
> >...Thus, projections of future Antarctic sea-ice extent and the associated climate implications are highly uncertain.
> Point is - we don't know.
People keep interpreting "we don't know" in the same way a mutual fund information sheet says "past performance does not guarantee future performance," but in reality, "we don't know" is akin to saying "You have a stage three liver cancer and it will likely spread to some other organs, but we don't know yet which organ and when."
Some people keep saying "But the doctors can't even tell me what will happen next month! I'm probably fine."
You're making a huge leap there. We do know that cancer is a sickness and we actually do know your chances of survival 6 months out, 1 year out, 5 years out, etc. We don't know the day you will die from it but we are certain you will die from it if left untreated. We have lots of empirical data that can be tested, replicated, and stated with a high probability of certainty. We have actual knowledge on this. This is what science is used for - to create actual knowledge. Not informed opinions.
You are the one making a logical leap. We do know that the Earth's climate is entering conditions never seen during human history. We know how CO2 warms up the Earth. We just don't have a detailed knowledge of exactly how and where it affects weather.
The operating assumption must be that things that never happened (or very rarely happened) will start to happen more frequently.
You are arguing that as long as climatologists cannot reliably predict any particular disaster, we should assume the climate should be "business as usual." That's not science, that's just refusing to acknowledge the reality.
Just based on a cursory examination, you seem to be cherry-picking from your citation and omitting words that appear in that study, like “slightly”, to make it sound as if there was some sort of significant growth of the Antarctic ice sheet since 1979 that is now reverting to some stable state, which is not the case.
Looking at the data itself, Antarctic sea ice extent was pretty stable until the past two years, where it has fallen quite dramatically.[0] I think it is reasonable to express some alarm when you’ve gone from a trend of -0.12% per decade, to 16% below the 30-year average, in two years.
It doesn't follow that it's reasonable to express alarm.
Decades of stability followed by sudden change is strong evidence against CO2 being the cause, because growth of that in the atmosphere is a very stable process. It suggests a different cause, which means it's natural, most likely related to undersea volcanism. In which case it's unlikely to be dangerous, unless you think this is some sort of freak event like an asteroid strike. But then you're not talking about climate change.
That paper is quite difficult to interpret for a non-expert, and isn't focused on just sea ice extent. I'm not sure what they mean by "extent", is it a maximum or an average? Here's a link with some graphs that are easier to understand: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/....
The annual maximum follows the trend you describe, while the annual minimum has been more static and decreased substantially in the last few years.
Arctic sea ice has been quite stable for the past 100 years but has recently begun to shrink rapidly. I imagine scientists might be worried that the Antarctic might be about to start seeing a similar change in behaviour.
Citing large technical volumes and claiming they say something counter to a consensus, such as https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/ is a classic bluff. For example, it's one of Alex Jones's favorite tactics.
I spent a couple minutes on the article in question and it does not agree with the OP.
The bluffer in this classic game, however, has already moved on to misappropriating their next large volume. It's easy to toss smoke bombs.
We've been over the data so many times that there isn't really anything new to say about it. Insisting on revisiting old arguments is itself a rhetorical tactic that superficially resembles argumentation but is really just a time-waster.
One could simply refuse to engage, but that cedes the field to the people using in the easiest talking points. That "field" consists of people whose opinions matter, because they vote, but continue to consider the situation "unproven" despite scientific evidence overwhelmingly on one side. It becomes entirely a matter of persuasion, almost completely divorced from the actual data, since anybody capable of being persuaded by the data already has been.
It's not that they don't find the empirical evidence persuasive but they can't resolve it with their personal emotional and political alignments.
Until you can repackage climate change as some slaphappy singsongy jesus thing or some hayekian libertarian delusion, a large percentage of the population will never get on board.
That's because the evidence they're looking for is biblical verses or rational choice theory argument - there's nothing materialist about their epistemology which is why that approach simply does not work.
I don't think you get it. Let's say you don't speak, say, Chinese. I make a claim that's in stark disagreement to the general consensus, such as "The Chinese claim their country is an island in the Caribbean north of Jamaica" and then I find a large academic text, in Chinese, and claim that I translated a section of it that supports my argument.
What are you going to do? Learn Chinese, read the text, then come back in 4 years and tell me I'm wrong?
That's what this game is.
You can go and find the quote the OP is using, read the context, and, if you take the time, see it doesn't mean what they claim.
It's asymmetrical and either not done in good faith or not worth engaging in.
The satellite measurements of Antarctic sea ice are not in dispute. Nobody is putting forth a device with a different measurement.
The submarine surveys agree with the Buoy measurements agree with the satellite measurements which agree with the microwave remote sensing measurements.
There was 1 (one) (singular) study from 8 years ago that had a different interpretation of the numbers by Jay Zwally. People who don't understand science love attaching themselves to it like pulling out Andrew Wakefield's vaccine autism paper.
They are quick to discredit 99.99% of the science and then parade around with the 0.01% cause celebre calling it irrefutable evidence.
You're strawmanning, please don't do that. The original claim was about long term ice trends/projections and what they do or don't mean, but now you're trying to claim there's a dispute over satellite measurement accuracy (there isn't).
As for your claims of consensus, please just stop. Almost nothing about the climate has a consensus outside of the physical absorption bands of various gases. Constantly claiming you don't need to respond to people's points because there's a "consensus" when there obviously isn't is an illegitimate tactic. Engage with the point or don't, but don't try and pretend you're in the right to ignore it.
It's almost invariably political ideology propagated by conservative intellectual dark web conspiracy peddlers like Sam Harris, Weinsteins or Rush Limbaugh type characters using rhetorical tricks to create FUD and blow smoke in order to support a political agenda.
They're propagandists and liars.
I'm tired of that game and I've got no time for their tricks. I've seen them all before and it's just feeding the trolls. They're being insincere frauds.
The chemistry works. The physics works. There's no dispute on the chemical properties of carbon dioxide. No dispute on the current measurements or the physics of it. Nobody is saying the ph levels of the ocean are not being measured accurately or that certain biological chemistry doesn't only work at specific levels.
There's no rogue satellite returning different data. Even the American Petroleum Institute doesn't dispute any actual data.
Very fundamental chemistry and physics would have to foundationally change for climate change to be fake. I've yet to find anyone with a scintilla of evidence to show how this alternative model actually works. That's because it doesn't.
It's all rhetorical hand waving nonsense by internet celebrities and talk show yappers who can't balance a chemical equation yet alone propose an alternate GCM. Their criticisms are just uninformed bullshit.
What are you talking about? Do you really think all you need to accurately predict global climate trends hundreds of years into the future is the chemical properties of a single gas? If you do actually believe that then your knowledge of climatology is very poor indeed.
The problems with the science here are legion, starting with the fact that the climate is far too complicated to predict given only knowledge of the chemical properties of CO2!
Consider the thousands of factors you need to also fully understand. Climate models don't properly handle the effects of clouds, they don't understand how energy is absorbed by the ocean, and they aren't even calibrated against reliable temperature measurements which is one reason estimates of the core ECS variable (the key to the whole thing) have been getting wider over time, not narrower. As in, literally, the constant you want to see scientists agree on has been losing consensus, not gaining it.
Your problem is that you think reality is very simple, and that's why you struggle to understand why anyone could possibly disagree with your views. Go spend a few months trying to explain why the models are diverging both from observation and each other - a scientific fact - and then you may start to find it possible to understand "talk show yappers" or whoever else you imagine is your enemy.
They attempt to deal with it, but there are still massive problems with their simulations of it. Go read the papers, the model authors talk about the issues themselves. Nothing right wing about climatological papers, is there, far from it.
Re: ocean warming. These aren't small details. For over a decade climatologists reported that there had been a long term pause in global warming. Thousands of papers were written about it, wondering where the heat went. They started to argue that it had disappeared into the ocean, in an event not anticipated by the models. Literally that all global warming had been absorbed this way since ~2000. That's a huge detail to miss!
Around 2015 or so they resolved the problem in a different way: they modified the temperature databases to erase the pause from the record. All those papers, apparently studying and trying to explain something that had never even happened.
So the uncomfortable fact remained that by their own telling, either:
1. They didn't understand heat absorption of the oceans.
or
2. They didn't know how to measure global temperature despite their entire field being based around these measurements.
But actual history is just "right wing fud", right? It's impossible for pure minded academics to ever be corrupted by power, pride or a lust for status. They're just born better than right wing people.
Responding specifically to the "vote carefully every couple years" part of this presumably sarcastic remark: I think this kind of throwaway comment belittles the fact that voting _does_ matter.
Last night, the Republicans held a primary debate in which none would acknowledge human-caused climate change. Last year, the Democratic party passed the inflation reduction act which puts a bunch of resources into addressing climate change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
"Recycle our plastic" may be worthless, but voting and acting while also developing technical solutions really does matter.
Do you have a solution for the "necessary change" that does not involve governments? Or are you in the "we're all going to die anyway so it doesn't matter what we do at this point" camp?
it's a top tier sarcasm. recycling plastic does nothing, United States of America is known to export its garbage, literal garbage, to bumfuck nowhere country across the pond. whoever you elect to the office, lobbyists already bought their asses before day one. technical solution is never the answer of this problem.
> whoever you elect to the office, lobbyists already bought their asses before day one
This is a disingenuous attitude; yes, special interests/lobbyists fund far more than (I think) they should, but there are _very_ clearly differences in opinion and legislation amongst political candidates and elected officials.
alright, i'll ammend my reply. republican politicians are assholes who don't care about imminent catastrophe while democrat politicians care a little more about it but still do nothing effective about it.
Right but if you look at data and scientific consensus rather than focusing on the media's catastrophizing, you see a much clearer, consistent image of a real problem.
Also what's this preferred left wing candidate who promises to alter the means of production..? If you're talking about the US, all potential candidates for both major parties are in favor of a capitalist mode of production. Not that this would have any impact at all, even if there were major parties which tried to use climate change as an argument in favor of socialism, that would have no effect on whether or not climate change is a real problem.
Which is why Exxon's internal research made accurate predictions about CO2 quantities and resulting temperature increases all the way back in the 70s right? Because Exxon is a liberal think tank attempting to get liberals elected?
And do you know what prevented further ozone layer catastrophe?
When leaders around the world got together and, without input from the people, voted to ban CFCs because the science was clear that CFC pollution was the problem.
Government regulation works. It solves environmental problems like ozone layer depletion. What COVID showed us is that individual freedom is an illusion we choose to believe in when times are good and energy is cheap. There are no libertarians in a crisis. If we want to solve the climate crisis -- really solve it, not pretend to try to solve it while supporting the status quo -- governments are going to have to impose drastic restrictions the public will not like.
The most exhausting aspect of climate denial is the rehashing of bad faith arguments that have, for all intents and purposes, been refuted hundreds of times.
I don't deny climate change. Quite the opposite. I just don't believe there's anything we can actually do about it. Seems a lot of the climate fanatics also agree with me, because we've passed many of their so-called "points of no return" and failed to achieve anything that would have averted them.
Seems to me that we should be trying to make people's lives easier in the meantime, rather than making them miserable and poor with bonkers legislation, regulation and taxes.
Until the prognosis is "100% chance of the imminent death of all humans", there will always be something we can do. We have passed "points of no return" meaning we won't avoid all consequences of climate change, but climate change isn't a binary "either we're fine or everybody dies" kind of thing. The more we reduce emissions, the fewer people will ultimately die from climate change, the fewer people will be displaced as climate refugees, the fewer people will have their quality of life reduced, the slower the changes will occur, etc.
In terms of outcomes, "climate change is real but nothing we could do would have any effect" is identical to "climate change is fake", which is why you're getting lumped in with the deniers.
This fails to take into account the reduced quality of life from implementing things like carbon taxes and other regulations that increase the costs of everyday goods and services, ultimately increasing the cost of living. Essentially making everyone poorer. Poverty increases your risk of mortality quite substantially.
Canada implemented carbon taxes to reduce emissions. Emissions still rose and everything just became more expensive.
From what I understand, large infrastructure investments (such as building out a green electric grid) are great for the economy.
Even if it's a net cost though... it's not like there isn't enough money to go around. If only there was a way to redistribute that wealth so that poor people didn't get even poorer.
I really truly don't think the only two options are "do nothing" or "do something but at such a great cost to people's quality of life that the cost outweighs the many millions or billions of lives saved".
I'm all for large infrastructure investments in clean energy. Unfortunately the people in power where I live (Northern Ontario in Canada) only seem interested in inneffective taxes and crony capitalism.
Any so-called attempt to "redistribute wealth" has led to massive inflation and a borderline humanitarian crisis in our cities with people losing their homes and becoming addicted to deadly drugs on the streets.
I'm much more likely to agree with criticism of any particular climate policy than the general statement "it's too late and the cost of any climate policy would outweigh the benefits".
The "Earth is dying, oh well let's live it up in the meantime" argument is one I keep hearing more and more from former climate deniers. This is the third stage of grief if I'm not wrong.
I've believed/had a basic understanding of the science since around high school, and at this point, I'm pretty much in the "get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames" camp too. It's quite clear at this point what direction it's all headed. I suppose the deniers "won".
I think solar radiation management is the only last-ditch idea that might pull things out.
This would be incredibly insightful if only we didn’t know that the current rate of extinction is extremely high, and on par with (if not exceeding) that of other mass extinction periods in our planet’s history.
Mass extinction events are generally not good for the animals which happen to exist during them. As one such animal, I would prefer if we tried to limit the damage.
There are many technologies which are inspired by animals found in nature as they have adapted several features after many generations, all such knowledge will be lost.
Especially due to animal agriculture (80% of agricultural lands).
Animal ag is the leading driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, droughts, water usage, eutrophication etc.
We could switch to plant-based diets, reforest the pastures (the size of both Americas) and stop climate change (together with phase-out of fossil fuels) and store enough carbon in those forests to cause new little ice age and reverse the warming.
There's good evidence that 2023 is trending to be the hottest year on record because of reduction of sulfur in cargo ship fuels. Sulfur is a pollutant that reduces air quality but on the flip side, it can increase cloud formation (which prevents heat being trapped in the atmosphere).
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/esnt/2022/nasa-study-finds-evid...
Some folks see this as an argument in favor of continuing to use high-sulfur fuels, and perhaps, intentionally disperse sulfur in the atmosphere. That's a bad idea for a number of reasons, one of which is acidification of rain.
The biggest and most alarming takeaway imo, is that high-sulfur fuels have been obscuring the severity of climate change.