I'm dismayed that the very environment we all share somehow got politicized to death. I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time, or the link between smoking and cancer if it got politicized. We trust our doctors; we trust our tech leaders; why don't we trust our scientists and climatologists? (Is this, sort of, Gore's fault, combined with a highly-polarizing media? I have to wonder.)
At this point I have almost no faith that until things get dire enough to cause even the most ignorant layperson to realize there's a serious problem going on, that anything impactful will be done to stop it, and by then it may be too late due to runaway multiplicative effects (such as the thawing of permafrost methane in the Arctic, or the absence of snow cover resulting in less planet-surface reflectivity)
"People are so polarized... maybe it's Al Gore's fault?"
C'mon man. The reason why there's no progress is that destroying the environment makes a lot of people a lot of money. Consumerism lines pockets, not only of manufacturers but also of advertisers like Facebook and Google.
Challenging climate change implies challenging capitalism, neoliberalism, and the idea that "free markets" always know best.
Back around 1980, I remember lots of tv news specials and saturday morning cartoon interruptions with reports about acid rain. Lots of scares about dying fish and melting statues and canada being pissed at the US for spewing stuff into their air.
I remember too how it was poo-poo'd by the political establishment of the time and lots of claims that its just the way it is and we're not going to be able to fix it, it would hurt jobs, it would hurt the economy.
But regulations were passed, and hard work was done, and we don't really hear much about acid rain (as much!) anymore.
Science and its-already-gone-too-far not-withstanding, I hope the US in particular will return to sanity and realize that we can make a difference in what is going on, and that doing so raises the quality of life not just for the US but for the entire world.
(I've also wondered: with the dismantling of environmental regulations and associated funding of the current administration, we're seeing individual states pick up the gauntlet and fund their own initiatives. Is this some sort of subtle "see, you don't need the feds to intervene when states have the power and ability" ploy? Then they can gut federal regulations and claim their smaller federal government mandate works? The fallacy being that climate doesn't follow state boundaries.)
Lots of weird half baked recollections today. The U.S. political system moved effectively on acid rain, Congress (not regulators) passed NO2 legislation by a 401-21 vote that was signed by a Republican president. It created a market for pollution that largely solved the issue and is a legislative model for dealing with other pollutants.
I remember an article not long ago about anti-trust regulation being a victim of it's own success. I think the same is true of many environmental regulations, people vaugely recall an outcry over some environmental concerned and imagine it must have just been overblown since acid rain isn't falling all the time or no canals in their town are currently burning.
How in the holy hell would it be Gore's fault? He has tried to be a communicator on this issue for decades. He's "highly polarized" because the great smear machine felt it needed to destroy him for having the temerity to run for President.
Gore is a political figure. He made a convenient target for the "no global warming" crowd. I do not see his actions as political but they were painted that way when "An Inconvenient Truth" came out.
I don't see Gore at fault but rather an unintentional result.
I'll bite. An Inconvenient Truth was so overly political and full of lame folksy rhetoric that it motivated me to investigate the issue further. And now I'm a climate skeptic. I'm sure there are others.
How? Could you elaborate on the type of investigation you undertook that led you to become a skeptic? The scientific community is so overwhelmingly on the side of climate change that you'd have to be really selective to see/read it otherwise.
The "lame folksy rhetoric" is Gore's way of trying to appeal to the skeptics. The problem with issues like climate change is that they're so large and complex that most people feel powerless to affect change, so they do nothing.
An Inconvenient Truth was meant to impart the severity, but also the hope that small changes will make a difference and that, collectively, there's a chance to change course. At the very least, lower our contribution in an effort to change course.
Honestly, blaming this on Gore is beyond comprehension. I'm trying to not to be hyperbolic, but this type of knee-jerk reaction and selective bias highlights how this issue is politicized, and will, as evidence suggests, lead to devastation.
This 6 minute clip made me question the entire thing, because it was so full of half truths, innuendo, false conclusions, and then topped off with a politician's favorite rhetorical device--morality.
So when Al Gore started caricaturing the "so-called skeptics" I started listening closely. Because that's what you do when someone is trying to bamboozle you. And at every turn, when he laid down reason and picked up rhetoric, there was an "inconvenient truth" that he knew he could not hide so he resorted to lame arguments and hand waving.
Al Gore's inconvenient truths, just from that clip:
1:30 - The medieval warm period was actually quite warm, and you can't simply will it away by adjusting your chart or appealing to humor. Did you notice the chart goes from big smooth lines to little jagged lines? I did. Apparently it's a reconstruction where scientists have attempted to compare prehistoric temperatures to modern ones. I fundamentally reject that this is a fair way to present data to make your case. Those jagged lines should have error bars at least. The "hockey stick" has since been removed from IPCC reports out of embarrassment (see the 'Climategate' scandal and efforts by McIntyre and McKitrick to reproduce the hockey stick study).
2:55 - "In all of this time, 650,000 years, the CO2 level has never gone above 300 parts per million". First of all this is wrong. The Holocene has seen an oscillation from 210 to 385 ppm. I don't know where he's getting his numbers. What he also does not say is that this trend is actually quite rare. In most of the Earth's history the CO2 level has been many many times higher, from 2000 to 8000 ppm in the last 500 million years.
3:00 - The two charts very clearly fit together because of the opposite relationship that Gore is implying: A warmer climate means more biological activity, therefore more CO2. Duh. But somehow he is bamboozling his audience into believing that the relationship goes the other way. An elementary scientific attitude would at least say "hey wait a minute, correlation does not imply causation."
6:00 - After the elevator gag, he responds to "so-called skeptics" with hand-waving. "If this much on the cold side is a mile of ice over our heads, what would that much on the warm side be?" The audience is left to conjure doomsday scenarios in their minds. The answer could very well be "far more economic growth due to great swaths of land opened up for farming" but no, Al Gore is sure it's going to be a catastrophe.
6:15 - Then here comes the "this is not politics, this is a moral issue" which is a politician's favorite thing to say. Love the finger pointing and lowered tone of voice. Again this is the kind of behavior that makes a reasonable person question the basis of the whole thing.
I get that Gore really believes he needs to stop Manbearpig and needs to do it ASAP. But he and everyone else on the political left that wants vast international control over economies (and that's really what his political plan is) should have expected some blowback from this kind of rhetoric. And that's my answer to chasing's question of "how could it be Gore's fault" that there is skepticism over his crazy agenda.
I blame at least a little of it on South Park for their portrayal of Al Gore ("ManBearPig"). A lot of the young generation don't know much about him beyond that.
> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time,
It did, and a large number of people on the Right took attitudes exactly like the Right takes on climate change today.
That faction was somewhat weaker within the Right at the time, and the Right somewhat weaker overall, so the political resistance to the science wasn't as successful in preventing federal policy action as it has been in the US on climate change, but the same overall shape of political dispute occurred.
Any evidence for your claim? That's not my recollection of the issue. The Reagan Administration implemented the Montreal Protocol to address ozone depletion. It was immediately ratified by the U.S. Senate by a unanimous vote. It's probably the most successful global environmental agreement in history.
I was thinking about the CFC thing the other day. We'd still have that hole there today if it we're for sane politicians willing to do the right thing. I fear we're doomed this time though.
I don't think so, really. It's surprisingly rare for politicians to face blowback for pushing stuff that later turned out to be obviously terrible. Everyone was pretty much pretending Strom Thurmond wasn't awful right up to his death, say.
I wonder why? Is the same phenomenon at play with Trump's approval rating? It's been in the high-mid-30s for many weeks now [1]. 80+ consecutive days at the time of this writing. Even outside of Russia-related scandals (like hiring Mike Flynn [3]), he has done some obviously bad things (like the Billy Bush tape [2]).
Pence is pretty clearly saying smoking is bad for you.
>This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit.
> We will hear about how this phalanx of government elates has suddenly grown a conscience after decades of subsidizing the product which, we are now told, "kills millions of Americans each year".
> Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.
Yeah, Pence is severely downplaying the risks but is not actually saying it's not dangerous. Note that this was 2001, seriously late in the day. Most of the serious denialism was 80s and earlier; Pence was probably one of the last people beating this drum.
> why don't we trust our scientists and climatologists?
1) I don't think local news media has helped last few decades. The constant reports of study that say "X" bad, followed by no no "X" is good (all the while both studies were describing tiny results) has led to distrust.
2) Govt funding of stupid studies creates image where researchers are scam artists who provide results by money
3) Lots of research is done by universities. Growing dissatisfaction with university system being projected onto researchers therein.
4) It was always sold wrong. It should have been sold as energy independence (freedom) not a burden (we need to change how we are doing things and limit ourselves).
I think it's also important to mention 5) decades of political propaganda painting climate science as a political issue, because Republicans found it advantageous to use as a wedge issue.
I think just about everyone I've talked to who doesn't believe in climate change arrived at that position from spending lots and lots of time listening to Rush Limbaugh or similar.
Seriously? This is HN, there are plenty of climate skeptics here, and I would guess that 0-5% of them listen to Rush Limbaugh or similar. Perhaps they are simply people with a scientific mind and came to different conclusions after evaluating the evidence independently?
The word "simply" sadly does not apply to climate modelling, reaching conclusions simply usually means lots of confirmation bias, and a foregone output. How do you know there are plenty of any opinion on HN?
No, I'm pretty sure they are all listening to Rush Limbaugh or similar characters as there is no-one else in the world thinking this to be true. If you follow all their links, they all converge to a few right wing, US based, sources.
I know this is a broad generalisation, but in this case, I believe it to be true.
Seriously. Of the ones whose media habits I've found, it's always like that.
That doesn't apply to HN. I rarely if ever figure out what the commenters here are watching or listening to. But I would be surprised if they were much different.
Part of the problem is that it is hard to convince people that 2 degrees farenheight difference would be all that bad. A lot of the talk is around keeping change "under 2 degrees" and a lot of the opposition is in the US.
Nobody in the US has an intuition for what a change of 2 degrees celcius feels like.
Please don't paint all of us with the idiot brush. It's not "opposition in the US", it's opposition from one party in the US. We were ready and willing, and had started under Obama, to combat climate change. It's the Republicans who have made opposition to even acknowledging climate change an article of their faith.
> Please don't paint all of us with the idiot brush
I'm not. I grew up in the US and lived there for 26 years. How is it idiocy to lack an intuitive sense for a unit of measurement that you don't ever use?
Very many people, even on HN, do not trust doctors. There's a bunch of anti-vax bollocks on HN, and any thread about doctoring includes people saying they can't wait until all doctors are replaced with AI because doctors don't know anything.
That is a false analogy and also rather symptomatic of the toxic discussion that, ironically, we have the leftists, the primitivists, and the the scientists to thank for, who have allowed themselves to be pulled into the fanatic company of religion like zealot.
I used to be on board with the climate change, branded global warming back then, bandwagon. I started actually thinking and looking at things myself though and started realizing that there were massive conflicts and unanswered questions and manipulated interpretations that made all sorts of flags and alarm bells go off in my mind. I am a scientist at heart and in mind, which very little scientists these days seem to be. I say that because most of today's scientists are very much driven by funding and political motivations that saturate and imbue them with biases and even go so far as to totally corrupt their investigations, especially in today's social climate. Do you really think that today, in a world where proto-religious environment zealots will try to destroy your career and life, you are willing to come out publicly as countering or even just questioning inconsistencies, inaccuracies, let alone policies?
We see it every day where the peasant mob is whipped up against anyone that even asks legitimate questions about inconsistencies. We are in dangerous territory when science cannot be questioned, the very nature of science it to question held assumptions and beliefs and results. The fact that a lot of research outputs simply cannot even be reproduced in many different disciplines, including climatology, does not bode well for the confidence a rational and reasonable person can put in these results.
Let's also be clear about what the consequences of these results are. Some say "worst case we will have moved to renewable energy" or some similar line. The reality though is that it would coast trillions upon trillions of dollars that would be squandered for nothing if this is all just nonsense. It is not at all well established or conclusive that the warming is caused by humans and not just a process that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years at the tail end of the ice age that used to essentially cover the whole European and North American continent.
You exhibit the very kind of ignorance you are immediately accusing others of expressing, but reality is simply that if you want to find the truth, you have to follow the money. When the careers and incomes of scientists and institutions heavily depends on gaining research funding based on the very biased notion that climate change is man made, there is an inherent and fundamentally corrupting incentive at play that will cause self-selection of scientists and researchers and institutions that seek to confirm the results that their funders are looking for. No funded scientific career is shorter than the one that results in non-results. There is simply no money to be made in saying "nope, we don't see any significant impact of man's contribution to climate change". Today you would even be flogged in the streets for saying so.
This is all part of what is seemingly a mass mental health disaster where confirmation bias abounds and is even apparently self-perpetuating at this point. As with all these points that divide society, I don't see those pushing for the massive impact and cost of ill conceived interventions to control people's lives making any kinds of efforts to abide by their own decrees.
Where are the leftist, primitivist, Liberals that don't fly in planes, live in tiny houses, don't own a car, don't eat out, don't use technology or the internet, etc. Computers and technology and the internet is a massive energy sink and causes massive environmental impact, yet here we are with people demanding intervention while they jet around on planes trying to impose their own authoritarian view on others and demanding things like importing people from low environmental impact societies that have not earned or contribut...
That is a false analogy and also rather symptomatic of the toxic discussion that, ironically, we have the leftists, the primitivists, and the the scientists to thank for, who have allowed themselves to be pulled into the fanatic company of religion like zealotry.
I used to be on board with the climate change, branded global warming back then, bandwagon. I started actually thinking and looking at things myself though and started realizing that there were massive conflicts and unanswered questions and manipulated interpretations that made all sorts of flags and alarm bells go off in my mind. I am a scientist at heart and in mind, which very little scientists these days seem to be. I say that because most of today's scientists are very much driven by funding and political motivations that saturate and imbue them with biases and even go so far as to totally corrupt their investigations, especially in today's social climate. Do you really think that today, in a world where proto-religious environment zealots will try to destroy your career and life, you are willing to come out publicly as countering or even just questioning inconsistencies, inaccuracies, let alone policies?
We see it every day where the peasant mob is whipped up against anyone that even asks legitimate questions about inconsistencies. We are in dangerous territory when science cannot be questioned, the very nature of science it to question held assumptions and beliefs and results. The fact that a lot of research outputs simply cannot even be reproduced in many different disciplines, including climatology, does not bode well for the confidence a rational and reasonable person can put in these results.
Let's also be clear about what the consequences of these results are. Some say "worst case we will have moved to renewable energy" or some similar line. The reality though is that it would coast trillions upon trillions of dollars that would be squandered for nothing if this is all just nonsense. It is not at all well established or conclusive that the warming is caused by humans and not just a process that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years at the tail end of the ice age that used to essentially cover the whole European and North American continent.
You exhibit the very kind of ignorance you are immediately accusing others of expressing, but reality is simply that if you want to find the truth, you have to follow the money. When the careers and incomes of scientists and institutions heavily depends on gaining research funding based on the very biased notion that climate change is man made, there is an inherent and fundamentally corrupting incentive at play that will cause self-selection of scientists and researchers and institutions that seek to confirm the results that their funders are looking for. No funded scientific career is shorter than the one that results in non-results. There is simply no money to be made in saying "nope, we don't see any significant impact of man's contribution to climate change". Today you would even be flogged in the streets for saying so.
This is all part of what is seemingly a mass mental health disaster where confirmation bias abounds and is even apparently self-perpetuating at this point. As with all these points that divide society, I don't see those pushing for the massive impact and cost of ill conceived interventions to control people's lives making any kinds of efforts to abide by their own decrees.
Where are the leftist, primitivist, Liberals that don't fly in planes, live in tiny houses, don't own a car, don't eat out, don't use technology or the internet, etc. Computers and technology and the internet is a massive energy sink and causes massive environmental impact, yet here we are with people demanding intervention while they jet around on planes trying to impose their own authoritarian view on others and demanding things like importing people from low environmental impact societies that have not earned or contributed anythin...
Action on CFCs and ozone depletion was a lot easier with a lot less economic/industrial impact. Work on CO2 emissions is much more difficult and much more costly. It also is more of a direct challenge to the implicit value assumptions of a huge group of people (that humans have "dominion" over the Earth, and it is theirs to subject rather than theirs to responsibly steward). It's an instance of the "boomerang effect" writ large.
> Also in 1985, 20 nations, including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention, which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances. After the discovery of the ozone hole it only took 18 months to reach a binding agreement in Montreal. But the CFC industry did not give up that easily. As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action. In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "We believe there is no imminent crisis that demands unilateral regulation."[21] And even in March 1988, Du Pont Chair Richard E. Heckert would write in a letter to the United States Senate, "we will not produce a product unless it can be made, used, handled and disposed of safely and consistent with appropriate safety, health and environmental quality criteria. At the moment, scientific evidence does not point to the need for dramatic CFC emission reductions. There is no available measure of the contribution of CFCs to any observed ozone change..."
>why don't we trust our scientists and climatologists?
"We" do. It's a faction of conservatives in the US who either don't or find it politically useful not to. Unfortunately they're currently in charge. Obama had started to move the US towards working on the problem, but that's hit a wall now.
>(Is this, sort of, Gore's fault, combined with a highly-polarizing media? I have to wonder.)
This is madness. Gore didn't politicize the issue, the right did by gearing up their ideology media machine to skewer him as part of its anti-climate change crusade.
> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time, or the link between smoking and cancer if it got politicized.
People have tried to politicize the smoking links. Mike Pence in 2001:
pence> Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit. The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second hand smoke or back handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.
>> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time, or the link between smoking and cancer if it got politicized.
I can't tell if you are being cute because both of those things were very much politicized.
I think some of it is that most of the proposed solutions involve social and economic pain. It is easier to deny this problem than accept higher taxes or a lower standard of living for most people. That's human self-interest at work.
A renewable that is cheaper than coal is really the only thing that is going to work.
Regarding your second paragraph, a joke I saw recently is "We won't act until it's too late. Luckily, it's too late now!".
The last 2 summers have had heatwaves that killed Indians, Europe just had a big one the last few weeks. Meanwhile, German automakers were caught in a conspiracy about diesel. Their government actually argued to keep lax testing methods a few years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...)!
Climate information is also written in the rings of trees, which in the case of giant sequoias goes back several thousand years. It's also there in the geological record in the form of layers in sedimentary rocks.
1) It's not clear how to derive a signal from that evidence. Is a thicker tree ring evidence of a hotter, wetter climate, or a "happy medium" temperature?
2) Such a record of tree rings, if it could produce any temperature signal whatsoever, would be a relative signal: Each year would be calculated in relation to other years on the same timeline for the same tree. How you could map that signal to modern temperature observations in any meaningful way?
Personally if you're talking about a global temperature estimate, I would only trust the gold standard: Satellite observations starting in 1978.
Nothing is "idiotic" about it. Any time a headline contains the word "record," it's probably nice to know which (among many) data series is being talked about.
It absolutely is. You're ignoring the dozens of other independent records of ice core data, tree rings, visual records of glaciation, and multiple independent data sets. Your pedantism is contributing nothing to this conversation.
totally apolitical here, I thought the same. Archaeologists are often studying bronze age and later sites off mediterranean shores in 10 meters of water...which used to be shoreline, so the sea has risen in a few thousand years more than current doomsayers are discussing. because, you know, yay politics, whatever the science and data happen to be.
This is a tricky question. (Hell, it could well be a trick question.)
El Niño takes place 2-3 times per generation. A stronger than usual phenomenon is a single data point, and we all know how much validity one should give to an outlier. In order to quantify the strength of consecutive events, and especially to rule out freak outliers in both directions you will need a few distinct data points. Let's say 6-8 data points at a minimum.
So the timescales for measurements will be in the range of 40-50 years.
By the time you can reliably use El Niño as a yardstick to say that it's getting late to act, it will have been too late for quite some time.
Nope. You still have people in this thread posting about how "oh the left is just too mean so I became a client skeptic" "oh well the scientists get paid and they don't have 100% of the answers so I'm a client skeptic now"
Regardless of CO2, does anyone have a sense of how much heat we are putting into the earth system by burning non-renewables?
edit: I did the math, and it seems our total yearly oil production in 2016, if used to directly boil the oceans, would raise the temperature of them by .0001 degrees.
It's really incredible the multiplier effect CO2 can have.
Fossil combustion is directly heating the Earth by ~16 terawatts. Radiative forcing from human emitted CO2 (primarily fossil combustion) is ~1 watt/m^2:
Multiplied by the surface area of the planet, 510,000,000 km^2, that's 510 terawatts heating from CO2 in the atmosphere. As time goes by the relative importance of radiative forcing continues to increase, because fuel produces heat for just a short time as it burns but the combustion emissions amplify the effects of sunlight for years to come.
The earth is always radiating heat, balanced against new heat from the sun. Absent the heat-trapping effects of CO2, the generated heat would quickly dissipate to equilibrium.
It's exasperating, people around me over-consume, drive too much, own pets (which are completely useless, cost energy too (healthcare, food, ..), cats damage seriously the ecosystem when they are outside, ..), we are talking of something close to a billion of pets, 20% of people still smoke cigarettes as a bonus
It's not just those simple acts, but when you consume 1L of gas with your car, you have to consider the amount of energy to extract it, transport it, stock it...
It can't go well with those attitudes, where residential pollution is about 40%-45% of overall pollution. This alone can be divided by 10, when I see my environmental fingerprint, with my bike and laptop
That is actually part of the plan. Everyone believes in a manufactured environmental doomsday scenario, and can blame it on nameless "others" who "pollute" the Earth with their trace gases. Soon there will be a carbon indulgence available for everyone to pay in order to secure your salvation. Then you can continue your patterns of actual pollution with a clear consience: littering, not picking up after your dog, not conserving resources, starting flamewars online, using too much water, ignoring the real environment around you.
How to virtually guarantee funding: Create a research project that attempts to better understand a cause or a potential effect of some aspect of Climate Change.
How to be ostracized from the University zeitgeist and receive little/no funding: Create a research project that attempts to disprove any major assumptions or pillars of modern Climate Change science.
I guess the new line is that we can't trust the scientists, because they're all corrupt.
Which I guess is pretty similar to the old line. But at least back then the know-nothingism had the pretense of caring about the science with screams of "1998!" and "sunspots!"
I am skeptic of everything "climate change" not because the theory lacks soundness (on the contrary it is a reasonable theory) but by the manner it has been espoused to the public over the past 10 years. The Earth has many, many problems just as dangerous; why has this one tiny topic been magnified to degrees of mass-hysteria above all else? That is why I am a skeptic. It has the annotations of a ploy with ulterior motives, a very successful ploy at that seeing the breeds of millions of pseudo-intellectual climate change advocates created out of thin-air thanks to mainstream media. History is ripe with such hoaxes.
Things that climate change discussions rarely talk about:
1. We have a climate that is greatly affected by the sun. The sun varies in the amount of light we get from it.
We have truly, absolutely zero ability to modify anything about the sun.
We couldn't even place a probe or device within 10,000 miles of the surface of the sun, if our survival depended on it.
2. Even if the USA cuts their emissions in half tomorrow, with China and India increasing their use of autos and other emissions producing devices, would that be enough? And how exactly is it that USA spends more on reducing emissions while others spend zero? How much of a hit to the economy does this entail, for essentially zero world wide benefit?
How many remember Canada's 180 degree turnaround a few years ago, when they realized that conforming to the Kyoto protocol meant a 10% GDP hit?
1. 100% of the problem that climatologists discuss is heat from the sun, trapped, by greenhouse gasses that we release. As you rightly point out, we can't control the sun, so we must control how much insulating gas we put in the atmosphere.
2. Even it China cuts is emissions, with the USA outputting more than 4 times per person, would that be enough? How exactly is it that China spends more on reducing emissions while USA spends zero? This is a collective action problem (much like CFC's were in the 1980s, or not peeing in the lake you depend on for drinking water), it requires grown-up behavior from all nations now so as to no despoil the inheritance we might leave to our children.
1. They don't talk about it because it is not the primary cause of the warming we see. [0]
2. China and India have agreed to reduce emissions, as part of the Paris agreement. 45% of all solar installed worldwide in 2016 was installed in China. Every country needs to do its part. [1]
If you're (rightly) concerned about climate change there is a lot you can do.
Here are three good resources.
Bret Victor's "What can a technologist do about climate change" is wonderful tech overview [0].
"Drawdown", a recent book which enumerates and stack-ranks the wide array of techniques we have which return the atmosphere to a safe composition. [1]
Finally, a self-pitch, we just launched our new site, ClimateAction.tech [2] with a guide for technology employees who are interested in making their companies more sustainable (feedback welcome, @samp or the email on the site)
Where I live (Finland) it has been a shockingly cold summer. All the denialists of course scream about "no global warming, don't tax me bro!".
Weird that the denialism-engine works all the way here (from the US).
Of course we have our fair share of different co2 taxes etc so when people don't like them of course it's somehow easier to deny global warming (a logic I don't quite understand... I myself are against any co2 taxes etc but still "believe" in AGW).
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"One of the strongest El Niño events since at least 1950"
At this point I have almost no faith that until things get dire enough to cause even the most ignorant layperson to realize there's a serious problem going on, that anything impactful will be done to stop it, and by then it may be too late due to runaway multiplicative effects (such as the thawing of permafrost methane in the Arctic, or the absence of snow cover resulting in less planet-surface reflectivity)
C'mon man. The reason why there's no progress is that destroying the environment makes a lot of people a lot of money. Consumerism lines pockets, not only of manufacturers but also of advertisers like Facebook and Google.
Challenging climate change implies challenging capitalism, neoliberalism, and the idea that "free markets" always know best.
I remember too how it was poo-poo'd by the political establishment of the time and lots of claims that its just the way it is and we're not going to be able to fix it, it would hurt jobs, it would hurt the economy.
But regulations were passed, and hard work was done, and we don't really hear much about acid rain (as much!) anymore.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/acid-rains-dirty-legacy...
Science and its-already-gone-too-far not-withstanding, I hope the US in particular will return to sanity and realize that we can make a difference in what is going on, and that doing so raises the quality of life not just for the US but for the entire world.
(I've also wondered: with the dismantling of environmental regulations and associated funding of the current administration, we're seeing individual states pick up the gauntlet and fund their own initiatives. Is this some sort of subtle "see, you don't need the feds to intervene when states have the power and ability" ploy? Then they can gut federal regulations and claim their smaller federal government mandate works? The fallacy being that climate doesn't follow state boundaries.)
Not the US. Conservatives.
How in the holy hell would it be Gore's fault? He has tried to be a communicator on this issue for decades. He's "highly polarized" because the great smear machine felt it needed to destroy him for having the temerity to run for President.
I don't see Gore at fault but rather an unintentional result.
I will forever be amazed at people's ability to blame other people for issues because they raised them. It's amazing.
The "lame folksy rhetoric" is Gore's way of trying to appeal to the skeptics. The problem with issues like climate change is that they're so large and complex that most people feel powerless to affect change, so they do nothing.
An Inconvenient Truth was meant to impart the severity, but also the hope that small changes will make a difference and that, collectively, there's a chance to change course. At the very least, lower our contribution in an effort to change course.
Honestly, blaming this on Gore is beyond comprehension. I'm trying to not to be hyperbolic, but this type of knee-jerk reaction and selective bias highlights how this issue is politicized, and will, as evidence suggests, lead to devastation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JIuKjaY3r4
This 6 minute clip made me question the entire thing, because it was so full of half truths, innuendo, false conclusions, and then topped off with a politician's favorite rhetorical device--morality.
So when Al Gore started caricaturing the "so-called skeptics" I started listening closely. Because that's what you do when someone is trying to bamboozle you. And at every turn, when he laid down reason and picked up rhetoric, there was an "inconvenient truth" that he knew he could not hide so he resorted to lame arguments and hand waving.
Al Gore's inconvenient truths, just from that clip:
1:30 - The medieval warm period was actually quite warm, and you can't simply will it away by adjusting your chart or appealing to humor. Did you notice the chart goes from big smooth lines to little jagged lines? I did. Apparently it's a reconstruction where scientists have attempted to compare prehistoric temperatures to modern ones. I fundamentally reject that this is a fair way to present data to make your case. Those jagged lines should have error bars at least. The "hockey stick" has since been removed from IPCC reports out of embarrassment (see the 'Climategate' scandal and efforts by McIntyre and McKitrick to reproduce the hockey stick study).
2:55 - "In all of this time, 650,000 years, the CO2 level has never gone above 300 parts per million". First of all this is wrong. The Holocene has seen an oscillation from 210 to 385 ppm. I don't know where he's getting his numbers. What he also does not say is that this trend is actually quite rare. In most of the Earth's history the CO2 level has been many many times higher, from 2000 to 8000 ppm in the last 500 million years.
3:00 - The two charts very clearly fit together because of the opposite relationship that Gore is implying: A warmer climate means more biological activity, therefore more CO2. Duh. But somehow he is bamboozling his audience into believing that the relationship goes the other way. An elementary scientific attitude would at least say "hey wait a minute, correlation does not imply causation."
6:00 - After the elevator gag, he responds to "so-called skeptics" with hand-waving. "If this much on the cold side is a mile of ice over our heads, what would that much on the warm side be?" The audience is left to conjure doomsday scenarios in their minds. The answer could very well be "far more economic growth due to great swaths of land opened up for farming" but no, Al Gore is sure it's going to be a catastrophe.
6:15 - Then here comes the "this is not politics, this is a moral issue" which is a politician's favorite thing to say. Love the finger pointing and lowered tone of voice. Again this is the kind of behavior that makes a reasonable person question the basis of the whole thing.
I get that Gore really believes he needs to stop Manbearpig and needs to do it ASAP. But he and everyone else on the political left that wants vast international control over economies (and that's really what his political plan is) should have expected some blowback from this kind of rhetoric. And that's my answer to chasing's question of "how could it be Gore's fault" that there is skepticism over his crazy agenda.
It did, and a large number of people on the Right took attitudes exactly like the Right takes on climate change today.
That faction was somewhat weaker within the Right at the time, and the Right somewhat weaker overall, so the political resistance to the science wasn't as successful in preventing federal policy action as it has been in the US on climate change, but the same overall shape of political dispute occurred.
And another: http://www.newsweek.com/ozone-hole-our-heads-194308
It precisely matches my recollection, as someone who spent far too long listening to Mr. Limbaugh at the time.
Largely in the US; the very existence of anthropogenic global warming is not a partisan issue in most of the world.
> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time
It did; there are people who deny it _to this day_, amazingly.
> or the link between smoking and cancer
It did; tobacco companies lobbied and continue to lobby mightily, and politicians were arguing that tobacco wasn't unsafe for a long time.
did these politicians suffer any discredit as a result?
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_and_Billy_Bush_re...
[3] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/sally-yates-pr...
Apparently not...
>This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit.
> We will hear about how this phalanx of government elates has suddenly grown a conscience after decades of subsidizing the product which, we are now told, "kills millions of Americans each year".
> Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...
It's both hilarious and sad at the same time
1) I don't think local news media has helped last few decades. The constant reports of study that say "X" bad, followed by no no "X" is good (all the while both studies were describing tiny results) has led to distrust.
2) Govt funding of stupid studies creates image where researchers are scam artists who provide results by money
3) Lots of research is done by universities. Growing dissatisfaction with university system being projected onto researchers therein.
4) It was always sold wrong. It should have been sold as energy independence (freedom) not a burden (we need to change how we are doing things and limit ourselves).
I think just about everyone I've talked to who doesn't believe in climate change arrived at that position from spending lots and lots of time listening to Rush Limbaugh or similar.
I know this is a broad generalisation, but in this case, I believe it to be true.
That doesn't apply to HN. I rarely if ever figure out what the commenters here are watching or listening to. But I would be surprised if they were much different.
Here is a video trailer for the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu6637cjk8A
Edit: This interview with Dave Rubin may also be helpful in understanding the other point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJmL9hRrpIQ
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels/dp/1591847443
Nobody in the US has an intuition for what a change of 2 degrees celcius feels like.
I'm not. I grew up in the US and lived there for 26 years. How is it idiocy to lack an intuitive sense for a unit of measurement that you don't ever use?
Very many people, even on HN, do not trust doctors. There's a bunch of anti-vax bollocks on HN, and any thread about doctoring includes people saying they can't wait until all doctors are replaced with AI because doctors don't know anything.
Everything's ridiculously polarised. :-/
I used to be on board with the climate change, branded global warming back then, bandwagon. I started actually thinking and looking at things myself though and started realizing that there were massive conflicts and unanswered questions and manipulated interpretations that made all sorts of flags and alarm bells go off in my mind. I am a scientist at heart and in mind, which very little scientists these days seem to be. I say that because most of today's scientists are very much driven by funding and political motivations that saturate and imbue them with biases and even go so far as to totally corrupt their investigations, especially in today's social climate. Do you really think that today, in a world where proto-religious environment zealots will try to destroy your career and life, you are willing to come out publicly as countering or even just questioning inconsistencies, inaccuracies, let alone policies?
We see it every day where the peasant mob is whipped up against anyone that even asks legitimate questions about inconsistencies. We are in dangerous territory when science cannot be questioned, the very nature of science it to question held assumptions and beliefs and results. The fact that a lot of research outputs simply cannot even be reproduced in many different disciplines, including climatology, does not bode well for the confidence a rational and reasonable person can put in these results.
Let's also be clear about what the consequences of these results are. Some say "worst case we will have moved to renewable energy" or some similar line. The reality though is that it would coast trillions upon trillions of dollars that would be squandered for nothing if this is all just nonsense. It is not at all well established or conclusive that the warming is caused by humans and not just a process that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years at the tail end of the ice age that used to essentially cover the whole European and North American continent.
You exhibit the very kind of ignorance you are immediately accusing others of expressing, but reality is simply that if you want to find the truth, you have to follow the money. When the careers and incomes of scientists and institutions heavily depends on gaining research funding based on the very biased notion that climate change is man made, there is an inherent and fundamentally corrupting incentive at play that will cause self-selection of scientists and researchers and institutions that seek to confirm the results that their funders are looking for. No funded scientific career is shorter than the one that results in non-results. There is simply no money to be made in saying "nope, we don't see any significant impact of man's contribution to climate change". Today you would even be flogged in the streets for saying so.
This is all part of what is seemingly a mass mental health disaster where confirmation bias abounds and is even apparently self-perpetuating at this point. As with all these points that divide society, I don't see those pushing for the massive impact and cost of ill conceived interventions to control people's lives making any kinds of efforts to abide by their own decrees.
Where are the leftist, primitivist, Liberals that don't fly in planes, live in tiny houses, don't own a car, don't eat out, don't use technology or the internet, etc. Computers and technology and the internet is a massive energy sink and causes massive environmental impact, yet here we are with people demanding intervention while they jet around on planes trying to impose their own authoritarian view on others and demanding things like importing people from low environmental impact societies that have not earned or contribut...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
> Also in 1985, 20 nations, including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention, which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances. After the discovery of the ozone hole it only took 18 months to reach a binding agreement in Montreal. But the CFC industry did not give up that easily. As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action. In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "We believe there is no imminent crisis that demands unilateral regulation."[21] And even in March 1988, Du Pont Chair Richard E. Heckert would write in a letter to the United States Senate, "we will not produce a product unless it can be made, used, handled and disposed of safely and consistent with appropriate safety, health and environmental quality criteria. At the moment, scientific evidence does not point to the need for dramatic CFC emission reductions. There is no available measure of the contribution of CFCs to any observed ozone change..."
"We" do. It's a faction of conservatives in the US who either don't or find it politically useful not to. Unfortunately they're currently in charge. Obama had started to move the US towards working on the problem, but that's hit a wall now.
>(Is this, sort of, Gore's fault, combined with a highly-polarizing media? I have to wonder.)
This is madness. Gore didn't politicize the issue, the right did by gearing up their ideology media machine to skewer him as part of its anti-climate change crusade.
People have tried to politicize the smoking links. Mike Pence in 2001:
pence> Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit. The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second hand smoke or back handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20010415085348/http://mikepence.c...
I can't tell if you are being cute because both of those things were very much politicized.
A renewable that is cheaper than coal is really the only thing that is going to work.
The last 2 summers have had heatwaves that killed Indians, Europe just had a big one the last few weeks. Meanwhile, German automakers were caught in a conspiracy about diesel. Their government actually argued to keep lax testing methods a few years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...)!
Not exactly shocking news :)
2) Such a record of tree rings, if it could produce any temperature signal whatsoever, would be a relative signal: Each year would be calculated in relation to other years on the same timeline for the same tree. How you could map that signal to modern temperature observations in any meaningful way?
Personally if you're talking about a global temperature estimate, I would only trust the gold standard: Satellite observations starting in 1978.
I'm curious how strong this El Nino was vs others in recent years? Was it particularly bad this time?
El Niño takes place 2-3 times per generation. A stronger than usual phenomenon is a single data point, and we all know how much validity one should give to an outlier. In order to quantify the strength of consecutive events, and especially to rule out freak outliers in both directions you will need a few distinct data points. Let's say 6-8 data points at a minimum.
So the timescales for measurements will be in the range of 40-50 years.
By the time you can reliably use El Niño as a yardstick to say that it's getting late to act, it will have been too late for quite some time.
edit: I did the math, and it seems our total yearly oil production in 2016, if used to directly boil the oceans, would raise the temperature of them by .0001 degrees.
It's really incredible the multiplier effect CO2 can have.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Multiplied by the surface area of the planet, 510,000,000 km^2, that's 510 terawatts heating from CO2 in the atmosphere. As time goes by the relative importance of radiative forcing continues to increase, because fuel produces heat for just a short time as it burns but the combustion emissions amplify the effects of sunlight for years to come.
It's not just those simple acts, but when you consume 1L of gas with your car, you have to consider the amount of energy to extract it, transport it, stock it...
It can't go well with those attitudes, where residential pollution is about 40%-45% of overall pollution. This alone can be divided by 10, when I see my environmental fingerprint, with my bike and laptop
How to be ostracized from the University zeitgeist and receive little/no funding: Create a research project that attempts to disprove any major assumptions or pillars of modern Climate Change science.
Welcome to politics.
Which I guess is pretty similar to the old line. But at least back then the know-nothingism had the pretense of caring about the science with screams of "1998!" and "sunspots!"
1. We have a climate that is greatly affected by the sun. The sun varies in the amount of light we get from it.
We have truly, absolutely zero ability to modify anything about the sun.
We couldn't even place a probe or device within 10,000 miles of the surface of the sun, if our survival depended on it.
2. Even if the USA cuts their emissions in half tomorrow, with China and India increasing their use of autos and other emissions producing devices, would that be enough? And how exactly is it that USA spends more on reducing emissions while others spend zero? How much of a hit to the economy does this entail, for essentially zero world wide benefit?
How many remember Canada's 180 degree turnaround a few years ago, when they realized that conforming to the Kyoto protocol meant a 10% GDP hit?
2. Even it China cuts is emissions, with the USA outputting more than 4 times per person, would that be enough? How exactly is it that China spends more on reducing emissions while USA spends zero? This is a collective action problem (much like CFC's were in the 1980s, or not peeing in the lake you depend on for drinking water), it requires grown-up behavior from all nations now so as to no despoil the inheritance we might leave to our children.
2. Maybe I phrased that part of my statement rather lumpily. I meant, if USA spends to reduce emissions and China and India do not spend.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
Here are three good resources.
Bret Victor's "What can a technologist do about climate change" is wonderful tech overview [0].
"Drawdown", a recent book which enumerates and stack-ranks the wide array of techniques we have which return the atmosphere to a safe composition. [1]
Finally, a self-pitch, we just launched our new site, ClimateAction.tech [2] with a guide for technology employees who are interested in making their companies more sustainable (feedback welcome, @samp or the email on the site)
[0] http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Drawdown-Comprehensive-Proposed-Rev... [2] ClimateAction.tech