We really are but I'm not sure what to do about it (other than considering environmental policy when voting).
We don't drive (me or my partner), We recycle, I mend everything I can (which outside of a clean room is most things, it's never been easier with youtube), neither of use go in for excessive consumption (My current desktop is from 2011, it's finally coming up on time to replace that).
I even considered going vegetarian but with Crohn's that isn't really viable (I have to avoid high fibre and getting enough minerals/vitamins is a struggle).
We don't eat wild caught fish (or much fish at all).
I mean I'm not a tofu eating ecowarrior or anything but it just seems sensible not to piss in your own drinking water.
Since you have Chron's and are thinking of going vegetarian, have a look this video on plant-based diets and Chron's disease: Achieving Remission of Crohn's Disease - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_T93ON2cBE and Preventing Crohn’s Disease With Diet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-JuRjSrJPo&t=5s
Note that for Chron patients, its recommended to stay way from nutritional yeast.
Thanks for the links, though I've run across Dr. Greger before (given the amount of quackery that you find with any health related stuff online I always do research on the person who is stating an opinion even if they have Dr. in front of their name).
I don't mean this to criticize attempts at personal responsibility when it comes to sustainability, but I think we are far past the point of no return.
Short of a massive population decrease, a complete switch in energy consumption, or some sci-fi type of technological breakthrough, we are doomed to run this planet into extinction.
At this point, most conservation efforts are more of a attempt to feel better as an individual then they are actually making a difference.
That doesn't mean we should stop, or concede, with our efforts. It just means we need to be realistic with what we do over the next 50-100 years.
Personally, I think the only way the human race will continue to thrive is to figure out how to survive without the Earth as a host. Whether we figure that out, or succumb to extinction, is really the ultimate test of our race. Were we designed to be a part of nature as it exists on Earth, or will we surpass it?
This is a defeatist and ahistorical attitude. We've brought species back from near extinction, we've brought entire biomes back from near destruction, we've made the air and water cleaner, we've saved the ozone layer, etc, etc, etc. We know how to do these things, it doesn't require magic or impossibly futuristic technology or excessive personal sacrifice. It's just work. All we have to do is do the work.
To be clear, I don't think sustainability efforts are a waste of time.
I'm more curious about what our path as a species will lead to - will we continuously innovate to survive on the planet we were given, or will we move past it? Both?
We've forced species so near to extinction that they need to be "brought back", we've had such a profound effect on the environment that there is essentially nowhere left that does not show the impact of humankind. We've made the air and water cleaner in highly specific ways whilst continuing to pollute globally and watch the developing world repeat our mistakes on a larger scale. We saved the ozone layer yet have thus far done nothing substantive as far as carbon is concerned. We've diligently avoided any serious discussion of population pressure on the planet.
We know how to do these things, we know how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Yet we are not doing them. How do you propose getting the international community to do that work?
Sure, maybe it's too late to save half of all frog species, but what we do in the next 100 years will determine whether there will be elephants and gorillas 1000 years later. It's not too late for them.
What about devoting a large portion of the economy to environmental restoration. Humans have certainly trashed the planet, but humans certainly have the intellect to undo the damage.
I had a crazy thought about applying free-software principles to environmentalism. Is there a Richard Stallman type character known among those circles? What I mean is, are there any 'strict-adherence' type rules that are too far even for the lay-environmentalist? Something like:
"A true environmentalist may not birth or father their own children, only adopt."
RMS is famously known for refusing to own a cell phone until there's one that runs entirely on free software, what is at the same level of adherence for environmentalists?
I can recommend wild caught fish from overpopulated lakes (usually caused by eutrophication from nearby farming, including fish farms). Overpopulation and invasive species usually share a few common trait: Low commercial interest, caused by human actions, and not enough focus from environmental friendly policies.
Here in Sweden it seems like most freshwater lakes suffer from overpopulation, and the commercial value of the fish is so little that the transportation cost to cat food factories makes it unprofitable to fish it. Making matters worse, overpopulation in lakes has a tendency to cause extinctions where some species crowds out others. There was/is some government initiative to fund fishing directly, but so far very few has taken up on the offer.
It is however quite hard to find a seller for this. Some restaurants has made a bit of PR from saying that they are serving this kind of fish, but I have never seen a menu with it or seen those species in any store. Your best bet would be to buy it directly from those fishing in the lakes which could be problematic depending on where you live.
We really are but I'm not sure what to do about it
What to do about it would be for humans to effectively stop taking more from nature than we can give back. The tricky part would be to orchestrate that.
If you cut down your consumption but I won't it won't save the planet.
If I cut down my consumption but you won't it won't save the planet.
If you and I both did cut our consumption, the planet would begin to recover but then there would be someone else who starts taking what we chose not to take.
And because that someone would later have more than we, you and I would ourselves risk dying in resource wars that would likely follow.
This is basically what countries and continents do.
To make any difference it would take one powerful party who could hoard resources: just leave them unconsumed except for the amount needed to prevent others from consuming them. At the same time, they would keep others poor, or at least limiting their standard of living by denying resources from everyone. Assuming there was one ruler who could control the majority of the planet's resources that would still be an extremely hard position to be.
The other option is not to do anything and play along. When we out-consume and out-grow enough the population can't sustain itself and the headcount on this planet will shrink back to 50% or 30% of the current levels. Then the race begins again...
"Under an accounting system based on emotions and feelings"
Fixed that for you.
We're nothing more than an extremely specialized animal. What we do is (whether you like it or not) a product of nature. Our use of technology is just the large-scale version of a bird's nest, or an ant pile.
We've done far less damage than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Deal with it.
The problem is that we are not specialized, we are adaptive. If we were specialized, we would ruin one particular biome through overpopulation, starve a little and eventually reach equilibrium. But we are adaptive, we will keep adapting and consuming until there is nothing left. Almost like a paperclip maximiser, but for food and amenities instead of paperclips.
Look at bacteria. They are also crazily adaptable. The do it by changing their DNA and a very high speed of generational change, and we use "culture" and "science" with longer individual lifespans.
And, we recognize what we are doing as our technology advances, and we adjust to do what we think is better for our environment. No other animals do that. There's no undoing the past, and to feel angry or bitter about it doesn't help anything.
Sorry, no. Please don't fix any more of my comments. That's really passive aggressive and demeaning and you can do better.
I really meant it. Under essentially any accounting system that is not human-centric at its core, we are really tops when it comes to destruction.
Birds and ants reach a natural equilibrium with their environment and end up as integral parts of a functioning ecosystem. Humans. Just. Don't. We nuke and pave. Stupidly. Overfishing is just one example, a tiny one. We exhaust all available resources in an area and if we're lucky enough to survive the inevitable ecosystem collapse that we leave in our wake, we move on, either up or out or over, and exhaust all of those resources, too.
If you really think we are equivalent to ants and birds, and we're just some kind of specialized animal, then I'm not sure we share the same basis for dialogue. Please step back from the personal afront that you feel by my comment and behold the destruction that humans have wrought. It is incalculable. There is a reason they are calling this the Anthropocene.
A hawk that eats a cute baby bunny is an asshole too right? My cat when it knocks over a bunch of stuff in the house chasing a mouse creates a local environmental mess. Humans are just better at this stuff than anything that's come before. Bacteria will consume all the food in a dish until their ecosystem collapses. Algae blooms happen and do the same thing. Again, humans are just doing this better and on a larger scale.
Having said that, it would be in our long term interest not to continue doing this until the system collapses.
You're responding to an imagined foe. See how you go with a "nature does it too, you're an environmentalist that wants to protect cute widdle animals" angle? That's because you're categorizing your opponent into a known bucket without actually pausing to consider their argument. This is a good way to efficiently comment on social media, but this style of dialogue will never either convince them that they're wrong or convince you that you're wrong. All it will do is reinforce itself by giving your brain a brief jolt of self-satisfaction.
>> That's because you're categorizing your opponent into a known bucket...
I actually assessed my opponent as someone who has it in for mankind, not an environmentalist (that's your word BTW and doesn't belong in quotes you attribute to me). My point wasn't so much "nature does it to" but rather to illustrate - humans are part of nature and their behavior is not unique. To keep us separate from nature seems to be either human-hating or human-aggrandizing. Given the OPs calling us assholes I figure we can guess which.
From there I was most definitely having more fun than trying to making a point!
> Having said that, it would be in our long term interest not to continue doing this until the system collapses.
You’ve stumbled through the straw men and into the point, my dude. The way of thinking which frames humans as “best animals” is the same one which makes us incapable of averting suicide by ecological collapse.
Consciousness is not just a cool survival trick, it’s a responsibility.
Consciousness is not a collective attribute of humans. I find it strange that people have discussions in which some sort of collective consciousness is implicitly assumed. You're arguing, so you're obviously individuals! If we had a collective mind, we wouldn't be disagreeing.
It's as though we were a bunch of single cells arguing about whether we should become a multicellular life form to avoid us all dying. It might in theory be necessary, but it would involve all members giving up autonomy and being willing to act and die on command. That raises two questions - is it really worth it, and is it possible?
I'm not firmly pro or con organizing humanity into a "super organism" to avoid ecological disaster - I'm just saying this is what people are ultimately debating wrt global warming, and it's pretty "out there". I'm not convinced it's feasible, at least not in the near future (next century).
How are humans not part of the animal kingdom? What are we if not a specialized animal?
Birds and ants don't reach a "natural equilibrium". They, and all other species, simply (and similarly) exhaust what their habitat will sustain in one way or another, just as humans do.
Almost all the species that ever existed went extinct without the help of humans.
> Birds and ants don't reach a "natural equilibrium". They, and all other species, simply (and similarly) exhaust what their habitat will sustain in one way or another, just as humans do.
No, not really. These ecosystems adapt to change very, very slowly, and birds and ants very gently come up against the carrying capacity of their surrounding environment, and when they exceed that carrying capacity, their populations cease to grow and may waver, but will reach some equilibrium. They generally do not experience extreme boom and busts, except in extreme cases of invasive species and rapid climate change. They also don't have a tendency to cause mass destruction that takes down the environment around them. The difference with humans is that we use technology and agriculture to continually boost ourselves past the carrying capacity of our local environment, and when that becomes unsustainable--usually wreaking havoc all around us, we move on and spread. Just look throughout history. The pattern repeats over and over.
If birds and ants had the same cycle, they would not have survived hundreds of millions of years like they have.
People just do not understand that our growth rates are so high that they are effectively alien to this planet. So, no, this is not "normal" or "natural" IMO.
Trilobites - one of the most diverse, plentiful, and advanced forms of life at the time - went extinct thanks to the evolution of plants.
It is very anthropocentric to view the preservation of the ecological status quo and cessation of evolutionary pressures as a "natural" ideal. Yes, we have a drive to consume and exploit but our desire to preserve what we see as beautiful is no different - it's all just a product of our desires.
I am not opposed to environmentalism - but we shouldn't tell lies about what is natural for life by cherrypicking examples of equilibrium and ignoring the trillions of extinct. The equilibrium you see in other species (ants, birds) only exists due the destruction of countless other species long before humans ever showed up. Just like the stable equilibrium between humans, cockroaches, and pigeons.
>These ecosystems adapt to change very, very slowly, and birds and ants very gently come up against the carrying capacity of their surrounding environment, and when they exceed that carrying capacity, their populations cease to grow and may waver, but will reach some equilibrium. They generally do not experience extreme boom and busts, except in extreme cases of invasive species and rapid climate change.
This is closer to what I meant to say, and the term "exhaust" was a poor descriptor. However, the way in which species encounter barriers that define the carrying capacity of an ecosystem are not commonly gentle.
>The difference with humans is that we use technology and agriculture to continually boost ourselves past the carrying capacity of our local environment, and when that becomes unsustainable--usually wreaking havoc all around us, we move on and spread. Just look throughout history. The pattern repeats over and over.
I'm still uncertain at what point in our evolution you draw the line that cuts us out of the animal kingdom.
I see your point, but you seem to be implying that the way you're using "equilibrium", and "natural" is rooted and biology, and this is incorrect. The there is no biological concept of "equilibrium", it's simply a way you could loosely describe a population with low rate of growth for some period.
"People just do not understand that our growth rates are so high that they are effectively alien to this planet."
It seems to me that while humans are outliers, we're not unique. For instance, we can be compared to the organisms that oxygenated the Earth's atmosphere. Or those that first produced lignin which other organisms couldn't digest for a long time. I recall reading that the latter is why such massive petroleum deposits exist[1]. So our effect on the planet could be considered an echo of that earlier runaway ecological change.
Humans did reach equilibrium before the industrial revolution which allowed for exponential population growth that's only now starting to slow. It just looks like we never have it because we're in a growth phase right now. In future, we'll have to reach equilibrium again as we're constrained by resources or we enjoy our own lives more than we want to make babies. Predictions I've seen are for a maximum of 12 billion people.
New species introduced into an ecosystem often wipe out existing species as they grow. It's happened on lots of islands. They eventually reach equilibrium too. It's quite normal and humans aren't special in that regard. We just happen to be the best at it right now.
There is some emotion in your statements. The reason we want to protect the environment is because it has value to humans. It doesn't somehow deserve to be saved independently of us any more than an asteroid deserves to stay floating in space without crashing into any planets. If we can truly and permanently survive OK without as many species, then what's the harm in making them extinct besides emotion?
Adding my own emotional opinion, I think humans really do deserve to dominate everything because we're absolutely the most incredible species ever to live on Earth. Through technology, we've giving ourselves more and more of the abilities of other animals. We can live in environments too hot, cold, or arid for any single other species. We can fly and "swim" across oceans, and even make meat for eating! If evolution had some sort of purpose, it would surely be to create the most capable organisms possible. So far, that's us and every species we wipe out deserved to go because it lost the game of evolution in the same way the poor soccer teams deserve to not win the World Cup.
Trilobites - one of the most diverse, plentiful, and advanced forms of life at the time - went extinct thanks to the evolution of plants.
If you take a snapshot during any of those events, a brief glimpse, sure those events were cataclysmically destructive. But step back and those events can instead be seen as fantastically creative.
It is anthropocentric to view the preservation of the ecological status quo and cessation of evolutionary pressures as a "natural" ideal. Humans like things that make life easy, but we also don't like change.
I am not opposed to environmentalism and imposing our curated view - but it shouldn't be guilt-ridden. We shouldn't tell lies about what is natural for life by cherrypicking examples of equilibrium and ignoring the trillions of extinct. The equilibrium you see in other species (ants, birds) only exists due the destruction of countless other species. Akin to an alien observing the seemingly stable equilibrium between humans, cockroaches, and pigeons.
Life survived despite incredible climate pressures and invasive species in the past - far more extreme than what is happening now - and reached new levels of complexity thanks to those pressures. There's no reason that will stop.
I didn't see that and can't find it so if anybody has a link that'd be great. I'm no biologist but have always been taught that this is the case. Specifically, while growing up on ranch I was told that coyotes near the house hunted at night while the coyotes that lived further out in the fields hunted during the day.
This isn't surprising to anyone who dives or spearfishes. You start to notice the body language of the larger fishes as being completely different than their younger counterparts. Only the wary get to be that old. I would also say that applies not just to human predation but also to predation from other fishes and mammals, you can see their movements and behaviors change immensely when something larger and hungrier is about.
That's not what the article is saying. It's not that they leave the shallow water for safety, it's that we remove the ones in the shallow water with hooks.
Well yes, there a fairly simple bit of selective pressure:fish nearer to the surface are more likely to be caught. As industrial fishing is aggressive to mass collection that increases pressure to move deeper.
It seems reasonable then that fish that are generally remaining (in average) deeper than there counterparts will (again on average) live longer, and so get bigger.
This is basic evolution. It’s no different than commercial fishing farms having to deal with their fish growing more slowly or simply staying small (the selection criteria being “stay less than X cm”)
I'm sceptic about that, specially after reading this.
> All the species in which older, bigger fish are found in deeper water have something else in common: we eat them
Hemm, not. Poisonous fishes show the same pattern. There are poisonous fishes also in the deep sea. If we do not eat then, why do not live in the surface?
Mola mola is the biggest extant bony fish. Is neither fished nor eaten normally. Adults still pass most of its time at deep waters.
To extrapolate the behaviour of 30.000 species of animals after one single species and one single variable leads often to wrong conclusions. Fishes are complex creatures.
Are you just saying that there are poisonous deep sea fish?
To be a counterexample it needs to be a poisonous fish that exists in shallow waters but whose older members only occupy deep waters. Entirely deep-sea species aren't what this article is referring to. I'm not aware of any poisonous fish that aren't hunted by humans that follow this pattern.
Just saw your edit. I don't think that sunfish fish of different ages spend their time at different ocean depths? Wasn't mentioned on wikipedia.
Many deep-sea fishes have buoyant eggs and larvae that can reach the photic zone. Even the species that do not reach the photic zone live in shallower areas when younger.
A lot of pelagic fishes start their life at 1cm under the ocean surface also.
Therefore some fishes could have good reasons to inhabite deep waters different than the article's bold assumption that "All fishes dive deep to not be eaten by humans".
Mola mola is a fish, therefore this would lead us to "Mola mola dive deep to not be eaten by humans" that is a false statement.
The paper (which admittedly I only skimmed, so someone correct me if I'm wrong) seems to indicate that only around 70% of the variance based on a simulation (and I believe historical data) was due to fishing. The remainder could very well be ontogenic. So it's entirely possible that fishing is only one factor in this phenomenon.
I currently reading "Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind". Through out human history we have destroyed ecosystems. We are responsible for extinction of 1000s of species. Oceans was left out because we didn't have the technology, but not for long.
That’s what happens when you have this many people. For the kind of population growth, it’s either we stop having so many people, or the animals die. It’s us or them. Why is this so hard to understand? No amount of talking points and musing on environmentalism will take away those facts of human existence.
How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it? Get real about human development and the necessities of human development.
I’m saying enough with these lamentations about the environment, would these people rather be living in the woods? It’s complete nonsense. Destroying the environment has been a necessary step to human evolution.
Are you legit saying, "I don't know if extinct-ing most of the species on the planet will wipe us out. It might. That seems like a worthwhile hypothesis to test empirically!"?
When the dice are that loaded, you throw them at your own peril.
When they're that loaded, you keep throwing them because it's more profitable at everyone's peril.
Sounds like you agree it's not certain but you're exaggerating the risk to scare people who don't understand risks. It might be appropriate to yell during a Greenpeace march but I would rather have intelligent discussions than just yell slogans at each other. It's like a parent telling their teen "If you don't wear a seat belt, you'll die in a car crash." It's obviously not true but dying in a car crash is so bad that it's worth telling a lie to increase the chance of saving their life. That's what the parent would desperately yell at them as they run off with the car keys, but not if they want to develop an independent person who can make complex decisions for themselves.
There's a very good reason we don't run experiments to test, e.g., the hypothesis that a certain chemical might cause birth defects: the consequences of the hypothesis being accurate are morally abhorrent.
You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something.
Is it really that hard to extrapolate from the specific case to the general? If we get this one wrong, we're dead. Even the possibility makes it incumbent upon us to tread exceptionally carefully.
EDIT: This, "Hey, now. Let's have a rational, skeptical discussion about this" is a disingenuous tactic, in the first place. If we played that game, we'd still be debating whether or not rising CO₂ levels are dangerous, as they crossed the 500ppm threshold. We know, for practical purposes, that this is coming, unless we change course. We know the consequences of its happening. But we're still somehow dithering, apparently in order to convince trenchant outliers who have identity-level investments in being trenchant outliers, that they're wrong. That ship will never sail.
"Oops. Yeah, I guess that was a bad idea after all," is not an reasonable response to an existential threat.
"You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something."
Have you checked out the self-driving car threads recently?
Nope. That's not what they're testing. They're testing whether or not the thing even works — which necessarily includes "doesn't kill people", sure. But that's not the specific thing being measured; it's a consequence of the system not being ready yet.
Your argument is more like, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent to see how many people it kills", versus, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent for safety and efficacy" (phase I and II, respectively). We aren't specifically screening for deadliness; we're trying to determine the therapeutic index of the agent, and get a baseline on its side effects (which, yes, may include death).
It's a subtle distinction, but it's a critical one.
All that aside, it's fundamentally disanalogous, anyway, because the populations in chemo clinical trials are already sick, and have given informed consent. Dude walking down the street getting smoked by a Tesla that thought he was a wall, not so much.
> There's a very good reason we don't run experiments to test, e.g., the hypothesis that a certain chemical might cause birth defects: the
consequences of the hypothesis being accurate are morally abhorrent.
Just because we don't know if it causes birth defects doesn't mean every untested chemical certainly does cause birth defects. In fact it's obvious that since we don't know, we don't know! You might save people by telling them that lie but it's still a lie and won't help anyone understand nature.
You're really confusing "We don't know if ignoring the environment will wipe us out" with "Let's ignore the environment and see what happens.". I'm not proposing we conduct that experiment, just pointing out that we don't know what the outcome will be.
Since you can't see the fault in your analogy, I'll tell you. People have already tried that and we have biology that tells us what would happen without those things. So we know the answer without having to test it again. It's not comparable to continuing to change the environment the way we are, which is something we don't know the effects of.
How can you destroy water? It literally falls out of the sky. Israel makes drinking water from sea water. How can you destroy all food? There's no way we can wipe out all plants and animals, and we can eat lots of them, even if they're not our favorite food today. You can even eat cockroaches.
You're confusing actually destroying the things we depend on with carelessly using them and not trying to make sure they survive. An obvious counterexample - we do our best to eat as many cows as we can, yet the species is thriving! Maybe fish farms will do that to desirable fish species too. We didn't even wipe out sperm whales despite whalers doing their best to find all they could and having no concern for conservation.
I agree there's a _risk_ of that happening though. We just don't know for sure. My concern is with people who claim to know for sure when actually they're taking a dishonest extreme position to make their political point stronger. Of course we should be careful not to destroy the environment because if we don't, the downside to being wrong is terrible. Somehow most of the people arguing about this seem to be victims of their own extremism and unable to distinguish risk from certainty.
Water is doable as long as you have enough energy to decontaminate it, which is not really a given. Food, I'm not nearly so confident as you. Cows thrive partly because of what we do with them and partly because of all the natural stuff we can use to do so. Sperm whales weren't wiped out because that particular act of environmental destruction was checked before the species disappeared. You can find plenty of examples of species that were hunted to extinction, that just happens to not be one of them.
To say that unchecked destruction of the environment won't necessarily destroy us is the same as saying that we'll be able to create closed-loop life support systems that can operate indefinitely without any outside organic input, and that we'll be able to do it fast enough to save ourselves. I'm highly dubious of that.
You're assuming that 'unchecked destruction of the environment" means all important species will be made extinct. That's not true. We do our best to destroy various pests but they keep surviving. Many species have been wiped out and everything's still going fine. How much damage do we have to do to cause important ecosystems to collapse? I'll bet nobody knows because it's too complicated. Again, it might happen but nobody's certain so it's a lie to say that it's certain.
Something I'm pretty sure of though is that we can never destroy all food-producing life on earth by just eating everything till it's gone. Whatever's left will thrive and can be used to make food. Maybe not as tasty or as cheap, but we won't need a fully artificial life support system. Even in an extreme case of desertification, we can still grow plants indoors, and rain will still fall on our "deserts". And that's the very extreme! In reality, maybe the price of beef will go up a little as farmers have to spend more on feeding them.
Ecosystems are massively interdependent. There is necessarily an inflection point where an ecosystem is so depleted that it can't carry itself any more, let alone us. That's called "collapse" and it tends to be permanent.
Species are currently going extinct at a rate we've previously only seen in the fossil record — from which we've estimated that the current rate of species extinction to be on the order of 10-100 times that of any previous extinction event.
Then, consider that there are key roles in an ecosystem, without which its collapse is more or less a certainty. One of those roles is pollinating.
The collapse of bee and butterfly populations, and our having to resort to commercial pollination (because something on the order of 3/4 of the world's food plants require pollinators, and many of the essential nutrients — things the body can't synthesize itself, and must obtain through diet — come from plants which critically depend on pollinators, while wild bee populations have fallen to alarming levels) is a dangerous leading indicator.
We're well on the path towards a collapse. If we don't avert it, things will not go well for us. When the things we eat all die, they aren't there for us to eat any more. When that happens, we die.
Life on Earth has never been wiped out, no matter how bad it got. And we're not even talking about glaciers over every continent bad (humans survived that), just less fish and some other things. Not even always making them extinct, just less of each species. You're assuming that if we carry on without worrying about it, we will make important species extinct. That's only an assumption and not obvious.
This feels brittle. Does that include lamentations about global warming? If so: I’m afraid I disagree. If not: that’s a bit arbitrary.
I understand the sentiment, but sometimes, a complaint is valid. And making it over and over and over again is also valid. It is the first step towards fixing it. If we stop acknowledging this problem we lose all hope for ever finding a way out.
I would say the litany of woeful clamouring is already driving SOME people to consciously consume , buy electric cars, (or we can focus on conscientious vegetarians, if you don’t like the global warming analogy) etc. Sure , it could be a lot better, but it could also be a lot worse.
If nobody ever complained , I bet there would be a lot fewer vegetarians.
It's a function of lingering ingorance and misaligned incentives. We have the technology and the institutions that can prevent the majority of this damage, despite our large numbers.
I am genuinely curious. Clean energy systems exist, but they are either expensive, restricted and dangerous to proliferate or expensive, inefficient and inconvenient.
What institutions exist that can make clean energy palatable to all the human societies that require it for their survival—at-scale, that they are all ignoring?
Leaving energy aside, what other powerful means of doing good to ecosystems as a whole, are they simply ignoring? Is there any quantification of the damage?
I am most certainly not trying to attack your position. I pretty much believe the same things you said. But we should have these answers documented. Is there a single source for these things on the web?
He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.
He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activities, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.
Five culture types based on food getting technology: 1 Foraging; 2 Hunter-gatherer; 3 Agricultural (cities); 5 Pastoral (Animal herding); 5 Industrial
Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."
(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...
Holmgrin's scenarios:
1 Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)
2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
3 Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.
4 "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.
"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.
Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.
The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects.
> 2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
Ok, we have something like 450 nuclear reactors globally. IIRC bumping that number up 10 times would give us roughly two times our current global energy usage (ie fuels and electricity).
That's a margin that could reasonably address energy requirements for synthetic fuel production & delivery, sustain the additional energy we want to use for cleaner but energy demanding electrical processes in industry, and arguably put us on footing to end global poverty. Atomic process heat is wicked-good for desalination, critical to avoid water-related wars. "Next gen" tech (from the 70s...), conceivably could let us think about replenishing continental aquifers, and all round have enough energy to continue exploring space. All without any social engineering or major lifestyle or geopolitical reshaping.
I'm a big fan of solar, but our global solar energy budget has some tricky hurdles before we get to 200% current global energy usage. And I'm not enthused about anything that requires a centrally managed government (that doesn't exist today), managing life and death. It sounds scary and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
It seems that all these points assume naturally unlimited and indefinite population growth, but it is projected that the world population will reach a certain point and then level off (see https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth for some charts).
The basic argument is that increasing the education of women leads to fewer children. You can already see this in developed countries which are actually starting to exhibit negative population growth (e.g. Japan).
Sorry it's been a long day, so I don't have the energy to write much.
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
Ideally, this should be a multi-national effort led by all the wealthy countries. They should also create investment funds to help more quickly developing nations move past lower tech, harfmul energy sources (need a lot oversight here to make sure there isn't any economic exploitation).
I'm not super well-researched, but there does seem to be a lot of effective, actionable solutions that we can start today. The above are just a small sample.
Understand. Thanks for stating some options - but like you said, it’s not 100% in the hands of the currently developing economies... but it would appear that a lot of commentary hates on them for being the polluters right now.
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
This was the basis for the Kyoto Protocol [1] in 1997, which sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions by making organizations pay for a license to emit greenhouse gases. It even put most of the burden on developed nations, as you suggest.
Now, you may argue that the costs for licenses were not steep enough, or that the resulting emissions trading market diluted the effectiveness of the regulation, or that the US' refusal to ratify it makes effectively a failed attempt -- but what you propose has been tried before.
I was nodding along with you--yes, the population explosion is destroying the environment--until I realized, with mixed bemusement and horror, that you were in favor of this.
Just for starters: Why is "the Industrial Revolution happened" an argument against trying to do better in the future?
It points to a hard fact about what kind of things cause environmental destruction but are also massive improvements for humanity. The picture painted where environmental destruction is superfluous is completely wrong and disingenuous.
It may be that the Industrial Revolution couldn't have happened without massive pollution, sure. The Industrial Revolution is long over. Why should we recapitulate the past when we have radically more advanced technology and a far better understanding of its effects? If you're in favor of progress, it should be obvious that we can do better than the Industrial Revolution.
> How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it? Get real about human development and the necessities of human development.
Not all of that environmental and human damage was necessary. Much of it was out of ignorance, and more was out greed, combined with a callous disregard for human life.
>How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it?
Possibly if they had used solar-thermal power generation and focused on battery tech instead of exploiting petroleum so heavily.
There was already heavy investment in steam technology. Using the sun the boil water instead of coal or wood is much less resource intensive and completely eliminates external supply chains.
Did they have enough tech by that point to even begin to figure out mass manufacturing of solar cells to focus enough energy into water to make steam? Burning something that burns well is a much more intuitive and scalable process...
Also, mining the easy stocks (at that point) is a low tech affair too. Which was powered by... combustion of fuel and human labor.
We still can’t make solar panels with 100% efficiency, what hope did they have?
Good points. But lens building is a complex endeavour that requires tooling at the manufacturing level (especially computing power!) - no matter the choice of available material, yes? Doing it with high precision at a civilisation-powering scale seems like an impossible ask of a species that was still considering much of their Home planet to be “new” (Americas).
I'm reading "The Progress of Invention in the 19th Century"[0] right now, and it's at least partly dissuading me of the whole "We couldn't possibly have developed without fossil fuels" idea, along with the similar "If we collapse now we'll never build back up without abundant surface fossil fuels."
Worthwhile electric generators really weren't that far behind worthwhile steam engines. Without any fossil fuels, I think we would've just built lots of hydro and wind.
Don't forget the plants! They're dying as well through the effects of agriculture, draining swamps for new subdivisions, and such. And from the few invasive species that thrive to the detriment of many native species.
Although I suppose the animals are getting the worst of it since we actively go after many of them.
I got downvotes on this... I should have explained more perhaps.
I do understand what that idiom means - I’m failing to understand how acknowledging that specific actor to be a powerful source of violence is to imagine an enemy.
Tilting at windmills is not just about imaginary enemies. From Wikipedia:
> The phrase is sometimes used to describe either confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. It may also connote an importune, unfounded, and vain effort against adversaries real or imagined for a vain goal.
People who incessantly complain about the evils of all governments -- a key clue here is referring to "the state" as a singular platonic entity -- as if they know of some better solution, when they clearly don't, remind me of the above.
frandroid did not appear to be complaining about the violence of the state. They were talking about harnessing it, which is the purpose of the violence of the state.
Thank you for the detailed explanation- while I don’t agree with your position for the reason stated, I fully understand where you are coming from.
I still am smarting from the downvotes on my innocuous request for an explanation though.
Open explanation requests often get downvotes, you usually have to show how far you understand what was meant, like you finally did above. Humour is also often frowned upon if it's not 105% on topic. It's a picky crowd...
Once upon a time rivers were clear and full of fish. There was no need for anyone to get in a boat and head out to sea to catch fish. Essentially the fish 'came to us' (not that they saw it that way).
With the advent of farming the rivers became full of the soil washed off the land and were no longer clear. Fishing now needed a boat.
At first this fishing was easy, however we ate the big fish and made various fisheries a thing of the past, case in point being the Newfoundland Grand Banks, once famous for cod but no longer.
So what do people eat now instead of 'cod and chips'? This amuses me as there is no problem for them. They get some other fish shaped object - 'battered' - and make judgements of how tasty or otherwise it is. Maybe this fish comes from another hemisphere, perhaps it has some unusual name, maybe it tastes 'different'. Marketing conquers all though, this mystery fish caught somewhere off Antarctica will have a fancy name as if it is some deluxe, exotic variety. It is as if the 'chef' went out of his way to offer something more exciting than 'humdrum cod' specifically for them, charging them more for this 'nouvelle cousine' in the process. No discussion of what happened to the cod will be mentioned although the despicable newspaper that will be read with the 'faux cod and chips' will talk about the evils of the E.U. and the Spanish fishermen invading 'our' shores.
Soon these fools will be eating the scummiest bottom-feeding detritus that can be scooped from the ocean's depths. They will do it if not every day but as the mood takes them until the day they die. Discussion will be made on how well the faux-cod is cooked and how lovely it was. The thinking won't go much further than their bellies and bowels.
Meanwhile, driving in their cars and going on their cheap holidays, these consumers, whom the world's economy depends on, will be pumping untold tonnes of carbon dioxide into the oceans, acidifying them to make life in the seas quite intolerable for our friends with gills. The cruise boats they holiday on and the container ships that bring them their cheap junk from China will also make so much noise in the oceans that any fish with ears will not be able to hear anything but the sound of diesel internal combustion engines.
There is no penalty for complicity in this madness. However, the cost of stepping outside of it is quite high. If you don't eat your fish or your beef or your mechanically removed horsemeat then there is not a place at the table for you. Unless you have got a good excuse. But nobody says they are 'allergic to beef' or 'allergic to fish'. You can only be allergic to peanuts. Much like how folks in the mafia have to have slaughtered someone to get a space at the table, so it is with meat and fish, to be accepted by your peers you have to partake in the ecocide.
There are those that are vegetarian and wanting to live life differently. But these people are somewhat drowned out by the vegan crowd, many of whom have entirely different motivations. This new vegan crowd are more likely to have an eating disorder that has nothing to do with saving the planet. Plus they can't get five minutes into a conversation without wanting to tell all that they are vegan. Their fanaticism plus the cost of their fake-meat products, e.g. that organic almond milk flown in from California, is no example for others to follow.
We will see if the meek inherit the earth, maybe the fatties scoffing all the fish are going to be going extinct shortly after they have scoffed the last plastic-infested jellyfish they can find in the oceans.
What you've just described is less an argument for vegetarianism and more an argument for population control. If the fish come to you, and you're incapable of overfishing them, your whole fantasy stops.
That said, you're right in that vegetarianism is just not sustainable in this size a population - but not just for elitist vegan snobs. If we all ate mostly vegetables, and got our proteins from other sources, we'd be facing a scarcity of land to grow crops as well as sources of fertilizer. The math just doesn't work at scale, and that's why purely vegetarian nations are generally that way: because they are poor, not enlightened. They also aren't usually particularly healthy. Ironically the healthiest cultures (if you'll permit the generalization) are those eating mostly fish-based diets like the Pacific and Mediterranean.
Where I work we used to have a lot of life in the river, now there are just place names and left over bits of infrastructure from those former times when there were fish. Unless you do your own bit of local (or global) history seeking then you cannot imagine times to have been different. Hence I shared what I know about how rivers used to be.
That was mere observation, as is my commentary on how people just move on from whatever they have just made extinct to some other fish without batting an eyelid.
Some crazy scientist chap once wrote that 'Nothing will benefit health or increase chances of survival on earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.' He also wrote 'e=mc2'.
Anyway, as for these 'poor vegetarian nations', you mean India!!! India wasn't poor and did not have famines until the British arrived with their guns. Before then India made and exported many things, fabrics being a speciality. The likes of the East India Company closed that down. A lot of enlightened thinking has came out of India. And it still does.
Now if you are going to live in Scandinavia then you are going to have a tough time of it being vegetarian. Those long winter months don't help you grow your oranges.
As for nitrogen fixing and general soil fertility, what you need are turnips. This was worked out a long time ago in England. What you don't need is more and more fertiliser from oil/natural gas thrown on the land to grow crops to feed animals that get churned up into beefburgers, with the residue washing into the oceans to create uncontrollable blooms of algae, suffocating the fish below.
Despite the significant numbers of humans on the planet there is plenty of arable land, albeit mostly owned by the 1%. We no longer need cows to pull the ploughs, the Dutch invented the harness for the horses bred by the British to do that. But we no longer need any beasts of burden, we can make tractors and power them with things like sunlight if we wanted to, cutting big oil out of the agri-business.
There is no need to be defeatist and to 'compromise'. Or to insist on eating fish just because some Japanese bloke lived to 112 possibly because he ate fish every day.
> Some crazy scientist chap once wrote that 'Nothing will benefit health or increase chances of survival on earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.' He also wrote 'e=mc2'.
Skill in physics does not necessarily equate to skill in macro-biology. 'Genius' is relative to one's profession.
> As for nitrogen fixing and general soil fertility, what you need are turnips. This was worked out a long time ago in England. What you don't need is more and more fertiliser from oil/natural gas thrown on the land to grow crops to feed animals that get churned up into beefburgers, with the residue washing into the oceans to create uncontrollable blooms of algae, suffocating the fish below.
Turnips are gross. Most people don't like eating them. You will never win that battle.
Eating fish is not a compromise, it's a logical place you end up if trying to feed a populous without forcing them to eat refined foods.
Perhaps you could take a look at the this traditional Okinawan diet, which is 95% plant-based (only a tiny amount of fish).
The longest lifespans on the planet (well until the western diet came along and promptly reversed that within mere decades).
If you want to talk logically, the most eco friendly approach is a vegan diet simply due to the inefficiency of calorie conversion through an intermediate species as opposed to getting directly from the source.
Vegetarianism doesn't scale? Right now most Americans eat meat that mostly eats food like corn and soybeans. How would it take more land if people got their protein from tofu instead?
There is a common myth in vegetarianism that cow fields can be just interchanged by soy or wheat fields. But they aren't equivalent. Lets see.
Lets take a cultured plant of wheat from family Poaceae: There is a crop of seeds once in the year and then the plant die. The cow eats the grain and maybe they eat the straw also. Finished.
Now lets take a similar plant in a pasture or a meadow. But the cows aren't put there for the "once in the year" grain of this plants. Is the Poaceae superpower to grow leaves again and again after being grazed what counts.
Therefore we need to take in mind that we can extract more food from the same plant in a pasture, and this happens all around the year.
And not all fields are flat. Some are located in mountains and have inclinations of 60-70 degrees or so. You can't use machines there to sow or harvest. Would be economically unfeasible. Using this areas as grazing fields for goats or sheeps are a better option.
And there are the arid areas, where you have all the sun and space to culture, but none of the needed water; and where a lot of plants are poisonous or have horrid spines. If you remove the donkeys, goats and sheep, you can't have still tofu in return. Does not work like that.
We need to refine our master plan of "1 Kg of meat equals to 10 of wheat". For some places "1 Kg of meat equals to 0 Kg of wheat".
Of course if "we'll do it for the animals", a meadow inhabited by 450 species is much better than a concrete parking; and the later holds still more species than a monoculture of soybean. All soybeans means "no more butterflies, micromammals, flowers, and birds"
Given the sheer inefficiency of animal agriculture, this argument doesn't hold up to even passing scrutiny.
For every 100 calories of grain fed to cattle in industrial (meat) factory farms, the result's equivalent to ~30 calories.
Those "inefficient" fields you cite wouldn't need to be cultivated at all if we didn't pour two thirds of the food fields produce into fuelling the livestock industry. Not everywhere outright requires cultivation.
Most of the meat on your plate will come from a factory farm, for the sake of maximising efficiency of food production. The idyllic picture of animals roaming freely across pastures doesn't really map to the reality of modern affordable meat production[1].
As to your point concerning the meadows/monocultures comparison- a global food production system less wasteful than that which exists presently, in which we wouldn't be pouring mountains of perfectly edible food into fuelling meat production, would substantially reduce the area of land required for continual cultivation. Modern diets in the western world area astoundingly inefficient- even reducing the amount of meat consumed would help matters considerably[2].
I run a vegan community group on Facebook, and we did a survey about why people became vegan (sample size 200).
The main reason was for the animals, followed shortly by wanting to have a minimized impact on the environment, and then personal health. Most vegans I've met are kind people who just want to act in alignment with their values.
Given that there is more impact to climate change from animal agriculture than all of transportation put together, it makes sense that people are starting to wake up to the reality.
> So what do people eat now instead of 'cod and chips'? This amuses me as there is no problem for them. They get some other fish shaped object - 'battered' - and make judgements of how tasty or otherwise it is. Maybe this fish comes from another hemisphere, perhaps it has some unusual name, maybe it tastes 'different'. Marketing conquers all though, this mystery fish caught somewhere off Antarctica will have a fancy name as if it is some deluxe, exotic variety.
This reminds me "Chilean seabass" [0]. I always chuckle to myself when I see it on a menu, usually for some outrageous price. Marketing conquers all, indeed.
I read a story once where ongoing changes in the timing of salmon runs were (of course) being blamed on climate change by scientists. But then someone who is actually in the fishing industry pointed out that for ages now we've been artificially selecting out those salmon which run during the "standard window", leaving in their wake mostly survivors who show up a little bit sooner or a little bit later, outside of that window. This person was of course then treated with absolute disdain by the online community which was discussing the issue; he might have even been banned outright for saying that.
Maybe it was met with disdain because it was unsupported speculation?
Why would a fishing effect occur over a span of a few recently years, instead of over 100 years of fishing?
Which is IMHO why the simplistic upvote / downvote / likes / retweet system is one of the major faults of most social networks. It encourages groupthink and tribalism and discourages engagement with other opinions and perspectives. (EG: Don't like an opinion or statement? Just downvote. Don't even try to engage or understand where the other person is coming from.)
No-one will lie on their deathbed wishing they'd scored more points in the Internet popularity contests.
However, I observed my remarks receiving a hidden downweighting following moderator action some time ago. dang confirmed since that they have a "penalty box" mechanism.
I post less frequently as a result, because I think fewer people will see what I have to say.
Forget hidden. I've noticed that within two minutes of every comment I make, even if they eventually end up positive, I get hit with 3-6 downvotes. Almost as if there's a bot.
> This chronic downvoting on HN is getting boring.
> Not only that - respected HN citizens need to create new throwaway accounts on order to speak their mind. It's becoming a new normal. That's ridiculous.
> it's tiring to express your opinion here and contribute to a conversation only to have it downvoted because it wasn't the right contribution.
The problem is that the "penalty box" mechanism doesn't distinguish between unpopular but well-reasoned opinions and offensive behavior. People here, like in many other online forums, are all-too-quick to downvote other opinions. This is particular stark in discussions around characters like Elon Musk, where for years criticisms were downvoted and flagged (and only recently has it become safe to comment negatively on the behaviors of Tesla and Musk)
I have noticed a greater preponderance of downvoting in recent months as well. However I've attributed that to the growing influence of Reddit, a forum in which brigading is common, voting is less about noise cancellation and more about memetic conformance, and where people will downvote if they disliked your punctuation or are simply having a rough morning.
The Reddit model (including HN) is inherently bad. Being downvoted for proposing a contrarian opinion is not a good model for discussion. I say this as someone with a moderate (small) amount of karma here.
If you value minority opinions more than what the hivemind thinks, the reddit model is inherently broken. The merit of the traditional forum model is that you can't suppress minority opinions - they are always there to read (unless removed by a mod). No downvoting, no flagging, no "dead" posts that are too negative to show up.
The SA model (pay $5 to register, if you are violently breaking the rules you get banned and you have to pay another $5 to unban your account) is massively better. It funds moderators. It funds server bills. It puts a direct pricetag on being a fucktard. It does not suppress dissenting opinions.
Lots of people will hate it. The quality of posting will also improve. Grandfather everyone who posts here in, ban them if they are fucktards, the quality of posting improves.
It's bad on the small scale of say like a post, but I think it works on the larger scale of the community at large.
If you make a post and it goes into negatives not because you're being an ass, but because it just goes against the groupthink, whatever. Your overall karma will go down a touch. There comes a point where no one post is going to devastate your overall standing.
But if every post you make gets downvoted, isn't that indicative of a larger problem?
But that's looking at the problem solely from a "user" perspective.
It's still bad from a content perspective because it means good, relevant content that goes against the groupthink gets buried.
That's definitely not why I post on HN and i think its terribly useless to hold universal positions on what motivates people. "Speak for yourself" and all that.
Yes, that’s how all major social networks work. Despite everyone knowing it’s dumb, it still works. They don’t mean anything except they do because people feel they mean something.
And most "scientific studies" that show up in such communities these days are at best only weakly supported, and may all but fall apart at the first sign of someone trying to validate their data integrity or replicate their results. Given the choice between someone sitting in a lab somewhere, maybe running computer models all day vs. the observations of someone who is pretty much hands-on, out in the field every day (like say a fisherman), who do you think I'm generally going to give the benefit of the doubt to?
I was referring to a long-term shift in the window, not short-term, oddball behavior as reported here. Natural fluctuations like this aren't really all that unusual and can happen for any number of reasons.
With respect, people have been coming up with their "common sense" objections to what those high-falutin' scientists have been saying every time one of them says absolutely anything at all. It's "common sense" that Climate Change isn't occurring - or man made. It's "common sense" that we can't effect the health of the oceans - they're just so big. It's also "common sense" that the earth is flat - just look around!
It's worthwhile raising and examining alternative hypothesis to explain phenomena but rejecting science out of hand on the basis of folk-knowledge is getting pretty old. Rejecting the science needs a higher bar than anecdotes.
Automatically assuming everything negative is caused by climate change is not science. If there is no evidence that salmon are changing spawning due to climate change, then it's just a hypothesis and no more scientific than the hypothesis that fishing is changing spawning. People are as guilty of blindly accepting climate change as the root cause for random things as they are of blindly rejecting it. A thing doesn’t become “scientific” because some group of scientists believes it.
I say this as someone who fully believes in man made climate change and its potentially catastrophic implications.
Yeah, in my mind it kind of boils down to this. The simpleton's answer to pretty much whatever ails you these days is "climate change". And the simpleton's answer to pretty much anything related to climate change is "CO2". Both of those positions are extraordinarily stupid, IMO, but far too common.
It's disingenuous to suggest that the simpletons in the climate change debate are those who attribute too much to climate change, when the leading figures of the denialists bring snowballs into the Senate and claim they disprove climate change.
There are plenty of clear-thinking, level-headed folks out there who, while they might have genuine concerns about climate change in general, aren't really buying into the doomsday aspects of it or that it's all caused by man. But those folks usually don't get much of an airing in the press or elsewhere, and if they do they're usually treated with derision. Instead the simpletons steal the show.
You know, at this point I don't know what's worse - that so many so-called experts seem to be spewing end-of-the-world nonsense, or that there appear to be so many folks out there who are all too willing to believe this stuff. I seriously question the qualifications and motivations of the former, and the mental health status of the latter.
You would make the whole community overjoyed if you gave us sound arguments for why we don't have a problem.
We see it in the data, and do our very best to run simulations to predict the future of this chaotic system (we should have the main influences down), and it looks bad.
You can doubt the doomsday aspect of it, since that is determined by society's response and resilience, but more CO2 in the atmosphere increasing radiative forcing and thus temperature as a 0th level effect are very basic physics. The fact that humanity caused a substantial increase on atmospheric CO2 is very obviously true as well.
Anything saving us must be a higher level effect. The natural way of CO2 sequestration, rock weathering and subsequent precipitation into ocean sediment, takes at least 10k years to get rid of an increase.
Please tell us if there is something big we miss. Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing.
Does that "we" actually include "you"? And if so, how much of that data have you looked at personally, and now closely? I ask because (as I have already referenced elsewhere in this thread) I went to the trouble of doing that some years ago - downloaded thousands of data files making up a particular temperature data set, consisting of hundreds of thousands of data entries. This after having heard some particularly inane and quite clearly wrong statements made about my local climate by the folks at NOAA or wherever. And you know what I found? The "raw" data there showed a definite but modest increase in temperatures in my area over the past 130 years or so. But the "adjusted" data (which was being used as the basis for making those statements) had been so badly mangled as to become completely unreliable, yet this was done in such a way as to make it show a rather dramatic increase in temperatures. It ultimately turned out that the whole data set was mangled, too (I spot checked several other locations), and that I wasn't the only person who had gone to such troubles and found much the same issues.
Of course, that was just one data set and that's been almost ten years ago now. But for easily the past 15 years or so, and continuing up to this day, folks outside of the climate research field who have gone to similar troubles to do basic analysis on various climate-related data sets have often come to similar conclusions - everything from "This [apparently very real] data is just too dirty and unreliable to be of much practical use, even after you try to clean it up" to "OMG, it looks like they're just wholesale making stuff up here!" And so on.
BTW, whenever someone mentions "the data" I always ask this question, and I almost never get an actual answer back: Is the data that you're referring to raw data, or adjusted data, or proxy data, or modeled data, or infilled data, or what? Apparently most people just assume that the data being referred to is real, live, actual data, but whenever I've followed up on the matter myself this almost always turns out not to be the case.
> Please tell us if there is something big we miss.
As I believe I have already said elsewhere, I don't think that it's so much that things get missed as it is that they seem to get willfully ignored, or maybe are just under-appreciated in their potential effects. But other folks outside of the climate research field who have noted various troubling things here might disagree with my assessment of the situation.
> Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing.
Again, as I have already noted, folks who come along and say "Good news everyone! The situation may not be as dark as it first appeared." often just get beaten down mercilessly. And in the press, for whatever reasons, if a "good news" type article appears it tends to fade out rarely quickly, while the "even more bad news" type articles may get hyped to no end. And even with the good news articles, often the reporter seems to go out of their way trying to track down so-called climate experts who will say "True, perhaps - but this actually changes nothing!", and who may then try to impune the motives of the person making the good news statement - "Probably a fossil-fuel funded climate denier!", or similar.
If you want to take a step back and get a breath of fresh air, consider the fact that throughout human history various episodes of doomsday-cult type thinking have come and gone repeatedly, usually with minimal aftereffects. This is very true for recent predictions made by scientists and such, too. For example, recently there was some discussion about how many of at least the most dire predictions being made around the time of the first Earth Day never came to pass. There may be several valid reasons for this, but the simple fact of the matter is that most o...
It seems like you looked more closely than I did at this kind of dataset. What kind of data did you look at, local temperature measurements? Did you figure out by which rules the data was 'mangled'? (Maybe I should invest some time over the weekend and do it too.. hm. )
> BTW, whenever someone mentions "the data" I always ask this question, and I almost never get an actual answer back: Is the data that you're referring to raw data, or adjusted data, or proxy data, or modeled data, or infilled data, or what?
Raw data in itself is not much use as you have mentioned. Nobody wants to look at spectra and electronic counts. (Properly) adjusted data is better, but not a lot is available for the less recent past. Proxy data also needs to be adjusted for the processes that left the record, but can then be used. Modelled or infilled data does not count since it is not 'real' data. So, adjusted data and proxy data.
If you look at all the datasets in Figure TS.1 (https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_TS_FINA...) here, do you really believe all of those datasets are problematic? Do you have a problem with the assertion that an increase in CO2 increases the energy coming into the Earth System? Where do you believe it goes, if not?
> folks who come along and say "Good news everyone! The situation may not be as dark as it first appeared." often just get beaten down mercilessly
I've never found anyone with good arguments backing them up, sadly. The hopeful ones who want to employ technology and engage in climate engineering make sense, at least, though many of the proposed techniques have.. interesting side effects in the models and don't all fully work. It's a chance, but it's better if we don't have to try. (Long term we need this tech anyway; who wants an ice age? That'd be even worse. Let's just test it on Venus first.)
> If you want to take a step back and get a breath of fresh air, consider the fact that throughout human history various episodes of doomsday-cult type thinking have come and gone repeatedly, usually with minimal aftereffects.
That would be good. But also consider that many of these problems were non-issues because action was taken to prevent them (such as the acid rain problem, the ozone hole, smog and freshwater pollution(where it applies)), and they were local and fixable fast (stop emitting pollution with a short lifetime and be done with the problem within a few days). If expectations such as yours prevent us from acting, that might be a problem.
I also don't expect the most dire predictions to come true, because I want to believe we either don't go the 'business as usual' emission plan or find a last-minute save in a technique for fast CO2 sequestration. Both of those require action though, and accepting that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to changes. (We have enough refugees everywhere already, and citizens in other places unhappy about it.)
(Btw, I like how clearly you express your thoughts!)
To answer a couple of your questions without getting too longwinded about it:
As to the nature of climate data itself, data sets which are of sufficient size are generally of questionable quality, and data sets which are of known high quality are generally too small to be useful. Climate folks use this as an excuse to do all sort of tricks, including using mostly models instead of actual data, and (my favorite) using a relative handful of actual measurements to create (infill) a whole lot of basically fictitious data points. That's why I always ask the question that I do, because I don't think people realize how little actual high-quality data is really being used here. You say that "Modelled or infilled data does not count", but in climate science it seems to count for an awful lot!
As to the nature of the adjusted data set that I reviewed, IIRC the rationale being used there was as follows. If you take a set of temperature sensors which are in relatively close proximity to each other, and one of those sensors starts showing a noticeable shift in temperatures, then the other nearby sensors should also show a similar shift. If they don't, the argument goes, then you can assume that the original sensor is suffering from some kind of anomaly and needs to be adjusted to correct for that. For example, perhaps that station had been moved a bit, enough so that its temperature-sensing characteristics had inadvertently changed.
Even if you assume that making such an adjustment is valid (I've seen well-reasoned arguments that it isn't), then the next question is how much to adjust. And that in itself leaves a whole lot of room for error. But none of this really applies to what I found.
The data set I reviewed was temperature data from sensors located all over the world; I was primarily interested in my local temperature history, though. When I downloaded all of that data I fully expected to see adjustments that seemed to at least be reasonably in line with what the computer algorithm used to make those adjustments was trying to accomplish, as explained above. But when I did even the simplest possible analysis (subtracted the raw numbers from the adjusted numbers) what turned up instead was quite surprising. Working from memory, this included:
1. Adjustments that were pretty much identical no matter where the temps came from or when they occurred. The same adjustment values were used for stations all over the world - Cairo or Anchorage, new data or old data, it didn't matter. (I didn't review all of the stations, though, just spot-checked several of them.)
2. The adjustments came and went, repeatedly - now you seen them, now you don't. If, for example, this was supposed to correct for a potential station move, then that implied that the station moved from point A to point B, then back to point A, then back to point B again, then back to point A, and so on.
3. The adjustments were always positive, never negative. This means they were adding considerable heat to all of the records.
4. Adjustments for winter temps were different from those for summer temps. For example, IIRC winter temps were adjusted upward by a full degree while summer temps were adjusted only by 1/10th of a degree.
There's probably other stuff, too, but I don't remember all of it. Other people out there also looked at this data and came up with other issues. Some even went so far as to look at the program code itself, and IIRC they said that no matter what the nature of the data was that you threw at it, it was always going to add considerable warming. As for my local temps, the raw data showed a small but apparently very real warming, while the adjusted temps showed a far more dramatic warming.
Being a computer guy myself, my take on the situation was that, at a minimum, the computer algorithm had been allowed to run roughshod all over the data. And at worst this may have been an intentional attempt to deceive - adding warming which wasn't really there.
If one side attributes too much to climate change, and the other side too little, then they are both wrong, and there's no benefit to favoring one side as being right in spirit while they are wrong in fact.
Yeah, that's just showboating. But also maybe something to be expected when, for example, climate folks go around saying things like "We predict that most/all of the snow and ice will be gone by year 20xx", but then that doesn't happen, and in fact we have near-record winter weather instead.
BTW, one of the simpleton's catchphrases is "the new normal", something which I used to see all the time but not as much lately. My wife has family who live near a lake in Texas, and during the drought there a few years back this lake was drying up. Folks in the area were being told by so-called climate experts that this was "the new normal", and not to expect that lake to fill up again during their lifetimes! But then of course a year later that lake was full to overflowing, and you will note that drought hasn't really been the major concern in Texas lately.
Is it a convenient excuse? Climate change would imply that it is not the salmon industry's fault that salmon populations are changing. The industry person suggested overfishing patterns are the cause. This puts the blame firmly on the fishing industry...
I'm an environmentalist who believes that we should stop carbon polution and that we should dramatically reduce other forms of pollution as quickly as possible.
But...
I have yet to read a research report that is convincing that climate change is abnormal due to humans.
The report most often cited is a meta report, but I'd rather have something with hard numbers that I can show people. Meta analysis is fine, but not convincing.
I'm curious what convinced people here that climate change is likely caused by humans rather than just earths cyclical temp changes that have happened for a long time.
Why do you believe we should stop carbon pollution if you don’t think it’s relevant to global warming? If it’s unrelated to climate change then carbon dioxide release is pretty benign. It actually helps trees and other plants.
> I'm curious what convinced people here that climate change is likely caused by humans rather than just earths cyclical temp changes that have happened for a long time.
What part do you have trouble believing? We’ve raised the carbon dioxide level by something like 40% since the industrial revolution. Unless carbon dioxide levels are somehow divorced from the amount of heat the atmosphere captures, we have clearly caused at least a portion of the increase.
Scroll down to the long term historical chart to see what we’ve done relative to historical concentrations.
I've seen that before on NASA's site, but the thing that bothers me (maybe not rightfully) is that the visualizations depend on the scale used. The didnt even note why they picked the scale for the colors or the graphs.
In other fields (business) that would be a HUGE red flag.
The other issue is that they appear to be changing measurement methods of carbon. First using ice cores and later using real air or at least much younger ice cores.
They dont say how or their methodology or assumptions they had to make. (Im sure there are good ones, but why not definitely state them so the reader can decide) etc.
I just dont know why there isnt a single source that aggregates the approaches, explains the assumptions and lets the reader decide. Instead, every bit of work on this topic is sensationalized and it makes me not want to believe it. I want to see a well reason argument that lays out the assumptions and I don't think that is too much to want before being convinced
> the thing that bothers me (maybe not rightfully) is that the visualizations depend on the scale used. The didnt even note why they picked the scale for the colors or the graphs.
> In other fields (business) that would be a HUGE red flag.
I don't know why you think this would be a huge red flag in other fields. You're given multiple visualizations. One is a graph of recent direct carbon dioxide measurements. The second is a graph covering 400,000 years of indirect measurements. The last is a time series of recent data showing carbon dioxide concentration in a map view.
The only thing iffy about these is that the graphs don't start the Y axis at 0. This is either a dirty trick to inflate the visible change or a helpful visualization choice to highlight the meaningful difference, depending mostly on how you feel about the data. But regardless it doesn't change the numbers.
> The other issue is that they appear to be changing measurement methods of carbon. First using ice cores and later using real air or at least much younger ice cores.
They give you different data sources in different visualizations. You make it sound as if they are mixing them where convenient. Especially with your "at least much younger ice cores" statement, I'm having trouble suspending my disbelief about your claimed intent here. Near as I can tell there is no substance or meaning to this claim, and you're simply creating FUD.
> They dont say how or their methodology or assumptions they had to make. (Im sure there are good ones, but why not definitely state them so the reader can decide) etc.
So do some research. You say you've "yet to read a research report that is convincing that climate change is abnormal due to humans." But have you actually looked? You can go to NOAA and learn about their core and atmosphere sampling methodology. You can look up NASA's AIRS system for details on how it works. It's not possible to spoon feed the level of detail that you claim to want. The spoon feeding is the high level data that NASA gives you. If you want more than that, dig in and find it.
> I just dont know why there isnt a single source that aggregates the approaches, explains the assumptions and lets the reader decide. Instead, every bit of work on this topic is sensationalized and it makes me not want to believe it. I want to see a well reason argument that lays out the assumptions and I don't think that is too much to want before being convinced
You complain that NASA is mixing measurements above (which doesn't appear to be a valid claim, by the way), and now you want someone to create a high-level summary that actually does aggregate the measurements? You're not consistent in what you're asking for.
You are also essentially asking why no one has managed to summarize literally centuries of human work into a blog post that explains this in an irrefutable way. You're asking for something unreasonable. You are asserting that everything is "sensationalized", but NASA's page is literally 3 visualizations and a short bit of text. Everything is only "sensationalized" if you're choosing to see it that way.
There are lots and lots of resources online that provide details. Start at Wikipedia and go from there.
And where exactly does he say that? Or are you just putting words into his mouth?
BTW, I know exactly where he's coming from. As a computer nerd I've done my fair share of accounting-type work over the years. And when I once downloaded a massive climate data set and looked at it and did some basic analysis on it (it was being used at the time to make some questionable claims about the climate), the first thing that popped into my head was "OMG, they're really cooking the books! Call in the auditors! Call in the law!" As far as I could tell I was looking at either a massive fraud or a major computer screwup; I could go either way here.
Well then write an email to the authors and ask them about it (maybe not with that tone though). I'm pretty sure you'll get an answer.
Edit: Seriously, if you think we made a mistake we want to know about it in detail. Just consider that a lot of people independently analyzed the data for the publications, including idealistic students without agenda, who then all made the same mistake. It's not very probable, but.. it's not like is has never happened either.
I didn't need to do that (contact the authors) because as it turned out other people had already done so; basically they just got stonewalled, though. And as I recall one of them was actually a young PhD (or at least a PhD-wannabe), and the response they got back was essentially "If you value your future career in science then you shouldn't go around rocking the boat by asking questions like this!"
> Just consider that a lot of people independently analyzed the data for the publications, including idealistic students without agenda, who then all made the same mistake.
Yeah, you make it sound like peer-review and such actually works the way that it's usually claimed to work, which is often just not the case. I've seen enough peer-reviewed junk floating around out there over the years to know that.
Hm, that does indeed sound concerning. I'd still try for myself though, since tone matters a lot. There is a reason lists like this exist [0]. If you have experience you probably know some of the letters and emails professors get (special and general relativity and quantum anything are prime targets). Honest questions on the other hand get either no response (too busy) or a detailed answer. It's hard to judge without seeing the correspondance.
I still believe that in aggregate peer review works, even if it fails once in a while for single cases, especially when the result is as scrutinized and as important as this. Do you have a better idea for making progress and figuring out what reality is really like?
Yeah, I've seen that crackpot list before, and of course most of it is just too funny. But things like that are really no excuse for just blowing off serious questions about current scientific thinking, which may of course potentially point to real problems with that thinking. In other words, you can't just label something "crackpot" primarily because it's convenient to do so.
As far as peer review goes, I'm trying to keep an eye on the whole "open peer review" thing, or whatever the proper name for that is. It of course has its own problems, but I haven't been particularly impressed with the current system for several decades now. And I don't think that it's really a matter of "it fails once in a while", but rather that it has problems which may be fairly pervasive. I've seen estimates that as much as 50% of what gets published these days as peer-reviewed science may be basically just fiction in the end, and I might put the percentage higher than that.
That's neither here nor there. "Business" is not a field in and of itself. It's an attempt to legitimize his refutation without actually having to put any work into it.
If he had just left it at "other fields" then the comment could maybe stand on its own. It's still a bit too vague, but whatever.
And even you, you're just here making the claim that you've done "accounting-type" work so that when you later say that you downloaded the data and "did some basic analysis" your conclusion will seem more valid.
What analysis? What about the data didn't line up? Saying something and showing something are two different things.
That's the kind of argument that sounds OK only if you already accept the conclusion. Here's another one - The amount of radioactive material in the atmosphere is higher since nuclear testing than ever before in human history. Radioactive material causes cancer so we've clearly caused at least a portion of higher rates of cancer. Call to action - We must all do our part to help clean the radioactive material from the air so we don't die of cancer!
> Radioactive material causes cancer so we've clearly caused at least a portion of higher rates of cancer.
I don't think anyone argues that radioactive testing has significantly (or even measurably) increased the background radiation level on Earth. Contrast with carbon dioxide, where we have increased by ~40%.
If we had evidence that nuclear testing had significantly increased background radiation levels, then the assertions that it's increased cancer rates and that we should try to clean it up would both be true.
Be careful about making too much cancer attribution here, though. For one, naturally occurring background radiation levels can be (and often are) far higher than most people realize, and our bodies have long ago adapted to that as best they can. Two, in addition to other pollutants, burning coal also releases quite a bit of radiation, far more than you average nuclear plant or whatever. Third, for the longest time a dose of radiation received all at once vs. that same dose of radiation received over time were treated as if they were exactly the same biologically. But now that we have actual long-term results to go by, it turns out that radiation received over time is generally somewhere between 10x and 100x less dangerous biologically than if that same radiation were received all at once. Also, it matters a lot what the type of radiation received is and where you receive it. For example, radiation received by the skin (dead tissue) may be all but inconsequential, while that same radiation received in the lungs or gut or bloodstream (live tissue) may potentially be disastrous.
Those are all good points and for anyone reading along with curiosity, I'd actually recommend the Wikipedia link two posts up as a nice starting point for learning more. Wikipedia on this general subject area isn't too shabby, I thought when I last went down the rabbit hole.
They did ban nuclear testing in the open air fairly quickly and resorted to underground tests which produce much less fallout. Then they did ban those too.
We've found particles of radioactive fallout in newly contacted remote tribes, those particles exist throughout the ecosystem and are present in all of us... Yeah, we have caused a slightly higher cancer rate with atmospheric testing.
Cleaning is a non-starter, but anyone with sense is working to prevent more radioactive material in our atmosphere.
If what you are suggesting were remotely viable it would be a wonderful way to, for example, capture radioactive particles released by burning coal. Swapping out coal plants with nuclear reactors being the 'final solution' there...
During the post-Chernobyl period we had almost exactly this - vast amounts of European food production had to be discarded because it had absorbed excessive radioactive material from the "plume" from the fire which blew west over Europe.
The trouble is - that historical data is the data so far as we know. I don't see anyone claiming the historical data is incorrect or fabricated and unless there's a really good reason to doubt it, we should accept it. If you're not convinced by the historical record, then it's more a matter of stubbornness than methodology at that point
> The trouble is - that historical data is the data so far as we know.
The trouble is, that the XKCD cartoon is not the data. It is a picture representation of some data. It still falls under the category of "meta" report. This is, of course, as the GP pointed out, "fine", but it does not subsitute for the data itself, nor for the methodology (which is discussed elsewhere in the thread.
> I don't see anyone claiming the historical data is incorrect or fabricated
I don't personally know enough about the topic to know if that's true, but, given the history of (arguably manufactured) controversy around the topic, nothing would surprise me.
Regardless, even as recently as 1,000 years ago, we would not have had reliable, direct temperature measurement across the globe.
That means that all but a minute portion of the time period covered by the referenced picture uses synthesized temperature data. Despite being potentially synonymous, I recognize that's not the same as frabricated. However, it does make the methodology that much more important.
The data (raw and synthesized) also have other characteristics significant to their eventual interpretation/analysis, besides correctness (or certainty), such as sample frequency. (The concept of overfitted models, for example, was recently discussed on HN).
> unless there's a really good reason to doubt it, we should accept it.
I posit this stance is incompatible with the scientific method and has contributed to the "reproducibility crisis" in modern science.
Although I certainly agree that attempting to reproduce (i.e. gather) raw data should be left as a last resort, I don't feel even it deserves any special treatment.
Sadly, the raw data is generally simply not publically available (for science in general, no ideal about climate, specifically).
To me, that's the difference between science and religion, with the former, it's actually helpful to "doubt" (i.e. skeptically verify) even if you "believe" (in the conclusion and how it was reached).
I'd love to have an answer to this too! Unfortunately, it seems to be a field that's too difficult for non-specialists to make any conclusions in at all. I'd say almost everyone who believes it was caused by humans does so because of peer/political pressure or trust in authority directly telling them that fact. All explanations I've ever heard don't have the conclusion logically following from the information we know. For example "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming." or "The increase in CO2 is dramatic so that must cause dramatic warming.".
I don't understand how even scientists can be so sure of the causality because in a complex system, proving that a one-off event caused another one-off event is supposed to be impossible, isn't it? You can't replicate it. You can't do a controlled experiment. It seems you can only model it and notice that your model shows causation. What if the model is wrong? It's too complicated for laymen to understand. It seems to be even harder than nuclear physics which even school kids can use to make predictions about nuclear reactions.
It's ok to want an answer. You may have to accept though (and it seems you're on your way to this) that the answer isn't simple, can't be broken down to a simple paragraph and can't be digested in a sitting. If you're not content taking the short explanation (e.g. "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming.") then you need to accept that you will have to study the models in depth and try to understand what assumptions/approximations were made, why the scientists consider those valid, what data are used and what biases or errors exist and needed to be corrected for and why those are valid, etc.
And that's all ok. As long as a person doesn't reject the science outright because they can't understand the work or don't want to put in the effort. But those who reject the science or insist that nothing be done about it until they personally understand it need to either put in the effort to understand it or lend faith to the scientific consensus which has been developed through great effort.
Yes, if you don't understand it and won't study it, then the best bet is to side with the scientists. The trouble is, that's almost everyone. It just seems to be one of those areas that's impenetrable to laymen.
> It just seems to be one of those areas that's impenetrable to laymen.
Bull-hooey.
If you're genuinely interested you only have to understand the difference between climate and weather, the time scales involved (decades, not years), the limitations of models vis-a-vis spot-predictions, and wrap your head around the nuance between "change" and "rate of change" (ie speed vs acceleration).
That is not hard, but 99% of "skeptics" can't be bothered...
If you're mentally flexible enough to get that the problem isn't that pendulums swing, but that a fast swinging pendulum could be Very Bad for our civilization, climate change rests on three straightforward principles and observations:
1) The absorption spectrum of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses: test-able with an aquarium and a UV light
2) That aggregate 24/7 human industrial activity (ie all: cars, boats, planes, construction, smelting, BTC mining, etc), is somehow increasing greenhouse gasses: this is tested by checking the air, if seeing smog clouds or logic isn't proof enough
3) That Venus exists, our telescopes are not lying, and we don't want to take vacations there
Of the 8 planets in this solar system, 1 of them has had its climate go into overdrive and now resembles biblical Hell. Human activity will never push things that far, but we'd talking about the end of mankind well before that point...
Climate change is not impenetrable to laymen. Climate change has been on the end of a 50 year FUD campaign meant to confuse the issue so that laymen only hear the arguing. Totally coincidental: oil company marketing triangulation has pointed out for years that they don't have to convince anyone on climate change, they just have to extend the debate past the point of action. It worked.
> That is not hard, but 99% of "skeptics" can't be bothered...
Actually, most of the "skeptics" that I've seen online are right on top of this kind of stuff! It's the other side that just wants to hand-wave away far too many things.
> 1) The absorption spectrum of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses: test-able with an aquarium and a UV light
If you want to have some "fun", go track down a full spectrum chart of sunlight and how carbon dioxide and water vapor and such absorb that sunlight. Pay particular attention to the infrared band, which is very large. What do you see?
As to your aquarium example, some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a similar experiment - one that was claimed to have been done many times and which clearly showed the greenhouse effect of CO2. Only it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying that the example itself may very well be bogus. Also, IIRC, another group ran a similar experiment sometime later and claimed a positive result. Except that even a layman like myself could clearly see that their experiment was very poorly controlled, and not nearly as cleanly run as the first one. So while they happily claimed a successful replication, in fact they never actually proved nor disproved anything, as far as I could tell.
> 2) That aggregate 24/7 human industrial activity (ie all: cars, boats, planes, construction, smelting, BTC mining, etc), is somehow increasing greenhouse gasses: this is tested by checking the air, if seeing smog clouds or logic isn't proof enough
This includes water vapor, perhaps the most powerful and important of all the greenhouse gases on Earth. Yet for some reason this is almost completely ignored by the anti-CO2 crowd.
> 3) That Venus exists, our telescopes are not lying, and we don't want to take vacations there
If you want to have some more "fun", go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Venus, which is very hot. And while you're at it, go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Mars, which is quite cold - cold enough that the CO2 actually freezes out of the air there on a regular basis. Tell me what you find.
> Climate change has been on the end of a 50 year FUD campaign meant to confuse the issue so that laymen only hear the arguing.
So it's 50 years now, is it? Seems a little long to me but whatever. What's important here is that this is another claim of "FUD", no doubt directed at the fossil-fuel industry. But IMO claims that this are often made less to point out "the truth of the matter" (in their opinion) and are instead usually more of a cheap-shot attempt to convince folks not to listen to the points being made by the other side (or to try and justify their own refusal to listen), which often call out glaring weaknesses in the overall argument.
You are disputing the most basic fact of CO2 being a greenhouse gas. This is why we say "skeptics" can't be bothered to understand the science.
If CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas then go write a paper about it and claim your Nobel.
Note that we put "skeptics" in quotes because cranks aren't skeptics. A skeptic would consider that the one guy who failed to replicate an experiment may be wrong, as well as the possibility that all the other people who ran the experiment were wrong.
No, I clearly said no such thing! (You're putting words into my mouth, which is a form of lying.) In fact what I said was that a particular experiment - one which was apparently falsely claimed to be easily replicable and had been done successfully dozens of times - was in fact not replicable when done in a careful and public way. This is very different from claiming that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.
That phrase though - "greenhouse gas" - is a misnomer. Actual greenhouses don't operate the same way that atmospheric greenhouse gases do, but the phrase has stuck so now we have to live with it.
And yes, there was much discussion among "skeptics" of the actual experiment and the supposed others like it at the time, and of the fact that problems with it may have traced back to what I just said above. But in the end I don't think anyone was convinced that these experiments necessarily proved or disproved anything, much less that they had been successfully replicated dozens of times.
And before that there was efforts to stimy acedemia as the models are so painfully obvious and unambiguous... Yeah, 50.
> What's important here is that this is another claim of "FUD",
Yeah, because it's a literal campaign of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (see link above). Less a "claim" as an "obvious, proven, well established fact". And the trolls are obvious and everywhere, even here.
> go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Venus ... Mars...
Too bad I didn't say anything that would have any connection to this irrelevent, obtuse, comparison. Did Venus experience a runaway greenhouse effect? Are you seriously implying greenhouse gases don't have greenhouse effects? Also: what does NASA say about terraforming Mars and CO2?
The top minds over there seemingly know something you do not. Climates can get hot from the greenhouse effect -- those who disagree are disagreeing with obvservable reality.
> go track down a full spectrum chart of sunlight and how carbon dioxide and water vapor and such absorb that sunlight
I'm completely befuddled by this attempt at a point. Greenhouse gasses absorb infrared radiation, CO2 is one of them. Are you implying the IPCC and top brains at Oak Ridge has missed something in a straight-forward chart about the absorbtion of sunlight? For decades? Sheesh.
More energy in a system, what could possibly happen. Wow. Hard. I dunno. Only we all do.
The physics of it are crystal clear, even if the predictive models were tricky to make. It makes absurd gesticulating to minor percieved issues look flacid, weak, and hallow.
> some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a [greenhouse gas] similar experiment ... it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying...
... implying very little as the experiments I was referring to are painfully simple and have been carried out repeatedly, not just twice. I'm sure you've alerted the relevant journals and conferences, though, to this travesty of scinece.
I bet they're sweating with this straightforward and easily proven assault on the foundations of their field... Mmmmm Hmmmm. Time to worry about black helicopters, false flags, and you getting disappeared! Or... is this backed by The Deep State? Tinfoil! Tinfoil!
> most of the "skeptics" that I've seen online are right on top of this kind of stuf
No they aren't. This is a(nother) blatant falsehood.
They are dishonest liars with no credibility and an armory of logical fallacies and hostile attitude that they use to export their moronic, uninformed, world-view. A world-view that is blatantly supported by monied interests pushing junk science and FUD.
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Here's the thing: as yet another in a lOOooooooooooooooong line of climate trolls on the internet, you gotta step it up. These obvious attempts at spreading debunked factoids was played out in the early 00's. So, yeah: "skeptic", because genuine skeptics would read and learn, instead of regurgitating talking points like a Russian Twitter troll.
Dude, obviously I struck a nerve here and you seem to be losing it, so please calm down and try to keep a civil discourse! I will make no further comments to you on these matters until you at least make an attempt to track down some of the info for yourself. (Note that I intentionally didn't spill the beans here just to see if you were in fact up to the challenge.) And if you don't do that, then I can only assume that you simply have no willingness to do so (because it might challenge your current worldview?) or maybe even lack the skills necessary to do so!
And I'm not saying that anyone has "missed" anything here. Rather they have full knowledge of it and simply choose to ignore it (because they want to stay "on message"), or maybe they have dismissed it as being relatively unimportant. Not everybody looks at this stuff and comes to those same conclusions, though.
BTW, "almost 40" in not 50, and the actual timeline here (which I'm probably at least somewhat more familiar with than you are) is not quite what it has been made out to be. In fact, in recent legal proceedings Judge Alsup (I'm sure you will recognize that name) has already called BS on a lot of it, and if I'm not mistaken some other judges in other jurisdictions are headed down this same path.
Since you haven't answered my questions, I will address one of yours: "what does NASA say about terraforming Mars and CO2?" OK, why don't you tell me your interpretation of what NASA says about terraforming Mars and CO2? I have my own take on the whole situation, but I'm interested in hearing yours.
> As to your aquarium example, some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a similar experiment - one that was claimed to have been done many times and which clearly showed the greenhouse effect of CO2. Only it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying that the example itself may very well be bogus.
Assuming it's true, it merely means that a pedagogical science-class-level experiment to demonstrate the effect of global warming doesn't quite work as well as expected. It has very little bearing on the actual effect CO2 has on atmosphere and how much we know about it.
There used to be also a popular middle school physics experiment, where children are asked to roll small stuff (say, a metal marble) down a slope, measure its velocity, and verify the conservation of energy, by computing mgh = 1/2 mv^2.
Only that it does not work---it should not work, because if you roll a metal ball then a big portion of the kinetic energy is in the form of its rotational motion! So, just computing its transitional velocity will never work.
So, now what? Does this show that the Newtonian physics is flawed? Of course not. It just shows that this particular experiment is poorly thought out.
> This includes water vapor, perhaps the most powerful and important of all the greenhouse gases on Earth. Yet for some reason this is almost completely ignored by the anti-CO2 crowd.
Yes indeed I have heard about it! The numbers that I've read vary, but (IIRC) the one that sticks in my mind is that there is currently estimated to be something like 15% more water vapor in the air now than in the past (not sure about the timeline here), or some such, and that this is growing, but I don't remember all of the details. So not quite in equilibrium after all, at least no more than CO2 itself is. (If you check my post history you may find more discussion on this matter, but I'm not going to rehash all of that here.) Perhaps you should ask yourself why you haven't heard about that. The reference you provided is from 2005, so maybe it's just well out of date by now or something.
As to that experiment, it was being held up as a simple enough experiment that anyone could do proving basic things related to the greenhouse effect. Only it didn't quite seem to pan out that way.
As to Newtonian physics and such, didn't someone named Einstein once come along and stir up the pot and show that Newton was kind of wrong about some things? And aren't folks today still doing experiments testing Einstein's claims, and still pointing out that some of the things currently believed about gravity might yet need correcting? (No need for me to go into further detail here because I'm sure you will recognize what I'm talking about.) So even in the well-established field of physics it's still OK to question things like long-held beliefs about gravity. But for some reason in the relatively new field of climate science you DARE not question any of the status-quo. No sir!
Newtonian mechanics is the approximation of Einstein's work to the speeds and masses that are accessible on Earth, it is not wrong and usually still sufficient unless you need insane precision or want to research large masses or speeds.
Warmer air can hold more water vapor. This effect is of course included in the research.
The whole thing with Mercury was readily visible and had been observed for a long time, but Newton and others never came up with an acceptable explanation for it while Einstein did. This didn't involve insane precision or high speeds or anything like that. (I guess the Sun counts as a pretty large mass, though.) And the basic rules of Newtonian gravity have been repeatedly questioned lately (beyond Einstein's revisions), but I don't know if any of that has stuck.
> Warmer air can hold more water vapor.
Yes indeed it can, and said water vapor (being a greenhouse gas) can induce more greenhouse gas effects. But this appears to be routinely glossed over, as if it's just a non-issue; not everyone agrees with that assessment, though.
As to the warmer air thing, lots of people make statements to the effect that warmer air holding more water vapor will lead to much heavier rainfall and such. Which certainly MIGHT be true, but it doesn't HAVE to be true. Why? Because there's nothing that says that all of that additional water vapor has to fall out of the sky in one fell swoop; a lot of it may just stick around as higher humidity. Plus it is well-known that rain sometimes falls from the clouds only to evaporate again in the warmer, drier air underneath those clouds, so it never actually makes it to the ground, and generally warmer air may lead to more of that. You almost never hear these facts mentioned, though.
Funny story: Some years back I was listening to a science podcast where a climatologist and an oceanographer were guests, and the subject of sea and air temperatures came up. The climatologist made a statement about "warming temperatures leads to more storms" and such, but the oceanographer corrected him, saying that while that used to be the thinking, further research had shown that if sea and air temperatures would changing more or less in tandem (both warming up together, in this case), then surprisingly the overall effect on storms actually appeared to be pretty inconsequential. And I thought the climatologist was going to blow a gasket over this; I mean, how DARE the oceanographer go "off message" like that!
> Yes indeed it can, and said water vapor (being a greenhouse gas) can induce more greenhouse gas effects. But this appears to be routinely glossed over, as if it's just a non-issue; not everyone agrees with that assessment, though.
You mean as in the models don't include it? I'm very sure they do, I'd have to search for citation though.
> As to the warmer air thing, lots of people make statements to the effect that warmer air holding more water vapor will lead to much heavier rainfall and such. Which certainly MIGHT be true, but it doesn't HAVE to be true.
That's why we use models to try and figure out what the probable truth is. This part is hard though, and only 'medium confidence' is reached for any influence on the water cycle since 1960 at all. (https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_TS_FINA...) I wouldn't rely too much on those precipitations change forecasts yet either, but things will change if we keep going like this.
> Funny story: ..
Haha, I can imagine. The storm thing is complex and hard to predict too. Let me cite the IPCC report:
'Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. However, for the years since the 1970s, it is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of storms in the North Atlantic have increased although the reasons for this increase are debated (see TFE.9). There is low confidence of large-scale trends in storminess over the last century and there is still insufficient evidence to determine whether robust trends exist in small-scale severe weather events such as hail or thunderstorms.' Table 11 here has details on the model runs: https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter...
Looks like your oceanographer was right. But I guess your point was the attitude, not the facts. There seems to be a general problem in communication since the beginning.
Concluding, what's your general point?
Do you think that CO2 is not a problem?
Do you want to doubt the specific predictions? (The IPCC reports helps to differentiate between virtually certain and still doubtful points, they're not all the same.)
Do you want to critize the attitude in communication? (I do think these issues need to be communicated and discussed better. Also, at this point it's really in the hands of politicians and society to work with this, not scientists.)
I don't have time for a long detailed reply but I will respond to a couple of things here.
> Do you think that CO2 is not a problem?
It's not so much that I think "that CO2 is not a problem", but rather that it's probably not THE problem when it comes to climate change issues - and certainly not the most pressing problem of our age, as it is often made out to be. And I think people who go too far down that path ("We're all doomed!") are maybe a little off-kilter mentally, to put it nicely, but there seems to be quite a few of them out there.
As to skepticalscience.com, some years back I spent many an hour reading through the stuff there, but eventually got to the point where I just no longer took it too seriously. The page you pointed me to "has issues"; the entire web site itself "has issues"; and even the guy who runs the site (John Cook) "has issues". I won't go into the details here because if you are as familiar with the situation as I am then I'm sure you're aware of at least some of those issues.
Coal is a problem, end-to-end. The buildup of nuclear waste (at least in the U.S.) is a problem. Sufficient freshwater supplies are a problem. Wildfires are a problem. Pollution (particularly plastics) is a problem. Concentrated overpopulation (too many people crammed into too small a space) is a problem. "Refugeeism" is a problem (note that I didn't say "refugees".) The threat of nuclear war (or at least the threat of rogue nations and such) is still a potential problem. And so on.
But what really disturbs me on a longterm basis is the fact that we have so much of our population and infrastructure located along coastlines. We've built permanent infrastructure on largely impermanent land, which is often perpetually at risk. And I'm not just talking about sea level rise, but rather subsidence (the land is often sinking faster than the sea is rising), constant erosion, hurricanes (common and often devastating), tsunamis (less common but often even more devastating), and so on. As to sea level rise itself, the seas have been rising pretty incessantly ever since the start of the last interglacial period (if I'm using the right terminology here), and AFAIK there is nothing to indicate that this has ever stopped. It has apparently proceeded in fits and starts, though, and by my math it's still occurring at something like half the rate of the historical average. So when some mentions sea level rise in relation to climate change my reaction is more like "So what? Sea level rise is nothing new, but it's less of aa overall global issue now than it was in the past. As for any anthropogenic influences, that's more a matter of rate than anything. But unless the natural part of sea level rise comes to a complete stop, then all of that coastal infrastructure is pretty much doomed in the long run anyway, and it's probably not even particularly safe even if it does stop."
> The whole thing with Mercury was readily visible and had been observed for a long time, but Newton and others never came up with an acceptable explanation for it while Einstein did. This didn't involve insane precision or high speeds or anything like that.
Perihelion of Mercury was observed to advance by 574 seconds per century. That is 0.16 degree per century, or 0.0016 degree per year.
Of this 574 seconds, Newtonian physics could accurately explain 532 seconds as gravitational interactions between planets. That still leaves about 42 seconds as unexplained.
General relativity predicts an additional 43 seconds, which is a near perfect match.
Of course, it's always a matter of opinion whether something is "insane precision"... so feel free to think it is not. (Never mind most people never see Mercury itself in their lifetime: I certainly haven't.)
You misunderstand me. These are all the same type of qualitative arguments that aren't convincing. They do explain the principles, which is a good start, and they can convince someone of the mechanism that it could work by but you can't make predictions from them so they have no value in convincing anyone who isn't already convinced or willing to trust authority once they've got the gist of how it could be possible.
Quick proof that they are unconvincing. Animals have been emitting CO2 since they appeared on Earth but the Earth is still - or even more - suitable for animal life than it ever was. Where's the "obvious" effect of all those millions of years of CO2 production? See, sometimes the effect is too small or it's counteracted by something else that we can't easily predict the effect of.
Of course it's counteracted by the plants.. You can see this signal strongly in the CO2 timeline as seasonal variation since most plants are on the land masses of the northern hemisphere and metabolize less in winter, leading to a temporary CO2 buildup.
Sure, but what about sea organisms turning into limestone and trapping carbon in the ground? What about cloud cover changing the rate of heat absorbed from the sun? What about the plants that created the fossil fuels in the first place? How much time does it take for the effect to appear? The fossil record doesn't have a resolution of 100s of years that's important for us because if change is slow enough, we'll probably be able to reactively adapt through technology. My point is that it's too complicated for the layman to be able to calculate the average temperature change 100 year in the future. Not even to the level of whether it'll be positive or negative, let alone what effect that change might have on the ecosystem. Even the IPCC isn't sure if sea levels will rise in that time frame significantly more than they would have without fossil fuel use. It's right on the edge of uncertainty for even the consensus of climate scientists. So laymen who aren't running their own models and keeping up with all the newly discovered effects have no hope whatsoever.
Here's another way to look at it. If it's so easy to understand, why didn't anyone notice it 50-100 years ago? Well, they did but they weren't able to make predictions accurate enough to scare anyone into change. How can a non-scientist today do better than the best scientists of the last century? Do we have some easy new theory they can apply? Do we have some new data they can plug into their simple formulas to make those predictions?
You're right, it's not simple. I still believe most people can understand all thee things you mention if they.put the time and energy in. Most of the things are complex, not complicated.
They can't make predictions from them. Can you tell me what the temperature in 100 years will be? How do you do the math? Do you need some hand-made closed-source HPC simulation software with no manual that nobody knows how to use except the author?
I can recommend looking into the IPCC report, chapter 9, Evaluation of Climate Models [0], chapter 11, Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability [1] and chapter 12, Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility [2].
The models run on inputs and include uncertainties (how much emissions will there be? How many clouds will really be produced in a warmer climate? ..), thus you get a range of results. The first step is to reproduce historical data, then you run the model into the future. The best prediction is given by the aggregate of a lot of different models with a realistic range of inputs.
For numbers check chapter <11.3.2 Near-term Projected Changes in the Atmosphere
and Land Surface> and chapter <12.4.3 - Changes in Temperature and Energy Budget>. Of course we're predicting climate here, not weather, so the exact temperature in exactly 100 years is unknown.
The wikipedia article is good for a start on the math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_models
If you have some basic knowledge of math and programming you can create a zero-dimensional model yourself. There are probably a lot of ressources out there to help with this too. The physical knowledge needed is basic radiative things such as the Stephan-Boltzmann law. [3] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law)
(This will inform you about the effects of albedo changes (ice and clouds are bright and the ocean is dark, forest is a lot darker than fields and cities), changes in solar irradation and Earth thermal emissions (changed by e.g. cloud cover, aerosols such as dust and greenhouse gases.)
You can run a full model yourself, but that easily turns into a full-time job. Here's one, for example: [3]
If you want to check the ones in the IPCC reports, here's an overview: [4].
Not all of them are available, sadly, but there is a general push to make it all open. (Many scientists are ashamed of their horrible coding practices.. but these things are better than most because they need to be high-performing. FORTRAN is quite popular..)
Whether you need or want HPC really depends on the resolution you want to model at and what to include.
Do you want local and regional resolution? What vertical resolution do you want? How long into the future do you want it to run? How many different parameter inputs do you want to check?
(In the IPCC reports you can find a couple of standard emission timelines for the future, for example. The 'business as usual' one usually leads to pretty horrible results. The 'stop all emissions right now' one seems to lead to manageable results, only the coral reefs and glaciers are in danger then.)
How many feedback loops do you want to include? Do you want to include the full ocean as well? How about other things such as the carbon cycle?
(Naturally CO2 is emitted from volcanoes, changes state during rock weathering and is then eroded into the ocean, sequestrated into the sediment and subducted back into the mantle, then again emitted from volcanoes. This process is really slow though.)
Do you want to check for secondary effects such as sea-level change, ocean acidification, changes in precipitation pattern, changes in cloud cover? (which are feedback for your model) It's best to estimate the largest possible effect of each of these and then start with the main one and keep refining, which is the current process. You can follow this if you read the IPCC reports of different years. Chapter 12 tells you more about the recent refinements.
If you write emails to the authors of the report and papers with questions you might just get an answer btw, as long as you seem willing to understand and listen. It is exhausting to be called a liar when you and your peers do your very best to ...
Yes, that's pretty much in agreement with how I imagined it would be. I'm not personally trying to model it, though it might be a fun project one-day when I'm not feeling so against fighting a steaming pile of professor-written simulation code. Most of my job was doing just that years ago and I'm glad to be away from it now! But my point is that almost nobody has done climate models! Probably 100% of people on the internet saying "It's definitely caused by people and it's definitely going to destroy civilization unless we all take action now and buy electric cars" are basing it all on trust in authorities and political rhetoric. They didn't even work out the economics of what harmful effects that would have. (eg. we need oil for food, poor people need it to earn money). This isn't like being an anti-flat-earther where you probably can actually look up some data and do some hand calculations and prove it wrong. This is just blind trust in the conclusions.
It depends on how much exactness you want. The fact that more CO2 means more energy coming into the system is easy to work out. What the scientific staff does is more akin to researching the 'potatoeness' of the Earth rather than just
figuring out it's round.
The economic impacts are researched as well, IPCC working group 2 I think? It's just not my area of expertise.
> The fact that more CO2 means more energy coming into the system is easy to work out
Not easy to work out that it'll be a problem. We've known that for 100 years haven't we? But people didn't seem to be sure it would be a disaster back then. Hell, even in the early 2000s when I was a science teacher, we'd get the kids to build little greenhouses and demonstrate the effect but the text book emphasized that "This is only a theory, and we're not sure what will happen with Earth.". Knowing the basic principle was obviously not sufficient to be sure of the outcome. If you don't work out the finer details, then you can only trust others with the "It's important, honestly it really is!" message.
I know I sound like an anti-climate change-ist but I'm really an anti-sheep-people-ist, skeptical of things that have signs of religious faith such as appeal to consensus, being certain of their claims, predicting doom on disbelievers, and insulting and silencing people for heretical speech or doubt, and proselytizing.
> I know I sound like an anti-climate change-ist but I'm really an anti-sheep-people-ist, skeptical of things that have signs of religious faith such as appeal to consensus, being certain of their claims, predicting doom on disbelievers, and insulting and silencing people for heretical speech or doubt, and proselytizing.
Bingo! There is so much about the current situation that sounds not at all like science but rather so much like doomsday cultism that it's hard to take a lot of what's being said seriously. Bouts of this warped type of thinking aren't at all new, either, but rather date back throughout much of human history, and they have often been associated with religious dogma.
As to your experiments, I gather what was actually being demonstrated here was just the actual greenhouse effect rather than any greenhouse _gas_ effect, much less one associated with CO2. I mean, unless maybe you actually played around with the CO2 levels during those experiments. Which, given the minuscule CO2 levels that we're talking about - around 410 ppm (0.041%) even today - would have required rather extreme care and precision.
> Sure, but what about sea organisms turning into limestone and trapping carbon in the ground?
Too slow, sadly, and running into problems due to ocean acidification.
> What about cloud cover changing the rate of heat absorbed from the sun?
This is included in the models and one of the largest sources of error bars in the result. Clouds are complicated. We're working on it. (To deal with it one can put the highest and lowest probable value into the model and see what the difference is.)
> What about the plants that created the fossil fuels in the first place?
They lived in a different climate. What about them?
> How much time does it take for the effect to appear?
Which effect exactly are you talking about? Does appear mean measurable or clearly visible to humans? Depending on what you mean it is either very fast, just years, or takes some time, hundreds of years.
The ice ages seem to end rather abruptly (hundreds of years, maybe even less! , nothing on geological timescales), but we don't know why yet. The knowledge might not help with the current problem either. This rate, method and numeric range of change is unprecedented in the historic record. (400ppm of CO2 and above like we have now can only be found in the old atmospheres when the climate was very different.)
We can easily calculate how much additional energy is entering the Earth system, and that energy has to go somewhere (right now mainly the ocean). System reactions are less certain and can be slow.
> we'll probably be able to reactively adapt through technology
Maybe, if we hurry. This is like technical debt. Any CO2 we add now we have to either get out again, at high energy costs, or get used to the new situation. If you check the numbers it is a lot cheaper to fix it now than to keep going and then adapt/undo.
> Do we have some easy new theory they can apply? Do we have some new data they can plug into their simple formulas to make those predictions?
This has become something you need to do as your full-time job or time-consuming hobby to do. There is just so much going on. There is a lot more data (new methods of finding new data (eg satellites!), longer data records), and a lot more people (not just 2), computers! (you do not want to run all these calculations by hand), and we're all building on each other. The computers allow us to run more and more complex models, increase the resolution, include more effects. The input parameters and states are becoming clearer (we have daily measurements all over the globe now, back then they had what, 1 or 2 research sailing boats that came by every 20 years and didn't even measure much?). We have detailed knowledge about how much ice there is now, for example, and about the cloud cover every day, about storms and about ocean currents, wind patterns, natural emissions, atmospheric chemistry reactions (such as Ozone catalysation which led to the ozone hole, which does have a climate effect, just not very important). Any of these and more has specialized people studying it full-time. How can you keep up as a single person? You probably cannot, not in the detail required by the critical people.
It is interesting that this science has so many people trying to argue it away. Can they predict a moon eclipse accurately themselves? They still do not doubt the prediction. Can they predict the existence of the Higgs Boson, the effects of general relativity on the signal of GPS satellites, the exact path a solar system probe will take? There are so many things science predicts, but not a lot of people try to argue.
It's probably because everyone is asked to change, and fast, or be doomed. Maybe something about the communication went terribly wrong at some point and that is why we will have massive problems. (Interestingly, the ozone hole is a wonderful example of quick and decisive international collaboration in the face of a problem. Did people argue against the science then? The problem was simple...
> It is interesting that this science has so many people trying to argue it away. Can they predict a moon eclipse accurately themselves? They still do not doubt the prediction. Can they predict the existence of the Higgs Boson, the effects of general relativity on the signal of GPS satellites, the exact path a solar system probe will take? There are so many things science predicts, but not a lot of people try to argue.
Oh, there is SO much that could say about this stuff, but I won't because I've already spent too much time around here. I will leave you with this little nugget, though, because I found it quite hilarious at the time.
Some years back I attended a computer conference where one of the folks there was receiving an award for using "actual science" in the production of computer animation. What he'd done was try and take orbital models and other data from NASA and use that to produce animation which correctly showed the path of a spacecraft traveling from Earth to Mars (I think it was), instead of just winging it like most animators would do. Except when he tried to actually use this stuff to generate the animation it didn't work, and in his simulations he ended up missing Mars by a wide margin. After some back and forth with NASA and taking some additional stabs at it, the situation was a bit better but in the end he still ended up having to draw a lot of that orbital path by hand - maybe 1/3 of it. He told some of us that he felt like an imposter because he was receiving an award for something that he felt like he didn't actually do.
And I thought this was kind of funny because it seemed to accurately sum up the state of "science" these days. Here you have an authoritative source sending out models and data and such which doesn't appear to actually work, in large part. But, you know, if you just go ahead and fudge it enough to try and cover up the flaws with it then you can still win accolades for that!
Hm, yes. At least in this case we have proof NASA really knows what they're doing since the probes usually get to Mars. For climate science we will only know in a hundred years or so.
Yes, but they didn't get those probes to Mars without doing a number of midcourse corrections (heck, you can't even get to the Moon without doing midcourse corrections), so it's not like you can just enter a model and run with it. If you try to do that then you're going to end up way off target.
Which brings up an important point about all those climate models. Anybody who actually uses models to solve real-world problems will tell you that you can generally only trust those models so far. For anything long-term (where "long-term" can be remarkably short), you usually have to make the equivalent of midcourse corrections based on actual events. And for the longest time, at least, the climate change folks seemed far too reluctant to do that.
And this may still be a problem, because I'm seeing reports now that "our climate models have been remarkably accurate", while others point out that they haven't necessarily been particularly accurate at all. To add insult to injury, there appear to have been several instances now where, when the data and the models diverged, instead of correcting the models they adjusted the data instead, justifying this by declaring that it had a "cool bias" or whatever.
I'm pretty disappointed in the downvotes for an honest question. I've been a longtime HN contributor and have never seen that. I guess this topic is too political for a real discussion.
Hypothesizing that human fishing patterns may have selected fish that migrate earlier or later than previous generations doesn't exactly fit into your anti-"common sense" rant.
Dude, unlike you (I'm pretty sure) back in the day I used to actually _read_ various scientific studies on a regular basis; these were often in top journals, too. And after some years of this I got to where I routinely threw aside those studies, asking myself "How does this kind of crap get published, anyway?" The situation has only gotten worse since then, as far as I can tell.
As far as common sense and such goes, I'm getting pretty tired right now of people complaining about plastic pollution in the oceans which "lasts forever", but then in the next breath complaining about the breakdown products of that very plastic being a danger to wildlife. So which is it - "lasts forever" or "breaks down"? It can't be both. Much of this wildlife would probably be far better off if that plastic did indeed last forever; it would be unsightly, of course, but not all that dangerous.
Here's something else that stuck in my craw the other day. The author of this article (a "climate scientist") says at one point that "Science isn’t a popularity contest", but earlier had talked about "the consensus" among scientists. But what is such a consensus if not a popularity contest among those scientists? Also, the tone of the article is such that the author might ver well rain down scorn and disdain upon anyone who weighed in here who wasn't a bonafide climate scientist. But they themselves were actually trained in theoretical physics, not climate science. This situation is quite common among climate scientists, BTW - they weren't actually trained in climatology!
So what is 97% to 99%, then? (The claimed consensus percentage here varies a bit.) BTW, much about the studies which make such claims was laughably amateurish. I've actually read some of them (mostly), but it's been a while now. (There were at least four of them, as I recall.) Have you?
> So which is it - "lasts forever" or "breaks down"? It can't be both.
It is both. Large pieces of plastic become smaller pieces of plastic, all the way down to microscopic pieces of plastic. In that sense, it “breaks down”. But it remains plastic, that is, it does not degrade to constituent parts. In that sense, it does not “break down”, and it does “last forever.”
Yes, if exposed to the elements it will indeed eventually break down. It's probably going to take a while, though. And AFAIK there's not much to prevent the individual polymers from eventually breaking down, either, although none of this may be particularly good for the environment. There are things out there which will happily eat (digest) that plastic, too.
The timescales required for plastic to become not plastic are, I believe, that of centuries at least. We have plastic in us, as does just about all living things on this earth, as a result.
Let me explain a little about why you're being downvoted, instead of just piling on. In short, the tone, dismissiveness, and belligerence of your comment is not up to community standards. It is not a positive contribution to discussion here, and from the downvoting I think the rest of the community would appreciate it if you would take a different approach to posting in the future so that we can hopefully preserve a tiny bubble of courteous discourse.
> So apparently there's not really that much "common sense" out there at all, from what I gather. At least not on the part of scientists, anyway.
You're painting with an incredibly broad brush here. There are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of scientists out there. There are thousands of climate scientists alone! Scientists are a diverse bunch. They come from every country in the world, every religion in the world, every gender, height, weight, and sexual orientation. They don't speak with one voice, they don't operate with one voice, and they don't all share the same worldview. Science is an imperfect process but at least it's a shared commitment to open debate and following the facts where they lead. Tarring whole communities with perjoratives like "lacking common sense" is not useful to the discussion. Stop that.
> Dude, unlike you (I'm pretty sure) back in the day I used to actually _read_ various scientific studies on a regular basis; these were often in top journals, too. And after some years of this I got to where I routinely threw aside those studies, asking myself "How does this kind of crap get published, anyway?" The situation has only gotten worse since then, as far as I can tell.
This part of your comment starts with an insult, then transitions quickly into braggadocio, and then crescendos with derisive dismissiveness. Not helpful.
> As far as common sense and such goes, I'm getting pretty tired right now of people complaining about plastic pollution in the oceans which "lasts forever", but then in the next breath complaining about the breakdown products of that very plastic being a danger to wildlife. So which is it - "lasts forever" or "breaks down"? It can't be both. Much of this wildlife would probably be far better off if that plastic did indeed last forever; it would be unsightly, of course, but not all that dangerous.
Well, you brag about reading all these studies and then when it comes to arguing you don't actually refer to studies but instead into some kind of Catch 22 which you concocted on your own. Read some actual studies (like this one https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-16510-3_...) and maybe debate their merits instead of trying to catch everybody in some kind of oversimplified "common sense" logic.
Yeah, I don't worry too much about downvotes. In fact, I usually take them as an indicator that I've probably hit a nerve with someone and made them start thinking about something that maybe they've never thought about much before.
Concerning scientists, you claim there's a wide diversity of backgrounds and opinions and such, which is no doubt true. But when it comes to climate science, at least, there's the frankly ridiculous (and fraudulent, IMO) claim of 97% or higher consensus. And if anyone dares raise any objections to that - even if it's just a rather tepid "Well, maybe things aren't really as bad as first believed" - then they're usually met with hostility and derision. (Maybe even with a "No, in fact things are even worse than we thought!") Those aren't acts of science at all; rather they are acts of dogma, and they should be actively discouraged, not defended!
Along the even worse line, lately I've seen a lot of claims that various climate models have been pretty much spot on in their predictions. (Other folks who've looked more closely into the matter might disagree with such an assessment.) But then this may be followed with a statement that in reality things are actually much worse than even the models being referenced predicted! So which part are they lying about, then? The part about "spot on" or the part about "even worse"? This is kind of a common sense question to ask, don't you think? I'm often amazed that the reporters who write about this stuff don't jump all over things like that, but I guess maybe they lack common sense also.
BTW, the “lying” part of that isn’t actually an insult, as you probably would at first believe. Rather it’s an acknowledgement of what is actually going on behind the scenes - a certain amount of professional dissembling in one direction or the other. This being justified as being in order to help fulfill an urgent need to help save the planet while not causing widespread panic, or whatever.
And yes, most academic types, having spent way too much time in educational institutions and libraries and labs and such, very often do lack a lot of common sense. I've rubbed elbows enough with them in academia and out in industry to know that firsthand. But what was often fun was talking to their spouses. I got a lot of "OMG, you won't believe what my husband/wife just did! How can somebody be so smart and still do such dumb things?" And the answer to that is pretty simple - a lack of common sense.
As far as braggadocio or whatever goes, everything I said there is true - including, I’m pretty sure, the “I’m pretty sure” part of it. If the person I was responding to had a problem with that then he could have said so directly. But the situation I referred to there happened decades ago. I no longer usually have the time or the patience or the access to read studies in depth; rather I will scan a summary of them and maybe read someone else’s thoughtful (or perhaps critical) analysis. And then if I feel the need to I will try and go back and check them out in more depth, which can be kind of hard work these days since so much of that stuff is paywalled. I will try to read the link you provided soon, but don’t be surprised if I come back with some critical analysis of it myself.
BTW, superficially the discourse here on HN is somewhat better than what you might find on reddit or wherever. But I’ve already run into a few of the same problems, including a remarkable level of intolerance and censorship. For example, in one thread around here fully half of the comments just up and disappeared in short order. (Only a handful of those were mine, in case you’re wondering.) So either someone censored those, or the software which runs this place is remarkably unreliable.
Did you, you know, actually _read_ the linked document that you gave me? I'm just getting a good start on it so my opinion may yet change, but so far it seems to be validating pretty much everything I said.
Can't be both? It is both. It lasts forever and the pieces break down into smaller pieces.
re: climate scientists - if 99% of scientists believe something to be true then we should believe them unless we have an alternative hypothesis that can't be trivially discounted. The "tone" that scientists take when talking to people has absolutely no relevance at all to the correctness of the science.
Their tone of "unquestionable authority" doesn't count for much here either, though. I've met plenty of PhD-level folks who were actually pretty clueless overall and didn't really know what they were talking about in the end; some of them were even scientists.
Fun fact: Not too far from me is an infamous "green energy" project which turned out to be a massive and expensive failure. A considerable amount of the money lost here was taxpayer dollars, too. An after-the-fact analysis showed that one big reason for the failure was having too many clueless PhD-level types running around making mostly empty promises, and not enough experienced Joe-the-welder types running around who know how things really work. All is not lost, though, because after having shut down and written off the green energy aspects of the project, it's now just a plain old fossil fuel plant which is doing well enough for itself. A very expensive plant, of course, but at least one that actually works.
First there are a lot of shitty scientists out there, period. Second, there is a reproducibility crisis in science.
Human-caused climate change has been in the public mindset for > 10 years. I don’t think there is much doubt that the earth is warming, and that CO2 among others cause increased global temp. However, here is where myself and others become disconnected with the movement. The adverse effects of climate change are fairly benign out to 50 years and at worse predict 10 ft increase in sea level in 100 years. So either humanity has already decreased output enough (unlikely) or the estimates have updated and long story short, probably doesn’t seem so bad. Definitely not worth the effort of completely revamping global economies.
That's because those people (online community) are the same stupid as those who believe earth is flat. They are just on a different side of the barricade, praising the story they are more comfortable with.
I guess they might think that agreeing with science people automatically makes them smart and critical thinking.
Part of this is because of the changes in catch laws. For example. Many of the fish in the oldest photos are Goliath Grouper. Nearly 30 years ago harvesting Goliath Grouper was banned. So it makes sense that you would see far fewer pictures of a fish you are no longer allowed to catch and keep.
I'm not sure that disagrees with the point. There was a species of fish that was particularly large that was caught. It was identified that we were damaging that species, so we banned catching it. It makes sense that part of the evidence for banning, was that we were finding less of them, especially at size.
That is, the point is that this metric was largely driven by that fish species.
I love this, it’s a fun story, and especially funny to read all the long-winded science-y sounding explanations that humans came up with rather than consider the self deprecating simple fact that we’re just eating them all.
BUT I am definitely not happy that this is going to be one of those weaponised stories that the anti-science brigade will start telling and re-telling everywhere, lending credibility to other lies they believe in.
"the researchers added a simulation in which the depth and mass of fish were tied to the rate of mortality by fishing"
Is this really a process where simulation->result->theory. IE died the model or simulation played a key role indeveloping or validating a theory. Or, is this a process where they started from a theory (that works, explaining observed results) and then built a simulation that demonstrates the theory?
I feel like I'm seeing this kind of language in the pop science press, maybe starting from the climate/weather world.
Have models of ecosystems (eg) been getting more use as "theory generators," are researchers creating more models ex post as an supporting evidence, or is this just a shift in journalistic language?
...and... if the answer is "models are really playing more of a role"... please elaborate if you know anything interesting. What software is being used? Are biologists building these models/simulations themselves, or are there specialists available to them?
^ I'm not hating on language choices or ex post evidence gathering. Darwin used what we might call a "simulation" (or statistical analysis, depending on the journalist) to predict and then validate a theory about bird mortality in storms. That was great science, and foundational. Not hating. Just curious about changes in the role of simulation/modeling.
yeah, every time I see "we proved this theory using a simulation..." I get a little voice in my head that says "then you didn't prove anything except your ability to create a simulation that agrees with your pet theory"
I understand that conducting experiments with ecosystems to prove why they behave in particular ways might be a tad tricky. But that just means that theories about ecosystems are hard to prove, not that they get a free ride to "proven".
A more charitable way if putting it might be, is the simulation part of the theory or part of the evidence for it. Both are acceptable, but not at once. Simulation as theory is "safer" in a poperian sense.
good point. The way the article presented it, the simulation clearly appears to be part of the proof. But that could be a product of the journalistic filter applied.
climate change has become an apocalyptic orthodox religion for secular pessimists, just like technology is an idealized utopia for materialistic optimists. this tends to happen when you build a world view on a single pillar and it starts sinking and tipping over, prophecies and pronouncements of certain doom or visions of heaven naturally follow.
the real issue is that modern education is not cross disciplinary so you have highly specialized people creeping into fields they don't understand and making basic errors of judgement based on pre-conceived ideas of what ought to be. you see this for example in the interplay between physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering. the physicist wants statistics over big data sets, the mathematician wants abstract tools and automatic proof theorems, the engineer wants practical numerical solutions and modelling and the computer scientist is fixated on throughput and efficiency of generative algorithms. is this even true? has anyone stopped and said, what are we actually doing? is there a bigger plan here, are we trying to work towards a common goal, or has the ladder we climbed been pulled away?
the relativistic revolution and subsequent collapse of the western world, the church, the state and the individual all dissolving into a jumbled mess of professional agitators applying some bayesian strategy of influence maximization is an unfortunate consequence of a change in world order, from west to east. being on the wrong side of the cyber curtain is a slow bleak dawn, with the intellectual and political elite always the last to realize the surrounding darkness.
globalization is an example of a desperate last gasp of a former dominant culture trying to exert control and influence over a world increasingly more alien and separate from it. the irony of course is in the conceit of the name itself. project the growth of asia and africa forwards for another half-century, then work backwards and try to understand the hysteria behind fossil fuel usage and the impact this will have on the balance of world power if 3+ billion new people become electrified and industrialized.
I'm in SE Asia at the moment, and the view is different here.
Globalisation doesn't look like the last gasp of a former dominant culture here, it looks like the way out of crushing poverty. People WANT to work in globalcorp garment factories. They get really annoyed if the factories shut down. For all our western idealism about a pastoral lifestyle, everyone who has the choice between growing food for a living and working 90 hours a week in a factory chooses the factory every time. And yes, it is their choice. They can leave whenever they want, there are 4375979 other applicants waiting at the gates.
The interesting thing is that they're skipping steps in the process. Cambodia skipped desktop/wired computing/telecoms and went straight from nothing to mobile (in about 5 years). Mobile access is hugely cheaper and generally faster than it is in either the UK or Australia.
I can see solar power doing the same in the next 5 years. Rather than waiting for the electricity authority to get round to wiring up the rural areas, they're already getting on with rigging up their own solar. In 20 years they'll be self-sufficient and the megaprojects to dam the rivers will be bankrupt.
in your observations, are consumption habits changing the same way with respect to diet? eg. will they (mostly) skip unhealthy processed snack foods and move towards something new, and if that happens how will preventable diseases that plague western countries manifest if at all, the health and drug industries, aged care (family vs business). some things are skipped others might be accelerated. globalization works as long as there is another country down the road you can kick it to, but the axis of power will eventually shift towards emergent markets and those governments will cut out western monopolies out of self-interest, or at least be very resistant to a foreign controlled corporation taking its local profits offshore. japan and south korea have a resistant corp-gov structure due to monopoly, high technology and mass employment creating huge economic leverage over the political system. are chaebols nepotistic fascism, a valid competing business structure, benevolent dictatorships?
were not having this conversation in the 1980s and most of the worlds airports and shopping malls look eerily similar today, yet older systems are more brittle and prone to fracturing and new infrastructures tend to be cheaper, deploy faster and require less maintenance. giant malls in america remind me of communist apartment blocks dotted all over eastern european capitals, permanent monuments to a big idea that proved temporary. at least the soviet model serves some present social utility. the hidden cost of solar is of course in the manufacturing and re-use process which is fossil fuel dependent, but se asia has oil and gas fit to purpose. globalization for the western leaders means controlling the development of poorer countries by creating avenues for the corporations they front to come in and build, for the poorer countries i think they correctly see it as a way to accelerate society but not necessarily at the cost of autonomy like some corporate colony of an american or german or chinese conglomerate. people may reduce consumption individually, but over the scale of the planet the food industry alone must be undergoing some giant mutation. it's really hard for me to imagine a future in asia and africa without massive increase in petroleum and it's assorted bi-products.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 324 ms ] threadWe don't drive (me or my partner), We recycle, I mend everything I can (which outside of a clean room is most things, it's never been easier with youtube), neither of use go in for excessive consumption (My current desktop is from 2011, it's finally coming up on time to replace that).
I even considered going vegetarian but with Crohn's that isn't really viable (I have to avoid high fibre and getting enough minerals/vitamins is a struggle).
We don't eat wild caught fish (or much fish at all).
I mean I'm not a tofu eating ecowarrior or anything but it just seems sensible not to piss in your own drinking water.
Short of a massive population decrease, a complete switch in energy consumption, or some sci-fi type of technological breakthrough, we are doomed to run this planet into extinction.
At this point, most conservation efforts are more of a attempt to feel better as an individual then they are actually making a difference.
That doesn't mean we should stop, or concede, with our efforts. It just means we need to be realistic with what we do over the next 50-100 years.
Personally, I think the only way the human race will continue to thrive is to figure out how to survive without the Earth as a host. Whether we figure that out, or succumb to extinction, is really the ultimate test of our race. Were we designed to be a part of nature as it exists on Earth, or will we surpass it?
I'm more curious about what our path as a species will lead to - will we continuously innovate to survive on the planet we were given, or will we move past it? Both?
I don't think we're doomed.
We know how to do these things, we know how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Yet we are not doing them. How do you propose getting the international community to do that work?
"A true environmentalist may not birth or father their own children, only adopt."
RMS is famously known for refusing to own a cell phone until there's one that runs entirely on free software, what is at the same level of adherence for environmentalists?
Here in Sweden it seems like most freshwater lakes suffer from overpopulation, and the commercial value of the fish is so little that the transportation cost to cat food factories makes it unprofitable to fish it. Making matters worse, overpopulation in lakes has a tendency to cause extinctions where some species crowds out others. There was/is some government initiative to fund fishing directly, but so far very few has taken up on the offer.
It is however quite hard to find a seller for this. Some restaurants has made a bit of PR from saying that they are serving this kind of fish, but I have never seen a menu with it or seen those species in any store. Your best bet would be to buy it directly from those fishing in the lakes which could be problematic depending on where you live.
What to do about it would be for humans to effectively stop taking more from nature than we can give back. The tricky part would be to orchestrate that.
If you cut down your consumption but I won't it won't save the planet.
If I cut down my consumption but you won't it won't save the planet.
If you and I both did cut our consumption, the planet would begin to recover but then there would be someone else who starts taking what we chose not to take.
And because that someone would later have more than we, you and I would ourselves risk dying in resource wars that would likely follow.
This is basically what countries and continents do.
To make any difference it would take one powerful party who could hoard resources: just leave them unconsumed except for the amount needed to prevent others from consuming them. At the same time, they would keep others poor, or at least limiting their standard of living by denying resources from everyone. Assuming there was one ruler who could control the majority of the planet's resources that would still be an extremely hard position to be.
The other option is not to do anything and play along. When we out-consume and out-grow enough the population can't sustain itself and the headcount on this planet will shrink back to 50% or 30% of the current levels. Then the race begins again...
Fixed that for you.
We're nothing more than an extremely specialized animal. What we do is (whether you like it or not) a product of nature. Our use of technology is just the large-scale version of a bird's nest, or an ant pile.
We've done far less damage than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Deal with it.
Look at bacteria. They are also crazily adaptable. The do it by changing their DNA and a very high speed of generational change, and we use "culture" and "science" with longer individual lifespans.
Sorry, no. Please don't fix any more of my comments. That's really passive aggressive and demeaning and you can do better.
I really meant it. Under essentially any accounting system that is not human-centric at its core, we are really tops when it comes to destruction.
Birds and ants reach a natural equilibrium with their environment and end up as integral parts of a functioning ecosystem. Humans. Just. Don't. We nuke and pave. Stupidly. Overfishing is just one example, a tiny one. We exhaust all available resources in an area and if we're lucky enough to survive the inevitable ecosystem collapse that we leave in our wake, we move on, either up or out or over, and exhaust all of those resources, too.
If you really think we are equivalent to ants and birds, and we're just some kind of specialized animal, then I'm not sure we share the same basis for dialogue. Please step back from the personal afront that you feel by my comment and behold the destruction that humans have wrought. It is incalculable. There is a reason they are calling this the Anthropocene.
Having said that, it would be in our long term interest not to continue doing this until the system collapses.
I actually assessed my opponent as someone who has it in for mankind, not an environmentalist (that's your word BTW and doesn't belong in quotes you attribute to me). My point wasn't so much "nature does it to" but rather to illustrate - humans are part of nature and their behavior is not unique. To keep us separate from nature seems to be either human-hating or human-aggrandizing. Given the OPs calling us assholes I figure we can guess which.
From there I was most definitely having more fun than trying to making a point!
You’ve stumbled through the straw men and into the point, my dude. The way of thinking which frames humans as “best animals” is the same one which makes us incapable of averting suicide by ecological collapse.
Consciousness is not just a cool survival trick, it’s a responsibility.
It's as though we were a bunch of single cells arguing about whether we should become a multicellular life form to avoid us all dying. It might in theory be necessary, but it would involve all members giving up autonomy and being willing to act and die on command. That raises two questions - is it really worth it, and is it possible?
I'm not firmly pro or con organizing humanity into a "super organism" to avoid ecological disaster - I'm just saying this is what people are ultimately debating wrt global warming, and it's pretty "out there". I'm not convinced it's feasible, at least not in the near future (next century).
Birds and ants don't reach a "natural equilibrium". They, and all other species, simply (and similarly) exhaust what their habitat will sustain in one way or another, just as humans do.
Almost all the species that ever existed went extinct without the help of humans.
No, not really. These ecosystems adapt to change very, very slowly, and birds and ants very gently come up against the carrying capacity of their surrounding environment, and when they exceed that carrying capacity, their populations cease to grow and may waver, but will reach some equilibrium. They generally do not experience extreme boom and busts, except in extreme cases of invasive species and rapid climate change. They also don't have a tendency to cause mass destruction that takes down the environment around them. The difference with humans is that we use technology and agriculture to continually boost ourselves past the carrying capacity of our local environment, and when that becomes unsustainable--usually wreaking havoc all around us, we move on and spread. Just look throughout history. The pattern repeats over and over.
If birds and ants had the same cycle, they would not have survived hundreds of millions of years like they have.
People just do not understand that our growth rates are so high that they are effectively alien to this planet. So, no, this is not "normal" or "natural" IMO.
Cyanobacteria wiped out most other species on earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
Birds caused mass extinctions and extreme evolutionary pressures: https://news.ucsc.edu/2012/06/giant-insects.html
Trilobites - one of the most diverse, plentiful, and advanced forms of life at the time - went extinct thanks to the evolution of plants.
It is very anthropocentric to view the preservation of the ecological status quo and cessation of evolutionary pressures as a "natural" ideal. Yes, we have a drive to consume and exploit but our desire to preserve what we see as beautiful is no different - it's all just a product of our desires.
I am not opposed to environmentalism - but we shouldn't tell lies about what is natural for life by cherrypicking examples of equilibrium and ignoring the trillions of extinct. The equilibrium you see in other species (ants, birds) only exists due the destruction of countless other species long before humans ever showed up. Just like the stable equilibrium between humans, cockroaches, and pigeons.
This is closer to what I meant to say, and the term "exhaust" was a poor descriptor. However, the way in which species encounter barriers that define the carrying capacity of an ecosystem are not commonly gentle.
>The difference with humans is that we use technology and agriculture to continually boost ourselves past the carrying capacity of our local environment, and when that becomes unsustainable--usually wreaking havoc all around us, we move on and spread. Just look throughout history. The pattern repeats over and over.
I'm still uncertain at what point in our evolution you draw the line that cuts us out of the animal kingdom.
I see your point, but you seem to be implying that the way you're using "equilibrium", and "natural" is rooted and biology, and this is incorrect. The there is no biological concept of "equilibrium", it's simply a way you could loosely describe a population with low rate of growth for some period.
It seems to me that while humans are outliers, we're not unique. For instance, we can be compared to the organisms that oxygenated the Earth's atmosphere. Or those that first produced lignin which other organisms couldn't digest for a long time. I recall reading that the latter is why such massive petroleum deposits exist[1]. So our effect on the planet could be considered an echo of that earlier runaway ecological change.
[1]http://piecubed.co.uk/carboniferous-period-insect/
New species introduced into an ecosystem often wipe out existing species as they grow. It's happened on lots of islands. They eventually reach equilibrium too. It's quite normal and humans aren't special in that regard. We just happen to be the best at it right now.
There is some emotion in your statements. The reason we want to protect the environment is because it has value to humans. It doesn't somehow deserve to be saved independently of us any more than an asteroid deserves to stay floating in space without crashing into any planets. If we can truly and permanently survive OK without as many species, then what's the harm in making them extinct besides emotion?
Adding my own emotional opinion, I think humans really do deserve to dominate everything because we're absolutely the most incredible species ever to live on Earth. Through technology, we've giving ourselves more and more of the abilities of other animals. We can live in environments too hot, cold, or arid for any single other species. We can fly and "swim" across oceans, and even make meat for eating! If evolution had some sort of purpose, it would surely be to create the most capable organisms possible. So far, that's us and every species we wipe out deserved to go because it lost the game of evolution in the same way the poor soccer teams deserve to not win the World Cup.
Cyanobacteria wiped out most other species on earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
Birds caused mass extinctions and extreme evolutionary pressures: https://news.ucsc.edu/2012/06/giant-insects.html
Trilobites - one of the most diverse, plentiful, and advanced forms of life at the time - went extinct thanks to the evolution of plants.
If you take a snapshot during any of those events, a brief glimpse, sure those events were cataclysmically destructive. But step back and those events can instead be seen as fantastically creative.
It is anthropocentric to view the preservation of the ecological status quo and cessation of evolutionary pressures as a "natural" ideal. Humans like things that make life easy, but we also don't like change.
I am not opposed to environmentalism and imposing our curated view - but it shouldn't be guilt-ridden. We shouldn't tell lies about what is natural for life by cherrypicking examples of equilibrium and ignoring the trillions of extinct. The equilibrium you see in other species (ants, birds) only exists due the destruction of countless other species. Akin to an alien observing the seemingly stable equilibrium between humans, cockroaches, and pigeons.
Life survived despite incredible climate pressures and invasive species in the past - far more extreme than what is happening now - and reached new levels of complexity thanks to those pressures. There's no reason that will stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17329264
This is basic evolution. It’s no different than commercial fishing farms having to deal with their fish growing more slowly or simply staying small (the selection criteria being “stay less than X cm”)
> All the species in which older, bigger fish are found in deeper water have something else in common: we eat them
Hemm, not. Poisonous fishes show the same pattern. There are poisonous fishes also in the deep sea. If we do not eat then, why do not live in the surface?
Mola mola is the biggest extant bony fish. Is neither fished nor eaten normally. Adults still pass most of its time at deep waters.
To extrapolate the behaviour of 30.000 species of animals after one single species and one single variable leads often to wrong conclusions. Fishes are complex creatures.
To be a counterexample it needs to be a poisonous fish that exists in shallow waters but whose older members only occupy deep waters. Entirely deep-sea species aren't what this article is referring to. I'm not aware of any poisonous fish that aren't hunted by humans that follow this pattern.
Just saw your edit. I don't think that sunfish fish of different ages spend their time at different ocean depths? Wasn't mentioned on wikipedia.
A lot of pelagic fishes start their life at 1cm under the ocean surface also.
Also, bycatch can reduce the populations of large fish that aren't actively fished or eaten.
Mola mola is a fish, therefore this would lead us to "Mola mola dive deep to not be eaten by humans" that is a false statement.
How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it? Get real about human development and the necessities of human development.
Who said anything about hard to understand?
Are you explaining the observation or justifying it? Because the former might be a fool’s errand; everyone understands, as you so eloquently put it.
In other words: just because I know why something happens, doesn’t mean that I think it’s a good thing, or that it shouldn’t change.
We wreck it at our own peril.
Rapacious destruction may have been an expedient shortcut to our development, but unchecked, it will also end us.
I understand that it _might_ and that that would be a pretty bad thing. So there is a risk, but why do you think it's so certain?
When the dice are that loaded, you throw them at your own peril.
When they're that loaded, you keep throwing them because it's more profitable at everyone's peril.
You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something.
Is it really that hard to extrapolate from the specific case to the general? If we get this one wrong, we're dead. Even the possibility makes it incumbent upon us to tread exceptionally carefully.
EDIT: This, "Hey, now. Let's have a rational, skeptical discussion about this" is a disingenuous tactic, in the first place. If we played that game, we'd still be debating whether or not rising CO₂ levels are dangerous, as they crossed the 500ppm threshold. We know, for practical purposes, that this is coming, unless we change course. We know the consequences of its happening. But we're still somehow dithering, apparently in order to convince trenchant outliers who have identity-level investments in being trenchant outliers, that they're wrong. That ship will never sail.
"Oops. Yeah, I guess that was a bad idea after all," is not an reasonable response to an existential threat.
Have you checked out the self-driving car threads recently?
Your argument is more like, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent to see how many people it kills", versus, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent for safety and efficacy" (phase I and II, respectively). We aren't specifically screening for deadliness; we're trying to determine the therapeutic index of the agent, and get a baseline on its side effects (which, yes, may include death).
It's a subtle distinction, but it's a critical one.
All that aside, it's fundamentally disanalogous, anyway, because the populations in chemo clinical trials are already sick, and have given informed consent. Dude walking down the street getting smoked by a Tesla that thought he was a wall, not so much.
Just because we don't know if it causes birth defects doesn't mean every untested chemical certainly does cause birth defects. In fact it's obvious that since we don't know, we don't know! You might save people by telling them that lie but it's still a lie and won't help anyone understand nature.
You're really confusing "We don't know if ignoring the environment will wipe us out" with "Let's ignore the environment and see what happens.". I'm not proposing we conduct that experiment, just pointing out that we don't know what the outcome will be.
If you haven’t tried it to see what happens, you can’t be certain....
You're confusing actually destroying the things we depend on with carelessly using them and not trying to make sure they survive. An obvious counterexample - we do our best to eat as many cows as we can, yet the species is thriving! Maybe fish farms will do that to desirable fish species too. We didn't even wipe out sperm whales despite whalers doing their best to find all they could and having no concern for conservation.
I agree there's a _risk_ of that happening though. We just don't know for sure. My concern is with people who claim to know for sure when actually they're taking a dishonest extreme position to make their political point stronger. Of course we should be careful not to destroy the environment because if we don't, the downside to being wrong is terrible. Somehow most of the people arguing about this seem to be victims of their own extremism and unable to distinguish risk from certainty.
To say that unchecked destruction of the environment won't necessarily destroy us is the same as saying that we'll be able to create closed-loop life support systems that can operate indefinitely without any outside organic input, and that we'll be able to do it fast enough to save ourselves. I'm highly dubious of that.
Something I'm pretty sure of though is that we can never destroy all food-producing life on earth by just eating everything till it's gone. Whatever's left will thrive and can be used to make food. Maybe not as tasty or as cheap, but we won't need a fully artificial life support system. Even in an extreme case of desertification, we can still grow plants indoors, and rain will still fall on our "deserts". And that's the very extreme! In reality, maybe the price of beef will go up a little as farmers have to spend more on feeding them.
Species are currently going extinct at a rate we've previously only seen in the fossil record — from which we've estimated that the current rate of species extinction to be on the order of 10-100 times that of any previous extinction event.
Then, consider that there are key roles in an ecosystem, without which its collapse is more or less a certainty. One of those roles is pollinating.
The collapse of bee and butterfly populations, and our having to resort to commercial pollination (because something on the order of 3/4 of the world's food plants require pollinators, and many of the essential nutrients — things the body can't synthesize itself, and must obtain through diet — come from plants which critically depend on pollinators, while wild bee populations have fallen to alarming levels) is a dangerous leading indicator.
We're well on the path towards a collapse. If we don't avert it, things will not go well for us. When the things we eat all die, they aren't there for us to eat any more. When that happens, we die.
How is this not flashing neon obvious?
I understand the sentiment, but sometimes, a complaint is valid. And making it over and over and over again is also valid. It is the first step towards fixing it. If we stop acknowledging this problem we lose all hope for ever finding a way out.
I would say the litany of woeful clamouring is already driving SOME people to consciously consume , buy electric cars, (or we can focus on conscientious vegetarians, if you don’t like the global warming analogy) etc. Sure , it could be a lot better, but it could also be a lot worse.
If nobody ever complained , I bet there would be a lot fewer vegetarians.
What institutions exist that can make clean energy palatable to all the human societies that require it for their survival—at-scale, that they are all ignoring?
Leaving energy aside, what other powerful means of doing good to ecosystems as a whole, are they simply ignoring? Is there any quantification of the damage?
I am most certainly not trying to attack your position. I pretty much believe the same things you said. But we should have these answers documented. Is there a single source for these things on the web?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo
Notes:
He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.
He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activities, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.
Five culture types based on food getting technology: 1 Foraging; 2 Hunter-gatherer; 3 Agricultural (cities); 5 Pastoral (Animal herding); 5 Industrial
Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."
(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...
Holmgrin's scenarios:
1 Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)
2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
3 Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.
4 "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.
"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.
Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.
The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects.
Ok, we have something like 450 nuclear reactors globally. IIRC bumping that number up 10 times would give us roughly two times our current global energy usage (ie fuels and electricity).
That's a margin that could reasonably address energy requirements for synthetic fuel production & delivery, sustain the additional energy we want to use for cleaner but energy demanding electrical processes in industry, and arguably put us on footing to end global poverty. Atomic process heat is wicked-good for desalination, critical to avoid water-related wars. "Next gen" tech (from the 70s...), conceivably could let us think about replenishing continental aquifers, and all round have enough energy to continue exploring space. All without any social engineering or major lifestyle or geopolitical reshaping.
I'm a big fan of solar, but our global solar energy budget has some tricky hurdles before we get to 200% current global energy usage. And I'm not enthused about anything that requires a centrally managed government (that doesn't exist today), managing life and death. It sounds scary and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
The basic argument is that increasing the education of women leads to fewer children. You can already see this in developed countries which are actually starting to exhibit negative population growth (e.g. Japan).
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
Ideally, this should be a multi-national effort led by all the wealthy countries. They should also create investment funds to help more quickly developing nations move past lower tech, harfmul energy sources (need a lot oversight here to make sure there isn't any economic exploitation).
I'm not super well-researched, but there does seem to be a lot of effective, actionable solutions that we can start today. The above are just a small sample.
This was the basis for the Kyoto Protocol [1] in 1997, which sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions by making organizations pay for a license to emit greenhouse gases. It even put most of the burden on developed nations, as you suggest.
Now, you may argue that the costs for licenses were not steep enough, or that the resulting emissions trading market diluted the effectiveness of the regulation, or that the US' refusal to ratify it makes effectively a failed attempt -- but what you propose has been tried before.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
Just for starters: Why is "the Industrial Revolution happened" an argument against trying to do better in the future?
Not all of that environmental and human damage was necessary. Much of it was out of ignorance, and more was out greed, combined with a callous disregard for human life.
Possibly if they had used solar-thermal power generation and focused on battery tech instead of exploiting petroleum so heavily.
Also, mining the easy stocks (at that point) is a low tech affair too. Which was powered by... combustion of fuel and human labor.
We still can’t make solar panels with 100% efficiency, what hope did they have?
With glass you can build a lens to concentrate light. With a metal you can build a concentrating mirror.
Worthwhile electric generators really weren't that far behind worthwhile steam engines. Without any fossil fuels, I think we would've just built lots of hydro and wind.
[0]: https://gutenberg.org/files/41538/41538-h/41538-h.htm
Although I suppose the animals are getting the worst of it since we actively go after many of them.
This assumes there can be an 'us' without a 'them'.
Only violence can protect this planet from the most violent creature.
HN is not a good place to tilt at windmills.
I do understand what that idiom means - I’m failing to understand how acknowledging that specific actor to be a powerful source of violence is to imagine an enemy.
> The phrase is sometimes used to describe either confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. It may also connote an importune, unfounded, and vain effort against adversaries real or imagined for a vain goal.
People who incessantly complain about the evils of all governments -- a key clue here is referring to "the state" as a singular platonic entity -- as if they know of some better solution, when they clearly don't, remind me of the above.
Thank you for the detailed explanation- while I don’t agree with your position for the reason stated, I fully understand where you are coming from.
I still am smarting from the downvotes on my innocuous request for an explanation though.
With the advent of farming the rivers became full of the soil washed off the land and were no longer clear. Fishing now needed a boat.
At first this fishing was easy, however we ate the big fish and made various fisheries a thing of the past, case in point being the Newfoundland Grand Banks, once famous for cod but no longer.
So what do people eat now instead of 'cod and chips'? This amuses me as there is no problem for them. They get some other fish shaped object - 'battered' - and make judgements of how tasty or otherwise it is. Maybe this fish comes from another hemisphere, perhaps it has some unusual name, maybe it tastes 'different'. Marketing conquers all though, this mystery fish caught somewhere off Antarctica will have a fancy name as if it is some deluxe, exotic variety. It is as if the 'chef' went out of his way to offer something more exciting than 'humdrum cod' specifically for them, charging them more for this 'nouvelle cousine' in the process. No discussion of what happened to the cod will be mentioned although the despicable newspaper that will be read with the 'faux cod and chips' will talk about the evils of the E.U. and the Spanish fishermen invading 'our' shores.
Soon these fools will be eating the scummiest bottom-feeding detritus that can be scooped from the ocean's depths. They will do it if not every day but as the mood takes them until the day they die. Discussion will be made on how well the faux-cod is cooked and how lovely it was. The thinking won't go much further than their bellies and bowels.
Meanwhile, driving in their cars and going on their cheap holidays, these consumers, whom the world's economy depends on, will be pumping untold tonnes of carbon dioxide into the oceans, acidifying them to make life in the seas quite intolerable for our friends with gills. The cruise boats they holiday on and the container ships that bring them their cheap junk from China will also make so much noise in the oceans that any fish with ears will not be able to hear anything but the sound of diesel internal combustion engines.
There is no penalty for complicity in this madness. However, the cost of stepping outside of it is quite high. If you don't eat your fish or your beef or your mechanically removed horsemeat then there is not a place at the table for you. Unless you have got a good excuse. But nobody says they are 'allergic to beef' or 'allergic to fish'. You can only be allergic to peanuts. Much like how folks in the mafia have to have slaughtered someone to get a space at the table, so it is with meat and fish, to be accepted by your peers you have to partake in the ecocide.
There are those that are vegetarian and wanting to live life differently. But these people are somewhat drowned out by the vegan crowd, many of whom have entirely different motivations. This new vegan crowd are more likely to have an eating disorder that has nothing to do with saving the planet. Plus they can't get five minutes into a conversation without wanting to tell all that they are vegan. Their fanaticism plus the cost of their fake-meat products, e.g. that organic almond milk flown in from California, is no example for others to follow.
We will see if the meek inherit the earth, maybe the fatties scoffing all the fish are going to be going extinct shortly after they have scoffed the last plastic-infested jellyfish they can find in the oceans.
That said, you're right in that vegetarianism is just not sustainable in this size a population - but not just for elitist vegan snobs. If we all ate mostly vegetables, and got our proteins from other sources, we'd be facing a scarcity of land to grow crops as well as sources of fertilizer. The math just doesn't work at scale, and that's why purely vegetarian nations are generally that way: because they are poor, not enlightened. They also aren't usually particularly healthy. Ironically the healthiest cultures (if you'll permit the generalization) are those eating mostly fish-based diets like the Pacific and Mediterranean.
That was mere observation, as is my commentary on how people just move on from whatever they have just made extinct to some other fish without batting an eyelid.
Some crazy scientist chap once wrote that 'Nothing will benefit health or increase chances of survival on earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.' He also wrote 'e=mc2'.
Anyway, as for these 'poor vegetarian nations', you mean India!!! India wasn't poor and did not have famines until the British arrived with their guns. Before then India made and exported many things, fabrics being a speciality. The likes of the East India Company closed that down. A lot of enlightened thinking has came out of India. And it still does.
Now if you are going to live in Scandinavia then you are going to have a tough time of it being vegetarian. Those long winter months don't help you grow your oranges.
As for nitrogen fixing and general soil fertility, what you need are turnips. This was worked out a long time ago in England. What you don't need is more and more fertiliser from oil/natural gas thrown on the land to grow crops to feed animals that get churned up into beefburgers, with the residue washing into the oceans to create uncontrollable blooms of algae, suffocating the fish below.
Despite the significant numbers of humans on the planet there is plenty of arable land, albeit mostly owned by the 1%. We no longer need cows to pull the ploughs, the Dutch invented the harness for the horses bred by the British to do that. But we no longer need any beasts of burden, we can make tractors and power them with things like sunlight if we wanted to, cutting big oil out of the agri-business.
There is no need to be defeatist and to 'compromise'. Or to insist on eating fish just because some Japanese bloke lived to 112 possibly because he ate fish every day.
Skill in physics does not necessarily equate to skill in macro-biology. 'Genius' is relative to one's profession.
> As for nitrogen fixing and general soil fertility, what you need are turnips. This was worked out a long time ago in England. What you don't need is more and more fertiliser from oil/natural gas thrown on the land to grow crops to feed animals that get churned up into beefburgers, with the residue washing into the oceans to create uncontrollable blooms of algae, suffocating the fish below.
Turnips are gross. Most people don't like eating them. You will never win that battle.
Eating fish is not a compromise, it's a logical place you end up if trying to feed a populous without forcing them to eat refined foods.
The longest lifespans on the planet (well until the western diet came along and promptly reversed that within mere decades).
If you want to talk logically, the most eco friendly approach is a vegan diet simply due to the inefficiency of calorie conversion through an intermediate species as opposed to getting directly from the source.
Personally I think vat-grown meat is gonna be the ideal win/win: low environmental footprint, perfect high quality kobe beef for all :)
Lets take a cultured plant of wheat from family Poaceae: There is a crop of seeds once in the year and then the plant die. The cow eats the grain and maybe they eat the straw also. Finished.
Now lets take a similar plant in a pasture or a meadow. But the cows aren't put there for the "once in the year" grain of this plants. Is the Poaceae superpower to grow leaves again and again after being grazed what counts.
Therefore we need to take in mind that we can extract more food from the same plant in a pasture, and this happens all around the year.
And not all fields are flat. Some are located in mountains and have inclinations of 60-70 degrees or so. You can't use machines there to sow or harvest. Would be economically unfeasible. Using this areas as grazing fields for goats or sheeps are a better option.
And there are the arid areas, where you have all the sun and space to culture, but none of the needed water; and where a lot of plants are poisonous or have horrid spines. If you remove the donkeys, goats and sheep, you can't have still tofu in return. Does not work like that.
We need to refine our master plan of "1 Kg of meat equals to 10 of wheat". For some places "1 Kg of meat equals to 0 Kg of wheat".
Of course if "we'll do it for the animals", a meadow inhabited by 450 species is much better than a concrete parking; and the later holds still more species than a monoculture of soybean. All soybeans means "no more butterflies, micromammals, flowers, and birds"
For every 100 calories of grain fed to cattle in industrial (meat) factory farms, the result's equivalent to ~30 calories.
Those "inefficient" fields you cite wouldn't need to be cultivated at all if we didn't pour two thirds of the food fields produce into fuelling the livestock industry. Not everywhere outright requires cultivation.
Most of the meat on your plate will come from a factory farm, for the sake of maximising efficiency of food production. The idyllic picture of animals roaming freely across pastures doesn't really map to the reality of modern affordable meat production[1].
As to your point concerning the meadows/monocultures comparison- a global food production system less wasteful than that which exists presently, in which we wouldn't be pouring mountains of perfectly edible food into fuelling meat production, would substantially reduce the area of land required for continual cultivation. Modern diets in the western world area astoundingly inefficient- even reducing the amount of meat consumed would help matters considerably[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vqIGTKuQE
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
Maybe in some countries, but this assumption is most probably false in my case.
> For every 100 calories of grain fed to cattle in industrial (meat) factory farms, the result's equivalent to ~30 calories.
Plus manure, leather and other subproducts that you can't obtain from grain. We need to take the whole equation, not only the good parts.
The main reason was for the animals, followed shortly by wanting to have a minimized impact on the environment, and then personal health. Most vegans I've met are kind people who just want to act in alignment with their values.
Given that there is more impact to climate change from animal agriculture than all of transportation put together, it makes sense that people are starting to wake up to the reality.
This reminds me "Chilean seabass" [0]. I always chuckle to myself when I see it on a menu, usually for some outrageous price. Marketing conquers all, indeed.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonian_toothfish
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/sockeye-salmon-and-cli...
Status is a powerful motivator, and you don't even need the points. You just have to feel like people are listening and take what you say seriously.
However, I observed my remarks receiving a hidden downweighting following moderator action some time ago. dang confirmed since that they have a "penalty box" mechanism.
I post less frequently as a result, because I think fewer people will see what I have to say.
People have noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274713 (dipped down to -5 before eventually settling at the current +7)
> This chronic downvoting on HN is getting boring.
> Not only that - respected HN citizens need to create new throwaway accounts on order to speak their mind. It's becoming a new normal. That's ridiculous.
> it's tiring to express your opinion here and contribute to a conversation only to have it downvoted because it wasn't the right contribution.
The problem is that the "penalty box" mechanism doesn't distinguish between unpopular but well-reasoned opinions and offensive behavior. People here, like in many other online forums, are all-too-quick to downvote other opinions. This is particular stark in discussions around characters like Elon Musk, where for years criticisms were downvoted and flagged (and only recently has it become safe to comment negatively on the behaviors of Tesla and Musk)
If you value minority opinions more than what the hivemind thinks, the reddit model is inherently broken. The merit of the traditional forum model is that you can't suppress minority opinions - they are always there to read (unless removed by a mod). No downvoting, no flagging, no "dead" posts that are too negative to show up.
The SA model (pay $5 to register, if you are violently breaking the rules you get banned and you have to pay another $5 to unban your account) is massively better. It funds moderators. It funds server bills. It puts a direct pricetag on being a fucktard. It does not suppress dissenting opinions.
Lots of people will hate it. The quality of posting will also improve. Grandfather everyone who posts here in, ban them if they are fucktards, the quality of posting improves.
If you make a post and it goes into negatives not because you're being an ass, but because it just goes against the groupthink, whatever. Your overall karma will go down a touch. There comes a point where no one post is going to devastate your overall standing.
But if every post you make gets downvoted, isn't that indicative of a larger problem?
But that's looking at the problem solely from a "user" perspective.
It's still bad from a content perspective because it means good, relevant content that goes against the groupthink gets buried.
I say this as someone who fully believes in man made climate change and its potentially catastrophic implications.
You know, at this point I don't know what's worse - that so many so-called experts seem to be spewing end-of-the-world nonsense, or that there appear to be so many folks out there who are all too willing to believe this stuff. I seriously question the qualifications and motivations of the former, and the mental health status of the latter.
We see it in the data, and do our very best to run simulations to predict the future of this chaotic system (we should have the main influences down), and it looks bad.
You can doubt the doomsday aspect of it, since that is determined by society's response and resilience, but more CO2 in the atmosphere increasing radiative forcing and thus temperature as a 0th level effect are very basic physics. The fact that humanity caused a substantial increase on atmospheric CO2 is very obviously true as well.
Anything saving us must be a higher level effect. The natural way of CO2 sequestration, rock weathering and subsequent precipitation into ocean sediment, takes at least 10k years to get rid of an increase.
Please tell us if there is something big we miss. Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing.
Does that "we" actually include "you"? And if so, how much of that data have you looked at personally, and now closely? I ask because (as I have already referenced elsewhere in this thread) I went to the trouble of doing that some years ago - downloaded thousands of data files making up a particular temperature data set, consisting of hundreds of thousands of data entries. This after having heard some particularly inane and quite clearly wrong statements made about my local climate by the folks at NOAA or wherever. And you know what I found? The "raw" data there showed a definite but modest increase in temperatures in my area over the past 130 years or so. But the "adjusted" data (which was being used as the basis for making those statements) had been so badly mangled as to become completely unreliable, yet this was done in such a way as to make it show a rather dramatic increase in temperatures. It ultimately turned out that the whole data set was mangled, too (I spot checked several other locations), and that I wasn't the only person who had gone to such troubles and found much the same issues.
Of course, that was just one data set and that's been almost ten years ago now. But for easily the past 15 years or so, and continuing up to this day, folks outside of the climate research field who have gone to similar troubles to do basic analysis on various climate-related data sets have often come to similar conclusions - everything from "This [apparently very real] data is just too dirty and unreliable to be of much practical use, even after you try to clean it up" to "OMG, it looks like they're just wholesale making stuff up here!" And so on.
BTW, whenever someone mentions "the data" I always ask this question, and I almost never get an actual answer back: Is the data that you're referring to raw data, or adjusted data, or proxy data, or modeled data, or infilled data, or what? Apparently most people just assume that the data being referred to is real, live, actual data, but whenever I've followed up on the matter myself this almost always turns out not to be the case.
> Please tell us if there is something big we miss.
As I believe I have already said elsewhere, I don't think that it's so much that things get missed as it is that they seem to get willfully ignored, or maybe are just under-appreciated in their potential effects. But other folks outside of the climate research field who have noted various troubling things here might disagree with my assessment of the situation.
> Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing.
Again, as I have already noted, folks who come along and say "Good news everyone! The situation may not be as dark as it first appeared." often just get beaten down mercilessly. And in the press, for whatever reasons, if a "good news" type article appears it tends to fade out rarely quickly, while the "even more bad news" type articles may get hyped to no end. And even with the good news articles, often the reporter seems to go out of their way trying to track down so-called climate experts who will say "True, perhaps - but this actually changes nothing!", and who may then try to impune the motives of the person making the good news statement - "Probably a fossil-fuel funded climate denier!", or similar.
If you want to take a step back and get a breath of fresh air, consider the fact that throughout human history various episodes of doomsday-cult type thinking have come and gone repeatedly, usually with minimal aftereffects. This is very true for recent predictions made by scientists and such, too. For example, recently there was some discussion about how many of at least the most dire predictions being made around the time of the first Earth Day never came to pass. There may be several valid reasons for this, but the simple fact of the matter is that most o...
> BTW, whenever someone mentions "the data" I always ask this question, and I almost never get an actual answer back: Is the data that you're referring to raw data, or adjusted data, or proxy data, or modeled data, or infilled data, or what?
Raw data in itself is not much use as you have mentioned. Nobody wants to look at spectra and electronic counts. (Properly) adjusted data is better, but not a lot is available for the less recent past. Proxy data also needs to be adjusted for the processes that left the record, but can then be used. Modelled or infilled data does not count since it is not 'real' data. So, adjusted data and proxy data.
If you look at all the datasets in Figure TS.1 (https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_TS_FINA...) here, do you really believe all of those datasets are problematic? Do you have a problem with the assertion that an increase in CO2 increases the energy coming into the Earth System? Where do you believe it goes, if not?
> folks who come along and say "Good news everyone! The situation may not be as dark as it first appeared." often just get beaten down mercilessly
I've never found anyone with good arguments backing them up, sadly. The hopeful ones who want to employ technology and engage in climate engineering make sense, at least, though many of the proposed techniques have.. interesting side effects in the models and don't all fully work. It's a chance, but it's better if we don't have to try. (Long term we need this tech anyway; who wants an ice age? That'd be even worse. Let's just test it on Venus first.)
> If you want to take a step back and get a breath of fresh air, consider the fact that throughout human history various episodes of doomsday-cult type thinking have come and gone repeatedly, usually with minimal aftereffects.
That would be good. But also consider that many of these problems were non-issues because action was taken to prevent them (such as the acid rain problem, the ozone hole, smog and freshwater pollution(where it applies)), and they were local and fixable fast (stop emitting pollution with a short lifetime and be done with the problem within a few days). If expectations such as yours prevent us from acting, that might be a problem.
I also don't expect the most dire predictions to come true, because I want to believe we either don't go the 'business as usual' emission plan or find a last-minute save in a technique for fast CO2 sequestration. Both of those require action though, and accepting that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to changes. (We have enough refugees everywhere already, and citizens in other places unhappy about it.)
(Btw, I like how clearly you express your thoughts!)
As to the nature of climate data itself, data sets which are of sufficient size are generally of questionable quality, and data sets which are of known high quality are generally too small to be useful. Climate folks use this as an excuse to do all sort of tricks, including using mostly models instead of actual data, and (my favorite) using a relative handful of actual measurements to create (infill) a whole lot of basically fictitious data points. That's why I always ask the question that I do, because I don't think people realize how little actual high-quality data is really being used here. You say that "Modelled or infilled data does not count", but in climate science it seems to count for an awful lot!
As to the nature of the adjusted data set that I reviewed, IIRC the rationale being used there was as follows. If you take a set of temperature sensors which are in relatively close proximity to each other, and one of those sensors starts showing a noticeable shift in temperatures, then the other nearby sensors should also show a similar shift. If they don't, the argument goes, then you can assume that the original sensor is suffering from some kind of anomaly and needs to be adjusted to correct for that. For example, perhaps that station had been moved a bit, enough so that its temperature-sensing characteristics had inadvertently changed.
Even if you assume that making such an adjustment is valid (I've seen well-reasoned arguments that it isn't), then the next question is how much to adjust. And that in itself leaves a whole lot of room for error. But none of this really applies to what I found.
The data set I reviewed was temperature data from sensors located all over the world; I was primarily interested in my local temperature history, though. When I downloaded all of that data I fully expected to see adjustments that seemed to at least be reasonably in line with what the computer algorithm used to make those adjustments was trying to accomplish, as explained above. But when I did even the simplest possible analysis (subtracted the raw numbers from the adjusted numbers) what turned up instead was quite surprising. Working from memory, this included:
1. Adjustments that were pretty much identical no matter where the temps came from or when they occurred. The same adjustment values were used for stations all over the world - Cairo or Anchorage, new data or old data, it didn't matter. (I didn't review all of the stations, though, just spot-checked several of them.)
2. The adjustments came and went, repeatedly - now you seen them, now you don't. If, for example, this was supposed to correct for a potential station move, then that implied that the station moved from point A to point B, then back to point A, then back to point B again, then back to point A, and so on.
3. The adjustments were always positive, never negative. This means they were adding considerable heat to all of the records.
4. Adjustments for winter temps were different from those for summer temps. For example, IIRC winter temps were adjusted upward by a full degree while summer temps were adjusted only by 1/10th of a degree.
There's probably other stuff, too, but I don't remember all of it. Other people out there also looked at this data and came up with other issues. Some even went so far as to look at the program code itself, and IIRC they said that no matter what the nature of the data was that you threw at it, it was always going to add considerable warming. As for my local temps, the raw data showed a small but apparently very real warming, while the adjusted temps showed a far more dramatic warming.
Being a computer guy myself, my take on the situation was that, at a minimum, the computer algorithm had been allowed to run roughshod all over the data. And at worst this may have been an intentional attempt to deceive - adding warming which wasn't really there.
BTW, one of the simpleton's catchphrases is "the new normal", something which I used to see all the time but not as much lately. My wife has family who live near a lake in Texas, and during the drought there a few years back this lake was drying up. Folks in the area were being told by so-called climate experts that this was "the new normal", and not to expect that lake to fill up again during their lifetimes! But then of course a year later that lake was full to overflowing, and you will note that drought hasn't really been the major concern in Texas lately.
But...
I have yet to read a research report that is convincing that climate change is abnormal due to humans.
The report most often cited is a meta report, but I'd rather have something with hard numbers that I can show people. Meta analysis is fine, but not convincing.
I'm curious what convinced people here that climate change is likely caused by humans rather than just earths cyclical temp changes that have happened for a long time.
I say this as someone who wants to understand it.
> I'm curious what convinced people here that climate change is likely caused by humans rather than just earths cyclical temp changes that have happened for a long time.
What part do you have trouble believing? We’ve raised the carbon dioxide level by something like 40% since the industrial revolution. Unless carbon dioxide levels are somehow divorced from the amount of heat the atmosphere captures, we have clearly caused at least a portion of the increase.
Scroll down to the long term historical chart to see what we’ve done relative to historical concentrations.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/
In other fields (business) that would be a HUGE red flag.
The other issue is that they appear to be changing measurement methods of carbon. First using ice cores and later using real air or at least much younger ice cores.
They dont say how or their methodology or assumptions they had to make. (Im sure there are good ones, but why not definitely state them so the reader can decide) etc.
I just dont know why there isnt a single source that aggregates the approaches, explains the assumptions and lets the reader decide. Instead, every bit of work on this topic is sensationalized and it makes me not want to believe it. I want to see a well reason argument that lays out the assumptions and I don't think that is too much to want before being convinced
> In other fields (business) that would be a HUGE red flag.
I don't know why you think this would be a huge red flag in other fields. You're given multiple visualizations. One is a graph of recent direct carbon dioxide measurements. The second is a graph covering 400,000 years of indirect measurements. The last is a time series of recent data showing carbon dioxide concentration in a map view.
The only thing iffy about these is that the graphs don't start the Y axis at 0. This is either a dirty trick to inflate the visible change or a helpful visualization choice to highlight the meaningful difference, depending mostly on how you feel about the data. But regardless it doesn't change the numbers.
> The other issue is that they appear to be changing measurement methods of carbon. First using ice cores and later using real air or at least much younger ice cores.
They give you different data sources in different visualizations. You make it sound as if they are mixing them where convenient. Especially with your "at least much younger ice cores" statement, I'm having trouble suspending my disbelief about your claimed intent here. Near as I can tell there is no substance or meaning to this claim, and you're simply creating FUD.
> They dont say how or their methodology or assumptions they had to make. (Im sure there are good ones, but why not definitely state them so the reader can decide) etc.
So do some research. You say you've "yet to read a research report that is convincing that climate change is abnormal due to humans." But have you actually looked? You can go to NOAA and learn about their core and atmosphere sampling methodology. You can look up NASA's AIRS system for details on how it works. It's not possible to spoon feed the level of detail that you claim to want. The spoon feeding is the high level data that NASA gives you. If you want more than that, dig in and find it.
> I just dont know why there isnt a single source that aggregates the approaches, explains the assumptions and lets the reader decide. Instead, every bit of work on this topic is sensationalized and it makes me not want to believe it. I want to see a well reason argument that lays out the assumptions and I don't think that is too much to want before being convinced
You complain that NASA is mixing measurements above (which doesn't appear to be a valid claim, by the way), and now you want someone to create a high-level summary that actually does aggregate the measurements? You're not consistent in what you're asking for.
You are also essentially asking why no one has managed to summarize literally centuries of human work into a blog post that explains this in an irrefutable way. You're asking for something unreasonable. You are asserting that everything is "sensationalized", but NASA's page is literally 3 visualizations and a short bit of text. Everything is only "sensationalized" if you're choosing to see it that way.
There are lots and lots of resources online that provide details. Start at Wikipedia and go from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
That right there should be a red flag of what you're dealing with.
BTW, I know exactly where he's coming from. As a computer nerd I've done my fair share of accounting-type work over the years. And when I once downloaded a massive climate data set and looked at it and did some basic analysis on it (it was being used at the time to make some questionable claims about the climate), the first thing that popped into my head was "OMG, they're really cooking the books! Call in the auditors! Call in the law!" As far as I could tell I was looking at either a massive fraud or a major computer screwup; I could go either way here.
Edit: Seriously, if you think we made a mistake we want to know about it in detail. Just consider that a lot of people independently analyzed the data for the publications, including idealistic students without agenda, who then all made the same mistake. It's not very probable, but.. it's not like is has never happened either.
> Just consider that a lot of people independently analyzed the data for the publications, including idealistic students without agenda, who then all made the same mistake.
Yeah, you make it sound like peer-review and such actually works the way that it's usually claimed to work, which is often just not the case. I've seen enough peer-reviewed junk floating around out there over the years to know that.
I still believe that in aggregate peer review works, even if it fails once in a while for single cases, especially when the result is as scrutinized and as important as this. Do you have a better idea for making progress and figuring out what reality is really like?
[0] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
As far as peer review goes, I'm trying to keep an eye on the whole "open peer review" thing, or whatever the proper name for that is. It of course has its own problems, but I haven't been particularly impressed with the current system for several decades now. And I don't think that it's really a matter of "it fails once in a while", but rather that it has problems which may be fairly pervasive. I've seen estimates that as much as 50% of what gets published these days as peer-reviewed science may be basically just fiction in the end, and I might put the percentage higher than that.
If he had just left it at "other fields" then the comment could maybe stand on its own. It's still a bit too vague, but whatever.
And even you, you're just here making the claim that you've done "accounting-type" work so that when you later say that you downloaded the data and "did some basic analysis" your conclusion will seem more valid.
What analysis? What about the data didn't line up? Saying something and showing something are two different things.
I don't think anyone argues that radioactive testing has significantly (or even measurably) increased the background radiation level on Earth. Contrast with carbon dioxide, where we have increased by ~40%.
If we had evidence that nuclear testing had significantly increased background radiation levels, then the assertions that it's increased cancer rates and that we should try to clean it up would both be true.
Source: See for example both the table and the C14 graph at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation
Source 2: Grad degree in physics. Worked at nuclear physics lab.
On the bright side it looks like we’re almost back to baseline.
Cleaning is a non-starter, but anyone with sense is working to prevent more radioactive material in our atmosphere.
If what you are suggesting were remotely viable it would be a wonderful way to, for example, capture radioactive particles released by burning coal. Swapping out coal plants with nuclear reactors being the 'final solution' there...
https://xkcd.com/1732/
That assumption is exhorted by the site guidelines.
> https://xkcd.com/1732/
The problem is that this is merely another "meta report" that the parent specifically found unconvincing.
It neither provides hard numbers, nor methodology (which would demonstrate the "hardness", as it were, of those numbers).
The trouble is, that the XKCD cartoon is not the data. It is a picture representation of some data. It still falls under the category of "meta" report. This is, of course, as the GP pointed out, "fine", but it does not subsitute for the data itself, nor for the methodology (which is discussed elsewhere in the thread.
> I don't see anyone claiming the historical data is incorrect or fabricated
I don't personally know enough about the topic to know if that's true, but, given the history of (arguably manufactured) controversy around the topic, nothing would surprise me.
Regardless, even as recently as 1,000 years ago, we would not have had reliable, direct temperature measurement across the globe.
That means that all but a minute portion of the time period covered by the referenced picture uses synthesized temperature data. Despite being potentially synonymous, I recognize that's not the same as frabricated. However, it does make the methodology that much more important.
The data (raw and synthesized) also have other characteristics significant to their eventual interpretation/analysis, besides correctness (or certainty), such as sample frequency. (The concept of overfitted models, for example, was recently discussed on HN).
> unless there's a really good reason to doubt it, we should accept it.
I posit this stance is incompatible with the scientific method and has contributed to the "reproducibility crisis" in modern science.
Although I certainly agree that attempting to reproduce (i.e. gather) raw data should be left as a last resort, I don't feel even it deserves any special treatment.
Sadly, the raw data is generally simply not publically available (for science in general, no ideal about climate, specifically).
To me, that's the difference between science and religion, with the former, it's actually helpful to "doubt" (i.e. skeptically verify) even if you "believe" (in the conclusion and how it was reached).
I don't understand how even scientists can be so sure of the causality because in a complex system, proving that a one-off event caused another one-off event is supposed to be impossible, isn't it? You can't replicate it. You can't do a controlled experiment. It seems you can only model it and notice that your model shows causation. What if the model is wrong? It's too complicated for laymen to understand. It seems to be even harder than nuclear physics which even school kids can use to make predictions about nuclear reactions.
And that's all ok. As long as a person doesn't reject the science outright because they can't understand the work or don't want to put in the effort. But those who reject the science or insist that nothing be done about it until they personally understand it need to either put in the effort to understand it or lend faith to the scientific consensus which has been developed through great effort.
Bull-hooey.
If you're genuinely interested you only have to understand the difference between climate and weather, the time scales involved (decades, not years), the limitations of models vis-a-vis spot-predictions, and wrap your head around the nuance between "change" and "rate of change" (ie speed vs acceleration).
That is not hard, but 99% of "skeptics" can't be bothered...
If you're mentally flexible enough to get that the problem isn't that pendulums swing, but that a fast swinging pendulum could be Very Bad for our civilization, climate change rests on three straightforward principles and observations:
1) The absorption spectrum of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses: test-able with an aquarium and a UV light
2) That aggregate 24/7 human industrial activity (ie all: cars, boats, planes, construction, smelting, BTC mining, etc), is somehow increasing greenhouse gasses: this is tested by checking the air, if seeing smog clouds or logic isn't proof enough
3) That Venus exists, our telescopes are not lying, and we don't want to take vacations there
Of the 8 planets in this solar system, 1 of them has had its climate go into overdrive and now resembles biblical Hell. Human activity will never push things that far, but we'd talking about the end of mankind well before that point...
Climate change is not impenetrable to laymen. Climate change has been on the end of a 50 year FUD campaign meant to confuse the issue so that laymen only hear the arguing. Totally coincidental: oil company marketing triangulation has pointed out for years that they don't have to convince anyone on climate change, they just have to extend the debate past the point of action. It worked.
Actually, most of the "skeptics" that I've seen online are right on top of this kind of stuff! It's the other side that just wants to hand-wave away far too many things.
> 1) The absorption spectrum of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses: test-able with an aquarium and a UV light
If you want to have some "fun", go track down a full spectrum chart of sunlight and how carbon dioxide and water vapor and such absorb that sunlight. Pay particular attention to the infrared band, which is very large. What do you see?
As to your aquarium example, some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a similar experiment - one that was claimed to have been done many times and which clearly showed the greenhouse effect of CO2. Only it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying that the example itself may very well be bogus. Also, IIRC, another group ran a similar experiment sometime later and claimed a positive result. Except that even a layman like myself could clearly see that their experiment was very poorly controlled, and not nearly as cleanly run as the first one. So while they happily claimed a successful replication, in fact they never actually proved nor disproved anything, as far as I could tell.
> 2) That aggregate 24/7 human industrial activity (ie all: cars, boats, planes, construction, smelting, BTC mining, etc), is somehow increasing greenhouse gasses: this is tested by checking the air, if seeing smog clouds or logic isn't proof enough
This includes water vapor, perhaps the most powerful and important of all the greenhouse gases on Earth. Yet for some reason this is almost completely ignored by the anti-CO2 crowd.
> 3) That Venus exists, our telescopes are not lying, and we don't want to take vacations there
If you want to have some more "fun", go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Venus, which is very hot. And while you're at it, go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Mars, which is quite cold - cold enough that the CO2 actually freezes out of the air there on a regular basis. Tell me what you find.
> Climate change has been on the end of a 50 year FUD campaign meant to confuse the issue so that laymen only hear the arguing.
So it's 50 years now, is it? Seems a little long to me but whatever. What's important here is that this is another claim of "FUD", no doubt directed at the fossil-fuel industry. But IMO claims that this are often made less to point out "the truth of the matter" (in their opinion) and are instead usually more of a cheap-shot attempt to convince folks not to listen to the points being made by the other side (or to try and justify their own refusal to listen), which often call out glaring weaknesses in the overall argument.
If CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas then go write a paper about it and claim your Nobel.
Note that we put "skeptics" in quotes because cranks aren't skeptics. A skeptic would consider that the one guy who failed to replicate an experiment may be wrong, as well as the possibility that all the other people who ran the experiment were wrong.
That phrase though - "greenhouse gas" - is a misnomer. Actual greenhouses don't operate the same way that atmospheric greenhouse gases do, but the phrase has stuck so now we have to live with it.
And yes, there was much discussion among "skeptics" of the actual experiment and the supposed others like it at the time, and of the fact that problems with it may have traced back to what I just said above. But in the end I don't think anyone was convinced that these experiments necessarily proved or disproved anything, much less that they had been successfully replicated dozens of times.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
And before that there was efforts to stimy acedemia as the models are so painfully obvious and unambiguous... Yeah, 50.
> What's important here is that this is another claim of "FUD",
Yeah, because it's a literal campaign of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (see link above). Less a "claim" as an "obvious, proven, well established fact". And the trolls are obvious and everywhere, even here.
> go look at the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Venus ... Mars...
Too bad I didn't say anything that would have any connection to this irrelevent, obtuse, comparison. Did Venus experience a runaway greenhouse effect? Are you seriously implying greenhouse gases don't have greenhouse effects? Also: what does NASA say about terraforming Mars and CO2?
The top minds over there seemingly know something you do not. Climates can get hot from the greenhouse effect -- those who disagree are disagreeing with obvservable reality.
> go track down a full spectrum chart of sunlight and how carbon dioxide and water vapor and such absorb that sunlight
I'm completely befuddled by this attempt at a point. Greenhouse gasses absorb infrared radiation, CO2 is one of them. Are you implying the IPCC and top brains at Oak Ridge has missed something in a straight-forward chart about the absorbtion of sunlight? For decades? Sheesh.
More energy in a system, what could possibly happen. Wow. Hard. I dunno. Only we all do.
The physics of it are crystal clear, even if the predictive models were tricky to make. It makes absurd gesticulating to minor percieved issues look flacid, weak, and hallow.
> some years back a "skeptic" once very publicly tried to replicate a [greenhouse gas] similar experiment ... it didn't replicate as described, as I recall, implying...
... implying very little as the experiments I was referring to are painfully simple and have been carried out repeatedly, not just twice. I'm sure you've alerted the relevant journals and conferences, though, to this travesty of scinece.
I bet they're sweating with this straightforward and easily proven assault on the foundations of their field... Mmmmm Hmmmm. Time to worry about black helicopters, false flags, and you getting disappeared! Or... is this backed by The Deep State? Tinfoil! Tinfoil!
> most of the "skeptics" that I've seen online are right on top of this kind of stuf
No they aren't. This is a(nother) blatant falsehood.
They are dishonest liars with no credibility and an armory of logical fallacies and hostile attitude that they use to export their moronic, uninformed, world-view. A world-view that is blatantly supported by monied interests pushing junk science and FUD.
. -------- .
Here's the thing: as yet another in a lOOooooooooooooooong line of climate trolls on the internet, you gotta step it up. These obvious attempts at spreading debunked factoids was played out in the early 00's. So, yeah: "skeptic", because genuine skeptics would read and learn, instead of regurgitating talking points like a Russian Twitter troll.
2/10, needs more effort.
And I'm not saying that anyone has "missed" anything here. Rather they have full knowledge of it and simply choose to ignore it (because they want to stay "on message"), or maybe they have dismissed it as being relatively unimportant. Not everybody looks at this stuff and comes to those same conclusions, though.
BTW, "almost 40" in not 50, and the actual timeline here (which I'm probably at least somewhat more familiar with than you are) is not quite what it has been made out to be. In fact, in recent legal proceedings Judge Alsup (I'm sure you will recognize that name) has already called BS on a lot of it, and if I'm not mistaken some other judges in other jurisdictions are headed down this same path.
Assuming it's true, it merely means that a pedagogical science-class-level experiment to demonstrate the effect of global warming doesn't quite work as well as expected. It has very little bearing on the actual effect CO2 has on atmosphere and how much we know about it.
There used to be also a popular middle school physics experiment, where children are asked to roll small stuff (say, a metal marble) down a slope, measure its velocity, and verify the conservation of energy, by computing mgh = 1/2 mv^2.
Only that it does not work---it should not work, because if you roll a metal ball then a big portion of the kinetic energy is in the form of its rotational motion! So, just computing its transitional velocity will never work.
So, now what? Does this show that the Newtonian physics is flawed? Of course not. It just shows that this particular experiment is poorly thought out.
> This includes water vapor, perhaps the most powerful and important of all the greenhouse gases on Earth. Yet for some reason this is almost completely ignored by the anti-CO2 crowd.
That's because water vapor is in equilibrium with 70% of the Earth's surface, so any "addition" or "subtraction" we can do to the water vapor is immaterial. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-...
It's not ignored: it's been thoroughly investigated and understood. It's just that you haven't heard about it.
As to that experiment, it was being held up as a simple enough experiment that anyone could do proving basic things related to the greenhouse effect. Only it didn't quite seem to pan out that way.
As to Newtonian physics and such, didn't someone named Einstein once come along and stir up the pot and show that Newton was kind of wrong about some things? And aren't folks today still doing experiments testing Einstein's claims, and still pointing out that some of the things currently believed about gravity might yet need correcting? (No need for me to go into further detail here because I'm sure you will recognize what I'm talking about.) So even in the well-established field of physics it's still OK to question things like long-held beliefs about gravity. But for some reason in the relatively new field of climate science you DARE not question any of the status-quo. No sir!
Warmer air can hold more water vapor. This effect is of course included in the research.
> Warmer air can hold more water vapor.
Yes indeed it can, and said water vapor (being a greenhouse gas) can induce more greenhouse gas effects. But this appears to be routinely glossed over, as if it's just a non-issue; not everyone agrees with that assessment, though.
As to the warmer air thing, lots of people make statements to the effect that warmer air holding more water vapor will lead to much heavier rainfall and such. Which certainly MIGHT be true, but it doesn't HAVE to be true. Why? Because there's nothing that says that all of that additional water vapor has to fall out of the sky in one fell swoop; a lot of it may just stick around as higher humidity. Plus it is well-known that rain sometimes falls from the clouds only to evaporate again in the warmer, drier air underneath those clouds, so it never actually makes it to the ground, and generally warmer air may lead to more of that. You almost never hear these facts mentioned, though.
Funny story: Some years back I was listening to a science podcast where a climatologist and an oceanographer were guests, and the subject of sea and air temperatures came up. The climatologist made a statement about "warming temperatures leads to more storms" and such, but the oceanographer corrected him, saying that while that used to be the thinking, further research had shown that if sea and air temperatures would changing more or less in tandem (both warming up together, in this case), then surprisingly the overall effect on storms actually appeared to be pretty inconsequential. And I thought the climatologist was going to blow a gasket over this; I mean, how DARE the oceanographer go "off message" like that!
You mean as in the models don't include it? I'm very sure they do, I'd have to search for citation though.
> As to the warmer air thing, lots of people make statements to the effect that warmer air holding more water vapor will lead to much heavier rainfall and such. Which certainly MIGHT be true, but it doesn't HAVE to be true.
That's why we use models to try and figure out what the probable truth is. This part is hard though, and only 'medium confidence' is reached for any influence on the water cycle since 1960 at all. (https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_TS_FINA...) I wouldn't rely too much on those precipitations change forecasts yet either, but things will change if we keep going like this.
> Funny story: ..
Haha, I can imagine. The storm thing is complex and hard to predict too. Let me cite the IPCC report:
'Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. However, for the years since the 1970s, it is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of storms in the North Atlantic have increased although the reasons for this increase are debated (see TFE.9). There is low confidence of large-scale trends in storminess over the last century and there is still insufficient evidence to determine whether robust trends exist in small-scale severe weather events such as hail or thunderstorms.' Table 11 here has details on the model runs: https://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter... Looks like your oceanographer was right. But I guess your point was the attitude, not the facts. There seems to be a general problem in communication since the beginning.
Concluding, what's your general point?
Do you think that CO2 is not a problem?
Do you want to doubt the specific predictions? (The IPCC reports helps to differentiate between virtually certain and still doubtful points, they're not all the same.)
Do you want to critize the attitude in communication? (I do think these issues need to be communicated and discussed better. Also, at this point it's really in the hands of politicians and society to work with this, not scientists.)
Addendum: There is vivid discussion of the water issue here: https://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas....
> Do you think that CO2 is not a problem?
It's not so much that I think "that CO2 is not a problem", but rather that it's probably not THE problem when it comes to climate change issues - and certainly not the most pressing problem of our age, as it is often made out to be. And I think people who go too far down that path ("We're all doomed!") are maybe a little off-kilter mentally, to put it nicely, but there seems to be quite a few of them out there.
As to skepticalscience.com, some years back I spent many an hour reading through the stuff there, but eventually got to the point where I just no longer took it too seriously. The page you pointed me to "has issues"; the entire web site itself "has issues"; and even the guy who runs the site (John Cook) "has issues". I won't go into the details here because if you are as familiar with the situation as I am then I'm sure you're aware of at least some of those issues.
And what to you think the problem is when it comes to climate change issues?
I'm interested in your opinions and ideas since you seem to have given this a lot of thought.
But what really disturbs me on a longterm basis is the fact that we have so much of our population and infrastructure located along coastlines. We've built permanent infrastructure on largely impermanent land, which is often perpetually at risk. And I'm not just talking about sea level rise, but rather subsidence (the land is often sinking faster than the sea is rising), constant erosion, hurricanes (common and often devastating), tsunamis (less common but often even more devastating), and so on. As to sea level rise itself, the seas have been rising pretty incessantly ever since the start of the last interglacial period (if I'm using the right terminology here), and AFAIK there is nothing to indicate that this has ever stopped. It has apparently proceeded in fits and starts, though, and by my math it's still occurring at something like half the rate of the historical average. So when some mentions sea level rise in relation to climate change my reaction is more like "So what? Sea level rise is nothing new, but it's less of aa overall global issue now than it was in the past. As for any anthropogenic influences, that's more a matter of rate than anything. But unless the natural part of sea level rise comes to a complete stop, then all of that coastal infrastructure is pretty much doomed in the long run anyway, and it's probably not even particularly safe even if it does stop."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity
Perihelion of Mercury was observed to advance by 574 seconds per century. That is 0.16 degree per century, or 0.0016 degree per year.
Of this 574 seconds, Newtonian physics could accurately explain 532 seconds as gravitational interactions between planets. That still leaves about 42 seconds as unexplained.
General relativity predicts an additional 43 seconds, which is a near perfect match.
Of course, it's always a matter of opinion whether something is "insane precision"... so feel free to think it is not. (Never mind most people never see Mercury itself in their lifetime: I certainly haven't.)
Quick proof that they are unconvincing. Animals have been emitting CO2 since they appeared on Earth but the Earth is still - or even more - suitable for animal life than it ever was. Where's the "obvious" effect of all those millions of years of CO2 production? See, sometimes the effect is too small or it's counteracted by something else that we can't easily predict the effect of.
Here's another way to look at it. If it's so easy to understand, why didn't anyone notice it 50-100 years ago? Well, they did but they weren't able to make predictions accurate enough to scare anyone into change. How can a non-scientist today do better than the best scientists of the last century? Do we have some easy new theory they can apply? Do we have some new data they can plug into their simple formulas to make those predictions?
The models run on inputs and include uncertainties (how much emissions will there be? How many clouds will really be produced in a warmer climate? ..), thus you get a range of results. The first step is to reproduce historical data, then you run the model into the future. The best prediction is given by the aggregate of a lot of different models with a realistic range of inputs.
For numbers check chapter <11.3.2 Near-term Projected Changes in the Atmosphere and Land Surface> and chapter <12.4.3 - Changes in Temperature and Energy Budget>. Of course we're predicting climate here, not weather, so the exact temperature in exactly 100 years is unknown.
The wikipedia article is good for a start on the math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_models If you have some basic knowledge of math and programming you can create a zero-dimensional model yourself. There are probably a lot of ressources out there to help with this too. The physical knowledge needed is basic radiative things such as the Stephan-Boltzmann law. [3] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law)
(This will inform you about the effects of albedo changes (ice and clouds are bright and the ocean is dark, forest is a lot darker than fields and cities), changes in solar irradation and Earth thermal emissions (changed by e.g. cloud cover, aerosols such as dust and greenhouse gases.)
You can run a full model yourself, but that easily turns into a full-time job. Here's one, for example: [3] If you want to check the ones in the IPCC reports, here's an overview: [4]. Not all of them are available, sadly, but there is a general push to make it all open. (Many scientists are ashamed of their horrible coding practices.. but these things are better than most because they need to be high-performing. FORTRAN is quite popular..)
Whether you need or want HPC really depends on the resolution you want to model at and what to include.
Do you want local and regional resolution? What vertical resolution do you want? How long into the future do you want it to run? How many different parameter inputs do you want to check?
(In the IPCC reports you can find a couple of standard emission timelines for the future, for example. The 'business as usual' one usually leads to pretty horrible results. The 'stop all emissions right now' one seems to lead to manageable results, only the coral reefs and glaciers are in danger then.)
How many feedback loops do you want to include? Do you want to include the full ocean as well? How about other things such as the carbon cycle?
(Naturally CO2 is emitted from volcanoes, changes state during rock weathering and is then eroded into the ocean, sequestrated into the sediment and subducted back into the mantle, then again emitted from volcanoes. This process is really slow though.)
Do you want to check for secondary effects such as sea-level change, ocean acidification, changes in precipitation pattern, changes in cloud cover? (which are feedback for your model) It's best to estimate the largest possible effect of each of these and then start with the main one and keep refining, which is the current process. You can follow this if you read the IPCC reports of different years. Chapter 12 tells you more about the recent refinements.
If you write emails to the authors of the report and papers with questions you might just get an answer btw, as long as you seem willing to understand and listen. It is exhausting to be called a liar when you and your peers do your very best to ...
The economic impacts are researched as well, IPCC working group 2 I think? It's just not my area of expertise.
Not easy to work out that it'll be a problem. We've known that for 100 years haven't we? But people didn't seem to be sure it would be a disaster back then. Hell, even in the early 2000s when I was a science teacher, we'd get the kids to build little greenhouses and demonstrate the effect but the text book emphasized that "This is only a theory, and we're not sure what will happen with Earth.". Knowing the basic principle was obviously not sufficient to be sure of the outcome. If you don't work out the finer details, then you can only trust others with the "It's important, honestly it really is!" message.
I know I sound like an anti-climate change-ist but I'm really an anti-sheep-people-ist, skeptical of things that have signs of religious faith such as appeal to consensus, being certain of their claims, predicting doom on disbelievers, and insulting and silencing people for heretical speech or doubt, and proselytizing.
Bingo! There is so much about the current situation that sounds not at all like science but rather so much like doomsday cultism that it's hard to take a lot of what's being said seriously. Bouts of this warped type of thinking aren't at all new, either, but rather date back throughout much of human history, and they have often been associated with religious dogma.
As to your experiments, I gather what was actually being demonstrated here was just the actual greenhouse effect rather than any greenhouse _gas_ effect, much less one associated with CO2. I mean, unless maybe you actually played around with the CO2 levels during those experiments. Which, given the minuscule CO2 levels that we're talking about - around 410 ppm (0.041%) even today - would have required rather extreme care and precision.
> Sure, but what about sea organisms turning into limestone and trapping carbon in the ground?
Too slow, sadly, and running into problems due to ocean acidification.
> What about cloud cover changing the rate of heat absorbed from the sun?
This is included in the models and one of the largest sources of error bars in the result. Clouds are complicated. We're working on it. (To deal with it one can put the highest and lowest probable value into the model and see what the difference is.)
> What about the plants that created the fossil fuels in the first place?
They lived in a different climate. What about them?
> How much time does it take for the effect to appear?
Which effect exactly are you talking about? Does appear mean measurable or clearly visible to humans? Depending on what you mean it is either very fast, just years, or takes some time, hundreds of years. The ice ages seem to end rather abruptly (hundreds of years, maybe even less! , nothing on geological timescales), but we don't know why yet. The knowledge might not help with the current problem either. This rate, method and numeric range of change is unprecedented in the historic record. (400ppm of CO2 and above like we have now can only be found in the old atmospheres when the climate was very different.) We can easily calculate how much additional energy is entering the Earth system, and that energy has to go somewhere (right now mainly the ocean). System reactions are less certain and can be slow.
> we'll probably be able to reactively adapt through technology
Maybe, if we hurry. This is like technical debt. Any CO2 we add now we have to either get out again, at high energy costs, or get used to the new situation. If you check the numbers it is a lot cheaper to fix it now than to keep going and then adapt/undo.
> Do we have some easy new theory they can apply? Do we have some new data they can plug into their simple formulas to make those predictions?
This has become something you need to do as your full-time job or time-consuming hobby to do. There is just so much going on. There is a lot more data (new methods of finding new data (eg satellites!), longer data records), and a lot more people (not just 2), computers! (you do not want to run all these calculations by hand), and we're all building on each other. The computers allow us to run more and more complex models, increase the resolution, include more effects. The input parameters and states are becoming clearer (we have daily measurements all over the globe now, back then they had what, 1 or 2 research sailing boats that came by every 20 years and didn't even measure much?). We have detailed knowledge about how much ice there is now, for example, and about the cloud cover every day, about storms and about ocean currents, wind patterns, natural emissions, atmospheric chemistry reactions (such as Ozone catalysation which led to the ozone hole, which does have a climate effect, just not very important). Any of these and more has specialized people studying it full-time. How can you keep up as a single person? You probably cannot, not in the detail required by the critical people.
It is interesting that this science has so many people trying to argue it away. Can they predict a moon eclipse accurately themselves? They still do not doubt the prediction. Can they predict the existence of the Higgs Boson, the effects of general relativity on the signal of GPS satellites, the exact path a solar system probe will take? There are so many things science predicts, but not a lot of people try to argue.
It's probably because everyone is asked to change, and fast, or be doomed. Maybe something about the communication went terribly wrong at some point and that is why we will have massive problems. (Interestingly, the ozone hole is a wonderful example of quick and decisive international collaboration in the face of a problem. Did people argue against the science then? The problem was simple...
Oh, there is SO much that could say about this stuff, but I won't because I've already spent too much time around here. I will leave you with this little nugget, though, because I found it quite hilarious at the time.
Some years back I attended a computer conference where one of the folks there was receiving an award for using "actual science" in the production of computer animation. What he'd done was try and take orbital models and other data from NASA and use that to produce animation which correctly showed the path of a spacecraft traveling from Earth to Mars (I think it was), instead of just winging it like most animators would do. Except when he tried to actually use this stuff to generate the animation it didn't work, and in his simulations he ended up missing Mars by a wide margin. After some back and forth with NASA and taking some additional stabs at it, the situation was a bit better but in the end he still ended up having to draw a lot of that orbital path by hand - maybe 1/3 of it. He told some of us that he felt like an imposter because he was receiving an award for something that he felt like he didn't actually do.
And I thought this was kind of funny because it seemed to accurately sum up the state of "science" these days. Here you have an authoritative source sending out models and data and such which doesn't appear to actually work, in large part. But, you know, if you just go ahead and fudge it enough to try and cover up the flaws with it then you can still win accolades for that!
Which brings up an important point about all those climate models. Anybody who actually uses models to solve real-world problems will tell you that you can generally only trust those models so far. For anything long-term (where "long-term" can be remarkably short), you usually have to make the equivalent of midcourse corrections based on actual events. And for the longest time, at least, the climate change folks seemed far too reluctant to do that.
And this may still be a problem, because I'm seeing reports now that "our climate models have been remarkably accurate", while others point out that they haven't necessarily been particularly accurate at all. To add insult to injury, there appear to have been several instances now where, when the data and the models diverged, instead of correcting the models they adjusted the data instead, justifying this by declaring that it had a "cool bias" or whatever.
As far as common sense and such goes, I'm getting pretty tired right now of people complaining about plastic pollution in the oceans which "lasts forever", but then in the next breath complaining about the breakdown products of that very plastic being a danger to wildlife. So which is it - "lasts forever" or "breaks down"? It can't be both. Much of this wildlife would probably be far better off if that plastic did indeed last forever; it would be unsightly, of course, but not all that dangerous.
Here's something else that stuck in my craw the other day. The author of this article (a "climate scientist") says at one point that "Science isn’t a popularity contest", but earlier had talked about "the consensus" among scientists. But what is such a consensus if not a popularity contest among those scientists? Also, the tone of the article is such that the author might ver well rain down scorn and disdain upon anyone who weighed in here who wasn't a bonafide climate scientist. But they themselves were actually trained in theoretical physics, not climate science. This situation is quite common among climate scientists, BTW - they weren't actually trained in climatology!
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/why-i-wont-d...
So apparently there's not really that much "common sense" out there at all, from what I gather. At least not on the part of scientists, anyway.
Second, the opinions of the ill-informed don't count but they sure love to talk.
PS: Individual papers are about as important as tweets. On their own they say almost nothing.
It is both. Large pieces of plastic become smaller pieces of plastic, all the way down to microscopic pieces of plastic. In that sense, it “breaks down”. But it remains plastic, that is, it does not degrade to constituent parts. In that sense, it does not “break down”, and it does “last forever.”
> So apparently there's not really that much "common sense" out there at all, from what I gather. At least not on the part of scientists, anyway.
You're painting with an incredibly broad brush here. There are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of scientists out there. There are thousands of climate scientists alone! Scientists are a diverse bunch. They come from every country in the world, every religion in the world, every gender, height, weight, and sexual orientation. They don't speak with one voice, they don't operate with one voice, and they don't all share the same worldview. Science is an imperfect process but at least it's a shared commitment to open debate and following the facts where they lead. Tarring whole communities with perjoratives like "lacking common sense" is not useful to the discussion. Stop that.
> Dude, unlike you (I'm pretty sure) back in the day I used to actually _read_ various scientific studies on a regular basis; these were often in top journals, too. And after some years of this I got to where I routinely threw aside those studies, asking myself "How does this kind of crap get published, anyway?" The situation has only gotten worse since then, as far as I can tell.
This part of your comment starts with an insult, then transitions quickly into braggadocio, and then crescendos with derisive dismissiveness. Not helpful.
> As far as common sense and such goes, I'm getting pretty tired right now of people complaining about plastic pollution in the oceans which "lasts forever", but then in the next breath complaining about the breakdown products of that very plastic being a danger to wildlife. So which is it - "lasts forever" or "breaks down"? It can't be both. Much of this wildlife would probably be far better off if that plastic did indeed last forever; it would be unsightly, of course, but not all that dangerous.
Well, you brag about reading all these studies and then when it comes to arguing you don't actually refer to studies but instead into some kind of Catch 22 which you concocted on your own. Read some actual studies (like this one https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-16510-3_...) and maybe debate their merits instead of trying to catch everybody in some kind of oversimplified "common sense" logic.
Concerning scientists, you claim there's a wide diversity of backgrounds and opinions and such, which is no doubt true. But when it comes to climate science, at least, there's the frankly ridiculous (and fraudulent, IMO) claim of 97% or higher consensus. And if anyone dares raise any objections to that - even if it's just a rather tepid "Well, maybe things aren't really as bad as first believed" - then they're usually met with hostility and derision. (Maybe even with a "No, in fact things are even worse than we thought!") Those aren't acts of science at all; rather they are acts of dogma, and they should be actively discouraged, not defended!
Along the even worse line, lately I've seen a lot of claims that various climate models have been pretty much spot on in their predictions. (Other folks who've looked more closely into the matter might disagree with such an assessment.) But then this may be followed with a statement that in reality things are actually much worse than even the models being referenced predicted! So which part are they lying about, then? The part about "spot on" or the part about "even worse"? This is kind of a common sense question to ask, don't you think? I'm often amazed that the reporters who write about this stuff don't jump all over things like that, but I guess maybe they lack common sense also.
BTW, the “lying” part of that isn’t actually an insult, as you probably would at first believe. Rather it’s an acknowledgement of what is actually going on behind the scenes - a certain amount of professional dissembling in one direction or the other. This being justified as being in order to help fulfill an urgent need to help save the planet while not causing widespread panic, or whatever.
And yes, most academic types, having spent way too much time in educational institutions and libraries and labs and such, very often do lack a lot of common sense. I've rubbed elbows enough with them in academia and out in industry to know that firsthand. But what was often fun was talking to their spouses. I got a lot of "OMG, you won't believe what my husband/wife just did! How can somebody be so smart and still do such dumb things?" And the answer to that is pretty simple - a lack of common sense.
As far as braggadocio or whatever goes, everything I said there is true - including, I’m pretty sure, the “I’m pretty sure” part of it. If the person I was responding to had a problem with that then he could have said so directly. But the situation I referred to there happened decades ago. I no longer usually have the time or the patience or the access to read studies in depth; rather I will scan a summary of them and maybe read someone else’s thoughtful (or perhaps critical) analysis. And then if I feel the need to I will try and go back and check them out in more depth, which can be kind of hard work these days since so much of that stuff is paywalled. I will try to read the link you provided soon, but don’t be surprised if I come back with some critical analysis of it myself.
BTW, superficially the discourse here on HN is somewhat better than what you might find on reddit or wherever. But I’ve already run into a few of the same problems, including a remarkable level of intolerance and censorship. For example, in one thread around here fully half of the comments just up and disappeared in short order. (Only a handful of those were mine, in case you’re wondering.) So either someone censored those, or the software which runs this place is remarkably unreliable.
Fun fact: Not too far from me is an infamous "green energy" project which turned out to be a massive and expensive failure. A considerable amount of the money lost here was taxpayer dollars, too. An after-the-fact analysis showed that one big reason for the failure was having too many clueless PhD-level types running around making mostly empty promises, and not enough experienced Joe-the-welder types running around who know how things really work. All is not lost, though, because after having shut down and written off the green energy aspects of the project, it's now just a plain old fossil fuel plant which is doing well enough for itself. A very expensive plant, of course, but at least one that actually works.
Don't attack strawmen.
Human-caused climate change has been in the public mindset for > 10 years. I don’t think there is much doubt that the earth is warming, and that CO2 among others cause increased global temp. However, here is where myself and others become disconnected with the movement. The adverse effects of climate change are fairly benign out to 50 years and at worse predict 10 ft increase in sea level in 100 years. So either humanity has already decreased output enough (unlikely) or the estimates have updated and long story short, probably doesn’t seem so bad. Definitely not worth the effort of completely revamping global economies.
I guess they might think that agreeing with science people automatically makes them smart and critical thinking.
That is, the point is that this metric was largely driven by that fish species.
BUT I am definitely not happy that this is going to be one of those weaponised stories that the anti-science brigade will start telling and re-telling everywhere, lending credibility to other lies they believe in.
Pretty disturbing.
"the researchers added a simulation in which the depth and mass of fish were tied to the rate of mortality by fishing"
Is this really a process where simulation->result->theory. IE died the model or simulation played a key role indeveloping or validating a theory. Or, is this a process where they started from a theory (that works, explaining observed results) and then built a simulation that demonstrates the theory?
I feel like I'm seeing this kind of language in the pop science press, maybe starting from the climate/weather world.
Have models of ecosystems (eg) been getting more use as "theory generators," are researchers creating more models ex post as an supporting evidence, or is this just a shift in journalistic language?
...and... if the answer is "models are really playing more of a role"... please elaborate if you know anything interesting. What software is being used? Are biologists building these models/simulations themselves, or are there specialists available to them?
^ I'm not hating on language choices or ex post evidence gathering. Darwin used what we might call a "simulation" (or statistical analysis, depending on the journalist) to predict and then validate a theory about bird mortality in storms. That was great science, and foundational. Not hating. Just curious about changes in the role of simulation/modeling.
I understand that conducting experiments with ecosystems to prove why they behave in particular ways might be a tad tricky. But that just means that theories about ecosystems are hard to prove, not that they get a free ride to "proven".
[0] - http://cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.ht...
Humans think that we can tell cause from effect but this is rarely the case.
the real issue is that modern education is not cross disciplinary so you have highly specialized people creeping into fields they don't understand and making basic errors of judgement based on pre-conceived ideas of what ought to be. you see this for example in the interplay between physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering. the physicist wants statistics over big data sets, the mathematician wants abstract tools and automatic proof theorems, the engineer wants practical numerical solutions and modelling and the computer scientist is fixated on throughput and efficiency of generative algorithms. is this even true? has anyone stopped and said, what are we actually doing? is there a bigger plan here, are we trying to work towards a common goal, or has the ladder we climbed been pulled away?
the relativistic revolution and subsequent collapse of the western world, the church, the state and the individual all dissolving into a jumbled mess of professional agitators applying some bayesian strategy of influence maximization is an unfortunate consequence of a change in world order, from west to east. being on the wrong side of the cyber curtain is a slow bleak dawn, with the intellectual and political elite always the last to realize the surrounding darkness.
globalization is an example of a desperate last gasp of a former dominant culture trying to exert control and influence over a world increasingly more alien and separate from it. the irony of course is in the conceit of the name itself. project the growth of asia and africa forwards for another half-century, then work backwards and try to understand the hysteria behind fossil fuel usage and the impact this will have on the balance of world power if 3+ billion new people become electrified and industrialized.
Globalisation doesn't look like the last gasp of a former dominant culture here, it looks like the way out of crushing poverty. People WANT to work in globalcorp garment factories. They get really annoyed if the factories shut down. For all our western idealism about a pastoral lifestyle, everyone who has the choice between growing food for a living and working 90 hours a week in a factory chooses the factory every time. And yes, it is their choice. They can leave whenever they want, there are 4375979 other applicants waiting at the gates.
The interesting thing is that they're skipping steps in the process. Cambodia skipped desktop/wired computing/telecoms and went straight from nothing to mobile (in about 5 years). Mobile access is hugely cheaper and generally faster than it is in either the UK or Australia.
I can see solar power doing the same in the next 5 years. Rather than waiting for the electricity authority to get round to wiring up the rural areas, they're already getting on with rigging up their own solar. In 20 years they'll be self-sufficient and the megaprojects to dam the rivers will be bankrupt.
were not having this conversation in the 1980s and most of the worlds airports and shopping malls look eerily similar today, yet older systems are more brittle and prone to fracturing and new infrastructures tend to be cheaper, deploy faster and require less maintenance. giant malls in america remind me of communist apartment blocks dotted all over eastern european capitals, permanent monuments to a big idea that proved temporary. at least the soviet model serves some present social utility. the hidden cost of solar is of course in the manufacturing and re-use process which is fossil fuel dependent, but se asia has oil and gas fit to purpose. globalization for the western leaders means controlling the development of poorer countries by creating avenues for the corporations they front to come in and build, for the poorer countries i think they correctly see it as a way to accelerate society but not necessarily at the cost of autonomy like some corporate colony of an american or german or chinese conglomerate. people may reduce consumption individually, but over the scale of the planet the food industry alone must be undergoing some giant mutation. it's really hard for me to imagine a future in asia and africa without massive increase in petroleum and it's assorted bi-products.