It annoys me when people act like Y2K was apocalyptic scaremongering. No, Y2K was a real threat, which the human race spent huge resources to meet and thereby mitigated appropriately.
I remember my father, a mainframe programmer, spending years correcting code for Y2K for the bank he worked for. COBOL and assembly. At the rollover, it went without a hitch, but there was a lot of sweat to make that happen
My uncle (a COBOL programmer in the 60's) got together with some other retired guys and made a lot of money doing exactly the same thing in the late 90's. One of his contracts he landed because they found his name all over the code.
Whenever I hear whinging about Y2K, I always jump in and say that the polio and smallpox scares were also overrated. "We also spent all that money on polio and smallpox vaccines and shit and look there's no polio or smallpox anymore, what a waste of money that was."
Might not work on anti-vaxxers but it has shut down more than one stupid conversation about Y2K.
Y2K was indeed a real threat, AND there was also a good bit of apocalyptic scaremongering. No conflict.
Those writing apocalyptic scare stories were poorly informed and deliberately trying to activate people’s base fears. AND there was a huge effort by very smart folks to avert it. No conflict.
This exactly. There was basically a run on canned goods the day before thanks to media stories, some of which didn't seem to have the slightest bit of logic to them. That doesn't mean that Y2K (and other date bugs) aren't real.
There is huge then there is huge. Having a bunch of smart people think about something is a huge deal and a lot of attention that could probably have been better spent elsewhere. For a business. Businesses are under constant pressure to demonstrate that they are using people's time effectively. As in, more effectively than the competition that is nipping at their heels.
But as a one-off thing it isn't really a big issue to a government, civilization or even an industry. At that level what does it matter if a few weeks are spent unnecessarily, once? Governments burn more resources than that on a slow news day.
Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn’t going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, modern lives. There will be 400 million people in Nigeria by 2050 and there is no political regime to address climate the change that’s workable unless it allows them to live a life at least as decent as say Eastern Europe. The west could reduce GHG emissions to zero and it wouldn’t do the trick.
People have viewed climate change as a political issue and its not. It’s a scientific issue. It’s the astroid hurtling toward earth in the movie Armageddon or the aliens in Independence Day. The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.
In the BP World Energy statistical review for 2018, they showed that though renewable energy had fantastic falls in prices, there wasn't enough addition to meet new energy demand, especially in China and India for industry, and for the USA regarding its huge growth in natural gas. They then asked the question, how much faster would renewables need to grow to JUST meet this new energy demand (nevermind decarbonizing existing demand). They found renewables would have to grow over 2X as fast (from 800 TWh up to 1,800 TWh).
Let this sink in: We are literally adding half the renewables we need just to keep the emissions curve flat. We probably need to go 4X faster to bend the curve downwards on emissions.
Can engineers solve that? They are a piece of the puzzle, but their most fundamental innovations will take years to kick in. We need policy, we need individual behavioral changes, we need everything we can get.
Of course not, even a totalitarian fascist regime would not be able to force their population to such a large downgrade in their lifestyles to achieve zero total emissions; any government trying to do that would get violently overthrown by their people.
The only conclusion that can be made from these IPCC projections is that we will not avoid a 2C increase because there's no chance that people would be willing to "pay the price" to achieve that.
Switching 100% of electricity production to nuclear would be very hard (though maaaybe possible) and very expensive to do within a decade (the mean time to construct a reactor is 7.5 years, so we'd have to launch immense construction projects right now), but that's not a solution that brings you even close to zero emissions. Electricity is just a small part (roughly 25%) of them.
To get close to zero emissions you'd also need to:
1) replace or remove all non-electric vehicles worldwide. That third world farmer with a thirty year old tractor who can't possibly afford to replace it with anything, much less with something new? That twenty year old pickup truck for a small storeowner? All those vehicles would have to stop being used. They would have to be pried out of their hands long before they become useless, meaningfully harming their livelihood (as replacements won't be affordable to them - they can't buy a ten-year old used truck/tractor because that's also fossil fuel based), which doesn't seem plausible without violence.
1a) Also, replace almost all ships worldwide.
1b) Also, replace all the fossil fuel based house heating systems. Poor regions without a centralised supply heating their homes with firewood? You're not allowed to burn that anymore, you need to build infrastructure to supply you with nuclear electricity.
2) Stop concrete production unless you also sequester enough carbon to compensate. That pretty much means destroying large parts of construction industry by making it prohibitively expensive, especially in poorer countries.
2a) Also, revamp all worldwide steel production.
3) Have everyone worldwide stop eating beef.
These three things won't be sufficient, but are required to even approach zero emissions. Does it seem plausible to suceed in somehow forcing everyone worldwide to implement such policies within a decade?
> These three things won't be sufficient, but are required to even approach zero emissions. Does it seem plausible to suceed in somehow forcing everyone worldwide to implement such policies within a decade?
So governments should better finance mitigations for the consequences of climate change.
There's no magic external source of resources. The wallet of "governments" is the wallet of the people. If people don't vote for a huge increase in taxes to finance mitigation or prevention (I mean, that's the whole point - the scale of resources needed for preventing climate change is very, very large, it's not like you can just increase the budget deficit by 1% and fund that), then governments can't and won't finance large scale mitigation or prevention.
Of course, people will eventually be forced to finance mitigations or suffer the consequences unmitigated - but that's not now, that's later. Prevention is likely to be much cheaper and more effective, but as the people aren't willing to pony up the enormous resources for prevention, well, then they'll pony up enormous resources (or take enormous suffering) when the time comes. But apparently not much earlier.
And the fact that causes and effects aren't equally distributed doesn't mean that countries (both governments and people) who suffer less will be willing to finance mitigations for the countries who bear the worst of the consequences.
>Electricity is just a small part (roughly 25%) of them.
25% is not a small part at all and as for the 7.5 years reactor construct/expensive claim, i'm afraid you need to update you knowledge about small scale/modular nuclear reactors, this is not the 60s-70s.
Of course they can, but the radical bleeding-heart environmentalists oppose the idea of nuclear power, they'd rather see this planet boil than accept this as a realistic solution.
If the US, which is the largest emitter per capita, and the EU, and the other first world countries can get to zero emissions while maintaining a good standard of living, that at least can provide a longer term template for the developing countries that gets is to some stable level, even if it is above 2C.
We can tell developing countries that they have 50 years where they can emit at current first world per capita levels while they raise their standard of living, but then they have to go to zero like the first world has, or they will be subject to sanctions, high carbon tariffs on their products, and things like that. Throw in good aid packages to help them develop and build their zero emissions infrastructure.
> The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.
I like the sentiment, and we're always going to need newer, better tech. Part of it will be engineering, but part of if also has to be pure science, which I suspect won't be profitable enough for the private industry to pursue. Government needs to fund such efforts. I think this applies generally (not just to climate).
Appealing to government isn't just about trying to go from no help to some help. It's also about getting them to stop doing harm. The Guardian claims that the US subsidises the fossil-fuel industry to the tune of $20B each year.
> The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.
As long as politicians continue to play their games, engineers won't be able to accomplish anything. Solving this problem requires a widespread increase in enlightenment, and as far as I can tell a vast majority of the population thinks that only applies to people of the other political/religious persuasion, but it really applies to all of us.
It _is_ a political issue. The technology already exists--courtesy of the scientists/engineers of course. Whether that technology is deployed is a problem of politics.
For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society--think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclear energy. This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.
In fact, James Hansen, NASA scientist and head of the Goddard Institute, got out of the science to focus specifically on the politics. He urges people to join the Citizens Climate Lobby, which has lobbied for carbon pricing legislation for over a decade now: the Energy Innovation Act has bipartisan support in Congress right now (https://energyinnovationact.org/). Many other scientists are involved in the politics these day as well (Katherine Hayhoe [atmospheric scientist], Michael Mann [climatologist]).
>This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.
You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or India's populations from expanding to modern western consumerism.
Of course we can't instantly solve global carbon emissions. But we can do our (very large) part here in the U.S. By shifting where our dollars go. By moving from carbon to renewable sources, we'll drop the price of renewables, helping small economies afford to do the same.
Progress is virtually always incremental. We need to begin by stopping dragging our feet.
That’s like saying we should try to bail out the boat with spoons because “progress is incremental.” It’s not only pointless, but actively dangerous, because it’s a distraction.
The “Green New Deal” is a great example. A jobs program obviously won’t do anything to seriously address climate change. Worse, it wastes money and political capital on things that could have more utility. If you spent that money on nuclear energy research and gave it away to developing nations, then you could really move the needle.
But is it a distraction? To overuse the analogy, GP is proposing to yes, get most of the crew to spoon, to buy some little extra time while the engineering team is trying to fix the pumps. The alternative is to have the crew drink or pray to deities for the pumps to be blessed and magically start working.
If the development of the developing world is a problem, you can't expect the solution to come from developing world. On our end, like in the example of the ship's crew, most people aren't able to contribute to a proper solution - they lack the necessary skills and opportunities. Unfortunately (in this case), we live in free market democracies, which means there isn't a body that can reallocate huge amount of resources to retraining and retooling towards mitigating climate change. The market doesn't care, so we have to do things the hard way - we have to force our governments to force the market to start allocating resources, so that engineers and scientists and logisticians can deal with the problem directly.
Spoons? The U.S. is responsible for a whopping 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. China is the only country on the planet that emits more than us, and they have ~4x the population.
Of course it will help. It's progress. Besides that, why won't the solutions which enable the US to go to zero emissions work as well for other countries? Because those countries can't afford those solutions? Well then the rest of us are going to have to figure that out too.
This is a problem that has no single, simple solution. If every possible solution is shot down because it doesn't solve ALL the problems at once then we will never succeed.
We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.
> We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.
And then donate some of the tech and resources, too. By virtue of being first, we've cut out the developing nations from the most direct path to improving their living conditions. We do, IMO, have a responsibility to help them leapfrog the "fossil fuel" part of that path.
(Though honestly, we can revisit that point later. First, let's get to zero emissions ourselves.)
There's a path dependence to everything. Had we started earlier, we would have shaped the curve of possibilities: renewables would be cheaper, storage solutions would have come online earlier, etc. We would have shaped international dialogue and culture around this issue too, with other nations following the US's lead as far as policies and technologies adopted.
Real world example of path dependence: Supreme Court stops recount in FL --> GWB elected --> Pulling out of Kyoto protocols, starting wars --> [...] Trump elected, partially due to government mistrust seeded in GWB era--> even worse climate change policies
But the problem is that the policies are wrong. They start from the premise that what matters is behavioral change, not technological change. We need $100 billion/year of federal money into thorium and battery research, not "green jobs" or Kyoto protocol. We don't need a "New Deal" to avert climate change, we need a Manhattan Project. But I absolutely agree that we needed those things starting 30 years ago.
You didn't address the problem of Nigeria that the OP brought up. How will a carbon tax in the U.S. address the issue of the Nigerian people rightly desiring a better standard of living?
If the tax is small enough to be affordable by these Nigerians, it won't have the required effect on climate.
If the tax is large enough to prevent 400m Nigerians from obtaining a better standard of living that they rightly desire, then they won't agree to it - and there's no way to force them to comply (not that it would be right to force them IMHO) other than a bloody war.
Billions of people in developing countries have justifiable, understandable, fair interests in a reasonable standard of living, achieving which unavoidably (at least in short term) involves increasing emissions, not decreasing them.
People don't support the concept of taxes even when they can directly see the positive impact the tax payment has on their own lives and on the community.
Addressing climate change is an abstract concept and for most people, like 80% of the population they can't grasp the abstract, so it all feels like a scam, one big flea circus. "No, no, the fleas are there you just can't see them, just trust me."
Unless someone can invent a way to capture and sequester greenhouse gases from the upper atmosphere to the tune of 50.9 gigatonnes per year I really don't see humanity making any progress, slowing growth isn't helping.
You are totally right and totally wrong at the same time.
Yes - the solution must be in large parts a technological and scientific solution, there are so many things we have to change. No - only engineers and scientists will not make a difference, engineers work for the government or companies and both need policies to shape markets for their products or investments. We need the public at the same time to shape the markets and give the engineers something to work with. Addressing climate change means changing the incentives and the direction of our technological development... and in a democracy we all get to decide on that, that politics.
I kind of wish we were facing a killer asteroid or alien invasion instead of climate change, because the former two would be much easier to deal with. What's killing us with climate is the level of global coordination it requires.
I don’t know what to make of your comment. One of the politicians during yesterday’s CNN climate change debate said the following:
"No individual can be expected singlehandedly to solve this problem. It's going to require national action. And by the way -- this is why we invented government. It's for dealing with issues that are too big for each of us to do on our own."
This is a humanity scale problem and government, by way of politicians and lawyers, and yes engineers, is how we deal with humanity scale problems.
Scientists and engineers put us on the moon, but it was government that directed and enabled them to do so.
> Scientists and engineers put us on the moon, but it was government that directed and enabled them to do so.
Rather: the government was arguably the only institution that could spend a sufficient amount of money for this mission. If there had existed another insitution with similar financial backing that was willing to finance such a mission: I doubt that the government would have been necessary.
I think they meant government-directed (mega-)engineering projects will solve this, not individual efforts. When the US wanted to get to the moon, its government created and funded a huge engineering program (Apollo) but the most individuals could do was pay their taxes and support the program—no amount of individual-scale collective action would ever put astronauts on the moon.
The problem is that the (US) government doesn't care about climate changes, so what individual-scale collective action could do is to make them care, in order for that government to start sponsoring engineering mega-projects, which will then have actual impact on the problem.
The United States is enormously influential throughout the world. We have the highest per capita emissions. If we make changes, it has ripple effects across the globe. We define what it means to live a wealthy, “middle class” lifestyle. Also, Nigeria and just about the rest of the world is part of the Paris accord, the US is not. China is poised to enact carbon taxes on a significant chunk of global emissions...
We might be left with no choice but to experiment with a technological “hail mary” — but so far, none are very attractive.
Two decades ago we could have solved the problem at a relatively low cost compared to what we’ll pay now, or what we’ll pay if we do nothing. Every year it gets more expensive.
It’s like the old adage, fitting to this discussion: the best time to plant a tree is five years ago. The next best time is today.
> Two decades ago we could have solved the problem at a relatively low cost compared to what we’ll pay now, or what we’ll pay if we do nothing. Every year it gets more expensive.
This is utterly false. Two decades ago we could have solved the problem if economic growth in the rest of the world stopped. (And maybe not even then.) It was never a solution.
A carbon tax is a viable solution. Last year’s Nobel winner in economics believes that even today, if a carbon tax were implemented we would be, paraphrasing, “stunned at how quickly the world would change”. Had we implemented a carbon tax two decades ago, enforced through global trade agreements, we could have started slow and ratcheted up over time.
We need to move beyond the scare tactic that it’s a choice between the economy and solving climate change. We already solved this on a small scale with the ozone layer.
This would have to be forced through war, and even if somehow the developing world agreed to it without being held at gunpoint, it would still cause lots of suffering and death in short-term. Economic growth is not just zeroes on executives' bank accounts; it's food on the tables of regular people.
Instead, IMO we should double-down on clean tech and then give it away for free, or even with subsidies attached, to the developing world. This way they get to develop even faster, while reducing their contribution to climate issues.
Basically a scientific issue wrapped in a political issue with a big huge asterisk that says even if we do all the right things we're triaging the patients, not curing them.
There was a lot of talk about how the world will be "uninhabitable by 2050" or "civilization will crumble by 2050" and anecdotally, that really backfired for all my elderly aunts and uncles. They happily admit that climate change is real but don't care because they will be dead by 2040. Hell, I'll be in my 80's.
Yes, and so is most of the population apparently. But they are also focused on their own problems; declining health, fixed incomes, cuts to government programs, etc. Hard to get to worked up about a problem that won't occur for 30 years when you're going in for surgery next week.
I keep trying to focus on the fact the process is already starting now and WILL affect them in their lifetimes ... hurricanes, fires, wierd storms, droughts ...
Like most humans. Hell, we comment here using devices made by slaves on the other side of the world. We could choose not to. We could make our life harder so that we didn't sponsor slavery. We don't. We are all very selfish.
Not sure that works. That's like telling a child, "Watch out for that car. Oh! Lookout for that one, too." And the kid thinks, "Well, neither of those hit me, why should I care?" And the next one flattens him.
Just because you can pick two things from the past that didn't turn out as expected doesn't mean the next potential danger isn't valid. Now, maybe we come up with some clever CO2 scrubbing technology and we start engineering the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean the danger doesn't need to be addressed. There was a lot of work that went into finding new ways to get oil and regulation to improve the air. Without acknowledging the problem we could have had those catastrophes.
> Not sure that works. That's like telling a child, "Watch out for that car. Oh! Lookout for that one, too." And the kid thinks, "Well, neither of those hit me, why should I care?" And the next one flattens him.
> Just because you can pick two things from the past that didn't turn out as expected doesn't mean the next potential danger isn't valid.
Correct, perhaps those issuing the warnings should accept the unfortunate reality that this is how average people behave and adjust their messaging. Rather than repetitive warning after warning, why not pool resources and focus on building and improving one single large educational resource that tells the whole story (including full disclosure of the uncertain and imperfect aspects, rather than having people learn of those in conspiracy forums, in order to build trust) from a variety of angles so it is approachable by people from all different intelligence and economic levels?
Part of the problem is that there isn't a centralized Science Propaganda Council issuing these warnings, which could be told to do better. Scientists publish studies and sometimes strongly worded letters; journalists and authors pick it up and twist into something that (then) sells publications / (now) attracts eyeballs to advertisements; people mishear these reports further, freak out and tell to each other (or, today, post on social media).
> Part of the problem is that there isn't a centralized Science Propaganda Council issuing these warnings, which could be told to do better.
The layman listening to how this is covered could very easily come to the exact opposite conclusion ("97% of scientists....!!"), and much of the armchair experts seem to behave as if there was.
But this is my point: why isn't there something akin to a centralized Science Propaganda Council where the very best science on the matter is agreed upon by the experts, and open to criticism by those who disagree? Isn't this how any large project would be organized (well, the "central" part of it if not the openness to criticism)? Does having a bunch of splintered groups arguing inconsistent viewpoints seem like the optimal approach to something that may very well be an existential threat to life as we know it on the planet?
> Scientists publish studies and sometimes strongly worded letters; journalists and authors pick it up and twist into something that (then) sells publications / (now) attracts eyeballs to advertisements; people mishear these reports further, freak out and tell to each other (or, today, post on social media).
Bingo. And intelligent people sincerely wonder why this isn't having success. The situation is so utterly absurd to me, it boggles my mind that no one else seems to notice any imperfections in our current approach (and this applies to all the issues facing the world, not just this one).
You actually are betting your entire fortune on that the world will be better then. Because in the current szenarios for the year 2050 without major actions to combat climate change, your fortune most likely will be gone.
I personally hope that the world will be better in in 2050, but the only way for that to come true is in my eyes very systematic action to go reneweable across the bord.
Yeah, journalists, scientists and the media in general are great at making these kind of predictions. I'm almost 40 now and I've heard it all before. With all of our great advances, we can't accurately track the path of a hurricane a day or two out. Stop trying to predict the demise of the planet.
Not doing something because "you'll be dead before it happens" is pure selfishness. My personal observations from those close to me who don't want to act on climate change seem that their reasons have changed within the last 5 years. They no longer claim that it isn't real or happening, they now dismiss it on grounds of losing the personal liberty provided to them by our over consumption lifestyle. (If you live in the West, then you are likely over consuming.)
So I actually don't think the "doom and gloom" is causing people not to act, if anything the younger generation are acting on that message. (Fridays for Future, etc.) Instead what is delaying action, in my mind, is that the West's middle class is disappearing and now with climate change demanding a further reduction of consumption it is casuing people to try to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle.
If you want to figure out how to do something, you have to take pure selfishness as granted - that's how people and society works; huge parts of sociology, economics, political science, etc are about structures and processes that allow to get large scale coordination and results despite lots of pure selfishness involved.
If any proposed solution (to climate change or anything else) relies on huge numbers of people not exhibiting pure selfishness, then it's not a solution but wishful thinking disconnected from reality. We have a good idea on how large groups of homo sapiens function. Selfishness is unavoidable. There will be lots of great unselfish, heroic, altruistic exceptions, but the mass behavior will still be overwhelmingly selfish in aggregate.
People trying "to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle" is a very important factor that needs to be taken into account for any calls to action. This is what's happening already and this will be happening - and I'm not pointing out this as something that "needs" to change; it kind of does, but it doesn't matter if it "needs" to change because it will not change, I'm pointing it out as something that's inevitable, people will try to hold on tight to unsustainable lifestyles (and fight to gain unsustainable lifestyles that they never had but others did) and any proposed solution needs to work despite that trend in order to be plausible and feasible.
> People trying "to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle" is a very important factor that needs to be taken into account for any calls to action.
This is what concerns me, calls to action that require our better nature to override our immediate self-interest require thoughtful and inspired leadership.
We have a real leadership vacuum right now: Boris and Donald, lightweight leaders in many countries (my own country, Canada, included), rise of Dictators and Fascists. We are not solving this problem with this team.
This is not an accident, but a causal relationship - the increaseing desire to "to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle" is a factor that's likely to drive the people even more towards populistic leaders like the worst cases in multiple countries now, or "strongman" fascist-like parties.
As the effects of climate change become apparent and causes economic strain either due to attempts to prevent climate change or the consequences of not preventing it, well, in times like these that's the exact type of team that people will vote for.
And even more, as the global 'tragedy of commons' scenario of splitting the burden of mitigating climate change becomes even harsher, and the very unequal burden of consequences of climate change strains relationships, we should expect that agressive nationalistic movements will become even more popular both in developed and developing countries. In short, we'll have a situation that has many parallels with the worst aspects of the 1930s and the type of autocratic leaders that people in so many countries worldwide chose back then.
> (If you live in the West, then you are likely over consuming.)
Is there any data on the spread of average vs median? From my personal experience, it seems that there are two peaks: one group of people are consuming far above the average while another is far below it (e.g. some travel by plane internationally or intercontinentally two or three times a year, others maybe once every three or five years). If you nag those below the average how they need to stop over-consuming, you'll likely yield nothing but confusion that might turn to anger and fundamental opposition if you continue.
>Not doing something because "you'll be dead before it happens" is pure selfishness.
What are you doing to deal with the sun expanding and consuming the Earth?
>If you live in the West, then you are likely over consuming.
What a weird normative statement for something where there is no agreed upon bar. What is an acceptable amount of "consuming" in your mind? Does it align with a poor rural Chinese resident's view?
The part about divers crying into masks hit home. It was on my bucket list to dive in the Great Barrier Reef but it’s now been declared dead. 95% of my diving has been in the last 25% of my diving career because I know I have a limited time.
Since the BBC is now officially a climate alarmist organization, I think one can be sure that this report is as alarmist as one can be without blatantly disregarding easily verifiable facts.
(The BBC report is summarizing a report from the Australian government, and unless it's just lying its level of alarmism will pretty much track those of that report itself. So whether the BBC is "officially a climate alarmist organization", whatever that means, matters less than whether the Australian government is one. Regardless, it would be nice to know what you mean.)
Even when reporting on a report, it's possible to emphasize certain aspects, or misleadingly paraphrase its conclusions. I haven't looked at the original report to tell whether that has happened here.
OK, I read it. I don't see anything there that to me seems to justify calling them "officially a climate alarmist organization". Could you elaborate on what exactly about their position you're describing by those words?
Well, for instance, it says that the BBC has an official position that "there is very high confidence that there will be more extreme events – floods, droughts, heatwaves etc." (Presumably, by "more", they mean an increase of substantial importance, not, say, 5%.) This seems more alarmist than the scientific consensus.
Regarding the consensus, they say "The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC’s position". Here, you have to read between the lines. Do you think that this means they will "de-platform" people who are more alarmist than the IPCC? I doubt it. In that respect, it's always, "the latest research, too recent for the last IPCC report, shows that it's worse than we thought...".
It looks to me as if the comment about "extreme events" is an illustrative example rather than a specific statement of BBC policy. Which is just as well, because I agree that it seems to go beyond current consensus.
The BBC is not proposing to "de-platform" everyone less alarmist than the IPCC so no, I wouldn't expect them to de-platform everyone more alarmist than the IPCC either. Here are some things they do say:
> As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate. Although there are those who disagree with the IPCC’s position, very few of them now go so far as to deny that climate change is happening. To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage
and
> There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates. These may include, for instance, debating the speed and intensity of what will happen in the future, or what policies government should adopt.
all of which seems to allow for a considerable degree of variation away from the IPCC's position before anything like "de-platforming" is on the table.
(I'd still like to know what exactly "officially a climate alarmist organization" means. By "climate alarmist", do you mean the same as "believing that climate change is real", or something else?)
It's not declared dead, but some (myself included) believe it has most likely crossed a tipping point and will be dead in the lifespan of the next generation or two.
You know, there was this guy that made a fool of Christianity when he predicted Jesus would return in 2011. When nothing happened, he said oops and adjusted the date. (People fortunately paid much less attention to him then.)
Kinda getting tired of hearing "the sky is falling" all the time from environmental folks. When you hear "the world is ending next year, it's gonna be too late" every single year, it seems like a thinly veiled push for suckers who want to make campaign donations and bad laws.
Ironic that the author makes this exact point, and then doubles down on it.
We have pretty good evidence to suggest that "bad shit" will probably happen eventually as a result of anthropogenic climate change. How bad, and how far into the future? Depends on the model.
The problem was, as you point out, that setting arbitrary deadlines led to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario. That doesn't invalidate the science indicating that the bad shit will start to happen eventually.
Climate change doesn't work like the Second Coming. It's not a catastrophe until a cat 5++ hurricane hits your city, and then it is. It's not evenly distributed, it does not happen all at once everywhere.
How does a guy making a prediction make a fool of Christianity? That's like saying if I read a science textbook and then incorrectly predict flying cars by 2020, that I have made a fool of science.
Jesus Himself said: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. ... Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come. But understand this: If the homeowner had known in which watch of the night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into." (Matthew 24:36-43)
You do realize you're talking about Christianity here, right? As in, people who worship a homeless man who was rejected by his own people, tortured, spat upon, and nailed to a cross beside common thieves. He died pitifully on that cross, naked and exposed. And you are saying that what gives cause to mock Christianity is ... some dude making idle predictions 2,000 years later???
"You will be hated by everyone on account of My name, but the one who perseveres to the end will be saved." (Matthew 10:22)
> The only rational path is a virtuous cycle of better politicians enacting better policies and promoting better public understanding of climate change. But as of today, there is no sign the world is moving in that direction.
Suppose my politicians fight the good fight and we enact the necessary policies. What about the other countries, especially those that aren't as well off?
A well off industrialized nation making progress on energy and pollution reduction would a) demonstrate what things works, and b) provide investment dollars into those technologies, which _usually_ results in optimizations and lowering of costs ... so even if those "other countries" don't follow immediately, their adoption could be enabled by earlier adoption by us
I recommend the title be changed to the actual story title or something actually similar. The article is about how setting deadlines for action on climate change came from more of an advocacy perspective rather than scientific, which had an effect opposite what was intended.
Would sure be nice if we spent those war trillions to solve the real problem. Unfortunately most people seem to have discovered climate change in November 2016.
Good that they did. Better to see more focus on solutions. It would be great and exciting to work on mass scale solutions and government can easily create laws to incent it
What are the implications of 'irreversible'? Practically irreversible? Cannot be reversed naturally? If we run out of ice, what's to say cooling down the planet by halting carbon production won't recreate the ice caps?
The implications of 'irreversible' are that it's going to become much more difficult to reverse in the "short term" (less than hundreds of years) as after the various tipping points reversing would involve not only to cancel/compensate for our emissions, but also to overcome the much larger positive feedback loops e.g. methane released by melting permafrost, increased solar absorbtion/heating after the reflective icecaps melt, etc.
It's not technically irreversible, however, the point is that however expensive and difficult prevention might seem, reversing it after the temperature increase is going to be much, much more expensive and difficult. And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc.
These feedback loops are in total larger than our emissions, so once we hit them in the coming decades, the global warming would continue increasing for at least a few centuries even if all humans would be dead and make zero emissions.
Hitting zero emissions now (which IMHO is unrealistic) would stop global warming at something like +2C level. Hitting zero emissions in 2050 will still mean a runaway global warming, and fixing that would require some effects that go way beyond zero emissions e.g. large scale carbon sequestration (effectively negative emissions), geoengineering sci-fi or something like that. In 1980 it would have been sufficient to "just" reduce the growth.
You will find that predictions of climate change have been 100% false. Nobody has a crystal ball and nobody can predict what will happen in the future. So lets look into the past.
About 20,000 years ago the earth was 10 celcius colder. For the last 20,000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily.
About 100,000 years ago the world was 5celcius warmer than today.
If you look at the black/red dots from the IPCC predictions. All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen. Overall on the graph what's happening is that we are more or less exactly flat.
Temperature on earth frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature.
So what happened to life on earth when it was 5+ celcius warmer? It was fantastic for life. Frozen wastelands like Canada and Russia thawed and became extremely livable. People moved into these northern places.
> predictions of climate change have been 100% false
That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. Here's one example. In 1982, some of Exxon's scientists wrote a memo for their management containing a graph (figure 3, page 7, of http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-ma...) saying that by 2020 CO2 levels would be in roughly the range 400..430 ppm and global mean temperature would be up by roughly 1..1.3 degrees C compared to 1960. Here we are in 2020 and the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?
> For the last 20,2000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily
What the graph you yourself linked to shows is something very different. There are wild oscillations in the Pleistocene (i.e., before 20k years ago), ending up with temperatures much colder than the present. Then a rapid increase from 20k to 10k years ago. Then near-flat temperatures for the last 10k years. And -- though it's over so short a period that it's hard to see on that graph -- an extremely rapid increase over the last ~50 years.
> All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen
> look at those spikes ... frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature
You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?
> it was fantastic for life
Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...
> The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14 celsius warmer and life thrived
... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator). At 100m, things we would lose include: about half of England and Ireland; all of the Netherlands; half of Belgium; most of western France; all of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.
I'm sure life would thrive. The human race would adapt too, no doubt; we're a very adaptable species. But a whole lot of us would have our homes under water, and large regions of what's now the inhabitable world would become inhospitable to human life. E.g., a temperature rise of 14 degrees C turns San Francisco into Death Valley.
>That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. >the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?
I certainly concede that not literally 100% of the predictions will be wrong. In fact I bet I could go predicting and we'll be within similar error margins.
My assertion was more to do with consequence predictions. Sorry for being unclear.
In 2001 the IPCC predicted that wildfires would be out of control because of climate change. In that the increased temperatures would make the summers dryer and make the fires worse. Which is a really bad prediction to start with because smokey the bear is dead because the actual movement to prevent forest fires resulted in the current situation where we have too many trees. Which the IPCC in 2001 did know about fire ecology. They were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Only a few years apart. The climate scientists are predicting days will get longer and shorter at the same time because of climate change. Except in the last 50 years the earth rotation has sped up and slowed down. These are patently false.
The most common thing climate scientists like to do is show only the last 150 years. I provided much much better information showing far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all.
>You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?
The point I was making is that climate change isn't a problem. It's a good thing. The climate does change as I proved. That's not a problem.
>Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...
A couple degrees celcius isn't going to result in any problem to our ridiculous species. We already regularly live in the hottest and coldest places on earth. Winterpeg Manitoba Canada might become habitable soon ...
I'm not sure I'm seeing the wrong predictions about wildfires; it looks to me as if there are two separate things going on.
1. Hotter drier summers make for more and worse wildfires in places like Yellowstone (where a big wildfire in 2012 was the context for that 2012 article). If human activity makes the climate warmer, these will be worse.
2. Increasing agriculture tends overall to lead to fewer fires, for complicated reasons that differ from one environment to another.
The climate is warming, but at the same time the population is growing and many parts of the world are getting richer and more "developed". So you get both #1 and #2 happening.
The IPCC in 2001, and Steven Running in 2012, weren't (so far as I can see) saying anything about #2. Quite possibly they never thought about the impact of increasing population and development on wildfires, which seems fair enough: that's not really their remit. I haven't seen anything to suggest that #2 is wrong. (The 2017 Science article mentioned by Science Daily reiterates that warming climate tends to increase fires; it just says that over the period they studied the effects of human activity have been larger and in the other direction.)
What's the problem here?
> an even more weird prediction
Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.
> far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all
Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".
The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.
I am curious about what you consider "no problems at all".
> I actually don't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to warm the planet 14 celsius warmer
Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.
> the graph I provided shows around 7 Celsius warmer at the 8.5% increase per year rate ... more like 0.85%
Sorry, which graph? I guess you mean the one on the Wikipedia page, which is mostly of (pre-)historical data, with IPCC projections for 2050 and 2100?
What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)
> This should have already happened
Could you be more specific? What exactly did Gore say was going to happen by when, and where did he say it?
I'll be frank: I do not believe that Gore claimed that large fractions of Florida would be underwater by now, and suspect you have been lied to. But I could be wrong!
Here's the best match I can find for that claim. Gore said something (I can't find his exact wording; it seems to have been vague, perhaps deliberately) about a 20ft (~= 6m) rise in sea levels. If there were a rise that big, then the southern part of Florida would look a little like...
>The climate is warming, but at the same time the population is growing and many parts of the world are getting richer and more "developed". So you get both #1 and #2 happening. What's the problem here?
The problem is that they themselves have made predictions which contradict themselves. This is pretty much the status quo for climate change science. They predict everything to happen. When some route happens they claim success.
When you remove these nostradamus folks. You are left with virtually nothing in climate science.
The climate is changing no question, the problem is that the hippies/commies have taken over climate change and are using climate change to propose their political positions as the fix to climate change. Except they have absolutely no basis in their proposals. Go read the "new green deal" and find out why there was unanimous support at crushing it. Yet the presidential candidates are all pushing effectively the same thing in the name of climate change. The new green deal has nothing to do with climate change, it has everything to do with economic inequality.
>Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.
Point I am making is that climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.
>Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".
Actually we do; whether you think geology and archaeology is a science or not I guess would be the decider here. We know during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth. In fact the areas near the equator became more green. Which isn't a surprise, places like the congo or amazon or other places at the equator arent deserts, they are more green than anywhere else.
If we are currently at "4 nuclear bombs a second" of climate change. Obviously implying imminent and immediate death. Then the Eocene which was 14 celcius warmer would have been a desert planet. Protip; it wasnt. What this 4 nuclear bombs a second actually is... is doomsayers. It's climate alarmism that has been ongoing for 30 years. They are saying we are doomed for 30 years and it's no different than the Mayan Calendar folks.
>The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.
Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.
>Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.
How would it be bad for the human race? Even if the climate alarmists are correct(which we know they are not) and it's suddenly mad max desert out there. Humans will live just fine; we are planning to move to far more inhospitable places like mars or space.
>What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)
> they themselves have made predictions that contradict themselves
Some scientists have made predictions that contradict other scientists' predictions. That happens all the time, in all fields. Eventually, with a bit of luck, experimental evidence makes it clear who was right, or someone spots the mistake one of them made. It doesn't mean that the branch of science where it happens is bullshit. (That standard would make everything bullshit. People make mistakes and work with incomplete and imperfect information. No getting around it.)
> climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.
Could be true, though frankly I see much more sign of money-motivated bullshit on the anti-climate-science side. But nothing you've said so far is any evidence to speak of for it, because all you've done is find places where scientists disagree about something. Again, that happens all the time, in every field, and the most negative thing it actually tells us is that human beings are fallible.
> during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth
Sure. But, as I already said, total amount of life is not necessarily what we want to optimize for. If every human being died and was replaced by a million fruit flies and one elephant, that would be an enormous increase in the total number, and the total size, of living things on earth, but I wouldn't regard it as an improvement.
No one is saying that climate change is going to wipe out life on earth. (Well, I dunno, you can find idiots saying pretty much anything, but it's not a common view anywhere that I know of.)
> "4 nuclear bombs a second"
The thing I think you may be missing is that, in the context of weather and climate, nuclear bombs are pretty small. A big hurricane is something like three nuclear bombs per hour (depends on the size of the hurricane and the size of the bombs, of course).
I haven't heard "4 nuclear bombs per second", for what it's worth, and if the back-of-envelope calculation I just did is right the correct figure is more like 5 x 10^-5 nuclear bombs per second. But "nuclear bombs per second" is a stupid measure because our intuitions for how much energy a nuclear bomb puts out are bad in this context.
> Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.
Then perhaps I'm not explaining it clearly. (But, first of all, no, of course I am not saying any non-negligible warming earlier than, say, 1800CE is manmade.) My point is that (1) something could be good for "life on earth" but really bad for the human race, and (2) the state that would result from 14 degrees of warming (or whatever other geologically-inspired figure you might choose) might be entirely survivable, but that doesn't mean the process of getting there in a hurry wouldn't be a big disaster.
(You could live in many other places besides the house you currently live in. But if I knocked it down, it would be a big deal for you.)
> The report [...] literally explains itself. [...] RCP8.5
It does, indeed, explain itself, and RCP8.5 does not mean anything like "8.5% per year". The "8.5" in RCP8.5 means that radiative forcing reaches 8.5 W/m^2 by the year 2100. It has nothing whatever to do with 8.5% of anything or with anything per year.
There is no possible way we could "now have the actual data", because (to repeat) the 8.5 in RCP8.5 is defined by a state of affairs in the year 2100, and it's still only 2019.
Whoever or whatever told you that RCP8.5 means an 8.5% increase of something per year and that we're only at 0.85% was lying to you. Sorry to be so blunt, but I don't think there's any alternative.
Incidentally, RCP8.5 isn't a prediction, it's one of several scenarios used by...
No matter how you put it, people will find tendentious excuses for ignoring the issue, and when they are no longer tenable, they will switch to another, without any concern as to whether it is consistent with their previous position.
>Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?
No.
I also see no evidence in the article it has hurt attitudes either way. In fact, polls show general concern about climate change. Doing something is another matter[0], but people are mindful of it. Nonetheless, the article seems to be more about the author's personal feelings than whether it influenced the movement around it either way.
I was alive in the 1970s when folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead form overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000. Those self-same folks told us this century the arctic will be completely ice free by 2013. In the 1980s, others predicted our total demise due to acid rain and ozone depletion.
Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed.
We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.
On the other hand, these doomsayers also caused public outcry that changed a few things.
We can never know if these changes are the reason doom didn't happen, or because the prospects were imaginary.
Anyway, I believe that it'll be very hard to annihilate humanity let alone the planet, but it'll be very easy to lower the living standards slowly enough that we won't notice the reasons for it.
If you plan to have children, I think it's something you should thinks of.
Ofcourse, I'd prefer a rational discussion regarding the issues. But the powers at be, which usually have what to lose, usually steer the debate to be anti rational. And then you find yourself in a position where you must exaggerate in order to gain attention to your cause. It's a tragedy...
Club of Rome predictions are pretty much spot on. It's been re-evaluated two or three times recently and each time has held up an amazingly accurate picture of what has happened since. See here for the graphs filled in the intervening years[1]. I don't recall any ice predictions from Club of Rome - do you have a link?
In the 1980s the world actually came together to phase out CFCs, and fit sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations. Interestingly the builders of Battersea were the first to fit these - in 1925. They took a while to catch on.
The ozone hole has finally stopped increasing only this decade. It's trending to resolve in 50 more years, if and only if, the recent discovery of CFC use in China doesn't grow. So a century to probably solve the man-made problem.
Except the people predicting climate change isn’t the club of Rome, it’s an entire scientific community, who have been double, triple, and quadruple checking every measurement and assumption for 50 years. This is not some hysterical group of panicked hippies. We’re talking about broad consensus among all the most educated and intelligent members of our civilization. Please show a little respect and listen to them.
You are missing the fact that the salesmen of climate change have been politicians, and politicians lie, and politicians propose political solutions, they want more and more of my limited money, and browbeat people who already don’t like or trust them, and frankly that is a bad combination of tactics if the solution is needed that badly across the broad spectrum of the population.
If climate change stops being sold as a one sided political problem with one sided political solutions, you may see momentum on it, but speaking as a conservative, when your pitch men and women are Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Cortez, amongst others, people I don’t trust and disagree with already, people who have tried framing me as a stupid person who doesn’t get it, you have already lost me entirely on the pitch before it left their mouths.
Change the salesman and the tactic, because the current one doesn’t work, and it is doomed to failure because of that.
The conservatives will never support addressing climate change honestly, because they are getting too much money from the fossil fuel industries. I mean honestly, that’s like saying, I won’t believe that we are spending too much money on the military until I hear it from Northrop Grumman. So you’re going to be waiting a long time if that’s what you’re waiting for. None of those people care at all about you or your kids or the worlds future. Not one single bit.
You are literally listening to the people who have the greatest conflict of interest on the subject and the least competence in it. It’s no wonder you’re confused.
Perhaps instead of assuming a position that he didn't actually state and calling him "confused" you could have addressed his larger point that the vocal proponents of climate action alienate large portions of the population by painting them as ignorant or stupid instead of attempting to engage with them.
No, his central point was that he would never listen to anyone on the issue that didn’t have specific ideological positions, which turn out to be the least likely people in the world to accurately represent the science due to blatant conflicts of interest. It’s in impossible request.
To my knowledge the only major political party anywhere in the world to deny the science of anthropogenic climate change is the Republican Party in the United States, and those are the only people he will listen to. It’s an absurd situation.
Absolutely this, the fight for climate change was lost 20 years ago when Al Gore made it one of his campaign goals. Things like CO2 climate change or net neutrality that 90% of the population had absolutely no opinion previously on are best resolved in the background because as soon as a politician tells people what opinion they should have, 50% of them are going to take the opposite side simply because of the letter next to their name. Politicizing anything is a guaranteed way to ensure it will be in a substandard limbo forever.
Yes, and they are repeatedly wrong in their predictions. We can't accurately forecast the weather a few days out. All our great hurricane model forecasts are off and that's typically a day or two out in the future. There are just far too many variables at play that we don't even know about for us to accurately forecast anything climate related that far into the future.
You don’t have to be able to predict weather to predict climate.
Think of it this way: it’s impossible due to quantum uncertainty to predict the path of a single particle in a gas. Yet out of the chaos, you can still draw out nice mathematical rules like the ideal gas law PV=nRT
I agree. My issue is the climate predictions that we do have over the last 50 years have been grossly inaccurate. We don't have any mathematical proofs for climate at this point like ideal gas law. But yet that is not how it is presented to the public.
I think you have it wrong. Gravity and momentum are very well understood, but a double pendulum or three body problem is chaotic such that prediction past a certain point is useless.
So is the climate well behaved like the ideal gas law, or are there complicated sources of feedback like clouds, plant growth, and albedo which make it chaotic? There are quasi-periodic alternations between the fairly cold periods of the current ice age and the interstitial we're now in, so you should recognize it's substantially more complicated than just averaging the speeds of all the molecules.
I'm all for a cleaner better world, but I'll never believe someone who says they can usefully predict a chaotic system.
> folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead from overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000
Some of the actual predictions from the CoR's "Limits to Growth", according to the Wikipedia page about that document:
> Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity".
(2072 is quite a long time after 2000. I wonder whether it's a typo for 2027, given what follows, but that too is a long time after 2000.)
> Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline
Those are all well after 2020. (The first of them doesn't seem like it's correct, thankfully. I suspect the others are some way off, too. But I'm not arguing that the CoR were right, only that they didn't say what you say they said.)
Really like that last paragraph, toally agree. I'm not sure I agree about the clear progress on reduction of greenhouse gases thou. Expanding consumerism and population in a carbon economy would seem to preclude this. Can you explain your thinking?
Wouldn't it be nice it it were something as simple as setting a timeline. The reality is, it's a combination of two things (mainly):
1) We can't afford to undermind the economy. That is, any plan that cuts back on consumption (even in the short term) is going to hurt an already hurting economy[1]. However, there aren't any "leader(s)" who want to be pinned with such things so the buck gets passed.
2) Along the same lines, we've convenience'd ourselves into a corner. At this point, sacrifices (in the context of status quo lifestyles / cultural expectations) need to be made; habits needed to be changed. But again, there's no leader willing to disrupt that which needs to be disrupted. We talk a good game when it comes to wanting change but then once the call comes in, we whine. "Leaders" that cause people to whine don't get elected / re-elected. It used to be, "at war" mean the POTUS (in the USA) had carte blanche to ask for help and sacrifice. Now we live in a world where "at war" means to keep the masses distracted by keeping up with the Kardashians.
[1] Not to get off topic (but to prove my point); there's a reason fracking hocket-stick'ed under the previous POTUS. That reason is, the Fed had shot it wad and keeping the cost of fuel down is a proxy for economic stimulation (without having to say so). Ultimately, we tossed Mother Nature under the bus to keep the economy from going tits-up. If that's what "green presidents" can get away with, then that doesn't exactly raise the bar for the rest.
To clarify: It's not __my__ argument. I'm simply saying that the powers that be are maintaining the status quo because its what keeps them in power.
I'd like to add, I put "leader" in quotes but what should be done is something real leaders do. They're willing and able. Instead, we have people in charge who are no leaders, and thus we don't get leader-esque action from them. Essentially, the spineless leading the mindless.
We can push the economy a bit. We can try to replace the more emission-intensive aspects of it. But we cannot do it too hard - because if we break the economy, that's quite literally game over. After humanity emerges from ensuing wars, famines and starvation, the survivors will be left stuck with medieval-era technology on a thoroughly broken planet.
I have this feeling that people forget that economy isn't just zeroes on the accounts of bank executives; it's the food on the table of everyone, it's the medicine and the running water, and everything that keeps civilization together.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, and even more so, let's not replace the bathwater with gasoline and set it on fire.
Sure, but the idea that it's untouchable is absurd.
Everything changes. The economy was different last year, in 2010, in 1950 and so on.
The country I grew up in is very different to the one that exists today.
Change is constant. No-one is talking about burning it down, the idea is more that the exceptional growth of the past few decades has likely overshot what is sustainable.
" the idea is more that the exceptional growth of the past few decades has likely overshot what is sustainable."
So you're running for office?, what's your tagline: "Vote for me, because they got it wrong. I'll fix the economy so that relative to expectations it underperforms like I believe it should."?
Wall Street with not donate to your campaign. No one will vote for you.
I'm not disagreeing with you. Simply pointing out We The People have a history of not supporting such things.
I'm not saying it's untouchable, just that it needs to be handled with care.
Think of it as doing live repair on a running engine of your airplane, mid-flight. You can do it if you're careful, but if you break it, we all die, and the airplane isn't going to fly anywhere anytime soon.
In particular, ideas like "we need to halt economic growth ASAP" I sometimes see in climate change threads are essentially suicidal.
My takeaway is different: we are beyond the tipping point. Even if we technically would not, our inability to make good decisions as a group dooms us. The good strategy is to prepare to live through the extinction event, and use that as the proof of need for better group decisions (a.k.a. politics). We do have the scientific knowledge to design a much better system, but the same knowledge hints that the momentums of the system, set by the current motivational structure would not allow a change for better without a collapse.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadMight not work on anti-vaxxers but it has shut down more than one stupid conversation about Y2K.
Those writing apocalyptic scare stories were poorly informed and deliberately trying to activate people’s base fears. AND there was a huge effort by very smart folks to avert it. No conflict.
But as a one-off thing it isn't really a big issue to a government, civilization or even an industry. At that level what does it matter if a few weeks are spent unnecessarily, once? Governments burn more resources than that on a slow news day.
People have viewed climate change as a political issue and its not. It’s a scientific issue. It’s the astroid hurtling toward earth in the movie Armageddon or the aliens in Independence Day. The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.
Let this sink in: We are literally adding half the renewables we need just to keep the emissions curve flat. We probably need to go 4X faster to bend the curve downwards on emissions.
Can engineers solve that? They are a piece of the puzzle, but their most fundamental innovations will take years to kick in. We need policy, we need individual behavioral changes, we need everything we can get.
The only conclusion that can be made from these IPCC projections is that we will not avoid a 2C increase because there's no chance that people would be willing to "pay the price" to achieve that.
To get close to zero emissions you'd also need to:
1) replace or remove all non-electric vehicles worldwide. That third world farmer with a thirty year old tractor who can't possibly afford to replace it with anything, much less with something new? That twenty year old pickup truck for a small storeowner? All those vehicles would have to stop being used. They would have to be pried out of their hands long before they become useless, meaningfully harming their livelihood (as replacements won't be affordable to them - they can't buy a ten-year old used truck/tractor because that's also fossil fuel based), which doesn't seem plausible without violence.
1a) Also, replace almost all ships worldwide.
1b) Also, replace all the fossil fuel based house heating systems. Poor regions without a centralised supply heating their homes with firewood? You're not allowed to burn that anymore, you need to build infrastructure to supply you with nuclear electricity.
2) Stop concrete production unless you also sequester enough carbon to compensate. That pretty much means destroying large parts of construction industry by making it prohibitively expensive, especially in poorer countries.
2a) Also, revamp all worldwide steel production.
3) Have everyone worldwide stop eating beef.
These three things won't be sufficient, but are required to even approach zero emissions. Does it seem plausible to suceed in somehow forcing everyone worldwide to implement such policies within a decade?
So governments should better finance mitigations for the consequences of climate change.
Of course, people will eventually be forced to finance mitigations or suffer the consequences unmitigated - but that's not now, that's later. Prevention is likely to be much cheaper and more effective, but as the people aren't willing to pony up the enormous resources for prevention, well, then they'll pony up enormous resources (or take enormous suffering) when the time comes. But apparently not much earlier.
And the fact that causes and effects aren't equally distributed doesn't mean that countries (both governments and people) who suffer less will be willing to finance mitigations for the countries who bear the worst of the consequences.
25% is not a small part at all and as for the 7.5 years reactor construct/expensive claim, i'm afraid you need to update you knowledge about small scale/modular nuclear reactors, this is not the 60s-70s.
If the US, which is the largest emitter per capita, and the EU, and the other first world countries can get to zero emissions while maintaining a good standard of living, that at least can provide a longer term template for the developing countries that gets is to some stable level, even if it is above 2C.
We can tell developing countries that they have 50 years where they can emit at current first world per capita levels while they raise their standard of living, but then they have to go to zero like the first world has, or they will be subject to sanctions, high carbon tariffs on their products, and things like that. Throw in good aid packages to help them develop and build their zero emissions infrastructure.
I like the sentiment, and we're always going to need newer, better tech. Part of it will be engineering, but part of if also has to be pure science, which I suspect won't be profitable enough for the private industry to pursue. Government needs to fund such efforts. I think this applies generally (not just to climate).
Appealing to government isn't just about trying to go from no help to some help. It's also about getting them to stop doing harm. The Guardian claims that the US subsidises the fossil-fuel industry to the tune of $20B each year.
As long as politicians continue to play their games, engineers won't be able to accomplish anything. Solving this problem requires a widespread increase in enlightenment, and as far as I can tell a vast majority of the population thinks that only applies to people of the other political/religious persuasion, but it really applies to all of us.
For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society--think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclear energy. This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.
In fact, James Hansen, NASA scientist and head of the Goddard Institute, got out of the science to focus specifically on the politics. He urges people to join the Citizens Climate Lobby, which has lobbied for carbon pricing legislation for over a decade now: the Energy Innovation Act has bipartisan support in Congress right now (https://energyinnovationact.org/). Many other scientists are involved in the politics these day as well (Katherine Hayhoe [atmospheric scientist], Michael Mann [climatologist]).
You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or India's populations from expanding to modern western consumerism.
Of course we can't instantly solve global carbon emissions. But we can do our (very large) part here in the U.S. By shifting where our dollars go. By moving from carbon to renewable sources, we'll drop the price of renewables, helping small economies afford to do the same.
Progress is virtually always incremental. We need to begin by stopping dragging our feet.
The “Green New Deal” is a great example. A jobs program obviously won’t do anything to seriously address climate change. Worse, it wastes money and political capital on things that could have more utility. If you spent that money on nuclear energy research and gave it away to developing nations, then you could really move the needle.
If the development of the developing world is a problem, you can't expect the solution to come from developing world. On our end, like in the example of the ship's crew, most people aren't able to contribute to a proper solution - they lack the necessary skills and opportunities. Unfortunately (in this case), we live in free market democracies, which means there isn't a body that can reallocate huge amount of resources to retraining and retooling towards mitigating climate change. The market doesn't care, so we have to do things the hard way - we have to force our governments to force the market to start allocating resources, so that engineers and scientists and logisticians can deal with the problem directly.
We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.
And then donate some of the tech and resources, too. By virtue of being first, we've cut out the developing nations from the most direct path to improving their living conditions. We do, IMO, have a responsibility to help them leapfrog the "fossil fuel" part of that path.
(Though honestly, we can revisit that point later. First, let's get to zero emissions ourselves.)
Real world example of path dependence: Supreme Court stops recount in FL --> GWB elected --> Pulling out of Kyoto protocols, starting wars --> [...] Trump elected, partially due to government mistrust seeded in GWB era--> even worse climate change policies
If the tax is small enough to be affordable by these Nigerians, it won't have the required effect on climate.
If the tax is large enough to prevent 400m Nigerians from obtaining a better standard of living that they rightly desire, then they won't agree to it - and there's no way to force them to comply (not that it would be right to force them IMHO) other than a bloody war.
Billions of people in developing countries have justifiable, understandable, fair interests in a reasonable standard of living, achieving which unavoidably (at least in short term) involves increasing emissions, not decreasing them.
Addressing climate change is an abstract concept and for most people, like 80% of the population they can't grasp the abstract, so it all feels like a scam, one big flea circus. "No, no, the fleas are there you just can't see them, just trust me."
Unless someone can invent a way to capture and sequester greenhouse gases from the upper atmosphere to the tune of 50.9 gigatonnes per year I really don't see humanity making any progress, slowing growth isn't helping.
On the bright side, one US party doesn't own that issue. There are proponents and detractors on both sides.
I kind of wish we were facing a killer asteroid or alien invasion instead of climate change, because the former two would be much easier to deal with. What's killing us with climate is the level of global coordination it requires.
"No individual can be expected singlehandedly to solve this problem. It's going to require national action. And by the way -- this is why we invented government. It's for dealing with issues that are too big for each of us to do on our own."
This is a humanity scale problem and government, by way of politicians and lawyers, and yes engineers, is how we deal with humanity scale problems.
Scientists and engineers put us on the moon, but it was government that directed and enabled them to do so.
Rather: the government was arguably the only institution that could spend a sufficient amount of money for this mission. If there had existed another insitution with similar financial backing that was willing to finance such a mission: I doubt that the government would have been necessary.
We might be left with no choice but to experiment with a technological “hail mary” — but so far, none are very attractive.
Two decades ago we could have solved the problem at a relatively low cost compared to what we’ll pay now, or what we’ll pay if we do nothing. Every year it gets more expensive.
It’s like the old adage, fitting to this discussion: the best time to plant a tree is five years ago. The next best time is today.
This is utterly false. Two decades ago we could have solved the problem if economic growth in the rest of the world stopped. (And maybe not even then.) It was never a solution.
We need to move beyond the scare tactic that it’s a choice between the economy and solving climate change. We already solved this on a small scale with the ozone layer.
So stop the economic growth in the rest of the world to save the climate.
Instead, IMO we should double-down on clean tech and then give it away for free, or even with subsidies attached, to the developing world. This way they get to develop even faster, while reducing their contribution to climate issues.
I keep trying to focus on the fact the process is already starting now and WILL affect them in their lifetimes ... hurricanes, fires, wierd storms, droughts ...
How are we? We breathe cleaner air and use more petroleum than 1970.
I will be 55 in 2050, and I bet my entire fortune that the world will be better then.
Just because you can pick two things from the past that didn't turn out as expected doesn't mean the next potential danger isn't valid. Now, maybe we come up with some clever CO2 scrubbing technology and we start engineering the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean the danger doesn't need to be addressed. There was a lot of work that went into finding new ways to get oil and regulation to improve the air. Without acknowledging the problem we could have had those catastrophes.
Let natural selection do its job.
Correct, perhaps those issuing the warnings should accept the unfortunate reality that this is how average people behave and adjust their messaging. Rather than repetitive warning after warning, why not pool resources and focus on building and improving one single large educational resource that tells the whole story (including full disclosure of the uncertain and imperfect aspects, rather than having people learn of those in conspiracy forums, in order to build trust) from a variety of angles so it is approachable by people from all different intelligence and economic levels?
More of the same isn't going to work.
The layman listening to how this is covered could very easily come to the exact opposite conclusion ("97% of scientists....!!"), and much of the armchair experts seem to behave as if there was.
But this is my point: why isn't there something akin to a centralized Science Propaganda Council where the very best science on the matter is agreed upon by the experts, and open to criticism by those who disagree? Isn't this how any large project would be organized (well, the "central" part of it if not the openness to criticism)? Does having a bunch of splintered groups arguing inconsistent viewpoints seem like the optimal approach to something that may very well be an existential threat to life as we know it on the planet?
> Scientists publish studies and sometimes strongly worded letters; journalists and authors pick it up and twist into something that (then) sells publications / (now) attracts eyeballs to advertisements; people mishear these reports further, freak out and tell to each other (or, today, post on social media).
Bingo. And intelligent people sincerely wonder why this isn't having success. The situation is so utterly absurd to me, it boggles my mind that no one else seems to notice any imperfections in our current approach (and this applies to all the issues facing the world, not just this one).
I personally hope that the world will be better in in 2050, but the only way for that to come true is in my eyes very systematic action to go reneweable across the bord.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#Legacy
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18092015/exxon-confirmed-...
So I actually don't think the "doom and gloom" is causing people not to act, if anything the younger generation are acting on that message. (Fridays for Future, etc.) Instead what is delaying action, in my mind, is that the West's middle class is disappearing and now with climate change demanding a further reduction of consumption it is casuing people to try to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle.
If any proposed solution (to climate change or anything else) relies on huge numbers of people not exhibiting pure selfishness, then it's not a solution but wishful thinking disconnected from reality. We have a good idea on how large groups of homo sapiens function. Selfishness is unavoidable. There will be lots of great unselfish, heroic, altruistic exceptions, but the mass behavior will still be overwhelmingly selfish in aggregate.
People trying "to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle" is a very important factor that needs to be taken into account for any calls to action. This is what's happening already and this will be happening - and I'm not pointing out this as something that "needs" to change; it kind of does, but it doesn't matter if it "needs" to change because it will not change, I'm pointing it out as something that's inevitable, people will try to hold on tight to unsustainable lifestyles (and fight to gain unsustainable lifestyles that they never had but others did) and any proposed solution needs to work despite that trend in order to be plausible and feasible.
This is what concerns me, calls to action that require our better nature to override our immediate self-interest require thoughtful and inspired leadership.
We have a real leadership vacuum right now: Boris and Donald, lightweight leaders in many countries (my own country, Canada, included), rise of Dictators and Fascists. We are not solving this problem with this team.
As the effects of climate change become apparent and causes economic strain either due to attempts to prevent climate change or the consequences of not preventing it, well, in times like these that's the exact type of team that people will vote for.
And even more, as the global 'tragedy of commons' scenario of splitting the burden of mitigating climate change becomes even harsher, and the very unequal burden of consequences of climate change strains relationships, we should expect that agressive nationalistic movements will become even more popular both in developed and developing countries. In short, we'll have a situation that has many parallels with the worst aspects of the 1930s and the type of autocratic leaders that people in so many countries worldwide chose back then.
Is there any data on the spread of average vs median? From my personal experience, it seems that there are two peaks: one group of people are consuming far above the average while another is far below it (e.g. some travel by plane internationally or intercontinentally two or three times a year, others maybe once every three or five years). If you nag those below the average how they need to stop over-consuming, you'll likely yield nothing but confusion that might turn to anger and fundamental opposition if you continue.
What are you doing to deal with the sun expanding and consuming the Earth?
>If you live in the West, then you are likely over consuming.
What a weird normative statement for something where there is no agreed upon bar. What is an acceptable amount of "consuming" in your mind? Does it align with a poor rural Chinese resident's view?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49520949?SThisFB
Since the BBC is now officially a climate alarmist organization, I think one can be sure that this report is as alarmist as one can be without blatantly disregarding easily verifiable facts.
What exactly does that mean?
(The BBC report is summarizing a report from the Australian government, and unless it's just lying its level of alarmism will pretty much track those of that report itself. So whether the BBC is "officially a climate alarmist organization", whatever that means, matters less than whether the Australian government is one. Regardless, it would be nice to know what you mean.)
Even when reporting on a report, it's possible to emphasize certain aspects, or misleadingly paraphrase its conclusions. I haven't looked at the original report to tell whether that has happened here.
Regarding the consensus, they say "The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC’s position". Here, you have to read between the lines. Do you think that this means they will "de-platform" people who are more alarmist than the IPCC? I doubt it. In that respect, it's always, "the latest research, too recent for the last IPCC report, shows that it's worse than we thought...".
The BBC is not proposing to "de-platform" everyone less alarmist than the IPCC so no, I wouldn't expect them to de-platform everyone more alarmist than the IPCC either. Here are some things they do say:
> As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate. Although there are those who disagree with the IPCC’s position, very few of them now go so far as to deny that climate change is happening. To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage
and
> There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates. These may include, for instance, debating the speed and intensity of what will happen in the future, or what policies government should adopt.
all of which seems to allow for a considerable degree of variation away from the IPCC's position before anything like "de-platforming" is on the table.
(I'd still like to know what exactly "officially a climate alarmist organization" means. By "climate alarmist", do you mean the same as "believing that climate change is real", or something else?)
Kinda getting tired of hearing "the sky is falling" all the time from environmental folks. When you hear "the world is ending next year, it's gonna be too late" every single year, it seems like a thinly veiled push for suckers who want to make campaign donations and bad laws.
Ironic that the author makes this exact point, and then doubles down on it.
We have pretty good evidence to suggest that "bad shit" will probably happen eventually as a result of anthropogenic climate change. How bad, and how far into the future? Depends on the model.
The problem was, as you point out, that setting arbitrary deadlines led to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario. That doesn't invalidate the science indicating that the bad shit will start to happen eventually.
Jesus Himself said: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. ... Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come. But understand this: If the homeowner had known in which watch of the night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into." (Matthew 24:36-43)
You do realize you're talking about Christianity here, right? As in, people who worship a homeless man who was rejected by his own people, tortured, spat upon, and nailed to a cross beside common thieves. He died pitifully on that cross, naked and exposed. And you are saying that what gives cause to mock Christianity is ... some dude making idle predictions 2,000 years later???
"You will be hated by everyone on account of My name, but the one who perseveres to the end will be saved." (Matthew 10:22)
Suppose my politicians fight the good fight and we enact the necessary policies. What about the other countries, especially those that aren't as well off?
Good that they did. Better to see more focus on solutions. It would be great and exciting to work on mass scale solutions and government can easily create laws to incent it
It's not technically irreversible, however, the point is that however expensive and difficult prevention might seem, reversing it after the temperature increase is going to be much, much more expensive and difficult. And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc.
If the population reduces, the emission of greenhouse gases decrease which helps to reverse the effect of climate change.
Hitting zero emissions now (which IMHO is unrealistic) would stop global warming at something like +2C level. Hitting zero emissions in 2050 will still mean a runaway global warming, and fixing that would require some effects that go way beyond zero emissions e.g. large scale carbon sequestration (effectively negative emissions), geoengineering sci-fi or something like that. In 1980 it would have been sufficient to "just" reduce the growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
About 20,000 years ago the earth was 10 celcius colder. For the last 20,000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily.
About 100,000 years ago the world was 5celcius warmer than today.
If you look at the black/red dots from the IPCC predictions. All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen. Overall on the graph what's happening is that we are more or less exactly flat.
However look at those spikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta...
Temperature on earth frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature.
So what happened to life on earth when it was 5+ celcius warmer? It was fantastic for life. Frozen wastelands like Canada and Russia thawed and became extremely livable. People moved into these northern places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene
The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14celcius warmer and life thrived better than no other time in history.
That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. Here's one example. In 1982, some of Exxon's scientists wrote a memo for their management containing a graph (figure 3, page 7, of http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-ma...) saying that by 2020 CO2 levels would be in roughly the range 400..430 ppm and global mean temperature would be up by roughly 1..1.3 degrees C compared to 1960. Here we are in 2020 and the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?
> For the last 20,2000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily
What the graph you yourself linked to shows is something very different. There are wild oscillations in the Pleistocene (i.e., before 20k years ago), ending up with temperatures much colder than the present. Then a rapid increase from 20k to 10k years ago. Then near-flat temperatures for the last 10k years. And -- though it's over so short a period that it's hard to see on that graph -- an extremely rapid increase over the last ~50 years.
> All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen
How? By whom?
> we are more or less exactly flat
This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".
> look at those spikes ... frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature
You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?
> it was fantastic for life
Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...
> The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14 celsius warmer and life thrived
... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator). At 100m, things we would lose include: about half of England and Ireland; all of the Netherlands; half of Belgium; most of western France; all of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.
I'm sure life would thrive. The human race would adapt too, no doubt; we're a very adaptable species. But a whole lot of us would have our homes under water, and large regions of what's now the inhabitable world would become inhospitable to human life. E.g., a temperature rise of 14 degrees C turns San Francisco into Death Valley.
I certainly concede that not literally 100% of the predictions will be wrong. In fact I bet I could go predicting and we'll be within similar error margins.
My assertion was more to do with consequence predictions. Sorry for being unclear.
In 2001 the IPCC predicted that wildfires would be out of control because of climate change. In that the increased temperatures would make the summers dryer and make the fires worse. Which is a really bad prediction to start with because smokey the bear is dead because the actual movement to prevent forest fires resulted in the current situation where we have too many trees. Which the IPCC in 2001 did know about fire ecology. They were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In 2012 they reiterated this flawed prediction: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120703/climate-change-s...
Except they are wrong: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629175502.h... Fires declined 24% in their prediction period. Not only did they cheat in their predictions, they were still wrong.
How about an even more wierd prediction:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11555-global-warming-...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/11/climate-chan...
Only a few years apart. The climate scientists are predicting days will get longer and shorter at the same time because of climate change. Except in the last 50 years the earth rotation has sped up and slowed down. These are patently false.
>This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".
The most common thing climate scientists like to do is show only the last 150 years. I provided much much better information showing far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all.
>You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?
The point I was making is that climate change isn't a problem. It's a good thing. The climate does change as I proved. That's not a problem.
>Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...
A couple degrees celcius isn't going to result in any problem to our ridiculous species. We already regularly live in the hottest and coldest places on earth. Winterpeg Manitoba Canada might become habitable soon ...
1. Hotter drier summers make for more and worse wildfires in places like Yellowstone (where a big wildfire in 2012 was the context for that 2012 article). If human activity makes the climate warmer, these will be worse.
2. Increasing agriculture tends overall to lead to fewer fires, for complicated reasons that differ from one environment to another.
The climate is warming, but at the same time the population is growing and many parts of the world are getting richer and more "developed". So you get both #1 and #2 happening.
The IPCC in 2001, and Steven Running in 2012, weren't (so far as I can see) saying anything about #2. Quite possibly they never thought about the impact of increasing population and development on wildfires, which seems fair enough: that's not really their remit. I haven't seen anything to suggest that #2 is wrong. (The 2017 Science article mentioned by Science Daily reiterates that warming climate tends to increase fires; it just says that over the period they studied the effects of human activity have been larger and in the other direction.)
What's the problem here?
> an even more weird prediction
Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.
> far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all
Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".
The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.
I am curious about what you consider "no problems at all".
> I actually don't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to warm the planet 14 celsius warmer
Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.
> the graph I provided shows around 7 Celsius warmer at the 8.5% increase per year rate ... more like 0.85%
Sorry, which graph? I guess you mean the one on the Wikipedia page, which is mostly of (pre-)historical data, with IPCC projections for 2050 and 2100?
What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)
> This should have already happened
Could you be more specific? What exactly did Gore say was going to happen by when, and where did he say it?
I'll be frank: I do not believe that Gore claimed that large fractions of Florida would be underwater by now, and suspect you have been lied to. But I could be wrong!
Here's the best match I can find for that claim. Gore said something (I can't find his exact wording; it seems to have been vague, perhaps deliberately) about a 20ft (~= 6m) rise in sea levels. If there were a rise that big, then the southern part of Florida would look a little like...
The problem is that they themselves have made predictions which contradict themselves. This is pretty much the status quo for climate change science. They predict everything to happen. When some route happens they claim success.
When you remove these nostradamus folks. You are left with virtually nothing in climate science.
The climate is changing no question, the problem is that the hippies/commies have taken over climate change and are using climate change to propose their political positions as the fix to climate change. Except they have absolutely no basis in their proposals. Go read the "new green deal" and find out why there was unanimous support at crushing it. Yet the presidential candidates are all pushing effectively the same thing in the name of climate change. The new green deal has nothing to do with climate change, it has everything to do with economic inequality.
>Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.
Point I am making is that climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.
>Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".
Actually we do; whether you think geology and archaeology is a science or not I guess would be the decider here. We know during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth. In fact the areas near the equator became more green. Which isn't a surprise, places like the congo or amazon or other places at the equator arent deserts, they are more green than anywhere else.
If we are currently at "4 nuclear bombs a second" of climate change. Obviously implying imminent and immediate death. Then the Eocene which was 14 celcius warmer would have been a desert planet. Protip; it wasnt. What this 4 nuclear bombs a second actually is... is doomsayers. It's climate alarmism that has been ongoing for 30 years. They are saying we are doomed for 30 years and it's no different than the Mayan Calendar folks.
>The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.
Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.
>Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.
How would it be bad for the human race? Even if the climate alarmists are correct(which we know they are not) and it's suddenly mad max desert out there. Humans will live just fine; we are planning to move to far more inhospitable places like mars or space.
>What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)
The report which is link...
Some scientists have made predictions that contradict other scientists' predictions. That happens all the time, in all fields. Eventually, with a bit of luck, experimental evidence makes it clear who was right, or someone spots the mistake one of them made. It doesn't mean that the branch of science where it happens is bullshit. (That standard would make everything bullshit. People make mistakes and work with incomplete and imperfect information. No getting around it.)
> climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.
Could be true, though frankly I see much more sign of money-motivated bullshit on the anti-climate-science side. But nothing you've said so far is any evidence to speak of for it, because all you've done is find places where scientists disagree about something. Again, that happens all the time, in every field, and the most negative thing it actually tells us is that human beings are fallible.
> during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth
Sure. But, as I already said, total amount of life is not necessarily what we want to optimize for. If every human being died and was replaced by a million fruit flies and one elephant, that would be an enormous increase in the total number, and the total size, of living things on earth, but I wouldn't regard it as an improvement.
No one is saying that climate change is going to wipe out life on earth. (Well, I dunno, you can find idiots saying pretty much anything, but it's not a common view anywhere that I know of.)
> "4 nuclear bombs a second"
The thing I think you may be missing is that, in the context of weather and climate, nuclear bombs are pretty small. A big hurricane is something like three nuclear bombs per hour (depends on the size of the hurricane and the size of the bombs, of course).
I haven't heard "4 nuclear bombs per second", for what it's worth, and if the back-of-envelope calculation I just did is right the correct figure is more like 5 x 10^-5 nuclear bombs per second. But "nuclear bombs per second" is a stupid measure because our intuitions for how much energy a nuclear bomb puts out are bad in this context.
> Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.
Then perhaps I'm not explaining it clearly. (But, first of all, no, of course I am not saying any non-negligible warming earlier than, say, 1800CE is manmade.) My point is that (1) something could be good for "life on earth" but really bad for the human race, and (2) the state that would result from 14 degrees of warming (or whatever other geologically-inspired figure you might choose) might be entirely survivable, but that doesn't mean the process of getting there in a hurry wouldn't be a big disaster.
(You could live in many other places besides the house you currently live in. But if I knocked it down, it would be a big deal for you.)
> The report [...] literally explains itself. [...] RCP8.5
It does, indeed, explain itself, and RCP8.5 does not mean anything like "8.5% per year". The "8.5" in RCP8.5 means that radiative forcing reaches 8.5 W/m^2 by the year 2100. It has nothing whatever to do with 8.5% of anything or with anything per year.
There is no possible way we could "now have the actual data", because (to repeat) the 8.5 in RCP8.5 is defined by a state of affairs in the year 2100, and it's still only 2019.
Whoever or whatever told you that RCP8.5 means an 8.5% increase of something per year and that we're only at 0.85% was lying to you. Sorry to be so blunt, but I don't think there's any alternative.
Incidentally, RCP8.5 isn't a prediction, it's one of several scenarios used by...
No.
I also see no evidence in the article it has hurt attitudes either way. In fact, polls show general concern about climate change. Doing something is another matter[0], but people are mindful of it. Nonetheless, the article seems to be more about the author's personal feelings than whether it influenced the movement around it either way.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechang...
Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed.
We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.
Anyway, I believe that it'll be very hard to annihilate humanity let alone the planet, but it'll be very easy to lower the living standards slowly enough that we won't notice the reasons for it.
If you plan to have children, I think it's something you should thinks of.
Ofcourse, I'd prefer a rational discussion regarding the issues. But the powers at be, which usually have what to lose, usually steer the debate to be anti rational. And then you find yourself in a position where you must exaggerate in order to gain attention to your cause. It's a tragedy...
In the 1980s the world actually came together to phase out CFCs, and fit sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations. Interestingly the builders of Battersea were the first to fit these - in 1925. They took a while to catch on.
The ozone hole has finally stopped increasing only this decade. It's trending to resolve in 50 more years, if and only if, the recent discovery of CFC use in China doesn't grow. So a century to probably solve the man-made problem.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...
If climate change stops being sold as a one sided political problem with one sided political solutions, you may see momentum on it, but speaking as a conservative, when your pitch men and women are Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Cortez, amongst others, people I don’t trust and disagree with already, people who have tried framing me as a stupid person who doesn’t get it, you have already lost me entirely on the pitch before it left their mouths.
Change the salesman and the tactic, because the current one doesn’t work, and it is doomed to failure because of that.
You are literally listening to the people who have the greatest conflict of interest on the subject and the least competence in it. It’s no wonder you’re confused.
To my knowledge the only major political party anywhere in the world to deny the science of anthropogenic climate change is the Republican Party in the United States, and those are the only people he will listen to. It’s an absurd situation.
Think of it this way: it’s impossible due to quantum uncertainty to predict the path of a single particle in a gas. Yet out of the chaos, you can still draw out nice mathematical rules like the ideal gas law PV=nRT
So is the climate well behaved like the ideal gas law, or are there complicated sources of feedback like clouds, plant growth, and albedo which make it chaotic? There are quasi-periodic alternations between the fairly cold periods of the current ice age and the interstitial we're now in, so you should recognize it's substantially more complicated than just averaging the speeds of all the molecules.
I'm all for a cleaner better world, but I'll never believe someone who says they can usefully predict a chaotic system.
Some of the actual predictions from the CoR's "Limits to Growth", according to the Wikipedia page about that document:
> Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity".
(2072 is quite a long time after 2000. I wonder whether it's a typo for 2027, given what follows, but that too is a long time after 2000.)
> Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline
Those are all well after 2020. (The first of them doesn't seem like it's correct, thankfully. I suspect the others are some way off, too. But I'm not arguing that the CoR were right, only that they didn't say what you say they said.)
1) We can't afford to undermind the economy. That is, any plan that cuts back on consumption (even in the short term) is going to hurt an already hurting economy[1]. However, there aren't any "leader(s)" who want to be pinned with such things so the buck gets passed.
2) Along the same lines, we've convenience'd ourselves into a corner. At this point, sacrifices (in the context of status quo lifestyles / cultural expectations) need to be made; habits needed to be changed. But again, there's no leader willing to disrupt that which needs to be disrupted. We talk a good game when it comes to wanting change but then once the call comes in, we whine. "Leaders" that cause people to whine don't get elected / re-elected. It used to be, "at war" mean the POTUS (in the USA) had carte blanche to ask for help and sacrifice. Now we live in a world where "at war" means to keep the masses distracted by keeping up with the Kardashians.
[1] Not to get off topic (but to prove my point); there's a reason fracking hocket-stick'ed under the previous POTUS. That reason is, the Fed had shot it wad and keeping the cost of fuel down is a proxy for economic stimulation (without having to say so). Ultimately, we tossed Mother Nature under the bus to keep the economy from going tits-up. If that's what "green presidents" can get away with, then that doesn't exactly raise the bar for the rest.
Heh. This is such a brilliant phrase that perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong.
We can't afford to not afford things. :D
I'd like to add, I put "leader" in quotes but what should be done is something real leaders do. They're willing and able. Instead, we have people in charge who are no leaders, and thus we don't get leader-esque action from them. Essentially, the spineless leading the mindless.
We can push the economy a bit. We can try to replace the more emission-intensive aspects of it. But we cannot do it too hard - because if we break the economy, that's quite literally game over. After humanity emerges from ensuing wars, famines and starvation, the survivors will be left stuck with medieval-era technology on a thoroughly broken planet.
I have this feeling that people forget that economy isn't just zeroes on the accounts of bank executives; it's the food on the table of everyone, it's the medicine and the running water, and everything that keeps civilization together.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, and even more so, let's not replace the bathwater with gasoline and set it on fire.
Everything changes. The economy was different last year, in 2010, in 1950 and so on.
The country I grew up in is very different to the one that exists today.
Change is constant. No-one is talking about burning it down, the idea is more that the exceptional growth of the past few decades has likely overshot what is sustainable.
So you're running for office?, what's your tagline: "Vote for me, because they got it wrong. I'll fix the economy so that relative to expectations it underperforms like I believe it should."?
Wall Street with not donate to your campaign. No one will vote for you.
I'm not disagreeing with you. Simply pointing out We The People have a history of not supporting such things.
Think of it as doing live repair on a running engine of your airplane, mid-flight. You can do it if you're careful, but if you break it, we all die, and the airplane isn't going to fly anywhere anytime soon.
In particular, ideas like "we need to halt economic growth ASAP" I sometimes see in climate change threads are essentially suicidal.