"An atmosphere of [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted."
One may suppose, too, that a healthy smattering of works by the great Edgar Allen Poe might come in handy, disregarding, of course, their largely unscientific nature; furthermore, if one wishes to write in such a fashion, one must devote oneself to the cause of attractive semicolon usage... a largely forgotten art in these modern times.
There's some old German food/nutrition researcher I read who mentioned in passing that co2 acted as a blanket in the atmosphere warming the planet. I can't remember the author or title of the book, it was something from the 1800s I was skimming from archive.org.
I remember being dumbfounded at the time and pasting the excerpt to some friends on IRC. People have known atmospheric co2 warms the planet for a very long time.
This book wasn't even about climate, it was about diet and evolution. It turns out if you want to talk about the history of evolution, you have to talk about the atmosphere and how it varied going through oxygen and carbon-rich periods.
Maybe it was a common way of thinking about atmosphere back then.
I remember while reading up on the history of climate science, that Fourier found that the planet should be markedly colder than it is, purely from physics. Then calling atmosphere a blanket that keeps it warm. That must have been in the early 1800s.
So thought was moving in the right direction long ago.
«The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838 and reasoned from experimental observations by Eunice Newton Foote in 1856. John Tyndall expanded her work in 1859 by measuring radiative properties of a wider spectrum of greenhouse gases. The effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the term "greenhouse" was not used to refer to this effect by any of these scientists; the term was first used in this way by Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901.»
In the Norwegian engineer paper (TU) from 1960 the main discussions of their time was that they had to get away from burning trees as energy source and use oil/coal or water fall to get the energy to supply the industry.
Lot of talks about deforestation with examples that we have not recovered from today (example Røros).
One of the tragedies of our failure to tackle GHG emissions is that now reasonable pathways to stay under 2C of warming require massive negative carbon sequestration after 2040, and at the moment the only way to do that is burning wood and capturing the CO2 emissions. The volume of wood which will have to be burnt each year is more than the volume of all international shipping. That is going to mean covering huge areas of land in industrial plantations which will probably damage wildlife further. Because we’ve delayed action, we’re entering into the teeth of a dilemma which will drive further mass extinctions whatever we do, either remove habitat for wood production for negative carbon, or accept high levels of warming.
Why does sequestration involve burning wood? Isn't it easier to leave the carbon in wood form and build e.g furniture, buildings, structures out of wood, and leave the carbon there?
Now many deck chairs do are you willing to pay for, on a yearly basis? I would bet few people are willing to purchase 100 or so new deck chairs per year. Burning seems a sensible alternative.
You’re talking about perhaps 10 tonnes of wood each year for each person. It’s an interesting concept, though, I wonder what uses we could find for it if we tried to do that.
Though from what I've heard, it's difficult to figure out if they are net negative CO2, and of course the timber needs to come from sustainably managed forests.
I think you're missing the other element: continued access to fuel and energy sources.
Before the switch to coal, wood was the primary thermal energy souce for humans (well, after direct passive solar heat). By the 19th century, and in many parts of the world, centuries or millennia prior, woodfuel burning, directly and as charcoal for kilns and smelters, had deforested vast parts of the globe, transforming many formerly forested parts of the world to desert or scrub (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Lebanon, Greece, Italy).
We have the dual problems of 1) replacing coal, oil, and natural gas, and 2) removing CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans.
Burning wood accomplishes #1, but not #2.
There's the additional slight problem that the scale of present energy consumption, let alone increases which would bring another 5-8 billions of souls up to modern European or US standards of living, largely defined by per-capita energy consumption, greatly exceeds total available biomass production in total, not merely wood growth.
do you need a thousand chairs? skyscrapers can't be built out of wood, too.
the easiest way would be to just bury the wood (we dug it out in the first place, right?) but we need to make sure that it doesn't rot and thus reenter the atmosphere. that's where burning makes sense.
Skyscrapers can't be built out of concrete either. It's the rebar that is the structural component that makes it possible to build skyscrapers. We can build skyscrapers with mass timber and steel reinforcement nowadays.
I have to admit, not working at a startup or FAANG-scale company, I'm amazed to see the place I work mentioned, even just as a note, on here. Fun little double-take!
The paper refers to CO2 as "carbonic acid gas". At this time, did they know that CO2 was also produced by burning fossil fuels? Or by respirating living things?
CO2 was first hypothesized specifically as a gas making up the difference in mass between charcoal and the remnants of burning it in the 1600's by Jan Baptist van Helmont[1].
That respiration of animals emits CO2 was determined at least by the 1750's.
A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "coal" found Babington, William. "A case of exposure to the vapour of burning charcoal." Medico-chirurgical transactions 1 (1809): 83. at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2128797/pdf/med... :
> When carbon in combustion combines with oxygen we obtain carbonic acid gas, and at the same time in proportion to its moisture, more or less hydrocarbonous gas is evolved.
A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "exhalation" found Allen, William, and William Hasledine Pepys. "XVII. On the changes produced in atmospheric air, and oxygen gas, respiration." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 98 (1808): 249-281. at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1808... with quotes like:
> In this experiment we meet with a remarkable fact, viz. that as much carbonic acid gas was given off in 5½ minutes, as in the former experiment in eleven minutes ; so that it appears, whenever atmospheric air is taken into the lungs, it returns charged with about 8 per cent, carbonic acid
I think other commenters have answered your question, but I thought I'd talk a little on carbonic acid.
Carbon dioxide partitions into water as carbonic acid. This is the key mechanism in ocean acidification. Of course the rate is affected by pH of the oceans, there's a buffering action going on between carbonate, bicarbonate, and carbonic acid depending on how many protons are available. It's also why pure water sitting open to the air will have a slightly acidic pH.
The oceans at the bottom have a decent layer of carbonate material accumulated from shells, which are also at equilibrium with the ocean, but the other direction (accepting protons). But since the oceans are so big, to increase the pH of the oceans you'd have to send the surface water to the bottom. Mixing the oceans is kind of a slow process -- around 500 years. But in theory we'll get some long term climate help from the ocean floor (well, if the methane clathrates don't get us first).
I’ve always found climate scepticism strange, because of its emphasis on refusing to accept the connection between rising temperatures and CO2. This really seems to be the least defensible position which could be chosen. The “scepticism” is disputing really basic science which has been well understood for a long time, and it’s in that sense that calling it denial is accurate. It would be much more defensible to accept a lower level of climate sensitivity, but dispute the mechanisms which cause higher sensitivity, or possible future positive feedback effects.
Sorry to hijack, but I have been curious about this for a while and have not been able to find any references from anyone working on the climate models or who has studied the forecasting methodology in detail.
If in 50 years, we find out that the predictions made by our models had been wrong (either the measures we take to reduce CO2 don't lead to the results we expected, or the warming we see is outside of the expected ranges) - in the post-mortem of the models, what would we likely say had gone wrong?
Climate research is one of the most politically-infused research avenues, among the likes of nuclear and genetically modified agriculture. There is money to be made, and lost, depending on public outlook of our climate, and it has a lot of power when used to enforce political ends such as sanctions, subsidies, and could lead to such events like uprisings, occupying of countries and war.
Most likely, if climate research is found to be far off the alarming predictions made by most institutions, we'll chalk it up to political meddling/statistical fubbing and move on. If the lifestyle changes for most of the polulation are already in place by then, many will believe it was "for the best, anyway", and I'm inclined to agree with this view - our response to climate change is more important than if climate change was primarily our fault to begin with. I'm not advocating for skewing research in favor of one position or the other, but it enables a public forum of such scale that at the very least, prepares us for dealing with ever-increasing scopes of global issues that impact all life on Earth, which will come in handy when we progress to the point we're dealing with the ethics of extremely advanced technology.
You're talking about what the media or politicians report. Things like "the climate crisis will come in 12 years" have usually no scientific basis and often are based on much more conservative predictions like 1.5C° warming cannot prevented after 12 years of "business as usual" because temperature increases lag CO2 emissions by several years. This doesn't actually mean that we will see 1.5°C warming within the next 12 years. It might even take 20 years or more. 1.5°C warming will suck but it's not the end of the world. It just means that we will have to adapt to a new way of living and we can't go back to the good old days.
Surely "what would we say had gone wrong" depends entirely on .. what actually happens? This seems like a double counterfactual that's impossible to answer in advance.
Presuming we don't lose key information (e.g. deliberate erasure of the NOAA archives), we'd treat it in the same way as the current investigation; find what changes are required to the model to make it consistent with the data.
And yet it is very useful to know what could go wrong. And that applies to building all kinds of things - software, companies, models, research, systems, etc.
> we'd treat it in the same way as the current investigation; find what changes are required to the model to make it consistent with the data
If that is how it is currently done, I have a big issue with it. It seems like the model is not being treated as a forecasting model but rather as a purely academic one ('if we make these assumptions and have these initial conditions, how does the behavior of the system evolve'?), while being sold to the media, politicians and the general public as a forecasting model that is assumed to have very strong predictive power.
> in the post-mortem of the models, what would we likely say had gone wrong
I think it's a really interesting question, even though on a charged topic and difficult to forecast.
Balance of feedback systems? There are so many feedback systems here, positive and negative all overlapping. Even if you are 95% sure you have each one figured out, after a little over a dozen factors that error compounds and you're at around 50/50 of getting something wrong.
Of course, could be wrong in the other direction too... that's why errors are bars not arrows.
Note: Feedback systems here are not under-studied, they're just hard to model. This isn't an example of a black swan that would devastate the discipline, if that's what you were looking for. Those might be... supervolcano? Nuclear war? Atmospheric scrubbing technology breakthrough? Even those have calculable effects. If there's some radical unpredicted shift I can't imagine it being along the lines of "water vapor and CO2 don't actually warm things," that's just too well confirmed.
If in 50 years, we find out that the predictions made by our models had been wrong (either the measures we take to reduce CO2 don't lead to the results we expected, or the warming we see is outside of the expected ranges) - in the post-mortem of the models, what would we likely say had gone wrong?
This has already happened. Models developed in the 1990s didn't match what happened in the 21st century. The resulting controversy is called the pause. Why did temperatures stop rising when models said they should continue? We didn't stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere after all.
For better or worse, the controversy was resolved by scientists "correcting" the historical temperature datasets to erase the pause from the record. The data was brought into line with the theory. You can go read old news stories or articles about the pause and look at the temperature graphs in them, then compare to the current, up to date temperature graphs and see that they don't match.
If you like there's a talk here by a guy who started out as a skeptic because he kept spotting errors in studies, and became a peer-reviewed, published climate scientist. He's still a skeptic about the models used to predict the future (he says he thinks the basics of climatology are sound though):
That talk is quite technical but might provide some answers to how the models could be wrong. Ultimately nothing surprising: they're based on major approximations and the underlying datasets may have issues. Go read his papers for more details.
You can see that most of the time, temperature rises lead increases in CO2. This implies that rising temperature increases CO2 levels, but not necessarily the other way around.
If you zoom out even further, the correlation isn't clear anymore at all:
Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts. In the interest of our descendants, we had better develop technology to deal with a tougher climate, rather than cut down on emissions so that maybe ten or twenty generations can live with a somewhat smaller fallout of manmade climate change.
> Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts.
The issue is the rate of change, which is unprecedented. The path we're currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop production.
> The issue is the rate of change, which is unprecedented.
Perhaps over some arbitrary timeframes within the measured record. On the other hand, a volcanic eruption can immediately cause a change of 1K or more.
But let's say it is unprecedented, so what?
> The path we're currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop production.
[citation needed]
This has been predicted numerous times, it didn't come to pass. Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate, we have to deal with that issue anyway. So let's deal with the actual issue, not part of what may cause the issue, some of the time.
As for ecosystems getting "devastated" - so what? They get devastated one way or another all the time. They recover.
> Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
When you write "This has been predicted numerous times", do you mean, for example, the predicted famines of the mid-1900s, saved by the Green Revolution? Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech cautious us technical success in raising food production is only a temporary victory - we must also limit our population.
When you write "Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate" ... how is that even a valid argument? Where are the Canadian orange groves? How's the Brazilian maple syrup industry? They don't exist, because the climate is wrong for those crops in those areas.
You write "They recover" .. Citation needed. Simple counter-example - the Icelandic forests from the Norse era have not recovered.
Or, 10,000 years ago the Sahara was green. Now it's a desert. Why hasn't that ecosystem recovered?
> Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
"Without adaptation" is not a plausible scenario. Of course there will be adaptation. But let's take those numbers anyway, and take a very liberal estimate of six degrees of temperature increase: That's 36% (wheat), 19.2% (rice), 44% (maize) and 18.6% (soy), respectively.
That may sound alarming if all that produce had to be turned into food that people need to live. In practice, most of it goes to livestock or even biofuel production. Being forced to have less cattle and fuel might be good for the climate, no?
> Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech cautious us technical success in raising food production is only a temporary victory - we must also limit our population.
Perhaps, but the best way to limit your population growth is to deliver a better standard of living.
> When you write "Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate" ... how is that even a valid argument? Where are the Canadian orange groves? How's the Brazilian maple syrup industry? They don't exist, because the climate is wrong for those crops in those areas.
I'm talking about actual crop production, not hypothetical crop production. Nobody is starving because farmlands that never existed stop producing. With bad weather, that's different.
If we're talking about climate and agriculture, the argument goes both ways: If global temperature rises, then new places will start making sense for certain forms of agriculture, just as old places will stop making sense. This also will happen regardless of human intervention.
If I may add to your sentence, specifically the last claim in your quote is what puts their train of thought on a collision course with reality.
Life adapts, when it can. The rate of change you mentioned ensures that a majority of life will not be able to adapt and it's not impossible that another K-T level extinction event is already taking place.
Geologically speaking, the speed at which the Earth is changing from human-induced climate change could just as well be a meteorite impact. Looking at global conflict resolution ability I fear that we have no hope to stop it.
> Life adapts, when it can. The rate of change you mentioned ensures that a majority of life will not be able to adapt and it's not impossible that another K-T level extinction event is already taking place.
It's also "not impossible" that a meteorite wipes us all out tomorrow. Which serious scientist is predicting a K-T level extinction event?
Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over thousands of years. That's not out of the ordinary in terms of variance for life on earth right now. Sure, some species may have to migrate, some will go extinct one way or another, but not a K-T level event.
> Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over thousands of years.
Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over the next century. That's very different. It may be hard to separate the climate change extinctions from the regular habitat destructions that are already ongoing, though.
The rate of change isn't unprecedented. In fact, most of the times the earth has come out of ice ages, similar to now, there have been rates of change in temperature similar to ours now.
You've missed the point. It is well known that co2 is a greenhouse gas. You can do the experiment yourself with some children using a plastic water bottle, a thermometer, and a mixture of baking soda and vinegar. We understand this physics extremely well. Denying the causal effect of co2 on warming is akin to denying the causal effect of gravity towards an apple falling from a tree.
Should we have continued with CFC emissions then? And not put restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions?
FWIW, we don't have to understand it extremely well, only well enough to affect policy changes.
A 99% probability of an estimated increase of 2-4°C can be considered a rather large range, but enough certainty to know that it's a problem. (Numbers made up for demonstration purposes.)
We should improve the environment wherever and whenever we can which is what people demand when the get pulled out of poverty and into the middle class.
But the idea that we should upend the use of fossil fuels without any realistic alternative is simply anti-human and will for sure cause millions to die.
I haven't heard of a single scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change that would lead to that and thus I see no need to worry more about climate change more than pulling people out of poverty.
We should always try and make energy cleaner and less pollutant but wouldn't you agree we should always make a cost benefit analysis and weigh the positive and negative consequences of our decisions?
I don't understand the point of your first paragraph.
Poor people demand an improved environment too - it's not a special demand limited to the middle class or richer.
Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_justice#Affected... starts "Among the affected groups of Environmental Justice, those in high-poverty and racial minority groups have the most propensity to receive the harm of environmental injustice." Many of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members are poor, and they lead the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in part on environmental grounds.
Have you heard of a single scientifically demonstrated consequence of decreased CFC emissions which would lead to people being pulled out of poverty and into the middle class?
Do you support CFC restrictions, and if so, when do you regard the evidence as being strong enough to warrant those restrictions?
I agree we should "weigh the positive and negative consequences of our decisions". I disagree with your statement that there are no realistic alternatives to the current practices.
"""Neither of the two primary CFC-11 use-cases, firefighting and refrigerators, are at all hampered today by not having the substance, Ferry said. He added that he couldn't think of any special use-case for the chemical for which there isn't already an alternative."""
There is undoubtedly room for alternatives for the current use of fossil fuels.
The west have the cleanest environments so yes they go hand in hand. If you have the money you can clean up your environment you do that mostly by replacing things like cooking over indoor fire with gas or induction or electricity and you use air purifiers, and you use better and more modern cars, you clean up the streets and so on. All things rich societies do and poor societies dont.
Do you support CFC restrictions, and if so, when do you regard the evidence as being strong enough to have warranted those restrictions and how has it lead to people being pulled out of poverty and into the middle class?
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador is but one of many examples which show that poor people don't need to become middle class before wanting to protect the environment. And it's the rich Western companies like Texaco/Chevron which caused the pollution they are protesting against.
I support restrictions as long as there are proper alternatives and that the restrictions don't have more negative than positive consequences.
But you are confusing things here. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador doesn't have the power to do anything about that as there are more people in the world than them and thus other interests. 100 year ago they would just have been wiped out. By becoming richer they have the power to have a say in the international community.
Are their lives more worth than others?
As long as you are not prepared to make a proper cost-benefit anlysis and judge what's right or wrong you aren't really taking the discussion seriously IMO.
I have long ago stated that while I agree that cost-benefit analysis is relevant, I disagree with your opinion that there are no realistic alternatives to the current practices.
CONAIE is an concrete example of my previous statement that "Poor people demand an improved environment too - it's not a special demand limited to the middle class or richer." It is a counter-example to your implication at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21248038 that we need to get people into the middle class first, in order that they demand we improve the environment.
I gave that one because you seemed to have rejected my earlier example of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, likely because you confused people in poverty (a large fraction of that tribe are in poverty) with the "rich society" of the US.
Respecting the rights of indigenous people is another way to let them have a say in the international community. Not that it makes a difference here since I'm pointing to their success in protecting the environment on the national stage in Ecuador.
You'll note that your "better and more modern cars" implies that all people want cars. Some indigenous people expressly do not.
You like talking about "worth". How do you balance the "worth the cost of upending the current use of ex fossil fuels" vs. the worth of indigenous lives and lifestyles?
Because the only way I see that you can do a cost-benefit analysis is to have some way to judge that balance. And my balance is far more on the side of indigenous lives than on the loss of profits to the rich.
chaos has nothing to do here. Look, it's really very very simple actually. The higher the concentration of greenhouse gases, the more energy gets trap in the atmosphere. This changes the balance and warms up area of the planets that did not warm up for millions of years. Chaos is more important when it comes to weather, but climate is more straight forward. The only pseudo-chaotic aspect of climate change is the so-called tipping cascade and that should scare the bejeezus out of you.
> You can do the experiment yourself with some children using a plastic water bottle, a thermometer, and a mixture of baking soda and vinegar. We understand this physics extremely well.
If you can't see how ridiculous that sounds, you might not understand how people become skeptical about climate science.
If we really understand these physics so well, why have most of the predictions been wrong?
Don't trust the CATO when it comes to climate (at the very least). They are known negationists. If you understand basic level physics, read the IPCC reports and the realclimate blog.
Thankfully climate scientists don't just eyeball a single graph. And as a matter of fact, you conflate two things, one is that we know that now industrial emission is the cause for global warming and the other is, that in the past warming has lead to the release of CO2. These are two different things, and taken together only implies a positive feedback loop.
On the second question, the problem with global warming is, that everybody talks about the weather, and all our systems are well adapted to the current climate. Concretely, there are farmers at the edge of the Sahara, who are adapted to a semi-arid conditions, and when the Sahara moves south, then they have to deal with desert conditions. Similar, when the Great Barrier Reef moves south, then there are dive centers without a reef north of the new location.
So we will have to adapt to a warmer climate anyhow, but not cutting down emissions is an entirely unforced error, it makes global warming worse, without any concrete benefit. Cutting down emissions is precisely the "smaller fallout of manmade climate change" you are arguing for.
> These are two different things, and taken together only implies a positive feedback loop.
If it's a positive feedback loop, then why hasn't there been a runaway greenhouse effect in the past? Something must have stopped it. What was that?
> Concretely, there are farmers at the edge of the Sahara, who are adapted to a semi-arid conditions, and when the Sahara moves south, then they have to deal with desert conditions.
Yes, they will. They'll have to move. The Sahara didn't use to be a desert for all of human history, it used to be fertile at one point. Now it isn't anymore, so we don't have agriculture there. So what?
> Similar, when the Great Barrier Reef moves south, then there are dive centers without a reef north of the new location.
First-world problems...
> So we will have to adapt to a warmer climate anyhow, but not cutting down emissions is an entirely unforced error, it makes global warming worse, without any concrete benefit.
No concrete benefit? You mean, besides the fact that our entire standard of living rests on the fact that we can emit CO2 more or less undisturbed?
> Cutting down emissions is precisely the "smaller fallout of manmade climate change" you are arguing for.
Not if you take into account the standard of living of the people calling the shots, right here and now.
> In the interest of our descendants, we had better develop technology to deal with a tougher climate, rather than cut down on emissions
Or do both. Let's make the world less hostile to live in for billions of people, whilst also providing technology & resources for them to survive.
About your graph: historical global temperature changes are not the same as anthropomorphic global temperature changes. Past periods of high CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 leads to higher global temperatures. Indeed, it confirms that there is a strong relationship between the two.
There are other sources of temperature change so you can't use one indicator to prove there is no effect. What climate scientists have done is look at ALL the possible drivers of climate change and ruled out all of the natural causes as contributing to the current very sharp and ongoing rise in temperature. Everything that's left is caused by human activity.
On the right of that graph, there is a vertical red line. That's not an axis or a border, that's the recent rise in CO2 levels, and it's unprecedented. The overwhelming majority of evidence shows that human activity, mainly greenhouse gases, is causing climate change. Misrepresenting one graph does not change that.
> Past periods of high CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 leads to higher global temperatures. Indeed, it confirms that there is a strong relationship between the two.
The relationship, at least in the smaller graph, isn't in question. The causality is. I didn't say it contradicts the causality, I say it doesn't support the causality.
If you look at the larger graph, whatever relationship there is between CO2 and global temperature becomes indiscernible.
> There are other sources of temperature change so you can't use one indicator to prove there is no effect
You can't prove a negative in the first place. Of course there's bound to be some effect, but how large is it really?
> On the right of that graph, there is a vertical red line. That's not an axis or a border, that's the recent rise in CO2 levels, and it's unprecedented.
The rise may be unprecedented, the level isn't.
> The overwhelming majority of evidence shows that human activity, mainly greenhouse gases, is causing climate change.
That's a strong statement for what it is at best a discernible correlation.
I'm willing to take it on faith. Humans cause climate change? Now what? We absolutely have to drop everything and start cooling the planet? Until the next ice age, when presumably we'll have to warm it?
In the past, temperature rises caused by other factors have in turn caused the release of CO2, raising the temperature further. This does not in any way call into question the causality between increasing concentration of CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and increased warming as predicted by gas absorption equations which we teach in high school.
> In the past, temperature rises caused by other factors have in turn caused the release of CO2, raising the temperature further.
That's your claim, but you can't actually derive that from the data. It may just as well be the case that rises in temperature cause the release of more CO2, period.
> This does not in any way call into question the causality between increasing concentration of CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and increased warming as predicted by gas absorption equations which we teach in high school.
The climate on the planet isn't a simple gas absorption equation, there are other factors. Even if the greenhouse effect is a factor, it couldn't be the dominating factor.
Otherwise, how could an ice age just "end" a period of high CO2 concentration? Shouldn't the greenhouse effect prevent it? And if so, will the next ice age be "tamer" if we keep CO2 levels up? Wouldn't that be good?
> I didn't say it contradicts the causality, I say it doesn't support the causality.
You picked the example as a rebuttal to the suggestion that there is causality. For the next time you need an image that doesn’t support this causality, may I suggest a picture of a cat?
> The rise may be unprecedented, the level isn't.
So you admit the there is a problem ;) The level hasn't been this high for over 400,000 years. How many homo sapiens were around then to adapt to that? The unprecedented rise is the problem, and it's not just CO2 and methane rising faster than should be expected, it's also the global temperature.
> That's a strong statement for what it is at best a discernible correlation.
It's a strong and very valid statement, supported by a wealth of science. In this instance it's not really possible, or wise, to run multiple randomly controlled experiments on our own planet to conclusively prove the point. Instead, we have a lot of observations and modelling that allow us to run those experiments, and the weight of those say we have a problem.
> We absolutely have to drop everything and start cooling the planet?
The majority consensus is not to drop everything but to continue making substantial changes to human activity to reduce warming. You personally do not need to become an eco-warrior, just more aware of the effect you're having on the planet and try to reduce it. Cooling the planet is now beyond expectations. The aim now is for it not to warm up too much.
> Until the next ice age, when presumably we'll have to warm it?
That is a terribly big false equivalency! First, yes, I expect so. Second, it's totally different! Ice ages take multiple hundreds, if not thousands, of years to get going. The next ice age is not going to affect the next generation, global warming is.
The benefits to ecological improvements and the risk of climate change vastly outweigh the costs. Less pollution related illness, our limited resources will last longer, etc... The risk alone is enough to make me think that ignoring the problem is the morally wrong choice, the benefits double the equation.
> Instead, we have a lot of observations and modelling that allow us to run those experiments, and the weight of those say we have a problem.
No, the weight of those say there will be an increase in temperature. Never mind that the weight of these have been wrong for more narrow definitions of the word "wrong":
If those models can't predict ten years into the future with any reasonable amount of confidence, how can we trust them to predict the next 100 years?
Even then, let's say these models are more or less correct, what exactly says "we have a problem"? What problem? We already have tons of problems! Not being able to emit CO2 would be a huge problem in and of itself. What are the models to predict the actual problems caused by climate change? How good are those? Do 95% of scientists agree on them?
> The majority consensus is not to drop everything but to continue making substantial changes to human activity to reduce warming.
Okay, I don't exactly feel like making substantial changes to my lifestyle based on these predictions, especially since the impact doesn't concern me much at all. Now what? Good luck getting all that political support that you will need.
1. A lot of the discussion at the moment is about action within the USA, Europe, Brazil and China. These are not poor countries. Brazil isn't doing great but is a significant economy. China is taking a lot of action already to move to greener tech. There is an acceptance amongst most that the richer nations should be doing most to tackle climate change, as well as helping other nations.
2. Green does not necessarily mean expensive. Look at the levelized cost of energy in different countries and green options are often cheaper or comparable to fossil fuels, even before the indirect costs are considered.
3. Green is often also the most practical solution for developing countries. In many, solar and wind are used as the infrastructure for power distribution does not exist, is incredibly unreliable and/or very expensive. For a lot of these countries localised green energy generation is a key factor for development.
1) China uses everything they can from coal to nuclear to the wind. They are moving in ALL directions, not just one.
2) If you with green mean wind and solar then yes it means expensive because both have a low capacity factor and intermittency problems which means that either coal, gas, oil og nuclear have to be there as a backup. They, of course, need to be calculated in just as things like decommission which isn't being calculated in for wind and solar but is for nuclear. In other words, green cost as it's calculated is not the true cost.
3) No green isn't the most practical solution exactly for the reasons mentioned in 2). Sure you can provide a little here and there but you cant actually build a flourishing economy on wind and solar and there isn't a single example of that being the case. With oil, gas, coal and nuclear you can. Nuclear is too expensive which leaves us with fossil fuels.
So I would claim that your 3 reasons lack reality :)
Sort the table by Renewables as a percentage of generation. There are countries with flourishing economies running with a majority of renewable power generation.
The intermittency problems for some renewables are being overcome as more solutions are invented and improved. Most new technologies have problems to overcome, so it'd be unrealistic to expect instant & perfect solutions. The speed of innovation here is impressive enough to already be delivering real world solutions which provide energy to communities and countries.
You are confusing energy with electricity. In ex, Denmark electricity is only 17% of the energy consumption.
On a global scale wind and solar only handles 1% of all energy consumption and it's not expected to move to more than 3-4% in 2040.
And no the intermittency problem is not being overcome, not even by a long shot, as it's a physical boundaries problem not technology or optimization problem.
This is such a crude, reductionist view that falls very short of reality. You know, it might just be you and minority that think this way.
Luckily reality shows time and time again that people in general (definitely excluding you here) have better motivations and take better decisions which consider other people.
>Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts. In the interest of our descendants, we had better develop technology to deal with a tougher climate, rather than cut down on emissions so that maybe ten or twenty generations can live with a somewhat smaller fallout of manmade climate change.
Because we don't actually have any realistic alternatives yet and the ones proposed would be much more expensive than just dealing with the issues as they arrive.
Can you mention one scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we don't know how to deal with with todays let alone future technologies?
(As a clarification, that's "global warming causing climate change".)
When you write "deal with", do you mean to include mass migrations, loss of populated areas, and civil unrest? Because that's how we dealt with, for example, the Dust Bowl.
One example is that there does not seem any way to save Miami in its current form, using today's technology or any realistic technology we could develop.
> “Miami as we know it today — there’s virtually no scenario under which you can imagine it existing at the end of the century,” Goodell said. “It may be some smaller version of Miami that incorporates platform houses and floating structures.” ...
> And while there is much that Florida can learn from these other places, no one has answers to looming threats like water rising through the ground underneath. “The solutions that are going to be used to save cities like Miami Beach probably haven’t been developed yet,” Mowry said.
> But the question isn’t whether this work will save every community: it won’t. Even those tasked with making their cities resilient admit that, at some point in the future, certain areas here will no longer be “viable” places to live. Rather, the challenge is to do enough to ensure that the economy as a whole continues to thrive and that tourists still come to enjoy the sun, sand – and swelling sea.
We can "deal with" that by mass migration to move. Or letting them die. But I don't think that's what you mean?
I mean we have had to deal with climate change in all of human history and we have only become increasingly better.
We also live places today which wasn't possible 100 year ago.
Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it. We are better at that today than any other time in history.
So the question I am trying to get answered is what have been scientifically demonstrated to be the case with climate change that we cant deal with if we don't "do anything" today?
Climate is always changing yes, the temperature have been rising yes, that will have consequences on us yes, but which changes have been demonstrated that would be worth the cost of upending the current use of ex fossil fuels to help modern civilization deliver goods and services to it's growing population and to reduce the amount of funding for new scientific discoveries or R&D in Molten or fusion?
It sounds like a Pascals wager to me but without the upside and instant damnation of the existing people inhabiting the planet.
It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before.
If so, I don't see a difference between your view and "just let things happen - some people will survive, and I don't care who."
(Actually, your "worth the cost" suggests that you care less about the world's poorest people, whose deaths have the least economic impact.)
If your view is anything at all like that, then of course we can "deal with" the effects climate change. But it's not a humane approach.
The human approach is the one that gets most people out of poverty and into the middle class so they can deal with the consequences of the climate which we always will have to deal with and always have had to deal with.
The most predictable way of doing that is allowing them to use cheap reliable energy.
Mass starvation happens when you don't have cheap reliable energy, pesticides and other modern technologies to deal with the always ongoing consequences of climate change.
Civil unrest is what happens when people don't have access to food, right now the only societies that can ensure that are rich societies using capitalism, technology, and energy (mostly fossil fuels) to deal with that.
Mass migration happens all the time but again it's more likely to happen when you don't have the means to defend you against the always occuring challenges of the climate.
It's anti-human to hinder poor people getting access to the very resource that allow them to fight the consequences of climate change like we are able to in modern societies.
Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, it gives us a hostile and dangerous enviroment we make safe through the use of energy.
My approach is pro human flourishing.
So "deal with" means allowing humans to deal the challenges of nature.
> It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before.
If you want to see civil unrest, just raise the taxes on gasoline, like Monsieur Macron.
As for mass migration, if there really is such a big fallout due to climate change (or anything else) rendering places uninhabitable, let the people migrate. Humans have always migrated. Why stop now?
As for mass starvation, I don't buy it. Most crops today are fed to cattle, there's a lot of leeway in terms of repurposing it for human consumption.
You'll notice that many Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe were not allowed to migrate there, nor the asylum seekers currently trying to reach the US through Mexico.
This is not new. Jews trying to flee Europe before WWII were also prevented from migrating. Chinese people were prohibited from migrating to the US. Many people resist economic migrants, to the point of wanting them killed. "Build a wall", etc.
So the question isn't "why stop now?" Why have we stopped over a century ago, and what must be done to allow migration?
But that's still not enough. I pointed out the Dust Bowl for a reason. The Okies who needed to migrate were discriminated against, even though there were no legal reasons to prevent their migration. Quoting http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/... :
> The mass of migrants that arrived in California did not receive a warm welcome from the state of California, which was already overwhelmed by the amount on people on the state’s relief roll. They were met at the state border by patrolmen who told them to turn back – that there was not enough work for them in California. Additionally, the established population of California was hostile towards the migrants due to differences in regional culture. They viewed the Okies as culturally and socially inferior, backward and uneducated – a view echoed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The term “Okie” originally had the derogatory connotation of "They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred."—The Grapes of Wrath
“poor, white trash.” As the character of Tom Joad stated in The Grapes of Wrath, “Okie means you’re scum.”
So when ThomPete writes "Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it", that seems to include the Okie experience as one of the ways we deal with it.
Is that experience what the Miamians of the 2060s might have to look forward to?
Please focus on things we have actually said instead of putting opinions on us you have no base for.
There are consequences to everything we do as life and also what we don't do.
People will also die from restricting the use of fossil fuels, in fact it's much more likely. If you want to point the moral finger our way keep ind mind that three points your way.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672: humankind (including "trusted" bodies such as the IPCC) have underestimated the dangers associated with anthropogenic climate change
- https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252: we have also underestimated the speed at which the climate will depart from the relatively stable Holocene equilibrium we've lived under for the past ~10,000 years
Our global industrial society relies, more precariously than most realize or admit, on conditions which will soon diminish or disappear. For example:
- Stable, predictable weather patterns (industrial agriculture depends on this)
- Just-in-time global shipping/logistics, by which food and other necessities get to supermarket shelves (threatened by extreme weather, political crises, fuel availability, etc)
- Relatively cheap, easy availability of fossil fuels (extraction costs will continue to rise over time, and competition will likely grow more intense)
- Plentiful fish/marine life stocks (we are destroying coral reefs extremely quickly, which are a key part of the ocean lifecycle; ocean acidification due to carbon capture also threatens sea life, as does oceanic warming) on which many rely for food
- Low atmospheric CO2 content for breathability (cognitive ability decreases as CO2 levels rise)
- Thriving coastal cities, as centers of both population and economic activity (many are under threat of regular flooding if not complete loss this century)
It will likely take indefinite human intervention to keep the climate system habitable for anywhere near our present numbers, if we're even capable of the sort of coordination required.
but it's not really an argument about the future either.
The facts are the facts and they are:
We are better than ever to deal with unpredictable weather patterns and can produce food places that used to be impossible.
We are better at living places that used to be impossible.
We are better at producing food than ever, we are better at using resources than ever, we are better at dealing with floods than ever, with drought than ever, with extreme weather than ever and I could go on.
You are claiming that this will change based on speculation and single points of reference, not science and thus we can then have a speculative debate if you'd like not a scientific one.
I haven't seen any evidence that would point to us not being able to deal with the climate in the future better than we are today.
So what's your point? What's your suggestion? What is it you want me/us to do we aren't already doing that wouldn't be worse than what we are already doing?
Can you post something to back up your claims from a well respected climate scientist?
Benny Peiser (b. 1957) is a UK social anthropologist and AGW denier listed among the Heartland Institute "Global warming experts" despite having no evident expertise in climate science or policy.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Benny_Peiser
The richest and one of the biggest country in the world cannot move one city?
Do you think that the whole world should be captive to city that was basically build on sea level because they found it opportune.
I don't understand you. In what why is starvation a solution? Perhaps you believe that moving equals starvation? Either way you hold some very concerning ideas.
My point is that "deal with" can mean almost anything.
We dealt with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s through mass exodus, malnutrition, widespread loss of personal land ownership, and stigmatizing the Okies and others who had to leave their homes.
Is that how we'll deal with the changes to Miami?
Or, look at the Swedish famine of 1867–1869. The government deal with it ... poorly, but it did deal with it.
So when ThomPete asks "Can you mention one scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we don't know how to deal with with todays let alone future technologies?" ... what does "deal with" mean?
Because we can always deal with problems by letting people suffer. That's surely not what's meant, but just what is meant?
Deal with it means to use the resources and knowledge available in this day and age to solve a problem. If you believe that we are today on the same civilizational and technological level as we were in the 19th hundreds then I guess your fear might be justified. I believe that we have come a very long way since then and don't think that moving a city should be an impossible task. The Chinese build new cities every year, so i guess USA should be capable of building one too or people could move to other existing safe cities slowly in a longer time span, without a mass exodus as you call it.
The companies, people, organizations, and countries who profited from mispriced costs which did not factor in externalities like the likely need to relocate most of the population of Miami?
How much should those companies, people, organization, and countries be penalized for committing fraud to suppress the true costs?
What is the cost of the emotional distress of being forced to move because of generations of pollution by others?
Or, are those who need to move the ones who bear most of the cost?
You are being overtly obtuse at this point. Have you never witnessed a natural disaster where people homes were burned, flooded or leveled by earth quakes so bad that they had to move?
And, what do natural disaster have to do with it? We're talking about a human-caused disaster in the making orders of magnitude greater than Bhopal.
Surely those companies, organizations, people, and countries which profited from petroleum extraction, including by telling lies about the impact of their work, should pay compensation, yes?
Or are you one of those people who believes in privatizing profits and socializing risk?
Do you honestly think insurance will cover it? Because I remember Hurricane Andrew, when 11 insurance companies went bankrupt from the claims filed.
Again, we can look to the Okie experience - the Dust Bowl was caused by soil mismanagement by humans - as a relevant historical example. Why shouldn't we expect something like that again?
Here is a great, low emotion description that covers the "CO2 lags temperature change". Potholer54 cites his claims, and does a lot of work to run down where claims first originated, then reads that paper instead of just citing some random web blogger or popular news article.
One of the problems cited: the temperature/CO2 graph probably came from an antarctic ice core sample ... and temperature leading/lagging there is different than in non-polar locations.
Second, the climate is a complex feedback system; there isn't one independent variable and everything else is dependent. If something forces any of the variables in the feedback system it can affect the other variables. For instance, say the artificial release of CO2 by humans results in the thawing of the arctic, releasing gigatons of methane, at which point CO2 might no longer be the primary driver. Over geologic time there are different causes for these forcings, but that doesn't mean that the current forcing (human released CO2) isn't the current problem.
He covers all of that and more, much better, in 13 minutes.
[EDIT] I forgot to address "what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures?"
That is a supremely cavalier attitude. Nobody is saying AGW is going to kill off all life. In the long term life will recover. But in the short term we humans are going to have to deal with the consequences: displacement of millions of people through crop failures and loss of coast, disruption of economic systems, and more civil unrest. The US military is gaming out these scenarios because they believe the science, not because they are pinko tree huggers who hate freedom.
> One of the problems cited: the temperature/CO2 graph probably came from an antarctic ice core sample ... and temperature leading/lagging there is different than in non-polar locations.
Specifically, he points out that CO2 lags temperature by hundreds of years in the southern hemisphere, but that temperature lags CO2 by again hundreds of years in the northern hemisphere.
CO2 is claimed to have accelerated natural warming through a feedback loop - until it didn't, and temperatures began drifting down again.
That's fair enough. That's reasonably nuanced. I'm missing the extent to which this feedback loop actually made an impact though, because clearly it can't be the dominant driver or ultimate control lever. Otherwise, we'd have had a runaway greenhouse already.
> Nobody is saying AGW is going to kill off all life.
One might get that impression from the media narrative though.
> But in the short term we humans are going to have to deal with the consequences: displacement of millions of people through crop failures and loss of coast, disruption of economic systems, and more civil unrest.
I don't think that's such a big deal, all things concerned. Sometimes, people have to move. Sometimes, crops fail. Sometimes, coasts move. Sometimes, there's civil unrest. Telling people in China or Brazil that they'll have to cut down on their emissions is going to cause civil unrest. "Vote for me, I'll make you poorer" is not a winning political provision.
> The US military is gaming out these scenarios because they believe the science, not because they are pinko tree huggers who hate freedom.
They're also gaming out scenarios of mass epidemics, or political secession. What do you expect them to do?
> Sometimes, people have to move. Sometimes, crops fail. etc
If the ebola infections started appearing in all the major cities with airports and seaports, would you want the experts to try their best to stop it, or would you shrug and say, eh, sometimes people live and sometimes they die,
> One might get that impression from the media narrative though. (that AGW is going to kill all life)
I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational. Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it. Second, I don't personally get the impression that even the press claims AGW will sterilize the planet. It sounds like a strawman to me.
> If the ebola infections started appearing in all the major cities with airports and seaports, would you want the experts to try their best to stop it, or would you shrug and say, eh, sometimes people live and sometimes they die
That highly depends on what "the experts" recommend that we do. In any case, your bad analogy is bad.
> I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational.
...which is what makes me far less worried about climate change.
> Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it.
All this talk about "95% of scientists agree (that the charts point up)" and "science denial" is an argument from authority.
Given that 50% of science is estimated to be wrong[1], I'm willing to take my chances on this one, especially since there's a strong ideological component to it.
The actual simulations are drastic simplifications with wide margins of error, and even those margins have been crossed by observation even in the close term, where the margins are still narrow. All the interesting stuff happens way further down the line, however.
Perhaps a bit more humility regarding the practical limits to the scientific method is in order, at least in this case - but then how would you make your argument from authority?
My father has been going on about cloud coverage lately. The conspiracy being that they have a cooling effect and invalidate some liberal climate change agenda.
Cloud coverage impact on global temperature is one of the last unknowns hard for us to predict. Hence it is the last defense any serious scientist for denial
Yeah, being left out of the models plays into the conspiracy factor. My father mentioned that climate scientists are shills knowingly leaving out this data.
We have a clearly observed and measured rapid global warming in the last decades. So whatever mechanism might counteract global warming, it obviously allowed the rapid warming to happen and unless anyone can present a plausible model why the counteraction should get stronger than any further warming, it won't prevent further warming.
How about the rising temperatures and the decreasing number of pirates?
There is nothing "basic" in climate science unless you assume that CO2 is the only factor.
"1838: Claude Pouillet, a French physicist, attributes the natural greenhouse effect to water vapor and carbon dioxide. He concludes that any change in the amount of water vapor, such as CO2, is expected to result in climate change." (google translate).
My (12 minute long) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon keynote in Barcelona this year used Foote's discovery of global warming as an example of simultaneous invention, and compared it to the creation of over a dozen container orchestrators other than Kubernetes.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 69.6 ms ] thread"An atmosphere of [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted."
https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...
I remember being dumbfounded at the time and pasting the excerpt to some friends on IRC. People have known atmospheric co2 warms the planet for a very long time.
This book wasn't even about climate, it was about diet and evolution. It turns out if you want to talk about the history of evolution, you have to talk about the atmosphere and how it varied going through oxygen and carbon-rich periods.
I remember while reading up on the history of climate science, that Fourier found that the planet should be markedly colder than it is, purely from physics. Then calling atmosphere a blanket that keeps it warm. That must have been in the early 1800s.
So thought was moving in the right direction long ago.
«The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838 and reasoned from experimental observations by Eunice Newton Foote in 1856. John Tyndall expanded her work in 1859 by measuring radiative properties of a wider spectrum of greenhouse gases. The effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the term "greenhouse" was not used to refer to this effect by any of these scientists; the term was first used in this way by Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901.»
Lot of talks about deforestation with examples that we have not recovered from today (example Røros).
Though from what I've heard, it's difficult to figure out if they are net negative CO2, and of course the timber needs to come from sustainably managed forests.
Before the switch to coal, wood was the primary thermal energy souce for humans (well, after direct passive solar heat). By the 19th century, and in many parts of the world, centuries or millennia prior, woodfuel burning, directly and as charcoal for kilns and smelters, had deforested vast parts of the globe, transforming many formerly forested parts of the world to desert or scrub (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Lebanon, Greece, Italy).
We have the dual problems of 1) replacing coal, oil, and natural gas, and 2) removing CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans.
Burning wood accomplishes #1, but not #2.
There's the additional slight problem that the scale of present energy consumption, let alone increases which would bring another 5-8 billions of souls up to modern European or US standards of living, largely defined by per-capita energy consumption, greatly exceeds total available biomass production in total, not merely wood growth.
the easiest way would be to just bury the wood (we dug it out in the first place, right?) but we need to make sure that it doesn't rot and thus reenter the atmosphere. that's where burning makes sense.
Skyscrapers can't be built out of concrete either. It's the rebar that is the structural component that makes it possible to build skyscrapers. We can build skyscrapers with mass timber and steel reinforcement nowadays.
That respiration of animals emits CO2 was determined at least by the 1750's.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baptist_van_Helmont
A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "coal" found Babington, William. "A case of exposure to the vapour of burning charcoal." Medico-chirurgical transactions 1 (1809): 83. at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2128797/pdf/med... :
> When carbon in combustion combines with oxygen we obtain carbonic acid gas, and at the same time in proportion to its moisture, more or less hydrocarbonous gas is evolved.
A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "exhalation" found Allen, William, and William Hasledine Pepys. "XVII. On the changes produced in atmospheric air, and oxygen gas, respiration." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 98 (1808): 249-281. at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1808... with quotes like:
> In this experiment we meet with a remarkable fact, viz. that as much carbonic acid gas was given off in 5½ minutes, as in the former experiment in eleven minutes ; so that it appears, whenever atmospheric air is taken into the lungs, it returns charged with about 8 per cent, carbonic acid
Carbon dioxide partitions into water as carbonic acid. This is the key mechanism in ocean acidification. Of course the rate is affected by pH of the oceans, there's a buffering action going on between carbonate, bicarbonate, and carbonic acid depending on how many protons are available. It's also why pure water sitting open to the air will have a slightly acidic pH.
The oceans at the bottom have a decent layer of carbonate material accumulated from shells, which are also at equilibrium with the ocean, but the other direction (accepting protons). But since the oceans are so big, to increase the pH of the oceans you'd have to send the surface water to the bottom. Mixing the oceans is kind of a slow process -- around 500 years. But in theory we'll get some long term climate help from the ocean floor (well, if the methane clathrates don't get us first).
If in 50 years, we find out that the predictions made by our models had been wrong (either the measures we take to reduce CO2 don't lead to the results we expected, or the warming we see is outside of the expected ranges) - in the post-mortem of the models, what would we likely say had gone wrong?
Most likely, if climate research is found to be far off the alarming predictions made by most institutions, we'll chalk it up to political meddling/statistical fubbing and move on. If the lifestyle changes for most of the polulation are already in place by then, many will believe it was "for the best, anyway", and I'm inclined to agree with this view - our response to climate change is more important than if climate change was primarily our fault to begin with. I'm not advocating for skewing research in favor of one position or the other, but it enables a public forum of such scale that at the very least, prepares us for dealing with ever-increasing scopes of global issues that impact all life on Earth, which will come in handy when we progress to the point we're dealing with the ethics of extremely advanced technology.
Presuming we don't lose key information (e.g. deliberate erasure of the NOAA archives), we'd treat it in the same way as the current investigation; find what changes are required to the model to make it consistent with the data.
> we'd treat it in the same way as the current investigation; find what changes are required to the model to make it consistent with the data
If that is how it is currently done, I have a big issue with it. It seems like the model is not being treated as a forecasting model but rather as a purely academic one ('if we make these assumptions and have these initial conditions, how does the behavior of the system evolve'?), while being sold to the media, politicians and the general public as a forecasting model that is assumed to have very strong predictive power.
I think it's a really interesting question, even though on a charged topic and difficult to forecast.
Balance of feedback systems? There are so many feedback systems here, positive and negative all overlapping. Even if you are 95% sure you have each one figured out, after a little over a dozen factors that error compounds and you're at around 50/50 of getting something wrong.
Of course, could be wrong in the other direction too... that's why errors are bars not arrows.
Note: Feedback systems here are not under-studied, they're just hard to model. This isn't an example of a black swan that would devastate the discipline, if that's what you were looking for. Those might be... supervolcano? Nuclear war? Atmospheric scrubbing technology breakthrough? Even those have calculable effects. If there's some radical unpredicted shift I can't imagine it being along the lines of "water vapor and CO2 don't actually warm things," that's just too well confirmed.
This has already happened. Models developed in the 1990s didn't match what happened in the 21st century. The resulting controversy is called the pause. Why did temperatures stop rising when models said they should continue? We didn't stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere after all.
For better or worse, the controversy was resolved by scientists "correcting" the historical temperature datasets to erase the pause from the record. The data was brought into line with the theory. You can go read old news stories or articles about the pause and look at the temperature graphs in them, then compare to the current, up to date temperature graphs and see that they don't match.
If you like there's a talk here by a guy who started out as a skeptic because he kept spotting errors in studies, and became a peer-reviewed, published climate scientist. He's still a skeptic about the models used to predict the future (he says he thinks the basics of climatology are sound though):
https://www.nicholaslewis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lew...
That talk is quite technical but might provide some answers to how the models could be wrong. Ultimately nothing surprising: they're based on major approximations and the underlying datasets may have issues. Go read his papers for more details.
The connection isn't disputed, the causality is. Look at this graph:
https://totheleftofcentre.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/400000...
You can see that most of the time, temperature rises lead increases in CO2. This implies that rising temperature increases CO2 levels, but not necessarily the other way around.
If you zoom out even further, the correlation isn't clear anymore at all:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cx5-osJUkAAPkF8.jpg
Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts. In the interest of our descendants, we had better develop technology to deal with a tougher climate, rather than cut down on emissions so that maybe ten or twenty generations can live with a somewhat smaller fallout of manmade climate change.
The issue is the rate of change, which is unprecedented. The path we're currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop production.
Perhaps over some arbitrary timeframes within the measured record. On the other hand, a volcanic eruption can immediately cause a change of 1K or more.
But let's say it is unprecedented, so what?
> The path we're currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop production.
[citation needed]
This has been predicted numerous times, it didn't come to pass. Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate, we have to deal with that issue anyway. So let's deal with the actual issue, not part of what may cause the issue, some of the time.
As for ecosystems getting "devastated" - so what? They get devastated one way or another all the time. They recover.
Here's a citation - https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9326 "Temperature increase reduces global yields of major crops in four independent estimates".
> Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
When you write "This has been predicted numerous times", do you mean, for example, the predicted famines of the mid-1900s, saved by the Green Revolution? Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech cautious us technical success in raising food production is only a temporary victory - we must also limit our population.
When you write "Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate" ... how is that even a valid argument? Where are the Canadian orange groves? How's the Brazilian maple syrup industry? They don't exist, because the climate is wrong for those crops in those areas.
You write "They recover" .. Citation needed. Simple counter-example - the Icelandic forests from the Norse era have not recovered.
Or, 10,000 years ago the Sahara was green. Now it's a desert. Why hasn't that ecosystem recovered?
No, I'm sincerely interested.
> Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
"Without adaptation" is not a plausible scenario. Of course there will be adaptation. But let's take those numbers anyway, and take a very liberal estimate of six degrees of temperature increase: That's 36% (wheat), 19.2% (rice), 44% (maize) and 18.6% (soy), respectively.
That may sound alarming if all that produce had to be turned into food that people need to live. In practice, most of it goes to livestock or even biofuel production. Being forced to have less cattle and fuel might be good for the climate, no?
> Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech cautious us technical success in raising food production is only a temporary victory - we must also limit our population.
Perhaps, but the best way to limit your population growth is to deliver a better standard of living.
> When you write "Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate" ... how is that even a valid argument? Where are the Canadian orange groves? How's the Brazilian maple syrup industry? They don't exist, because the climate is wrong for those crops in those areas.
I'm talking about actual crop production, not hypothetical crop production. Nobody is starving because farmlands that never existed stop producing. With bad weather, that's different.
If we're talking about climate and agriculture, the argument goes both ways: If global temperature rises, then new places will start making sense for certain forms of agriculture, just as old places will stop making sense. This also will happen regardless of human intervention.
Life adapts, when it can. The rate of change you mentioned ensures that a majority of life will not be able to adapt and it's not impossible that another K-T level extinction event is already taking place.
Geologically speaking, the speed at which the Earth is changing from human-induced climate change could just as well be a meteorite impact. Looking at global conflict resolution ability I fear that we have no hope to stop it.
It's also "not impossible" that a meteorite wipes us all out tomorrow. Which serious scientist is predicting a K-T level extinction event?
Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over thousands of years. That's not out of the ordinary in terms of variance for life on earth right now. Sure, some species may have to migrate, some will go extinct one way or another, but not a K-T level event.
Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over the next century. That's very different. It may be hard to separate the climate change extinctions from the regular habitat destructions that are already ongoing, though.
The climate is a non-linear chaotic system it has positive and negative feedback loops.
You can't replicate the climate in a simple experiment which is why we try with models and they are depending on which initial conditions we put in.
If we understood it extremely well we wouldn't come up with a rather large range in the predictions.
FWIW, we don't have to understand it extremely well, only well enough to affect policy changes.
A 99% probability of an estimated increase of 2-4°C can be considered a rather large range, but enough certainty to know that it's a problem. (Numbers made up for demonstration purposes.)
But the idea that we should upend the use of fossil fuels without any realistic alternative is simply anti-human and will for sure cause millions to die.
I haven't heard of a single scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change that would lead to that and thus I see no need to worry more about climate change more than pulling people out of poverty.
We should always try and make energy cleaner and less pollutant but wouldn't you agree we should always make a cost benefit analysis and weigh the positive and negative consequences of our decisions?
Poor people demand an improved environment too - it's not a special demand limited to the middle class or richer.
Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_justice#Affected... starts "Among the affected groups of Environmental Justice, those in high-poverty and racial minority groups have the most propensity to receive the harm of environmental injustice." Many of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members are poor, and they lead the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in part on environmental grounds.
Have you heard of a single scientifically demonstrated consequence of decreased CFC emissions which would lead to people being pulled out of poverty and into the middle class?
Do you support CFC restrictions, and if so, when do you regard the evidence as being strong enough to warrant those restrictions?
I agree we should "weigh the positive and negative consequences of our decisions". I disagree with your statement that there are no realistic alternatives to the current practices.
People argued that there were no realistic alternatives to CFCs. (See http://aei.pitt.edu/63734/1/WD_126.pdf from 1980 for "No satisfactory substitute has yet been found for these machines containing CFCs [11 and 12], but there is undoubtedly room for reducing emissions by making design changes.") Now, from https://www.livescience.com/62603-new-cfcs-enter-ozone-layer... :
"""Neither of the two primary CFC-11 use-cases, firefighting and refrigerators, are at all hampered today by not having the substance, Ferry said. He added that he couldn't think of any special use-case for the chemical for which there isn't already an alternative."""
There is undoubtedly room for alternatives for the current use of fossil fuels.
So you are making my point.
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador is but one of many examples which show that poor people don't need to become middle class before wanting to protect the environment. And it's the rich Western companies like Texaco/Chevron which caused the pollution they are protesting against.
But you are confusing things here. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador doesn't have the power to do anything about that as there are more people in the world than them and thus other interests. 100 year ago they would just have been wiped out. By becoming richer they have the power to have a say in the international community.
Are their lives more worth than others?
As long as you are not prepared to make a proper cost-benefit anlysis and judge what's right or wrong you aren't really taking the discussion seriously IMO.
CONAIE is an concrete example of my previous statement that "Poor people demand an improved environment too - it's not a special demand limited to the middle class or richer." It is a counter-example to your implication at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21248038 that we need to get people into the middle class first, in order that they demand we improve the environment.
I gave that one because you seemed to have rejected my earlier example of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, likely because you confused people in poverty (a large fraction of that tribe are in poverty) with the "rich society" of the US.
Respecting the rights of indigenous people is another way to let them have a say in the international community. Not that it makes a difference here since I'm pointing to their success in protecting the environment on the national stage in Ecuador.
You'll note that your "better and more modern cars" implies that all people want cars. Some indigenous people expressly do not.
You like talking about "worth". How do you balance the "worth the cost of upending the current use of ex fossil fuels" vs. the worth of indigenous lives and lifestyles?
Because the only way I see that you can do a cost-benefit analysis is to have some way to judge that balance. And my balance is far more on the side of indigenous lives than on the loss of profits to the rich.
If you can't see how ridiculous that sounds, you might not understand how people become skeptical about climate science.
If we really understand these physics so well, why have most of the predictions been wrong?
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs/public...
Don't trust the CATO when it comes to climate (at the very least). They are known negationists. If you understand basic level physics, read the IPCC reports and the realclimate blog.
On the second question, the problem with global warming is, that everybody talks about the weather, and all our systems are well adapted to the current climate. Concretely, there are farmers at the edge of the Sahara, who are adapted to a semi-arid conditions, and when the Sahara moves south, then they have to deal with desert conditions. Similar, when the Great Barrier Reef moves south, then there are dive centers without a reef north of the new location.
So we will have to adapt to a warmer climate anyhow, but not cutting down emissions is an entirely unforced error, it makes global warming worse, without any concrete benefit. Cutting down emissions is precisely the "smaller fallout of manmade climate change" you are arguing for.
If it's a positive feedback loop, then why hasn't there been a runaway greenhouse effect in the past? Something must have stopped it. What was that?
> Concretely, there are farmers at the edge of the Sahara, who are adapted to a semi-arid conditions, and when the Sahara moves south, then they have to deal with desert conditions.
Yes, they will. They'll have to move. The Sahara didn't use to be a desert for all of human history, it used to be fertile at one point. Now it isn't anymore, so we don't have agriculture there. So what?
> Similar, when the Great Barrier Reef moves south, then there are dive centers without a reef north of the new location.
First-world problems...
> So we will have to adapt to a warmer climate anyhow, but not cutting down emissions is an entirely unforced error, it makes global warming worse, without any concrete benefit.
No concrete benefit? You mean, besides the fact that our entire standard of living rests on the fact that we can emit CO2 more or less undisturbed?
> Cutting down emissions is precisely the "smaller fallout of manmade climate change" you are arguing for.
Not if you take into account the standard of living of the people calling the shots, right here and now.
Or do both. Let's make the world less hostile to live in for billions of people, whilst also providing technology & resources for them to survive.
About your graph: historical global temperature changes are not the same as anthropomorphic global temperature changes. Past periods of high CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 leads to higher global temperatures. Indeed, it confirms that there is a strong relationship between the two.
There are other sources of temperature change so you can't use one indicator to prove there is no effect. What climate scientists have done is look at ALL the possible drivers of climate change and ruled out all of the natural causes as contributing to the current very sharp and ongoing rise in temperature. Everything that's left is caused by human activity.
On the right of that graph, there is a vertical red line. That's not an axis or a border, that's the recent rise in CO2 levels, and it's unprecedented. The overwhelming majority of evidence shows that human activity, mainly greenhouse gases, is causing climate change. Misrepresenting one graph does not change that.
The relationship, at least in the smaller graph, isn't in question. The causality is. I didn't say it contradicts the causality, I say it doesn't support the causality.
If you look at the larger graph, whatever relationship there is between CO2 and global temperature becomes indiscernible.
> There are other sources of temperature change so you can't use one indicator to prove there is no effect
You can't prove a negative in the first place. Of course there's bound to be some effect, but how large is it really?
> On the right of that graph, there is a vertical red line. That's not an axis or a border, that's the recent rise in CO2 levels, and it's unprecedented.
The rise may be unprecedented, the level isn't.
> The overwhelming majority of evidence shows that human activity, mainly greenhouse gases, is causing climate change.
That's a strong statement for what it is at best a discernible correlation.
I'm willing to take it on faith. Humans cause climate change? Now what? We absolutely have to drop everything and start cooling the planet? Until the next ice age, when presumably we'll have to warm it?
That's your claim, but you can't actually derive that from the data. It may just as well be the case that rises in temperature cause the release of more CO2, period.
> This does not in any way call into question the causality between increasing concentration of CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and increased warming as predicted by gas absorption equations which we teach in high school.
The climate on the planet isn't a simple gas absorption equation, there are other factors. Even if the greenhouse effect is a factor, it couldn't be the dominating factor.
Otherwise, how could an ice age just "end" a period of high CO2 concentration? Shouldn't the greenhouse effect prevent it? And if so, will the next ice age be "tamer" if we keep CO2 levels up? Wouldn't that be good?
You picked the example as a rebuttal to the suggestion that there is causality. For the next time you need an image that doesn’t support this causality, may I suggest a picture of a cat?
> That's a strong statement for what it is at best a discernible correlation. It's a strong and very valid statement, supported by a wealth of science. In this instance it's not really possible, or wise, to run multiple randomly controlled experiments on our own planet to conclusively prove the point. Instead, we have a lot of observations and modelling that allow us to run those experiments, and the weight of those say we have a problem.
> We absolutely have to drop everything and start cooling the planet? The majority consensus is not to drop everything but to continue making substantial changes to human activity to reduce warming. You personally do not need to become an eco-warrior, just more aware of the effect you're having on the planet and try to reduce it. Cooling the planet is now beyond expectations. The aim now is for it not to warm up too much.
> Until the next ice age, when presumably we'll have to warm it? That is a terribly big false equivalency! First, yes, I expect so. Second, it's totally different! Ice ages take multiple hundreds, if not thousands, of years to get going. The next ice age is not going to affect the next generation, global warming is.
The benefits to ecological improvements and the risk of climate change vastly outweigh the costs. Less pollution related illness, our limited resources will last longer, etc... The risk alone is enough to make me think that ignoring the problem is the morally wrong choice, the benefits double the equation.
No, the weight of those say there will be an increase in temperature. Never mind that the weight of these have been wrong for more narrow definitions of the word "wrong":
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs/public...
If those models can't predict ten years into the future with any reasonable amount of confidence, how can we trust them to predict the next 100 years?
Even then, let's say these models are more or less correct, what exactly says "we have a problem"? What problem? We already have tons of problems! Not being able to emit CO2 would be a huge problem in and of itself. What are the models to predict the actual problems caused by climate change? How good are those? Do 95% of scientists agree on them?
> The majority consensus is not to drop everything but to continue making substantial changes to human activity to reduce warming.
Okay, I don't exactly feel like making substantial changes to my lifestyle based on these predictions, especially since the impact doesn't concern me much at all. Now what? Good luck getting all that political support that you will need.
Yes, it usually boils down to selfishness.
1. A lot of the discussion at the moment is about action within the USA, Europe, Brazil and China. These are not poor countries. Brazil isn't doing great but is a significant economy. China is taking a lot of action already to move to greener tech. There is an acceptance amongst most that the richer nations should be doing most to tackle climate change, as well as helping other nations.
2. Green does not necessarily mean expensive. Look at the levelized cost of energy in different countries and green options are often cheaper or comparable to fossil fuels, even before the indirect costs are considered.
3. Green is often also the most practical solution for developing countries. In many, solar and wind are used as the infrastructure for power distribution does not exist, is incredibly unreliable and/or very expensive. For a lot of these countries localised green energy generation is a key factor for development.
2) If you with green mean wind and solar then yes it means expensive because both have a low capacity factor and intermittency problems which means that either coal, gas, oil og nuclear have to be there as a backup. They, of course, need to be calculated in just as things like decommission which isn't being calculated in for wind and solar but is for nuclear. In other words, green cost as it's calculated is not the true cost.
3) No green isn't the most practical solution exactly for the reasons mentioned in 2). Sure you can provide a little here and there but you cant actually build a flourishing economy on wind and solar and there isn't a single example of that being the case. With oil, gas, coal and nuclear you can. Nuclear is too expensive which leaves us with fossil fuels.
So I would claim that your 3 reasons lack reality :)
Sort the table by Renewables as a percentage of generation. There are countries with flourishing economies running with a majority of renewable power generation.
The intermittency problems for some renewables are being overcome as more solutions are invented and improved. Most new technologies have problems to overcome, so it'd be unrealistic to expect instant & perfect solutions. The speed of innovation here is impressive enough to already be delivering real world solutions which provide energy to communities and countries.
On a global scale wind and solar only handles 1% of all energy consumption and it's not expected to move to more than 3-4% in 2040.
And no the intermittency problem is not being overcome, not even by a long shot, as it's a physical boundaries problem not technology or optimization problem.
All lifeforms are selfish. If your solution only works on an imaginary selfless version of the human being, then it's not a solution. It's a fantasy.
This is such a crude, reductionist view that falls very short of reality. You know, it might just be you and minority that think this way.
Luckily reality shows time and time again that people in general (definitely excluding you here) have better motivations and take better decisions which consider other people.
False dichotomy. Why not do both?
Can you mention one scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we don't know how to deal with with todays let alone future technologies?
When you write "deal with", do you mean to include mass migrations, loss of populated areas, and civil unrest? Because that's how we dealt with, for example, the Dust Bowl.
One example is that there does not seem any way to save Miami in its current form, using today's technology or any realistic technology we could develop.
Quoting https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-floods-sea-level-rise-... :
> “Miami as we know it today — there’s virtually no scenario under which you can imagine it existing at the end of the century,” Goodell said. “It may be some smaller version of Miami that incorporates platform houses and floating structures.” ...
> And while there is much that Florida can learn from these other places, no one has answers to looming threats like water rising through the ground underneath. “The solutions that are going to be used to save cities like Miami Beach probably haven’t been developed yet,” Mowry said.
Or from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170403-miamis-fight-aga... :
> But the question isn’t whether this work will save every community: it won’t. Even those tasked with making their cities resilient admit that, at some point in the future, certain areas here will no longer be “viable” places to live. Rather, the challenge is to do enough to ensure that the economy as a whole continues to thrive and that tourists still come to enjoy the sun, sand – and swelling sea.
We can "deal with" that by mass migration to move. Or letting them die. But I don't think that's what you mean?
We also live places today which wasn't possible 100 year ago.
Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it. We are better at that today than any other time in history.
So the question I am trying to get answered is what have been scientifically demonstrated to be the case with climate change that we cant deal with if we don't "do anything" today?
Climate is always changing yes, the temperature have been rising yes, that will have consequences on us yes, but which changes have been demonstrated that would be worth the cost of upending the current use of ex fossil fuels to help modern civilization deliver goods and services to it's growing population and to reduce the amount of funding for new scientific discoveries or R&D in Molten or fusion?
It sounds like a Pascals wager to me but without the upside and instant damnation of the existing people inhabiting the planet.
It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before.
If so, I don't see a difference between your view and "just let things happen - some people will survive, and I don't care who."
(Actually, your "worth the cost" suggests that you care less about the world's poorest people, whose deaths have the least economic impact.)
If your view is anything at all like that, then of course we can "deal with" the effects climate change. But it's not a humane approach.
The most predictable way of doing that is allowing them to use cheap reliable energy.
Mass starvation happens when you don't have cheap reliable energy, pesticides and other modern technologies to deal with the always ongoing consequences of climate change.
Civil unrest is what happens when people don't have access to food, right now the only societies that can ensure that are rich societies using capitalism, technology, and energy (mostly fossil fuels) to deal with that.
Mass migration happens all the time but again it's more likely to happen when you don't have the means to defend you against the always occuring challenges of the climate.
It's anti-human to hinder poor people getting access to the very resource that allow them to fight the consequences of climate change like we are able to in modern societies.
Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, it gives us a hostile and dangerous enviroment we make safe through the use of energy.
My approach is pro human flourishing.
So "deal with" means allowing humans to deal the challenges of nature.
If you want to see civil unrest, just raise the taxes on gasoline, like Monsieur Macron.
As for mass migration, if there really is such a big fallout due to climate change (or anything else) rendering places uninhabitable, let the people migrate. Humans have always migrated. Why stop now?
As for mass starvation, I don't buy it. Most crops today are fed to cattle, there's a lot of leeway in terms of repurposing it for human consumption.
You'll notice that many Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe were not allowed to migrate there, nor the asylum seekers currently trying to reach the US through Mexico.
This is not new. Jews trying to flee Europe before WWII were also prevented from migrating. Chinese people were prohibited from migrating to the US. Many people resist economic migrants, to the point of wanting them killed. "Build a wall", etc.
So the question isn't "why stop now?" Why have we stopped over a century ago, and what must be done to allow migration?
But that's still not enough. I pointed out the Dust Bowl for a reason. The Okies who needed to migrate were discriminated against, even though there were no legal reasons to prevent their migration. Quoting http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/... :
> The mass of migrants that arrived in California did not receive a warm welcome from the state of California, which was already overwhelmed by the amount on people on the state’s relief roll. They were met at the state border by patrolmen who told them to turn back – that there was not enough work for them in California. Additionally, the established population of California was hostile towards the migrants due to differences in regional culture. They viewed the Okies as culturally and socially inferior, backward and uneducated – a view echoed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The term “Okie” originally had the derogatory connotation of "They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred."—The Grapes of Wrath “poor, white trash.” As the character of Tom Joad stated in The Grapes of Wrath, “Okie means you’re scum.”
So when ThomPete writes "Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it", that seems to include the Okie experience as one of the ways we deal with it.
Is that experience what the Miamians of the 2060s might have to look forward to?
There are consequences to everything we do as life and also what we don't do.
People will also die from restricting the use of fossil fuels, in fact it's much more likely. If you want to point the moral finger our way keep ind mind that three points your way.
- https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252: we have also underestimated the speed at which the climate will depart from the relatively stable Holocene equilibrium we've lived under for the past ~10,000 years
- https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-operations/usda-crop-progr...): we are already seeing consequences to crop yields in the U.S.
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/201...): heat waves are becoming more frequent and more damaging
- https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab13bf), etc: so are other extreme weather events
- https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/29/2002084200/-1/-1/1/CLI...: the DOD recognizes climate change as an extraordinary threat to the U.S.
- https://games-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/docu...: so does the intelligence community
- https://iflas.blogspot.com/2019/07/compendium-of-research-re...: a good aggregation (the commentary is speculative; read the papers)
Our global industrial society relies, more precariously than most realize or admit, on conditions which will soon diminish or disappear. For example:
- Stable, predictable weather patterns (industrial agriculture depends on this) - Just-in-time global shipping/logistics, by which food and other necessities get to supermarket shelves (threatened by extreme weather, political crises, fuel availability, etc) - Relatively cheap, easy availability of fossil fuels (extraction costs will continue to rise over time, and competition will likely grow more intense) - Plentiful fish/marine life stocks (we are destroying coral reefs extremely quickly, which are a key part of the ocean lifecycle; ocean acidification due to carbon capture also threatens sea life, as does oceanic warming) on which many rely for food - Low atmospheric CO2 content for breathability (cognitive ability decreases as CO2 levels rise) - Thriving coastal cities, as centers of both population and economic activity (many are under threat of regular flooding if not complete loss this century)
It will likely take indefinite human intervention to keep the climate system habitable for anywhere near our present numbers, if we're even capable of the sort of coordination required.
You are linking to the interpretation of data not actually scientifically demonstrated claims.
I could post rebuttals to each of them here is just one:
https://www.thegwpf.com/ignore-climate-hysteria-brazil-set-t...
but it's not really an argument about the future either.
The facts are the facts and they are:
We are better than ever to deal with unpredictable weather patterns and can produce food places that used to be impossible. We are better at living places that used to be impossible. We are better at producing food than ever, we are better at using resources than ever, we are better at dealing with floods than ever, with drought than ever, with extreme weather than ever and I could go on.
You are claiming that this will change based on speculation and single points of reference, not science and thus we can then have a speculative debate if you'd like not a scientific one.
I haven't seen any evidence that would point to us not being able to deal with the climate in the future better than we are today.
So what's your point? What's your suggestion? What is it you want me/us to do we aren't already doing that wouldn't be worse than what we are already doing?
Benny Peiser (b. 1957) is a UK social anthropologist and AGW denier listed among the Heartland Institute "Global warming experts" despite having no evident expertise in climate science or policy. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Benny_Peiser
Some of them are. Some are not, eg, they are links to newspaper articles and government publications.
But the question was "Can you post something to back up your claims from a well respected climate scientist?" That means "at least one", not "all".
walleeee's links includes claims from well-respected climate scientists. Eg, the first author of the Nature paper is https://patricktbrown.org/about/ and the first author of the PNAS paper is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Steffen .
So, I'll ask again: "Can you post something to back up your claims from a well respected climate scientist?"
If so, then I agree that we have solutions. Mass starvation is another solution. But I wanted clarification on what "deal with" means.
We dealt with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s through mass exodus, malnutrition, widespread loss of personal land ownership, and stigmatizing the Okies and others who had to leave their homes.
Is that how we'll deal with the changes to Miami?
Or, look at the Swedish famine of 1867–1869. The government deal with it ... poorly, but it did deal with it.
So when ThomPete asks "Can you mention one scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we don't know how to deal with with todays let alone future technologies?" ... what does "deal with" mean?
Because we can always deal with problems by letting people suffer. That's surely not what's meant, but just what is meant?
The companies, people, organizations, and countries who profited from mispriced costs which did not factor in externalities like the likely need to relocate most of the population of Miami?
How much should those companies, people, organization, and countries be penalized for committing fraud to suppress the true costs?
What is the cost of the emotional distress of being forced to move because of generations of pollution by others?
Or, are those who need to move the ones who bear most of the cost?
Who pays?
And, what do natural disaster have to do with it? We're talking about a human-caused disaster in the making orders of magnitude greater than Bhopal.
Surely those companies, organizations, people, and countries which profited from petroleum extraction, including by telling lies about the impact of their work, should pay compensation, yes?
Or are you one of those people who believes in privatizing profits and socializing risk?
Do you honestly think insurance will cover it? Because I remember Hurricane Andrew, when 11 insurance companies went bankrupt from the claims filed.
Again, we can look to the Okie experience - the Dust Bowl was caused by soil mismanagement by humans - as a relevant historical example. Why shouldn't we expect something like that again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A
One of the problems cited: the temperature/CO2 graph probably came from an antarctic ice core sample ... and temperature leading/lagging there is different than in non-polar locations.
Second, the climate is a complex feedback system; there isn't one independent variable and everything else is dependent. If something forces any of the variables in the feedback system it can affect the other variables. For instance, say the artificial release of CO2 by humans results in the thawing of the arctic, releasing gigatons of methane, at which point CO2 might no longer be the primary driver. Over geologic time there are different causes for these forcings, but that doesn't mean that the current forcing (human released CO2) isn't the current problem.
He covers all of that and more, much better, in 13 minutes.
[EDIT] I forgot to address "what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures?"
That is a supremely cavalier attitude. Nobody is saying AGW is going to kill off all life. In the long term life will recover. But in the short term we humans are going to have to deal with the consequences: displacement of millions of people through crop failures and loss of coast, disruption of economic systems, and more civil unrest. The US military is gaming out these scenarios because they believe the science, not because they are pinko tree huggers who hate freedom.
Specifically, he points out that CO2 lags temperature by hundreds of years in the southern hemisphere, but that temperature lags CO2 by again hundreds of years in the northern hemisphere.
CO2 is claimed to have accelerated natural warming through a feedback loop - until it didn't, and temperatures began drifting down again.
That's fair enough. That's reasonably nuanced. I'm missing the extent to which this feedback loop actually made an impact though, because clearly it can't be the dominant driver or ultimate control lever. Otherwise, we'd have had a runaway greenhouse already.
> Nobody is saying AGW is going to kill off all life.
One might get that impression from the media narrative though.
> But in the short term we humans are going to have to deal with the consequences: displacement of millions of people through crop failures and loss of coast, disruption of economic systems, and more civil unrest.
I don't think that's such a big deal, all things concerned. Sometimes, people have to move. Sometimes, crops fail. Sometimes, coasts move. Sometimes, there's civil unrest. Telling people in China or Brazil that they'll have to cut down on their emissions is going to cause civil unrest. "Vote for me, I'll make you poorer" is not a winning political provision.
> The US military is gaming out these scenarios because they believe the science, not because they are pinko tree huggers who hate freedom.
They're also gaming out scenarios of mass epidemics, or political secession. What do you expect them to do?
If the ebola infections started appearing in all the major cities with airports and seaports, would you want the experts to try their best to stop it, or would you shrug and say, eh, sometimes people live and sometimes they die,
> One might get that impression from the media narrative though. (that AGW is going to kill all life)
I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational. Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it. Second, I don't personally get the impression that even the press claims AGW will sterilize the planet. It sounds like a strawman to me.
That highly depends on what "the experts" recommend that we do. In any case, your bad analogy is bad.
> I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational.
...which is what makes me far less worried about climate change.
> Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it.
All this talk about "95% of scientists agree (that the charts point up)" and "science denial" is an argument from authority.
Given that 50% of science is estimated to be wrong[1], I'm willing to take my chances on this one, especially since there's a strong ideological component to it.
The actual simulations are drastic simplifications with wide margins of error, and even those margins have been crossed by observation even in the close term, where the margins are still narrow. All the interesting stuff happens way further down the line, however.
Perhaps a bit more humility regarding the practical limits to the scientific method is in order, at least in this case - but then how would you make your argument from authority?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
https://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/role.html#COMP_MODS
sources: https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-scien... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
"1838: Claude Pouillet, a French physicist, attributes the natural greenhouse effect to water vapor and carbon dioxide. He concludes that any change in the amount of water vapor, such as CO2, is expected to result in climate change." (google translate).
edit: I think it was this paper https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pou... but I have not checked (cannot Ctrl-F).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkvOgnnbTqWIzQnyaUUp...