We are way worse at understanding how the effects of global temperature rise will manifest than we are at estimating those changes. That is coming to pass now - pollinators disappearing that could collapse ecosystems are just one example. We should not be arguing about how fast we are falling once we step off the cliff.
I have literally just quoted the original article and the current data. I didn't state any opinion but apparently this is enough for people to disagree.
I think it is interesting in itself to read predictions made thirty years ago for the next thirty years and compare them with actual data. What I get from it is that the analysis was fundamentally correct- temperatures have kept increasing; but I also see a tendency to overconfidence and exaggeration: the source says that the most conservative estimates put the warming by 2018 between 1 and 7 degrees- even if it's Fahrenheit it literally means that we're at the lower end of the "most conservative estimates".
Exactly! Which is why we need to be extremely prudent and not assume we can pollute without any major impacts. If the flashlight is poor, we should crawl, not run inside the cave.
What % of overall sea level rise predictions did this effect contribute? Do we still have to worry about New York and other coastal cities being inundated in the next few decades, or not?
You still have to worry. This is one study, not a final word on the topic, there's considerable uncertainty in this area. Notably recent numbers indicate that Greenland melting is worse than predicted.
No, I don't have to worry. That would make me unhappy.
Worry is bad for your health. Don't worry about far-off uncertain things that are out of your control. It'd just get you down, paranoid and freaking out, when you could instead focus on the things that matter in life.
If memory serves some of the more dire predictions accounted for 40 feet of sea level rise as a result of melting ice. This article says that Antarctica's ice shelves (cliffs) would only amount to six feet.
So that leaves 'only' 34 feet of sea level rise if the ice cliffs don't collapse as a result of occasional calving and instead gradually melt over time (at a slower pace).
Either way it's going to make the sea rise... Just over say, 150 years instead of 50.
Sea level rise predictions have the most uncertainty of any climate predictions. We can estimate pretty confidently what the equilibrium level of ice will be from a given temperature from the geologic record, but how quickly we get there depends on a lot we don't fully understand about the physics of ice sheets. One study like this probably shouldn't change your perception of our state of knowledge of this that much, but your baseline should also be that there's huge uncertainty.
Interesting. It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics.
It seems that ice cliffs are very different than ice sheets - the things currently melting. Ice cliffs were previously supposed to account for up to 6 feet of sea level rise, instead of the much more toned-down projections we have seen in the last few years.
The subtle distinction between ice cliffs and ice sheets will be lost in the media re-telling of this. Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not.
Nah. It's like having a study come out that shows smoking doesn't cause toenail cancer like the previous ones did. You know the tobacco industry will portray it as "new study shows smoking doesn't cause cancer!" or "scientists cast doubt on smoking-cancer link".
I also want to mention that I don't agree with whoever flagged the above comment. Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.
> Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.
I completely agree with this. But looking at the (now dead) comment (not having flagged it myself)...it's not really an example of a differing opinion. It's a cheap rhetorical shot that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. If the commentor had actually expanded on their disagreement, the remark could certainly stand as part of that. There are examples of substantive comments in this thread that disagree with yours.
On its own, that one has no merit except to lower the level of discourse here.
I'm sorry that this is what you got from my comment, because it wasn't my intention.
I was trying to say that the nuance in the article will be completely lost in the media. Even commenters in this thread who "believe in" climate change and claim to subscribe to the scientific orthodoxy are missing the distinction between ice sheets and ice cliffs, which was one of the main points of the article. And HN is one of the rare places on the internet where people actually read things, so imagine what the conversation will look like when someone posts it on facebook.
Ultimately I was trying to raise the question of whether it's even possible to communicate science to the general public. And this thread so far is answering that question with a big fat "NO".
It's inherently impossible to communicate advanced scientific research results in a quick, meaningful way to a layperson.
By definition a layperson doesn't understand any scientific field in depth.
Since they don't, they do not have the tools to truly understand anything in the field's research - you need to understand the field's current state to understand what's going on in the latest research.
Ever tried to explain something highly technical to non-technical management? That's another instance of this problem.
They're both special cases of the general problem that only experts can really understand and appreciate great work in their field, and that a very fortunate person might get to be an expert in four or maybe five fields before they die.
Yes, I can already see all the articles saying that the meltdown of the ice sheets is "not that bad after all", even though the melting is on record levels in the last few years.
This is why even in the age of the Internet, it's going to take decades until the measures that actually need to be taken to combat climate change to be put in place.
By then we will be well above the 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, and population north of 10 billion.
We don't control the climate. The climate is a non-linear dynamic system. There are dozens of natural cycles that control the climate (AMO, PDO, ENSO, solar cycles, to name a few). And all predictions of catastrophic, runaway warming have failed to materialize in the 21st century despite over 30 years of doomsday predictions. We've seen maybe a 0.13C per decade increase in temps. Well within cyclical norms. Our understanding of the climate has to be driven by facts on the ground and not computer models and hype.
We still do not have good models for understanding or predicting global low cloud cover. Clouds are hugely important to our climate system. There is no way to accurately predict the temperature in the future, especially 100 years into the future, without modeling fundamental and extremely complex systems. Our current models do not match reality or even closely approximate it.
I started trying to write out a reply going point by point, but it's just exhausting. When someone is that far from reality it's just too much work to try to pull them back, and they're not going to do any of the work themselves.
Arctic sea ice has a third of the volume it had when I was young, smaller than at any point we've ever measured, can reconstruct from ships logs, or estimate from ice cores. You'd think that kind of absurd level of change would give some of these people pause, but it doesn't.
Well for one there's contradicting comments. First saying that there has been warming every decade, but then saying that's somehow cyclical (warming and cooling cycle) when it's really a trend (continuous warming). Then saying we need facts and not computer models, but then going on to saying we need computer models.
Anecdotal, but something an economist friend of mine said: there are currently better models for predicting economics than there are for predicting the weather tomorrow.
That's because predicting economics is like predicting climate, not weather.
Predicting weather is like predicting if the stock market will go up or down tomorrow. We can't, really. Like climate, though, we can predict with decent accuracy what it'll do over years.
When you say "we" - are you speaking as one of the many who have puts years of work into these matters? If not shouldn't you at least say "they... do not have good models" etc ?
I don't mean suggest that you/we have no ability to look over experienced shoulders to cast judgement on their works, but to speak as them without having their full experience seems problematic.
NASA has a collection of scientists that believe a range of things about the climate. I watched a good video by JPL back in April discussing how lacking our models are of clouds and cloud cover and their influence on climate: https://youtu.be/ra9AFNco3lI
Solar cycles indirectly affect cloud cover not by variations in irradiance but by increases in cosmic rays from reduction in solar magnetic shield.
Finally, even the IPCC has acknowledged this and are in the process of altering their CMIP model for 2021, CMIP6, to include stronger solar forcing: https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/2247/2017/
The problem you run into, though, is that people who don't understand science confuse "we're continuing to refine our knowledge" with "we were completely and totally incorrect".
Discovering clouds play more of a role than expected is useful information, but it's a far cry from shaking the consensus on climate change as a whole.
The addition of solar forcing to CMIP6 means that they completely missed it for the first 5 models, so the consensus was wrong. Science is driven by observation and experiment not by consensus.
We should not expect their first iteration to accurately model clouds, but at least they are factoring it in now. How much did consensus override the concerns about cloud cover during the formation of climate models over the last few decades? Consensus is just a fancy word for groupthink.
We should be asking how much more accurate do our models need to be in order to predict future climate?
There are cycles such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation that we still don't really know how to model with a high degree of accuracy. The AMO has dramatic effects on climate. So does the PDO.
We don't know how volcanic activity is going to play out over the 21st century.
We don't know how much cosmic ray flux will increase if we enter a prolonged solar minimum cycle like the Maunder Minimum.
There are a ton of factors that influence climate that our models don't account for.
> We compare the climatic effects of the CMIP6 solar forcing dataset to its CMIP5 predecessor by using time-slice experiments of two chemistry–climate models and a reference radiative transfer model... This solar-cycle response is slightly larger, but not statistically significantly different from that for the CMIP5 forcing dataset.
We may not know the exact values of cosmic ray, volcanic, etc. inputs into the systems, but we can make reasonable conclusions about their high and low end values and the likely impacts that result. A quick Googling will reveal plenty of research on (and mentions in IPCC reports) the things you assert are being ignored.
So going on 10 billion humans don't have anything to do with it? A large part of the habitable land covered in agricultural fields, polar caps melting, forecasts of 2 degrees increase in temperature by the end of the century, its just all a coincidence?
Because it's the same bad-faith argument that people have seen dozens of times from climate-action-deniers before. The idea that scientists at NASA and dozens of the most prestigious and reputable institutions and journals in the world have all conspired to miss That One Thing That Explains Climate Change that isn't the obvious CO2 that has been known to contribute to global temperatures for about a century.
Eventually people tire of living in Groundhog Day and go through the same thing over and over again and they just click the downvote button and move on.
The thing about cycles is, well, they're cyclical. That means on a long enough time scale they factor out. That's why it's easier to predict the long-term climate than it is to predict what the weather will be tomorrow, next week, or next year.
It won't take decades, because we are not going to do anything.
Well, there might be a bit of corruption. Politicians have relatives who can make big money on environmental projects. The financial industry is all excited about carbon trading, with high-frequency trading and insider trading and intentional crashes and lots more fun. Political "donations" have to be generated somehow, and the lingering possibility of legislation does that well no matter which side a politician has chosen.
Crashing the economy to combat climate change seems like an abstract far-off concept until you lose your source of income. Most countries aren't about to crash their economies. The ones that do so will end up under new management after revolution or after being conquered in their weakened state.
> It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics.
That will always happen, though it only shows that these people don't understand science: That "we don't know every detail about climate change and there's scientific controversy and new discoveries about many details" does not equal "we have a controversy about the basic facts of climate change".
Interesting enough the collapse of the west antarctic ice shield was a major point of criticism where people said the IPCC got things wrong, because they were underplaying risks. It seems the debate isn't over. We'll see how it plays out.
I remember in middle school (~2004) in Cambridge we had a school assembly about global warming, and they showed an animation of a cup of water filled with ice, the ice melting, and then the cup overflowing.
In retrospect it was a simplified analogy for kids to understand, but on the other hand, massive ammunition for climate skeptics such as my parents who instantly debunked the analogy as soon as I told them about the assembly and put a cup of ice water on the kitchen table to show how silly the claim was.
That analogy may hold for arctic ice, but not antarctic ice, which is mostly a set of glacier's above the ground - some of it even has its base more than a mile above sea level.
So think of a full cup and dropping ice cubes into it. Totally different result.
Sure, but even now the analogy is not great because the melting part has nothing to do with it.
In other words, if you drop an ice cube into a cup of water, it will either immediately overflow or it will never overflow. The melting part has nothing to do with whether it will overflow. If the snow on the roof melts -> the cup overflows
I think a better analogy is a cup sitting at the drain pipe of a rain gutter and the roof is covered with snow.
If you want to simulate Greenland/Antarctica, you have to put the ice cubes outside the cup, and have them drain into the already full cup as they melt.
I flatly don't believe in CAGW. Science shows us CO2 has a base2 logarithmic effect with 50% of the heating coming in at around 40ppm. Do the math. At this point even if we go up to 5k ppm there is less than 2C total warming even possible. The rest of the temperature rise scare comes from IPCC models that amplify the tiny amount of CO2 warming. The same models that have so far failed to track reality. Satellite data shows the rate of warming over the last 50 years has not changed even as CO2 skyrocketed. The correlation isn't even there. NASA admits that the most recent years would not have actually been the hottest years ever if they didn't fill in missing data with their propriety algorithm. The sky is not falling. I expect it to take another 10 years or so before the data is so in your face that we start talking about how we made such a large mistake. Even if CO2 was a problem the only way to fix it at this point is to keep the 2 billion people down that are striving for a much larger footprint. Good luck with that.
> Even if CO2 was a problem the only way to fix it at this point is to keep the 2 billion people down that are striving for a much larger footprint.
Or, help them skip over the heavily polluting stages of that growth. We subsidize electric cars and solar installations in the US; helping developing nations do the same might go a ways.
Pollution is the real problem and it really feels like it has been given a back seat to the climate. Those Chinese factories are churning away for the same American corporations that lobby for the CO2 laws.
That climate change alarmist’s predictions have been shown to be wrong - again - will be used as “ammunition” by the people who can’t help but notice that climate alarmists predictions are wrong each and every single time they pronounce them strikes you as a problem… why, exactly?
Conspiracy thinking doesn't require, or reward, consistency. It doesn't matter how trivial it is to refute a talking point. They'll just Gish Gallop on to the next one -- including ones that have been refuted for them before.
> Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not.
Come now, that's short-sighted. Have you forgotten the hundreds of scientific discoveries making your daily life better than it was for your great-great-grandparents?
of course, but I'm not sure those discoveries have been "put to work" with the intention and mass organization in the same way climate science has been. I think with climate science we are trying to organize scientific knowledge and use it to solve a problem on a planetary scale that has not really been done before. There have been huge international interdisciplinary efforts like CERN and the ISS for example. But nothing so messily intertwined with people's personal lives, values, principles as climate science.
I found the terms confusing so looked them up. Does this look right to you?
Glacier: Large ice masses created by snowfall that has transformed into ice and compressed over the course of many years. Ice sheets, ice streams, and ice shelves are a few types of glaciers. [2]
Ice Sheets: Freaking huge glaciers
Ice Cliffs: the vertical edges of an ice sheet. Like a rock cliff but made of ice.
Ice Shelf: the "hanging chad" of the ice world. Chunk of an ice sheet that extends out over the ocean (nice diagram in source below) [1]
Sea ice: Frozen seawater, floating on the ocean. Not made from snowfall.
Iceberg: Ice floating on the ocean, chunk of an ice sheet/ice shelf
Where can I read an unbiased summary of the current state of climate models?
Last night I was called "alt-right" and a climate change denier by a peer for hesitating to agree that we are in a climate crisis, because I said don't have enough information about the situation and I'm suspicious whenever too many people start shouting about something.
The precautionary principle still prevails, though. The more uncertain you are, the more certain the course of action is, which is to avoid burning hydrocarbons.
Edit: I meant to say precautionary principle, not "uncertainty principle".
The IPCC report is actually biased--it's too conservative. It doesn't consider positive feedback loops that cause "runaway" change:
> By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today’s temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees—let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control.
Every statement in the IPCC report must be approved unanimously by a panel of authors from various countries. The theories that are not reaching consensus yet cannot be part of it.
That's what gives the reports so much weight. Literally everyone should agree with it.
It depends on your way of selecting the panel of authors, though.
eg. if you only pick people who agree with you, it's not a scientific consensus, but an echo chamber.
There are delegates from more than 120 governments that have to approve every line from every report. Government-appointed delegates from Saudi Arabia have the same weight as from France, UK, the US. The whole thing is mandated and sponsored by the UN and every government can participate. It's not an echo chamber.
Well, I'd start here: https://www.ipcc.ch and claim that's the least biased information available. Don't know whether it fits your definition of summary or up-to-date.
There isn't really such a thing as "unbiased" in climate unless you're an outright AGQ denier. There are a lot of different models, and the model you choose will give you different results. People have different foci- some people, like David Wallace Wells in the Uninhabitable Earth look at and warn about the most dangerous model. Others, like the IPCC, try to look at them broadly.
Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know by Joseph Romm is a great read. Very basic.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken is a good follow up for understanding what is necessary and what can be done.
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen explains how historically Carbon has controlled the Earth's climate system.
I have the same reserves about the climate change hysteria going on now, but I agree, there are other reasons to stop burning hydrocarbons anyway, not the least health and comfort in big cities.
I lean more toward the side that climate change is starting to become undeniable, even to subjective experience, but in either case it really is a Pascal's wager as far as I can see.
The worst case if we act as if climate change is real and it's not real is that the economy might slow a bit, and the environment probably becomes quite a bit healthier. The worst case if we act as if climate change is not real and it is in fact real is that the only place we know of in the universe where our species can exist might become uninhabitable.
I disagree. If climate change is as catastrophic as it is being portrayed by most it's not going to a cause economic slowdown. It will cause massive economic upheaval.
If all fossil fuel vehicles are replaced by 2030 think of the scale of that. Every gas station in the U.S. will close. 98% of the cars on road will become junk items.
Yes this change would destroy a lot of things, but it would require creating a lot of things as well. Replacing all those cars and gas stations with something else, like EVs and more public transportation will require a massive infrastructure effort. It might require demand reduction, like requiring employers to allow employees to work remotely when possible.
Yes these are big changes, but again what would be the alternative? To me it's like if you were diagnosed to Celiac's disease. Imagine your doctor tells you that you must stop eating grains or you will go insane and die. That may require making significant changes to your lifestyle you don't want to make, but can you really afford to just hope medical scientific consensus is wrong, and that you've been misdiagnosed, just because it's too hard or too complicated to make a change?
extinction rebellion, the hundreds of videos flooding twitter of climate change activists blocking streets/intersections (one video that blew up was of "activists" on top of a train. stopping it, working class people trying to get to work in the most environmentally friendly way) have been ruining the movement
everyone is aware of the real effects of climate change but the extremes people are going about it (hysteria/moral panic) are dishonest. I would guess the majority of us western relatively well off middle/upper middle class understand the hardest hit by climate change will be the poors/lower classes. so far I've seen the ecofriendly movement as a war on the less fortunate. The biggest enemies of the environment are still the huge corporations/shipping and the us military/select countries.
I desire the same type of "unbiased" information myself but I do not believe it is attainable for this topic. The amount of emotion that people have about the effects of pollution on temperature makes it hard to take anything at face value. The best I do is try to read up on different opinions and ignore people telling me not to look or listen to something. Ultimately, though, I have a Ph.D. in physics and not meteorology, so there is a limit to how well I'm going to be able to understand the actual science involved.
On the topic of physics
>The uncertainty principle still prevails, though. The more uncertain you are, the more certain the course of action is, which is to avoid burning hydrocarbons.
This is _not_ the uncertainty principle. At least not the one I'm familiar with. :)
I have not but I will take a look! Sadly, it will probably just get added to the ever growing list of projects that I will pass away before working on them. :/
Haha I know the feeling! To solve that, I made the choice 3 years ago to focus my curiosity (is that possible...) on climate topics.
I worked with a bunch of HN readers to build "Carbon Doomsday", an interactive chart of carbon dioxide levels, like Coinbase charts. It got really great comments on HN about a year ago:
Note that climate science is only really controversial in the US, and as I understand it, it wasn't even controversial there 30 years ago. The current political situation has arisen when the oil industry took issue with findings coming out of climate science which was not at that time politicised.
Of course, predicting the climate it tricky business. But the underlying processes (e.g. the greenhouse) are simple physics that a high-school student can understand, and are completely beyond reasonable doubt.
> Of course, predicting the climate it tricky business. But the underlying processes (e.g. the greenhouse) are simple physics that a high-school student can understand, and are completely beyond reasonable doubt.
> How much more evidence do you need?
Understanding how the underlying processes work isn't evidence of the specifics of how it is working in this instance.
As for wanting more evidence, I'd be interested to see some comprehensive documentation on the data sources and adjustments that occur, including a full honest disclosure of areas that are problematic for various reasons. I've read some fairly detailed conspiracies related to this (some email leak, can't recall the name), and as I recall the outcome of the investigation that was promised essentially consisted of "we fully investigated and found no problems, carry on".
As another example, I've also read a fair amount of interesting behind the scenes details on the rise of "grassroots" activist Greta Thunburg that don't get mentioned for some reason in the extensive coverage in the mainstream media.
This and many other similar things do not give me a feeling of trust that everything is on the up and up.
> I've read some fairly detailed conspiracies related to this (some email leak, can't recall the name), and as I recall the outcome of the investigation that was promised essentially consisted of "we fully investigated and found no problems, carry on".
"The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context 'trick' was normal scientific or mathematical jargon for a neat way of handling data, in this case a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion."
Maybe basing your opinion on climate science on "some email leak [you] can't recall the name [of]" isn't ideal?
On 22 January 2010, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee announced it would conduct an inquiry into the affair, examining the implications of the disclosure for the integrity of scientific research, reviewing the scope of the independent Muir Russell review announced by the UEA, and reviewing the independence of international climate data sets.[86] The committee invited written submissions from interested parties, and published 55 submissions that it had received by 10 February. They included submissions from the University of East Anglia, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Met Office, several other professional bodies, prominent scientists, some climate change sceptics, several MEPs and other interested parties.[87] An oral evidence session was held on 1 March 2010.[88]
The Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry reported on 31 March 2010 that it had found that "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact". The emails and claims raised in the controversy did not challenge the scientific consensus that "global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity". The MPs had seen no evidence to support claims that Jones had tampered with data or interfered with the peer-review process.[89]
The committee criticised a "culture of non-disclosure at CRU" and a general lack of transparency in climate science where scientific papers had usually not included all the data and code used in reconstructions. It said that "even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified." The report added that "scientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressively publishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewall their critics." The committee criticised the university for the way that freedom of information requests were handled, and for failing to give adequate support to the scientists to deal with such requests.[90]
The committee chairman Phil Willis said that the "standard practice" in climate science generally of not routinely releasing all raw data and computer codes "needs to change and it needs to change quickly". Jones had admitted sending "awful emails"; Willis commented that "[Jones] probably wishes that emails were never invented," but "apart from that we do believe that Prof. Jones has in many ways been scapegoated as a result of what really was a frustration on his part that people were asking for information purely to undermine his research."[33] In Willis' view this did not excuse any failure to deal properly with FOI Act requests, but the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he could.[33] It stated: "There is no reason why Professor Jones should not resume his post. He was certainly not co-operative with those seeking to get data, but that was true of all the climate scientists".[91]
The committee was careful to point out that its report had been written after a single day of oral testimony and would not be as in-depth as other inquiries.[89]
It sounds like standard head patting assurances to me, I'd there anything in there beyond claims that all is well, which was the same story prior to the email leak?
Is all of the data and calculations now open sourced so the matter is permanently put to rest?
After reading this thread, the problem you have is YOU.
I'm not trying to be critical or a dick. Your argument is "I don't have the information, and random sources I didn't dig into cast aspersions and make me think things are not as straightforward, I want to see the data etc..."
The solution is TO GO LOOK AT THE DATA!. There are hundreds if not thousands of studies with methods laid out in detail, data provided for you with information on collection, manipulation etc... Everything you're asking for to be "more informed" exists, but your not actually out there reading it obviously, you're here claiming you want the data that is available and accessible simply by starting on google and working your way through it to educate yourself.
Ignore the media, ignore those 'email leaks' and other BS you're seeing. Read the actual studies look at the actual information.
Or alternatively you can go to the experts that do all of that and look at their point of view, which is overwhelmingly that while the models might not be as accurate as we'd like all the time, the trend and future direction and many of the eventual outcomes of those changes are predictable.
Furthermore, climate change scientists have been beating this drum for 3 decades. As they predicted and we ignored, We're in the middle of an extinction event where we're seeing massive die-offs in multiple areas of the ecosystem, sea level rise and temperature rise is already happening and visible/quantifiable, increased storms, flooding and fire is already part of our lives.
To still deny the scientists who have been largely right for 30 years+, to ignore the actual evidence published while demanding "more evidence" and to deny the climate changes and the causes (significantly: us) as we've well established is at best ignorant, at worst malicious.
Do the research, do the reading. Inform yourself instead of demanding others inform you while casting aspersions on scientists based on media and rumors.
I think one reason it is controversial in the US is that many of the solutions are basically the policies the Democrats have been arguing for (taxes and regulations). It looks somewhat convenient that the solution lines up with existing policies pushed.
I desire the same type of "unbiased" information myself but I do not believe it is attainable for this topic. The amount of emotion that people have about the effects of pollution on temperature makes it hard to take anything at face value.
As far as I can tell, the scientific consensus is that CO2 generated climate change is happening more or less according to the models, with the exact degree somewhat difficult to determine year-on-year. The situation along inaction, has provoked a strong emotional response in many people. It don't see how the combination of these things demonstrates a lack of objectivity.
The approach seems rather, uh, bad faith. Consider "People seem to react emotionally when I talk a flat earth. Where can I get objective information that considers flat and round earth possibilities in a balanced fashion not reacting emotionally to flat possibilities?"
NASA is usually a good place to start. Their articles are clearly written for laymen, they're proven to do good science, and you can't say that NASA is overly political.
Basically, the consensus I can find is this:
1) The earth is warming, and it's our fault. There is no credible debate here - CO2 causes warming, and we release a crapload of CO2.
2) We're on track for something like 4°C by the end of the century. That's the difference between an ice-age and current temps (https://xkcd.com/1379/). So we're on track to find out what the opposite of an ice-age is by 2100.
3) What does "the opposite of an ice age" mean, besides warmer? Wetter.
4) All the models have thick error bars, though. For temperature, think of everything as being plus-or-minus something like 25%. Our current warming is well within current error bars, despite what deniers will tell you.
5) Sea level rise will happen, but of course slower than Gore and the like said - those previous predictions were using worst-case-scenario things. Remember, error bars. Also, when talking about sea-level-rise, don't think of it as "Miami swallowed by the ocean", but think about storm surges and floods creeping further and further in land. A house doesn't have to be permanently under-water to be inhospitable due to sea-level-rise - an annually-flooded-basement will do that just as well.
6) What else? That's where it gets iffy. There are millions of different theories with varying amounts of evidence supporting them - some of them quite apocalyptic. Extreme weather, shifting climates like desertification, heat waves, etc. vicious-cycle positive-feedback-loops like cloud collapse (https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/climate-change-kills-off-c...).
The biggest threat of climate change is what happens if the Global South becomes inhospitable. There are billions of poor people who cannot survive if their countries become deserts. And if that doesn't sound like Your Problem, remember that some of those people have nukes.
One thing to notice is that models and measurements are a lot more exact than they were only 20 years ago (when most of the modern controversies surroundies these issues started).
As those error bars have shrunk it is clear that early models were in fact too cautious. That's important to keep in mind as some pundits drop the word hysteria. So far, anything from the IPCC has been shown to be the opposite.
I wouldn't call you all-right however I do have my suspicions about comments like this. The evidence is very strong now yet here you are casting some doubt. Why?
I’m in the same boat as the person you replied to. In the past I’ve read arguments for and against anthropogenic climate change. Both were compelling to me when I read them. I’ve come to the conclusion that I just won’t understand the climate models enough to evaluate them on my own without spending months or years studying the topic. If my opinion on climate change ever matters, I will side with the vast majority of climate scientists, but I will always have my doubts.
There are no credible arguments against the fact that an increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gives a warmer climate. The physics is well known, we've seen historical evidence of how it's happened before, and it's easy to demonstrate experimentally.
We know pretty well how much hydrocarbons we burn every year, global production of both oil and other hydrocarbons are public figures. The oxidization process of hydrocarbon is high school chemistry. Anyone who went to school should be able to understand these processes.
Climate models are complicated, but they're something else. They are helpful to understand exactly how the climate changes. That may be where scientific discourse is, but very far from the public one.
(1) read the research published by climate research
(2) ignore the press which tries to report the climate research, and bloggers, and youtube videos.
You might ask, why believe the climate researchers? I'll point out that even the climate change deniers who claim that climate researchers are in the pocket of Soros (or something equally crazy) have no problem taking climate research as fact if they think it supports their claims. Eg, they'll point out that there have been various earlier epochs of high CO2, or high temps or low temps, etc, all facts which are based on the work of the same climate researchers they disagree with.
The problem with the precautionary principle is that there are many doomsday scenarios, so it is not clear which one to take precautions against. Also taking precautions has a cost.
This YouTube channel from a former oil and gas surveying geologist and technology columnist does a good job of conveying the science while taking care not to spook people who are on the right of the political spectrum (like he is) and have absorbed too much misinformation:
For hundreds of years there have been people predicting some kind of nightmare scenario 'in about 30 years'. In the 1960's and 1970's they were predicting a new ice age, that oil would completely run out, etc etc.
More recently they have been predicting extremely rapid climate change, global warming, 'cities underwater', etc.
Notice anything suspicious? It goes along pretty flat (the historical data looks as linear as it could possibly be), then as soon as you get to right now it jumps up and to the right with exponential growth. If a startup pitched that growth trajectory everyone would know exactly what was going on - high hopes and lies. Except that well meaning idiots have been pitching this for the last 30 years, exponential up and to the right growth of temperature and sea level, and it never materializes. Every few years they just update the graphs to show the small increase that actually occurred and move the exponential explosion so it's always in the near future.
Edit: I have noticed people down-voting this comment, that's fine of course, but I wonder whether it's because you think the oceans are going to start rising exponentially - starting right now - or if you think it's dangerous to question climate change dogma because it empowers climate change deniers or something? Or are you just down-voting it because it seems like something you don't like?
Notice that from now into the future it is no longer a line, but a range that widens the further into the future it goes. The base of which continues in a perfectly linear fashion. It's attempting to encompass simple progression and the likely impact of tipping points and accelerating melt.
So no I don't notice anything suspicious by including uncertainty on the plot. If you look at the range of IPCC predictions, current measured sea level rise is tracking the linear portion of their worst case prediction. (RCP8.5) Draw whatever conclusion you will.
This is again a misleading response. If these are uncertainty ranges, it should be statistically absurd for reality to always end up at the extreme low end of the predicted range.
How many times does that have to happen before you would have to say the prediction isn't a good one?
IPCC reports are inherently conservative - they reflect the known and agreed. It's not surprising that reality tends worse as additional effects, tipping points and surprises are reflected in reality but not IPCC reports.
There has been criticism that they are too conservative.
You are being downvoted because you are spreading lies and misinformation. No AGW nightmare scenarios have been spread for "hundreds of years" (except maybe a biblical end of times, which is not scientific) and the "global cooling" of the 60s/70s meme has also long been debunked.
You are disagreeing, but also agreeing with me. My point is that weird biblical cults believed disaster is 'right around the corner' and when the disaster didn't happen at the appointed time, people kept believing it was 'right around the corner'. Global cooling has been debunked, but at the time it was something people thought was real and had a veneer of sciencism attached to it which enhanced it's credibility.
My point is that I have yet to see an academic model of climate change that under predicted the actual warming (or sea rise) that has subsequently been measured. You can interpret that in lots of ways, but what you can't deny is that if every model is over estimating, there is a clear systemic bias.
It's worth noting that even we fall into the best case of the ranges depicted here, which there is no reason to believe we will, such a rise in sea levels would have deleterious effects. There are already climate refugees who were forced to relocate because their homes are now below water, and there are millions more living at or near sea level.
This is extremely false, there are no refugees who fled because sea level rise made their homes be underwater.
There are people who's homes are not tenable due to storms and storm surge, which would be true with or without sea level rise. There are people who live on land that is subsiding, and so the land is lower (not the sea being higher).
Sea level rise is estimated to be something like 60mm since the year 1900. That is about as much as your finger, less if you have an averaged sized hand. You can't live in a place that is 60mm above sea level, even a light breeze would put you under water due to the height of waves being far, far higher.
So to believe there are refugees due to sea level rise, you have to believe there were people who lived at some level that was already under water much of the time in the year 1900, basically whenever there is some wind, and now with sea level rise it's under water a little more often, because now it only takes a 11kph wind to put them under water when 120 years ago it would have taken 12kph, and that 'little bit more often' over the course of a hundred years was enough that they abandoned their home rather than put a couple of thin boards on top of their floor to make it 3 inches higher, which would put them far higher above the water than they would have been even in 1900. It's completely absurd.
Well, I'm with you on sea level rise. I live in The Netherlands. Big part of our country is below sea level, millions of people actually. Recently Deltares, the body that advises the government on the height of our dikes released a 187-page report on sea level rise. Using the newest methods, they found that sea level has been rising at a constant rate (1.8mm/yr) for > 125 years now, and the sea level rise is NOT accelerating. I trust these people, since they are responsible for millions of lives.
Of course IPCC climate models are projecting acceleration, but those are just models. And past sea level rise acceleration projections have obviously been wrong so far.
I clearly remember over the course of my life reading about climate catastrophes, scientists being in consensus about it, it never came true, and I don't believe it now.
> Climate change is happening right now and at a frightening speed, especially in the Arctic. To underpin the need for action, I share three wake-up calls...
> We can’t afford to ignore the warning signs. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to get climate change under control. After long negotiations, world leaders have agreed on action at the Paris climate summit. Now it’s up to the engineers to develop ambitious plans and innovative solutions.
In another comment, someone pointed out issues with your understanding of that report, which you replied to with basically "well I don't believe that part". As such, I'm not inclined to credit your claim they "debunked" this. You're welcome to cite an updated statement or blog post saying so, though.
This is just a bizarre exchange, (which I'm obviously changing to make people look silly, but I'll assume it reflects things accurately):
raarts: the official report by people with the expertise to measure this says X.
itcrowd: yea but here's someone's personal opinion from some blog hosted by that organization
raarts: sure, but that's an old blog post, and also it's just a blog post?
ceejayoz: I found some other post you made so I don't have to care what the official report says. I can assume you are lying because it is convenient. In the meantime, I won't hold any posts I agree with to any such standard.
Except the official report doesn't say what's being claimed here. If they've decided climate change is debunked, that'd be worthy of at least a new blog post.
For others who arrived here, it was not 'pointed out' that I read it wrong, it was suggested that I read it wrong. The discussion continued from there, and I think I explained my point quite clearly, and I definitely did not read it wrong.
I still maintain sea level rise is not accelerating and my logic behind that was not proven wrong.
Instead my discussion partner started pointing to other sources.
You need to read the report more closely. First, it describes only the Dutch sea level rise, not the global sea level. Second, the most important reason that the sea level rise is that "the Netherlands is located in one of the least affected areas [of sea level rise] in the world. 9cm/century [of sea level rise] has not influenced the Netherlands, but has been observed around the equator" [1, from the summary]
Yes, I've had that comment more often. My standard answer is that if sea level rise is accelerating somewhere on the planet, it should be accelerating everywhere. The sea level rise itself may differ per location, but logic dictates that an acceleration should be visible everywhere.
Note that sea level rise differs across the globe for many reasons, land sinking being one of them. For example, sea levels are dropping in Sweden, because the land is rising.
> if sea level rise is accelerating somewhere on the planet, it should be accelerating everywhere.
If you mean "accelerating upwards" then it is completely wrong. Sea level gets lower near large icebergs (e.g. the arctic). As the ice from the pole melts, the gravitational pull of the ice mass decreases and water is displaced to areas further from the pole.
As for your Sweden comment, I don't see how it is relevant. Please explain
Maybe I'm confused with what you're saying, please correct me where I misinterpret what you mean.
On a global scale, the sea-level is rising [1] and the sea-level increase is itself increasing (i.e. accelerating). This can also be seen in [1]. That does NOT mean that the change is uniform over the globe. You can check your locale here [2] (and confirm that Sweden's sea level is getting lower, the Netherlands slightly rising).
Globally, sea level rise IS accelerating [3].
Coming back to your claim that "if sea level rise is accelerating somewhere on the planet, it should be accelerating everywhere". Please explain why there could not be some (the Netherlands? hypothetical?) place where the the sea level rise does not increase even if more water is added to the system? This IS possible but the water must go somewhere else, i.e. the acceleration will be stronger in other regions (for example, Manilla).
You are confusing 'sea level rise increasing' with 'sea level rise increase acceleration'. Of course when a lot of water enters the ocean sea level rises everywhere. The amount to which it rises may not be the same everywhere, for example due to gravity differences. But as far as the 'acceleration of sea level rise' is concerned, that has to be visible everywhere.
An example. Suppose due to melting ice sea level rises 1 mm at the Dutch coast. Let's entertain the possibility that in Australia this results in 1,1 mm. Let's say this happens every year. Eventually this correlation will break, but for the sake of argument let's assume it doesn't. Now, when ice starts melting faster and faster, the sea level rise at the Dutch coast grows to 1.5 mm each year. This is sea level rise accelerating. Now, it is very unlikely that the rise in Australia stays at 1.1 mm each year and will not accelerate.
That is why I say that if sea level rise is accelerating, it should show up every where. Hence if the rise isn't accelerating on the Dutch coast, it isn't accelerating anywhere.
Sea level rise isn't the same everywhere, but acceleration of that yearly rise should show up everywhere in some form.
Thank you for expanding on your thoughts. I now understand what you mean, however, I do believe you are wrong. Look at source [3] above. Sea level rise is accelerating globally. The effects are different locally.
A later study by (former IPCC) Dr Judith Curry has gone more into this [1]. And the report I referenced was even later. The comments on that page BTW make abundantly clear that scientists do not agree at all that the sea level rise is accelerating, and even if it is, if it's more than a minute amount. Most of the rise graphs focus around satellite measurement starting from 1993 which seem to show 3mm/year rise, and attaching these number to the graphs of sea level tide gauges is heavily disputed as scientific heresy. Additionally to get to that 3mm the satellite measurements had to be corrected, an action which was explicitly rejected by the recent Deltares report I referenced.
So, whatever people may think, acceleration is not a fact, and even the scientists that believe it, think it's very small. It's the alarmist media that blow it up to huge proportions.
As a side note: I have been following climate news closely since a year now, and I have to say, I'm noticing strange patterns, in for example picking starting dates for graphs. Read for a recent example this article[2]. And I have noticed many occurrences of this, including from Goddard (part of NASA), NOAA, but also other institutions. This makes me suspicious.
In my own country the Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute, was accused of erroneously changing past temperature data - supposedly to correct for changed sensor setups, to make heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century disappear. I read that report, and it was very careful, and very thorough. But the Meteorological Institute refused to discuss it. It's these things that make me very suspicious. There are more examples, but I won't make this overly long.
So I would recommend looking really critically at any climate news, since in my experience most scientists do not agree on a lot of issues, despite claims to the contrary, and the subject is very heavily politicized.
The climate news needs to be looked at with extreme caution, I agree. Newspapers tend to spin scientific reports in a specific direction (both "alarmist" and "denyist"). However, in general the scientific literature is very cautious, and presents models, measurements and conclusions along with their uncertainties and assumptions. The interpretation of these uncertainties and assumptions is often lost in translation when presented to the general public, which is a shame and should not be endorsed. From a PR perspective, it may be nice if the Meteorological institute(s) would give some public interview or explanation when doubts are cast on their work. The discussions get political really quickly, which leads to a blurring of the lines between what the facts are and what (politicians) suggest the solutions should be to curb carbon emissions. This needs to end. Unfortunately, we are still in the situation where people outright deny the human role in climate change and politicians on the "denier" side of the spectrum abuse this to continuously cast doubt on whether any action is required at all.
That being said, you claim: "the satellite measurements had to be corrected, an action which was explicitly rejected by the recent Deltares report I referenced" but I couldn't find it in the report. The report (section 6.9) says [rough translation]: "The trend between satellite measurements and tide gauges [in the Netherlands] shows some agreement, along with their standard errors." and later "[..] satellite data are a less suitable source of deriving sea level rise". Note that this last quote should be interpreted in the Dutch sea level context, not the global context.
> It's the alarmist media that blow it up to huge proportions.
Agreed. That needs to stop.
> I'm noticing strange patterns, in for example picking starting dates for graphs
This, if true, is bad and needs to stop. It is the same behavior as the "deniers" have used for years (for example, the "no warming since 1998" meme).
The researchers state (page 68 - my translation): "We don't see the worldwide acceleration observed by Nerem et al. (2018), within the 1993-2017 record. A correction for the eruption of the Pinatubo and El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was needed to find that acceleration. These corrections
we do not apply in the sea level monitor."
I must say I'm currently on the fence about the role of CO2 in global warming. I've read enough to confidently say that the consensus claimed by the media is not there, so I'm not done reading yet.
It was my mistake to link to the summary, I was actually referring to the full report in the comments before.
As for your quote, it needs to be read in the context of the full paragraph. Its written sloppily, but a better phrasing would be: "We don't see the worldwide acceleration observed by Nerem et al. (2018) in the Netherlands' coast area, within the 1993-2017 record". I.e. they are saying the global trend is not the same as the local (Dutch) trend. Perfectly reasonable.
> I must say I'm currently on the fence about the role of CO2 in global warming.
Well, I could imagine your doubts about sea level rise because they are difficult and uncertain. But there is absolutely no scientific doubt about the role of CO2 in global warming. In fact, CO2 as a control knob of the climate is the only way to explain climatic variations observed in (at least) the past 500 million years. What is uncertain is the predictions because they are influenced by action taken to curb emissions etc.
There is a great video series on YouTube by "potholer54" that shows the scientific evidence for it better than I can. The first video is only 10 minutes and addresses the general points rather well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo&list=PL82yk73N8e...
1) Your meme-image does not show there is no relation. In fact, the source of one of the lines in the image is by Berner [1] which states (p. 201): "This means that over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the atmospheric greenhouse effect." The source of your image directly contradicts your claim.
2) RE "unlikely that [...] there would be only one control knob": I never said there was only one. I said it was a control knob. And it is in fact the most important one (but not the only one) [2].
3) RE "I've seen all of potholer54's videos.": I think you need to watch them again.
The only thing you can say about the correlation in Geocarb II (my graph) and Geocarb III (your graph) is that 500 million years ago CO2 was 6000ppm and temperature 25ºC. Today CO2 is 410ppm, and temp 16ºC. That's it. So you could say there's a long term trend. But both graphs show wildly diverging lines between those points, in fact it was only during a few percent of the total time that the temperature rose when CO2 levels rose. This does not look like CO2 is mainly controlling the climate at all. So there is my problem.
There are more problems, like the multiple periods of warming and cooling in the last 1000 years, that were just as bad or worse as what we're in now, but without human CO2. Like the fact that in the past CO2 followed temperature instead of preceding it (and the Milankovitch 'explanation' is not convincing at all), and like the fact that in recent years records are being shattered for cold weather all over the globe. And the media doesn't report about that.
This thing about the climate is that everybody tells me to educate myself, and when I did, it only raised more questions.
I am glad you're willing to educate yourself. I hope to give you at least a starting point and will try to address the points you made.
1) Regarding the correlations: The reason why you don't "see" the correlation (i.e. the lines don't perfectly overlap) if you plot CO2 and average global temperature is because there are other effects that obscure the correlation. For example, on the scales of 500 million years, the power coming from the sun (solar luminosity) has increased [1]. Milankovitch cycles are also important over longer timescales. Albedo changes of Earth's surface, etc. I have already cited the principle control knob paper. If you don't agree with the results, we can discuss that but, if so, please give some arguments instead of "I don't believe it".
2) "CO2 lags temperature": this is true in some cases. Vostok ice core is often cited and indeed the authors point to a ~1000 year difference between CO2 and temperature [2]. A more recent analysis [3] goes into more detail on a global sample. They find that on average, CO2 leads temperature but in the southern hemisphere, temperature leads CO2. This lag can be explained by ocean circulation changes.
3) "multiple periods of warming and cooling in the last 1000 years, that were just as bad or worse as what we're in now": A landmark paper was released this year reconstructing the global temperatures in the last 2000 years [4] and they concluded the current warming is global and warmer than ever. Other warm periods in the last 2000 years were simply a) not as warm AND/OR b) not global. One image says it all [5].
4) Record cold not reported? I get a lot of search results from mainstream outlets when searching [6]. Of course, one cold/warm year does not disprove/prove global warming, but you know that. Also, weather and climate are different but you also know that. Popsci did an article explaining how this cold can be interpreted [7].
I will probably get downvoted, but climate change has turned into a religion where any sort of criticism or questions are not appreciated and you are immediately treated as a heretic.
Climate change are now a multi-billion dollar industry with a lot of researchers, companies and international and national governments tied up with it. They have zero interest in changing opinion or even questioning if this is all correct.
Anyone remember the global cooling scare? Or the nuclear war scare? Or the acid rain scare?
People love doomsday thinking. Politicians right and left absolutely love it. Make people scared with all kinds of "end of the world as we know" scenarios and they do whatever you want.
"Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
> Or the nuclear war scare?
Still scary.
> Or the acid rain scare?
Acid rain was mitigated via extensive, global efforts to regulate the pollution emissions that caused it.
The arguments you're making - "climate change industry profiting! global cooling! scaremongering!" - tend to be deployed to prevent that effort.
It is, for example, rather curious to focus on "multi-billion dollar" climate science but not to count the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry as an interested party.
Likely story to try and hide being wrong when the scientists have so much money on the lines and can't risk giving up the BILLIONS they're making and getting rich/profiting off of. I've never received acid burns from the rain!
I suppose my anecdata supports your sentiment. Though, most criticisms and support I hear about climate change are based on anecdata. So I dismiss them as such.
Like hearing a family member or friend say, "Summers are getting hotter, and we got 2 extra inches of snow this past winter. Climate change must be real!". Usually these types of comments are ignorant of multi-year long climate cycles.
I can personally say that I have no idea what the state of the climate is, or how much humans have had an impact on it. Each article I read is only a small glimpse of the big picture, and I am not a subject-matter expert. So I try not to spread FUD.
> Like hearing a family member or friend say, "Summers are getting hotter, and we got 2 extra inches of snow this past winter. Climate change must be real!". Usually these types of comments are ignorant of multi-year long climate cycles.
I've never heard this kind of statement. I've only heard it the other way around where it snows and people are like "what global warning?".
> I will probably get downvoted, but climate change has turned into a religion where any sort of criticism or questions are not appreciated and you are immediately treated as a heretic.
Interesting to say in response to a scientific study published by a reputable institution that questions previously believed theories on climate change. I haven't seen anyone here calling MIT a heretic institution for doing that.
See there's the thing. Wouldn't you think there would be a few vested interests who would be putting billions into research proving it ain't so? It's reasonable to assume they've tried and failed given how little there is questioning the basic premise, just arguing about detail.
Some estimates will turn out to be pessimistic. Many have turned out to be happening far worse than predicted. Both are normal and expected.
Point of order - acid rain scare: You do realise that the world agreed to mandate sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations, and hugely limit vehicle emissions in response to that? It's not like it magically went away on its own.
I find it curious that the 'climate change industry' is a powerful, unwavering monolith in your mind and yet you don't mention the petroleum industry's deep pockets and incentives to maintain the status quo.
I got a degree in climate science but took a job writing code because the pay was terrible unless and until you become a professor. My chemical engineer buddy went to work at Exxon Mobile and started with a salary 4x greater than my best climate science related offer.
> climate change has turned into a religion where any sort of criticism or questions are not appreciated and you are immediately treated as a heretic.
Except it's supported by a plethora of scientific evidence. And yes, since questioners are usually pushing for inaction, it's quite reasonable to be treated as a heritic. If I came out and said "I support something that is likely to cause mass deaths in the next 50-80 years", I would expect to be pilloried for that.
> Anyone remember the global cooling scare?
Global cooling never had a scientific consensus around it. It basically came out of one Newsweek article, which was later retracted[1]. The fact that you're even bringing it up shows that you're reading too much media in circles that use very specious reasoning. People are lying to you and you're repeating their lies.
> Or the nuclear war scare?
The USA and Russia had enough nuclear weapons to end current civilization armed and pointed at each other, and had several incidents where they nearly opened fire.[2]
> Or the acid rain scare?
Acid rain was stopped by government action. In fact, there are many parallels to global warming, because it was corrected by an emissions pricing system analogous to modern carbon taxes. Basically, emitting sulfur dioxide (which causes acid rain) was taxed and the tax raised over time, which created a market for scrubbers. [3]
Come on scientific evidence means nothing (that was sarcasm). Issues here in the US are you have one political team saying it doesn't happen and you have another telling people the world will end in 12 years. You have a ton of news outlets click-bating whatever gets them their Benjamin's, and you have the average (and some above average) people who will not understand most scientific papers. And everyone else working their angle.
So who do you believe? You are at the mercy of the "unbiased" opinions of news.
It seems like it should be a black and white issue, but it is not. Especially to the people by whom changing their lifestyles to help stop emissions would consume money they don't have.
One would imagine that even a person not believing would come to the conclusion that there is research that indicates global warming and even if they believe mankind was not causing it, stopping our emissions would still be a good idea.
Climate change is nothing of the sort. There is plenty of healthy debate about what exactly the scale of the effects will be, what kind of timeframe these effects will be felt over, and what the most effective ways to slow down, halt, and/or reverse our current course are. You are literally—in the original, literal sense—replying to an article wherein scientists are questioning whether some component will be as bad as predicted.
What there is no room for any more are: denial that global warming is happening, denial that it’s happening as a result of greenhouse gases, and denial that it’s happening primarily as a result of greenhouse gases being emitted by humans. There is no more room for these denials because the matter is settled. Without incredible new data that contradicts existing data or future models, or without a compelling theory that both explains current warming trends and explain new phenomena, any such argumentation is flatly unwelcome.
This is not unique to climate change. Similarly, nobody is going to debate you on your new theory regarding gravitation unless your approach agrees with Newton and Einstein while also solving existing unanswered questions.
Nuance is needed. Being told by you (who?) that the matter ‘is settled’ is not a persuasive approach.
If people like MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen, Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, and Stanford University professor emeritus Elliott D. Bloom and many more including other atmospheric physicists believe there are arguments to be had on a complex subject then I tend to think they have a point.
The above joined 497 other distinguished scientists in signing the European Climate Declaration and are listed in a link here.
https://clintel.nl/prominent-scientists-warn-un-secretary-ge...
In summary their position is:
1. There is no climate emergency:
2. Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming:
3. Warming is far slower than predicted:
4. Climate policy relies on inadequate models:
5. CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth (< 150ppm plants do not survive):
6. Global warming has not increased natural disasters:
7. Policy must respect scientific and economic realities:
8. An honest climate science debate is warranted
Distinguished mining engineers, business leaders with links to Australian mining, retired geologists, two signatories from CATO and Richard Lindzen signed the Clintel petition. Clintel was founded by a Dutch engineer with time in the oil industry, and former professor of acoustics, geophysics and innovation management.
> Climate change are now a multi-billion dollar industry ... They have zero interest in changing opinion or even questioning if this is all correct.
I don't understand this argument as the fossil fuel industry is worth many trillions of dollars, so the argument is much stronger in favour of them being the ones not wanting to change. The climate protection industry is small in comparison. Industries like green electricity generation, resource use reduction and recycling also have benefits beyond climate alone, so are becoming the right choice even without that consideration.
There is also a big "industry" working now and historically on the link between tobacco and smoking. Do you think that they were just doing so to make money and there is no actual link? Who you believe is an epistemological issue: none of us can research everything ourselves so we choose who to believe based on our influence and internal desires.
Anyone remember the global cooling scare? Or the nuclear war scare? Or the acid rain scare?
The threat of nuclear war and acid rain were very real, they just got solved (almost). It's like the Y2K bug: people love to say it was a lot of nonsense and a non-event, but it was so exactly because a lot of work was done to avoid it.
Nuclear war is no longer a threat due to diplomacy; acid rain is severely reduced due to international treaties & technological solutions. These problems are perfect examples of a real problems being solved by concerted international action.
> I don't understand this argument as the fossil fuel industry is worth many trillions of dollars, so the argument is much stronger in favour of them being the ones not wanting to change.
Those vested in the success of fossil fuels have much bigger issues than what the public thinks of them. Their markets are much more efficient and global.
Things like controlling prices through limiting supply, currency manipulation, trade routes, economic sanctions, etc. are top of mind for fossil fuel producers.
I think it's fair to say that the challenges faced by climate protection interests are probably a few magnitudes smaller than what's faced by fossil fuel interests.
In areas with low alkalinity bedrock, and soil the acidification of forest, lakes and streams was easily measurable, and had clear effects on aquatic life. It's also nothing that's dealt with its entirety. Today's CO2 levels are already high enough to significantly alter acidity of the Baltic seas, and probably several other waters.
There's a huge opportunity to be curious about the changing climate. The HN community is naturally curious. I encourage everyone here to get curious about ice sheets, shelves, sea ice mentioned in this article.
Nope, and neither do you. It was mentioned a few times, found to be based on nothing (well, weak data, anyway), and all forgotten as quickly as it was brought up.
Or the nuclear war scare?
Umm, that was a real thing. In fact, thanks to declassification and determined digging, we find out years later that we were a lot closer than we were told.
Or the acid rain scare?
Another real thing, made suitable for history books by government regulation.
What's next? The "Y2K scare"? Go ahead, this crowd will especially love that one. Hmm, "heretic" you say? Not quite the word I'm looking for, frankly.
EDIT: Hey, wait a minute...</old man knowingly shaking finger>...you're one of those "youngsters", aren't you? All that shit happened 40 years ago before you were born, and you're just reading about it, aren't you? Well, you're reading from some sketchy sources, and you should cut it out.
Just a theory I cooked up trying to figure out how the fuck someone would think acid rain was a "scare". Hardy apologies if I'm barking up the wrong tree.
A lot of people are going to read only the headline and shout "MIT says global warming isn't true" into their science denial bubbles!
From my reading of this, the study does not say that sea-level rise won't happen, it's just saying one theoretical mechanism for RAPID sea-level rise might not be correct, so it'll be slower than some models predict.
The study relates to ice cliffs on land and the theory that if the ice shelves in the sea break apart, then the ice cliffs on land will break apart rapidly, contributing to rapid sea-level rise. Ice already in the sea doesn't raise sea-levels but ice currently on land would. The study uses modelling to demonstrate that runaway event is unlikely, so the sea-level rise from that even should be removed from estimates.
- "We’re saying that scenario, based on cliff failure, is probably not going to play out. That’s something of a silver lining. That said, we have to be careful about breathing a sigh of relief. There are plenty of other ways to get rapid sea-level rise."
- Ice cliff collapse... "is not required to reproduce sea-level changes due to Antarctic ice loss ... without it we find that the projections agree with previous studies (all 95th percentiles are less than 43 centimetres)."
A couple more things:
- Both papers still agree that sea-level rise will happen, but maybe not so fast and not so much. (Whether your house is under one foot of water or two doesn't make much difference to if you can live there.)
- If your discussion point against climate change is based on the models being wrong/inaccurate/too varied, then you have to discount this evidence, as it too is based on modelling.
- MIT's press department need to write better headlines.
> Scientists have assumed that ice cliffs taller than 90 meters (about the height of the Statue of Liberty) would rapidly collapse under their own weight, contributing to more than 6 feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century — enough to completely flood Boston and other coastal cities.
If I understand correctly, these are icebergs. I don't understand how melting icebergs should impact the sea level in the first place. If I melt an ice cube in a cup the water lever remains unchanged. Don't the icebergs already displace as much water as they would contribute? Is there something about icebergs that mean they displace less water, or am I somehow misunderstanding what is going on?
This is describing cliffs of ice on land, like the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The worry this paper is investigating is whether those could rapidly collapse ones the sea ice that protects it calves off.
And in addition to the ice moving from land to water, the land will be less compressed by the weight of ice above it and will rise, displacing even more water.
Thanks I clearly misunderstood. So it seems the icebergs provided support that the grounded ice did not. How is not exactly clear. Why would icebergs be more supportive than solid ground?
> Don't the icebergs already displace as much water as they would contribute?
Yes, this is Archimedes' principle. However, large icebergs have a gravitational influence on nearby water. Effectively, large icebergs attract water meaning the local sea level rises and elsewhere on the planet the sea level becomes lower. When the iceberg melts, this gravitational pull disappears and the melt water is spread more evenly across the surface of the Earth. The sea level across the rest of the world thus slightly increases.
Modeling this effect is quite complex, but the above is a summary of the effect of melting (large) icebergs.
Huh, this idea is new to me. Could you help out with a link? I only found two articles that talk about icebergs and gravity, one from NASA that only mentions taking measurements with a gravimeter [0] and a popsci article from 2011 [1] that mentions the geoid and irregular gravitational field of earth, but only sourced its “sister site” which appears defunct and simply redirected to its own front page, which looks like a garbage fire of pseudoscientific advertisement. I also found a BI article (to which I link with great trepidation) that mentions I think the same iceberg as the NASA article but mentions it is not expected to contribute to sea level rise in any significant way [2].
Awesome, thank you! I’m now interested to try some back-of-the-envelope math to compare the mass of certain ice bodies to that of the moon, and the respective distances from moon to earth and, as the article mentions, Greenland to Scotland, and compare tidal differences induced by the moon, its squared inverse distance, and the gravitational effect of the ice on sea levels.
Can I get a source for this? It seems incorrect, given that water is more dense than ice, so the gravitational pull of melted water on nearby water should be stronger than the gravitational pull of ice on nearby water (due to the decrease in distance due to the shrinkage when melting).
See my sister post for link. The difference between ice and water is that water can freely move over the Earth's surface while massive icebergs cannot.
You do not understand correctly. From the article, italicized emphasis mine:
> In a warming climate, as Antarctica’s ice shelves collapse into the ocean, they expose towering cliffs of grounded ice, or ice over land. Without the buttressing support of ice shelves, scientists have assumed that the continent’s very tall ice cliffs would collapse, calving into the ocean, to expose even taller cliffs further inland, which would themselves fail and collapse, initiating a runaway ice-sheet retreat.
regional hegemons enforce embargoes on nations which refuse to behave according to new standards. a carbon non-proliferation treaty backed with coordinated blockades and cyber-attacks of critical infrastructure, initiating limited civil wars. the top level view is mutual cooperation to avoid global catastrophe.
this would require america and russia to stop selling their terrestrial missile technology and fossil fuels to the rest of world. once the current generation of inventory and raw energy is cleared it, orbital space based weapons can be deployed, obsolescing land and sea nuclear delivery and defense. this might explain china and india's rush to space, in order to have a bargaining chip in the future discussion about their territorial and energy sovereignty it is necessary for them to have a significant presence in low earth orbit.
things typically don't escalate dramatically during international disputes, and it's likely that the russians and americans will just use blackmail diplomacy to freeze, then develop the rest of the world with new energy they control. in order to avoid public scrutiny it's important to paint this as a critical emergency rather than a strategic sharing of influence between continental superpowers.
i suspect this will play out slowly over the next century, all the while regular people will be cowed by the ever looming threat of total extinction. not a very original sequel, a real throwback your parents might enjoy, cold war 2: fight the heat. the science on anything hardly matters, since scientific truth is subservient to pragmatism and political realities. given the massive investment in government information collection, it is clear that any large popular movement would quickly be steered towards desired policy goals, which should reinforce some version of the above story i laid out.
I get suspicous when people start shouting and screaming that the only way to do anything about climate change is X - where X might or might not reduce greenhouse gases but definately aligns with there politial prirors.
I also don't like the fact that these same people seem to have no respect at all for economic growth. I firmly believe that any realy solution will be an encouragement to growth not a discouragement.
Economic growth? How does the imaginary game of wealth-points intersect with preserving the planet's ecosystem?
I can imagine many scenarios for saving the planet, that are detrimental to human interests. Nuke all major population centers, for instance. Ban burning oil entirely. Begin sequestering all crops in the bottom of the ocean as CO2 sinks.
To confuse human trivia with planetary disaster is one of the first refuges of naive deniers - "Well, we sure can't go without our cars, don't be ridiculous!"
Reducing and eventually eliminating net emissions is not optional. How we get there can be discussed - if you have any better ideas please put them forward!
I may be completely missing something, but I was under the impression that floating ice has zero impact on sea levels - a unique characteristic of water. Ice floating in water in a cup already at the top won’t overflow when it melts.
It seems like only land-supported ice sheets would have any impact at all anyway. Where were they getting the 6 foot rise in the first place? The violent water displacement when the cliff falls?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadhttps://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
"The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown."
Dated June 30, 1989
Global temperature anomaly 2018: +0.83 Celsius
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4626
2) Also from your own source of NASA, the end of the last ice age saw a global temperature increase of "4 to 7 degrees C over 5000 years"
Does that not make you wonder if 0.83C in 30(!) years is an extremely accelerated rate?
I think it is interesting in itself to read predictions made thirty years ago for the next thirty years and compare them with actual data. What I get from it is that the analysis was fundamentally correct- temperatures have kept increasing; but I also see a tendency to overconfidence and exaggeration: the source says that the most conservative estimates put the warming by 2018 between 1 and 7 degrees- even if it's Fahrenheit it literally means that we're at the lower end of the "most conservative estimates".
Worry is bad for your health. Don't worry about far-off uncertain things that are out of your control. It'd just get you down, paranoid and freaking out, when you could instead focus on the things that matter in life.
So that leaves 'only' 34 feet of sea level rise if the ice cliffs don't collapse as a result of occasional calving and instead gradually melt over time (at a slower pace).
Either way it's going to make the sea rise... Just over say, 150 years instead of 50.
It seems that ice cliffs are very different than ice sheets - the things currently melting. Ice cliffs were previously supposed to account for up to 6 feet of sea level rise, instead of the much more toned-down projections we have seen in the last few years.
The subtle distinction between ice cliffs and ice sheets will be lost in the media re-telling of this. Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not.
I feel like we are in the dark era of Christianity burning witches and dissidents.
The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same.
I completely agree with this. But looking at the (now dead) comment (not having flagged it myself)...it's not really an example of a differing opinion. It's a cheap rhetorical shot that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. If the commentor had actually expanded on their disagreement, the remark could certainly stand as part of that. There are examples of substantive comments in this thread that disagree with yours. On its own, that one has no merit except to lower the level of discourse here.
Because he and only him, holds the truth, and dare you not go against what he states, as you will end on the stake.
I was trying to say that the nuance in the article will be completely lost in the media. Even commenters in this thread who "believe in" climate change and claim to subscribe to the scientific orthodoxy are missing the distinction between ice sheets and ice cliffs, which was one of the main points of the article. And HN is one of the rare places on the internet where people actually read things, so imagine what the conversation will look like when someone posts it on facebook.
Ultimately I was trying to raise the question of whether it's even possible to communicate science to the general public. And this thread so far is answering that question with a big fat "NO".
By definition a layperson doesn't understand any scientific field in depth.
Since they don't, they do not have the tools to truly understand anything in the field's research - you need to understand the field's current state to understand what's going on in the latest research.
Ever tried to explain something highly technical to non-technical management? That's another instance of this problem.
They're both special cases of the general problem that only experts can really understand and appreciate great work in their field, and that a very fortunate person might get to be an expert in four or maybe five fields before they die.
This is why even in the age of the Internet, it's going to take decades until the measures that actually need to be taken to combat climate change to be put in place.
By then we will be well above the 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, and population north of 10 billion.
We still do not have good models for understanding or predicting global low cloud cover. Clouds are hugely important to our climate system. There is no way to accurately predict the temperature in the future, especially 100 years into the future, without modeling fundamental and extremely complex systems. Our current models do not match reality or even closely approximate it.
Arctic sea ice has a third of the volume it had when I was young, smaller than at any point we've ever measured, can reconstruct from ships logs, or estimate from ice cores. You'd think that kind of absurd level of change would give some of these people pause, but it doesn't.
1. Getting clouds right is extremely important for the climate models. 2. We still do not know how to get clouds right.
Predicting weather is like predicting if the stock market will go up or down tomorrow. We can't, really. Like climate, though, we can predict with decent accuracy what it'll do over years.
I don't mean suggest that you/we have no ability to look over experienced shoulders to cast judgement on their works, but to speak as them without having their full experience seems problematic.
You don't think scientists are aware of these? You don't think they're already tracking solar cycles and the like?
For example, see this graph:
https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/1896/
from this NASA article:
https://climate.nasa.gov/causes
showing how solar input does not explain climate change.
Solar cycles indirectly affect cloud cover not by variations in irradiance but by increases in cosmic rays from reduction in solar magnetic shield.
Some call this the Svensmark effect, after the Danish scientist who proved this influence in cloud chamber experiment from 2017 (https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2019/03/SvensmarkSol...)
Finally, even the IPCC has acknowledged this and are in the process of altering their CMIP model for 2021, CMIP6, to include stronger solar forcing: https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/2247/2017/
Climate science is not settled.
No science really ever is.
The problem you run into, though, is that people who don't understand science confuse "we're continuing to refine our knowledge" with "we were completely and totally incorrect".
Discovering clouds play more of a role than expected is useful information, but it's a far cry from shaking the consensus on climate change as a whole.
We should not expect their first iteration to accurately model clouds, but at least they are factoring it in now. How much did consensus override the concerns about cloud cover during the formation of climate models over the last few decades? Consensus is just a fancy word for groupthink.
We should be asking how much more accurate do our models need to be in order to predict future climate?
There are cycles such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation that we still don't really know how to model with a high degree of accuracy. The AMO has dramatic effects on climate. So does the PDO.
We don't know how volcanic activity is going to play out over the 21st century.
We don't know how much cosmic ray flux will increase if we enter a prolonged solar minimum cycle like the Maunder Minimum.
There are a ton of factors that influence climate that our models don't account for.
https://www.geosci-model-dev.net/10/2247/2017/
> We compare the climatic effects of the CMIP6 solar forcing dataset to its CMIP5 predecessor by using time-slice experiments of two chemistry–climate models and a reference radiative transfer model... This solar-cycle response is slightly larger, but not statistically significantly different from that for the CMIP5 forcing dataset.
We may not know the exact values of cosmic ray, volcanic, etc. inputs into the systems, but we can make reasonable conclusions about their high and low end values and the likely impacts that result. A quick Googling will reveal plenty of research on (and mentions in IPCC reports) the things you assert are being ignored.
Eventually people tire of living in Groundhog Day and go through the same thing over and over again and they just click the downvote button and move on.
Well, there might be a bit of corruption. Politicians have relatives who can make big money on environmental projects. The financial industry is all excited about carbon trading, with high-frequency trading and insider trading and intentional crashes and lots more fun. Political "donations" have to be generated somehow, and the lingering possibility of legislation does that well no matter which side a politician has chosen.
Crashing the economy to combat climate change seems like an abstract far-off concept until you lose your source of income. Most countries aren't about to crash their economies. The ones that do so will end up under new management after revolution or after being conquered in their weakened state.
That will always happen, though it only shows that these people don't understand science: That "we don't know every detail about climate change and there's scientific controversy and new discoveries about many details" does not equal "we have a controversy about the basic facts of climate change".
Interesting enough the collapse of the west antarctic ice shield was a major point of criticism where people said the IPCC got things wrong, because they were underplaying risks. It seems the debate isn't over. We'll see how it plays out.
In retrospect it was a simplified analogy for kids to understand, but on the other hand, massive ammunition for climate skeptics such as my parents who instantly debunked the analogy as soon as I told them about the assembly and put a cup of ice water on the kitchen table to show how silly the claim was.
So think of a full cup and dropping ice cubes into it. Totally different result.
https://antarctic-logistics.com/about-antarctica/antarctic-e...
In other words, if you drop an ice cube into a cup of water, it will either immediately overflow or it will never overflow. The melting part has nothing to do with whether it will overflow. If the snow on the roof melts -> the cup overflows
I think a better analogy is a cup sitting at the drain pipe of a rain gutter and the roof is covered with snow.
Works fine on my person device running ABP ( I just double checked to make sure).
Or, help them skip over the heavily polluting stages of that growth. We subsidize electric cars and solar installations in the US; helping developing nations do the same might go a ways.
That climate change alarmist’s predictions have been shown to be wrong - again - will be used as “ammunition” by the people who can’t help but notice that climate alarmists predictions are wrong each and every single time they pronounce them strikes you as a problem… why, exactly?
On the contrary, skeptics' argument that climate science is being suppressed and manipulated just took a heavy blow.
Come now, that's short-sighted. Have you forgotten the hundreds of scientific discoveries making your daily life better than it was for your great-great-grandparents?
Glacier: Large ice masses created by snowfall that has transformed into ice and compressed over the course of many years. Ice sheets, ice streams, and ice shelves are a few types of glaciers. [2]
Ice Sheets: Freaking huge glaciers
Ice Cliffs: the vertical edges of an ice sheet. Like a rock cliff but made of ice.
Ice Shelf: the "hanging chad" of the ice world. Chunk of an ice sheet that extends out over the ocean (nice diagram in source below) [1]
Sea ice: Frozen seawater, floating on the ocean. Not made from snowfall.
Iceberg: Ice floating on the ocean, chunk of an ice sheet/ice shelf
[1] Helpful: http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacier-processes/glacier-t...
[2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/02/05/glaciers-ice-sheets...
Last night I was called "alt-right" and a climate change denier by a peer for hesitating to agree that we are in a climate crisis, because I said don't have enough information about the situation and I'm suspicious whenever too many people start shouting about something.
The precautionary principle still prevails, though. The more uncertain you are, the more certain the course of action is, which is to avoid burning hydrocarbons.
Edit: I meant to say precautionary principle, not "uncertainty principle".
> By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today’s temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees—let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control.
[0]: https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/climate-report-understates-t... (by Nobel prize winner Mario Molina)
That's what gives the reports so much weight. Literally everyone should agree with it.
Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know by Joseph Romm is a great read. Very basic.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken is a good follow up for understanding what is necessary and what can be done.
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen explains how historically Carbon has controlled the Earth's climate system.
That's my best list for "unbiased".
The worst case if we act as if climate change is real and it's not real is that the economy might slow a bit, and the environment probably becomes quite a bit healthier. The worst case if we act as if climate change is not real and it is in fact real is that the only place we know of in the universe where our species can exist might become uninhabitable.
If all fossil fuel vehicles are replaced by 2030 think of the scale of that. Every gas station in the U.S. will close. 98% of the cars on road will become junk items.
What's the lifespan of a car? A large proportion of vehicles will be replaced anyway in 11 years.
If we do act, what you say here will happen, but we'll have charging stations instead and cars of a different kind on the road.
If climate change is real and we don't act: what you say will happen, with no replacement.
The question isn't whether gas stations can stay. The question is if we can stay on this planet.
Yes these are big changes, but again what would be the alternative? To me it's like if you were diagnosed to Celiac's disease. Imagine your doctor tells you that you must stop eating grains or you will go insane and die. That may require making significant changes to your lifestyle you don't want to make, but can you really afford to just hope medical scientific consensus is wrong, and that you've been misdiagnosed, just because it's too hard or too complicated to make a change?
everyone is aware of the real effects of climate change but the extremes people are going about it (hysteria/moral panic) are dishonest. I would guess the majority of us western relatively well off middle/upper middle class understand the hardest hit by climate change will be the poors/lower classes. so far I've seen the ecofriendly movement as a war on the less fortunate. The biggest enemies of the environment are still the huge corporations/shipping and the us military/select countries.
On the topic of physics
>The uncertainty principle still prevails, though. The more uncertain you are, the more certain the course of action is, which is to avoid burning hydrocarbons.
This is _not_ the uncertainty principle. At least not the one I'm familiar with. :)
Thanks to your post, now I have. Looks like interesting stuff, and could be far better. Now I'm interested in building that better version. Thanks!
https://www.google.com/search?ei=CMmtXdKDMvjG0PEPwJSakA4&q=i...
I worked with a bunch of HN readers to build "Carbon Doomsday", an interactive chart of carbon dioxide levels, like Coinbase charts. It got really great comments on HN about a year ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332595
http://carbondoomsday.com
Of course, predicting the climate it tricky business. But the underlying processes (e.g. the greenhouse) are simple physics that a high-school student can understand, and are completely beyond reasonable doubt.
How much more evidence do you need?
This is the right question to ask.
> How much more evidence do you need?
Understanding how the underlying processes work isn't evidence of the specifics of how it is working in this instance.
As for wanting more evidence, I'd be interested to see some comprehensive documentation on the data sources and adjustments that occur, including a full honest disclosure of areas that are problematic for various reasons. I've read some fairly detailed conspiracies related to this (some email leak, can't recall the name), and as I recall the outcome of the investigation that was promised essentially consisted of "we fully investigated and found no problems, carry on".
As another example, I've also read a fair amount of interesting behind the scenes details on the rise of "grassroots" activist Greta Thunburg that don't get mentioned for some reason in the extensive coverage in the mainstream media.
This and many other similar things do not give me a feeling of trust that everything is on the up and up.
You're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c..., where you'll find that eight different major organizations investigated, with pretty detailed findings.
"The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context 'trick' was normal scientific or mathematical jargon for a neat way of handling data, in this case a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion."
Maybe basing your opinion on climate science on "some email leak [you] can't recall the name [of]" isn't ideal?
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House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
On 22 January 2010, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee announced it would conduct an inquiry into the affair, examining the implications of the disclosure for the integrity of scientific research, reviewing the scope of the independent Muir Russell review announced by the UEA, and reviewing the independence of international climate data sets.[86] The committee invited written submissions from interested parties, and published 55 submissions that it had received by 10 February. They included submissions from the University of East Anglia, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Met Office, several other professional bodies, prominent scientists, some climate change sceptics, several MEPs and other interested parties.[87] An oral evidence session was held on 1 March 2010.[88]
The Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry reported on 31 March 2010 that it had found that "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact". The emails and claims raised in the controversy did not challenge the scientific consensus that "global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity". The MPs had seen no evidence to support claims that Jones had tampered with data or interfered with the peer-review process.[89]
The committee criticised a "culture of non-disclosure at CRU" and a general lack of transparency in climate science where scientific papers had usually not included all the data and code used in reconstructions. It said that "even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified." The report added that "scientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressively publishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewall their critics." The committee criticised the university for the way that freedom of information requests were handled, and for failing to give adequate support to the scientists to deal with such requests.[90]
The committee chairman Phil Willis said that the "standard practice" in climate science generally of not routinely releasing all raw data and computer codes "needs to change and it needs to change quickly". Jones had admitted sending "awful emails"; Willis commented that "[Jones] probably wishes that emails were never invented," but "apart from that we do believe that Prof. Jones has in many ways been scapegoated as a result of what really was a frustration on his part that people were asking for information purely to undermine his research."[33] In Willis' view this did not excuse any failure to deal properly with FOI Act requests, but the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he could.[33] It stated: "There is no reason why Professor Jones should not resume his post. He was certainly not co-operative with those seeking to get data, but that was true of all the climate scientists".[91]
The committee was careful to point out that its report had been written after a single day of oral testimony and would not be as in-depth as other inquiries.[89]
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Is there a convincing evidence-based part in there that I'm missing?
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Science Assessment Panel
The report of the independent Science Assessment Panel was published on 14 April 2010 and concluded that the panel had seen "...
Is all of the data and calculations now open sourced so the matter is permanently put to rest?
Yes (with the exception of 19 Polish stations, for reasons the Poles didn't disclose). https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-14315747
These sorts of discussions don't do much for increasing my confidence level that statements in the media or forums should be taken at face value.
I'm not trying to be critical or a dick. Your argument is "I don't have the information, and random sources I didn't dig into cast aspersions and make me think things are not as straightforward, I want to see the data etc..."
The solution is TO GO LOOK AT THE DATA!. There are hundreds if not thousands of studies with methods laid out in detail, data provided for you with information on collection, manipulation etc... Everything you're asking for to be "more informed" exists, but your not actually out there reading it obviously, you're here claiming you want the data that is available and accessible simply by starting on google and working your way through it to educate yourself.
Ignore the media, ignore those 'email leaks' and other BS you're seeing. Read the actual studies look at the actual information.
Or alternatively you can go to the experts that do all of that and look at their point of view, which is overwhelmingly that while the models might not be as accurate as we'd like all the time, the trend and future direction and many of the eventual outcomes of those changes are predictable.
Furthermore, climate change scientists have been beating this drum for 3 decades. As they predicted and we ignored, We're in the middle of an extinction event where we're seeing massive die-offs in multiple areas of the ecosystem, sea level rise and temperature rise is already happening and visible/quantifiable, increased storms, flooding and fire is already part of our lives.
To still deny the scientists who have been largely right for 30 years+, to ignore the actual evidence published while demanding "more evidence" and to deny the climate changes and the causes (significantly: us) as we've well established is at best ignorant, at worst malicious.
Do the research, do the reading. Inform yourself instead of demanding others inform you while casting aspersions on scientists based on media and rumors.
As far as I can tell, the scientific consensus is that CO2 generated climate change is happening more or less according to the models, with the exact degree somewhat difficult to determine year-on-year. The situation along inaction, has provoked a strong emotional response in many people. It don't see how the combination of these things demonstrates a lack of objectivity.
The approach seems rather, uh, bad faith. Consider "People seem to react emotionally when I talk a flat earth. Where can I get objective information that considers flat and round earth possibilities in a balanced fashion not reacting emotionally to flat possibilities?"
Here's an iPhone app version: https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/climate-pathways/
Have you tried Google for "interactive climate model"? I'm reading through the results now, interesting stuff. Needs better software. https://www.google.com/search?ei=CMmtXdKDMvjG0PEPwJSakA4&q=i...
Here's a nice interactive model I found for Bay Area sea level rise from 2019 - 2100: https://explorer.adaptingtorisingtides.org/explorer
Also, this isn't a model, but we built CarbonDoomsday, an interactive chart of carbon dioxide levels: http://carbondoomsday.com
Basically, the consensus I can find is this:
1) The earth is warming, and it's our fault. There is no credible debate here - CO2 causes warming, and we release a crapload of CO2.
2) We're on track for something like 4°C by the end of the century. That's the difference between an ice-age and current temps (https://xkcd.com/1379/). So we're on track to find out what the opposite of an ice-age is by 2100.
3) What does "the opposite of an ice age" mean, besides warmer? Wetter.
4) All the models have thick error bars, though. For temperature, think of everything as being plus-or-minus something like 25%. Our current warming is well within current error bars, despite what deniers will tell you.
5) Sea level rise will happen, but of course slower than Gore and the like said - those previous predictions were using worst-case-scenario things. Remember, error bars. Also, when talking about sea-level-rise, don't think of it as "Miami swallowed by the ocean", but think about storm surges and floods creeping further and further in land. A house doesn't have to be permanently under-water to be inhospitable due to sea-level-rise - an annually-flooded-basement will do that just as well.
6) What else? That's where it gets iffy. There are millions of different theories with varying amounts of evidence supporting them - some of them quite apocalyptic. Extreme weather, shifting climates like desertification, heat waves, etc. vicious-cycle positive-feedback-loops like cloud collapse (https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/climate-change-kills-off-c...).
The biggest threat of climate change is what happens if the Global South becomes inhospitable. There are billions of poor people who cannot survive if their countries become deserts. And if that doesn't sound like Your Problem, remember that some of those people have nukes.
As those error bars have shrunk it is clear that early models were in fact too cautious. That's important to keep in mind as some pundits drop the word hysteria. So far, anything from the IPCC has been shown to be the opposite.
Suspicions about what?
We know pretty well how much hydrocarbons we burn every year, global production of both oil and other hydrocarbons are public figures. The oxidization process of hydrocarbon is high school chemistry. Anyone who went to school should be able to understand these processes.
Climate models are complicated, but they're something else. They are helpful to understand exactly how the climate changes. That may be where scientific discourse is, but very far from the public one.
(1) read the research published by climate research
(2) ignore the press which tries to report the climate research, and bloggers, and youtube videos.
You might ask, why believe the climate researchers? I'll point out that even the climate change deniers who claim that climate researchers are in the pocket of Soros (or something equally crazy) have no problem taking climate research as fact if they think it supports their claims. Eg, they'll point out that there have been various earlier epochs of high CO2, or high temps or low temps, etc, all facts which are based on the work of the same climate researchers they disagree with.
https://youtu.be/D99qI42KGB0
More recently they have been predicting extremely rapid climate change, global warming, 'cities underwater', etc.
Look at the graph of anticipated sea level rise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
Notice anything suspicious? It goes along pretty flat (the historical data looks as linear as it could possibly be), then as soon as you get to right now it jumps up and to the right with exponential growth. If a startup pitched that growth trajectory everyone would know exactly what was going on - high hopes and lies. Except that well meaning idiots have been pitching this for the last 30 years, exponential up and to the right growth of temperature and sea level, and it never materializes. Every few years they just update the graphs to show the small increase that actually occurred and move the exponential explosion so it's always in the near future.
Edit: I have noticed people down-voting this comment, that's fine of course, but I wonder whether it's because you think the oceans are going to start rising exponentially - starting right now - or if you think it's dangerous to question climate change dogma because it empowers climate change deniers or something? Or are you just down-voting it because it seems like something you don't like?
So no I don't notice anything suspicious by including uncertainty on the plot. If you look at the range of IPCC predictions, current measured sea level rise is tracking the linear portion of their worst case prediction. (RCP8.5) Draw whatever conclusion you will.
How many times does that have to happen before you would have to say the prediction isn't a good one?
There has been criticism that they are too conservative.
Please read up on climate science before making outrageous statements like you do (and provide sources for your claims). Maybe you can start learning here: https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/washington-examiner-o...
My point is that I have yet to see an academic model of climate change that under predicted the actual warming (or sea rise) that has subsequently been measured. You can interpret that in lots of ways, but what you can't deny is that if every model is over estimating, there is a clear systemic bias.
Well, here's one under prediction:
Hansen made 3 scenarios in 1988 (A, B and C), of which A over-estimated the warming, B was almost spot-on and C was under-estimating the warming.
[1] https://skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction.htm
There are people who's homes are not tenable due to storms and storm surge, which would be true with or without sea level rise. There are people who live on land that is subsiding, and so the land is lower (not the sea being higher).
Sea level rise is estimated to be something like 60mm since the year 1900. That is about as much as your finger, less if you have an averaged sized hand. You can't live in a place that is 60mm above sea level, even a light breeze would put you under water due to the height of waves being far, far higher.
So to believe there are refugees due to sea level rise, you have to believe there were people who lived at some level that was already under water much of the time in the year 1900, basically whenever there is some wind, and now with sea level rise it's under water a little more often, because now it only takes a 11kph wind to put them under water when 120 years ago it would have taken 12kph, and that 'little bit more often' over the course of a hundred years was enough that they abandoned their home rather than put a couple of thin boards on top of their floor to make it 3 inches higher, which would put them far higher above the water than they would have been even in 1900. It's completely absurd.
Of course IPCC climate models are projecting acceleration, but those are just models. And past sea level rise acceleration projections have obviously been wrong so far.
I clearly remember over the course of my life reading about climate catastrophes, scientists being in consensus about it, it never came true, and I don't believe it now.
OK, so do so.
https://www.deltares.nl/en/blog/the-battle-of-engineers-agai...
> Climate change is happening right now and at a frightening speed, especially in the Arctic. To underpin the need for action, I share three wake-up calls...
> We can’t afford to ignore the warning signs. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to get climate change under control. After long negotiations, world leaders have agreed on action at the Paris climate summit. Now it’s up to the engineers to develop ambitious plans and innovative solutions.
raarts: the official report by people with the expertise to measure this says X.
itcrowd: yea but here's someone's personal opinion from some blog hosted by that organization
raarts: sure, but that's an old blog post, and also it's just a blog post?
ceejayoz: I found some other post you made so I don't have to care what the official report says. I can assume you are lying because it is convenient. In the meantime, I won't hold any posts I agree with to any such standard.
It's pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21313203 that /u/raarts misread that section.
[1] The report is here (in Dutch) https://www.deltares.nl/app/uploads/2019/03/faq-zeespiegelmo...
Note that sea level rise differs across the globe for many reasons, land sinking being one of them. For example, sea levels are dropping in Sweden, because the land is rising.
If you mean "accelerating upwards" then it is completely wrong. Sea level gets lower near large icebergs (e.g. the arctic). As the ice from the pole melts, the gravitational pull of the ice mass decreases and water is displaced to areas further from the pole.
As for your Sweden comment, I don't see how it is relevant. Please explain
Sweden was just an example of a place where sea level is dropping.
On a global scale, the sea-level is rising [1] and the sea-level increase is itself increasing (i.e. accelerating). This can also be seen in [1]. That does NOT mean that the change is uniform over the globe. You can check your locale here [2] (and confirm that Sweden's sea level is getting lower, the Netherlands slightly rising).
Globally, sea level rise IS accelerating [3].
Coming back to your claim that "if sea level rise is accelerating somewhere on the planet, it should be accelerating everywhere". Please explain why there could not be some (the Netherlands? hypothetical?) place where the the sea level rise does not increase even if more water is added to the system? This IS possible but the water must go somewhere else, i.e. the acceleration will be stronger in other regions (for example, Manilla).
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/
[2] https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds-se...
An example. Suppose due to melting ice sea level rises 1 mm at the Dutch coast. Let's entertain the possibility that in Australia this results in 1,1 mm. Let's say this happens every year. Eventually this correlation will break, but for the sake of argument let's assume it doesn't. Now, when ice starts melting faster and faster, the sea level rise at the Dutch coast grows to 1.5 mm each year. This is sea level rise accelerating. Now, it is very unlikely that the rise in Australia stays at 1.1 mm each year and will not accelerate. That is why I say that if sea level rise is accelerating, it should show up every where. Hence if the rise isn't accelerating on the Dutch coast, it isn't accelerating anywhere.
Sea level rise isn't the same everywhere, but acceleration of that yearly rise should show up everywhere in some form.
As a side note: I have been following climate news closely since a year now, and I have to say, I'm noticing strange patterns, in for example picking starting dates for graphs. Read for a recent example this article[2]. And I have noticed many occurrences of this, including from Goddard (part of NASA), NOAA, but also other institutions. This makes me suspicious.
In my own country the Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute, was accused of erroneously changing past temperature data - supposedly to correct for changed sensor setups, to make heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century disappear. I read that report, and it was very careful, and very thorough. But the Meteorological Institute refused to discuss it. It's these things that make me very suspicious. There are more examples, but I won't make this overly long.
So I would recommend looking really critically at any climate news, since in my experience most scientists do not agree on a lot of issues, despite claims to the contrary, and the subject is very heavily politicized.
[1] https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/27/special-report-on-sea-lev... [2] http://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/10/illustrating-the-c...
That being said, you claim: "the satellite measurements had to be corrected, an action which was explicitly rejected by the recent Deltares report I referenced" but I couldn't find it in the report. The report (section 6.9) says [rough translation]: "The trend between satellite measurements and tide gauges [in the Netherlands] shows some agreement, along with their standard errors." and later "[..] satellite data are a less suitable source of deriving sea level rise". Note that this last quote should be interpreted in the Dutch sea level context, not the global context.
> It's the alarmist media that blow it up to huge proportions.
Agreed. That needs to stop.
> I'm noticing strange patterns, in for example picking starting dates for graphs
This, if true, is bad and needs to stop. It is the same behavior as the "deniers" have used for years (for example, the "no warming since 1998" meme).
The researchers state (page 68 - my translation): "We don't see the worldwide acceleration observed by Nerem et al. (2018), within the 1993-2017 record. A correction for the eruption of the Pinatubo and El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was needed to find that acceleration. These corrections we do not apply in the sea level monitor."
I must say I'm currently on the fence about the role of CO2 in global warming. I've read enough to confidently say that the consensus claimed by the media is not there, so I'm not done reading yet.
As for your quote, it needs to be read in the context of the full paragraph. Its written sloppily, but a better phrasing would be: "We don't see the worldwide acceleration observed by Nerem et al. (2018) in the Netherlands' coast area, within the 1993-2017 record". I.e. they are saying the global trend is not the same as the local (Dutch) trend. Perfectly reasonable.
> I must say I'm currently on the fence about the role of CO2 in global warming.
Well, I could imagine your doubts about sea level rise because they are difficult and uncertain. But there is absolutely no scientific doubt about the role of CO2 in global warming. In fact, CO2 as a control knob of the climate is the only way to explain climatic variations observed in (at least) the past 500 million years. What is uncertain is the predictions because they are influenced by action taken to curb emissions etc.
There is a great video series on YouTube by "potholer54" that shows the scientific evidence for it better than I can. The first video is only 10 minutes and addresses the general points rather well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo&list=PL82yk73N8e...
I think you may now be stretching it: https://miro.medium.com/max/1320/0*3Vm0copgT8K-pcRm.gif No relation between temperature and CO2 levels.
Also, it's rather unlikely that for a system as complex as the climate there would be only one control knob.
I've seen all of potholer54's videos.
2) RE "unlikely that [...] there would be only one control knob": I never said there was only one. I said it was a control knob. And it is in fact the most important one (but not the only one) [2].
3) RE "I've seen all of potholer54's videos.": I think you need to watch them again.
[1] "Geocarb III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time ", http://www.ajsonline.org/content/301/2/182
[2] "Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature", https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356
[3] As a side note: your image has no x- and y-axis scales. If you want to spread misleading images, at least use a better version (for instance, https://abruptearthchanges.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/no-lo...)
There are more problems, like the multiple periods of warming and cooling in the last 1000 years, that were just as bad or worse as what we're in now, but without human CO2. Like the fact that in the past CO2 followed temperature instead of preceding it (and the Milankovitch 'explanation' is not convincing at all), and like the fact that in recent years records are being shattered for cold weather all over the globe. And the media doesn't report about that.
This thing about the climate is that everybody tells me to educate myself, and when I did, it only raised more questions.
1) Regarding the correlations: The reason why you don't "see" the correlation (i.e. the lines don't perfectly overlap) if you plot CO2 and average global temperature is because there are other effects that obscure the correlation. For example, on the scales of 500 million years, the power coming from the sun (solar luminosity) has increased [1]. Milankovitch cycles are also important over longer timescales. Albedo changes of Earth's surface, etc. I have already cited the principle control knob paper. If you don't agree with the results, we can discuss that but, if so, please give some arguments instead of "I don't believe it".
2) "CO2 lags temperature": this is true in some cases. Vostok ice core is often cited and indeed the authors point to a ~1000 year difference between CO2 and temperature [2]. A more recent analysis [3] goes into more detail on a global sample. They find that on average, CO2 leads temperature but in the southern hemisphere, temperature leads CO2. This lag can be explained by ocean circulation changes.
3) "multiple periods of warming and cooling in the last 1000 years, that were just as bad or worse as what we're in now": A landmark paper was released this year reconstructing the global temperatures in the last 2000 years [4] and they concluded the current warming is global and warmer than ever. Other warm periods in the last 2000 years were simply a) not as warm AND/OR b) not global. One image says it all [5].
4) Record cold not reported? I get a lot of search results from mainstream outlets when searching [6]. Of course, one cold/warm year does not disprove/prove global warming, but you know that. Also, weather and climate are different but you also know that. Popsci did an article explaining how this cold can be interpreted [7].
[1] For a short explanation, see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_luminosity
[2] "CO2‐climate relationship as deduced from the Vostok ice core: a re‐examination based on new measurements and on a re‐evaluation of the air dating", https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1034/j.1600-0889....
[3] "Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation", https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10915
[4] "No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2"
[5] Image from [4] https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...
[6] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=record+cold+2019
[7] https://www.popsci.com/cold-weather-climate-change/
Coding is one of the things you just pick up on the way, while physics etc is taught formally.
"97% of climate scientists!!!" right?
http://www.storyarts.org/library/aesops/stories/boy.html
Climate change are now a multi-billion dollar industry with a lot of researchers, companies and international and national governments tied up with it. They have zero interest in changing opinion or even questioning if this is all correct.
Anyone remember the global cooling scare? Or the nuclear war scare? Or the acid rain scare?
People love doomsday thinking. Politicians right and left absolutely love it. Make people scared with all kinds of "end of the world as we know" scenarios and they do whatever you want.
Largely a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
"Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
> Or the nuclear war scare?
Still scary.
> Or the acid rain scare?
Acid rain was mitigated via extensive, global efforts to regulate the pollution emissions that caused it.
Excellent point. Big problems are solvable with the right level of effort.
It is, for example, rather curious to focus on "multi-billion dollar" climate science but not to count the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry as an interested party.
Likely story to try and hide being wrong when the scientists have so much money on the lines and can't risk giving up the BILLIONS they're making and getting rich/profiting off of. I've never received acid burns from the rain!
/s
Like hearing a family member or friend say, "Summers are getting hotter, and we got 2 extra inches of snow this past winter. Climate change must be real!". Usually these types of comments are ignorant of multi-year long climate cycles.
I can personally say that I have no idea what the state of the climate is, or how much humans have had an impact on it. Each article I read is only a small glimpse of the big picture, and I am not a subject-matter expert. So I try not to spread FUD.
I've never heard this kind of statement. I've only heard it the other way around where it snows and people are like "what global warning?".
Interesting to say in response to a scientific study published by a reputable institution that questions previously believed theories on climate change. I haven't seen anyone here calling MIT a heretic institution for doing that.
Some estimates will turn out to be pessimistic. Many have turned out to be happening far worse than predicted. Both are normal and expected.
Point of order - acid rain scare: You do realise that the world agreed to mandate sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations, and hugely limit vehicle emissions in response to that? It's not like it magically went away on its own.
Are you suggesting that because we happened to avoid disaster in some instances that the risks were never real in the first place?
I got a degree in climate science but took a job writing code because the pay was terrible unless and until you become a professor. My chemical engineer buddy went to work at Exxon Mobile and started with a salary 4x greater than my best climate science related offer.
Except it's supported by a plethora of scientific evidence. And yes, since questioners are usually pushing for inaction, it's quite reasonable to be treated as a heritic. If I came out and said "I support something that is likely to cause mass deaths in the next 50-80 years", I would expect to be pilloried for that.
> Anyone remember the global cooling scare?
Global cooling never had a scientific consensus around it. It basically came out of one Newsweek article, which was later retracted[1]. The fact that you're even bringing it up shows that you're reading too much media in circles that use very specious reasoning. People are lying to you and you're repeating their lies.
> Or the nuclear war scare?
The USA and Russia had enough nuclear weapons to end current civilization armed and pointed at each other, and had several incidents where they nearly opened fire.[2]
> Or the acid rain scare?
Acid rain was stopped by government action. In fact, there are many parallels to global warming, because it was corrected by an emissions pricing system analogous to modern carbon taxes. Basically, emitting sulfur dioxide (which causes acid rain) was taxed and the tax raised over time, which created a market for scrubbers. [3]
[1]https://www.insidescience.org/news/my-1975-cooling-world-sto...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
[3]https://blogs.ubc.ca/lisatam/2013/03/08/reducing-acid-rain-e...
So who do you believe? You are at the mercy of the "unbiased" opinions of news.
It seems like it should be a black and white issue, but it is not. Especially to the people by whom changing their lifestyles to help stop emissions would consume money they don't have.
One would imagine that even a person not believing would come to the conclusion that there is research that indicates global warming and even if they believe mankind was not causing it, stopping our emissions would still be a good idea.
What there is no room for any more are: denial that global warming is happening, denial that it’s happening as a result of greenhouse gases, and denial that it’s happening primarily as a result of greenhouse gases being emitted by humans. There is no more room for these denials because the matter is settled. Without incredible new data that contradicts existing data or future models, or without a compelling theory that both explains current warming trends and explain new phenomena, any such argumentation is flatly unwelcome.
This is not unique to climate change. Similarly, nobody is going to debate you on your new theory regarding gravitation unless your approach agrees with Newton and Einstein while also solving existing unanswered questions.
If people like MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen, Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, and Stanford University professor emeritus Elliott D. Bloom and many more including other atmospheric physicists believe there are arguments to be had on a complex subject then I tend to think they have a point. The above joined 497 other distinguished scientists in signing the European Climate Declaration and are listed in a link here. https://clintel.nl/prominent-scientists-warn-un-secretary-ge...
In summary their position is: 1. There is no climate emergency: 2. Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming: 3. Warming is far slower than predicted: 4. Climate policy relies on inadequate models: 5. CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth (< 150ppm plants do not survive): 6. Global warming has not increased natural disasters: 7. Policy must respect scientific and economic realities: 8. An honest climate science debate is warranted
Distinguished mining engineers, business leaders with links to Australian mining, retired geologists, two signatories from CATO and Richard Lindzen signed the Clintel petition. Clintel was founded by a Dutch engineer with time in the oil industry, and former professor of acoustics, geophysics and innovation management.
As you mention, knowing "who" matters.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-sci...
I don't understand this argument as the fossil fuel industry is worth many trillions of dollars, so the argument is much stronger in favour of them being the ones not wanting to change. The climate protection industry is small in comparison. Industries like green electricity generation, resource use reduction and recycling also have benefits beyond climate alone, so are becoming the right choice even without that consideration.
There is also a big "industry" working now and historically on the link between tobacco and smoking. Do you think that they were just doing so to make money and there is no actual link? Who you believe is an epistemological issue: none of us can research everything ourselves so we choose who to believe based on our influence and internal desires.
Anyone remember the global cooling scare? Or the nuclear war scare? Or the acid rain scare? The threat of nuclear war and acid rain were very real, they just got solved (almost). It's like the Y2K bug: people love to say it was a lot of nonsense and a non-event, but it was so exactly because a lot of work was done to avoid it. Nuclear war is no longer a threat due to diplomacy; acid rain is severely reduced due to international treaties & technological solutions. These problems are perfect examples of a real problems being solved by concerted international action.
Those vested in the success of fossil fuels have much bigger issues than what the public thinks of them. Their markets are much more efficient and global.
Things like controlling prices through limiting supply, currency manipulation, trade routes, economic sanctions, etc. are top of mind for fossil fuel producers.
I think it's fair to say that the challenges faced by climate protection interests are probably a few magnitudes smaller than what's faced by fossil fuel interests.
In areas with low alkalinity bedrock, and soil the acidification of forest, lakes and streams was easily measurable, and had clear effects on aquatic life. It's also nothing that's dealt with its entirety. Today's CO2 levels are already high enough to significantly alter acidity of the Baltic seas, and probably several other waters.
This is a valid point. The media was wrong about this in the 70's
>Or the nuclear war scare?
I don't know what you mean by this. Nuclear war never happened, but it's obvious that the USA and USSR had enough weapons to wage war.
>Or the acid rain scare?
This was an actual problem that was successfully solved by preventing sulfur emissions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#In_the_United_States
Take the opportunity to read up on it!
EDIT : I live in the Netherlands.
Nope, and neither do you. It was mentioned a few times, found to be based on nothing (well, weak data, anyway), and all forgotten as quickly as it was brought up.
Or the nuclear war scare?
Umm, that was a real thing. In fact, thanks to declassification and determined digging, we find out years later that we were a lot closer than we were told.
Or the acid rain scare?
Another real thing, made suitable for history books by government regulation.
What's next? The "Y2K scare"? Go ahead, this crowd will especially love that one. Hmm, "heretic" you say? Not quite the word I'm looking for, frankly.
EDIT: Hey, wait a minute...</old man knowingly shaking finger>...you're one of those "youngsters", aren't you? All that shit happened 40 years ago before you were born, and you're just reading about it, aren't you? Well, you're reading from some sketchy sources, and you should cut it out.
Just a theory I cooked up trying to figure out how the fuck someone would think acid rain was a "scare". Hardy apologies if I'm barking up the wrong tree.
From my reading of this, the study does not say that sea-level rise won't happen, it's just saying one theoretical mechanism for RAPID sea-level rise might not be correct, so it'll be slower than some models predict.
The study relates to ice cliffs on land and the theory that if the ice shelves in the sea break apart, then the ice cliffs on land will break apart rapidly, contributing to rapid sea-level rise. Ice already in the sea doesn't raise sea-levels but ice currently on land would. The study uses modelling to demonstrate that runaway event is unlikely, so the sea-level rise from that even should be removed from estimates.
There's another paper about this from February_:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0901-4
Some quotes from the papers:
- "We’re saying that scenario, based on cliff failure, is probably not going to play out. That’s something of a silver lining. That said, we have to be careful about breathing a sigh of relief. There are plenty of other ways to get rapid sea-level rise."
- Ice cliff collapse... "is not required to reproduce sea-level changes due to Antarctic ice loss ... without it we find that the projections agree with previous studies (all 95th percentiles are less than 43 centimetres)."
A couple more things:
- Both papers still agree that sea-level rise will happen, but maybe not so fast and not so much. (Whether your house is under one foot of water or two doesn't make much difference to if you can live there.)
- If your discussion point against climate change is based on the models being wrong/inaccurate/too varied, then you have to discount this evidence, as it too is based on modelling.
- MIT's press department need to write better headlines.
You can check and uncheck various factors (ice sheets, greenland, methane tundra).
Interesting?
For example, this looks like it was designed on the Apple II
https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/climate-bathtub-sim...
https://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/en/arbeitsgruppen/theoretische...
It has a GUI mode where you can check and uncheck various things. (Needs a FORTRAN compiler though, and I needed some legacy packages.)
edit: It might be less comprehensive that what you mean but it is an actual physical model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback
If I understand correctly, these are icebergs. I don't understand how melting icebergs should impact the sea level in the first place. If I melt an ice cube in a cup the water lever remains unchanged. Don't the icebergs already displace as much water as they would contribute? Is there something about icebergs that mean they displace less water, or am I somehow misunderstanding what is going on?
Yes, this is Archimedes' principle. However, large icebergs have a gravitational influence on nearby water. Effectively, large icebergs attract water meaning the local sea level rises and elsewhere on the planet the sea level becomes lower. When the iceberg melts, this gravitational pull disappears and the melt water is spread more evenly across the surface of the Earth. The sea level across the rest of the world thus slightly increases.
Modeling this effect is quite complex, but the above is a summary of the effect of melting (large) icebergs.
[0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/fromthefield/2017/11... [1] https://www.livescience.com/amp/15605-melting-glaciers-alter... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/antarctica-larsen-c-iceberg-...
edit: the video in the link also provides an animation of the effect
You do not understand correctly. From the article, italicized emphasis mine:
> In a warming climate, as Antarctica’s ice shelves collapse into the ocean, they expose towering cliffs of grounded ice, or ice over land. Without the buttressing support of ice shelves, scientists have assumed that the continent’s very tall ice cliffs would collapse, calving into the ocean, to expose even taller cliffs further inland, which would themselves fail and collapse, initiating a runaway ice-sheet retreat.
this would require america and russia to stop selling their terrestrial missile technology and fossil fuels to the rest of world. once the current generation of inventory and raw energy is cleared it, orbital space based weapons can be deployed, obsolescing land and sea nuclear delivery and defense. this might explain china and india's rush to space, in order to have a bargaining chip in the future discussion about their territorial and energy sovereignty it is necessary for them to have a significant presence in low earth orbit.
things typically don't escalate dramatically during international disputes, and it's likely that the russians and americans will just use blackmail diplomacy to freeze, then develop the rest of the world with new energy they control. in order to avoid public scrutiny it's important to paint this as a critical emergency rather than a strategic sharing of influence between continental superpowers.
i suspect this will play out slowly over the next century, all the while regular people will be cowed by the ever looming threat of total extinction. not a very original sequel, a real throwback your parents might enjoy, cold war 2: fight the heat. the science on anything hardly matters, since scientific truth is subservient to pragmatism and political realities. given the massive investment in government information collection, it is clear that any large popular movement would quickly be steered towards desired policy goals, which should reinforce some version of the above story i laid out.
Not showing up on Scihub tho. Anyone found it?
I also don't like the fact that these same people seem to have no respect at all for economic growth. I firmly believe that any realy solution will be an encouragement to growth not a discouragement.
I can imagine many scenarios for saving the planet, that are detrimental to human interests. Nuke all major population centers, for instance. Ban burning oil entirely. Begin sequestering all crops in the bottom of the ocean as CO2 sinks.
To confuse human trivia with planetary disaster is one of the first refuges of naive deniers - "Well, we sure can't go without our cars, don't be ridiculous!"