I've watched quite a few of the flat earther videos found on youtube and at least to me, they seem to come across as genuine and sincere, yet very much misguided.
I would say this is also a good description for todays climate change deniers.
On the other hand, I have pretended to be a flat earther many times for fun and I've noticed there are some people who seem convinced you're genuine no matter how silly you make your arguments. That's kind of a sport in itself; seeing how ridiculous you can get before other people realize you're having them on.
> "The earth used to be round but over a timescale of billions of years it slowly flattened out like a ball of silly putty left sitting on the table."
I found the same documentary instructive. I think there's an insight there into human tribal instincts, demonstrating that our epistemologies can't help be be socially mediated. It was flabbergasting how deeply intelligent some of the true believers were, and it's a little too convenient to label and discard them as crazies or outliers. They might be a little more representative of the human animal than any of us want to admit.
What's most unsettling is, there's no reason to expect that the same psychosocial tribal mechanisms are not constantly active, even when the facts are on the side of one's tribal beliefs. This leads to any number of blind spots, not only in truth-seeking and self-correction, but in social dynamics (in-group vs. out-group). Our brains are exceptionally, insidiously good at working backwards, not just to convince others, but to convince ourselves. Those who can spin on a dime and update/discard ideas in the presence of new evidence are a truly rare breed.
Two of my favorite books on motivated reasoning and self-deception:
What about the person who believes in anthropogenic climate change but doesn’t believe that humans will ever be able (or have ever been able) to cooperate to the extent that is necessary to prevent it, and questions whether required technological advances will ever be made?
Humans have cooperated plenty. Many universal or nearly- universal treaties have been signed by all nations. In fact humans already cooperated on an atmospheric pollution treaty when we prevented the destruction of the Ozone layer.
1) Actual solutions to climate change are not taken seriously (nuclear power, natural gas)
2) Effect size is still unknown or small. 0.3C over decades is not much to write home about.
3) Solutions to climate change have to include developing / third world countries.
And most importantly:
4) Oil/gas with capitalism has lead to the greatest throughput of innovation known to mankind, lifting billions out of poverty, medical and scientific advances, and allows 7B people to live on earth. Removing and replacing this will have consequences that IMHO go beyond a 0.3C increase in temp and a few cm increase in water level. Just MHO.
That's definitely a step up from flat earther, more along the lines of "the moon landing was faked" levels of denialism.
We can do this right now. Sequestration of all human-driven carbon output at current costs and with current technology amounts to something like 1.5% of world GDP.
As for cooperation, that's a bad faith argument. Saying you won't do something because no one else will is just a sneaky way of saying you won't do it. Someone has to start. Someone has to be willing to start. If you aren't willing to start, you simply don't want to see the problem solved.
Just come out and give us the cynical argument if you really want to go there: the bulk of the human damage[1] from climate change will be felt in still developing equatorial nations and not in the temperate latitudes where you and your friends live (hell, Russia and Canada might well come out "ahead"!).
[1] The ecosystem damage and mass extinction event will be pervasive everywhere, but then I doubt you care about that either.
It’s not the cooperation that’s the issue. Every country can come together for the Olympics. It’s the cost. Green energy and co2 emissions reduction needs to have a cheaper price point to be globally adopted. If being green meant being more efficient and cost reduction it would be a no brainer. This is the challenge of green tech. We have to create the alternative. No one is willing to jump in a lifeboat made out of good intentions.
Also, I understand your frustration with this topic. The method of guilting people into changing makes me sick. I can’t think of a more counterproductive method of evangelism. We need to make real products that do the things that will give humanity a prosperous future. Politics isn’t how we will get out of this, imho. Science and engineering is the key.
> If being green meant being more efficient and cost reduction it would be a no brainer.
The studies indicate that it's a lot cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the consequences. So, economically speaking, it is a no-brainer.
> Politics isn’t how we will get out of this, imho. Science and engineering is the key.
We mostly have the technological means now to deal with the issue, but politics are the impediment. We can't convince people to do things we know are the sane way forward.
Technological improvements will help if they come through, but it's madness to bank the future of our civilisation on future breakthroughs that may or may not happen.
> It’s not the cooperation that’s the issue. Every country can come together for the Olympics.
It has been repeatedly demonstrated that countries can come together for the Olympics. It has yet to be demonstrated that they can do the same to fight global climate change. The opposite seems to be the case so far, as far as I can tell.
> The method of guilting people into changing makes me sick.
100% agree.
> Politics isn’t how we will get out of this, imho. Science and engineering is the key.
To move forward, we are going to need both science and engineering, and some minimum level of agreement in Democratic countries. Perhaps if we could manage that, China might consider getting on board as well.
Realistic. Everything else sounds like hopium. Sure, let's try and clean up our mess and change our energy sources but looking at how things have been and are going it wouldn't be realistic to think we will solve this or even mitigate it. What else are we going to do though?
Since you've clearly got it all figured out, Tell me, how are we going to address China's runaway coal plant development? Bangladesh's rampant deforestation?
Are you so bold as to say that you know what's best for the people in those countries?
It’s one thing saying “climate change is real, but we can’t realistically do much about it”. It’s delusional at this point to claim it isn’t a thing, tho.
Erm... I feel like you're maybe projecting and/or arguing a strawman. Acknowledging that humans are causing the climate to change is quite a far cry from demanding actions from China's population.
China isn't doing dick diddly squat to reduce emissions and "go green". If they're not optimizing and complying, nothing the rest of us do will matter.
Not sure about ordering people like this, but to your underlying point: I would say that the evidence for Earth not being flat is directly and immediately observable in everyday life. Climate change evidence on the other hand, one has to either put in some effort in the form of research/reading, or, place trust in an authority or peers.
There are lots of people who can observe climate change in everyday life. Anyone who regularly spends time in mountains around glaciers can see this change with their eyes.
Or people in Houston who see 500 year floods yearly. Or Californians breathing wildfire smoke. Or Hondurans suffering from drought. Or people in Miami wading through floods on sunny days.
I was referring to, and should have written explicitly: "anthropogenic climate change" -- this was the context of the parent's comment. I don't think your examples are immediately obvious as evidence for it.
Totally agree. And you can still believe man is a contributor (though not the primary cause) and that the climate change doomsday that is pushed is completely oversold. The parent's comparison is not accurate at all.
> I'm going to guess you're on the capitalism is the cause, true believer, scientism crowd..
> Of course, don't let skepticism stand in the way of your belief system, but i highly suspect that'll be a problem for you.
Interesting article, thanks. Unfortunately your first and last lines are unkind, snarky name-calling, to choose a few of the ways they seem to break the HN guidelines. And "I'm going to guess you're on the X, Y, Z crowd.." seems close to Schopenhauer's Stratagem 32:
If you are confronted with an assertion, there is a short way of getting rid of it, or, at any rate, of throwing suspicion on it, by putting it into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, "That is Manichaeism" or "It is Arianism," or "Pelagianism," or "Idealism," or "Spinozism," or "Pantheism," or "Brownianism," or "Naturalism," or "Atheism," or "Rationalism," "Spiritualism," "Mysticism," and so on. In making an objection of this kind, you take it for granted (1) that the assertion in question is identical with, or is at least contained in, the category cited - that is to say, you cry out, "Oh, I have heard that before"; and (2) that the system referred to has been entirely refuted, and does not contain a word of truth.
Is it really true that the scientific concensus was in favor of ice age in the 70s? I have heard people say this before but I have never seen the historical evidence.
No, it’s not. There were a small number of scientists that wrote about possibilities of global cooling, but vast majority of scientists were concerned with warming.
It’s _nearly_ an urban myth. Some people did say we were due an ice age, but in the “within the next few millennia” range of accuracy, not ‘any day now’. Basically, it’s a good story, but that’s all.
"Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. ... If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. ``A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,'' warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, ``because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.''" -- Newsweek, April 28, 1975
Not just Newsweek, but Time, the New York Times, and other outlets reported on it.
Elementary school children were taught it. I was one of them.
I read now that meteorologists (this is before "climatologist" was a real thing) were divided on whether there was cooling or warming. (But it seems that they were mostly in agreement that something catastrophic was going to happen!)
This global cooling episode does not teach us that there was a scientific consensus on cooling in the 70s, or that climate research since then is equally unfounded. However, it is a really interesting story.
I remember two occasions in the seventies that climate cooling was reported. Both times it was presented as something of "here's a bit of a crazy idea" for the last spot of the news. I don't remember any of the pop science programmes that I used to watch avidly back then ever covering it, though every series had one or two slots for some crazy or outlier idea... Sometimes to see potential, sometimes to debunk.
In the early 80s I picked up one of the "coming ice age" paperbacks, remaindered down to pennies, in the same category as Von Danekin's Chariots of the Gods and his Egyptian aliens. It was absolute garbage, but that's beside the point here. I probably still have it at the back of a bookshelf. Yet already by the early 80s climate heating was coming up in conjunction with acid rain and ozone depletion - they were a holy trinity that often seemed to come together, and they were starting to crop up regularly. Ultimately reporting of all increased throughout the decade, leading to action on ozone and acid rain, and formation of IPCC, at the end of the decade but also the start of the industry moves to oppose via disinformation and obfuscation - the tobacco playbook. Like the Bush administration effort to rebrand climate heating as climate crisis - as that sounds benign and normal.
So I'm old enough, and I doubt your tale - perhaps some sources were reporting it poorly, perhaps the US bought into some climate cooling cult in a way that was completely and entirely unseen here in Europe.
Meteorologists are not, and have never been, scientists. Their opinion on climate is no more valid than any other lay persons. It is like equating the physicists and engineers who develop new MRI machines with the technicians who press the button at the imaging center. Time and Newsweek are not scientific sources. Your whole post is just nonsense.
It's rubbish that science predicted an ice age in the 70s. The vast majority of peer reviewed studies predicted a rise in global temperatures due to a rise in CO2.
There were a few studies that predicted an incoming ice age, but they were by far the minority. And these studies were based on predictions of the composition of the atmosphere which did not pan out, where the CO2 predictions have been on point.
CO2 atmospheric levels are way below what was predicted because huge amounts of CO2 was absorbed by the oceans. This has wrecked havoc on the oceans, but the point is that the predictions of atmospheric levels were absolutely wrong because they did not account for the ocean absorption effect.
I appreciate having a link to a known pseudo science resource, but that article is referencing non-anthropogenic climate change - specifically that there are relatively mild temperature cycles measured in the spans of hundreds of years. Dropping a couple of degrees would (and in relatively recent history has) significantly impacted crop failure rates.
However that is kind of moot, because human driven climate change has been pushing temperatures up faster than any natural temperature reduction has ever achieved. Even if we would otherwise be experience a reduction in average global temperature it doesn't matter because human driven warming would overcome that.
It was a political concensus. And that political concensus is still strong today. Our (Australian) politics are infested with it. It is like another reality with them.
In 1974 and 1975, Time and Newsweek respectively ran articles proposing a global cooling trend. These articles were (loosely) based on a couple of papers that found that if fine-particulate atmospheric aerosols continued to increase the way they were, they could reflect away enough sunlight to cause surface cooling. (And in fact, exactly that was happening during the 70s.)
However, the Clean Air Act and other similar efforts around the world reduced the amount of particulate aerosols in the air. The amount of CO2 kept climbing though, so the warming model won.
The consensus among published climate science papers at the time was predicting an overall warming trend.
But then Dennis Miller said that scientists believed in an ice age in the 70s, and a bunch of suckers fell for it.
Also for reference on the history of climate science:
Here is a paper [1] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that warns of crisis-level warming. From the abstract --
> In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage."
For whatever it's worth, this also appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the warming problem. See [2], from 1983.
By contrast, I don't think the possible cooling effect ever received broad support, it was more of a hypothesis.
> the Clean Air Act and other similar efforts around the world reduced the amount of particulate aerosols in the air.
You just found a solution to global warming. Since you agree that particulate aerosols in the air were going to cause an ice age and the Clean Air Act would fix that, then the Clean Air Act is what has contributed more than anything else to global warming. Repeal the Clean Air Act, reintroduce those old aerosols, and the problem is solved. The global cooling certainty cancels out the global warming certainty and normalcy is achieved.
This is what I came to say. There were very definite beliefs and they were pretty reasonable (although the evidence did not bear out) about global freezing in the early 1970s.
Interestingly, we might compare this with the popular idea of Nuclear Winter at the time. Essentially, a nuclear war was supposed to ignite a global conflagration that would incinerate the skies and burn so much smoke to block out the earth. But 1). The calculations were excessive in terms of the number of smoke supposedly produced and 2). Bombs became so powerful and caused such a shockwave as to almost extinguish their own fires.
Kinda. These studies made big news and even ended up in some school textbooks. Yes, they were a minority belief but let's not exaggerate how fringe they were.
>A survey of the scientific literature has found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20 were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling. So while predictions of cooling got more media attention, the majority of scientists were predicting warming even then.
The ice age hysteria was big in the 70s as well. I don't know what year it started but 70s through 80s climate scientists were saying a global ice age was all but certain, based on sound science and those who disagreed were science haters and all around bad people.
Interesting the guy noting this historical fact above has been flagged and censored and this subthread removed. The truth isn't allowed to be known on HN.
Bad science reporting is not the same thing as science. Major news cycles were misreporting the actual science. No science was predicting a coming ice age in the 80s.
Because you've only listened to people who told you what you wanted to hear (that there hasn't been consensus, that its a conspiracy, that it's normal and not human created) and one of the other things that have been pushed has been the idea that there was a significant belief and prediction in an ice age outcome. There were some early models that could produce such an outcome, but they were not long lived due to them very quickly found to be too simple and inaccurate.
But sure, you can claim that 50 years of consistent predictions are fictional or rewriting history.
Perhaps not as many of us. But that's part of the problem isn't it? Too many humans, chopping down forests, over fishing, sucking melted dinosaurs out of the earth.
This is a genocidal argument couched as environmentalism. It's not acceptable, because you and I know full well that the world's poor and those who already live in warmer climates will be the first and most helpless victims of this outcome while those of us from richer countries will be much more capable of navigating the coming changes.
If you're eager to reduce the global population, start from yourself and your family rather than writing off most of the global south. Stop consuming energy and don't have kids.
1. Pretty sure suggesting murder suicide is against the rules.
2. The warm areas of are planet aren't recently poor. There's a very narrow habitable band of temperatures in which human society has thrived. The extreme energy needed to develop those areas is contributing more to the degradation of the environment than benefit to the species it is providing.
It's not sustainable. It's going to kill us all. Not everyone can win.
1. I'm pretty sure I was suggesting not having kids. It's a bit terrifying that you went here.
2. This doesnt change the calculus of what you're proposing at all. And it's not energy that is the missing resource; that's available in quantity. It's resources and water.
Sitting here saying, "Well the people I'm proposing the death of are historically poor and therefore their hardship inevitable" isn't a rebuttal, it's a rationalization.
What you're essentially defending is the right for nations contributing the most to climate change and what not to essentially put people in nations most affected by climate change to the sword if they chose to immigrate away from their ravaged nation.
Instead of making an argument justifying genocide, perhaps we should instead take action against climate change before it becomes a problem? Or would you prefer the next war to be fought over water instead of oil?
> For forcing projections that were close to linear, this didn’t make that much difference, but for scenarios that weren’t (notably scenario C in Hansen et al (1988)), the correction does not work well.
Notably the RCS article (quote above) emphasizes that the non-alarmist papers were sort of accurate, while the alarmist crap was off by a lot.
The climatists trumpet this news as if the alarmist crap (examples from your comment) was right on the spot. No it wasn't - it was ridiculously overrated just so that statists and plunderers can get their hands on our liberty and income.
Edit: That doesn't detract from the article's more subtle point about the precision of climate models in the past, I was reacting to the comments here viewing this in the light of a fictive controversy.
Can we have climate change without it being based on humans? I mean what model was predicting the rise of china and india and the vast amounts of trash they burn or dump in the oceans?
--We don't know if the globe is getting warmer or not
--We do know the globe is getting warmer, but we don't know why
--We do know the globe is getting warmer, but it has a different cause than human activities
--We do know the globe is getting warmer, and it is in part due to human activities, but any action to counter this would be more harmful than letting it get warmer.
--We do know the globe is getting warmer and action needs to be taken, but it should all be voluntary actions by private enterprises, and no new governmental regulations.
And let us not forget: increased atmospheric co2 is beneficial because it increases agricultural production.
--We do know the global is getting warmer and action wasn't taken, and it's too late, but I'm in my compound with my guns and my family and we will shoot climate refugees and protestors if they get near. Tough luck, might makes right.
Well I'll take that bet. Climate activists have advocated that precisely the opposite should happen: that they should maintain or even increase their growth since they are developing economies.
You're betting that Trump is going to push policies that address climate change? The same individual who says that climate change is a hoax? Who praises clean coal and says that wind turbines cause cancer?
Climate activists have made the much more subtle point that it is unjust to expect nations which have never industrialized not to industrialize so that rich industrial nations can run their air conditioners with the doors open and their SUVs idling.
India and China are not against fighting climate change together. What they need is fairness. CO2-equivivalents per capita is the fair measure stick (maybe adjusted to imported and exported co2eq)
Government level climate skepticism is mainly problem in Anglo-Saxon countries.
China and India are enemies and competitors but they work together in energy sector. They are trying to push renewables and nuclear. It's just that their energy needs exceed the progress in these fields. They build Nuclear as fast as they can, It's just hard to build them in schedule with conventional reactors.
Bill Gates had experimental nuclear power plant planned and ready to go in China. It had green light from both governments. Then came Trump and it was forbidden. 5-year setback when there is no time to waste. Any sane government would have granted exception for the project.
You invest heavily in deploying technologies so that they become cheaper, and either win on cost alone or at least become an easy political choice to switch to. Ramez Naam talks about this in much more detail here: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how-to-decarbonize-america...
Yes I was there; it was a toxic smog hellscape, and nobody cares if they're the "largest green..." whatever marketing bilge you've dug up. They're also the largest carbon dioxide producers, the largest polluters of oceans with plastic, and the most responsible for slaughter of rare megafauna for placebo dong pills.
There could have been a point 40 or 50 years ago where that was harder to argue. Today? No. The modern right is part crime syndicate, part cult.
I'm honestly beginning to wonder if conservatives vs liberals is a form of speciation, and if at some point in the not too distant future interbreeding will no longer happen.
"It's all part of God's plan, and therefore it is both futile and in aid of the devil to work against it."
I think there are some people out there that may want to bring on 'the great flood' so they can actually live through a biblical story, as if they themselves desire to be chosen to build the boat of salvation.
Out of curiosity, I just have to ask for clarification: do you consider this a standard (normal, average) conservative response? If so, upon what is this belief based?
I don't consider it normal or average for a conservative person, but I have come across the "god's plan" part quoted from a politician or two. Sadly. The 'in aid of the devil' I added as my tacit understanding of what "god's plan" means. This was poor judgement on my part, obvious to me in hindsight...
Australia currently has a very conservative government that are in denial of climate change who just happen to be led by a card-carrying Pentecostal. So there's a good chance I'm overly sensitive to such commentary :)
P.S. I think 'conservative', 'liberal', 'progressive', 'left wing' and 'right wing' tend to get in the way of proper discussion of what is actually factual, logical, or at least has basis in valid research.
'Conservatism' isn't helped by it's entanglement with religion and that old quote "A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"
In case you're wondering what my point is, consider the possibility that from a human psychology perspective, comments like this may be harmful to your cause, despite being popular among like minded people.
-- We know the globe is getting warmer, and transferring a trillion dollars (Paris Agreement) from taxpayers in developed nations into the pockets of corrupt political and business entities in third world countries (with Goldman Sachs taking their fair share) is not a genuine solution.
-- We know the globe is getting warmer, but the reports are exaggerated by an order of magnitude by well funded powerful political entities in order to achieve ultra large scale globalist political objectives. Legitimate criticism of climate modelling accuracy from experts in the field of climate science research is met with primitive ad hominem attacks from other so called scientists, making us very skeptical indeed.
I don't think there's any disputing the overall trendline, which far predates the Industrial Revolution. Yet that doesn't mean that human activity isn't also meaningfully impactful. Though it's hardly scientific, from a layperson's perspective, I find xkcd's climate history megacomic instructive: https://xkcd.com/1732/. That rapid-ish spike after 1900 is by no means a smoking gun, but it's a hint that there may be more going on than a ten-thousand-year gradual geological process (which I don't think any climate scientist disputes the presence of).
I know of at least a few cases, where skeptics have changed their minds due to new evidence (Richard Muller [0] comes to mind). I'm curious if there are any instances of reputable scientists with sufficient training in the relevant fields, who went from true believers to significant skepticism of anthropogenic influence.
No dispute. And yet, I don't see any other instances of the a near-45-degree angle spike over the last 20k years (with the obvious caveat that our data on the past is imperfect).
Like I said, not a smoking gun; just a clue that it's worth digging into. And from a Bayesian perspective, one must ask: what are the odds that that rising temperature would happen to correlate with CO2, for entirely unrelated reasons? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sme8WQ4Wb5w
Don't get me wrong, I find Greta-style alarmism and claims of "extinction" to be counter-productive. But given how difficult it is to get nerds to agree on anything, the fact that there are so few credible scientists on the other side of the issue gives me pause. Pure groupthink? Maybe. Hardly unprecedented. But we've been examining the data and improving the models for decades (including from those with a strong financial incentive to debunk AGW), and yet the scientific consensus continues trending in one direction. Skepticism is a good thing, but the evidence for AGW can't merely be handwaved away by causal narrative.
Where is the story hère though? So they looked retroactively and found some models in the past that fitted with current observations even though they had no clue that China would become such a powerful force in terms of CO2 emissions?
If you run random models and wait long enough you will always be able to find at least one model that predicted the current observations. That does NOT mean the models were right, it means that you are basically ignoring all the other models that made bad predictions. So in order to make a headline out of this you would need to make a extensive review of all the models we had back then and found out HOW MANY were actually not bad.
Would not make that much of a headline because you would find most models were bad. Anyone involved with forecasting will know what I mean.
As someone who's written basic fluid dynamics codes, I'm blown away by the complexity of climate models. The errors I ran into in debugging my relatively straightforward codes were incredibly subtle. Like pressures, velocities still "looking right" but still being wrong, due to numerical viscosity and other artifacts of the inexact solutions to Navier-Stokes. This is for flow in a box in a steady state. For an entire planetary atmosphere at a time scale of decades, I can't even imagine how they can track down every error without duct taping "corrections" (overfitting) on everything.
Doesn't this partly fall into the weather Vs climate difference? I can't run fluid dynamics in my head but no matter how much you shake up the box once it's on the table I can say "I think the water/oil/honey will end up at the bottom".
But also yes, it's complex, that's why independent groups dedicate huge amounts of time researching and building them and then models are compared against each other.
> Doesn't this partly fall into the weather Vs climate difference? I can't run fluid dynamics in my head but no matter how much you shake up the box once it's on the table I can say "I think the water/oil/honey will end up at the bottom".
Not in the slightest. For example, the output of a numerically unstable [1] algorithm, run on 64-bit floats, can diverge arbitrarily from the output of the same algorithm run on real numbers with infinite precision (which computers can't do). Often this will lead to obviously wrong outputs, but not always. There are numerically-stable versions of most of the workhorse linear algebra algorithms, but (1) sometimes it's possible to use a faster, numerically unstable algorithm, and this is a matter of judgment that can be mistaken and (2) it's easy to introduce numerical instability via subtle bugs, or even via the exact arithmetic steps you use to calculate a result (in particular, trying to add or subtract two numbers of very different orders of magnitude is a big no-no).
This is not a rebuttal to the parent. They’re talking about stability of prediction of aggregate properties, and you’re fixating on numerical precision errors and algorithm bugs in particular implementations. The one has little to do with the other.
Numerical instability leads to obvious, wildly inconsistent errors. It isn’t subtle. Literally no climate simulations are going off the rails because of these kinds of first-year grad-student code problems.
Correctness of numerical codes is a huge and under-appreciated concern in climate models. There have been some attempts to apply software correctness techniques to climate models. For example, https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/jwb/papers/altuntas-correctness...
> It's just as likely that reality is worse than predicted.
This cannot possibly be correct; it's the same reasoning as the argument "Either the sun will rise tomorrow or it won't. These two possibilities exhaust the entire space. Therefore, the odds of the sun rising tomorrow are 50%, one in two." The premises are completely correct -- and unrelated to the conclusion.
It isn't the same reasoning at all. Our prior for what could possibly happen should be informed by what has happened before, and we know to the best of what geology can tell us, that many mass extinctions on earth were caused by CO2 mediated warming, including the one that wiped out 95% of all species at the end of the Permian.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/climate-change-ma...
How can you say that unless we know how to sort good models from bad ones before observations kick in? As far as I know its always very easy to fit historical data with thousands of models but very few will actually be useful for prediction and we have no idea which ones.
This blog post is highly misleading and poorly-informed. The author of it does not seem to know that climate scientists do test their models against reality, leading him/her to waste a lot of words explaining how cargo cult science is bad, and how overfitting is being done, etc. These points are valid in the abstract, but don't represent how real climate science works.
Amazingly, the author at one point says:
"In proper science, the different theories are bloodily competing with each other."
as a contrast to climate science, where supposedly these models are just peacefully cooperating to raise more funds. Anyone who has been in the middle of a conference where people with competing models are comparing results (to each other and to observations) knows how off-base this is.
How can you distinguish survivorship bias different from... developing better models? If there are any models that made quantitative predictions of global temperature change (whether warming, cooling, or neither), please let me know. I am extremely interested :)
Your comment contains hypotheticals ("run random models and wait long enough you will always be able to find at least one model that predicted the current observations") that are NOT what the present study did.
As noted in TFA, they looked at 17 forecasts from 14 models and found that the temperature predictions of 10 of them were consistent with what has happened in the meantime. And if you adjust for forcing (CO2, methane) then the predictions improve further.
> As noted in TFA, they looked at 17 forecasts from 14 models
Pardon a little pedantry:
>> The researchers compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to the surface temperatures predicted in 17 forecasts. Those predictions were drawn from 14 separate computer models released between 1970 and 2001. In some cases, the studies and their computer codes were so old that the team had to extract data published in papers, using special software to gauge the exact numbers represented by points on a printed graph.
They compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to 17 forecasts, from 14 separate models.
But....how many models did they look at, before choosing those particular 14 models?
TFA doesn't say.
Articles written in this style provide rich fodder for conspiracy theorists, particularly because there is no shortage of examples in the past where authoritative, trustworthy organizations have gotten caught in lies. Rare is the climate change article I've read that can't easily have similar holes poked in it.
What's the real truth here? Based on the literal content of this article, no one knows. It is speculation vs speculation.
I've said it before, and I will say it again: if your persuasion tactics aren't working, it might be worth considering whether you should change your tactics.
TFA article does say. They looked at 17 forecasts drawn from 14 models. You are the one who implicitly believes they are lying about that and only reporting 17 out of some huge unknown number. The reality is that the vast majority (>99%) of climate change research does not produce the type of forecast, or really any forecast at all, that one could do this analysis on. Therefore, the 17 forecast number is actually very easy to believe.
With sincerity, I think you may misunderstand what GP is pointing out. I understood “forecasts” to be a simulation run using a model. In that case, they took 14 models and ran those each at least once to come up with 17 predictions.
What GP wants is transparency around how many possible models were there over the last decades from which they chose the 14. This gives the reader a better understanding of whether 14 is a lot or a little. It is a fair point IMO regardless of their overall stance on the issue.
Simulation is one way to produce a numerical forecast, but the prediction of any forecast model would never be the result of a single simulation run. Model predictions are always (or should always) be reported as an expected value, or the average over many simulation runs. The expected value of a random variable (e.g. mode output) is probably the most fundamental concept in all of statistics/probability, and many mind-wrenching (read: wrong+incoherent) internet hot takes are rooted in logical fallacies about the science of prediction. The reason that there are more predictions (17) than models (14) is that several of the models (eg Hansen 1981) consider several distinct “scenarios” based on differing assumptions about future levels of GHG emissions.
Secondly, the forecast models evaluated in the study are from the likes of James Hansen, William Nordhaus, and the IPCC (in other words, authoritative sources). So at the very least this adds weight to the hypothesis that the models published by the IPCC are accurate and methodologically sound. Sure, there is some probability that the models and reality corresponded by random chance, but that probability is made ever more diminishingly small as evidence accumulates.
So, I don’t think any of the comments in this thread that accuse the authors of retrospective cherry-picking of climate models are anything but embarrassing examples of pseudo-intellectual contrarianism and/or confusion over basic statistics.
The models considered by the study, their predictions, and the methodology used are all located here and were easily found after 30s of digging: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels
Agreed. The point of criticism that the authors didn’t include all relevant models is among the lowest of the low-hanging fruit I can imagine one picking. And while the process of peer review isn’t without its flaws, I can also imagine that fruit has long since been picked by the reviewers, who have far deeper knowledge of the published models than I or just about anyone else in this thread, save for the actual climate scientists among us.
Thirded. The posting of climate-related stories on HN brings out a lot of un-informed skepticism. The resulting back-and-forth tends to crowd out everything else.
In many of these cases, it's clear that the commenters have done no background reading, and have no climate science background. Their comments thus consist of simple armchair speculation (your "lowest of the low-hanging fruit").
In these comments, I have found people with strong opinions on the lack of seriousness of climate science, who have no idea we have gravimetric measurements of ice sheet mass. This is a dataset going back almost 20 years that has revolutionized geoscience. HN commenters have expressed strong opinions about melting ice, with no knowledge of this data and what it means.
I have found people who think that climate science consists of having a stable of models each with a host of knobs, and the research method is to turn the knobs or choose new models until the results look dramatic enough to publish.
The gap between the firmness of these claims and the knowledge to back it up just boggles the mind.
The most basic step people could take to fix this is to read the executive summary of the IPCC AR5 report, or (even better/easier) the executive summary of the NCA (https://science2017.globalchange.gov). This report was specifically written by people who really know this stuff, for people like us.
Your comment is an example of the "middlebrow dismissal" [1] and overdone and uninformed skepticism that is prevalent on HN climate threads.
There's no indication that the authors are cherry-picking their models but the comments above are assuming this (without reading the original paper to get a sense of the care of the analysis). It's really easy to find supposed gotchas in this way - basically any analytic step can be questioned.
If you live in the Bay Area, AGU is next week at Moscone Center. It's the biggest one-stop-shop in the world for geoscience research. Maybe it's worth paying a one-day admission fee to see some of this in person?
> Your comment is an example of the "middlebrow dismissal"
--> It's a word coined by pg that's sort of a term-of-art for the depressing tendency of the top HN comment to be something which pooh-poohs the company/topic/idea in the submission, doesn't add anything to the discussion, but (crucially) is worded convincingly enough to not just end up on the bottom of the thread.
--> e.g. "Lol that suckz because Google can steal ur passwerdz!" would not end up at the top of the thread. We wouldn't be terribly worried if someone actually said "Wait, I just audited NativeClient and it turns out you can achieve arbitrary code execution. Maybe you should avoid this software." The danger zone is comments which sound like the second but, on reflection, only tell you about as much as the first.
I love the first reply:
"Ironically the concept of a "middlebrow dismissal" seems to me to enable what it condemns--e.g. HN'ers can now just post "hey that's a middlebrow dismissal" instead of a detailed statement of why a particular response falls short. Basically I think pg made it worse by giving it a catchy name."
- something which pooh-poohs the company/topic/idea in the submission [Invalid]
- doesn't add anything to the discussion [Invalid]
- We wouldn't be terribly worried if someone actually said "Wait, I just audited NativeClient and it turns out you can achieve arbitrary code execution. Maybe you should avoid this software." [If you'd have read more closely, and less tribally, perhaps you might have noticed something along these lines]
> There's no indication that the authors are cherry-picking their models
My comment wasn't that they are cherry picking their models, it was that it is (as worded) not entirely clear that they are not. I also explained why this is may be harmful.
> but the comments above are assuming this
Mine weren't assuming anything.
> basically any analytic step can be questioned
Perhaps. But survivorship bias isn't a conspiracy theory.
> If you live in the Bay Area, AGU is next week at Moscone Center. It's the biggest one-stop-shop in the world for geoscience research. Maybe it's worth paying a one-day admission fee to see some of this in person?
I'm satisfied enough with the science to support doing something about climate change. My interest in this conversation is the apparent unwillingness of similarly minded people to consider weaknesses in their persuasion campaign. How do you foresee getting past the current impasse we find ourselves in?
> They looked at 17 forecasts drawn from 14 models.
It does not say this. What you have written is your uncritical interpretation, what I wrote is a literal quotation, which allows for (satisfies) the conspiratorial possibility that I raised.
> You are the one who implicitly believes they are lying about that
You are speculating. Speculation is fine, but it's best to realize (and state explicitly) when you're doing it.
Know how I know you're speculating? Because while you only believe you can read my mind, I can actually do it, and I do not "believe they are lying". I was only pointing out that as written, they could be lying.
And I even told you the reason why I wrote that comment: "Articles written in this style provide rich fodder for conspiracy theorists..."
If you truly want to change minds, you might want to learn how the minds you want to change work. Go spend some serious time in conspiracy forums, I suspect you might learn something useful.
And rather than largely ignoring the actual words of someone who's trying to help out your cause, treating them as an enemy rather than someone who may have some insight you lack, it might be helpful to keep a more open mind. Perhaps if those with knowledge severely lacking in the mainstream discourse weren't rate limited, some here may find some new ideas to consider.
Even if they said how many models they looked at before choosing 14 models (and explained why they chose those 14), conspiracy theorists and people skepticalof climate science would still argue that it is not legitimate because of survivorship bias and several other reasons.
"You looked at 1000 models, but what about the 1000 models that scientists made and didn't publish. You didn't look at those!"
People can always suggest more tests you need to do or poke holes in any analysis. That doesn't mean you just stop ding the work.
Overall it is impressive that different models made over 30 years can predict fairly accurate results. In my opinion that shows that the underlying physics of the models is correct and makes me trust the models even more.
> Even if they said how many models they looked at before choosing 14 models (and explained why they chose those 14), conspiracy theorists and people skeptical of climate science would still argue that it is not legitimate because of survivorship bias and several other reasons.
Undoubtedly some would, but are you willing to consider the possibility that the number/percentage of people that would do so might be altered by the language used in articles on climate science?
> People can always suggest more tests you need to do or poke holes in any analysis.
Some analyses are easier to poke holes in than others. If this article was tightened up in the manner I describe, excluding the possibility of survivorship bias, then an entirely new approach to denial would be required. As written, survivorship bias is a very real possibility.
Wikipedia says: "Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias."
Survivorship bias is a real phenomenon, not a conspiracy theory. It is neither illogical or unscientific to consider the possibility that is might be in play behind the scenes here, and the article as written makes no attempt to rule it out.
> Overall it is impressive that different models made over 30 years can predict fairly accurate results. In my opinion that shows that the underlying physics of the models is correct and makes me trust the models even more.
I suspect this is because your mind does not consider it a possibility that the models discussed do not result from survivorship bias. A conspiratorial mind however, would most likely strongly consider that a possibility, and therefore compute a completely different level of trust.
Imagine for a moment how the human mind works when reading something. Typically, if the mind is primed with preexisting beliefs, it is going to be actively searching (interpreting) for confirmation of those beliefs, and this behavior will likely be stronger if the topic happens to be one associated with one's identity. So, your mind processes an article such as this optimistically (uncritically), whereas a "denier" or "conspiracy theorist" is going to read it pessimistically (critically).
The top comment is: (/u/aClimateScientist) "Hi all, I'm a coauthor of this paper (Henri Drake) and happy to answer questions."
Someone asks the question: "How did you account for survivorship bias of models? IOW how did you select the 17? I mean if I asked 1,000 psychics to predict GDP growth, I could probably find 10-20 who were pretty close and say that that proves they're clairvoyant."
As of when I'm writing this, neither /u/aClimateScientist nor /u/avogadros_number (the article submitter, who seems to have considerable background in climate science) have addressed this question.
(Or, same thread: a moderator [Removed] comment.)
My question to you is: do you think it is possible that the manner in which your mind evaluates this particular situation (an unanswered questi...
Since one of authors posted the paper, we do know:
> “We conducted a literature search to identify papers published prior to the early-1990s that include climate model outputs containing both a time-series of projected future GMST (with a minimum of two points in time) and future forcings (including both a publication date and future projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations, at a minimum). Eleven papers with fourteen distinct projections were identified that fit these criteria.
> Eleven papers with fourteen distinct projections were identified that fit these criteria.
This brings to mind the old joke: "I used to smoke weed. I still do, but I used to, too."
Specifically, the phrase "were identified that fit these criteria" sets off my skepticism spider senses. Kind of like the popular "97% of scientists..." meme, that doesn't quite hold water when you dig under the covers.
To be clear, I'm not saying deceit is taking place, I am simply saying that I am skeptical.
I wasn't able to find any details on the specifics of the literature search, such that the search could be reproduced. Any idea if that was included in the study and I somehow overlooked it?
The motive could be “think twice before dismissing climate scientists because they have a pretty good track record.” Your interpretation seems to display the exact bias you are attributing to others.
The bias I'm suggesting is an appeal to authority, and you'll have to be more clear on how I'm displaying that, since I am neither suggesting I am an expert, nor am I showing off my long history of "being right" about other things.
You can back up study X with all the data and numerical analysis in the world, and it still doesn't increase study Y being right, except through appeal to authority.
They compared both temperature over time and temperature vs forcing. The latter test factors out the "quantity of emissions" which as you say are much harder to predict (geopolitical), so just measures the quality of the climate modelling.
while I generally agree with your comment, I don't think it is necessary you'd actually have to know about China, you just need to know the general growth trends and if emissions seem to correlate with it, whether that meant cocentrated manufacturing in China or distributed around the world, or even concentrated somewhere else seems like a "detail"
> even though they had no clue that China would become such a powerful force in terms of CO2 emissions
I think you're making the same mistake that you're attributing to the story. It really doesn't matter what China does per se. The global energy consumption, roughly, follows a log-linear trend. If the energy comes from fossil fuels, the CO2 emissions would also follow the same trend [1]. It doesn't matter whether it's China or someone else; the CO2 emission would go up if we don't innovate and rely on fossil fuels.
As an analogy, think about the Moore's law. Does it matter whether the chip is made by Intel or AMD?
Disagree. China's move to a more market based economy has resulted in them tripling their fossil CO2 emissions compared to the 1990s. India doubled. EU and the US are slowing down in emissions but on the whole China is driving the huge increase of CO2 emissions worldwide, matching their rapid economic development. If you did not take that into account you would miss on the acceleration of CO2 content in the atmosphere over time.
There is no physical phenomenon that causes the log-linear trend, its just a model that happens to fit for a small select period of history. Moore's law isn't an actual law I hope you understand that..
Rising prosperity comes with rising energy consumption. If China didn't export so much it wouldn't be able to import the fuel that it used. Its dramatic rise was definitely not a given.
> There is no physical phenomenon that causes the log-linear trend, its just a model that happens to fit for a small select period of history.
Of course it's a model. Please look up the Kardashev scale and correlations that people have developed based on it [1]. The energy output is not necessarily coupled with the CO2 emission unless we burn fossil fuels to generate power.
Yeah, this is like the stories about the guy who correctly predicted the winner of the Presidential election decades in advance (Bloom County said Trump would win back in the 1980s was it), or did well on some stock investments that did well based on events they didn't actually predict.
> they had no clue that China would become such a powerful force in terms of CO2 emissions?
Why would the models care? In fact world GDP growth has been right on trend since the 60's. It's true that it's concentrated in areas we didn't expect, but that's always true. China did much better than expected, the Americas were right on curve, Europe a little worse and eastern europe in particular fell off a cliff. So what?
Those models surely predicted aggregate carbon output pretty well. Are you saying they didn't?
Indeed, the authors (I am one of them) would appreciate this. I'll personally add any extra papers you find to the plots. If it turns out we really left out some important papers, we (or at least I) will publish a revision to the paper.
I would very much like to hear your opinion on the perspective I am (unsuccessfully) trying to draw attention to via my comments in this thread. I believe this, and things like it, are far more important than people are willing to consider.
>We gathered all the climate models published between 1970 and the mid-2000s that gave projections of both future warming and future concentrations of CO2 and other climate forcings – from Manabe (1970) and Mitchell (1970) through to CMIP3 in IPCC 2007.
If you're a cynic or suspicious: "projections of future warming" means they intentionally excluded studies that projected cooling.
Otherwise: it could have been written as "projections of future temperature", but they came across no studies that projected cooling.
This really makes me wish for open access journals, as most of the questions in this thread could be answered if it was possible for anyone to look at the paper.
We didn't find any quantitative and peer-reviewed projections of cooling, or we would have included them. If you know of any, please let me know and I'll publish an update to the paper.
I don't know if it helps, but these are the papers the media cooling stories came from. They are peer reviewed and quantitative, but perhaps not exactly what you need (that is to say, not sufficiently predictive).
Whether or not China emitted lots of CO2 doesn't matter here. The old studies didn't predict how much CO2 the world would emit. They predicted how much the planet would warm, for various amounts of CO2 emissions. It turned out they were correct about that.
Among the models this study looked at was Hansen's. That's the NASA scientist who testified about global warming to Congress in 1988. It'd be quite a coincidence if there were lots of models with a wide variety of predictions, and the one model that was presented to Congress just happened by chance to be one of the few that got it right.
But if you can actually show that there were in fact a bunch of models by scientists of similar stature, which made really different predictions and were left out of this study, then that would be interesting.
There are people downthread who are arguing that because numerical instability bugs exist and climate models are complicated, climate models can’t be trusted. Literally any flimsy pretext is used to dismiss work that people don’t like.
This conversation is dominated by people who have just enough knowledge to defend their pre-conceptions, but no more.
Your comment doesn't match what the paper actually says[1].
Your claim that "The old studies didn't predict how much CO2 the world would emit" is directly contradicted on the first page. The paper begins by pointing out that "model projections rely on...accurate assumptions around future emissions of CO2". In fact, one of the criteria the authors used for choosing a model to include was that it came with a time-series prediction of "future projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations".
With that restriction, the authors found 11 papers containing a total of 14 models. Unless the authors of this paper left out other predictions from the original papers, the only papers included in the study that "predicted how much the planet would warm, for various amounts of CO2 emissions" were Hansen's, and the other 9 papers included in this study only made one prediction for both emissions and temperature.
This paper also points out that Hansen's 1988 "most plausible" model, which you described as "the one model that was presented to Congress", was not accurate under the usual definition of accurate: "H88's “most plausible” scenario B overestimated warming experienced subsequent to publication by around 54%."
Then how does this paper lead to the headline that "Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming"?
What the authors of this paper have done is to compare errors in the models' predictions of CO2 emissions to errors in the models' predictions of temperature. In other words, the models were wrong about both, but in the same direction. They overestimated both future emissions and future temperature.
Even so, the claim that the models were accurate is a linguistic trick. The table on line 326 shows what the authors are calling skill score: "A skill score of one represents perfect agreement between a model projection and observations."
Not a single model has a "skill score" of one, or for which one is within the uncertainty. In fact, all of the models are wrong in the same direction, even after this paper has attempted to correct for their incorrect assumptions about future CO2 emissions.
The linguistic trick is that this error is not, according to the authors, "statistically significant". But that's a tremendous abuse of the phrase. The authors are effectively saying: "The null hypothesis is that the models are right, and we've failed to disprove it." They've assumed the conclusion.
I suspect that this paper is being promoted for political, not scientific, correctness.
All that says (in your second paragraph) is that if you're going to predict the actual temperature, you need an accurate CO2 prediction, which of course is true.
From the abstract: "We make a 100-year control run and perform experiments for three scenarios of atmospheric composition. These experiments begin in 1958 and include measured or estimated changes in atmospheric CO2, CH4, H2O, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and stratospheric aerosols for the period from 1958 to the present. Scenario A assumes continued exponential trace gas growth, scenario B assumes a reduced linear linear growth of trace gases, and scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000."
Note the word "assumes." There's no attempt to really model what humanity would choose to emit. None of these assumptions exactly match what happened with CO2 and other greenhouse gases, so of course none of them exactly match the temperature either. But adjusted for actual greenhouse emissions, they come remarkably close.
Were they completely accurate in that way? Certainly not. People knew a lot less back then. It took a while to nail down things like the effect of water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas but also makes clouds that reflect sunlight away. But they were close enough to make good policy decisions, and if we'd paid attention, we'd be much better off today.
Incidentally, the case for global warming doesn't depend on models. There have been warming events before, and there's enough evidence in geological history to tell us what's going to happen. Hansen's book has details.
> But adjusted for the actual CO2 emissions, they come remarkably close.
Take a look at the table I mentioned (line 326), in particular "ΔT / ΔF skill". That's the change in temperature over the change in forcing (ie, CO2 etc). Hausfather et al call it "implied TCR". In (overly) simple terms, it's the predicted increase in temperature per unit of CO2 emitted.
Look at the numbers: 0.51, 0.41, 0.63, 0.42, 0.83, etc. The best is 0.87. The average was 0.69.
The authors attempted to adjust for actual CO2 emissions and found that, after the correction, the models were predicting 40%-90% of the observations, with an average score around 70%.
Is that "remarkably close"?
Well, we might disagree about the meaning of that term. But there's another observation that we should agree on. Note what the authors say after that table:
> The average of the median skill scores across all the model projections evaluated is 0.69 for the temperature vs time metric.
> Using the implied TCR metric, the average projection skill of the models was also 0.69.
In other words, the models are, on average, as accurate with or without the correction. Adjusting for actual greenhouse emissions doesn't make the models more accurate (nor less).
If you are correct, what are the policy implications? In particular, is it your view that we should stay on fossil fuels, rather than trying to move to renewables? And are there any possible future scientific findings that could lead you to change your view?
> Anyone involved with forecasting will know what I mean.
I'm not involved with forecasting, but am generally very skeptical of people 'debunking' climate science in non-scientific forums such as these. Can you back up your claim that these people haven't done their job properly? Have you read the article and their methodology? It seems to be behind a paywall unfortunately so I can't assess your claim right now.
Since you didn't point out any specific flaw in the study, but mentioned merely general biases which any scientist is aware of, suggesting they apply to the article but not really pointing out how, I really can't take this criticism of a peer reviewed article seriously.
It does seem like survivorship bias could be a factor. The article talks about how some of the old models were off until they "corrected" them. All right, and did they apply the same scrutiny to the apparently "correct" ones? "All of the models predicted this (except for the ones that didn't.)
The only correction I see referenced was the amount of CO2 produced by people after the papers were written. Annual CO2 emissions from human industry is an input to the model, rather than the model itself, but it does affect the result and can only be estimated when the models were published. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Unless I overlooked other changes.
These climate models can also correctly predict the climate on other planets. Planetary scientist use the same models, modified to it to match conditions in Mars, Venus and run them to get more coarse but essentially correct climate.
Those predictions were based upon projections that we would not address the growing levels of smog and other particulates, and the cooling effect from those would be larger than the warming effect from greenhouse gases.
We did address smog. Without growing smog, those models predicted warming.
That's one proposal for geoengineering (either sulfate particles in the stratosphere, or marine particles over the oceans). More for a "pause" or slow down rather than a solution to stop it.
Definitely, there was an "albedo yachts" solution that was floated a while back. Basically kicking up mist from the oceans. It's all just theory, and the repercussions are probably not well understood, but the idea is out there and implementation would be relatively inexpensive.
This reminds me of the models I made a few years ago to predict where a Frisbee will land after you throw it. I made about 14 different models, some of them correctly predict where the Frisbee will land. That's right, I have a model that can tell you where the Frisbee you are about to throw will land, it correctly predicts Frisbee throws.
Here is how it works: You input all the factors of your Frisbee throw. Then you throw the Frisbee, and that's it! Well, I guess there is one more step, since all 14 models make wrong predictions about where the Frisbee will land. But you can just go back and adjust the models and input better data after you already know where the Frisbee actually ended up, and then some of them correctly predicted where it will land!
Don't down-vote me, this is definitely what the phrase 'correctly predicted' means, and I'm not being misleading at all.
"Well of course the models were right", you say to yourself. Who is still arguing about this? The evidence has piled up to the extent that being "skeptical of the science" is unacceptable in educated, elite spaces (such as Hacker News and the tech industry generally).
But now, as you can already see proliferating in the comments to this piece, the new acceptable contrarian take on climate change is that of course its happening, but since life thrived on the planet during other climactic conditions there's nothing to worry about.
The message is the same as it's always been: trying to do anything in response is foolish, and we should all continue to just focus on making as much money as possible.
But the real issue with climate change is and has always been that it will socially and politically de-stabilize the planet, because quite a few people live in places that will become less livable in the near future, and those people will want to go somewhere else.
Those people will have a quite strong claim on land and resources in wealthy countries that emitted most of the pollution and have lots of mostly empty and more habitable land. This will cause global conflict on a scale beyond any that exists in living memory.
Yes, "life" will survive. Our societies in their current configurations will not, and decisions we make now will determine how messy or violent (or not) that transition will be.
Pedantic retorts about geological time should embarrass you in the face of the leaders of the tech industry evidently using their immense wealth to prepare for social collapse[1].
And although these people are clearly willing to spend money to prep for climate change, I still can't get a single one of the recruiters who cold-call or email me about HOT NEW SILICON VALLEY OPPORTUNITIES to find me a single credible company working on anything climate or energy adjacent. I can just hear their jaws slackening every time I bring it up.
That's not "prediction". Prediction is when you say something will happen and then it does, at least somewhat reliably. Better yet, if you have some skin in the game, such as your scientific reputation. I.e. if you say there won't be any polar bears by 2020, their population better not quadruple to thwart your prognostications.
It's very easy to find a model that predicts this retrospectively. It's also completely worthless. Predicting the future is much harder.
That's my main beef with climate science: not only do they do this kind of hand picking retroactively and claim they're able to "predict", they also sometimes go back and _tweak the input data_ to fit the models better, or make it up entirely where coverage is inadequate. This is not how science is done in any other field. This also doesn't feel like it's being treated as an existential threat would be treated, in terms of scientific rigor. I understand it's a very complex problem, sure, but that doesn't give you a license to take arbitrary liberties with scientific method or ground truth data.
They aren't wrong technically, but the papers relied on key mechanisms that no longer are as big of a issue thus negated. Particulate matter, the effect is now actually being considered as a method of 'geoengineering' a cooler climate to combat the warming by businessmen like Bill Gates [0].
When I was growing up we had a set of encyclopedias from the 70s. They were predicting a new ice age coming if we didn't change our ways. Anyone else remember this? I doubt I can find them online but I'll look.
There was a paper by Rasool and Schneider in 1971 that was behind this, I think. "Our ways" would've been industrial particulate pollution, where a 4x increase, sustained, risked kicking off a new ice age. Schneider later retracted the findings in 1974.
There were dozens and dozens of "climate models" which predicted everything from global cooling to a fiery wasteland and everything in between. Of course you could go back and find a model that "predicted" correctly because every possibility was predicted.
That's like dozens and dozens of "stock price models" predicting FB stock to go up, down and stay the same. Of course one is guaranteed to be correct.
What is "scientific" about this? It's simply people who want to prove something and then narrowly searching for the data to prove that point and ignoring everything else.
This is so disappointing coming from something calling itself a sciencemag.
This comment is just completely nonsensical and intellectually dishonest. This is not at all what this paper did, nor what any remotely credible scientific study ever does.
> This comment is just completely nonsensical and intellectually dishonest.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Would be interested to find which parts you felt was "nonsensical and intellectually dishonest" so I expand on it and clarify it for you. Hard to respond to an ad hominem.
> This is not at all what this paper did, nor what any remotely credible scientific study ever does.
It's exactly what it did. How about this. If a "anticlimatemag" opposed to the climate change agenda had an article titled "Even 50-year-old climate models were wrong about global warming", would you be defending it as vigorously?
No, that was a statement of fact. The core problem is that your comment (ironically) commits the very offense that you are falsely projecting onto the authors. Namely, you are redefining concrete terms to fit the meaning that you want them to have (=nonsense) and generating your own set of easily-disprovable "facts" and stating them as truth (=intellectual dishonesty). I feel exasperated and exhausted from spending my evening responding to shallow anti-science trolling (note: not an ad hominem since I'm addressing your words and not you as a person), which led to my response. But since you asked politely, let's walk through a fiery wasteland of mangled logic.
>There were dozens and dozens of "climate models" which predicted everything from global cooling to a fiery wasteland and everything in between.
> What is "scientific" about this? It's simply people who want to prove something and then narrowly searching for the data to prove that point and ignoring everything else.
The paper clearly states their methodology, which included a literature review to find all published climate models that produce a numeric forecast for future average temperatures. I quoted the relevant section in a different comment. If they missed or ignored dozens and dozens of other published climate models, then find them and show us. Otherwise, you're explicitly accusing the authors and publishers of peer-reviewed science of committing research malpractice.
>Of course you could go back and find a model that "predicted" correctly because every possibility was predicted.
The output of a climate model (in this context) is an expected value (i.e. a single real number) of the global mean temperature at time t (in years). It is true that if the support of a random variable is the real numbers, then every outcome in (-inf, +inf) is weighted by some probability density (and yet any particular outcome in the set of reals occurs with zero probability!). But it is decidely untrue that the model predictions analyzed by this study (or produced by climate scientists in the time period considered by the study) contained the set of all possible outcomes. It data evaluated is one temperature value per model per year are published right here--take a look: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels/tree/master/references
>That's like dozens and dozens of "stock price models" predicting FB stock to go up, down and stay the same. Of course one is guaranteed to be correct.
Effectively the same fallacy as above, but with a discrete number of outcomes. The point of probabilistic forecasts is not to be correct (this goes against the definition), it's to estimate the likelihood that a certain outcome will occur in the future given information known up until the current time (ideally--but not necessarily--so that some rational decision can be made). Laypeople often incorrectly redefine prediction to meaning the black-or-white selection of a particular future outcome. I could go on, but I suggest you read this masterpiece instead: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probabi... (or Thinking, Fast and Slow for the human psychology lens on this problem of misunderstanding the nature of uncertainty).
>If a "anticlimatemag" opposed to the climate change agenda had an article titled "Even 50-year-old climate models were wrong about global warming", would you be defending it as vigorously?
Um, no? I do not and will not defend blatantly false anti-science regardless of the source or agenda. That is extra true of anti-science that supports an avoidable exis...
I’m confused as hell to be honest. A few years ago they said there was a global warming pause.[1]. They seemed so sure it was happening that Nature devoted a whole issue to it.
Then they came back and said “actually it never happened”.[2]
Shouldn’t it be pretty straightforward to tell whether there was warming or not?
Most scientists didn’t think much of the idea of a pause, but skeptics started beating the drum so consistently and loudly after a few years after 2001 that the media began asking the question pretty consistently, and the climate science community had to spend time answering the question.
There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused.
My link has dozens of papers that claim to explain the pause. It wasn’t we think there is a pause, they are already explaining why there was one.
I’d say a full issue Nature dedicated to exploring why there was a pause, suggests it was a broadly held idea.
That said, if there was no consensus, why is that? Why do some scientists believe there was a pause, while others disagree? Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward?
> Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward?
Not exactly. There are two ways that it can be ambiguous:
1. We don't measure the entire earth to measure its temperature, and combining the sensor readings from various sources to get a calibrated total energy content can be difficult.
2. It is difficult to take a time series, and with a short history, decide whether something is a significant deviation from the trend or just random variation. Humans instinctively underestimate how often a random sequence of coin flips will have consecutive strings of heads of a given length, and the same tendency causes us to see a "pause" as a deviation from the trend, when it's really just random variation causing a bunch of consecutive heads.
This is exactly the sort of position that manufactures new climate change skeptics.
If there can be disagreement over something as basic as "are temperatures actually going up", then that throws all of climatology into doubt. Global temperature is the question that motivates this field, yet you're arguing here that whether it was going up or stable was merely an "idea" rather than a matter of measuring physical reality. It is absurd that such a basic question is actually a matter of dispute at this point: reading thermometers and averaging them just isn't that difficult compared to what other scientific fields routinely accomplish.
There's also an interesting social viewpoint on display: you claim the "climate science community" is a completely separate group from "skeptics" and they only "had" to spend time answering the "question" of a pause due to "beating the drum".
Are there no climate scientists skeptical of beliefs in their own field, like there are in every other field of science? If not, why not? Why are people asking obvious questions like "why does it seem temperatures stopped rising" seen as nuisance outsiders rather than fellow scientists seeking the truth? From an outsider's perspective this looks a lot like groupthink.
There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused.
This is not true, as refurb already showed. To spell it out, his [2] link starts by saying: "The United Nations panel of climate science experts mentioned it in a 2013 report, scientists have published more than 200 papers analyzing it, and climate deniers said it was proof that climate change didn't exist, but in reality the global warming pause or hiatus never occurred."
Over 200 papers published analysing a pause is clear evidence that this was a broadly held idea.
There seems to be a problematic tendency in climatology to try and retroactively rewrite history. Prior disputes or false predictions are recast as "scientists didn't actually believe that" or "scientists weren't actually wrong after all" using dubious, Orwellian style practices. Even temperature records themselves are constantly being rewritten: basic questions like "what was the temperature on date X at location Y" had different answers in the past to what they do now.
As another example, elsewhere in this thread [1] the author of the paper we're discussing claims he couldn't find any papers that predicted global cooling. Predictions of a new ice age were widely covered in the media and discussed in the literature in the 1970s. There were global conferences and scientific summits held about it. Embarrassingly, some random Hacker News commentator was able to produce a list of six such papers within an hour of that post being made.
What is wrong with climatology? Other fields like physics or medicine don't have problems dealing with their past history of wrong experiments, theories or measurements.
Some time ago, I got curious about the sources of data in the period where humans were measuring temperature using thermometers. When we talk about predictions from fifty years ago matching today (also I read the linked article and I didn't really see proof that a model that was specified at that time being explicitly benchmarked), it matters how the distribution of sources of surface temperature data varied since then.
I haven't been motivated enough to do another one of these animations, but this video[1] shows locations of all temperature stations in GHCNv3[2] (I see that GHCNv4[3] is out). Notice how where humans measure temperature depends so much on what living conditions humans seek or find acceptable. I find this visualization interesting in terms of the number of modeling questions it poses. If you are interested, it shouldn't take much to replicate something similar with current hardware/software.
As another note, it makes little sense to say model predictions are not statistically significantly different from each other. What is the population from which these models are being drawn? What is the measure of variability among models? The article[4] is behind a paywall, so I can't see what they did.
I never doubted our capability to predict short term (10s of years) temperature change from CO2 levels.
I'm also 100% sure we aren't capable of predicting the consequences of these temperature changes, because they are going to be complex. This will be an interesting ride and the train has left the station. We may want to find more diverse controls than just the CO2 emissions. How about manipulating not just land but also the oceans to run more efficient photosynthesis? Dangerous perhaps?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadI would say this is also a good description for todays climate change deniers.
> "The earth used to be round but over a timescale of billions of years it slowly flattened out like a ball of silly putty left sitting on the table."
What's most unsettling is, there's no reason to expect that the same psychosocial tribal mechanisms are not constantly active, even when the facts are on the side of one's tribal beliefs. This leads to any number of blind spots, not only in truth-seeking and self-correction, but in social dynamics (in-group vs. out-group). Our brains are exceptionally, insidiously good at working backwards, not just to convince others, but to convince ourselves. Those who can spin on a dime and update/discard ideas in the presence of new evidence are a truly rare breed.
Two of my favorite books on motivated reasoning and self-deception:
Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013827
The Elephant in the Brain, by Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler: http://elephantinthebrain.com/
Asking for a friend...
1) Actual solutions to climate change are not taken seriously (nuclear power, natural gas)
2) Effect size is still unknown or small. 0.3C over decades is not much to write home about.
3) Solutions to climate change have to include developing / third world countries.
And most importantly:
4) Oil/gas with capitalism has lead to the greatest throughput of innovation known to mankind, lifting billions out of poverty, medical and scientific advances, and allows 7B people to live on earth. Removing and replacing this will have consequences that IMHO go beyond a 0.3C increase in temp and a few cm increase in water level. Just MHO.
We can do this right now. Sequestration of all human-driven carbon output at current costs and with current technology amounts to something like 1.5% of world GDP.
As for cooperation, that's a bad faith argument. Saying you won't do something because no one else will is just a sneaky way of saying you won't do it. Someone has to start. Someone has to be willing to start. If you aren't willing to start, you simply don't want to see the problem solved.
Just come out and give us the cynical argument if you really want to go there: the bulk of the human damage[1] from climate change will be felt in still developing equatorial nations and not in the temperate latitudes where you and your friends live (hell, Russia and Canada might well come out "ahead"!).
[1] The ecosystem damage and mass extinction event will be pervasive everywhere, but then I doubt you care about that either.
There are many vested interested, motivation by greed who are working hard to fight any action, which is easy enough to understand.
What I fail to understand is the (voting majority of the) populous just don't seem to care.
Unfortunately, for these reasons I too find it hard to believe this is a problem that will be prevented.
Also, I understand your frustration with this topic. The method of guilting people into changing makes me sick. I can’t think of a more counterproductive method of evangelism. We need to make real products that do the things that will give humanity a prosperous future. Politics isn’t how we will get out of this, imho. Science and engineering is the key.
The studies indicate that it's a lot cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the consequences. So, economically speaking, it is a no-brainer.
> Politics isn’t how we will get out of this, imho. Science and engineering is the key.
We mostly have the technological means now to deal with the issue, but politics are the impediment. We can't convince people to do things we know are the sane way forward.
Technological improvements will help if they come through, but it's madness to bank the future of our civilisation on future breakthroughs that may or may not happen.
It has been repeatedly demonstrated that countries can come together for the Olympics. It has yet to be demonstrated that they can do the same to fight global climate change. The opposite seems to be the case so far, as far as I can tell.
> The method of guilting people into changing makes me sick.
100% agree.
> Politics isn’t how we will get out of this, imho. Science and engineering is the key.
To move forward, we are going to need both science and engineering, and some minimum level of agreement in Democratic countries. Perhaps if we could manage that, China might consider getting on board as well.
Since you've clearly got it all figured out, Tell me, how are we going to address China's runaway coal plant development? Bangladesh's rampant deforestation?
Are you so bold as to say that you know what's best for the people in those countries?
Or people in Houston who see 500 year floods yearly. Or Californians breathing wildfire smoke. Or Hondurans suffering from drought. Or people in Miami wading through floods on sunny days.
In reality the government pushed no burn policies have let the underbrush build up to catastrophic levels.
Same way they nearly tanked the Yellowstone ecology when they removed the wolves.
But this time they _know_ how to stop the planet from getting too warm
Here's someone who can provide a healthy amount of skepticism..
https://judithcurry.com/2019/12/02/madrid/
Of course, don't let skepticism stand in the way of your belief system, but i highly suspect that'll be a problem for you.
> Of course, don't let skepticism stand in the way of your belief system, but i highly suspect that'll be a problem for you.
Interesting article, thanks. Unfortunately your first and last lines are unkind, snarky name-calling, to choose a few of the ways they seem to break the HN guidelines. And "I'm going to guess you're on the X, Y, Z crowd.." seems close to Schopenhauer's Stratagem 32:
If you are confronted with an assertion, there is a short way of getting rid of it, or, at any rate, of throwing suspicion on it, by putting it into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, "That is Manichaeism" or "It is Arianism," or "Pelagianism," or "Idealism," or "Spinozism," or "Pantheism," or "Brownianism," or "Naturalism," or "Atheism," or "Rationalism," "Spiritualism," "Mysticism," and so on. In making an objection of this kind, you take it for granted (1) that the assertion in question is identical with, or is at least contained in, the category cited - that is to say, you cry out, "Oh, I have heard that before"; and (2) that the system referred to has been entirely refuted, and does not contain a word of truth.
http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/erist32.htm
Check out the apocalyptic tone of the last paragraph: http://agem.com/GlobalCooling.htm
Not just Newsweek, but Time, the New York Times, and other outlets reported on it.
Elementary school children were taught it. I was one of them.
I read now that meteorologists (this is before "climatologist" was a real thing) were divided on whether there was cooling or warming. (But it seems that they were mostly in agreement that something catastrophic was going to happen!)
This global cooling episode does not teach us that there was a scientific consensus on cooling in the 70s, or that climate research since then is equally unfounded. However, it is a really interesting story.
I wonder how old these people are swearing that we are wrong and hallucinating. Most of them were undoubtedly born long after these events.
In the early 80s I picked up one of the "coming ice age" paperbacks, remaindered down to pennies, in the same category as Von Danekin's Chariots of the Gods and his Egyptian aliens. It was absolute garbage, but that's beside the point here. I probably still have it at the back of a bookshelf. Yet already by the early 80s climate heating was coming up in conjunction with acid rain and ozone depletion - they were a holy trinity that often seemed to come together, and they were starting to crop up regularly. Ultimately reporting of all increased throughout the decade, leading to action on ozone and acid rain, and formation of IPCC, at the end of the decade but also the start of the industry moves to oppose via disinformation and obfuscation - the tobacco playbook. Like the Bush administration effort to rebrand climate heating as climate crisis - as that sounds benign and normal.
So I'm old enough, and I doubt your tale - perhaps some sources were reporting it poorly, perhaps the US bought into some climate cooling cult in a way that was completely and entirely unseen here in Europe.
There were a few studies that predicted an incoming ice age, but they were by far the minority. And these studies were based on predictions of the composition of the atmosphere which did not pan out, where the CO2 predictions have been on point.
CO2 atmospheric levels are way below what was predicted because huge amounts of CO2 was absorbed by the oceans. This has wrecked havoc on the oceans, but the point is that the predictions of atmospheric levels were absolutely wrong because they did not account for the ocean absorption effect.
However that is kind of moot, because human driven climate change has been pushing temperatures up faster than any natural temperature reduction has ever achieved. Even if we would otherwise be experience a reduction in average global temperature it doesn't matter because human driven warming would overcome that.
In 1974 and 1975, Time and Newsweek respectively ran articles proposing a global cooling trend. These articles were (loosely) based on a couple of papers that found that if fine-particulate atmospheric aerosols continued to increase the way they were, they could reflect away enough sunlight to cause surface cooling. (And in fact, exactly that was happening during the 70s.)
However, the Clean Air Act and other similar efforts around the world reduced the amount of particulate aerosols in the air. The amount of CO2 kept climbing though, so the warming model won.
The consensus among published climate science papers at the time was predicting an overall warming trend.
But then Dennis Miller said that scientists believed in an ice age in the 70s, and a bunch of suckers fell for it.
More reading at https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in... and https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
Here is a paper [1] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that warns of crisis-level warming. From the abstract --
> In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage."
For whatever it's worth, this also appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the warming problem. See [2], from 1983.
By contrast, I don't think the possible cooling effect ever received broad support, it was more of a hypothesis.
[1] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
[2] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of....
You just found a solution to global warming. Since you agree that particulate aerosols in the air were going to cause an ice age and the Clean Air Act would fix that, then the Clean Air Act is what has contributed more than anything else to global warming. Repeal the Clean Air Act, reintroduce those old aerosols, and the problem is solved. The global cooling certainty cancels out the global warming certainty and normalcy is achieved.
Interestingly, we might compare this with the popular idea of Nuclear Winter at the time. Essentially, a nuclear war was supposed to ignite a global conflagration that would incinerate the skies and burn so much smoke to block out the earth. But 1). The calculations were excessive in terms of the number of smoke supposedly produced and 2). Bombs became so powerful and caused such a shockwave as to almost extinguish their own fires.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-gl...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-t...
>A survey of the scientific literature has found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20 were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling. So while predictions of cooling got more media attention, the majority of scientists were predicting warming even then.
The anti-warming FUD spreaders use this debunked claim to press their lies.
Interesting the guy noting this historical fact above has been flagged and censored and this subthread removed. The truth isn't allowed to be known on HN.
But sure, you can claim that 50 years of consistent predictions are fictional or rewriting history.
EDIT:
Here is some of the code used in the paper: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels
Here is a blog post on the paper, written by one of the authors: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/12/how-go...
EDIT AGAIN:
The "supporting information" .docx at the bottom of this page has a lot more detail, for those (like me) who can't get past the paywall ( :-/ ): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...
> Note to reader: I was going to use Arctic sea ice in 2100 as an example, but there probably won’t be any lol
Life thrived
The Sahara desert was a grassland 5000-10000 years
Life thrived.
Perhaps not as many of us. But that's part of the problem isn't it? Too many humans, chopping down forests, over fishing, sucking melted dinosaurs out of the earth.
If you're eager to reduce the global population, start from yourself and your family rather than writing off most of the global south. Stop consuming energy and don't have kids.
2. The warm areas of are planet aren't recently poor. There's a very narrow habitable band of temperatures in which human society has thrived. The extreme energy needed to develop those areas is contributing more to the degradation of the environment than benefit to the species it is providing.
It's not sustainable. It's going to kill us all. Not everyone can win.
2. This doesnt change the calculus of what you're proposing at all. And it's not energy that is the missing resource; that's available in quantity. It's resources and water.
Sitting here saying, "Well the people I'm proposing the death of are historically poor and therefore their hardship inevitable" isn't a rebuttal, it's a rationalization.
Instead of making an argument justifying genocide, perhaps we should instead take action against climate change before it becomes a problem? Or would you prefer the next war to be fought over water instead of oil?
I kinda question that the living quality and wealth of the survivors ends up better in your scenario...
The question is whether we will. Civilization is a fragile thing.
Notably the RCS article (quote above) emphasizes that the non-alarmist papers were sort of accurate, while the alarmist crap was off by a lot.
The climatists trumpet this news as if the alarmist crap (examples from your comment) was right on the spot. No it wasn't - it was ridiculously overrated just so that statists and plunderers can get their hands on our liberty and income.
Unfortunately, arguing about this might just reinforce the mistaken view that there are different valid "sides" to this.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_...
Edit: That doesn't detract from the article's more subtle point about the precision of climate models in the past, I was reacting to the comments here viewing this in the light of a fictive controversy.
--The globe is not getting warmer
--We don't know if the globe is getting warmer or not
--We do know the globe is getting warmer, but we don't know why
--We do know the globe is getting warmer, but it has a different cause than human activities
--We do know the globe is getting warmer, and it is in part due to human activities, but any action to counter this would be more harmful than letting it get warmer.
--We do know the globe is getting warmer and action needs to be taken, but it should all be voluntary actions by private enterprises, and no new governmental regulations.
And let us not forget: increased atmospheric co2 is beneficial because it increases agricultural production.
Have I missed any?
Government level climate skepticism is mainly problem in Anglo-Saxon countries.
China and India are enemies and competitors but they work together in energy sector. They are trying to push renewables and nuclear. It's just that their energy needs exceed the progress in these fields. They build Nuclear as fast as they can, It's just hard to build them in schedule with conventional reactors.
Bill Gates had experimental nuclear power plant planned and ready to go in China. It had green light from both governments. Then came Trump and it was forbidden. 5-year setback when there is no time to waste. Any sane government would have granted exception for the project.
Don't trust bureaucrats further than the rope you need to hang them
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+smog&source=lnms&tbm=i...
Also: https://www.google.com/search?q=China+is+the+largest+green+e...
Just China really. They've seen explosive growth in carbon emissions since 2000 and plan to keep growing into 2030.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...
I'm honestly beginning to wonder if conservatives vs liberals is a form of speciation, and if at some point in the not too distant future interbreeding will no longer happen.
"It's all part of God's plan, and therefore it is both futile and in aid of the devil to work against it."
I think there are some people out there that may want to bring on 'the great flood' so they can actually live through a biblical story, as if they themselves desire to be chosen to build the boat of salvation.
Australia currently has a very conservative government that are in denial of climate change who just happen to be led by a card-carrying Pentecostal. So there's a good chance I'm overly sensitive to such commentary :)
P.S. I think 'conservative', 'liberal', 'progressive', 'left wing' and 'right wing' tend to get in the way of proper discussion of what is actually factual, logical, or at least has basis in valid research.
'Conservatism' isn't helped by it's entanglement with religion and that old quote "A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"
This isn't the article quoting a politican, but it gives a clue as to why a politician may say such a thing: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/religion/climate-change-schism-...
Standard, according to?
In case you're wondering what my point is, consider the possibility that from a human psychology perspective, comments like this may be harmful to your cause, despite being popular among like minded people.
-- We know the globe is getting warmer, but the reports are exaggerated by an order of magnitude by well funded powerful political entities in order to achieve ultra large scale globalist political objectives. Legitimate criticism of climate modelling accuracy from experts in the field of climate science research is met with primitive ad hominem attacks from other so called scientists, making us very skeptical indeed.
More at 11.
I know of at least a few cases, where skeptics have changed their minds due to new evidence (Richard Muller [0] comes to mind). I'm curious if there are any instances of reputable scientists with sufficient training in the relevant fields, who went from true believers to significant skepticism of anthropogenic influence.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...
Even 20k years is miniscule.
Like I said, not a smoking gun; just a clue that it's worth digging into. And from a Bayesian perspective, one must ask: what are the odds that that rising temperature would happen to correlate with CO2, for entirely unrelated reasons? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sme8WQ4Wb5w
Don't get me wrong, I find Greta-style alarmism and claims of "extinction" to be counter-productive. But given how difficult it is to get nerds to agree on anything, the fact that there are so few credible scientists on the other side of the issue gives me pause. Pure groupthink? Maybe. Hardly unprecedented. But we've been examining the data and improving the models for decades (including from those with a strong financial incentive to debunk AGW), and yet the scientific consensus continues trending in one direction. Skepticism is a good thing, but the evidence for AGW can't merely be handwaved away by causal narrative.
I know that alarmism is the best way to get attention, but its also the best way for me to think you're a zealot who should be ignored.
If you run random models and wait long enough you will always be able to find at least one model that predicted the current observations. That does NOT mean the models were right, it means that you are basically ignoring all the other models that made bad predictions. So in order to make a headline out of this you would need to make a extensive review of all the models we had back then and found out HOW MANY were actually not bad.
Would not make that much of a headline because you would find most models were bad. Anyone involved with forecasting will know what I mean.
As someone who's written basic fluid dynamics codes, I'm blown away by the complexity of climate models. The errors I ran into in debugging my relatively straightforward codes were incredibly subtle. Like pressures, velocities still "looking right" but still being wrong, due to numerical viscosity and other artifacts of the inexact solutions to Navier-Stokes. This is for flow in a box in a steady state. For an entire planetary atmosphere at a time scale of decades, I can't even imagine how they can track down every error without duct taping "corrections" (overfitting) on everything.
But also yes, it's complex, that's why independent groups dedicate huge amounts of time researching and building them and then models are compared against each other.
Not in the slightest. For example, the output of a numerically unstable [1] algorithm, run on 64-bit floats, can diverge arbitrarily from the output of the same algorithm run on real numbers with infinite precision (which computers can't do). Often this will lead to obviously wrong outputs, but not always. There are numerically-stable versions of most of the workhorse linear algebra algorithms, but (1) sometimes it's possible to use a faster, numerically unstable algorithm, and this is a matter of judgment that can be mistaken and (2) it's easy to introduce numerical instability via subtle bugs, or even via the exact arithmetic steps you use to calculate a result (in particular, trying to add or subtract two numbers of very different orders of magnitude is a big no-no).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_stability
Numerical instability leads to obvious, wildly inconsistent errors. It isn’t subtle. Literally no climate simulations are going off the rails because of these kinds of first-year grad-student code problems.
Much more work in this direction is needed.
This cannot possibly be correct; it's the same reasoning as the argument "Either the sun will rise tomorrow or it won't. These two possibilities exhaust the entire space. Therefore, the odds of the sun rising tomorrow are 50%, one in two." The premises are completely correct -- and unrelated to the conclusion.
Amazingly, the author at one point says:
"In proper science, the different theories are bloodily competing with each other."
as a contrast to climate science, where supposedly these models are just peacefully cooperating to raise more funds. Anyone who has been in the middle of a conference where people with competing models are comparing results (to each other and to observations) knows how off-base this is.
Can you elaborate your point of view a little more?
P.S. Read the paper here: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha08910q.html
As noted in TFA, they looked at 17 forecasts from 14 models and found that the temperature predictions of 10 of them were consistent with what has happened in the meantime. And if you adjust for forcing (CO2, methane) then the predictions improve further.
Pardon a little pedantry:
>> The researchers compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to the surface temperatures predicted in 17 forecasts. Those predictions were drawn from 14 separate computer models released between 1970 and 2001. In some cases, the studies and their computer codes were so old that the team had to extract data published in papers, using special software to gauge the exact numbers represented by points on a printed graph.
They compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to 17 forecasts, from 14 separate models.
But....how many models did they look at, before choosing those particular 14 models?
TFA doesn't say.
Articles written in this style provide rich fodder for conspiracy theorists, particularly because there is no shortage of examples in the past where authoritative, trustworthy organizations have gotten caught in lies. Rare is the climate change article I've read that can't easily have similar holes poked in it.
What's the real truth here? Based on the literal content of this article, no one knows. It is speculation vs speculation.
I've said it before, and I will say it again: if your persuasion tactics aren't working, it might be worth considering whether you should change your tactics.
What GP wants is transparency around how many possible models were there over the last decades from which they chose the 14. This gives the reader a better understanding of whether 14 is a lot or a little. It is a fair point IMO regardless of their overall stance on the issue.
Secondly, the forecast models evaluated in the study are from the likes of James Hansen, William Nordhaus, and the IPCC (in other words, authoritative sources). So at the very least this adds weight to the hypothesis that the models published by the IPCC are accurate and methodologically sound. Sure, there is some probability that the models and reality corresponded by random chance, but that probability is made ever more diminishingly small as evidence accumulates.
So, I don’t think any of the comments in this thread that accuse the authors of retrospective cherry-picking of climate models are anything but embarrassing examples of pseudo-intellectual contrarianism and/or confusion over basic statistics.
The models considered by the study, their predictions, and the methodology used are all located here and were easily found after 30s of digging: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels
In many of these cases, it's clear that the commenters have done no background reading, and have no climate science background. Their comments thus consist of simple armchair speculation (your "lowest of the low-hanging fruit").
In these comments, I have found people with strong opinions on the lack of seriousness of climate science, who have no idea we have gravimetric measurements of ice sheet mass. This is a dataset going back almost 20 years that has revolutionized geoscience. HN commenters have expressed strong opinions about melting ice, with no knowledge of this data and what it means.
I have found people who think that climate science consists of having a stable of models each with a host of knobs, and the research method is to turn the knobs or choose new models until the results look dramatic enough to publish.
The gap between the firmness of these claims and the knowledge to back it up just boggles the mind.
The most basic step people could take to fix this is to read the executive summary of the IPCC AR5 report, or (even better/easier) the executive summary of the NCA (https://science2017.globalchange.gov). This report was specifically written by people who really know this stuff, for people like us.
There's no indication that the authors are cherry-picking their models but the comments above are assuming this (without reading the original paper to get a sense of the care of the analysis). It's really easy to find supposed gotchas in this way - basically any analytic step can be questioned.
If you live in the Bay Area, AGU is next week at Moscone Center. It's the biggest one-stop-shop in the world for geoscience research. Maybe it's worth paying a one-day admission fee to see some of this in person?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224
--> It's a word coined by pg that's sort of a term-of-art for the depressing tendency of the top HN comment to be something which pooh-poohs the company/topic/idea in the submission, doesn't add anything to the discussion, but (crucially) is worded convincingly enough to not just end up on the bottom of the thread.
--> e.g. "Lol that suckz because Google can steal ur passwerdz!" would not end up at the top of the thread. We wouldn't be terribly worried if someone actually said "Wait, I just audited NativeClient and it turns out you can achieve arbitrary code execution. Maybe you should avoid this software." The danger zone is comments which sound like the second but, on reflection, only tell you about as much as the first.
I love the first reply:
"Ironically the concept of a "middlebrow dismissal" seems to me to enable what it condemns--e.g. HN'ers can now just post "hey that's a middlebrow dismissal" instead of a detailed statement of why a particular response falls short. Basically I think pg made it worse by giving it a catchy name."
- something which pooh-poohs the company/topic/idea in the submission [Invalid]
- doesn't add anything to the discussion [Invalid]
- We wouldn't be terribly worried if someone actually said "Wait, I just audited NativeClient and it turns out you can achieve arbitrary code execution. Maybe you should avoid this software." [If you'd have read more closely, and less tribally, perhaps you might have noticed something along these lines]
> There's no indication that the authors are cherry-picking their models
My comment wasn't that they are cherry picking their models, it was that it is (as worded) not entirely clear that they are not. I also explained why this is may be harmful.
> but the comments above are assuming this
Mine weren't assuming anything.
> basically any analytic step can be questioned
Perhaps. But survivorship bias isn't a conspiracy theory.
> If you live in the Bay Area, AGU is next week at Moscone Center. It's the biggest one-stop-shop in the world for geoscience research. Maybe it's worth paying a one-day admission fee to see some of this in person?
I'm satisfied enough with the science to support doing something about climate change. My interest in this conversation is the apparent unwillingness of similarly minded people to consider weaknesses in their persuasion campaign. How do you foresee getting past the current impasse we find ourselves in?
Why don't you demolish me with your science and facts? Does that question even register?
Would you like to try? The authors of the paper seem unwilling, perhaps you'd like to give it a shot.
It says something.
> They looked at 17 forecasts drawn from 14 models.
It does not say this. What you have written is your uncritical interpretation, what I wrote is a literal quotation, which allows for (satisfies) the conspiratorial possibility that I raised.
> You are the one who implicitly believes they are lying about that
You are speculating. Speculation is fine, but it's best to realize (and state explicitly) when you're doing it.
Know how I know you're speculating? Because while you only believe you can read my mind, I can actually do it, and I do not "believe they are lying". I was only pointing out that as written, they could be lying.
And I even told you the reason why I wrote that comment: "Articles written in this style provide rich fodder for conspiracy theorists..."
If you truly want to change minds, you might want to learn how the minds you want to change work. Go spend some serious time in conspiracy forums, I suspect you might learn something useful.
And rather than largely ignoring the actual words of someone who's trying to help out your cause, treating them as an enemy rather than someone who may have some insight you lack, it might be helpful to keep a more open mind. Perhaps if those with knowledge severely lacking in the mainstream discourse weren't rate limited, some here may find some new ideas to consider.
"You looked at 1000 models, but what about the 1000 models that scientists made and didn't publish. You didn't look at those!"
People can always suggest more tests you need to do or poke holes in any analysis. That doesn't mean you just stop ding the work.
Overall it is impressive that different models made over 30 years can predict fairly accurate results. In my opinion that shows that the underlying physics of the models is correct and makes me trust the models even more.
Undoubtedly some would, but are you willing to consider the possibility that the number/percentage of people that would do so might be altered by the language used in articles on climate science?
> People can always suggest more tests you need to do or poke holes in any analysis.
Some analyses are easier to poke holes in than others. If this article was tightened up in the manner I describe, excluding the possibility of survivorship bias, then an entirely new approach to denial would be required. As written, survivorship bias is a very real possibility.
Wikipedia says: "Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias."
Survivorship bias is a real phenomenon, not a conspiracy theory. It is neither illogical or unscientific to consider the possibility that is might be in play behind the scenes here, and the article as written makes no attempt to rule it out.
> Overall it is impressive that different models made over 30 years can predict fairly accurate results. In my opinion that shows that the underlying physics of the models is correct and makes me trust the models even more.
I suspect this is because your mind does not consider it a possibility that the models discussed do not result from survivorship bias. A conspiratorial mind however, would most likely strongly consider that a possibility, and therefore compute a completely different level of trust.
Imagine for a moment how the human mind works when reading something. Typically, if the mind is primed with preexisting beliefs, it is going to be actively searching (interpreting) for confirmation of those beliefs, and this behavior will likely be stronger if the topic happens to be one associated with one's identity. So, your mind processes an article such as this optimistically (uncritically), whereas a "denier" or "conspiracy theorist" is going to read it pessimistically (critically).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_inter...
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-279...
Here is another interesting example. See this reddit thread on the article: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/e63ic5/of_17_clima...
The top comment is: (/u/aClimateScientist) "Hi all, I'm a coauthor of this paper (Henri Drake) and happy to answer questions."
Someone asks the question: "How did you account for survivorship bias of models? IOW how did you select the 17? I mean if I asked 1,000 psychics to predict GDP growth, I could probably find 10-20 who were pretty close and say that that proves they're clairvoyant."
As of when I'm writing this, neither /u/aClimateScientist nor /u/avogadros_number (the article submitter, who seems to have considerable background in climate science) have addressed this question.
(Or, same thread: a moderator [Removed] comment.)
My question to you is: do you think it is possible that the manner in which your mind evaluates this particular situation (an unanswered questi...
With that being said, I doubt that survivorship bias is strong enough to explain their combined result of 10/17 models being significant.
> “We conducted a literature search to identify papers published prior to the early-1990s that include climate model outputs containing both a time-series of projected future GMST (with a minimum of two points in time) and future forcings (including both a publication date and future projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations, at a minimum). Eleven papers with fourteen distinct projections were identified that fit these criteria.
This brings to mind the old joke: "I used to smoke weed. I still do, but I used to, too."
Specifically, the phrase "were identified that fit these criteria" sets off my skepticism spider senses. Kind of like the popular "97% of scientists..." meme, that doesn't quite hold water when you dig under the covers.
To be clear, I'm not saying deceit is taking place, I am simply saying that I am skeptical.
I wasn't able to find any details on the specifics of the literature search, such that the search could be reproduced. Any idea if that was included in the study and I somehow overlooked it?
The motive here is the "trust climate scientists now because they've been right about everything all along" narrative. There's no other reason for it.
I think you're making the same mistake that you're attributing to the story. It really doesn't matter what China does per se. The global energy consumption, roughly, follows a log-linear trend. If the energy comes from fossil fuels, the CO2 emissions would also follow the same trend [1]. It doesn't matter whether it's China or someone else; the CO2 emission would go up if we don't innovate and rely on fossil fuels.
As an analogy, think about the Moore's law. Does it matter whether the chip is made by Intel or AMD?
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_co2_emissions...
Rising prosperity comes with rising energy consumption. If China didn't export so much it wouldn't be able to import the fuel that it used. Its dramatic rise was definitely not a given.
Of course it's a model. Please look up the Kardashev scale and correlations that people have developed based on it [1]. The energy output is not necessarily coupled with the CO2 emission unless we burn fossil fuels to generate power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status...
Why would the models care? In fact world GDP growth has been right on trend since the 60's. It's true that it's concentrated in areas we didn't expect, but that's always true. China did much better than expected, the Americas were right on curve, Europe a little worse and eastern europe in particular fell off a cliff. So what?
Those models surely predicted aggregate carbon output pretty well. Are you saying they didn't?
There would actually be substance to your comment if you could point us to the models the authors didn't consider.
>We gathered all the climate models published between 1970 and the mid-2000s that gave projections of both future warming and future concentrations of CO2 and other climate forcings – from Manabe (1970) and Mitchell (1970) through to CMIP3 in IPCC 2007.
If you're a cynic or suspicious: "projections of future warming" means they intentionally excluded studies that projected cooling.
Otherwise: it could have been written as "projections of future temperature", but they came across no studies that projected cooling.
This really makes me wish for open access journals, as most of the questions in this thread could be answered if it was possible for anyone to look at the paper.
Rasool and Schneider 1971 [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4db2/1045b17ebcdd6a8c6adeb1...
Earl Barrett 1971 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003809...
Hamilton and Seliga 1972 https://www.igsoc.org/journal/14/72/igs_journal_vol14_issue0...
Chylek and Coakley 1974 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/183/4120/75
Bryson and Dittberner 1976 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%28197...
Sean Twomey 1977 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%28197...
[1] edit: Schneider later retracted findings
I share your wish for open access journals.
Among the models this study looked at was Hansen's. That's the NASA scientist who testified about global warming to Congress in 1988. It'd be quite a coincidence if there were lots of models with a wide variety of predictions, and the one model that was presented to Congress just happened by chance to be one of the few that got it right.
But if you can actually show that there were in fact a bunch of models by scientists of similar stature, which made really different predictions and were left out of this study, then that would be interesting.
There are people downthread who are arguing that because numerical instability bugs exist and climate models are complicated, climate models can’t be trusted. Literally any flimsy pretext is used to dismiss work that people don’t like.
This conversation is dominated by people who have just enough knowledge to defend their pre-conceptions, but no more.
Your claim that "The old studies didn't predict how much CO2 the world would emit" is directly contradicted on the first page. The paper begins by pointing out that "model projections rely on...accurate assumptions around future emissions of CO2". In fact, one of the criteria the authors used for choosing a model to include was that it came with a time-series prediction of "future projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations".
With that restriction, the authors found 11 papers containing a total of 14 models. Unless the authors of this paper left out other predictions from the original papers, the only papers included in the study that "predicted how much the planet would warm, for various amounts of CO2 emissions" were Hansen's, and the other 9 papers included in this study only made one prediction for both emissions and temperature.
This paper also points out that Hansen's 1988 "most plausible" model, which you described as "the one model that was presented to Congress", was not accurate under the usual definition of accurate: "H88's “most plausible” scenario B overestimated warming experienced subsequent to publication by around 54%."
Then how does this paper lead to the headline that "Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming"?
What the authors of this paper have done is to compare errors in the models' predictions of CO2 emissions to errors in the models' predictions of temperature. In other words, the models were wrong about both, but in the same direction. They overestimated both future emissions and future temperature.
Even so, the claim that the models were accurate is a linguistic trick. The table on line 326 shows what the authors are calling skill score: "A skill score of one represents perfect agreement between a model projection and observations."
Not a single model has a "skill score" of one, or for which one is within the uncertainty. In fact, all of the models are wrong in the same direction, even after this paper has attempted to correct for their incorrect assumptions about future CO2 emissions.
The linguistic trick is that this error is not, according to the authors, "statistically significant". But that's a tremendous abuse of the phrase. The authors are effectively saying: "The null hypothesis is that the models are right, and we've failed to disprove it." They've assumed the conclusion.
I suspect that this paper is being promoted for political, not scientific, correctness.
1: A PDF of this paper can be found at https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/tbp/inp_Hausfather_ha08910q....
But here is Hansen's original 1988 paper: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha02700w.html
From the abstract: "We make a 100-year control run and perform experiments for three scenarios of atmospheric composition. These experiments begin in 1958 and include measured or estimated changes in atmospheric CO2, CH4, H2O, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and stratospheric aerosols for the period from 1958 to the present. Scenario A assumes continued exponential trace gas growth, scenario B assumes a reduced linear linear growth of trace gases, and scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000."
Note the word "assumes." There's no attempt to really model what humanity would choose to emit. None of these assumptions exactly match what happened with CO2 and other greenhouse gases, so of course none of them exactly match the temperature either. But adjusted for actual greenhouse emissions, they come remarkably close.
Were they completely accurate in that way? Certainly not. People knew a lot less back then. It took a while to nail down things like the effect of water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas but also makes clouds that reflect sunlight away. But they were close enough to make good policy decisions, and if we'd paid attention, we'd be much better off today.
Incidentally, the case for global warming doesn't depend on models. There have been warming events before, and there's enough evidence in geological history to tell us what's going to happen. Hansen's book has details.
Take a look at the table I mentioned (line 326), in particular "ΔT / ΔF skill". That's the change in temperature over the change in forcing (ie, CO2 etc). Hausfather et al call it "implied TCR". In (overly) simple terms, it's the predicted increase in temperature per unit of CO2 emitted.
Look at the numbers: 0.51, 0.41, 0.63, 0.42, 0.83, etc. The best is 0.87. The average was 0.69.
The authors attempted to adjust for actual CO2 emissions and found that, after the correction, the models were predicting 40%-90% of the observations, with an average score around 70%.
Is that "remarkably close"?
Well, we might disagree about the meaning of that term. But there's another observation that we should agree on. Note what the authors say after that table:
> The average of the median skill scores across all the model projections evaluated is 0.69 for the temperature vs time metric.
> Using the implied TCR metric, the average projection skill of the models was also 0.69.
In other words, the models are, on average, as accurate with or without the correction. Adjusting for actual greenhouse emissions doesn't make the models more accurate (nor less).
I'm not involved with forecasting, but am generally very skeptical of people 'debunking' climate science in non-scientific forums such as these. Can you back up your claim that these people haven't done their job properly? Have you read the article and their methodology? It seems to be behind a paywall unfortunately so I can't assess your claim right now.
Since you didn't point out any specific flaw in the study, but mentioned merely general biases which any scientist is aware of, suggesting they apply to the article but not really pointing out how, I really can't take this criticism of a peer reviewed article seriously.
Honest question.
We did address smog. Without growing smog, those models predicted warming.
Here is how it works: You input all the factors of your Frisbee throw. Then you throw the Frisbee, and that's it! Well, I guess there is one more step, since all 14 models make wrong predictions about where the Frisbee will land. But you can just go back and adjust the models and input better data after you already know where the Frisbee actually ended up, and then some of them correctly predicted where it will land!
Don't down-vote me, this is definitely what the phrase 'correctly predicted' means, and I'm not being misleading at all.
But now, as you can already see proliferating in the comments to this piece, the new acceptable contrarian take on climate change is that of course its happening, but since life thrived on the planet during other climactic conditions there's nothing to worry about.
The message is the same as it's always been: trying to do anything in response is foolish, and we should all continue to just focus on making as much money as possible.
But the real issue with climate change is and has always been that it will socially and politically de-stabilize the planet, because quite a few people live in places that will become less livable in the near future, and those people will want to go somewhere else.
Those people will have a quite strong claim on land and resources in wealthy countries that emitted most of the pollution and have lots of mostly empty and more habitable land. This will cause global conflict on a scale beyond any that exists in living memory.
Yes, "life" will survive. Our societies in their current configurations will not, and decisions we make now will determine how messy or violent (or not) that transition will be.
Pedantic retorts about geological time should embarrass you in the face of the leaders of the tech industry evidently using their immense wealth to prepare for social collapse[1].
And although these people are clearly willing to spend money to prep for climate change, I still can't get a single one of the recruiters who cold-call or email me about HOT NEW SILICON VALLEY OPPORTUNITIES to find me a single credible company working on anything climate or energy adjacent. I can just hear their jaws slackening every time I bring it up.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-popula...
It's very easy to find a model that predicts this retrospectively. It's also completely worthless. Predicting the future is much harder.
That's my main beef with climate science: not only do they do this kind of hand picking retroactively and claim they're able to "predict", they also sometimes go back and _tweak the input data_ to fit the models better, or make it up entirely where coverage is inadequate. This is not how science is done in any other field. This also doesn't feel like it's being treated as an existential threat would be treated, in terms of scientific rigor. I understand it's a very complex problem, sure, but that doesn't give you a license to take arbitrary liberties with scientific method or ground truth data.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/07/bill-gates-funded-solar-geoe...
So I guess some scientists of the age predicted cold, and others heat?
That's like dozens and dozens of "stock price models" predicting FB stock to go up, down and stay the same. Of course one is guaranteed to be correct.
What is "scientific" about this? It's simply people who want to prove something and then narrowly searching for the data to prove that point and ignoring everything else.
This is so disappointing coming from something calling itself a sciencemag.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Would be interested to find which parts you felt was "nonsensical and intellectually dishonest" so I expand on it and clarify it for you. Hard to respond to an ad hominem.
> This is not at all what this paper did, nor what any remotely credible scientific study ever does.
It's exactly what it did. How about this. If a "anticlimatemag" opposed to the climate change agenda had an article titled "Even 50-year-old climate models were wrong about global warming", would you be defending it as vigorously?
>There were dozens and dozens of "climate models" which predicted everything from global cooling to a fiery wasteland and everything in between. > What is "scientific" about this? It's simply people who want to prove something and then narrowly searching for the data to prove that point and ignoring everything else.
The paper clearly states their methodology, which included a literature review to find all published climate models that produce a numeric forecast for future average temperatures. I quoted the relevant section in a different comment. If they missed or ignored dozens and dozens of other published climate models, then find them and show us. Otherwise, you're explicitly accusing the authors and publishers of peer-reviewed science of committing research malpractice.
>Of course you could go back and find a model that "predicted" correctly because every possibility was predicted.
The output of a climate model (in this context) is an expected value (i.e. a single real number) of the global mean temperature at time t (in years). It is true that if the support of a random variable is the real numbers, then every outcome in (-inf, +inf) is weighted by some probability density (and yet any particular outcome in the set of reals occurs with zero probability!). But it is decidely untrue that the model predictions analyzed by this study (or produced by climate scientists in the time period considered by the study) contained the set of all possible outcomes. It data evaluated is one temperature value per model per year are published right here--take a look: https://github.com/hausfath/OldModels/tree/master/references
>That's like dozens and dozens of "stock price models" predicting FB stock to go up, down and stay the same. Of course one is guaranteed to be correct.
Effectively the same fallacy as above, but with a discrete number of outcomes. The point of probabilistic forecasts is not to be correct (this goes against the definition), it's to estimate the likelihood that a certain outcome will occur in the future given information known up until the current time (ideally--but not necessarily--so that some rational decision can be made). Laypeople often incorrectly redefine prediction to meaning the black-or-white selection of a particular future outcome. I could go on, but I suggest you read this masterpiece instead: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probabi... (or Thinking, Fast and Slow for the human psychology lens on this problem of misunderstanding the nature of uncertainty).
>If a "anticlimatemag" opposed to the climate change agenda had an article titled "Even 50-year-old climate models were wrong about global warming", would you be defending it as vigorously?
Um, no? I do not and will not defend blatantly false anti-science regardless of the source or agenda. That is extra true of anti-science that supports an avoidable exis...
Also: as has been pointed out, in TFA and elsewhere in this thread, the authors of the linked study did not cherry-pick the models.
How else would you do this?
Then they came back and said “actually it never happened”.[2]
Shouldn’t it be pretty straightforward to tell whether there was warming or not?
[1] https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp
[2] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18122018/global-warming-h...
There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused.
I’d say a full issue Nature dedicated to exploring why there was a pause, suggests it was a broadly held idea.
That said, if there was no consensus, why is that? Why do some scientists believe there was a pause, while others disagree? Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward?
Not exactly. There are two ways that it can be ambiguous:
1. We don't measure the entire earth to measure its temperature, and combining the sensor readings from various sources to get a calibrated total energy content can be difficult.
2. It is difficult to take a time series, and with a short history, decide whether something is a significant deviation from the trend or just random variation. Humans instinctively underestimate how often a random sequence of coin flips will have consecutive strings of heads of a given length, and the same tendency causes us to see a "pause" as a deviation from the trend, when it's really just random variation causing a bunch of consecutive heads.
If there can be disagreement over something as basic as "are temperatures actually going up", then that throws all of climatology into doubt. Global temperature is the question that motivates this field, yet you're arguing here that whether it was going up or stable was merely an "idea" rather than a matter of measuring physical reality. It is absurd that such a basic question is actually a matter of dispute at this point: reading thermometers and averaging them just isn't that difficult compared to what other scientific fields routinely accomplish.
There's also an interesting social viewpoint on display: you claim the "climate science community" is a completely separate group from "skeptics" and they only "had" to spend time answering the "question" of a pause due to "beating the drum".
Are there no climate scientists skeptical of beliefs in their own field, like there are in every other field of science? If not, why not? Why are people asking obvious questions like "why does it seem temperatures stopped rising" seen as nuisance outsiders rather than fellow scientists seeking the truth? From an outsider's perspective this looks a lot like groupthink.
There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused.
This is not true, as refurb already showed. To spell it out, his [2] link starts by saying: "The United Nations panel of climate science experts mentioned it in a 2013 report, scientists have published more than 200 papers analyzing it, and climate deniers said it was proof that climate change didn't exist, but in reality the global warming pause or hiatus never occurred."
Over 200 papers published analysing a pause is clear evidence that this was a broadly held idea.
There seems to be a problematic tendency in climatology to try and retroactively rewrite history. Prior disputes or false predictions are recast as "scientists didn't actually believe that" or "scientists weren't actually wrong after all" using dubious, Orwellian style practices. Even temperature records themselves are constantly being rewritten: basic questions like "what was the temperature on date X at location Y" had different answers in the past to what they do now.
As another example, elsewhere in this thread [1] the author of the paper we're discussing claims he couldn't find any papers that predicted global cooling. Predictions of a new ice age were widely covered in the media and discussed in the literature in the 1970s. There were global conferences and scientific summits held about it. Embarrassingly, some random Hacker News commentator was able to produce a list of six such papers within an hour of that post being made.
What is wrong with climatology? Other fields like physics or medicine don't have problems dealing with their past history of wrong experiments, theories or measurements.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709263
I haven't been motivated enough to do another one of these animations, but this video[1] shows locations of all temperature stations in GHCNv3[2] (I see that GHCNv4[3] is out). Notice how where humans measure temperature depends so much on what living conditions humans seek or find acceptable. I find this visualization interesting in terms of the number of modeling questions it poses. If you are interested, it shouldn't take much to replicate something similar with current hardware/software.
As another note, it makes little sense to say model predictions are not statistically significantly different from each other. What is the population from which these models are being drawn? What is the measure of variability among models? The article[4] is behind a paywall, so I can't see what they did.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg
[2]: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-dat...
[3]: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-dat...
[4]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2019...
I'm also 100% sure we aren't capable of predicting the consequences of these temperature changes, because they are going to be complex. This will be an interesting ride and the train has left the station. We may want to find more diverse controls than just the CO2 emissions. How about manipulating not just land but also the oceans to run more efficient photosynthesis? Dangerous perhaps?