At one point I really took it upon myself to have some idea of what climate change would be. What I found was:
1. The greenhouse effect is very real
2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown
Having been made to believe that it was going to cause the next mass extinction event, I found #2 fairly underwhelming. Never-the-less, this isn't a gamble worth messing with.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. We simply don’t know. Experts couldn’t even predict COVID waves correctly (UK) but we think we can predict the entire planets ecosystem changes?
I also think we need to seperate out how humans are driving species extinct, and climate change. These two can be very different things, yet are always conflated in the media for hype.
Most species are going extinct because their habitats are actively destroyed by humans, or are fished to extinction, not because the planet is warming.
Predicting aggregate impacts of a warm climate decade into the future is far easier than predicting the short-term process of an unstable system hypersensitive to initial conditions.
As a layman, can you explain to me why a very accurate (i.e. small error) model wouldn't still lead to catastrophically incorrect results when projected across a long timespan?
There's a difference between a fairly simple linear model of the climate and trying to guess whether the initial conditions of an unstable disease propagation model are < 1.0 or > 1.0.
Think of climate modeling as saying that for a given species of trees, half of them will be dead at a given latitude in 50-100 years, not pointing at a specific tree and predicting that it will die on July 7th, 2047.
What do you consider to be catastrophically incorrect?
If the model predicts that a glacier disappears in 2050 and it disappears in 2070 instead?
Or if the lack-of-model makes a lack-of-prediction about glacier disappearance, and then it disappears in 2070 by surprise?
Error accumulation makes sense to worry about if you're planning a voyage and worried that dead-reckoning navigation will leave you kilometres off course. But if you're on the voyage already, out on the open ocean, you can argue with the navigator's math but you still need to navigate -- you won't do better by just blindly insisting the boat never left the harbour.
ever since I read this article titled "Clouds May Be the Key to a Climate Modeling Mystery"[0], I've come to understand that all climate models are basically useless for predicting anything. anyone who claims such-and-such will happen as a result of climate change, because a model said so, is speaking nonsense. the planet is massive and its climate is an infinitely fractally complex system. if we can't even model clouds with anything remotely resembling accuracy, then why do we put any stock in predictive climate models at all?
basically everyone agrees that the climate is changing, has always changed, and will always change. there is debate over how much of climate change is anthropogenic, but this is irrelevant to the point that predictive climate models are functionally useless, due to the complexity of the thing it's modeling.
downvoters: I would appreciate an explanation as to how my understanding of this situation is inaccurate. my views are never set in stone, I'm always open to learn new things. I just don't see how, short of a complete holistic Matrix-style simulation of the planet, one can obtain meaningful predictions from a data-driven climate model. I'm wrong about a lot of stuff all the time and I'd like to know where my understanding of this situation is incomplete or inaccurate.
> climate models are basically useless for predicting anything
That is false. Although you’re correct that climate is very complex and it is impossible to model every detail. The notion that you cannot make valid conclusions from modeling because a set of observations do not match models is fallacious because it discounts the correct conclusions that climate models have achieved. For example, the first climate models from the 1960s predicted that the mesosphere will contract and cool as a result of increasing co2 concentrations, and this conclusion has been backed by empirical observations. Furthermore, modeling from the 1970s by scientists at Exxon Mobile found that by 2020, net warming would reach an average of 1 degree centigrade, which we’ve since exceeded.
how is this different than a broken clock being correct twice a day? by this I mean to say, just because some predictions made using some models turned out to be correct, why does this validate those or all climate models as accurate predictors of the future? the system is so complex, poorly-understood, infinitely fractal, with endless variables depending upon each other in ways that we mostly don't understand... the models are so varied, based on different data sources, some omitting entire classes of data entirely... I would be more surprised if some predictions some models made didn't end up being true after several years. but that doesn't mean they're useful at predicting things going forward, by any means.
It’s not the results that make models valid/invalid. It’s how well the model approximates the underlying processes that lead to the results, which make it valid.
A clock that is stuck is a poor model of time because it does not model the progression of time, even though it is still correct twice a day.
We can make a very simplistic climate model that would be valid. We have a sphere of radius 6,357km, which is illuminated by electro-magnetic radiation centered at wavelengths of 0.6um. When the light hits the surface, it is absorbed and is re-emitted as black body radiation with a wavelength centered at 10um. It has an atmosphere, which contains a gas, which blocks the escape of wavelengths at 4um and 15um. This reflects some of the black body radiation back to the sphere, causing it to warm. In 2009 for the earth, this lead to a net accumulation of 0.6 W/m^2 of energy absorption [1]. If accumulated over the entire area of the sphere and accumulated over time, this would lead to an increase in temperature. Although the model does not take into account land formations, ocean currents, air currents, seasons, etc, it still models the underlying process of the earth’s energy balance and can answer the question of whether the planet will warm and can provide estimates at how quickly this will occur.
I think you’re hinting at systems being so complex that they can vary based on minute changes in initial conditions, you’d be correct to say that climate is chaotic. Not all chaotic systems are the same though. A double pendulum will swing in eccentric motions, but if you look at something like the stock market, there’s a lot of short term variability with long term certainty. I cannot tell you what my stocks will do next week. But markets generally converge on a doubling of money in 10 years. In fact that’s reliable enough that I’m willing to have a 401k. With the pendulum, I can tell you with a lot of certainty that if it’s damped, it will settle to its lowest energy state and stay there permanently.
A climate model will not predict the weather. But in the same way that I can tell you that winter will be cold, I can also tell you that Arctic amplification and Hadley cell expansion will lead to very different weather patterns that civilization has not seen before, such as much more extreme swings in temperature and weather.
Climate models published since 1973 have generally been quite skillful in projecting future warming. While some were too low and some too high, they all show outcomes reasonably close to what has actually occurred, especially when discrepancies between predicted and actual CO2 concentrations and other climate forcings are taken into account.
Based on reading an article about detailed work on making a model more accurate you’ve concluded that models are useless? Just because models aren’t infinitely perfect doesn’t mean they don’t have some predictive power. Yes you might drop a ball and it gets destroyed by a nuclear explosion before hitting the floor but it doesn’t mean a model that says it will likely hit the floor is useless!
At large scale climate change isn’t that complicated - sun hits earth, heats it up, some energy escapes. We can get a pretty good picture from models and the details just add to that.
> Based on reading an article about detailed work on making a model more accurate you’ve concluded that models are useless?
no—I, knowing basically nothing about climate science and having been taught to more or less blindly trust climate models as accurate predictors of the future, read an article that said we have no idea how to model clouds with anything resembling accuracy, because clouds by themselves are crazy complex things. this led me to realize that this should have been intuitive knowledge without even reading the article, which led me to truly consider the scope of the climate system w.r.t. how it could possibly be modeled by computers, which led me to realize that the idea that it's possible for a data-driven computer model to predict anything about the future with any kind of reliability is pretty silly to begin with.
This just seems like a ridiculous position to hold: data-driven computer models can’t predict anything with any reliability?! Pretty much all predictions about the future rely on data-driven models! Yes models are not perfect, but the answer’s not to close your eyes and hope!
The right way to think about models at this scale is complexity isn't "Accurate" vs. "Inaccurate"; it's to use probabilistic/Bayesian reasoning. No map is a perfect representation of the territory, and no model can encapsulate the entirety of the earth. That doesn't mean maps and models are useless.
A couple counterpoints from former climate skeptics:
- Richard Mueller is a prominent physicist who founded an institute to debunk anthropogenic climate change, only to change his mind after thorough examination of the data. https://youtu.be/Sme8WQ4Wb5w
- Jerry Taylor is a libertarian and former climate debunker for the Cato Institute; a noteworthy pivot moment was speaking to a risk analyst for a financial institution, whose job it is to make bets on complex systemic risks in the context of uncertainty. He claimed that from a financial lens, AGW was a slam-dunk case for mitigation, not because of the certainty of any one model, but of the full probability distribution in aggregate. https://www.reckonings.show/episodes/17
sure, that's fine. the problem arises when politicians state that things must be done by x date or y year or else we're going to have a CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, because the models say so. models can't predict anything like this
I agree there is a moral hazard / perverse incentive when it comes to alarmism, especially in politics (eg, specious references to "mushroom clouds" in the run-up to the Iraq invasion).
But as good Bayesians, we also have to consider the opposite case: crises and "black swan" events do happen. How do we filter signal from noise? We probably could have benefitted from more "enlightened alarmism" re: COVID in Jan/Feb 2020, when billions in preventative measures could have saved trillions to world GDP (and millions of lives).
It's a double-bind politically: given a non-trivial long-term risk, how does one frame its urgency? A calm and measured tone spurs little action (the unsqueaky wheel doesn't get the grease); a tone of urgency and panic bypasses badly-needed rational faculties, and/or flips the "bullshit detectors" based on the history of proverbial boys crying wolf.
While I'm not opposed to FDR-ish green infrastructure plans, the answer from economists is undramatic and uncontroversial [0]: tax the externality to establish a price signal, and return the dividend back to citizens, whose consumption behaviors then change in response to those signals [1].
Of course, we've had to contend with decades of FUD from vested O&G interests, no different than the tobacco cancer debacle [2], despite having had credible evidence for AGW since the late 70's. I'm happy to concede the potential for scientific groupthink and perverse Big Government incentives on the green side, so long as we're also acknowledging the enormous financial incentives for muddying the waters (uncertainty = inaction = status quo = profit).
> I've come to understand that all climate models are basically useless for predicting anything
I am under the impression that the worst-case scenarios in most models have pretty much all come to pass, often earlier than expected. Seems to me that they’ve been very predictive. It would have been nice had the media more accurately delivered those predictions; perhaps it would have prompted some early action.
Yes, most models plotted a range of outcomes over time, depending on how much we reined in CO2 production.
Our current CO2 levels, ocean temperature & acidity, glacier melt, and global temperature are in excess of all “good case” predictions. We failed to rein in CO2 production and now we’re pretty much living the worst-case scenarios… as predicted.
No - since even warming areas will experience weather and climate instability which is very hard to manage. We as humans like plants are good at adapting to certain conditions, if these conditions are volatile we can't adapt. Plants and animals can't adapt.
So no, there is no possibility of anything positive in this.
Plants love carbon dioxide. That’s why it’s called “greenhouse effect” - greenhouses artificially increase the amount of carbon dioxide in order to increase plant growth. Trees and plants will grow faster and larger as CO2 ppm increases, and we have already observed this.
The greenhouse effect is due to radiation being trapped by the environment, atmospheric or otherwise - not the increased CO2. And while greenhouses may have artificially increased CO2 to improve plant growth it's accompanied with nitrogen fertilizer. The global increase in CO2 will only see a minor increase in plant growth but will be capped by limited nitrogen, and the hotter environment and associated increase in water evaporation will lead to reduced plant growth.
Not if increased water evaporation leads to increased cloud cover leads to increased rainfall. We don’t know what will happen, it’s simply too complex to model accurately.
"We don't know what will happen" is a specious reply because the models we do have are continuously improving, have been proven quite accurate so far, and backtesting continues to refine the behavior. This isn't a matter of having no idea what'll happen; there'll always be uncertainty but when the models continue to be validated and keep pointing at potentially devastating scenarios then the prudent thing is to act now instead of hoping the models are wrong.
What we can definitively say is that CO2 levels have increased dramatically since the industrial revolution, and their cause is humans burning fossil fuels. On the models themselves, if you look deeply at how they are created and how they are updated, they involve a ridiculous amount of "tuning" where basically they don't line up with historical records so they have to continually modify them with fudge factors.
I think the central problem is that the way they divide the atmosphere / oceans into 100km square grids is too large for local weather, but if they shrink the grids it takes way too long to run the simulations, so they are in a bind. I am of the opinion it's better not to risk increasing the amount of CO2 because we don't know what will happen. But I wouldn't consider any of our models even low-confidence. It is impossible to solve given how chaotic nature is, the number of variables, and how slow our super computers currently are.
CO2 isn't the only metric to look at to determine if plants can grow or not in a given environment...
Rainfall pattern/acidity, humidity, average temperatures, extreme temperatures, animals living the the area (providing nutrients through body waste and decomposition), insect population, &c. are all factors, and most of these factors are interdependent
Trees, like animal, migrate, this migration isn't a matter of months, or years, but centuries, since the lifecycles of trees are very long and their locomotion speed is ... limited
Plants do not sequester enough additional co2 to offset what humans release into atmosphere. But increasing co2 will increase rate of growth of plants provided other limiting factors do not impede growth.
Flora, fauna and the whole ecology have adapted over tens of thousands of years to the current environment we're in. Sudden massive changes is more likely to lead to mass extinction, adaption due in thousands of years for entirely new species. To massively try to force adaption, will lead to lots of instability and even worse damage than letting nature take its course over a longer timespan.
It's called the "greenhouse effect" because the CO2 traps heat in the earth's atmosphere, just like the walls and roof of a greenhouse trap the heat inside the greenhouse. Greenhouses are also enriched with extra CO2 to boost yields, but that's not why it's called the "greenhouse effect"
My point was that we refer to “greenhouse gasses” and “greenhouse effect” because these are associated with what happens in greenhouses because plants grow better in them.
It’s pretty well established by science that the effects will be overwhelmingly bad. To try to find the “silver lining” in the sixth mass extinction sounds like a pundit’s exercise in devil’s advocacy. You may as well be trying to “look on the bright side” of the holocaust.
... except that's _literally_ how science works. People _have_ looked into the "bright side" of the holocaust. Refusing to expand human's knowledge and understanding of the world because of political taboos is a mistake. Yes, we wouldn't purposely warm the planet in the interests of "increasing our knowledge," but since the experiment is already underway, there is an obligation to learn from that.
Is this science that we're doing right now? No, this is debate in the service of a particular agenda. No one is stopping you from "looking into the bright side of the holocaust", as you put it, on your own time. There are plenty of holocaust "researchers" who question its place in history. I'm sure they would welcome your company.
But if you were to pose that question in the context of a discussion about a Holocaust survivor's fund, for example, then that's definitely not historical research you're engaging in.
Likewise, when you interrupt discussion about global warming with "maybe there are good sides", without providing any actual evidence for your supposition, then your actions have the effect of redirecting the conversation away from the scientific consensus and casting a shadow of doubt, on the basis of nothing more than speculation.
This kind of absolute confidence about an extremely unpredictable change in an extremely dynamic and complicated system is not remotely scientific. We can predict (reasonably) that the changes will be overall worse, but it would IMO be pretty shocking if there were _no_ positive effects:
- Growing seasons are longer in near-arctic regions
- Higher CO2 means plants photosynthesize easier, requiring less water in desert regions
- The arctic passage means shorter cargo vessel trips
This doesn't balance out the overall crisis, but there are going to be a lot of changes both directions.
I'm trying hard, but I absolutely cannot fathom how these "positive effects" can outbalance even 1% of the disastrous consequences of climate change. We (i.e. mostly undeveloped countries) are about to experience decades of extreme hunger, deadly hotness and critical environmental events (tornadoes, floods...). That the Arctic ice floe melts won't bring any positive consequence except for the fact that it will increase trades and shipping with cargoes and will thus lead to more emissions. The same goes for plants: many species will not survive to the environmental changes so CO2 will stay roughly the same. And it goes without saying that it's far from being the only metrics at play there.
If assessing the consequences of climate change from the point of view of a human (which everybody should do) seems to make you think that I am a humanist, then yes, I am. Climate change won't destroy the planet. Climate change won't destroy every single species living on it. But climate change will destroy us. We're taking actions against climate change to save humans, not to save animals or the flora. Pretending the contrary is hypocritical.
Something to keep in mind about making unknown changes to a landscape: it's not by coincidence that most changes would be for the worse.
It's not because the status quo is globally optimal, but because humans have invested a lot in the way things are.
We happen to have built cities on coastlines, put farms where food grows, put bridges where the rivers are, and so on. We can shake things up and get unknown results, but most random changes will be for the worse because we've molded our civilization to the planet we already have.
And this goes not only for humans, but even moreso for other species, who are much slower to adapt to changes.
Right, we've invested a lot in the idea that specific people and specific countries own specific pieces of land, we're really not well set up for fluid changing circumstances, as a civilization. The mass migration and the strains that will cause seem like they're going to be rough.
Climate change includes a range of outcomes ranging from “terrible for agriculture and many species but possibly survivable” to “mass extinction”. We’re already seeing some of the “mild” effects in the form of crop underperformance in the Middle East and wildfires all over the world. Many of the worst outcomes have to do with tipping points that we don’t fully understand, some of which seem to be breaking against us.
TL;DR climate change isn’t necessarily an extinction-level event. It is just possibly an extinction level event. I would argue that if you’re looking at it and saying “meh” then you’re not assessing risks properly.
It's hard to imagine humans going extinct. An extinction level event for organisms which can't adapt fast enough, sure. But humans have existed in all sorts of climates from the stone age, while colonizing most of the planet. Our ancestors survived ice ages.
It's actually pretty easy to imagine humans going extinct, and taking a huge portion of the other life on this planet out with us. As the level of human "crazy" in the world grows (seemingly exponentially), I find myself worrying more and more about the fact that some of the craziest people on the planet (political "leaders" and their militaries) have access to nuclear weapons, and that's only one potential concern among far too many.
To wipe humans out, you would have to make the entire planet unlivable, which includes high altitudes, polar regions, remote locations, islands, etc. I don't see that happening short of a gray goo scenario.
The planet might not be unlivable, but the standard of living for any remaining humans might regress back several centuries or more. In addition, bootstrapping a new civilization will be hard given we've used up most of the most easily accessible energy sources.
I, for one, think it would be terribly difficult to maintain mines, steel mills, farms, water purification plants, chemical plants, concrete plants, auto factories, living quarters, hydroponic farms, plastic plants, glass plants, textile factories, sanitation, and all the other infrastructure we would rely on to maintain a technological existence, in an H2S-poisoned atmosphere with no ozone layer and no end in sight over eon timescales.
Technological civilization isn't a balloon or a tower, it's a pyramid. In order for the peak to climb higher, the base levels -- a stable and inexpensive supply of food, air, land, and water -- need to grow as well. Undermine that foundation and you can't expect the upper levels to float.
> 2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown
This is true, but is also a bit of a red herring. All hierarchical organizations from the individual to the country is optimized to the environmental condition they are situated in, and any level of uncertainty at that scope should alarming in of itself.
Just two examples of our optimization and as a consequence, our lack of resiliency to disturbance: Suez Canal and the Ever Given, chip shortage, cargo container mis-allocation in shipping that is happening at the moment.
If the poster boy of efficiency, the market is so easily impacted, what do you think will happen to lumbering and lethargic political institutions that we like to rail about so much?
Apparently, when scientists say "we don't really know what is going to happen," a lot of us subconsciously interpret it as "even the scientists can't say it will be bad, we will probably be fine."
Turns out, when scientists say that, they literally mean it.
Cue 49°C heat wave at Canada.
"We don't really know" should be considered an absolutely terrifying phrase out of the mouth of a climate scientist - and we'll be hearing it for years to come.
The trees are rotting from the inside. That's a complex issue and doesn't sound like it's from warming. Old live oaks can suffer a similar fate, and the issue is usually caused by stress on the tree impacting the tree's immune system.
Trees are really good at managing stress from heat, however stress from moisture much less so.
You're wrong. They rot from the inside as they die. The soil moisture is falling and the trees can't store enough water. The insides die first. Stress comes from climate change. Imagine in extreme conditions with high variance in water availability or temperature shifts how an organism will survive. This is part of the larger Holocene extinction humans are causing now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
My first thought when seeing the Baobob picture was I wonder if you can still travel to see them before they're gone? My second thought was how much CO2 would such a trip generate?
Exactly. All life has a capacity to adapt, but it is mostly[0] constrained by lifespan. Individual organisms don't adapt - their type does, over time, through generations breeding and dying. But if the environment is changing faster than that - faster than what it takes to cycle through a couple generations - then the organism type won't ever be able to catch up.
--
[0] - Excluding shenanigans like horizontal gene transfer, that are mostly relevant to bacteria and archaea.
That's true. There's been multiple ice ages over the eons, not to mention shifting continents, and new species radically changing the landscape (the land used to be dominated by giant mushrooms, before plants came along).
That being said, although climate and the makeup of life on earth changes on its own, and can greatly change over time, the big difference here is how fast this is happening. I feel quite confident that humans will never kill all life on earth, because life is very adaptable and resilient. However, rapid climate change could result in the loss of a huge amount of the biodiversity that exists now. Many species will die, and be replaced with more resilient ones.
I think what we're also likely to see, is that some of the most adaptable animal species are small animals (eg: rodents) and insects, things that are typically considered invasive species. Larger animals don't reproduce as fast, and there aren't as many, so they have a smaller gene pool that doesn't recombine as rapidly as with animals that can produce large amounts of babies every year. That makes them way more vulnerable to being killed off by climate change. So, yeah, I hope you like cats, rats, possums, mosquitos and cockroaches.
It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred years.
As we have developed, we have spent the majority of our human productivity on efforts to optimize ourselves, our cultures, and our infrastructure for the relatively static status quo climate.
This includes the placement of cities, the choice of crop cultivars in various regions, the effort put into irrigation systems and infrastructure, the planning of building codes and expected lifetimes of infrastructure based on regional climate, the kinds of diseases and pests we guard against in various regions, and on and on. Billions of people depend on those optimizations. A slippage of a percent in the effectiveness of those optimizations will be counted in the lives of millions.
What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
AKA roughly 3% of the times humans have been on earth. Or .0002% the age of the earth. But on the other hand, that probably doesn't matter much. The difference between human made and natural climate change is just the moral implications. If there was another (natural) ice-age on the horizon, it'd be in humanities best interest to try and prevent it.
AKA roughly 100% of the times humans have lived in settled communities.
I would prefer to not live a roaming hunter-gatherer life.
Edit: disclaimer—“first settlement” doesn’t seem to be a settled fact. How permanent must it be? How many families? Is purposeful agriculture a requirement?
The infrastructure, agricultural optimization, crop cultivation and breeding, city growth, and other technology that supports the several billion people that are alive today was built over the last century. The capacity growth is also exponential, so the relevant infrastructure is on an even shorter timescale than that.
Global ecosystems are also far more stressed from the load of humanity than they were 100 years ago. The regenerative capacity of biological systems responding to that system is not simply "barely at capacity", it is in a negative state. On top of that, we will be accelerating the rate of average temperature changes, in a time when access to weapons of mass destruction (ones that are orders of magnitude higher than what existed 100 years ago) are higher than ever.
The nature of exponential growth and what it does to fixed capacity regenerative systems is certainly difficult to internalize. Cracks form over time as stress is absorbed. Collapses happen fast. The transition between the two is hard to time.
> It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred years.
That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints.
> What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment, but more often than not we are making proportionality errors (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it).
I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
I'd venture the opposite, that people have an inherent need to believe that humanity is special in an objective sense, that drastic change and collapse cannot happen in the timescales we operate in. An adult variant of "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".
After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
> Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
> I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".)
> After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.
You keep insinuating that you are not a denier, but really, you are. Climate change is going to rip through society like a wrecking ball. At the very least, massive crop failures are going to result in a global starvation crisis. This is absolutely the truth of the situation, but you dismiss it: “affective/emotional.”
You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes. Maybe you should give it a shot.
I think you're confused about the forum you're in. If you have a counter argument to people's arguments, all the power to you and you're more than welcome to discuss, in the hopes that we can learn something more about it. But if your argument is mere willful assertion of what is already stated, or is calling people names, kindly back off.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Normally I wouldn't want to honor your manner of discourse by responding to it, but I want to make the case that one can still discuss the contents of an argument despite emotionality;
> You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm.
I personally am pretty optimistic and excited regarding the prospects of tackling this problem, because embedded in it a plethora of large scale multi-agent coordination problems we ought to solve, and we do have the capacity for it. Incidentally, I think individual level solutions don't necessarily have the strategic depth to address what is essentially a problem of scale. But if you think you're doing the right thing, more power to you, at least at your scale you couldn't harm things even if you wanted to.
> Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes.
Does her influence look like a success to you? It doesn't to me. Maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in talking down to people, or appeals to romantic emotionality, instead of bringing the best and the most rational in them. Maybe rampant consumerism and lack of higher-order thinking to maneuver climate change are sibling problems, both intimately related to the problem of stupefaction of the masses.
Maybe calling people names is part of the shame-politics that attempt to turn adults into temporary children. Hijacking our deepest fears of ostracism in the name of some ostensible "greater good", but inadvertently reducing people's agency and higher order thinking, both of which are deeply needed to steer out of the problem.
> Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that.
You seem to be making the mistake of assuming all predictions are similar in scope and nature.
To use an analogy: predicting the specific effects of how a blast of heavy radiation will affect a human body is _complicated_. But a prediction of "this is going to hurt you badly" can be made with high confidence.
There's a universality here regarding complex systems, and it applies to human bodies, buildings, economies, geologies, and natural ecosystems alike. Complex, self-reinforcing systems do not fail linearly. Pressure cause cracks and minor symptoms as the system absorbs the initial stresses, and at some point systemic collapse occurs rapidly.
Concrete spalls, metal rusts, and when the time comes the building collapses rapidly as the reinforcing mechanisms fail one by one. Cancers form, mild symptoms are felt, and eventually the body succumbs in weeks or days as the final metastasized stages shut down vital functions. The ground is silent as pressure build, tremors are felt, and in a matter of seconds heaves to spew its burning contents.
The stressors on our world's ecosystems are numerous and myriad and well documented. The seas and fish populations are strained by plastic pollution and overfishing to feed a population that is an order of magnitude larger than existed just 100 years ago. Insect populations are observably collapsing in many parts of the world. Water tables have been severely depleted in many agricultural lands, including in many parts of the USA, but also places like southern india. These are the observable cracks. The article of this subject contains more.
Modern agriculture, at the rate of productivity that it operates at now, relies on the existence and viability of sophisticated supply chains that mine, produce, and deliver fertilizer, pesticides, and other "high-level economy" products that themselves depend on deeper supply chains.
Climate change and the rapid increase in global temperatures introduces a steady grind of increasing pressure - a new stressor to this complex system that is already heavily stressed to unsustainability, and is already showing it cracks.
We know for a fact that the stress will increase steadily and inexorably.
It is indeed possible to make high confidence statements that this is going to hurt us badly. It is wishful thinking to hope otherwise.
What _can_ be hoped for is mitigations. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage, if we try hard and fast enough.
> Complex, self-reinforcing systems do not fail linearly.
I am with you. This is called the criticality of a complex adaptive system.
It is the grain of sand that will collapse a sand heap into chaos.
The problem is we don't know where the criticality point is, nor we qualify the knowability of that point, nor we know if the critical point is the most important thing to focus on, e.g. incremental degradation could just as well saturate our harm tolerance without really reaching a phase-shift point. The reason I am bringing these up is not to use skepticism to induce apathy, but to underline the fact that all of these axes require drastically different policy responses.
There is a risk in trying to invest the entire political, psychological and moral capital into an all-or-nothing apocalypse-countermeasure-policy-A if the system at hand actually needed a set of incremental countermeasures with policies B, C .. Z. This is the main objective in focusing on proportionality, to ensure our response is the appropriate one.
Incrementalism doesn't make headlines the way apocalypticism does and over-salience of criticality might be distracting us in a way that brings us closer to it. Demonstrated time and again, it doesn't rally people to action, it doesn't seem to enchance our agency, and maybe even hurts it.
> The problem is we don't know where the criticality point is
We know that given the inertia we have currently, we are almost guaranteed to hit it. We cannot stop on a dime, and even if we did, the existing inertial effects will continue.
> Incrementalism doesn't make headlines
It also doesn't really work, as evidenced by the complete failure of the incrementalist "reduce, recycle, reuse" campaign, which effected nothing and might well have acted as a safety blanket to prevent serious policy.
But the failure here lies more in a politically dominant demographic that was not ready to understand any reality that might involve policy that impacted material costs or the conveniences, combined with the fact that any relevant solution necessarily would involve those sacrifices.
Alarmism works just fine as a political tool, and it has worked to spur action on many issues - legitimate or not. In this particular case, the alarmism is certainly warranted. And generational shifts allow for a more receptive audience for that message.
It seems biased to assume apocalyptism. It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project.
You might be right. And that is the whole point; how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? What is the objective measure? What is the criteria to use to find out if and in which direction we are making such an error?
> It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but also can't ignore that the non-linearity and complexity of climate science is an unknown quantity more than that of a construction project. The reliability of predictions will have different upper bounds, and our conveyed sense of confidence should reflect that, not the romantically moving horribleness of the worst case scenario we can think of.
> how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction?
LOL, yah, I’d hate for the ocean to not have plastic, or CO2 levels to get back down, or to not breathe mercury from the local coal plant, or… gosh, any of those errors in the wrong direction, you know.
Whataboutism and analysis paralysis are not helpful modes of behaviour. Immediate action to begin remedying the obvious problems would be helpful. We can do that on an individual basis, and must also press those with more power to do the same.
A lot of things have no objective measure at all. We still have to make decisions and act. And people will naturally see a perspective based on their own experience and understanding. We put the burden of proof on one side or the other. A good example of this was the response to covid. People had completely different levels of optimism based on their background.
A good practical tool we have is to just run a cost benefit analysis. But reduce your requirement for unproven benefit as the cost drops. So you require masks in a pandemic even when you don't know if they will work. Because the cost is low the loss is minimal if there is no benefit. This kind of decision is made all the time intuitively in things like renewable energy.
Ultimately the political system has to answer these questions. And it deals with such questions all the time. I wonder how predictable international power politics or economics is in terms of "non-linearity and complexity".
99.999% of all species ever existed are extinct today. Climate is always affecting nature, we are the first species who have a chance of not joining that statistics.
What % of species that have existed in the last 300 years are now extinct because of us? Is the rate of extinction graph linear, or is it trending up logarithmically?
Clean energy alone is not nearly enough to solve ecological collapse. You also need to stop the conversion of wild areas into monocrop agriculture and confine metropolitan development, to stop the loss of further carbon sinks. And even once you can stop all new greenhouse gas emissions, there’s still the massive task of removing all the excess CO2 currently in the atmosphere, which would otherwise remain for thousands of years and continue to drive carbon-releasing feedback loops in the permafrost, ocean, arctic ice, and rainforests.
you forgot to mention cleaning up all of the plastic and other poisons, also it would be nice to preserve some of the aquafiers. Oh, and also the dirt (at current erosion rates, the US runs out of dirt at the end of the century).
Anthropogenic Global Warming is great for plant life. The world is greening right now, and that's great for food production and lowering world poverty.
And here we see the bad-faith rhetorical goalpost shift happening in real time. 1. deny that change is happening. -> 2. deny that we have anything to do with climate change. -> 3. deny that what we're doing to the climate is bad. -> 4. actually, amazingly, claim that what we're doing to the climate is good. (you are here)
I agree, we are starting to see the bad-faith posters here not engaging in real discussion.
These trolls generally setup strawmen arguments instead of engaging with the real points made, terribly unfortunate and not a good sign of healthy democracy.
The reality is that yes Anthropogenic Global Warming is happening to a certain degree, but even without AGW our climate was warming. And thank god for that because we're coming out of an ice age... can you imagine if we were cooling?! Yeesh, then we'd have a real problem on our hands.
Instead we have an earth coming out of an ice age, getting slightly slightly more warmed by anthropogenic causes. The main end result of which is a more green earth, more agricultural production and less poverty.
Btw, in case you didn't clue into it, you're the bad-faith poster in this scenario.
Except it isn't. The Western US is experiencing the worst drought in over 1000 years.
And that's on top of the vast reduction in wild spaces, logging and burning of rainforests, urbanization, and conversion of prairies and grasslands to agriculture.
This is probably the least "green" the world has been for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, modulo ice ages.
You're gonna need a citation for that statement, because everything I know about the US disagrees with that. Indiana, for example, was almost completely forest before European settlers arrived [1] and has seen forest cover reduced by 75%. Most of the midwest is similar.
No, you're gonna need a citation for my statement; I already know it to be so. You can google as well as I can. I'm not here to win an Internet argument, merely to inform. Whether you agree with me is not my concern.
I agree with you though that deforestation and a lot of agricultural practices have been absolutely terrible to our environment and need to be addressed with the same level of focus that people currently have towards climate change.
The impact on flora and fauna from human development isn't simply from climate change; our localized ecological impacts can be quite severe, as well. I feel like our discussion of conservation and reasonable limits on development have been lost in the last few decades, with environmentalism having become dominated by climate change.
The gypsy moth problem where I'm from seems like it could become genuinely catastrophic in a few years. That or we figure out how to seed clouds with BTK /s
Recently moved from a town with an infestation. Returned a week later, and no exaggeration, 90% of the leaves in my neighborhood had been chewed away. Even ones where residents had taken steps to protect the tree. I'm not old but I haven't seen devastation like that from an invasive species here in Ontario before.
I saved my beech tree by wrapping the trunk in burlap starting mid-may, and then burning it/squishing all the (thousands of) caterpillars under it on a weekly basis. It has been traumatizing, but my tree is fine. I also sprayed BTK on my small fruit trees and they have been unaffected. So it can be done... but it is time consuming and disgusting.
>with environmentalism having become dominated by climate change
Humanity is too selfish to do anything about big problems (climate change), of course we're not going to do anything about smaller problems (localized impacts). We're not doing anything because we expect a magic solution to all of these problems to drop in our laps if we wait long enough. I'm very pessimistic about the future because we're not doing what we need to do today.
In my eyes, the best thing we could do, to help plants "migrate" is to take whole pieces of eco-systems and transplant them, with the ability to escape. Like a greenhouse, that is artificially cooled or heated, but a trapdoor that allows plant off-spring to "escape" if the conditions are good enough.
The idea, that we can protect the world from change is misguided.All that we can do, is save a maximum of Eco-diversity, by offering it transport from closing niche to opening niche - or storage, if all niches should vanish.
There was a time when humans were not the dominant species. There will be a time when we will again go lower in the ranks or disappear.
In the arrogance of being higher than all things we forget, we are but a line item in the larger excel sheet of planet earth.
The threat is not to mother earth - worrying about her is above our paygrade. The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine. It will evolve and thrive. What will happen to humans, well, that's another story, we'll have to live with the seeds we sow.
Yes, if you use wishy washy terms like "mother earth" then everything can treated as abstract and distant.
I care about humans and want them to survive and prosper. I care about wildlife and don't want species to be killed. And as humans we can use culture to go beyond our in-built programming. Ideas can spread. That does make us different to other species. That is not arrogant, it is just the truth.
Literally thousands of species, from coyotes to whales to crows, teach their young survival behaviors and have "culture". The more we look at our fellow DNA-based creatures on the planet, the less special we are. Personally, I think if you really cared about humans, you'd be interested in understanding and valuing the complex and fragile lifeforms that are being trampled by our current prevailing societal attitude of consumption and perpetual growth and preserving those fragile things for future humans to enjoy, instead of being mindless consumers disconnected from nature. Jeesh, as if no humans in history had fulfilling lives without potato chips, bottled water, and endless online entertainment.
Humans can spread ideas massively better than other species. Our phenotype is distinct among extant species. Just like plants are distinct from animals. I say that as a matter of fact rather that trying to suggest any particular moral implications of that. Our distinctness does not automatically mean we are special. And our lack of genetic specialness does mean that humans are worthless.
I absolutely agree that understanding life is amazing and even essential to our future. That in itself is an idea that couldn't possibly have existed without the distinctive ability to communicate I mentioned above.
> The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine
This entire school of thinking that has derived from a George Carlin bit never ceases to annoy me.
For starters the "world" as some abstract ideal that we find comforting only exists because our human minds perceive it and imagine it as such. Our planet is just a rock out in spaces with some complex chemical reactions fizzlingly along on the surface. There is no "mother Earth" that will still be around to enjoy the life that reemerges in millions of years.
And there really is no guarantee that it is "going to get by just fine". Are you familiar with the current hypothesis behind the End-Permian extinction? It's believed by some to have been caused by a super volcano that ignited massive coal veins around what is today Siberia. Now the scale of CO2 emitted in the End Permian was much more dramatic than even current worse case scenarios, but we're emitting about 10x faster than lava burning coal was able to do back then. The End Permian nearly did wipe out life on this planet.
We don't fully understand all the possible CO2 feedbacks. We're already in one of the top 6 extinction events on this planet and that has little to do with climate change.... yet. CO2 has played a surprisingly big role in most mass extinctions.
Now it's certainly a low probability scenario, but it is not inconceivable that the end result of our insane release of CO2 in the atmosphere could lead to an unrecoverable extinction event.
At the very least a startling percent of the current species on this planet will go extinct (because a startling number already have). Corals which have survived plenty of extinction events might be replaces with green slime.
> The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine.
We may be turning this planet into a lifeless rock. Other planets like Mars and Venus are "getting by just fine" by that measure. We may not be able to induce a total runaway greenhouse effect but killing off the oceans and making much of the planet inhospitable is still on the table. Really though, environmentalism is more about saving ourselves than our planet.
Our sun won't last forever and eventually the Earth will be totally destroyed. The less we have to struggle with survival due to what we've allowed to be done to the Earth the more we can work towards finding new homes.
Even small changes can move an ecosystem e.g. change altitude at which a plant thrives; change depth at which ocean life survives. Coffee plants are currently moving - the traditional mountain fields are no longer optimal so planting has to be done elsewhere. Reefs of course are dying/dead and regrowing in deeper water.
Who cares? Folks who depend on food from these ecosystems. They have to eat every day/year. They cannot wait for reefs to regrow in 100 years, etc.
We can probably react. But will we? We let Cambodian people die in the '70s rather that lift a finger. Our track record is very poor. Hard to care about people dying halfway around the world.
But politics is very affected. The Cambodian famine created the Khmer Rouge for instance.
Imagine refugees from starving countries, looking to settle elsewhere. First thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions. The outcry from 1000's of Syrian refugees rocked nations. Now multiply that by 100 thousand.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] thread1. The greenhouse effect is very real
2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown
Having been made to believe that it was going to cause the next mass extinction event, I found #2 fairly underwhelming. Never-the-less, this isn't a gamble worth messing with.
I also think we need to seperate out how humans are driving species extinct, and climate change. These two can be very different things, yet are always conflated in the media for hype.
Most species are going extinct because their habitats are actively destroyed by humans, or are fished to extinction, not because the planet is warming.
Think of climate modeling as saying that for a given species of trees, half of them will be dead at a given latitude in 50-100 years, not pointing at a specific tree and predicting that it will die on July 7th, 2047.
If the model predicts that a glacier disappears in 2050 and it disappears in 2070 instead?
Or if the lack-of-model makes a lack-of-prediction about glacier disappearance, and then it disappears in 2070 by surprise?
Error accumulation makes sense to worry about if you're planning a voyage and worried that dead-reckoning navigation will leave you kilometres off course. But if you're on the voyage already, out on the open ocean, you can argue with the navigator's math but you still need to navigate -- you won't do better by just blindly insisting the boat never left the harbour.
basically everyone agrees that the climate is changing, has always changed, and will always change. there is debate over how much of climate change is anthropogenic, but this is irrelevant to the point that predictive climate models are functionally useless, due to the complexity of the thing it's modeling.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clouds-may-be-the...
downvoters: I would appreciate an explanation as to how my understanding of this situation is inaccurate. my views are never set in stone, I'm always open to learn new things. I just don't see how, short of a complete holistic Matrix-style simulation of the planet, one can obtain meaningful predictions from a data-driven climate model. I'm wrong about a lot of stuff all the time and I'd like to know where my understanding of this situation is incomplete or inaccurate.
That is false. Although you’re correct that climate is very complex and it is impossible to model every detail. The notion that you cannot make valid conclusions from modeling because a set of observations do not match models is fallacious because it discounts the correct conclusions that climate models have achieved. For example, the first climate models from the 1960s predicted that the mesosphere will contract and cool as a result of increasing co2 concentrations, and this conclusion has been backed by empirical observations. Furthermore, modeling from the 1970s by scientists at Exxon Mobile found that by 2020, net warming would reach an average of 1 degree centigrade, which we’ve since exceeded.
A clock that is stuck is a poor model of time because it does not model the progression of time, even though it is still correct twice a day.
We can make a very simplistic climate model that would be valid. We have a sphere of radius 6,357km, which is illuminated by electro-magnetic radiation centered at wavelengths of 0.6um. When the light hits the surface, it is absorbed and is re-emitted as black body radiation with a wavelength centered at 10um. It has an atmosphere, which contains a gas, which blocks the escape of wavelengths at 4um and 15um. This reflects some of the black body radiation back to the sphere, causing it to warm. In 2009 for the earth, this lead to a net accumulation of 0.6 W/m^2 of energy absorption [1]. If accumulated over the entire area of the sphere and accumulated over time, this would lead to an increase in temperature. Although the model does not take into account land formations, ocean currents, air currents, seasons, etc, it still models the underlying process of the earth’s energy balance and can answer the question of whether the planet will warm and can provide estimates at how quickly this will occur.
I think you’re hinting at systems being so complex that they can vary based on minute changes in initial conditions, you’d be correct to say that climate is chaotic. Not all chaotic systems are the same though. A double pendulum will swing in eccentric motions, but if you look at something like the stock market, there’s a lot of short term variability with long term certainty. I cannot tell you what my stocks will do next week. But markets generally converge on a doubling of money in 10 years. In fact that’s reliable enough that I’m willing to have a 401k. With the pendulum, I can tell you with a lot of certainty that if it’s damped, it will settle to its lowest energy state and stay there permanently.
A climate model will not predict the weather. But in the same way that I can tell you that winter will be cold, I can also tell you that Arctic amplification and Hadley cell expansion will lead to very different weather patterns that civilization has not seen before, such as much more extreme swings in temperature and weather.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget#/media...
Conclusion
Climate models published since 1973 have generally been quite skillful in projecting future warming. While some were too low and some too high, they all show outcomes reasonably close to what has actually occurred, especially when discrepancies between predicted and actual CO2 concentrations and other climate forcings are taken into account.
At large scale climate change isn’t that complicated - sun hits earth, heats it up, some energy escapes. We can get a pretty good picture from models and the details just add to that.
no—I, knowing basically nothing about climate science and having been taught to more or less blindly trust climate models as accurate predictors of the future, read an article that said we have no idea how to model clouds with anything resembling accuracy, because clouds by themselves are crazy complex things. this led me to realize that this should have been intuitive knowledge without even reading the article, which led me to truly consider the scope of the climate system w.r.t. how it could possibly be modeled by computers, which led me to realize that the idea that it's possible for a data-driven computer model to predict anything about the future with any kind of reliability is pretty silly to begin with.
A couple counterpoints from former climate skeptics:
- Richard Mueller is a prominent physicist who founded an institute to debunk anthropogenic climate change, only to change his mind after thorough examination of the data. https://youtu.be/Sme8WQ4Wb5w
- Jerry Taylor is a libertarian and former climate debunker for the Cato Institute; a noteworthy pivot moment was speaking to a risk analyst for a financial institution, whose job it is to make bets on complex systemic risks in the context of uncertainty. He claimed that from a financial lens, AGW was a slam-dunk case for mitigation, not because of the certainty of any one model, but of the full probability distribution in aggregate. https://www.reckonings.show/episodes/17
But as good Bayesians, we also have to consider the opposite case: crises and "black swan" events do happen. How do we filter signal from noise? We probably could have benefitted from more "enlightened alarmism" re: COVID in Jan/Feb 2020, when billions in preventative measures could have saved trillions to world GDP (and millions of lives).
It's a double-bind politically: given a non-trivial long-term risk, how does one frame its urgency? A calm and measured tone spurs little action (the unsqueaky wheel doesn't get the grease); a tone of urgency and panic bypasses badly-needed rational faculties, and/or flips the "bullshit detectors" based on the history of proverbial boys crying wolf.
While I'm not opposed to FDR-ish green infrastructure plans, the answer from economists is undramatic and uncontroversial [0]: tax the externality to establish a price signal, and return the dividend back to citizens, whose consumption behaviors then change in response to those signals [1].
Of course, we've had to contend with decades of FUD from vested O&G interests, no different than the tobacco cancer debacle [2], despite having had credible evidence for AGW since the late 70's. I'm happy to concede the potential for scientific groupthink and perverse Big Government incentives on the green side, so long as we're also acknowledging the enormous financial incentives for muddying the waters (uncertainty = inaction = status quo = profit).
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/economists-statement-on-carbon-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
[2] https://www.barbarafreese.com/industrialstrength-denial
I am under the impression that the worst-case scenarios in most models have pretty much all come to pass, often earlier than expected. Seems to me that they’ve been very predictive. It would have been nice had the media more accurately delivered those predictions; perhaps it would have prompted some early action.
Our current CO2 levels, ocean temperature & acidity, glacier melt, and global temperature are in excess of all “good case” predictions. We failed to rein in CO2 production and now we’re pretty much living the worst-case scenarios… as predicted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
And regarding your second point, we know it won’t do anything good, but we don’t know exactly what (nor could we ever!).
So no, there is no possibility of anything positive in this.
I think the central problem is that the way they divide the atmosphere / oceans into 100km square grids is too large for local weather, but if they shrink the grids it takes way too long to run the simulations, so they are in a bind. I am of the opinion it's better not to risk increasing the amount of CO2 because we don't know what will happen. But I wouldn't consider any of our models even low-confidence. It is impossible to solve given how chaotic nature is, the number of variables, and how slow our super computers currently are.
Rainfall pattern/acidity, humidity, average temperatures, extreme temperatures, animals living the the area (providing nutrients through body waste and decomposition), insect population, &c. are all factors, and most of these factors are interdependent
Trees, like animal, migrate, this migration isn't a matter of months, or years, but centuries, since the lifecycles of trees are very long and their locomotion speed is ... limited
If plant kept up with our co2 production we wouldn't get a graph like this when we look at atmospheric co2 level: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/CO2_emissions_vs...
Arguing that "the greenhouse is good because we get more plants" is extremely reductive, and factually wrong
Please see : The Biggest Little Farm
But if you were to pose that question in the context of a discussion about a Holocaust survivor's fund, for example, then that's definitely not historical research you're engaging in.
Likewise, when you interrupt discussion about global warming with "maybe there are good sides", without providing any actual evidence for your supposition, then your actions have the effect of redirecting the conversation away from the scientific consensus and casting a shadow of doubt, on the basis of nothing more than speculation.
This kind of absolute confidence about an extremely unpredictable change in an extremely dynamic and complicated system is not remotely scientific. We can predict (reasonably) that the changes will be overall worse, but it would IMO be pretty shocking if there were _no_ positive effects:
- Growing seasons are longer in near-arctic regions - Higher CO2 means plants photosynthesize easier, requiring less water in desert regions - The arctic passage means shorter cargo vessel trips
This doesn't balance out the overall crisis, but there are going to be a lot of changes both directions.
It's not because the status quo is globally optimal, but because humans have invested a lot in the way things are.
We happen to have built cities on coastlines, put farms where food grows, put bridges where the rivers are, and so on. We can shake things up and get unknown results, but most random changes will be for the worse because we've molded our civilization to the planet we already have.
And this goes not only for humans, but even moreso for other species, who are much slower to adapt to changes.
TL;DR climate change isn’t necessarily an extinction-level event. It is just possibly an extinction level event. I would argue that if you’re looking at it and saying “meh” then you’re not assessing risks properly.
http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pd...
Page 6 helped grow my imagination. The ice ages are not the worst it ever was.
Technological civilization isn't a balloon or a tower, it's a pyramid. In order for the peak to climb higher, the base levels -- a stable and inexpensive supply of food, air, land, and water -- need to grow as well. Undermine that foundation and you can't expect the upper levels to float.
This is true, but is also a bit of a red herring. All hierarchical organizations from the individual to the country is optimized to the environmental condition they are situated in, and any level of uncertainty at that scope should alarming in of itself.
Just two examples of our optimization and as a consequence, our lack of resiliency to disturbance: Suez Canal and the Ever Given, chip shortage, cargo container mis-allocation in shipping that is happening at the moment.
If the poster boy of efficiency, the market is so easily impacted, what do you think will happen to lumbering and lethargic political institutions that we like to rail about so much?
Turns out, when scientists say that, they literally mean it.
Cue 49°C heat wave at Canada.
"We don't really know" should be considered an absolutely terrifying phrase out of the mouth of a climate scientist - and we'll be hearing it for years to come.
Trees are really good at managing stress from heat, however stress from moisture much less so.
You just restated what I said. What am I wrong about?
If a 1,000 year old tree suddenly can't survive in the now new climate in the same location, that's a little bit more than curious.
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[0] - Excluding shenanigans like horizontal gene transfer, that are mostly relevant to bacteria and archaea.
That being said, although climate and the makeup of life on earth changes on its own, and can greatly change over time, the big difference here is how fast this is happening. I feel quite confident that humans will never kill all life on earth, because life is very adaptable and resilient. However, rapid climate change could result in the loss of a huge amount of the biodiversity that exists now. Many species will die, and be replaced with more resilient ones.
I think what we're also likely to see, is that some of the most adaptable animal species are small animals (eg: rodents) and insects, things that are typically considered invasive species. Larger animals don't reproduce as fast, and there aren't as many, so they have a smaller gene pool that doesn't recombine as rapidly as with animals that can produce large amounts of babies every year. That makes them way more vulnerable to being killed off by climate change. So, yeah, I hope you like cats, rats, possums, mosquitos and cockroaches.
As we have developed, we have spent the majority of our human productivity on efforts to optimize ourselves, our cultures, and our infrastructure for the relatively static status quo climate.
This includes the placement of cities, the choice of crop cultivars in various regions, the effort put into irrigation systems and infrastructure, the planning of building codes and expected lifetimes of infrastructure based on regional climate, the kinds of diseases and pests we guard against in various regions, and on and on. Billions of people depend on those optimizations. A slippage of a percent in the effectiveness of those optimizations will be counted in the lives of millions.
What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
Past few hundred years has had the greatest change in temperature in the last 10 thousand years according to tree studies.
I don't think you can have it both ways here.
AKA roughly 3% of the times humans have been on earth. Or .0002% the age of the earth. But on the other hand, that probably doesn't matter much. The difference between human made and natural climate change is just the moral implications. If there was another (natural) ice-age on the horizon, it'd be in humanities best interest to try and prevent it.
I would prefer to not live a roaming hunter-gatherer life.
Edit: disclaimer—“first settlement” doesn’t seem to be a settled fact. How permanent must it be? How many families? Is purposeful agriculture a requirement?
Global ecosystems are also far more stressed from the load of humanity than they were 100 years ago. The regenerative capacity of biological systems responding to that system is not simply "barely at capacity", it is in a negative state. On top of that, we will be accelerating the rate of average temperature changes, in a time when access to weapons of mass destruction (ones that are orders of magnitude higher than what existed 100 years ago) are higher than ever.
The nature of exponential growth and what it does to fixed capacity regenerative systems is certainly difficult to internalize. Cracks form over time as stress is absorbed. Collapses happen fast. The transition between the two is hard to time.
Your whole timescale is wrong. We’re not talking about humans. We’re talking about settled civilizations.
Things didn’t fluctuate very much since 9000 BCE, when the Bering land bridge went away. All of recorded history is since then.
As for recent history it’s only really since 2000 we’ve burst out of that range. There was fluctuation before but within the post 9000 BCE norms.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints.
> What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment, but more often than not we are making proportionality errors (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it).
I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
> Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".)
> After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.
You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes. Maybe you should give it a shot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Normally I wouldn't want to honor your manner of discourse by responding to it, but I want to make the case that one can still discuss the contents of an argument despite emotionality;
> You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm.
I personally am pretty optimistic and excited regarding the prospects of tackling this problem, because embedded in it a plethora of large scale multi-agent coordination problems we ought to solve, and we do have the capacity for it. Incidentally, I think individual level solutions don't necessarily have the strategic depth to address what is essentially a problem of scale. But if you think you're doing the right thing, more power to you, at least at your scale you couldn't harm things even if you wanted to.
> Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes.
Does her influence look like a success to you? It doesn't to me. Maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in talking down to people, or appeals to romantic emotionality, instead of bringing the best and the most rational in them. Maybe rampant consumerism and lack of higher-order thinking to maneuver climate change are sibling problems, both intimately related to the problem of stupefaction of the masses.
Maybe calling people names is part of the shame-politics that attempt to turn adults into temporary children. Hijacking our deepest fears of ostracism in the name of some ostensible "greater good", but inadvertently reducing people's agency and higher order thinking, both of which are deeply needed to steer out of the problem.
You seem to be making the mistake of assuming all predictions are similar in scope and nature.
To use an analogy: predicting the specific effects of how a blast of heavy radiation will affect a human body is _complicated_. But a prediction of "this is going to hurt you badly" can be made with high confidence.
There's a universality here regarding complex systems, and it applies to human bodies, buildings, economies, geologies, and natural ecosystems alike. Complex, self-reinforcing systems do not fail linearly. Pressure cause cracks and minor symptoms as the system absorbs the initial stresses, and at some point systemic collapse occurs rapidly.
Concrete spalls, metal rusts, and when the time comes the building collapses rapidly as the reinforcing mechanisms fail one by one. Cancers form, mild symptoms are felt, and eventually the body succumbs in weeks or days as the final metastasized stages shut down vital functions. The ground is silent as pressure build, tremors are felt, and in a matter of seconds heaves to spew its burning contents.
The stressors on our world's ecosystems are numerous and myriad and well documented. The seas and fish populations are strained by plastic pollution and overfishing to feed a population that is an order of magnitude larger than existed just 100 years ago. Insect populations are observably collapsing in many parts of the world. Water tables have been severely depleted in many agricultural lands, including in many parts of the USA, but also places like southern india. These are the observable cracks. The article of this subject contains more.
Modern agriculture, at the rate of productivity that it operates at now, relies on the existence and viability of sophisticated supply chains that mine, produce, and deliver fertilizer, pesticides, and other "high-level economy" products that themselves depend on deeper supply chains.
Climate change and the rapid increase in global temperatures introduces a steady grind of increasing pressure - a new stressor to this complex system that is already heavily stressed to unsustainability, and is already showing it cracks.
We know for a fact that the stress will increase steadily and inexorably.
It is indeed possible to make high confidence statements that this is going to hurt us badly. It is wishful thinking to hope otherwise.
What _can_ be hoped for is mitigations. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage, if we try hard and fast enough.
I am with you. This is called the criticality of a complex adaptive system.
It is the grain of sand that will collapse a sand heap into chaos.
The problem is we don't know where the criticality point is, nor we qualify the knowability of that point, nor we know if the critical point is the most important thing to focus on, e.g. incremental degradation could just as well saturate our harm tolerance without really reaching a phase-shift point. The reason I am bringing these up is not to use skepticism to induce apathy, but to underline the fact that all of these axes require drastically different policy responses.
There is a risk in trying to invest the entire political, psychological and moral capital into an all-or-nothing apocalypse-countermeasure-policy-A if the system at hand actually needed a set of incremental countermeasures with policies B, C .. Z. This is the main objective in focusing on proportionality, to ensure our response is the appropriate one.
Incrementalism doesn't make headlines the way apocalypticism does and over-salience of criticality might be distracting us in a way that brings us closer to it. Demonstrated time and again, it doesn't rally people to action, it doesn't seem to enchance our agency, and maybe even hurts it.
We know that given the inertia we have currently, we are almost guaranteed to hit it. We cannot stop on a dime, and even if we did, the existing inertial effects will continue.
> Incrementalism doesn't make headlines
It also doesn't really work, as evidenced by the complete failure of the incrementalist "reduce, recycle, reuse" campaign, which effected nothing and might well have acted as a safety blanket to prevent serious policy.
But the failure here lies more in a politically dominant demographic that was not ready to understand any reality that might involve policy that impacted material costs or the conveniences, combined with the fact that any relevant solution necessarily would involve those sacrifices.
Alarmism works just fine as a political tool, and it has worked to spur action on many issues - legitimate or not. In this particular case, the alarmism is certainly warranted. And generational shifts allow for a more receptive audience for that message.
You might be right. And that is the whole point; how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? What is the objective measure? What is the criteria to use to find out if and in which direction we are making such an error?
> It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but also can't ignore that the non-linearity and complexity of climate science is an unknown quantity more than that of a construction project. The reliability of predictions will have different upper bounds, and our conveyed sense of confidence should reflect that, not the romantically moving horribleness of the worst case scenario we can think of.
LOL, yah, I’d hate for the ocean to not have plastic, or CO2 levels to get back down, or to not breathe mercury from the local coal plant, or… gosh, any of those errors in the wrong direction, you know.
Whataboutism and analysis paralysis are not helpful modes of behaviour. Immediate action to begin remedying the obvious problems would be helpful. We can do that on an individual basis, and must also press those with more power to do the same.
A good practical tool we have is to just run a cost benefit analysis. But reduce your requirement for unproven benefit as the cost drops. So you require masks in a pandemic even when you don't know if they will work. Because the cost is low the loss is minimal if there is no benefit. This kind of decision is made all the time intuitively in things like renewable energy.
Ultimately the political system has to answer these questions. And it deals with such questions all the time. I wonder how predictable international power politics or economics is in terms of "non-linearity and complexity".
The article starts off with "Previous periods of rapid warming millions of years ago drastically altered plants and forests on Earth"
I'm probably forgetting a few things myself.
She lives in New York.
Also, what is up with all the perfectly relevant comments getting downvoted here?
These trolls generally setup strawmen arguments instead of engaging with the real points made, terribly unfortunate and not a good sign of healthy democracy.
The reality is that yes Anthropogenic Global Warming is happening to a certain degree, but even without AGW our climate was warming. And thank god for that because we're coming out of an ice age... can you imagine if we were cooling?! Yeesh, then we'd have a real problem on our hands.
Instead we have an earth coming out of an ice age, getting slightly slightly more warmed by anthropogenic causes. The main end result of which is a more green earth, more agricultural production and less poverty.
Btw, in case you didn't clue into it, you're the bad-faith poster in this scenario.
And that's on top of the vast reduction in wild spaces, logging and burning of rainforests, urbanization, and conversion of prairies and grasslands to agriculture.
This is probably the least "green" the world has been for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, modulo ice ages.
[1] https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr-nrs-p-108papers/02car...
I agree with you though that deforestation and a lot of agricultural practices have been absolutely terrible to our environment and need to be addressed with the same level of focus that people currently have towards climate change.
Heck fusion might ruin the price of gold.
Humanity is too selfish to do anything about big problems (climate change), of course we're not going to do anything about smaller problems (localized impacts). We're not doing anything because we expect a magic solution to all of these problems to drop in our laps if we wait long enough. I'm very pessimistic about the future because we're not doing what we need to do today.
The idea, that we can protect the world from change is misguided.All that we can do, is save a maximum of Eco-diversity, by offering it transport from closing niche to opening niche - or storage, if all niches should vanish.
In the arrogance of being higher than all things we forget, we are but a line item in the larger excel sheet of planet earth.
The threat is not to mother earth - worrying about her is above our paygrade. The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine. It will evolve and thrive. What will happen to humans, well, that's another story, we'll have to live with the seeds we sow.
I care about humans and want them to survive and prosper. I care about wildlife and don't want species to be killed. And as humans we can use culture to go beyond our in-built programming. Ideas can spread. That does make us different to other species. That is not arrogant, it is just the truth.
I absolutely agree that understanding life is amazing and even essential to our future. That in itself is an idea that couldn't possibly have existed without the distinctive ability to communicate I mentioned above.
This entire school of thinking that has derived from a George Carlin bit never ceases to annoy me.
For starters the "world" as some abstract ideal that we find comforting only exists because our human minds perceive it and imagine it as such. Our planet is just a rock out in spaces with some complex chemical reactions fizzlingly along on the surface. There is no "mother Earth" that will still be around to enjoy the life that reemerges in millions of years.
And there really is no guarantee that it is "going to get by just fine". Are you familiar with the current hypothesis behind the End-Permian extinction? It's believed by some to have been caused by a super volcano that ignited massive coal veins around what is today Siberia. Now the scale of CO2 emitted in the End Permian was much more dramatic than even current worse case scenarios, but we're emitting about 10x faster than lava burning coal was able to do back then. The End Permian nearly did wipe out life on this planet.
We don't fully understand all the possible CO2 feedbacks. We're already in one of the top 6 extinction events on this planet and that has little to do with climate change.... yet. CO2 has played a surprisingly big role in most mass extinctions.
Now it's certainly a low probability scenario, but it is not inconceivable that the end result of our insane release of CO2 in the atmosphere could lead to an unrecoverable extinction event.
At the very least a startling percent of the current species on this planet will go extinct (because a startling number already have). Corals which have survived plenty of extinction events might be replaces with green slime.
We may be turning this planet into a lifeless rock. Other planets like Mars and Venus are "getting by just fine" by that measure. We may not be able to induce a total runaway greenhouse effect but killing off the oceans and making much of the planet inhospitable is still on the table. Really though, environmentalism is more about saving ourselves than our planet.
Our sun won't last forever and eventually the Earth will be totally destroyed. The less we have to struggle with survival due to what we've allowed to be done to the Earth the more we can work towards finding new homes.
Who cares? Folks who depend on food from these ecosystems. They have to eat every day/year. They cannot wait for reefs to regrow in 100 years, etc.
We can probably react. But will we? We let Cambodian people die in the '70s rather that lift a finger. Our track record is very poor. Hard to care about people dying halfway around the world.
But politics is very affected. The Cambodian famine created the Khmer Rouge for instance.
Imagine refugees from starving countries, looking to settle elsewhere. First thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions. The outcry from 1000's of Syrian refugees rocked nations. Now multiply that by 100 thousand.