There are several claims worth disputing, but in a nutshell:
1) The claim that "climate change" is a problem is on its face pretty dumb (are we shooting for climate stasis?)
2) The claim that humans are causing all the change is again pretty dumb (we didn't have climate stasis prior to our industrial revolution, now did we?)
3) Most climate alarmists don't really engage much with this outside of research papers, but there's really quite a lot of debate about how much the climate is actually changing (not as easy to ascertain as it sounds), and as well how much of the change is caused by humans (it's nowhere near 100%).
4) The claim that a warmer planet is necessarily worse for humans is... strange and not supported by history (in fact, looking back through ancient civilizations, they tended to thrive and grow with warming periods, and die off, sometimes precipitously during cooling periods--the name itself, greenhouse gasses, kind of hints a bit at this--that is, whaddya grow in a greenhouse?)
So, it's not clear entirely how much humans are causing the change (and thus how much we could realistically affect it in the other direction). But it's not also clear what amount of change is ok or desirable, or even what direction we should target.
Historically, we weren't supporting 8B people on large scale mono-crop agriculture. When the dinosaurs were around and the atmospheric CO2 was at 5000ppm, no one was growing rice. Speaking of rice, the fact that rice germination fails at between 34-36degC is concerning when roughly 3-4B people around the equator rely on rice grown at 31-33degC to survive. It can be true that beneficial climate changes in the past are not beneficial to the present due to structural changes in human civilization.
At this point, we need a large-scale geoengineering project to reduce methane and CO2 levels in the atmosphere to protect our large-scale mono-crop agriculture practices OR the survivors of the food wars can return to subsistence farming among the corpse of past human civilization.
Placing blame here is useless - it doesn't matter if it's humans. Let's say it's not humans. Great, cool, super. Do we defend civilization or not?
For every acre of cropland that becomes too hot to grow in, shouldn't there be more cropland that becomes arable? Why does climate change literally only make things worse everywhere, and better nowhere? That's what it seems like when to talking to climate change alarmists. There can be no admission of even something so simple as uncertainty over any of the bold claims, much less any kind of identification of positives of climate change.
I mean, what if you're wrong? What if the planet gets 2C hotter and... everything's mostly fine? What if the planet gets cooler? Or what if we get the ideal (apparently) total climate stasis?
Due to the laws of thermodynamics, CO2 and Methane gases diffuse evenly throughout the atmosphere creating a blanket over the entire globe. As we add more gas to the atmosphere, the blanket gets more dense.
In the summer, you probably have a light comforter on your bed while in the winter you probably switch to a heavier comforter. While you're asleep your bed warms up under the comforter and it doesn't cool down until you get out of bed. In the same way, the CO2 and Methane gases are like a comforter that is wrapped around the planet. A low density of gases is like your summer comforter and a high density of gases is like your heavy winter comforter. Unfortunately, unlike your bed, it's not easy to switch from a heavy volume of gases to a light volume of gases -- if it were, then we could terraform Venus. Venus is covered in a CO2 and Methane gas atmosphere so dense that we could float a city on it and the surface is 900degC.
The issue is that many of us know there are ways to make our civilization more sustainable, but the incentives are often to maintain the status quo. Something needs to shake or break loose.
The jury has been in for a while. Humans are causing climate change. We're not going to do anything about it, future generations are just going to have to deal with it.
The way things are going, will there be a human future we actually want anyway? I'm seriously, 100%, with all my heart, believing we are going to live in a dystopian world in 20 years.
False. They didnt provide any evidence to support their claim, and given their claim is absolutely ridiculous and baseless, its ok to say: that's not going to happen. If they disagree, they can give some evidence and the conversation can move forward from there.
You haven't provided any evidence either, preferring to stick with the namecalling, so all this is just noise. Am I supposed to be wiser after reading your comment? How does it contribute at all?
I didn't name call, I called out a behavior. I still think this was the intended goal of the original commenter. I don't care if you are wiser or not, that's not my responsibility.
Even most aggressive estimates don’t put significant heating in the next 20 years. Some extreme climate events will continue getting more extreme, but lots of places are just not affected.
It's a shame you're getting downvoted, because you're probably not wrong. Even if the increase in extreme weather events/drought/heat waves is less impactful on non-tropical regions, we're still going to be dealing with a multi-billion-person climate refugee crisis in the next few decades.
I think we only have to look at society's response to the pandemic, a worldwide crisis with immediate (rather than delayed) effects directly on individuals with honestly simple, straightfoward solutions (mask up, pay people to stay home and industries to maintain capacity, vaccinate everyone), to realize that humanity is not going to be able to tackle climate change as an existential issue. We just slide into an endless resource war while a few billionaires who could have meaningfully changed the course of human history hide out in New Zealand, or try to leave the planet and die.
I doubt that's possible at this point, honestly -- this is our great filter. We had a chance, in the 70s and 80s (when the risk was frankly already fairly well-understood), but perhaps being the evolutionary top dog / intelligence comes with a greedy optimizer that prevents long-term societal thinking.
This is a fascinating comment. It caters both to fears of climate catastrophe and fears of authoritarian dystopia. Most responses to it are unaware of this duality and instinctively project one side onto it's motives.
My own biases lead me to believe it is warning of a dystopian society because of human political activity, not anthropogenic climate change. I may be wrong, and so far many of the responses are taking the opposite position.
This is a great question. You should ask the principle scientist of the study, Chris Poulsen. He has a twitter account that you can reach out to him through.
This is not my field, but my guess would be that 24,000 years ago was chosen because it corresponds to the Last Glacial Maximum. The obvious reason is that it represents the lowest global temperature within a timeframe of normal human activity, and was a recent major turning point of the global climate.
Beyond that, I'm not sure why the Last Glacial Maximum was specifically chosen as the starting point but I'm sure someone more versed in climatology may be able to comment on the significance of it.
Geeze. Climate change alarmists have been so incredibly wrong for almost two generations.
I've mentioned this before, but I live near Glacier National Park. In the early 2000s, some new screeching alarmist climate model forecasted the demise of the glaciers in the park by 2020. Signs at all the parks' entrances were erected stating this sad climate fact. But when ol' 2020 rolled around and the glaciers were still there, the signs with the climate facts were taken down with zero fanfare and zero interest in why the claim was wrong, no interest in ascertaining why the climate model failed.
Reminds me a lot of the CIA and it's hilariously worse-than-useless history. A few months before the fall of the wall and the crumbling of the Soviet empire, CIA reported that Russia was as strong as ever, a huge threat, they reported on its secret military buildups that were never in existence and this booming economy cranking out war machine stuff constantly, a real juggernaut. They were the most surprised people to find the soviet empire crumbling--they'd spent generations amping up every president that this was _the_ threat, existential, and justified all manner of ridiculous garbage. And this was just the cherry on a multi-decade ice cream sunday of failed predictions, bad intelligence, and counterproductive covert ops.
Eventually, it came to the point where the president, hilariously the son of a CIA director, had to state that their opinions were worthless, basically, before they tried to, like, improve their intelligence gathering systems.
Climate change alarmists are like post-wall CIA right now. Zero credibility. A track record that is just unbelievable--full of shrill, insane predictions over decades that have been completely disproven by basic facts and evidence.
Ice caps gone by 2000! No, wait, 75% chance they're gone by 2014! No wait, gone by 2030! Florida sunk by 2015!
For something as difficult to predict and globally observe and for something as complex as the environment, I'd say we should be very wary of anyone pushing shrill alarmism.
It should be very suspicious that the shrill alarmists seem to always have the solution which invariably involves them getting lots more money and lots more power over the carbon-spewing masses. ("Increase taxes and eat less meat to change the weather." lol)
To boot, the explanation I heard for that gives insight into the alarmist mentality. I heard that "global warming" was a bad name because every time anyone experienced a cool summer or a hardcore freezing winter, they became convinced that "global warming" was total bullshit. But, the climate alarmists argued, this was silly--climate change and its impacts are felt over decades, half-centuries, looooong periods, and so reading any particular cold summer or brutal winter was just getting mixed up in noise, short-term variance that has no impact on or indication of the trend. But then these same activists turn around immediately and blame every single hurricane and tornado and flood and forest fire and every other natural disaster on climate change, that slow-ass, barely perceptible process that I guess causes very slow bad things, very fast bad things, but has nothing to do whatsoever with mild summers or very cold winters.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 73.8 ms ] threadJust give it up, NONE of the previous climate disaster predictions came true. NOT ONE.
1) The claim that "climate change" is a problem is on its face pretty dumb (are we shooting for climate stasis?)
2) The claim that humans are causing all the change is again pretty dumb (we didn't have climate stasis prior to our industrial revolution, now did we?)
3) Most climate alarmists don't really engage much with this outside of research papers, but there's really quite a lot of debate about how much the climate is actually changing (not as easy to ascertain as it sounds), and as well how much of the change is caused by humans (it's nowhere near 100%).
4) The claim that a warmer planet is necessarily worse for humans is... strange and not supported by history (in fact, looking back through ancient civilizations, they tended to thrive and grow with warming periods, and die off, sometimes precipitously during cooling periods--the name itself, greenhouse gasses, kind of hints a bit at this--that is, whaddya grow in a greenhouse?)
So, it's not clear entirely how much humans are causing the change (and thus how much we could realistically affect it in the other direction). But it's not also clear what amount of change is ok or desirable, or even what direction we should target.
At this point, we need a large-scale geoengineering project to reduce methane and CO2 levels in the atmosphere to protect our large-scale mono-crop agriculture practices OR the survivors of the food wars can return to subsistence farming among the corpse of past human civilization.
Placing blame here is useless - it doesn't matter if it's humans. Let's say it's not humans. Great, cool, super. Do we defend civilization or not?
I mean, what if you're wrong? What if the planet gets 2C hotter and... everything's mostly fine? What if the planet gets cooler? Or what if we get the ideal (apparently) total climate stasis?
How likely are those scenarios?
In the summer, you probably have a light comforter on your bed while in the winter you probably switch to a heavier comforter. While you're asleep your bed warms up under the comforter and it doesn't cool down until you get out of bed. In the same way, the CO2 and Methane gases are like a comforter that is wrapped around the planet. A low density of gases is like your summer comforter and a high density of gases is like your heavy winter comforter. Unfortunately, unlike your bed, it's not easy to switch from a heavy volume of gases to a light volume of gases -- if it were, then we could terraform Venus. Venus is covered in a CO2 and Methane gas atmosphere so dense that we could float a city on it and the surface is 900degC.
https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-cli...
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert
I think we only have to look at society's response to the pandemic, a worldwide crisis with immediate (rather than delayed) effects directly on individuals with honestly simple, straightfoward solutions (mask up, pay people to stay home and industries to maintain capacity, vaccinate everyone), to realize that humanity is not going to be able to tackle climate change as an existential issue. We just slide into an endless resource war while a few billionaires who could have meaningfully changed the course of human history hide out in New Zealand, or try to leave the planet and die.
My own biases lead me to believe it is warning of a dystopian society because of human political activity, not anthropogenic climate change. I may be wrong, and so far many of the responses are taking the opposite position.
>In between ice ages, some lesser peaks of temperature have occurred a number of times, especially around 125,000 years ago.
>At this time, temperatures may have been about 1°C to 2°C degrees warmer than today.
>Sea level was 5 to 8 metres higher than today – a rise sufficient to inundate most of the world’s coastal cities.
>This peak was triggered by the orbital cycles.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11647-climate-myths-i... -- from 2007
This is not my field, but my guess would be that 24,000 years ago was chosen because it corresponds to the Last Glacial Maximum. The obvious reason is that it represents the lowest global temperature within a timeframe of normal human activity, and was a recent major turning point of the global climate.
Beyond that, I'm not sure why the Last Glacial Maximum was specifically chosen as the starting point but I'm sure someone more versed in climatology may be able to comment on the significance of it.
I've mentioned this before, but I live near Glacier National Park. In the early 2000s, some new screeching alarmist climate model forecasted the demise of the glaciers in the park by 2020. Signs at all the parks' entrances were erected stating this sad climate fact. But when ol' 2020 rolled around and the glaciers were still there, the signs with the climate facts were taken down with zero fanfare and zero interest in why the claim was wrong, no interest in ascertaining why the climate model failed.
Reminds me a lot of the CIA and it's hilariously worse-than-useless history. A few months before the fall of the wall and the crumbling of the Soviet empire, CIA reported that Russia was as strong as ever, a huge threat, they reported on its secret military buildups that were never in existence and this booming economy cranking out war machine stuff constantly, a real juggernaut. They were the most surprised people to find the soviet empire crumbling--they'd spent generations amping up every president that this was _the_ threat, existential, and justified all manner of ridiculous garbage. And this was just the cherry on a multi-decade ice cream sunday of failed predictions, bad intelligence, and counterproductive covert ops.
Eventually, it came to the point where the president, hilariously the son of a CIA director, had to state that their opinions were worthless, basically, before they tried to, like, improve their intelligence gathering systems.
Climate change alarmists are like post-wall CIA right now. Zero credibility. A track record that is just unbelievable--full of shrill, insane predictions over decades that have been completely disproven by basic facts and evidence.
Ice caps gone by 2000! No, wait, 75% chance they're gone by 2014! No wait, gone by 2030! Florida sunk by 2015!
For something as difficult to predict and globally observe and for something as complex as the environment, I'd say we should be very wary of anyone pushing shrill alarmism.
It should be very suspicious that the shrill alarmists seem to always have the solution which invariably involves them getting lots more money and lots more power over the carbon-spewing masses. ("Increase taxes and eat less meat to change the weather." lol)
"Fight climate change!" -> "Support climate stasis!"
LOL!
To boot, the explanation I heard for that gives insight into the alarmist mentality. I heard that "global warming" was a bad name because every time anyone experienced a cool summer or a hardcore freezing winter, they became convinced that "global warming" was total bullshit. But, the climate alarmists argued, this was silly--climate change and its impacts are felt over decades, half-centuries, looooong periods, and so reading any particular cold summer or brutal winter was just getting mixed up in noise, short-term variance that has no impact on or indication of the trend. But then these same activists turn around immediately and blame every single hurricane and tornado and flood and forest fire and every other natural disaster on climate change, that slow-ass, barely perceptible process that I guess causes very slow bad things, very fast bad things, but has nothing to do whatsoever with mild summers or very cold winters.