Considering the period of concern over global cooling (from last century), claims of "we've known this, but have pretended not to for a hundred years" are just historical revisionism. When you lie about facts in favor of pushing a "more important truth" you don't convince people. You just give people more reason to doubt other things you're claiming.
"Just don't talk about nuclear power, it's yucky, we're way past that and on to renewables + unspecified future quantum leaps in battery technology + a complete, multi-decade revamp in how our grid operates, mkay?"
(Also known as the 'environmentalist' take on tackling climate change)
The fact is that oil companies have been knowingly sabotaging the discourse and scientific process about this in a similar way that the tobacco companies kept 'having the debate' for as long as possible to not change their business model, externalities be damned.
To downplay this is the real historical revisionism and lie
Nobody is demanding anything be taken away. Scientists are reporting the results of their computer models.
The fix is cheap, easy and will only have a very mild inflationary effect. A carbon tax. The only losers are the oil industry, everyone else gains. This will actually reduce future inflation from crop failures, famines and climate refugee riots.
Who are these "intellectuals". Commentors on internet forums like yourself? Or are you one of the proud "ignorants"?
There's no "other foot" here: we all want clean air and water, healthy farms and forests, etc.
I've never heard "intellectuals" complain about the good things oil has provided: energy, nitrogen fertilizer, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other useful chemical byproducts, and so on.
Those things are not the problem. It's the undesirable consequences that are the problem. We are victims of our own success, so to speak.
(Just to give one example of how oil itself is not the problem: biodegradable plastic has been commercially available for decades. We could make e.g. plastic shopping bags that lasted only as long as they were needed, but it's cheaper to use nigh indestructible ones. We could use biodegradable plastic straws.)
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In re: "a ready and steady supply of energy", I like to remind people that the Sun is a maintenance-free fusion reactor so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from 150,000,000 km away.
Oh, for sure. A sudden ice age would definitely ruin global civilization. But that's not the issue, and the opposite of an ice age, a rapid period of warming with huge disruptions to ecosystems, is not good either. It's almost like huge disruptions to ecosystems is the problem and independent from the red team/blue team political polarization culture-war horseshit.
No it is not much about the rate of disruption, the end state we are aiming at will be painful and not much would adapt even if it would be 1000 years?! That it happens so quickly within one generation and is caused by us is icing on top..
It seems we had 5 mass extinction events on earth so far, one caused by an asteroid, and the 4 others by climate change. Sure, something will survive, regrow or be newly created.. if we go for 4°C expectations for earth to recover on its own to something similar we had now are just another 30 million years ;)
I believe it is. The rate at which iso-climate lines are moving north is faster than a lot of species can move. Most fauna could be ok by that criteria alone, but most flora can't move so rapidly (a lot of tree species can only move 10m/10years).
And when the flora goes, a lot fauna does too.
Sure, the human species will survive. It certainly did with a few million of individuals for most of the time. But I believe we're already in the 6th mass extinction event, perhaps the biggest so far.
We're going to get a lesson from nature. The only question is how tough will it be. I believe large famines, wars, and a partial civilization collapse are coming.
Yes, long-term climate cycles also exists but the important difference we’re confronted by with man-made climate versus the longer trends you refer to is that this is happening on a vastly quicker timescale, meaning that ecosystems (and our own societies) are unable to adapt. For instance on geologic timescales plants and creatures evolve, forests move, mountains sink and new reefs can grow, but when similar changes happen in the order of decades this is not just going to happen and everything relying on those ecosystems is going to have a real problem.
While the earth does indeed have its own cycles, the reason we know about them is the same reason we know we don't want to add a few degrees in a century. And not just because a timescale of "the dinosaurs" is enough for "India collides with Asia forming the Himalayas which creates a rain shadow over what is now the Gobi desert".
Claiming it's about fear and control is a very easy way to ignore it — fact is, it's much easier to create fear (for the purpose of control) with human boogiemen: post WW2 British tabloids made hay by going "Communists and Germans! The Irish! Gays! Single mothers! The disabled! Muslims! Millennials! The EU!", while mostly saying that anyone concerned about the environment (even more broadly than CO2) was scaremongering.
"Arrhenius estimated doubling CO₂ would produce a world 5℃ hotter. This, thankfully, is higher than modern calculations but not too far off, considering he wasn’t using a sophisticated computer model!"
This is talking about the variable called "equilibrium climate sensitivity". Climate sensitivity is a key question in any fact-based discussion of climate change. There are three problems with this statement:
1. ECS calculations based on empirical measurement come in far, far lower than 5 degrees, more like 1.7-2.5 degrees and this has been falling over time, e.g. measurement based estimates of ECS in 2001 were higher than they are today.
2. ECS calculations based on models (which scientists should consider weaker evidence than observational data, but don't) are extremely uncertain, with estimates ranging from 2 to 4 degrees.
3. The range of values models use for ECS are getting wider over time, not narrower as you'd expect.
So it's really tough to say that Arrhenius was close given that modern climatologists have no idea what the correct value for ECS is even though they've been studying it intensively for 40 years, that their "sophisticated computer models" disagree very deeply about the right value and this is getting worse with time, and that all those values are still too high when compared to studies that aren't modelling based.
It's also worth noting that even the headline is totally misleading. Today climate change is used as a synonym for global warming but for long periods scientists were telling the world that "climate change" meant a new ice age. As late as 1975 (when the switch from cooling to warming was well underway) Newsweek was telling readers that "To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down".
So the article is trying to make it seem like scientists have been talking about global warming for over a century, but that isn't true. We could call it misinformation, perhaps. The physics of CO2 were understood for a long time but there's so much more to the climate than just CO2 that this isn't enough to be able to make accurate predictions.
Congrats on unearthing a 1970s example of O&G disinfomation and propaganda disseminated via the pop media.
You assert it represents what scientists of the time were saying, it clearly misrepresents J. Murray Mitchell:
> Mitchell was a pioneer in investigation and understanding of climate change, and from the 1960s onwards sought to alert the public to issues of global warming.
> In 1976 he described the conjecture of global cooling as irresponsible, and around that time supported other scientists in warning of the damaging effects of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
The part I quoted isn't about Mitchell, and the article doesn't even quote Mitchell at all. It just reports what one of his studies concludes about temperature trends.
I think you've yourself been misled. Mitchell accepted global cooling was really happening and the world was indeed cooling since 1940. See for yourself, here's one of his papers published in 1975:
"In balance, the net thermal impact of all global-scale pollution (including thermal pollution) is likely to be one of warming, perhaps increasingly so after 2000 A.D. It is concluded that the cooling of climate since 1940, apparently still in progress, is a natural phenomenon plausibly related to an enhanced stratospheric loading by volcanic dust in the period"
The fact that the world got colder between 1940 and 1975(ish) was never really in dispute up until climatologists realized that they couldn't explain the contradiction between that and the greenhouse gas nature of CO2. At that point they started re-calculating old temperatures to make the cooling trend disappear, and telling people that all the stories published about their agreement in the 60s and 70s were just awful terrible journalists somehow getting what they were saying entirely backwards. To finish it off they claim that anyone who points out that this isn't true is an immoral denier who should be silenced. It's very much 1984 in real life.
> In balance, the net thermal impact of all global-scale pollution (including thermal pollution) is likely to be one of warming, perhaps increasingly so after 2000 A.D
So Mitchell was right all along! What is this so called "contradiction" that you are talking about?
The contradiction appears there, in the abstract of his paper. He realized that greenhouse gas physics should trap warmth and CO2 was going up, but accepted that the world had actually been cooling for decades. So how could he explain this contradiction? He presented a hypothesis that maybe it was a volcano-related natural phenomenon, in which cooling caused by volcano exhaust was offsetting the warming effects of CO2, and that over time CO2 would overpower volcano cooling to create rising temperatures. But it was just a guess.
The main reason this is important is for the meta-level issue of what claims about consensus really mean. Newsweek didn't really care if the world got colder or warmer, they just wanted to sell papers. Mitchell wasn't misrepresented by the article nor me, as defrost claims. The article doesn't even quote him, it simply cites temperature data from one of his studies as a way to establish what trends existed at the time. Newsweek does so accurately because that's exactly what Mitchell's data did show, as my citation of his paper establishes. By Mitchell's own words, in 1975 the world had not only been cooling for decades but was still cooling!
Now defrost might argue that the Newsweek article was deceptive because, in fact, there was at least one scientist who rejected the "ice age doom is imminent" consensus as irresponsible. Indeed, claims about consensus are always very dubious for that exact reason, it's so rarely true. By 1975 there were certainly more than just Mitchell! But a Newsweek reader of the time couldn't have known that. They were being told that scientists in general believed in global cooling. Indeed nobody could deny the world was cooling, as that's clearly what the facts showed, so you'd have been a cooling denier if you'd said otherwise. If anyone had objected by raising Mitchell as a counter-example they'd have been told he was fringe, that his theories were outside the mainstream, that he was delaying action to prepare for the ice age and that even he accepted long term global cooling was real!
It can all be very confusing because to learn anything from this, you have to learn to doubt what you "know" is right based on what a handful of people have told you other people believe. Which is hard! But there's an even more confusing meta-level issue. Look at modern graphs of temperature:
Look at the period between 1940 and 1975. The cooling Mitchell was writing about, that Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, that so many academics researched and reported on, that governments funded investigations into, that people proposed covering the Arctic with coal dust to fight - it's gone. The graph is flat. According to modern climatologists the cooling trend Mitchell was trying to explain with volcanos never existed at all ... and anyone who says otherwise is a malicious liar.
> According to modern climatologists the cooling trend Mitchell was trying to explain with volcanos never existed at all ... and anyone who says otherwise is a malicious liar
Who are the modern climatologists that are saying that the data recorded and reported by Mitchell does not exist? Are you saying that the NASA data graph is false for 1940-1975? I couldn't find any graph in Mitchell's paper.
Yes, it's been changed. Mitchell's paper doesn't have a graph but there are plenty that do. On mobile now but if you research this topic (don't use Google) you can find graphs that show the per year deltas from older data sources to newer. It's not a secret they do this, they admit it when people find out, but it's never brought up by those who are pushing doom for obvious reasons (+the edits specifically created a simple warming trend).
In this case you don't actually need a graph anyway, because the editing in that period is so extreme. Just look at his abstract. He says the world was cooling since 1940 and still is in 1975. Obviously that statement makes no sense if you look at modern databases during the period. To understand why he said that you have to look at older graphs, before climatology became so corrupted. They do indeed show a step and decades long fall in temperatures.
Could you define how long "for long periods" is and who those Scientists were?
It is really funny how the "but they told us its cooling" thing is actually only widely known and talked in the English speaking parts of the world (mainly the US). Everywhere else in the world nobody even knows about this argument. There might be a reason for that.
Also love you linking to a Newsweek article instead of some relevant papers that detail this cooling trend and how it was predicted. I mean its not a meme at all how popular Media misunderstands science and only reports on the most surprising aspects to get people to buy their publications.
See my comment below for example links to scientific papers talking about the cooling trend.
I don't really see why lack of familiarity with the historical facts in some parts of the world should reflect badly on the people who do know them. At any rate, it's not a big surprise. English is the de-facto language of science, the English speaking world has a stronger tradition of free speech and simply has more people who can research obscure topics vs most languages.
Also, look at where the global temperature datasets are produced - it's all US and UK universities and agencies. Historical temperature data for much of the 19th and 20th centuries comes primarily from US sources, because for much of the 20th century the rest of the world wasn't running organized weather station networks at all - rest of the world was either dirt poor, being ravaged by world wars or undergoing communist revolutions. The USA has a large scale weather station network dating back to the Victorian era. It also launched lots of weather satellites in the 70s.
What's weird is that climate cooling take. I use to read it a lot and took it as truth, but quite recently i did a research project on a French engineer/scientist, whit basically created the green political movement in the 70s. And i learned that this global cooling is totally false, and never existed at least in my country. So I really thought it was just shills and grifters who managed to fool me for quite some time, but it seems that in the US, this is taken quite seriously.
So to be clear: this global cooling 'research' did not exist. We founded research on temperature change in the 60s and on the prior earth climate, adaptation and means of surviving a global cooling, but this was driven by fear of a nuclear winter. All the global cooling 'research' was journalist bullshit at best.
It’s striking to me that Hacker News has a significant audience of flat earthers. Don’t look up, right? Let’s be clear, human caused climate change is very real. Rigorous science confirms this and CO2 + methane levels are now driving very visible and catastrophic weather all over the world.
That's a bad review. The movie was a satire, it's not supposed to make sense like a normal movie would, rather it's holding up a funhouse mirror to current events.
For example, SA presents as a contradiction:
> It depicts elites as simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent.
But this is exactly what we see in the real world. Take the iPhone for example: a marvel of technology with a cretinous supply chain and amoral-at-best business model. Or VW, great cars but we could do without the emissions scandal. Or the tech industry, great tech (mostly) but they turn around and have a that "no poaching" scandal. Bankers have their LIBOR scandal, etc. Really, "simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent" is the order of the day, yeah?
You realise the nuance is in blaming where the methane production is coming from as well as the c02. There's a huge amount of shifting the "who is going to take any responsibility" which has made this pointlessly political and just wastes time and effort.
This isn't helped by certain parties "reviewing" scientific data until it's massaged into narratives that they can push. (Again on all sides of whatever political spectrum you want to draw)
Unfortunately few take a step back and realise we need to try to get people to stop pointing fingers and work together, but that doesn't sell news, allow people to feel righteous or give people the ability to say "I told you". But it gets the job done.
It's asif politics is full of the worst of middle managers unfortunately.
I wonder what it is that people actually want? That's the part I can never figure out, and they never seem to be able to articulate, at least truthfully.
Like, I'm fine to say that I'd be OK to see this planet burned to the ground once I've had my fun with it. I mean, I feel a bit sorry for the humans who might come after, but that's a problem I'm not going to contribute to, so whatever. This seems to be the mainstream opinion as well, based on our current trajectory and actions, but it's gauche to say it plainly and so we create rationalizations to see ourselves as better people.
> This seems to be the mainstream opinion as well,
I don't agree with you.
There are many people who do care about future generations.
And maybe there are other people that share my opinion:
1) future generations deserve our attention and our best efforts, but only the efforts that can have an actual impact are worth to be taken. Going back to Stone Age for the others to keep enjoying modern comfort and spoiling my efforts any way? No, thanks! Convincing peoples around the world to formally engage in reducing emissions and then respecting the agreement? Sign me in!
2) despite our best efforts, we know that climate change is here to stay. Let's stop pretending that we can revert it in a couple of years! We are having several droughts, and it's likely they will be back next year: we need to act during this winter to save some water for next summer; we have to stop now to export produce from California. Not in twenty years, not in five years, but now! The ocean level is going up, and it will keep going up: stop building on the coast, stop moving to coastal cities built on flat terrain. Stop it now!
> > This seems to be the mainstream opinion as well, > I don't agree with you.
Unfortunately I'd have to agree with the original author here.
People gest and make empty vacuous statements on social media _a lot_. People are also unwilling to change or take on a small amount of responsibility. These 2 things are in direct conflict.
Again my strongest condemnation of this is people only now care about power and fuel efficiency at a large level now that Putin has caused the price to rise. Putin by his actions in the last few months has done more to sway public ACTION here than 30 years of social media posts and politicians. This is a damning sad statement on how much people honestly care about impacting change in the world.
Climate change can not be solved by individual action. It's a ridiculous idea to propose this in the first place. Governments are supposed to solve Tragedy of the Commons through regulation. The Common who takes it on himself will lose everything to gain nothing.
government intervention such ad carbon tax and EV subsidies and actions like the green new deal are what is needed.
> Climate change can not be solved by individual action. It's a ridiculous idea to propose this in the first place.
I... No
Again please stop focusing on what I'm not saying.
And btw there are huge environmental impacts that can be made that build up from bet actions of individuals and societal change. Ignoring that is frankly inconsistent or dishonest. It's a different scale to Chinas industrial pollution but I'm bout even talking about that.
Again I'm talking about the way people have these things explained and educated. When I mention the education here is damaged and being self defeatist I get 4 or 5 people explaining how climate policy does or should work show exactly how people "think good".
Again I'm saying you misrepresent something that will go on for years and people will remember you as a liar even if you were exaggerating a truth. Exactly because that's what lying is.
Again Putin has done more to make the west energy conservative in a few months than our leaders in decades. I want to nominate him for the Nobel peace prize.
Really, thank you for posting a fact-based statement without attaching your political opinion. I think facts would be accepted more easily if there were presented to the general public without attaching the personal opinion of the writer.
There has always been catastropic weather. The climate has always been changing. The current tag line is 'climate change is accelerating due to human released CO2.'
I believe human released CO2 is more or less inconsequential. We face far bigger problems with industrial chemical pollution. Put your money where your mouth is and quit buy any good made from materials from environmentally hostile countries. Advocate for banning imports from environmental destroyers.
As long as we keep talking about CO2, we're not going to make any progress and we're going to exhaust all of our other precious resources long before we burn to death.
What is not being posted in news often enough are the options that we have to mitigate the effects. the only thing i read is that we need yo drive down co2. fact is: we are not gonna reach the targets in a reasonable timeframe. hence, we must start preparing to mitigate effects. instead we are caught by climate catastrophies like the current draught in europe, us and china and we are running around like headless chicken.
let us setup multi generational projects on international scale to develop mitigations.
this os mot being covered well enough in media. the only thing i see in 80% of the articles is status quo reporting of climate change effects (fires, draughts, rain) and YET ANOTHER climate change warning... and ofc some aggressive climate terrorists that are getting too much coverage, too.
I actually disagree, I think we’re conflating dictatorships and social cohesion. Concerted efforts have functioned better under social cohesion(the NHS, social security, etc), but social cohesion isn’t valuable in a modern system because it’s not an efficient use of labor (think: young people leaving their extended families for work elsewhere, not inheriting family farms and businesses which are then bought by conglomerates).
Planning for predictable disasters and response are not things we prioritize. Shock is an acceptable repeated response to catastrophic failures, quarterly thinking traps, growth assumptions. Multigenerational projects have no chance, we cant even get a decade of continuity.
We fail to plan even for hurricanes adequately or proportionately.
Hurricane disaster response isn’t simply ineffective, it is subject to outside pressures which should never be a part of the process. Governments which intentionally obscure how many deaths have occurred, how costly the damage, all made worse as preventive actions are deemed too costly.
Prevention needs to include building standards which refactor building codes to survive the conditions of their particular environment.
Zoning, preventing new construction in areas which need to be rebuilt every time hurricane knocks them over.
Insurance companies pressure local governments and organizations to score category 5 hurricanes as 4 to avoid paying out their customers. Governments overly concerned with minimizing the damage in order to hide incompetence and save face.
Developers charm local, state, and federal officials to keep building costs low and keep producing structures which are cheaply made and begin to fall apart the minute they are finished being built.
Developers who discourage or minimize transparency concerning risks.
People have their dream homes built believing they will last longer than a 30 year mortgage when in reality these homes will need significant interventions within 10 years.
Often the dialog prioritizes who is at fault before and above actually fixing or responding to the events and helping the people effected.
There is a time for blame and a time for action. When and directly after a disaster is the time for action, blame must be analyzed during response, post mortem must taken seriously, organizations, governments, and corporations must be held to account once those affected are relieved, stabilized.
Blame however is usually addressed during the crisis this allows the framing to be controlled by private interests.
One problem that must be overcome in the US are inappropriate cabinet departments. We saw many examples of this during the pandemic. Some goals are too important to have leadership that is subject to change every 4-8 years. Some departments must be shielded from administration instability issues.
Reactive approaches to a crisis are expensive, more expensive than adequate planning. Certain areas in Florida are repeatedly rebuilt at great cost, costs which could be much lower when proactive planning is prioritized equally with response.
Bad at response and no planning seem to be accepted as too ingrained to change. This is not of course true.
What mitigations are there that do not target greenhouse gas emissions, how could those be simpler or cheaper than what we already know to do? Serious question!
I don't think the point is "simpler or cheaper", I think the point is that, say, widespread famine under our current production regime is inevitable. Let's talk about this now, so we can at least do SOMETHING about it, instead of being caught flat-footed when it happens and having no options left.
Or continued serious drought, or climate migration, or massive heat die-offs, etc. Better to face reality and prepare SOME kind of response, and the earlier we do, the better we can mitigate it.
But its happening already right now, it will just become very much worse over the next three to six generations.. it is also clear what we would need to mitigate right now.. not doing it is robbing us of any future options.
But I'm still wanting and waiting to here just one concrete option (which if not simpler nor cheaper than preventing further greenhouse gas emissions I'm not sure why we would want to do those then at all) that could help the e.g. surely unavoidable famine problem that we will encounter if world cements its path towards 3-4°C? There is just none even imaginable..
> Or continued serious drought, or climate migration, or massive heat die-offs, etc.
You'd have to admit that there are significant effects first. And you'd probably have to admit that they're going to get worse. And you'd have to expect that some mitigation is going to be effective.
All of which are a tall order at this point. We're still talking about buying a new car just because, or flying off to some far off land just for fun. "The news" is not going to get serious about this until we do. In the meantime, it'll be catchy headlines and clickbait as usual.
> yo drive down co2. fact is: we are not gonna reach the targets in a reasonable timeframe.
The solution to climate change is very cheap and simple. It is a carbon tax. It is also not difficult to implement at all and will cause only modest inflation.
However, the oil industry is a huge influence on governments all over the world and will throw everything at preventing this from happening.
Imagine for a moment that all of the carbon taxes were directed to subsidize EV and solar. All if us would be driving cheap EVs and getting 90% of our electricity from solar sources.
Wondering what your approach is to convince Nigerians and Indians on including a carbon tax and making their struggle into the middle class even more expensive :)
It was very eye opening to see how many groups and individuals who "just want to have a debate" on the reality of climate change are funded by fossil fuel companies[1][2][3][4]. We are being lied to, and it's working. Just see the first few comments in reply to this article.
Your first link claims Koch Industries is "a little-known, privately owned US oil company". That's the sort of lie you've got to expect from the Guardian. Quoting Wikipedia:
"Koch Industries, Inc. (/ˈkoʊk/) is an American privately held multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill.[2] Its subsidiaries are involved in the manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizer, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, cloud computing, finance, commodity market trading, and investments. Koch owns Flint Hills Resources, Georgia-Pacific, Guardian Industries, Infor, Invista, KBX, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, Koch Engineered Solutions, Koch Investments Group, Koch Minerals & Trading, and Molex. The firm employs 122,000 people in 60 countries, with about half of its business in the United States"
The Guardian states that the Koch brothers aren't directly funding climate related stuff, but they do fund libertarian and conservative groups. This is, in their eyes, immoral.
Is it terrible for wealthy billionaires to fund people with particular perspectives on what to do about the climate? If you believe so then your biggest criticism must be in the other direction, because the money flows to support pro-doom climate journalism are vast. The Gates Foundation literally directly gives money to news companies that can only be used to hire people to write about climate and vaccines (in his preferred direction). Amongst the recipients of Gates' largesse is, of course, the Guardian.
"I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups."
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. When you look at the people who actually study this stuff for a living there is very little disagreement about the nature of the problem and the direction things are headed. Most of the controversy and the oft-regurgitated talking points about "solar cycles", "ice age", "but everyone thought it was global cooling in the 70s", etc seem to originate from the same few sources.
I agree that journalists suck and are easily manipulated. But the overwhelming scientific evidence seems to point in one direction and it's not good.
It's ok to disagree on policy, but the global warming "skeptic" game plan has been to disagree on reality.
People keep forgetting how science works when it's convenient for them to do so. In the 70s Time reported scientists concerned with global cooling. Yes, some scientists were concerned about global cooling, but there was no scientific consensus. It was a scientific discussion. Now of course people say "scientists said" something back then and "scientists are saying something different" today - you just can't trust those darned scientists! Which of course simply isn't true but even if it were - so what? The evidence is the evidence.
It should in principle be okay to disagree with whatever posture you like, just it should be okay for billionaires to fund the viewpoints of their choice if other billionaires can fund more dominant viewpoints of their choice without problems. I'd say it's you who misses the forest for the trees, and the other poster's main point, which to my reading was that if the Gates Foundation (and many others) can funnel billions to a certain climate science/policy stance, it's nothing short of hypocritical for hysteria to be devoted on people like the Koch brothers for doing the same in a different direction.
On a final note, while the basic scientific consensus that human caused climate change is a real thing seems quite firmly settled, there are many details and disagreements that no self-respecting scientist can claim don't exist. There are enough of these for plenty of healthy debate, even on major points, to be a good thing, as it almost always is on most topics. There's also no shortage of self-interested politics being mixed into narratives pushing for aggressive climate change responses. This is rarely conducive to completely honest discourse from either side of the table.
What are you talking about the most controversy is that scientist are refusing to answer questions sceptics have. Your talking points are just well poison used to make critiques look stupid. Like what is the margin of error of the climate data. They don't give any and just say they don't need too, they are perfect. Which can easily be disproven.
Even Bill Gates criticized that scientist don't have an answer to "cloud formations" in his TED Talk about climate change. Clouds just don't exist in climate models, because apparently it's just to complicated.
If you want metaphysical certitude, ask your preferred religious leader and then ignore all the other religious leaders who provide metaphysical certitude that contradicts your preferred religious leader.
A good scientist will not provide you with guarantees, because they know that they are limited, imperfect humans who are doing the best with the information and models they have. Many people will interpret this as refusing to answer questions.
The fact that we don't have a perfect understanding of climate does not suggest to me that we're free to alter the gas composition of our atmosphere any way we choose - I'd think the opposite - we should be careful when making changes to the Earth when we do not fully understand the consequences.
> Is it terrible for wealthy billionaires to fund people with particular perspectives on what to do about the climate?
The vagueness here is problematic. Not all "particular perspectives" are the same. It matters if the "particular perspectives" were rational and respectful of the science.
If that's important to you, then you should also be aware that many of the greens and various anti-nuke groups from the 1980s and onwards were funded by the Soviets.
Some of these details can be found in books like "The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War".
Reviews of that book don't seem to mention any original source revelations about funding the western political movements. As it's not openly accessible this would need a citation from the book for credibility I think.
I think nuclear power is great and would go a long way to solving our energy needs, so I'm not sure how that's relevant. Moreover, the soviets stopped existing in 1992, so their influence 30 years later is limited.
And the US funded countless parties and organisations that could effect a more favorable situation to the US in other countries. None of this is surprising. The important issue is holding parties accountable for the damage done. Fossil fuel companies should owe massive reparations.
I'd really like a debate to be possible, but it doesn't seem so.
On one side, you have the idiots who don't "believe in science", as if facts were something to believe in rather than acknowledge.
On the other side, you have too many people confusing science with politics.
Yes, the temperature is going up. Yes, we are guilty. Yes, fossil fuels play a fundamental role. No, the only answer is not "let's reduce fossil fuel consumption".
Sure, reducing fossil fuel consumption is a valid proposal, but like any other proposal it has to be carefully evaluated in terms of (monetary and non-monetary) costs and benefits. Do you know why we are consuming so many fossil fuels? Because, as soon as the stem engine was invented, people found out that life got instantly better! If we found a way to reduce emissions without impacting our comfort, that would be perfect. Unfortunately, we are far from there.
In the end, as this is a planetary issue, and as we know very well the tragedy of the common, it's fundamental that we move all together in the same direction.
But those people who spit nonsense like "It's too late, stop C02", without ever wondering why C02 is emitted in the first place, and without realizing how illogic it is to claim a solution exists to a problem for which "it's too late", do not make very charismatic leaders that the world is ready to follow.
It is definitely time that feelings are taken off the table and rationality is applied to the most serious concern for the future of humanity.
> No, the only answer is not "let's reduce fossil fuel consumption".
There's really no other option though, there are pretty solid reasons rooted in basic physics why CO2 capture/scrubbing are not feasible at a large enough scale to really matter, geoengineering proposals are unproven, expensive and high risk, and the cost of attempting to adapt to the sorts of temperature and sea level changes expected to take place over the next few 100 years if we don't reduce emissions would be measured in innumerable human and non- human lives. Actually we'll likely need all 4 strategies, but replacing fossil-fuel energy sources with largely carbon neutral ones is almost certainly the simplest and cheapest, and if we'd started doing so 30 or 40 years ago there'd probably be little to worry about by now.
Your answer reflects the dogmatic view that too often is attached to otherwise serious reports and articles.
You are technically correct that reducing emissions is the only way to impact the temperature raising, but why do people think that stopping global warming is the only option? Why do you think that embracing it is not possible?
Whatever we do, we know that global warming is not going to disappear in a matter of years, and global cooling is at least several decades in the future. We must learn anyway to live with the current climate, so we can choose how much we want to give up of the modern way of living for how many fewer degrees.
How much of the IPCC report have you read? If temperatures are allowed to increase 5 or 6 degrees the changes would be catastrophic, even without considering the very real possibility of tipping points triggering run away climate change that would make the planet entirely uninhabitable. There's nothing dogmatic about it, this is our absolute best scientific understanding at this point in time. There are various hypotheses around that allow for the possibility of negative feedbacks that will reduce the likelihood of catastrophe, but so far none have stood up to testing well enough to gain any more than fringe acceptance. I desperately hope somehow one of them turns out to be right, but that's no basis for sensible policy.
> Why do you think that embracing it is not possible?
We need to learn to stop worrying and to love climate change?
Because it will destruct significant portions of inhabited land? Because we now can have a marina where once were densely inhabited cities? Because those surviving the famines and wars will have a low BMI?
Your comment is the most stupid shilling I read in a while. How about embracing a truck on the highway?
I'm not saying it will be nice. I'm just reminding that current science states that global warming is here to stay.
> Because we now can have a marina where once were densely inhabited cities?
I don't agree with your "can". We will have a marina where today are densely inhabited cities. No shouting "stop fossil fuels", no actual stopping fossil fuels will prevent huge cities to disappear.
We can (and must) avoid the uber-super catastrophe, but part of the problem is that the situation is much worse than most people appreciate.
There is no alternative to learning to cope with global warming.
Apparently everyone alive today were also alive in the 70s and reading the latest scientific reports from climate journals. They somehow also managed to miss all the papers on global warming, while the 2 papers on cooling left a huge impression.
They all insisted that the world was cooling because that's what official data at the time showed. Only some insisted it was or could be a problem, but of course those were the ones that got media and political attention.
The same is true today. Almost all scientists believe the world is warming. Only some extrapolate that into a crisis, but those are the ones who get media and political attention.
There are lots of claims being made in this thread that aren't true, e.g.
- only two papers talking about global cooling (wrong)
- journalists were inverting what scientists believed (wrong)
- there was no consensus on cooling (wrong; see how none of the papers discussing the cooling trend note any disagreement on its existence)
and so on. For examples of media reports and scientific papers talking about global cooling see my other posts.
The 50s and 60s were also full of reports on global cooling. Temperatures started dropping from the 1940s by the data they used back then (these days that fall has been edited out).
But there's a deeper problem with the point you're trying to make here. You claim the reports didn't reflect the scientific consensus. Really? Go read those reports. They do claim they were reporting the consensus. To the extent they admitted the existence of uncertainty it was uncertainty of the form, we don't know why temperatures are falling, we don't know how bad it'll get but it'll probably be bad, etc.
So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't? Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway? Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that? What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could?
Here's some quotes from articles published in the 60s and 70s [1]
New York Times, 1961: "Scientists agree world is colder. After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder"
Washington Post, 1970: "Get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come. That's the long long range forecast being given out by climatologists".
New York Times, July 1970: "The US and the Soviet Union are mounting large scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid." (this one also discusses geo-engineering with the goal of melting the poles)
Letter to the US President, 1972: "we feel obliged to inform you of the results of the recent scientific conference held here recently ... a global deterioration of climate by an order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by mankind is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has a natural cause"
The Post-Crescent, 1973: "'Clearly we are living in an unusual time and cannot, based on past evidence, expect the present warm age to last much longer' [said] Imbrie, [who] is a part of CLIMPA, a new three institution climate research team (Brown, Columbia and Oregon State Universities) engaged in a global study of climactic change under the sponsorship of NSF-IDOE".
Uh, why are you linking a lot of NY times and random letters. You are aware that news media often misunderstands science or gets it wrong by amplifying the most surprising and interesting conclusions one might take from research?
This whole "they told us the world is cooling" thing is an almost completely US-only phenomenon.
This is a big part of the problem. I was a child in the 70's and 80's, and it was a constant drumbeat about how climate change was going to freeze the planet.
It was rather hard to take it seriously when the narrative suddenly shifted to how climate change was going to melt the planet.
I never hear discussion about the discrepancy, so the whole thing has been quite a head-scratcher!
well the takeaway is to not trust news media to report on science correctly and be doubly sceptical when its interesting or "newsworthy" results.
That means there never was a discrepancy - it was just interesting so the news media reported on it. If you want an explanation of it you should not look with climate science - look at media studies or may be publications about great advertisement campaigns.
To me the whole thing shows parallels to the is smoking bad for your health thing. If doctors are undecided it cannot be too bad - right?
Also I can at least confirm from me being German and of similar age that the whole thing was not a thing in Germany at all. By asking a friend from the UK I can at least suspect that it wasn't prevalent there either (he knows about it but that is from US-sources).
> So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't?
Doch[0]. Todays newspaper reports are also generally disconnected from reality. To illustrate with a tech news story as this is a tech news site, I saw one news story about the Raspberry Pi which had more errors than sentences, including the price, the OS, the RAM, the processor, the country of manufacture, and claimed it came with a hard drive. In general this problem is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
> Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway?
You can try doing a poll of the scientists or their publications and seeing what those say.
In fact, it's the scientists' own work doing this, and absolutely not the newspapers, which make me aware of the actual scientific consensus.
Though I should point out that this whole concept only matters if you're specifically trying to study the social dynamics of the scientist themselves (and those consuming their work) rather than the actual science itself — while this seems to be the case for you, I'd like you to ask yourself if that's the right question to be asking.
> Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that?
Yes. Also, as scientists exist in the physical world, you can try email and such.
> What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could?
Which "they" is this? The newspapers again? Because scientist absolutely don't say it's impossible for a virus to escape from a lab in general, including any who are also saying there's no evidence in favour of any specific outbreak *actually* being caused by that.
"while this seems to be the case for you, I'd like you to ask yourself if that's the right question to be asking."
I don't actually care about the social dynamics of scientists, because since the start of COVID I've developed a strong cynicism about all academic reliability, and so really wish that No True Scientist type arguments would go away. They're boring and even if an academic consensus did exist (it doesn't) I wouldn't care anyway.
But look at my other top level post in this thread. It makes two points. One is a technical point about ECS ranges. The other is about the way the article tries to make it seem like there's been a century-long consensus of scientists. The first is more important, but the replies and arguments are all about the second. Nobody seems to care about ECS. They're all about what some random guy whose data was cited in an article thinks, and whether I'm trying to deliberately mislead people.
So, arguments about what scientists as a group do/did believe are unavoidable because so many people have developed extreme views like Net Zero on the back of reading in the Guardian that all scientists agree on <some prediction>. You can argue about the scientific details of the claims, and that's really important, but it's of limited use because most people aren't basing their views on science anyway. For people who say look, just give me the 10 second summary of what the experts think, the only thing that can shift their view is by showing that the experts actually aren't expert at all.
The global cooling thing is therefore important, not because people aren't allowed to be wrong or change their mind - they are and they can - but because when that happens on a large scale, we'd expect to see some sort of post mortem where they collectively study why so many bold predictions were made that they later recanted. No such reflective learning process has ever happened. This raises questions about how genuine their expertise really is. Instead, as I and others document elsewhere, what they actually did is try to rewrite the past to claim global cooling was never a thing at all. They even edited temperature graphs to erase the cooling entirely. Then when it's pointed out that this isn't true using archival evidence, the claim changes to be that journalists were - inexplicably, as a group - engaged in a vast conspiracy to s/warming/cooling/g in everything scientists said. This claim is implausible, it's also literally a conspiracy theory, except one with no motive and no proof that it's real.
So yeah it'd be great to talk about the science more but there's little appetite for it here. They want to talk about social dynamics.
W.R.T. virology, how many virologists objected to the famous Lancet Letter in which dozens of scientists said "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin ... Scientists from multiple countries .... overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife"? Zero? One? A consensus of people and institutions like that is worthless.
You only even know the term ECS because scientists are in fact talking about it.
> the Guardian
Are a newspaper and therefore misrepresent everything (if not literally then at least a lot of stuff). Did you know the Guardian's nickname is "Grauniad" because of its early reputation for frequent typographical errors, including misspelling its own name as "The Gaurdian"?
> the only thing that can shift their view is by showing that the experts actually aren't expert at all.
I doubt it, you're still reacting like the stuff the newspapers are publishing is representative of the domains of discussion despite me already referencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. (In fairness, it got that name precisely because of how rapidly people, or at least how fast Michael Crichton, forgot how bad newspapers are at reality).
> we'd expect to see some sort of post mortem where they collectively study why so many bold predictions were made that they later recanted. No such reflective learning process has ever happened.
Indeed. But, Gell-Mann amnesia effect. People keep trusting newspapers. It's the newspapers who keep getting stuff wrong, and it isn't merely science where they get things badly wrong in their reporting. Look at what the newspapers say about your area of expertise.
You do have an area of expertise, I assume?
Look at what any of those newspapers say about your area of expertise. Are the newspapers wrong? Are they "wet pavements cause rain" level wrong? It happens.
> Then when it's pointed out that this isn't true using archival evidence
There are archives of scientific publications, not just newspapers. This backs up what the scientists are saying and not what the newspapers are saying and have previously said (one case I saw "live" about a decade ago, climate scientists said one thing, then a UK tabloid said basically the opposite but claimed to be quoting them).
> the claim changes to be that journalists were - inexplicably, as a group - engaged in a vast conspiracy to s/warming/cooling/g in everything scientists said.
More that they make stuff up and are works of fiction that are at most loosely inspired by reality.
> This claim is implausible, it's also literally a conspiracy theory, except one with no motive
Newspapers are paid in proportion to the drama not the factuality.
> and no proof that it's real.
Except for all the published archives of all the scientific journals reproduced in most university libraries.
> "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin ... Scientists from multiple countries .... overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife"?
Literally none of what you're quoting there says it's impossible for a virus to leak from a lab. It says the evidence in this case is that it almost certainly didn't, not that it couldn't. Those are importantly different things, especially given what else the conspiracy theories at the time were trying to claim.
> A consensus of people and institutions like that is worthless.
You must consider that to have been a good argument, but I don't see why.
"There are archives of scientific publications, not just newspapers. This backs up what the scientists are saying and not what the newspapers are saying"
OK, let's check. Here are just a handful of scientific papers from the 60s and 70s talking about global cooling that I pulled off Google Scholar in five minutes. By the way, notice how every single one treats the existence of a long term cooling trend as unarguable, undisputed fact and then observe that modern climatologists present long term temperature data that simply erases the trend all these older scientists were talking about: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
"Suggestions by several previous authors to the effect that the apparent worldwide cooling of climate in recent decades is attributable to large-scale increases of particulate pollution of the atmosphere by human activities are not supported by this analysis"
"It is concluded that the cooling of climate since 1940, apparently still in progress, is a natural phenomenon plausibly related to an enhanced stratospheric loading by volcanic dust in the period"
"The regions that would be most severely affected by a continuation of the cooling trend to the year 2000 would be the higher latitudes (above 50 degrees) where spring wheat is grown and the warm band below 30 degrees latitude where rice is the principal grain crop."
"If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climatic change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide. By analogy with similar events in the past, the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out."
"The mean temperature for the Northern Hemisphere had a warming trend from 1890 to 1950 and a cooling trend since 1950. The eastern and central United States had colder temperatures in 1961–1970 than in 1931–1960"
"There is mounting evidence that the bad climate of 1972 may be the forerunner of a long series of less favourable agricultural crop years that lie ahead for most of the world. Thus widespread food shortages threaten just at the same time that populations are growing to new...
Sadly the fact that it HAS been written about for so long just fuels the fire (no pun intended) for the sceptics.
Something I often hear when trying to talk to people who refuse to believe the impact we have:
"See these domsday prophets have been ranting about this for over a century and we're still here enjoying life!"
This just makes the problem worse because little remember this 30 years later and think you're a liar or idiot because you pushed exaggerated claims.
In the 80s in the UK acid rain was hyped up, in the 90s it was 20 years of oil reserves in the education system.
Both now have generated adults distrusting education because they're not an academic and they just remember what a fool told them at face value without nuance.
One of the biggest recently being reports that we will have millions dead unless X which doesn't match reality which is just going to create more anti intellectual fear
Acid rain was hyped up because it was a real problem and was fixed by tighter emissions standards[1]. Same with the ozone layer hole, an issue I heard a lot about as a kid, which was fixed by regulating CFCs[2]. These are examples of successfully tackling an issue and largely solving it, not "panicking over nothing".
> Overall, the program's cap and trade program has been successful in achieving its goals. Since the 1990s, SO2 emissions have dropped 40%, and according to the Pacific Research Institute, acid rain levels have dropped 65% since 1976.[43][44] Conventional regulation was used in the European Union, which saw a decrease of over 70% in SO2 emissions during the same time period.[45]
This default reactive stance causes pointless arguments and discussion as I'm trying to demonstrate.
Yes there were 200% valid concerns. But this lead more to something close to hysteria than actual communication.
These concerns turned into teaching kids that the environment is going to die. The "unless nothing changes" gets lost in the discussion with 90% of non science teachers. In the same way that "emmissions have fallen" is on page 23 and is not front-page news.
The net result of this, although well intended. Is that most people are taught the headlines which turn into "watch out for acid rain". And now 40 years on they are even more confused and distrusting given the inconsistent messaging around this.
(News flash the oceans are still getting more acidic, almost no effort has been made here imo, but I digress)
Bad communication on these topics is more dangerous than not getting public approval. Bad communication around fossil fuels spreads distrust on the topic of conversation. (Again I remember well meaning teachers saying fuels would dry up by 2010 when I was in school)
Bad communication on climate change or global warming (notice how they don't use that latter phrase in outreach now) causes distrust here. Same goes for healthcare, 5G and the list goes on.
There will always be people who disagree. Trying to reach 100% is also futile. The communication should be straightforward clear and consistent and it's falling short of that by a long way.
The "just trust the science" is exactly the same call to authority as "this book says throw them off buildings". It helps nobody. But it happens at _all_ levels of outreach and bad education because people get afraid to say "good point, I don't know".
Yes, Im painfully aware of this. Christ I wouldn't be making the point of I wasn't this aware of it! (My own personal anger aside here)
I have a strong educational background and a head on my shoulders. However from the mainstream public perception it just "disappeared one day" and transformed into "fossil fuels will be gone" which turned into "global warming" which is now "climate change".
This is obviously complete nonsense to anyone with a science background but is the result of decades of broken outreach combined with poor public education.
Why do you think it's nonsense? There are at least two competing narratives about climate change:
1. It's huge, an emergency and we're all basically fucked, in fact there's nothing we can do the problem is so vast.
2. It's actually not that big of a deal, most of the warming is natural cycles, a bit is human made but we're not sure how much, a mix of changing power sources and adaptation is entirely possible and if anything the path we're already on. There are likely bigger environment problems to focus on.
The second is the position you'd expect people to take having seen environmental problems be fixed without much fuss in the past. And obviously not every academic "crisis" is fixed via regulation. Think about Limits to Growth and all the claims that the world would run out of food that were popular in the 70s and 80s, or really for much longer than that. Governments didn't do much there and yet there was no crisis in the end, in fact we ended up with a crisis of obesity.
I'm not talking about the "narratives" around the "conversation".
The first problem is that this changes as it's almost 110% political.
The comment I'm making is that bad education causes problems 10-20 years down the line. Inconsistent exaggerated stories which are not presented in context are dangerous and in the case of multi-genrrational issues undermine the whole effort to get anything done.
Talking about the "we'll run out of food" as another example is showing how people don't trust the people saying this. The problem here is that the word "academic" often has to be put in quotes. It's so doo-gooder pro science but who shouts a lot and causes more problems for researchers. (For another example most of my time doing outreach is undoing the damage caused by fools "explaining" the highs boson)
I'm already trying to imagine how society will adapt with climate change. I see mostly rich people shielding themselves from the hot climate in developed countries and feeding themselves.
Meanwhile, other countries are going to be left to die or left to generalized social unrest, drought and hunger. Massive migrations with a massive security apparatus. I'm guessing human population will fall below two billion or less before 2080 or before, until we can build a green industry while protecting people from this new climate.
I don't think it will be a "collapse" like it's often talked about by the collapse movement, but it will be a slow disaster, which will be much more "tolerable" and avoid dangerous, unstable crises or large conflicts. Intelligence agencies are going to carefully plan all of this.
Hawks are going to say "it won't be so bad" and that "only the fittest shall survive". It won't be very civilized, but individualism will go away and be replaced by communities who focus on survival at the expense of outgroups. It will probably look like dystopian movies, minus the glory, the heroes and the adventure.
I notice that a lot of past predictions took the form "if we don't hit metric X by time T1, then easily-observable bad thing Y will happen by time T2". These were concrete, falsifiable (assuming we don't actually hit the metric in question, which in practice we never did), and basically left no room for interpretation. These days, the predictions we get seem way more wishy-washy and completely unfalsifiable.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadAnd that something being banning lawn mowers...
I'd really be more empathetic to the ones who will need to inhabit this future and not turn this into ridicule, even if you won't be there then..
(Also known as the 'environmentalist' take on tackling climate change)
To downplay this is the real historical revisionism and lie
The fix is cheap, easy and will only have a very mild inflationary effect. A carbon tax. The only losers are the oil industry, everyone else gains. This will actually reduce future inflation from crop failures, famines and climate refugee riots.
Who are these "intellectuals". Commentors on internet forums like yourself? Or are you one of the proud "ignorants"?
I've never heard "intellectuals" complain about the good things oil has provided: energy, nitrogen fertilizer, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other useful chemical byproducts, and so on.
Those things are not the problem. It's the undesirable consequences that are the problem. We are victims of our own success, so to speak.
(Just to give one example of how oil itself is not the problem: biodegradable plastic has been commercially available for decades. We could make e.g. plastic shopping bags that lasted only as long as they were needed, but it's cheaper to use nigh indestructible ones. We could use biodegradable plastic straws.)
- - - -
In re: "a ready and steady supply of energy", I like to remind people that the Sun is a maintenance-free fusion reactor so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from 150,000,000 km away.
It seems we had 5 mass extinction events on earth so far, one caused by an asteroid, and the 4 others by climate change. Sure, something will survive, regrow or be newly created.. if we go for 4°C expectations for earth to recover on its own to something similar we had now are just another 30 million years ;)
I believe it is. The rate at which iso-climate lines are moving north is faster than a lot of species can move. Most fauna could be ok by that criteria alone, but most flora can't move so rapidly (a lot of tree species can only move 10m/10years).
And when the flora goes, a lot fauna does too.
Sure, the human species will survive. It certainly did with a few million of individuals for most of the time. But I believe we're already in the 6th mass extinction event, perhaps the biggest so far.
We're going to get a lesson from nature. The only question is how tough will it be. I believe large famines, wars, and a partial civilization collapse are coming.
Claiming it's about fear and control is a very easy way to ignore it — fact is, it's much easier to create fear (for the purpose of control) with human boogiemen: post WW2 British tabloids made hay by going "Communists and Germans! The Irish! Gays! Single mothers! The disabled! Muslims! Millennials! The EU!", while mostly saying that anyone concerned about the environment (even more broadly than CO2) was scaremongering.
800000
This is talking about the variable called "equilibrium climate sensitivity". Climate sensitivity is a key question in any fact-based discussion of climate change. There are three problems with this statement:
1. ECS calculations based on empirical measurement come in far, far lower than 5 degrees, more like 1.7-2.5 degrees and this has been falling over time, e.g. measurement based estimates of ECS in 2001 were higher than they are today.
2. ECS calculations based on models (which scientists should consider weaker evidence than observational data, but don't) are extremely uncertain, with estimates ranging from 2 to 4 degrees.
3. The range of values models use for ECS are getting wider over time, not narrower as you'd expect.
So it's really tough to say that Arrhenius was close given that modern climatologists have no idea what the correct value for ECS is even though they've been studying it intensively for 40 years, that their "sophisticated computer models" disagree very deeply about the right value and this is getting worse with time, and that all those values are still too high when compared to studies that aren't modelling based.
It's also worth noting that even the headline is totally misleading. Today climate change is used as a synonym for global warming but for long periods scientists were telling the world that "climate change" meant a new ice age. As late as 1975 (when the switch from cooling to warming was well underway) Newsweek was telling readers that "To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down".
http://www.denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
So the article is trying to make it seem like scientists have been talking about global warming for over a century, but that isn't true. We could call it misinformation, perhaps. The physics of CO2 were understood for a long time but there's so much more to the climate than just CO2 that this isn't enough to be able to make accurate predictions.
You assert it represents what scientists of the time were saying, it clearly misrepresents J. Murray Mitchell:
> Mitchell was a pioneer in investigation and understanding of climate change, and from the 1960s onwards sought to alert the public to issues of global warming.
> In 1976 he described the conjecture of global cooling as irresponsible, and around that time supported other scientists in warning of the damaging effects of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Murray_Mitchell
Is this a delibrate ploy by yourself, or were you merely ignorant?
I think you've yourself been misled. Mitchell accepted global cooling was really happening and the world was indeed cooling since 1940. See for yourself, here's one of his papers published in 1975:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1729-9_...
"In balance, the net thermal impact of all global-scale pollution (including thermal pollution) is likely to be one of warming, perhaps increasingly so after 2000 A.D. It is concluded that the cooling of climate since 1940, apparently still in progress, is a natural phenomenon plausibly related to an enhanced stratospheric loading by volcanic dust in the period"
The fact that the world got colder between 1940 and 1975(ish) was never really in dispute up until climatologists realized that they couldn't explain the contradiction between that and the greenhouse gas nature of CO2. At that point they started re-calculating old temperatures to make the cooling trend disappear, and telling people that all the stories published about their agreement in the 60s and 70s were just awful terrible journalists somehow getting what they were saying entirely backwards. To finish it off they claim that anyone who points out that this isn't true is an immoral denier who should be silenced. It's very much 1984 in real life.
So Mitchell was right all along! What is this so called "contradiction" that you are talking about?
The main reason this is important is for the meta-level issue of what claims about consensus really mean. Newsweek didn't really care if the world got colder or warmer, they just wanted to sell papers. Mitchell wasn't misrepresented by the article nor me, as defrost claims. The article doesn't even quote him, it simply cites temperature data from one of his studies as a way to establish what trends existed at the time. Newsweek does so accurately because that's exactly what Mitchell's data did show, as my citation of his paper establishes. By Mitchell's own words, in 1975 the world had not only been cooling for decades but was still cooling!
Now defrost might argue that the Newsweek article was deceptive because, in fact, there was at least one scientist who rejected the "ice age doom is imminent" consensus as irresponsible. Indeed, claims about consensus are always very dubious for that exact reason, it's so rarely true. By 1975 there were certainly more than just Mitchell! But a Newsweek reader of the time couldn't have known that. They were being told that scientists in general believed in global cooling. Indeed nobody could deny the world was cooling, as that's clearly what the facts showed, so you'd have been a cooling denier if you'd said otherwise. If anyone had objected by raising Mitchell as a counter-example they'd have been told he was fringe, that his theories were outside the mainstream, that he was delaying action to prepare for the ice age and that even he accepted long term global cooling was real!
It can all be very confusing because to learn anything from this, you have to learn to doubt what you "know" is right based on what a handful of people have told you other people believe. Which is hard! But there's an even more confusing meta-level issue. Look at modern graphs of temperature:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
Look at the period between 1940 and 1975. The cooling Mitchell was writing about, that Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, that so many academics researched and reported on, that governments funded investigations into, that people proposed covering the Arctic with coal dust to fight - it's gone. The graph is flat. According to modern climatologists the cooling trend Mitchell was trying to explain with volcanos never existed at all ... and anyone who says otherwise is a malicious liar.
Who are the modern climatologists that are saying that the data recorded and reported by Mitchell does not exist? Are you saying that the NASA data graph is false for 1940-1975? I couldn't find any graph in Mitchell's paper.
In this case you don't actually need a graph anyway, because the editing in that period is so extreme. Just look at his abstract. He says the world was cooling since 1940 and still is in 1975. Obviously that statement makes no sense if you look at modern databases during the period. To understand why he said that you have to look at older graphs, before climatology became so corrupted. They do indeed show a step and decades long fall in temperatures.
I don't care about engaging in debates about editorial language.
I would also like to see some citations about these modern climatologists claiming that the data from 1940-75 are malicious lies.
It is really funny how the "but they told us its cooling" thing is actually only widely known and talked in the English speaking parts of the world (mainly the US). Everywhere else in the world nobody even knows about this argument. There might be a reason for that.
Also love you linking to a Newsweek article instead of some relevant papers that detail this cooling trend and how it was predicted. I mean its not a meme at all how popular Media misunderstands science and only reports on the most surprising aspects to get people to buy their publications.
I don't really see why lack of familiarity with the historical facts in some parts of the world should reflect badly on the people who do know them. At any rate, it's not a big surprise. English is the de-facto language of science, the English speaking world has a stronger tradition of free speech and simply has more people who can research obscure topics vs most languages.
Also, look at where the global temperature datasets are produced - it's all US and UK universities and agencies. Historical temperature data for much of the 19th and 20th centuries comes primarily from US sources, because for much of the 20th century the rest of the world wasn't running organized weather station networks at all - rest of the world was either dirt poor, being ravaged by world wars or undergoing communist revolutions. The USA has a large scale weather station network dating back to the Victorian era. It also launched lots of weather satellites in the 70s.
So to be clear: this global cooling 'research' did not exist. We founded research on temperature change in the 60s and on the prior earth climate, adaptation and means of surviving a global cooling, but this was driven by fear of a nuclear winter. All the global cooling 'research' was journalist bullshit at best.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
Honestly that sounds like a pretty good model of my life so far.
For example, SA presents as a contradiction:
> It depicts elites as simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent.
But this is exactly what we see in the real world. Take the iPhone for example: a marvel of technology with a cretinous supply chain and amoral-at-best business model. Or VW, great cars but we could do without the emissions scandal. Or the tech industry, great tech (mostly) but they turn around and have a that "no poaching" scandal. Bankers have their LIBOR scandal, etc. Really, "simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent" is the order of the day, yeah?
Unfortunately few take a step back and realise we need to try to get people to stop pointing fingers and work together, but that doesn't sell news, allow people to feel righteous or give people the ability to say "I told you". But it gets the job done.
It's asif politics is full of the worst of middle managers unfortunately.
Like, I'm fine to say that I'd be OK to see this planet burned to the ground once I've had my fun with it. I mean, I feel a bit sorry for the humans who might come after, but that's a problem I'm not going to contribute to, so whatever. This seems to be the mainstream opinion as well, based on our current trajectory and actions, but it's gauche to say it plainly and so we create rationalizations to see ourselves as better people.
I don't agree with you.
There are many people who do care about future generations.
And maybe there are other people that share my opinion:
1) future generations deserve our attention and our best efforts, but only the efforts that can have an actual impact are worth to be taken. Going back to Stone Age for the others to keep enjoying modern comfort and spoiling my efforts any way? No, thanks! Convincing peoples around the world to formally engage in reducing emissions and then respecting the agreement? Sign me in!
2) despite our best efforts, we know that climate change is here to stay. Let's stop pretending that we can revert it in a couple of years! We are having several droughts, and it's likely they will be back next year: we need to act during this winter to save some water for next summer; we have to stop now to export produce from California. Not in twenty years, not in five years, but now! The ocean level is going up, and it will keep going up: stop building on the coast, stop moving to coastal cities built on flat terrain. Stop it now!
Unfortunately I'd have to agree with the original author here.
People gest and make empty vacuous statements on social media _a lot_. People are also unwilling to change or take on a small amount of responsibility. These 2 things are in direct conflict.
Again my strongest condemnation of this is people only now care about power and fuel efficiency at a large level now that Putin has caused the price to rise. Putin by his actions in the last few months has done more to sway public ACTION here than 30 years of social media posts and politicians. This is a damning sad statement on how much people honestly care about impacting change in the world.
government intervention such ad carbon tax and EV subsidies and actions like the green new deal are what is needed.
I... No
Again please stop focusing on what I'm not saying.
And btw there are huge environmental impacts that can be made that build up from bet actions of individuals and societal change. Ignoring that is frankly inconsistent or dishonest. It's a different scale to Chinas industrial pollution but I'm bout even talking about that.
Again I'm talking about the way people have these things explained and educated. When I mention the education here is damaged and being self defeatist I get 4 or 5 people explaining how climate policy does or should work show exactly how people "think good".
Again I'm saying you misrepresent something that will go on for years and people will remember you as a liar even if you were exaggerating a truth. Exactly because that's what lying is.
It's worse than that: it's as if people voted the worst of middle managers into office!
No, making the topical "political" really mean partisan and it's not pointless.
It's a deliberate tactic to stifle conversation and delay changes of policy.
There are enormous financial benefits for many companies in delaying the adoption of sustainable economy.
Really, thank you for posting a fact-based statement without attaching your political opinion. I think facts would be accepted more easily if there were presented to the general public without attaching the personal opinion of the writer.
I believe human released CO2 is more or less inconsequential. We face far bigger problems with industrial chemical pollution. Put your money where your mouth is and quit buy any good made from materials from environmentally hostile countries. Advocate for banning imports from environmental destroyers.
As long as we keep talking about CO2, we're not going to make any progress and we're going to exhaust all of our other precious resources long before we burn to death.
let us setup multi generational projects on international scale to develop mitigations.
this os mot being covered well enough in media. the only thing i see in 80% of the articles is status quo reporting of climate change effects (fires, draughts, rain) and YET ANOTHER climate change warning... and ofc some aggressive climate terrorists that are getting too much coverage, too.
We fail to plan even for hurricanes adequately or proportionately.
Hurricane disaster response isn’t simply ineffective, it is subject to outside pressures which should never be a part of the process. Governments which intentionally obscure how many deaths have occurred, how costly the damage, all made worse as preventive actions are deemed too costly.
Prevention needs to include building standards which refactor building codes to survive the conditions of their particular environment.
Zoning, preventing new construction in areas which need to be rebuilt every time hurricane knocks them over.
Insurance companies pressure local governments and organizations to score category 5 hurricanes as 4 to avoid paying out their customers. Governments overly concerned with minimizing the damage in order to hide incompetence and save face.
Developers charm local, state, and federal officials to keep building costs low and keep producing structures which are cheaply made and begin to fall apart the minute they are finished being built.
Developers who discourage or minimize transparency concerning risks.
People have their dream homes built believing they will last longer than a 30 year mortgage when in reality these homes will need significant interventions within 10 years.
Often the dialog prioritizes who is at fault before and above actually fixing or responding to the events and helping the people effected.
There is a time for blame and a time for action. When and directly after a disaster is the time for action, blame must be analyzed during response, post mortem must taken seriously, organizations, governments, and corporations must be held to account once those affected are relieved, stabilized.
Blame however is usually addressed during the crisis this allows the framing to be controlled by private interests.
One problem that must be overcome in the US are inappropriate cabinet departments. We saw many examples of this during the pandemic. Some goals are too important to have leadership that is subject to change every 4-8 years. Some departments must be shielded from administration instability issues.
Reactive approaches to a crisis are expensive, more expensive than adequate planning. Certain areas in Florida are repeatedly rebuilt at great cost, costs which could be much lower when proactive planning is prioritized equally with response.
Bad at response and no planning seem to be accepted as too ingrained to change. This is not of course true.
Or continued serious drought, or climate migration, or massive heat die-offs, etc. Better to face reality and prepare SOME kind of response, and the earlier we do, the better we can mitigate it.
But I'm still wanting and waiting to here just one concrete option (which if not simpler nor cheaper than preventing further greenhouse gas emissions I'm not sure why we would want to do those then at all) that could help the e.g. surely unavoidable famine problem that we will encounter if world cements its path towards 3-4°C? There is just none even imaginable..
> Or continued serious drought, or climate migration, or massive heat die-offs, etc.
We know these all will happen together?
You'd have to admit that there are significant effects first. And you'd probably have to admit that they're going to get worse. And you'd have to expect that some mitigation is going to be effective.
All of which are a tall order at this point. We're still talking about buying a new car just because, or flying off to some far off land just for fun. "The news" is not going to get serious about this until we do. In the meantime, it'll be catchy headlines and clickbait as usual.
The solution to climate change is very cheap and simple. It is a carbon tax. It is also not difficult to implement at all and will cause only modest inflation.
However, the oil industry is a huge influence on governments all over the world and will throw everything at preventing this from happening.
Imagine for a moment that all of the carbon taxes were directed to subsidize EV and solar. All if us would be driving cheap EVs and getting 90% of our electricity from solar sources.
Indians already pay some of the highest fuel sales tax. And United states has some of the cheapest gasoline rates.
https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/diu/story/nearly-two-third-of-...
If you are concerned about equity, then high carbon footprint countries can transfer the carbon tax revenue to low carbon footprint countries.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-d...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-skeptic-idUST...
[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-skeptic-pat-micha_b_6...
[4] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/global-warming-skeptic-orga...
"Koch Industries, Inc. (/ˈkoʊk/) is an American privately held multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill.[2] Its subsidiaries are involved in the manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizer, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, cloud computing, finance, commodity market trading, and investments. Koch owns Flint Hills Resources, Georgia-Pacific, Guardian Industries, Infor, Invista, KBX, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, Koch Engineered Solutions, Koch Investments Group, Koch Minerals & Trading, and Molex. The firm employs 122,000 people in 60 countries, with about half of its business in the United States"
The Guardian states that the Koch brothers aren't directly funding climate related stuff, but they do fund libertarian and conservative groups. This is, in their eyes, immoral.
Is it terrible for wealthy billionaires to fund people with particular perspectives on what to do about the climate? If you believe so then your biggest criticism must be in the other direction, because the money flows to support pro-doom climate journalism are vast. The Gates Foundation literally directly gives money to news companies that can only be used to hire people to write about climate and vaccines (in his preferred direction). Amongst the recipients of Gates' largesse is, of course, the Guardian.
https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...
"I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups."
I agree that journalists suck and are easily manipulated. But the overwhelming scientific evidence seems to point in one direction and it's not good.
It's ok to disagree on policy, but the global warming "skeptic" game plan has been to disagree on reality.
On a final note, while the basic scientific consensus that human caused climate change is a real thing seems quite firmly settled, there are many details and disagreements that no self-respecting scientist can claim don't exist. There are enough of these for plenty of healthy debate, even on major points, to be a good thing, as it almost always is on most topics. There's also no shortage of self-interested politics being mixed into narratives pushing for aggressive climate change responses. This is rarely conducive to completely honest discourse from either side of the table.
A good scientist will not provide you with guarantees, because they know that they are limited, imperfect humans who are doing the best with the information and models they have. Many people will interpret this as refusing to answer questions.
The fact that we don't have a perfect understanding of climate does not suggest to me that we're free to alter the gas composition of our atmosphere any way we choose - I'd think the opposite - we should be careful when making changes to the Earth when we do not fully understand the consequences.
The vagueness here is problematic. Not all "particular perspectives" are the same. It matters if the "particular perspectives" were rational and respectful of the science.
Some of these details can be found in books like "The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War".
References please.
On one side, you have the idiots who don't "believe in science", as if facts were something to believe in rather than acknowledge.
On the other side, you have too many people confusing science with politics.
Yes, the temperature is going up. Yes, we are guilty. Yes, fossil fuels play a fundamental role. No, the only answer is not "let's reduce fossil fuel consumption".
Sure, reducing fossil fuel consumption is a valid proposal, but like any other proposal it has to be carefully evaluated in terms of (monetary and non-monetary) costs and benefits. Do you know why we are consuming so many fossil fuels? Because, as soon as the stem engine was invented, people found out that life got instantly better! If we found a way to reduce emissions without impacting our comfort, that would be perfect. Unfortunately, we are far from there.
In the end, as this is a planetary issue, and as we know very well the tragedy of the common, it's fundamental that we move all together in the same direction.
But those people who spit nonsense like "It's too late, stop C02", without ever wondering why C02 is emitted in the first place, and without realizing how illogic it is to claim a solution exists to a problem for which "it's too late", do not make very charismatic leaders that the world is ready to follow.
It is definitely time that feelings are taken off the table and rationality is applied to the most serious concern for the future of humanity.
No, the "debate" they want to have is not on what to do but rather if science is to be trusted or not.
There's really no other option though, there are pretty solid reasons rooted in basic physics why CO2 capture/scrubbing are not feasible at a large enough scale to really matter, geoengineering proposals are unproven, expensive and high risk, and the cost of attempting to adapt to the sorts of temperature and sea level changes expected to take place over the next few 100 years if we don't reduce emissions would be measured in innumerable human and non- human lives. Actually we'll likely need all 4 strategies, but replacing fossil-fuel energy sources with largely carbon neutral ones is almost certainly the simplest and cheapest, and if we'd started doing so 30 or 40 years ago there'd probably be little to worry about by now.
You are technically correct that reducing emissions is the only way to impact the temperature raising, but why do people think that stopping global warming is the only option? Why do you think that embracing it is not possible?
Whatever we do, we know that global warming is not going to disappear in a matter of years, and global cooling is at least several decades in the future. We must learn anyway to live with the current climate, so we can choose how much we want to give up of the modern way of living for how many fewer degrees.
We need to learn to stop worrying and to love climate change?
Because it will destruct significant portions of inhabited land? Because we now can have a marina where once were densely inhabited cities? Because those surviving the famines and wars will have a low BMI?
Your comment is the most stupid shilling I read in a while. How about embracing a truck on the highway?
> Because we now can have a marina where once were densely inhabited cities?
I don't agree with your "can". We will have a marina where today are densely inhabited cities. No shouting "stop fossil fuels", no actual stopping fossil fuels will prevent huge cities to disappear.
We can (and must) avoid the uber-super catastrophe, but part of the problem is that the situation is much worse than most people appreciate.
There is no alternative to learning to cope with global warming.
Alright, so let's hear your proposal for doing so that doesn't involve stopping the use of fossil fuels?
And yes, huge amounts of adaptation will be necessary no matter what else we do, nobody's arguing otherwise.
The same is true today. Almost all scientists believe the world is warming. Only some extrapolate that into a crisis, but those are the ones who get media and political attention.
There are lots of claims being made in this thread that aren't true, e.g.
- only two papers talking about global cooling (wrong)
- journalists were inverting what scientists believed (wrong)
- there was no consensus on cooling (wrong; see how none of the papers discussing the cooling trend note any disagreement on its existence)
and so on. For examples of media reports and scientific papers talking about global cooling see my other posts.
Or were you thinking of a different decade?
But there's a deeper problem with the point you're trying to make here. You claim the reports didn't reflect the scientific consensus. Really? Go read those reports. They do claim they were reporting the consensus. To the extent they admitted the existence of uncertainty it was uncertainty of the form, we don't know why temperatures are falling, we don't know how bad it'll get but it'll probably be bad, etc.
So how do you know that reports back then were lying about the existence of a consensus, but today's reports aren't? Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway? Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that? What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could?
Here's some quotes from articles published in the 60s and 70s [1]
New York Times, 1961: "Scientists agree world is colder. After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder"
Washington Post, 1970: "Get a good grip on your long johns cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come. That's the long long range forecast being given out by climatologists".
New York Times, July 1970: "The US and the Soviet Union are mounting large scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid." (this one also discusses geo-engineering with the goal of melting the poles)
Letter to the US President, 1972: "we feel obliged to inform you of the results of the recent scientific conference held here recently ... a global deterioration of climate by an order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by mankind is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has a natural cause"
The Post-Crescent, 1973: "'Clearly we are living in an unusual time and cannot, based on past evidence, expect the present warm age to last much longer' [said] Imbrie, [who] is a part of CLIMPA, a new three institution climate research team (Brown, Columbia and Oregon State Universities) engaged in a global study of climactic change under the sponsorship of NSF-IDOE".
etc. There are more examples at the link.
https://realclimatescience.com/1970s-global-cooling-scare/
This whole "they told us the world is cooling" thing is an almost completely US-only phenomenon.
It was rather hard to take it seriously when the narrative suddenly shifted to how climate change was going to melt the planet.
I never hear discussion about the discrepancy, so the whole thing has been quite a head-scratcher!
That means there never was a discrepancy - it was just interesting so the news media reported on it. If you want an explanation of it you should not look with climate science - look at media studies or may be publications about great advertisement campaigns.
To me the whole thing shows parallels to the is smoking bad for your health thing. If doctors are undecided it cannot be too bad - right?
Also I can at least confirm from me being German and of similar age that the whole thing was not a thing in Germany at all. By asking a friend from the UK I can at least suspect that it wasn't prevalent there either (he knows about it but that is from US-sources).
Doch[0]. Todays newspaper reports are also generally disconnected from reality. To illustrate with a tech news story as this is a tech news site, I saw one news story about the Raspberry Pi which had more errors than sentences, including the price, the OS, the RAM, the processor, the country of manufacture, and claimed it came with a hard drive. In general this problem is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
> Who gets to declare a "general scientific consensus" anyway?
You can try doing a poll of the scientists or their publications and seeing what those say.
In fact, it's the scientists' own work doing this, and absolutely not the newspapers, which make me aware of the actual scientific consensus.
Though I should point out that this whole concept only matters if you're specifically trying to study the social dynamics of the scientist themselves (and those consuming their work) rather than the actual science itself — while this seems to be the case for you, I'd like you to ask yourself if that's the right question to be asking.
> Can we meet these people and ask how they determined that?
Yes. Also, as scientists exist in the physical world, you can try email and such.
Also, they published their work, including how they reached their conclusions. Here is one of many such studies: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
> What about virology, where they claim there's an absolute consensus that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't have escaped from a lab even though it's obvious it could?
Which "they" is this? The newspapers again? Because scientist absolutely don't say it's impossible for a virus to escape from a lab in general, including any who are also saying there's no evidence in favour of any specific outbreak *actually* being caused by that.
[0] German word that needs to be adopted into English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch
I don't actually care about the social dynamics of scientists, because since the start of COVID I've developed a strong cynicism about all academic reliability, and so really wish that No True Scientist type arguments would go away. They're boring and even if an academic consensus did exist (it doesn't) I wouldn't care anyway.
But look at my other top level post in this thread. It makes two points. One is a technical point about ECS ranges. The other is about the way the article tries to make it seem like there's been a century-long consensus of scientists. The first is more important, but the replies and arguments are all about the second. Nobody seems to care about ECS. They're all about what some random guy whose data was cited in an article thinks, and whether I'm trying to deliberately mislead people.
So, arguments about what scientists as a group do/did believe are unavoidable because so many people have developed extreme views like Net Zero on the back of reading in the Guardian that all scientists agree on <some prediction>. You can argue about the scientific details of the claims, and that's really important, but it's of limited use because most people aren't basing their views on science anyway. For people who say look, just give me the 10 second summary of what the experts think, the only thing that can shift their view is by showing that the experts actually aren't expert at all.
The global cooling thing is therefore important, not because people aren't allowed to be wrong or change their mind - they are and they can - but because when that happens on a large scale, we'd expect to see some sort of post mortem where they collectively study why so many bold predictions were made that they later recanted. No such reflective learning process has ever happened. This raises questions about how genuine their expertise really is. Instead, as I and others document elsewhere, what they actually did is try to rewrite the past to claim global cooling was never a thing at all. They even edited temperature graphs to erase the cooling entirely. Then when it's pointed out that this isn't true using archival evidence, the claim changes to be that journalists were - inexplicably, as a group - engaged in a vast conspiracy to s/warming/cooling/g in everything scientists said. This claim is implausible, it's also literally a conspiracy theory, except one with no motive and no proof that it's real.
So yeah it'd be great to talk about the science more but there's little appetite for it here. They want to talk about social dynamics.
W.R.T. virology, how many virologists objected to the famous Lancet Letter in which dozens of scientists said "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin ... Scientists from multiple countries .... overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife"? Zero? One? A consensus of people and institutions like that is worthless.
It does.
> Nobody seems to care about ECS
You only even know the term ECS because scientists are in fact talking about it.
> the Guardian
Are a newspaper and therefore misrepresent everything (if not literally then at least a lot of stuff). Did you know the Guardian's nickname is "Grauniad" because of its early reputation for frequent typographical errors, including misspelling its own name as "The Gaurdian"?
> the only thing that can shift their view is by showing that the experts actually aren't expert at all.
I doubt it, you're still reacting like the stuff the newspapers are publishing is representative of the domains of discussion despite me already referencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. (In fairness, it got that name precisely because of how rapidly people, or at least how fast Michael Crichton, forgot how bad newspapers are at reality).
> we'd expect to see some sort of post mortem where they collectively study why so many bold predictions were made that they later recanted. No such reflective learning process has ever happened.
Indeed. But, Gell-Mann amnesia effect. People keep trusting newspapers. It's the newspapers who keep getting stuff wrong, and it isn't merely science where they get things badly wrong in their reporting. Look at what the newspapers say about your area of expertise.
You do have an area of expertise, I assume?
Look at what any of those newspapers say about your area of expertise. Are the newspapers wrong? Are they "wet pavements cause rain" level wrong? It happens.
> Then when it's pointed out that this isn't true using archival evidence
There are archives of scientific publications, not just newspapers. This backs up what the scientists are saying and not what the newspapers are saying and have previously said (one case I saw "live" about a decade ago, climate scientists said one thing, then a UK tabloid said basically the opposite but claimed to be quoting them).
> the claim changes to be that journalists were - inexplicably, as a group - engaged in a vast conspiracy to s/warming/cooling/g in everything scientists said.
More that they make stuff up and are works of fiction that are at most loosely inspired by reality.
> This claim is implausible, it's also literally a conspiracy theory, except one with no motive
Newspapers are paid in proportion to the drama not the factuality.
> and no proof that it's real.
Except for all the published archives of all the scientific journals reproduced in most university libraries.
> "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin ... Scientists from multiple countries .... overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife"?
Literally none of what you're quoting there says it's impossible for a virus to leak from a lab. It says the evidence in this case is that it almost certainly didn't, not that it couldn't. Those are importantly different things, especially given what else the conspiracy theories at the time were trying to claim.
> A consensus of people and institutions like that is worthless.
You must consider that to have been a good argument, but I don't see why.
OK, let's check. Here are just a handful of scientific papers from the 60s and 70s talking about global cooling that I pulled off Google Scholar in five minutes. By the way, notice how every single one treats the existence of a long term cooling trend as unarguable, undisputed fact and then observe that modern climatologists present long term temperature data that simply erases the trend all these older scientists were talking about: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
Mitchell (debated elsewhere in this thread): https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/10/4/1520-04...
"Suggestions by several previous authors to the effect that the apparent worldwide cooling of climate in recent decades is attributable to large-scale increases of particulate pollution of the atmosphere by human activities are not supported by this analysis"
Mitchell again: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-1729-9_...
"It is concluded that the cooling of climate since 1940, apparently still in progress, is a natural phenomenon plausibly related to an enhanced stratospheric loading by volcanic dust in the period"
Science, 1975: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.188.4188.535
"The regions that would be most severely affected by a continuation of the cooling trend to the year 2000 would be the higher latitudes (above 50 degrees) where spring wheat is grown and the warm band below 30 degrees latitude where rice is the principal grain crop."
Another Science paper, 1975: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.189.4201.460
"If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climatic change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide. By analogy with similar events in the past, the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out."
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1972: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1974...
"The mean temperature for the Northern Hemisphere had a warming trend from 1890 to 1950 and a cooling trend since 1950. The eastern and central United States had colder temperatures in 1961–1970 than in 1931–1960"
Science and Public Policy, 1975: https://academic.oup.com/spp/article-abstract/2/6/264/163373...
"There is mounting evidence that the bad climate of 1972 may be the forerunner of a long series of less favourable agricultural crop years that lie ahead for most of the world. Thus widespread food shortages threaten just at the same time that populations are growing to new...
Something I often hear when trying to talk to people who refuse to believe the impact we have: "See these domsday prophets have been ranting about this for over a century and we're still here enjoying life!"
In the 80s in the UK acid rain was hyped up, in the 90s it was 20 years of oil reserves in the education system. Both now have generated adults distrusting education because they're not an academic and they just remember what a fool told them at face value without nuance.
One of the biggest recently being reports that we will have millions dead unless X which doesn't match reality which is just going to create more anti intellectual fear
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
> Overall, the program's cap and trade program has been successful in achieving its goals. Since the 1990s, SO2 emissions have dropped 40%, and according to the Pacific Research Institute, acid rain levels have dropped 65% since 1976.[43][44] Conventional regulation was used in the European Union, which saw a decrease of over 70% in SO2 emissions during the same time period.[45]
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
This default reactive stance causes pointless arguments and discussion as I'm trying to demonstrate.
Yes there were 200% valid concerns. But this lead more to something close to hysteria than actual communication.
These concerns turned into teaching kids that the environment is going to die. The "unless nothing changes" gets lost in the discussion with 90% of non science teachers. In the same way that "emmissions have fallen" is on page 23 and is not front-page news.
The net result of this, although well intended. Is that most people are taught the headlines which turn into "watch out for acid rain". And now 40 years on they are even more confused and distrusting given the inconsistent messaging around this.
(News flash the oceans are still getting more acidic, almost no effort has been made here imo, but I digress)
Bad communication on these topics is more dangerous than not getting public approval. Bad communication around fossil fuels spreads distrust on the topic of conversation. (Again I remember well meaning teachers saying fuels would dry up by 2010 when I was in school)
Bad communication on climate change or global warming (notice how they don't use that latter phrase in outreach now) causes distrust here. Same goes for healthcare, 5G and the list goes on.
There will always be people who disagree. Trying to reach 100% is also futile. The communication should be straightforward clear and consistent and it's falling short of that by a long way.
The "just trust the science" is exactly the same call to authority as "this book says throw them off buildings". It helps nobody. But it happens at _all_ levels of outreach and bad education because people get afraid to say "good point, I don't know".
I have a strong educational background and a head on my shoulders. However from the mainstream public perception it just "disappeared one day" and transformed into "fossil fuels will be gone" which turned into "global warming" which is now "climate change".
This is obviously complete nonsense to anyone with a science background but is the result of decades of broken outreach combined with poor public education.
1. It's huge, an emergency and we're all basically fucked, in fact there's nothing we can do the problem is so vast.
2. It's actually not that big of a deal, most of the warming is natural cycles, a bit is human made but we're not sure how much, a mix of changing power sources and adaptation is entirely possible and if anything the path we're already on. There are likely bigger environment problems to focus on.
The second is the position you'd expect people to take having seen environmental problems be fixed without much fuss in the past. And obviously not every academic "crisis" is fixed via regulation. Think about Limits to Growth and all the claims that the world would run out of food that were popular in the 70s and 80s, or really for much longer than that. Governments didn't do much there and yet there was no crisis in the end, in fact we ended up with a crisis of obesity.
I'm not talking about the "narratives" around the "conversation".
The first problem is that this changes as it's almost 110% political.
The comment I'm making is that bad education causes problems 10-20 years down the line. Inconsistent exaggerated stories which are not presented in context are dangerous and in the case of multi-genrrational issues undermine the whole effort to get anything done.
Talking about the "we'll run out of food" as another example is showing how people don't trust the people saying this. The problem here is that the word "academic" often has to be put in quotes. It's so doo-gooder pro science but who shouts a lot and causes more problems for researchers. (For another example most of my time doing outreach is undoing the damage caused by fools "explaining" the highs boson)
It's yet another discussion or "debate" or shock healine about something which won't change based on discussion...
Yet another "shock" headline is just a waste of effort which polarises yet more people into bad positions on all sides even more...
What's wrong in just making the planet nicer for everyone?
Meanwhile, other countries are going to be left to die or left to generalized social unrest, drought and hunger. Massive migrations with a massive security apparatus. I'm guessing human population will fall below two billion or less before 2080 or before, until we can build a green industry while protecting people from this new climate.
I don't think it will be a "collapse" like it's often talked about by the collapse movement, but it will be a slow disaster, which will be much more "tolerable" and avoid dangerous, unstable crises or large conflicts. Intelligence agencies are going to carefully plan all of this.
Hawks are going to say "it won't be so bad" and that "only the fittest shall survive". It won't be very civilized, but individualism will go away and be replaced by communities who focus on survival at the expense of outgroups. It will probably look like dystopian movies, minus the glory, the heroes and the adventure.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2017/01/chronology-of-the-u-s...
Great list of references
[0] https://xkcd.com/1732/