No, some scientists discovered particulate pollution is associated with cooling and there was increasing particulates in the upper atmosphere from human activities, which is a well known effect today.
People took it wildly out of context, think day of tomorrow’s ice hurricanes vs the extremely mildly by comparison effect changing ocean circulation was actually predicted to have.
Yeah, back in the day fossil fuel emitted more sulphur, which cools the planet (temporarily), offsetting some of the warming. It also causes acid rai and other stuff, so sulphur emissions have gone down.
Back 50 years ago some scientists believe the sulphur cooling and smoke clouds would offset the greenhouse effect and lead to overall cooling, but this was always the minority view. We've since gotten way better models, and the warming has become much more obvious so it can be measured directly.
Others have already mentioned that those who predicted cooling were basing it on increasing particulates. They also knew greenhouse gases would cause warming, but they thought our particulate emissions would continue to increase faster than our greenhouse gas emissions so the cooling would beat out the warming.
We they right, or was the majority of scientists who felt that even with our increased particulates it would not be enough to counter the increasing greenhouse gases right?
We never got to find out, because the particulate emissions are noticeable enough to the average person and annoying enough to the average person that bipartisan efforts to reduce those emissions can get political support, such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 in the US.
This led to a massive reduction in particulate emissions.
When I was growing up the concern was that fossil fuels were a limited resource that we are rapidly depleting. Now the concern is that they are far too abundant and cheap for our own good. Eventually the economics should force us to use renewables if the fossil fuels are a rapidly depleting limited resource, right?
Peak oil was always a lie. As it gets more scarce, it gets more valuable, and innovations in extraction and processing are further incentivized to progress (see:fracking). It's just all living things on Earth that are the collateral damage (read:externalities) to that equation.
That's awfully dismissive. Not exactly a leap for people to argue:
Climate change was always a lie. As the planet warms, the premium for a safe and healthy planet increases, and innovations in clean energy technology continue progress.
Actually, we have no idea. We don't know how much oil is still in the ground in many of the major oil exporting countries. Even though it was anticipated that OPEC would increase output after Russia was banned from the global market, they didn't. Were the explanations given valid, or might it be that they are no longer able to ramp up so quickly?
And realistically why would have they. Russia did not stop too much production, just moved where it was sold. And increasing production would have driven price down making in long run less money in total for them.
First and foremost, that is not how the law of supply and demand works. If there is a sudden increase in demand, the equilibrium point rises, and they could have sold more at a higher price.
Plus, they've always done it before in a similar situation.
Campbell and Laherrère's prediction was also true.
(You can say that they failed to predict the tight oil and bituminous sands boom, focusing instead on the (thankfully still completely uneconomical) oil shale potential, but the gist of them being extremely dirty and expensive also fits.)
I don't think that is what 'Peak Oil' concept was about. It acknowledged, or did not dispute, that with scarcity, prices rise, and supply/demand will cause something to happen. What 'Peak Oil' was speculating about, was that the change in supply would change rapidly enough, that the rate of change would be faster than the normal supply/demand humans are used to, and hence cause massive economic and societal disturbance. Not really too different than recent chip shortages, sure, with more demand, people will build new factories, but those factories take huge capital and time, so the rate of change of the demand is more than can be adapted to without 'discomfort'.
Should also have added, that we are fracking at all, is an indicator that we are heading towards a shortage. Oil Sands/Fracking all take energy to produce energy, and have only recently become economical, because we are running out make these poor second rate inputs become valuable.
I think the difference is that proponents of peak oil relied on motivated thinking and largely ignored known information. Their assumptions were widely criticized as inaccurate at the time and doubled down.
This is because they were looking to support a policy position to stop oil usage and trying to build a scientific case, opposed to the other way around.
It doesn't sound like you understand what "peak oil" means.
It was always the opposite of a lie: a logical truism.
If you have a limited resource and an increasing rate of use, there will a point in time where that rate of use peaks, i.e. reaches a maximum and then declines. That's just (very) basic mathematical truth.
And scarcity incentivizing innovations in extraction and processing changes absolutely nothing about it, those things are just (part of) the reason why the peak will be followed by a gradual decline rather than consumption continuing to rise until the day before all reserves are depleted.
True but as we are seeing, by then it will be too late.
The cost of extraction and use of fossil fuels is much lower than the real cost of using them. A carbon tax system can fix some of that and let the market do it's thing properly with more complete information.
The issue now is carbon emissions, not sources of energy. Fossil fuels are already-sequestered carbon and releasing that into the atmosphere is bad unless we can close the loop by sequestering CO2 back into combustibles using solar or nuclear energy.
No, more CO2 in the air does not lead to increased flora. In fact, the higher temperatures will more likely destabilize ecosystems and result in more deserts and habitats unsuitable for flora.
We're also cutting down flora at an unprecedented rate for meat farming and other uses.
Flora also don't grow that rapidly. Fossil fuels are compacted, sequestered carbon from thousands of years.
> No, more CO2 in the air does not lead to increased flora.
Are you sure?
“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 [,2016].
[…]
The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.
[…]
Studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.
[…]
Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University.”
I don't think this is accurate. Increased CO2 can lead to increased flora--though not enough to offset the negative effects of additional CO2 in the first place.
Why do commercial greenhouses have CO2 generators? I am not following your argument at all. I haven't seen evidence for your first claim (and asked you a follow-up question related to that). We're not cutting down flora for meat farming. We are changing some environments over to farming, but that farm land is largely being used to raise...more plants. In addition, I remember seeing a study (I don't have time to try and find it) that showed that we have more trees now than anytime in the last 500 years.
Your third claim (flora also don't grow that rapidly) is just an assertion that doesn't really make sense to me. And the final statement about fossil fuels is a non sequitur.
> In addition, I remember seeing a study (I don't have time to try and find it) that showed that we have more trees now than anytime in the last 500 years.
Maybe in Europe, only. But absolutely not globally. The amazon deforestation alone...
> Increased temperatures can lengthen growing seasons, higher carbon dioxide concentrations can enhance plant growth, and in some areas rainfall and the availability of water resources can increase as a result of climate change.
That ("fossil fuels were a limited resource") is only true if the fossil fuel oil producers have to pay the cost of cleanup. Take a look at how a new superfund site is being constructed: https://archive.is/AMt7I
But it's ok because it makes gasoline cheap, and hey, we can figure out how to clean^H^H^H^H^H make more money on the cleanup when people start dying.
This sort of foolishness is why I prefer the original term “global warming”. The phrase “climate change” was invented by Republican spin doctors and for unfortunately it’s become the standard term. The problem is that the Earth’s average temperature is rising, because of air pollution, which leads to the climate changing in undesirable ways.
In this PBS frontline interview Senator Timothy Wirth discusses how he scheduled James Hansen's 1988 Senate hearing on climate change for the day that was historically the hottest day of the year and how they opened all the windows so the air conditioners couldn't keep up prior to the hearing so that it was unbearably hot during the session: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/intervi...
Neither side seems to be above "bad faith debating".
One side has truth and scientific consensus on its side, as well the prosperity of the human race, and the LIVES of billions of individuals on the line.
The other side to extend corporate subsidies and fossil fuel company profits for another generation and get themselves a nice fat retirement cushion from lobbyist contributions.
Comparing their tactics for influence misses the forest for the trees.
Stuff like that is why the messaging switched from "global warming" to "global climate change". Both are valid, they just refer to different things:
Global warming - The tiny increase in the global average temperature, as a representation of how much energy is in the system. The average person has no real idea what this means.
Global climate change - The knock-on effects of that increase in energy, referring to more localized effects like larger hurricanes, temperature swings, destabilization of the polar vortex, and so on.
> The phrase “climate change” was invented by Republican spin doctors and for unfortunately it’s become the standard term.
Let's avoid jumping to delusional conspiracy theories. Both terms have a place in science.
> Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect. [1]
I’m aware of the difference. I was incorrect to say it was “invented” by Republican spin doctors, but was promoted by them. So not delusional, not a theory, yes a a conspiracy.
> Ironically, the change may also have been accelerated by politically-motivated spin doctors. This is advice from a Republican political consultant who advised President Bush, talking about changing the name for political purposes:
In the multi billion year history of the earth the climate has changed yes.
For the whole of human history (the past 10-12 thousand years) it has not changed all that much. This stability has given rise to countless civilizations and human flourishing.
Now we have upset this stability and will have to spend a large part of our economic output just to defend our current standard of living. The less we do about climate change, the worse we'll have it.
The planet will be fine and humanity won't disappear, but we lose a lot of opportunities every year we sit on our asses.
There are lots of things people predicted, most of which did not come true (take a look at any future predicting writings, the serious ones: pop "explosion", starvation, social collapse, etc).
We can only act now on what we know today. We cannot act retroactively.
You can’t go around and say someone sometime somewhere said something and use that as evidence. Just as in law you can’t take a confession as sole proof of something. It has to be independently confirmed.
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1] It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2]. The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4]. More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade earlier than the last founding father of the United States died.
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
and i’m quite literally seeing posts from people earnestly asking why they’re having a hard time finding property insurance in florida. and others earnestly asking “who could have seen this coming?”
A friend from high school’s parents were vehemently, angrily, argue-with-kids-in-the-car in denial of climate change and 15 years later they have moved to the border of Canada because the winters in southern new england aren’t the same anymore and the summers are even more uncomfortably hot and humid.
Per my friend, they are still positive that climate change is a big hoax and have a list of confabulated explanations for why that’s as long as ever. (I remember one frequent highlight being that you can’t trust historic temperature readings, because the scientists just “changed how they read the temperature,” because they “want more funding”. It always came back to the duplicitous capture of “funding.”)
It just seems like a completely different view of the world at its fundamentals.
Same situation for antibiotics. Fleming, in the actual Nobel prize acceptance speech, warned:
"It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the
laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them,
and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body."
<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1945/fleming/lect...>
And so today we have infections resistant to practically every known antibiotic. And it's getting worse.
This will open up a huge can of worms, but I am asking in good faith, because I have never really heard it articulated clearly. What is bad about the climate changing?
Here's what I understand so far: The climate is a complex system, which means it's the interplay of many complex and/or chaotic systems, which means it's inherently unpredictable. The climate changes. It has changed dramatically over the course of the earth's existence, as far as we can surmise from available geologic records, etc. The main argument I have heard is "yes, the climate changes, but not at this rate! Ever!" Which seems like a very dubious claim, in my mind, because we don't have very good weather data going back very far, so we don't actually know if that's the case.
I really want to understand the fear and anxiety people are experiencing with regard to climate change, because from my current understanding of the data and of the inherent unpredictability of complex systems, I don't.
Tangentially related: if we are anxious about the climate changing, why do we think it should stay the same, and also, what would "ideal steady state" look like?
I am prepared for "You're obviously an idiot..." kinds of comments. I'm genuinely asking these questions in good faith, hoping someone can help me understand the panic.
To ELI5 your question: the infrastructure that makes the world go round is located in the zones that will be flooded as sea level rises. It will be a huge cost to migrate this, and it isn't being done, which means a potential for massive disruptions in everything that makes society possible. It is SO expensive to address, 95% of the world's politicians are just pretending it isn't happening.
The magnitude of the change is far beyond anything that has been experienced over "recent history" where "recent" is on a geological time scale. It's not on the order of the "little ice ages" and such of the past. It is extreme.
Change, apropos of nothing, is not positive or negative; but when the climate changes so much that the ocean turns into acid and the animals start to die off, people will have concerns.
I guess the problem is actually fast climate change. Faster than evolution can adapt maybe, at least for many species.
And it’s just potentially gonna change life as we know it. For example, the currents in the oceans are changing. This could potentially eradicate a large number of maritime species pretty fast. Which in turn are food not available anymore to other species. And so on.
More severe storms, droughts/desertification, ocean levels rising, oceans acidifying, ocean currents potentially hauting, lower crop yields, loss of arable land, fights over remaining land that is livable, mass migrations, mass extinctions.
Basically, the world we evolved to live in is changing such that most of life isn't going to be capable of living in the new world. So mass extinctions will occur (and have already started) and the next wave of life suited for this new climate will emerge and take over (hint: this won't be humans).
[0] (data warning, large image file) has a pretty good demonstration of the scale we are looking at here. We may not have accurate weather data into the past, but we do have good climate data into the past. A figure part way through goes lightly into the kinda of deviations to the data would be realistic. If you need harder evidence than a comic you will need to dig up some papers.
The civilization we've built, globally, is dependent on a certain climate. Certain places are livable and some aren't. Climate change threatens that. Even a few inches of global sea rise threatens millions of people who live in places like Miami or on islands. Many animals as well can only survive under certain climate conditions. So, the Earth will not crack in half, but those of us who live here will have a lot to deal with in the next few decades. Wouldn't it be better to just (or "just") reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?
Evidence points to the specific change we are charging forward into resulting in huge amounts of drought, famine and flooding around the world. This will lead to resource wars and refugee crises at a scale we have not yet dealt with.
Or, if we somehow set the greenhouse gas levels back to where it was not long ago and kept it there, we would Not have tremendous excess amounts of drought, famine, flooding, wars and refugees.
What is bad is the variance. We know that the variance in weather is increasing, and the average temperature is also moving up.
Yes earth has been hot and cold, but the point is to avoid enormous fluctuations due to variance as they lead to extreme events. We saw huge droughts and floods in Europe, China, and the US, events that we hadn’t seen in a long time.
We also know that the variance causes a split of the polar vortex in Europe which creates heat domes and traps air from Northern Africa. The world we have built was not designed to withstand such heat, see infrastructure melting in England last summer, and much of the world is not prepared to deal with extreme heat, ask the Scandinavians how they handled last couple of summers, I know I suffered in CPH.
We also know that it is caused by our emissions, while we use “CO2” it’s a few different gases and we scale their potency to equivalent CO2.
I can recommend “firmament” as an introduction to weather science. Dr Simon Clark is an excellent science communicator with a PhD in meteorology, and has a great YT channel.
I'm not sure what gave you the impression you articulate in your last sentence there. I haven't dismissed any science. I simply haven't seen enough of it to come to a conclusion. I was asking for more information and a lot of people, including you, have helped me learn more about the topic.
You're getting a lot of the usual talking points back. People assume you're stupid if ask questions like this, and you get the equivalent of someone speaking louder and slower when they realize someone doesn't speak english.
Anyway, I can see the point that something equally or more disruptive will happen, so, whatever. As others have pointed out, we're all indirectly very bought in to the current equilibrium, even more so those in power. There's always resistance to change, and so I'd say it's that that people are against, rather than the end state. (And of course it's been turned into a big political power grab, so it's in everyone's interests for you to belive either it's the worst threat we face or it's not happening at all and we can ignore it).
> People assume you're stupid if ask questions like this, and you get the equivalent of someone speaking louder and slower when they realize someone doesn't speak english.
I'd genuinely tried to answer the question. If this came across this way, I'd love some feedback so I can not come across this way in the future.
In many places, humans have adapted to live on the verge of the survivable wet bulb temperature. These places have been relatively static in temperature and humidity for hundreds of years and while they may have occasional spikes, it's something mitigatable. Climate change means longer and higher extremes, and if an area exceeds the wet bulb temperature then that means any sort of outside work or function is actively deadly.
I think this is a very good question! IIRC when the effects of greenhouse gasses were discussed in the late 1800s, some people thought that it might be a positive thing, and might make the planet more comfortable to live on.
I think "Climate Change" as a term doesn't really strike at the heart of the issue. The issue is not that 'any change is bad,' but rather that the climate is changing (1) in a way that will negatively impact people, and (2) because of _our_ greenhouse gas emissions.
There are many negative impacts, but here's one major one: farmers grow certain foods because their farms experience certain climates. If your farm gets too hot, or too little rain, or too much rain, then your crops won't grow. The world bank has a report analyzing this particular issue in depth: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/6766014682496426...
If you're interested, there are many more reports, from different sources, analyzing the varied effects that climate change will have on humanity.
Thank you for pointing me to resources. That's what I was hoping for. I work in data science, so I am not a scientist per se, but I know how to read statistics. I appreciate you taking the time to give me a detailed answer and links to other references.
Our current societal organization requires the climate to be within certain
bounds, our current way of living, and the things we rely on to survive (plants, livestock) only work within certain temperature ranges with a certain stability/predicability.
adding Greenhouse gasses to atmophere -> traps more heat -> increases volatility of the system
Which causes more intense heatwaves, more intense colds, quicker changes in weather patterns, rare weather events becoming more common.
Which in turn ruins harvests, increase scarcity, creates migration waves, creates conflicts and societal instability which affects everything because of how interconnected our way of living is.
The poorest people are the first ones affected because it requires money to mitigate the effects, so you might say, so what because you yourself are in a rich place, but your rich economy requires on products produced in cheaper places.
There probably is a point where it becomes prohibitively expensive to continue our way of living, because the cheaper places stop working, so it's a good idea for rich countries to take expensive measures now to prevent everything falling apart in the future.
And personally I feel like it's also our moral obligation because the richest countries are responsible for a large amount of excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
My eyes were opened when I saw the calculations for how many watts of energy a 1 C change in the atmosphere equals. It is something like the world's total energy output over a ten-year period.
Think of the weather system as a huge engine. We are effectively stepping on the accelerator with an enormous number of terawatts. That's a lot of wind and rain.
An increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2 leads to cascading systemic failures and an endogenous positive feedback loop that is moving us very quickly out of the - frightfully and incomprehensibly narrow - window of human habitability. Some of us know it now, some of us will become intimately acquainted with it soon enough.
If I'm understanding your argument correctly, it's that people have been worrying/predicting issues with the climate for a while, but everything is currently fine?
If that's a correct understanding (and apologies if it's not), then here's my argument:
If someone told you that "50 years from now, there's going to be an earthquake in this exact spot; here's the data to back me up," it'd be kind of silly to say 25 years later "there's no earthquake. I don't see what all the fuss was about."
> If someone told you that "50 years from now, there's going to be an earthquake in this exact spot; here's the data to back me up," it'd be kind of silly to say 25 years later "there's no earthquake. I don't see what all the fuss was about
No, it would be like someone saying they had scientific proof that an earthquake would happen in 25 years and 50 years later not so much as the tiniest tremor ever occurring.
There is no scientific “consensus” that there is a climate “crisis”. Just a small minority of loud fear mongers with political motivation.
There are literally hundreds of other pressing issues that are real crises that deserve attention way before climate.
Second, is your argument that "if climate change was going to be very bad, it would've happened by now?" I'm not aware (tho please correct me if I'm wrong!) of analyses saying that sea levels should have significantly risen by 2023, or the more catastrophic effects that models are currently showing.
> There is no scientific “consensus” that there is a climate “crisis”. Just a small minority of loud fear mongers with political motivation.
I also want to push back on the "political motivation" portion. As the OP notes, scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. Carl Sagan testified before congress about it in 1985. This is older than the current left-right political divide in America. George Bush gave a speech in 2001 in which he says that we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases to stop climate change https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20...
> There are literally hundreds of other pressing issues that are real crises that deserve attention way before climate.
I agree that we should be combating other issues, too!
Another complex question asked in good faith: Nothing has been done? Nothing?
This seems like an overtly emotional value statement to the global response to a complex problem-- our industrial activities have side effects that effect our environment. The challenge is, what can we do about it, and what has worked so far?
Can we explore this issue from a not-panicked perspective? Off the top of my head (feel free to hit me with Cunningham's Law):
- Aerosol CFC's were a problem we addressed
- Leaded paint and gasoline were another example
- There is a dramatic increase in interest in electrification, which seems to be spearheaded by the environmentalist movement
- I see more discussion about E-waste now than I did 10 years ago. Right to repair seems to be gaining speed in the Reduce/Repair side of the 3 R's
- Are we seeing increased efficiencies in extracting fossil fuels? Fracking seems to fit that niche
"Nothing was done" seems to be a value statement. If we are to agree on progress, we have to agree on who we are serving. Nether Molech (Unbounded consumption at the expense of the human) nor Malthus (Humans are an evil virus) strike me as great options.
i hope you don’t read this as snarky as it’s going to sound, i really don’t mean it snarky at all… but people were pushing for changes decades ago in a non-panicked way.
I didn't even have to be "pushing for changes" to be ridiculed by most everyone I knew (with the exception of my mother and my 5th grade teacher). All I had to do / say was be in agreement with the scientists who actually understood the issue. That was enough for most to label me a "tree-hugging hippie". Truth is that the ridicule just pushed me even further toward serious concerns about the future of our environment, because it opened my eyes to the fact that most people aren't gonna worry about it until it directly impacts their lives in a truly undeniable way (by which time it's already far too late).
> Can we explore this issue from a not-panicked perspective?
I think we tried doing that. See, for example, Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 [1].
I _wish_ that fossil fuels could be on your list. I think a main reason why nothing is being done is that oil is big business! Oil companies have toppled a democratically elected government because that government was cutting into their oil profits [2]. Moving away from fossil fuels would cut into oil's bottom line, so they paid lots of money to discredit and oppose climate change research for decades [3].
Iran wasn't reducing the oil production, but taking it away from the British at a time when Britain still had a very colonial mindset.
The whole Iran coup wasn't really so much the oil companies toppling government as Churchill wanting to ensure access to oil to permit Britain to recover quickly after the war.
Just look at most of the comments in any climate thread. They are mostly people dooming “it’s too late” or similar (nothing has been done!)
Ignoring the scientific realities, the public is hopelessly lost and emotional on the subject.
It’s frustrating to say the least but this is the effect of mass programming. The question to me is why are these people being programmed to think that everything is hopeless?
It’s not a helpful strategy for actually making changes that can help the climate
I don’t see that, but in many ways, it is actually too late, maybe not catastrophically, but in ways where most people will pay a cost higher than the manufactured fear around the potential costs of doing anything about it, the profits around it have been privatised, the costs socialised
"Too late" is the only logical conclusion I've been able to make. And just to be clear, "too late" is entirely subjective. The universe will be fine with or without the human ape.
But I recognize living in an information bubble, and I've been educated as a truth seeking scientist.
Can you point me to resources that talk about this entirely opposite conclusion?
The second derivative of CO2 levels turned negative in 2015. In other words, before 2015 we were increasing our CO2 levels by a greater amount every year. Since 2015 we're still dumping more CO2 into the atmosphere each year, but the amount we're dumping every year is decreasing by a small amount.
Obviously, it's not anywhere close to enough and the effects won't be significant until the first derivative goes negative too, but anybody telling you we're doing nothing is selling you panic rather than solutions.
What’s most galling is not necessarily the amount done, but the massive success of the disinformation around the issue where even now we have very reasonable sounding people asking, why can’t we have a nice discussion about it without the panic?
Leaded paint and Asbestos are examples of things where nothing was really done about them other than the manufacturers were required to slowly phase the products out. As late as the 1980s drywall contains asbestos, and both leaded paint and asbestos persists in a remarkable amount of products that remain installed in many houses throughout the US, to the degree where you're risking liability by not just blanket warning potential tenants about it.
So we didn't really do much about it from the homeowner's perspective.
Fracking is heavily decreased efficiency in extracting fossil fuels. To the point where it's economic viability is under question... (How can a whole industry be in the red for more than a decade ? Is this a giant scam caused by post-2008 easy money ?) There's a reason why in the industry they call it "scraping the bottom of the barrel". So it (along with Canada's bituminous sands) should never have been extracted. You would think that we would have threatened to turn North America into a pariah if they proceed with extracting them, but nope, nobody seems to have cared enough... but of course that's just in the same vein as Bush declaring USian mode of life as "non-negotiable". (Indeed, natural laws do NOT negotiate.)
P.S.: You hurt your credibility by using a straw man of Malthus.
John von Neumann — not only a very prominent scientist, but a self-identified conservative — described climate change in a Fortune article titled "Can We Survive Technology?" in 1955:
>The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—-may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.
Von Neumann may have meant the cumulative delta-T as of 1955; he may have also been referring to the expected equilibrium delta-T given the total emissions as of 1955. I don't think he meant the change over a generation; he was saying that CO2 emissions over the preceding generation were as large as all of the emissions before it. If we take the simple, cumulative change interpretation, he was off by about a factor of 2 using the usual start date of 1880; the equilibrium is harder to reckon. To make things more confusing, the years 1883-1920 were actually much colder than the preindustrial norm due to the eruption of Krakatoa, which he also mentions; using these as the baseline, one degree Fahrenheit is quite close to accurate (but no longer solely human-forced). The Krakatoa anomaly is why pre-1880 is usually chosen as baseline.
There is this idea that governments should do stuff about climate change and I think only people enjoying the fruits of indistrialization in developed countries think that way to the most part. The side of climate change solutions I like are the people working to make clean tech cheaper. The world was an unpleasant place in 1965 and it has been largley fossil fuel enabled changes that have seen a lot of famine, sickness and poverty reduced. HDI has improved a lot!
My point is not to say how nice fossil fuels are but how much no one gives a shit when their people are starving and fighting wars over resources. The cheapest tech wins. Wanna kill fossil fuel? Come with a cheaper solution (and there are already plenty). R&D and infra spending is better than tax incentives and forcing companies to do expensive things.
Smarter spending too, E.g.: 10s of billions will go into ev chargers in cities but none to making cheaper electric trams and rails for public transport in cities.
Doesn't really matter as EROIE is a dumb measurement that people use wrong anyway, but for people who think it is meaningful that should be worthwhile info to update your opinions.
Frankly, if people got a magic crystal ball and after hearing that warning in 1965 they would be able to know that there would be a 1.1C temperature rise by 2023 - in 58 years - then it still would make all sense for them to do nothing.
For these people, even if (a big if!) there would be a global consensus, then they would not approve significant cuts to the industry and consumption in order to prevent the limited effect that we're seeing now. The world was a much poorer place in absolute numbers, and wellbeing was directly linked to physical goods unlike the digital economy we have now, so even with perfect foresight, the big priorities of that era would still be increasing agriculture (through mass use of fossil fuels!) to feed people and increasing industry (through mass use of fossil fuels!) to reduce global poverty. The Green Revolution and economic changes of 1965-1985 were an enormous boon to humanity, and sacrificing THAT to slow down climate change would not be a good deal for us.
And of course, unilateral sacrifices make even less sense. At the height of the Cold war, neither the west nor the USSR could agree to simply restrict their industry while the other would do nothing, because then you suffer all the drawbacks and climate change doesn't get prevented anyway.
Not to mention that developing tech faster can lead to subsequent tech that will help clean the mess.
We don’t talk about climate change as an engineering project, but it absolutely could be.
Think if we spent a fraction of what we spend on war every decade and instead dedicated that to tech to cleanse the atmosphere or oceans, or maybe even fusion.
That 1.1°C is not your everyday weather temperature. Is the global average over a year. It’s not like the temperature at 13:58 on Monday will be 1.1°C higher than what it was exactly 60 years before.
That kind of increase is making frequent enough 1 in a century extreme weather events, Canada got 2 years ago nearly 50°C in a town, floods in all continents, increased frequency and strength of hurricanes and so on.
And to make it worse, it is not the end of the change, and enough of the current warming is fueled by the warming itself, due to positive feedback loops, so it will keep going on even if we stop emissions. Things will keep getting worse, and will keep worsening probably for centuries. And things will stop being, let’s say, pleasant, closer to today than to the end of that process.
There are still enormous savings that could have been made by taking climate action more seriously earlier.
Prioritizing efficient public transportation and the cargo train network. Reducing meat production. Insulating houses. Etc, would have prevented many net-bad investments that were made and would've alleviated the need to now very rapidly transition the economy at enormous cost.
Not to speak of the cost in the future if we don't fix this.
The implication is, at the very least, there were SOME scientists concerned about global cooling in the 1960's and 1970's. I was around then, and it was very much publicized in the media. I never heard anything about global warming until decades later.
Sorry, I'm still a bit confused. I guess I phrased my question poorly.
> there were SOME scientists concerned about global cooling in the 1960's and 1970's
I get that the existence of the letter implies that people were thinking that way. My question was more, what do you see as the implication of the fact that some people were thinking this way. That is, how does this play into the discussion of the article.
The article makes no mention of any cooling, but does mention warming.
The article is making the case that climate change has been a concern of scientists for over 50 years, which is true, but for the first half of that time, many/most scientists were concerned about global cooling, which is an important point that is not mentioned at all.
I feel like I'm living in Orwell's 1984 where history is being re-written.
History is not being re-written, you just don't know the difference between opinion articles and actual scientific papers, and you additionally have no understanding of the relevant science. It's not that AGW hasn't been controversial, it's that you have no idea what that controversy was or when it happened. The theory was flat-out disproved in the first half of the 20th Century, and it only slowly regained credibility[0]. By the late 60s the consensus had broadly shifted in favor of CO2-mediated climate change, which is recognized by one of the documents linked in the "economonitor" article[1].
What you believe is untrue. It also seems to be motivated reasoning, so I will limit my engagement, but it's worth clarifying to others that your perspective is meritless.
What I believe is irrelevant, and please don't be condescending. I've done science for most of my life and had the word "scientist" in my job title for a good part of it.
The article talks about "climate change" since the 1960's, but it's obviously lumping in cooling and warming without distinction, which is misleading.
By limiting your engagement, you are slamming the door on debate and discussion, which is the same game that all climate change alarmists play. Science is never about consensus, it's about a cycle of theory, experiments (where possible), and analysis.
Galileo and Einstein were both victims of consensus.
TLDR: The book "The Discovery of Climate Change" by Spencer Weart dedicates an entire chapter to fitting the global cooling coverage you remember into the wider history of today's consensus, and I think it will address that much more satisfactorily for you than anyone here can.
Edit: Or one quick one about cooling specifically:
>There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then...When the myth of the
1970s global cooling scare arises in contemporary
discussion over climate change, it is most often in the
form of citations not to the scientific literature, but
to news media coverage.
>the same game that all climate change alarmists play
I wrote a different reply and deleted it in hopes of taking a completely different direction rather than just try to argue the points here. My dad remembered the same new coverage and had (I think) the same questions as you, and eventually he got his questions answered in a way that satisfied him in understanding the present day scientific consensus about climate change.
On a board like this you're always going to get terse responses to what you are asking about because to most people here it is akin to demanding that they, individually, win a debate that electricity is safe before you will use your light switch. There is no shortage at all of literature by so many sources specifically to address what you are asking about. Highly qualified people have labored exhaustively compiling the present day evidence for climate change, how it was gathered, how consensus has changed over time. Many people remember the global cooling controversy of the 70s and have asked your exact kind of question many times before. A quick google found this reply on /r/askhistorians[0], and that reply just links a post from 2005[1] which itself cites Spencer Weart's History of Global Warming, since republished as The Discovery of Global Warming, which dedicates a whole chapter specifically to 1970s "global cooling" claims.[3] These kinds of sources are going to be much better equipped and better qualified to explain the facts to you than an internet commenter, and since they've already spent the effort, why should some stranger on this board do it? Especially since this information is already easily available to you! I am not a researcher, or an expert, I didn't have this all immediately on hand. I'm sure you will have stringent standards to apply to select your sources, but even still I suspect you will be able to find enough scholarly works you find sufficiently trustworthy to build a good understanding of how "global cooling" on cable news in the 70s fits into the bigger story of reaching today's scientific consensus about climate change, without somehow contradicting all of it.
Spencer Weart is not an "alarmist playing a game," he provides an extremely thorough analysis of how this science was discovered. The internet records many instances of these positions being investigated and debated without the door being slammed in anyone's face. The refusal of a random internet commenter to retread the exact same debate here today doesn't make them an alarmist and it doesn't say anything about the validity of the general consensus for climate change. The popular debate about climate change has been held and reheld so many times that today scientists ask why there is still such an ongoing popular debate despite so many years of such broad scientific consensus.[4]
The sources linked by the commenter you replied to would probably help too, and my hope is their offer of a "limited engagement" would include a discu...
">There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then...When the myth of the 1970s global cooling scare arises in contemporary discussion over climate change, it is most often in the form of citations not to the scientific literature, but to news media coverage."
Please see my above reply citing over two dozen contemporaneous articles from reputable sources and scientists about global cooling ~50 years ago. Can you cite even a few articles or papers from the same era on the topic of global warming?
So much for the consensus argument, but why are you using it anyway? Science has nothing to do with consensus.
The Spencer Weart book you cite appears to be a "history of scientific discoveries that led to the current scientific opinion on climate change." I will give it a read, but I am reminded of this presentation: (You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are)
> Can you cite even a few articles or papers from the same era on the topic of global warming
Yes, the citations of the article I linked in my edit, the one you requoted, are absolutely full of them. The article also specifically addresses the "cooling consensus" some people perceived from media coverage and compares it to the reality of what was being published and cited at the time academically (note many of the sources you linked are newspaper articles, not journal publications). In particular, refer to the section starting at page number 1329:
>Survey of the Peer Reviewed Literature
>One way to determine what scientists think is to ask them. This was actually done in 1977 following the severe 1976/77 winter in the eastern United States. “Collectively,” the 24 eminent climatologists responding to the survey “tended
to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling” (National Defense University Research Directorate 1978). However, given that an opinion survey does not capture the full state of the science of the time, we conducted a rigorous literature review of the American Meteorological Society’s electronic archives as well as those of Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR).
>The survey identified only 7 articles indicating
cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those
seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the
citations.
On page number 1332, you will find an entire table "Cooling, neutral, and warming papers as defined in the text followed by the number of times they have been cited up through 1983."
The book also of course cites lots of research over the decades that built to this consensus, a consensus originating from many reputable sources and scientists individually studying global warming. I'm don't agree with the climate change consensus in a vacuum, but on the basis of the real story of how the consensus was reached from real research that I am trying so hard to point you in the direction of.
I'll just refer back to my original remarks that it's pretty much impossible for anyone to discuss these points with you if you won't do the reading. I said above I'm not interested in a personal back and forth about this point. I already gave you what you asked for in this reply in an earlier source, and I'm not going to keep replying any further now. Enjoy the book, but if all you need to be convinced is peer reviewed research into global warming from the 70s-80s it is readily available online. Below are just two examples I pulled from that article and a web search.
>Thus, one should recognize the possibility of
rising mean air temperature within the next quarter
of the century. Then the calculations carried out
using different models of climate theory show that
in this case the boundary of polar ice will appreci-
ably recess to the north. The available data show
that this warming, possibly began in late or even
mid-1960s
Hansen, J., D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell (1981), Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide,
Science, 213, 957-966. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
> It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980s.
It's intended to seem like a serious critique of AGW, while not actually having any factual value. It's more effective the less familiar you are with science; if your understanding of the subject ends with the authorities claimed by the persons involved then it may be as strong an argument as you need. You may also note that the articles the author lists in support of the "diversity of opinion" on this matter are not academic sources, and puzzlingly, one of the few serious works explicitly endorses the "consensus ... that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth with a different distribution of climatic regimes."
The source and person who posted it are unserious and should be disregarded.
Despite my above comment being modded to oblivion, I am trying to keep an open mind. I am not disputing that humans are responsible for a significant increase in CO2 levels over the past few decades. I'm keeping an open mind and looking at scientific media (and public media) that is both inaccurate and conflicted on both sides. At the very least, it's clear to me that the science is not "settled."
Please identify which of the three citations I made above are connected to the oil industry, and how. I've added more than two dozen more references below too. If there was some conspiracy on the part of the oil companies, please provide references.
129 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadPeople took it wildly out of context, think day of tomorrow’s ice hurricanes vs the extremely mildly by comparison effect changing ocean circulation was actually predicted to have.
We they right, or was the majority of scientists who felt that even with our increased particulates it would not be enough to counter the increasing greenhouse gases right?
We never got to find out, because the particulate emissions are noticeable enough to the average person and annoying enough to the average person that bipartisan efforts to reduce those emissions can get political support, such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 in the US.
This led to a massive reduction in particulate emissions.
Climate change was always a lie. As the planet warms, the premium for a safe and healthy planet increases, and innovations in clean energy technology continue progress.
Plus, they've always done it before in a similar situation.
King Hubbert's prediction was true.
Campbell and Laherrère's prediction was also true.
(You can say that they failed to predict the tight oil and bituminous sands boom, focusing instead on the (thankfully still completely uneconomical) oil shale potential, but the gist of them being extremely dirty and expensive also fits.)
This is because they were looking to support a policy position to stop oil usage and trying to build a scientific case, opposed to the other way around.
It was always the opposite of a lie: a logical truism.
If you have a limited resource and an increasing rate of use, there will a point in time where that rate of use peaks, i.e. reaches a maximum and then declines. That's just (very) basic mathematical truth.
And scarcity incentivizing innovations in extraction and processing changes absolutely nothing about it, those things are just (part of) the reason why the peak will be followed by a gradual decline rather than consumption continuing to rise until the day before all reserves are depleted.
The cost of extraction and use of fossil fuels is much lower than the real cost of using them. A carbon tax system can fix some of that and let the market do it's thing properly with more complete information.
We're also cutting down flora at an unprecedented rate for meat farming and other uses.
Flora also don't grow that rapidly. Fossil fuels are compacted, sequestered carbon from thousands of years.
Are you sure?
“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 [,2016].
[…]
The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.
[…]
Studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth.
[…]
Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University.”
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...
Your third claim (flora also don't grow that rapidly) is just an assertion that doesn't really make sense to me. And the final statement about fossil fuels is a non sequitur.
Maybe in Europe, only. But absolutely not globally. The amazon deforestation alone...
> Increased temperatures can lengthen growing seasons, higher carbon dioxide concentrations can enhance plant growth, and in some areas rainfall and the availability of water resources can increase as a result of climate change.
See https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/6766014682496426...
However, as that document goes into, the benefit from the extra flora won't be enough to offset the negative impacts of increased CO2.
But it's ok because it makes gasoline cheap, and hey, we can figure out how to clean^H^H^H^H^H make more money on the cleanup when people start dying.
Nothing has been being done for a loooooooong time.
When it was called "Global Warming", Republican spin doctors were bringing in snowballs into Congress to illustrate how ridiculous the concept is.
You STILL hear this from modern conservatives every time there is any unexpected cold snap or "polar vortex": "So much for global warming, amirite?"
Neither side seems to be above "bad faith debating".
The other side to extend corporate subsidies and fossil fuel company profits for another generation and get themselves a nice fat retirement cushion from lobbyist contributions.
Comparing their tactics for influence misses the forest for the trees.
Global warming - The tiny increase in the global average temperature, as a representation of how much energy is in the system. The average person has no real idea what this means.
Global climate change - The knock-on effects of that increase in energy, referring to more localized effects like larger hurricanes, temperature swings, destabilization of the polar vortex, and so on.
Global Warming: Look at this blizzard! So much for Global Warming!
Climate Change: Climate is always changing, what's the problem?
Rename "Global Warming" to "Climate Change": Scientists can't defend the global warming hoax any more, that's why they're changing!
Do not rename "Global Warming": Look at this blizzard, and they won't even admit how misleading their "theory" is!
...ad nauseum
Let's avoid jumping to delusional conspiracy theories. Both terms have a place in science.
> Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect. [1]
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_ot...
> Ironically, the change may also have been accelerated by politically-motivated spin doctors. This is advice from a Republican political consultant who advised President Bush, talking about changing the name for political purposes:
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming-b...
Now we have upset this stability and will have to spend a large part of our economic output just to defend our current standard of living. The less we do about climate change, the worse we'll have it.
The planet will be fine and humanity won't disappear, but we lose a lot of opportunities every year we sit on our asses.
We can only act now on what we know today. We cannot act retroactively.
You can’t go around and say someone sometime somewhere said something and use that as evidence. Just as in law you can’t take a confession as sole proof of something. It has to be independently confirmed.
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1] It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2]. The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4]. More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade earlier than the last founding father of the United States died.
----------
0: The Rodney and Otamatea Times (Aug 1912) https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...
1: Popular Mechanics (Mar 1912): https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=...
2: Nature (1882): https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0
3: Journal of Science (Apr 1896) https://doi.org/10.1080/14786449608620846
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
Per my friend, they are still positive that climate change is a big hoax and have a list of confabulated explanations for why that’s as long as ever. (I remember one frequent highlight being that you can’t trust historic temperature readings, because the scientists just “changed how they read the temperature,” because they “want more funding”. It always came back to the duplicitous capture of “funding.”)
It just seems like a completely different view of the world at its fundamentals.
The “climate change caused by CO2” argument is about the latter, local change goes on continuously.
The average global troposphere temperature change over the last forty years is half a degree centigrade.
That would not cause someone to move.
"It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body." <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1945/fleming/lect...>
And so today we have infections resistant to practically every known antibiotic. And it's getting worse.
I wonder how big is the impact of residual antibiotics in meat and dairy on bacterial resistance.
Here's what I understand so far: The climate is a complex system, which means it's the interplay of many complex and/or chaotic systems, which means it's inherently unpredictable. The climate changes. It has changed dramatically over the course of the earth's existence, as far as we can surmise from available geologic records, etc. The main argument I have heard is "yes, the climate changes, but not at this rate! Ever!" Which seems like a very dubious claim, in my mind, because we don't have very good weather data going back very far, so we don't actually know if that's the case.
I really want to understand the fear and anxiety people are experiencing with regard to climate change, because from my current understanding of the data and of the inherent unpredictability of complex systems, I don't.
Tangentially related: if we are anxious about the climate changing, why do we think it should stay the same, and also, what would "ideal steady state" look like?
I am prepared for "You're obviously an idiot..." kinds of comments. I'm genuinely asking these questions in good faith, hoping someone can help me understand the panic.
Change, apropos of nothing, is not positive or negative; but when the climate changes so much that the ocean turns into acid and the animals start to die off, people will have concerns.
And it’s just potentially gonna change life as we know it. For example, the currents in the oceans are changing. This could potentially eradicate a large number of maritime species pretty fast. Which in turn are food not available anymore to other species. And so on.
More severe storms, droughts/desertification, ocean levels rising, oceans acidifying, ocean currents potentially hauting, lower crop yields, loss of arable land, fights over remaining land that is livable, mass migrations, mass extinctions.
Basically, the world we evolved to live in is changing such that most of life isn't going to be capable of living in the new world. So mass extinctions will occur (and have already started) and the next wave of life suited for this new climate will emerge and take over (hint: this won't be humans).
[0] https://xkcd.com/1732/
Or, if we somehow set the greenhouse gas levels back to where it was not long ago and kept it there, we would Not have tremendous excess amounts of drought, famine, flooding, wars and refugees.
Yes earth has been hot and cold, but the point is to avoid enormous fluctuations due to variance as they lead to extreme events. We saw huge droughts and floods in Europe, China, and the US, events that we hadn’t seen in a long time.
We also know that the variance causes a split of the polar vortex in Europe which creates heat domes and traps air from Northern Africa. The world we have built was not designed to withstand such heat, see infrastructure melting in England last summer, and much of the world is not prepared to deal with extreme heat, ask the Scandinavians how they handled last couple of summers, I know I suffered in CPH.
We also know that it is caused by our emissions, while we use “CO2” it’s a few different gases and we scale their potency to equivalent CO2.
I can recommend “firmament” as an introduction to weather science. Dr Simon Clark is an excellent science communicator with a PhD in meteorology, and has a great YT channel.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
But since you've premeptively dismissed the science behind it, maybe a web comic won't convince you either.
Anyway, I can see the point that something equally or more disruptive will happen, so, whatever. As others have pointed out, we're all indirectly very bought in to the current equilibrium, even more so those in power. There's always resistance to change, and so I'd say it's that that people are against, rather than the end state. (And of course it's been turned into a big political power grab, so it's in everyone's interests for you to belive either it's the worst threat we face or it's not happening at all and we can ignore it).
I'd genuinely tried to answer the question. If this came across this way, I'd love some feedback so I can not come across this way in the future.
I think "Climate Change" as a term doesn't really strike at the heart of the issue. The issue is not that 'any change is bad,' but rather that the climate is changing (1) in a way that will negatively impact people, and (2) because of _our_ greenhouse gas emissions.
There are many negative impacts, but here's one major one: farmers grow certain foods because their farms experience certain climates. If your farm gets too hot, or too little rain, or too much rain, then your crops won't grow. The world bank has a report analyzing this particular issue in depth: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/6766014682496426...
If you're interested, there are many more reports, from different sources, analyzing the varied effects that climate change will have on humanity.
Our current societal organization requires the climate to be within certain bounds, our current way of living, and the things we rely on to survive (plants, livestock) only work within certain temperature ranges with a certain stability/predicability.
adding Greenhouse gasses to atmophere -> traps more heat -> increases volatility of the system
Which causes more intense heatwaves, more intense colds, quicker changes in weather patterns, rare weather events becoming more common.
Which in turn ruins harvests, increase scarcity, creates migration waves, creates conflicts and societal instability which affects everything because of how interconnected our way of living is.
The poorest people are the first ones affected because it requires money to mitigate the effects, so you might say, so what because you yourself are in a rich place, but your rich economy requires on products produced in cheaper places.
There probably is a point where it becomes prohibitively expensive to continue our way of living, because the cheaper places stop working, so it's a good idea for rich countries to take expensive measures now to prevent everything falling apart in the future.
And personally I feel like it's also our moral obligation because the richest countries are responsible for a large amount of excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Think of the weather system as a huge engine. We are effectively stepping on the accelerator with an enormous number of terawatts. That's a lot of wind and rain.
I don't think that's what people were predicting.
If I'm understanding your argument correctly, it's that people have been worrying/predicting issues with the climate for a while, but everything is currently fine?
If that's a correct understanding (and apologies if it's not), then here's my argument:
If someone told you that "50 years from now, there's going to be an earthquake in this exact spot; here's the data to back me up," it'd be kind of silly to say 25 years later "there's no earthquake. I don't see what all the fuss was about."
No, it would be like someone saying they had scientific proof that an earthquake would happen in 25 years and 50 years later not so much as the tiniest tremor ever occurring.
There is no scientific “consensus” that there is a climate “crisis”. Just a small minority of loud fear mongers with political motivation.
There are literally hundreds of other pressing issues that are real crises that deserve attention way before climate.
First, we are already seeing early effects of climate change https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135852
Second, is your argument that "if climate change was going to be very bad, it would've happened by now?" I'm not aware (tho please correct me if I'm wrong!) of analyses saying that sea levels should have significantly risen by 2023, or the more catastrophic effects that models are currently showing.
> There is no scientific “consensus” that there is a climate “crisis”. Just a small minority of loud fear mongers with political motivation.
The data doesn't support that it's a minority of scientists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat... dives into the data, but surveys of scientists (who have published in peer-reviewed journals) consistently show that over 97% of scientists believe in human-caused global warming (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists%27_views...).
I also want to push back on the "political motivation" portion. As the OP notes, scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. Carl Sagan testified before congress about it in 1985. This is older than the current left-right political divide in America. George Bush gave a speech in 2001 in which he says that we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases to stop climate change https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20...
> There are literally hundreds of other pressing issues that are real crises that deserve attention way before climate.
I agree that we should be combating other issues, too!
Same can't be said about global scale we use fossil fuels.
Can we explore this issue from a not-panicked perspective? Off the top of my head (feel free to hit me with Cunningham's Law):
- Aerosol CFC's were a problem we addressed
- Leaded paint and gasoline were another example
- There is a dramatic increase in interest in electrification, which seems to be spearheaded by the environmentalist movement
- I see more discussion about E-waste now than I did 10 years ago. Right to repair seems to be gaining speed in the Reduce/Repair side of the 3 R's
- Are we seeing increased efficiencies in extracting fossil fuels? Fracking seems to fit that niche
"Nothing was done" seems to be a value statement. If we are to agree on progress, we have to agree on who we are serving. Nether Molech (Unbounded consumption at the expense of the human) nor Malthus (Humans are an evil virus) strike me as great options.
I think we tried doing that. See, for example, Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 [1].
I _wish_ that fossil fuels could be on your list. I think a main reason why nothing is being done is that oil is big business! Oil companies have toppled a democratically elected government because that government was cutting into their oil profits [2]. Moving away from fossil fuels would cut into oil's bottom line, so they paid lots of money to discredit and oppose climate change research for decades [3].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bp-and-iran-the-forgotten-histo... [3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382
The whole Iran coup wasn't really so much the oil companies toppling government as Churchill wanting to ensure access to oil to permit Britain to recover quickly after the war.
Ignoring the scientific realities, the public is hopelessly lost and emotional on the subject.
It’s frustrating to say the least but this is the effect of mass programming. The question to me is why are these people being programmed to think that everything is hopeless?
It’s not a helpful strategy for actually making changes that can help the climate
But I recognize living in an information bubble, and I've been educated as a truth seeking scientist.
Can you point me to resources that talk about this entirely opposite conclusion?
What’s too late? Why are the doomers wholly unable to provide a solid claim or example of a prior claim of catastrophe that has come to pass?
Stop saying it’s too late, and use words to explain exactly what you’re saying. Otherwise it’s fear mongering and that’s all this conversation ever is
Obviously, it's not anywhere close to enough and the effects won't be significant until the first derivative goes negative too, but anybody telling you we're doing nothing is selling you panic rather than solutions.
So we didn't really do much about it from the homeowner's perspective.
P.S.: You hurt your credibility by using a straw man of Malthus.
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf
>The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—-may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.
That’s higher than the actual warning of the global troposphere observed over the most recent forty years.
But, maybe his “generation” is more than twenty years.
My point is not to say how nice fossil fuels are but how much no one gives a shit when their people are starving and fighting wars over resources. The cheapest tech wins. Wanna kill fossil fuel? Come with a cheaper solution (and there are already plenty). R&D and infra spending is better than tax incentives and forcing companies to do expensive things.
Smarter spending too, E.g.: 10s of billions will go into ev chargers in cities but none to making cheaper electric trams and rails for public transport in cities.
Solar and wind have lower EROEI than fossil fuels.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098/htm
Doesn't really matter as EROIE is a dumb measurement that people use wrong anyway, but for people who think it is meaningful that should be worthwhile info to update your opinions.
For these people, even if (a big if!) there would be a global consensus, then they would not approve significant cuts to the industry and consumption in order to prevent the limited effect that we're seeing now. The world was a much poorer place in absolute numbers, and wellbeing was directly linked to physical goods unlike the digital economy we have now, so even with perfect foresight, the big priorities of that era would still be increasing agriculture (through mass use of fossil fuels!) to feed people and increasing industry (through mass use of fossil fuels!) to reduce global poverty. The Green Revolution and economic changes of 1965-1985 were an enormous boon to humanity, and sacrificing THAT to slow down climate change would not be a good deal for us.
And of course, unilateral sacrifices make even less sense. At the height of the Cold war, neither the west nor the USSR could agree to simply restrict their industry while the other would do nothing, because then you suffer all the drawbacks and climate change doesn't get prevented anyway.
We don’t talk about climate change as an engineering project, but it absolutely could be.
Think if we spent a fraction of what we spend on war every decade and instead dedicated that to tech to cleanse the atmosphere or oceans, or maybe even fusion.
That kind of increase is making frequent enough 1 in a century extreme weather events, Canada got 2 years ago nearly 50°C in a town, floods in all continents, increased frequency and strength of hurricanes and so on.
And to make it worse, it is not the end of the change, and enough of the current warming is fueled by the warming itself, due to positive feedback loops, so it will keep going on even if we stop emissions. Things will keep getting worse, and will keep worsening probably for centuries. And things will stop being, let’s say, pleasant, closer to today than to the end of that process.
Prioritizing efficient public transportation and the cargo train network. Reducing meat production. Insulating houses. Etc, would have prevented many net-bad investments that were made and would've alleviated the need to now very rapidly transition the economy at enormous cost.
Not to speak of the cost in the future if we don't fix this.
News article about the Nixon global cooling letter:
https://www.thestreet.com/economonitor/us/an-important-lette...
CIA report about global cooling from 1974:
http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974...
In the 70s, they said there'd be an Ice Age:
(Linked to Google Cache below because the USG has removed the original (very well cited) content from the climate.gov website.)
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vtKwOK...
> there were SOME scientists concerned about global cooling in the 1960's and 1970's
I get that the existence of the letter implies that people were thinking that way. My question was more, what do you see as the implication of the fact that some people were thinking this way. That is, how does this play into the discussion of the article.
The article is making the case that climate change has been a concern of scientists for over 50 years, which is true, but for the first half of that time, many/most scientists were concerned about global cooling, which is an important point that is not mentioned at all.
I feel like I'm living in Orwell's 1984 where history is being re-written.
What you believe is untrue. It also seems to be motivated reasoning, so I will limit my engagement, but it's worth clarifying to others that your perspective is meritless.
[0] https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm#Sk [1] https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/warming_papers/charney.1...
The article talks about "climate change" since the 1960's, but it's obviously lumping in cooling and warming without distinction, which is misleading.
By limiting your engagement, you are slamming the door on debate and discussion, which is the same game that all climate change alarmists play. Science is never about consensus, it's about a cycle of theory, experiments (where possible), and analysis.
Galileo and Einstein were both victims of consensus.
Edit: Or one quick one about cooling specifically:
>There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then...When the myth of the 1970s global cooling scare arises in contemporary discussion over climate change, it is most often in the form of citations not to the scientific literature, but to news media coverage.
[5]https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/11584/1/2008bams2370%252E1...
>the same game that all climate change alarmists play
I wrote a different reply and deleted it in hopes of taking a completely different direction rather than just try to argue the points here. My dad remembered the same new coverage and had (I think) the same questions as you, and eventually he got his questions answered in a way that satisfied him in understanding the present day scientific consensus about climate change.
On a board like this you're always going to get terse responses to what you are asking about because to most people here it is akin to demanding that they, individually, win a debate that electricity is safe before you will use your light switch. There is no shortage at all of literature by so many sources specifically to address what you are asking about. Highly qualified people have labored exhaustively compiling the present day evidence for climate change, how it was gathered, how consensus has changed over time. Many people remember the global cooling controversy of the 70s and have asked your exact kind of question many times before. A quick google found this reply on /r/askhistorians[0], and that reply just links a post from 2005[1] which itself cites Spencer Weart's History of Global Warming, since republished as The Discovery of Global Warming, which dedicates a whole chapter specifically to 1970s "global cooling" claims.[3] These kinds of sources are going to be much better equipped and better qualified to explain the facts to you than an internet commenter, and since they've already spent the effort, why should some stranger on this board do it? Especially since this information is already easily available to you! I am not a researcher, or an expert, I didn't have this all immediately on hand. I'm sure you will have stringent standards to apply to select your sources, but even still I suspect you will be able to find enough scholarly works you find sufficiently trustworthy to build a good understanding of how "global cooling" on cable news in the 70s fits into the bigger story of reaching today's scientific consensus about climate change, without somehow contradicting all of it.
Spencer Weart is not an "alarmist playing a game," he provides an extremely thorough analysis of how this science was discovered. The internet records many instances of these positions being investigated and debated without the door being slammed in anyone's face. The refusal of a random internet commenter to retread the exact same debate here today doesn't make them an alarmist and it doesn't say anything about the validity of the general consensus for climate change. The popular debate about climate change has been held and reheld so many times that today scientists ask why there is still such an ongoing popular debate despite so many years of such broad scientific consensus.[4]
The sources linked by the commenter you replied to would probably help too, and my hope is their offer of a "limited engagement" would include a discu...
Please see my above reply citing over two dozen contemporaneous articles from reputable sources and scientists about global cooling ~50 years ago. Can you cite even a few articles or papers from the same era on the topic of global warming?
So much for the consensus argument, but why are you using it anyway? Science has nothing to do with consensus.
The Spencer Weart book you cite appears to be a "history of scientific discoveries that led to the current scientific opinion on climate change." I will give it a read, but I am reminded of this presentation: (You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8V8rtdXnLA
Yes, the citations of the article I linked in my edit, the one you requoted, are absolutely full of them. The article also specifically addresses the "cooling consensus" some people perceived from media coverage and compares it to the reality of what was being published and cited at the time academically (note many of the sources you linked are newspaper articles, not journal publications). In particular, refer to the section starting at page number 1329:
>Survey of the Peer Reviewed Literature
>One way to determine what scientists think is to ask them. This was actually done in 1977 following the severe 1976/77 winter in the eastern United States. “Collectively,” the 24 eminent climatologists responding to the survey “tended to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling” (National Defense University Research Directorate 1978). However, given that an opinion survey does not capture the full state of the science of the time, we conducted a rigorous literature review of the American Meteorological Society’s electronic archives as well as those of Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR).
>The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations.
On page number 1332, you will find an entire table "Cooling, neutral, and warming papers as defined in the text followed by the number of times they have been cited up through 1983."
The book also of course cites lots of research over the decades that built to this consensus, a consensus originating from many reputable sources and scientists individually studying global warming. I'm don't agree with the climate change consensus in a vacuum, but on the basis of the real story of how the consensus was reached from real research that I am trying so hard to point you in the direction of.
I'll just refer back to my original remarks that it's pretty much impossible for anyone to discuss these points with you if you won't do the reading. I said above I'm not interested in a personal back and forth about this point. I already gave you what you asked for in this reply in an earlier source, and I'm not going to keep replying any further now. Enjoy the book, but if all you need to be convinced is peer reviewed research into global warming from the 70s-80s it is readily available online. Below are just two examples I pulled from that article and a web search.
M. I. Budyko (1977) On present-day climatic changes https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3402/tellusa.v29i3.11...
>Thus, one should recognize the possibility of rising mean air temperature within the next quarter of the century. Then the calculations carried out using different models of climate theory show that in this case the boundary of polar ice will appreci- ably recess to the north. The available data show that this warming, possibly began in late or even mid-1960s
Hansen, J., D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell (1981), Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Science, 213, 957-966. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html
> It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980s.
The source and person who posted it are unserious and should be disregarded.
That information was showing up on TV paid by big oil to confuse the population, it worked.
Please identify which of the three citations I made above are connected to the oil industry, and how. I've added more than two dozen more references below too. If there was some conspiracy on the part of the oil companies, please provide references.
Thanks.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1961/01/30/976...
https://www.newspapers.com/image/381452398/
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/doc/14...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160805020812/http://pqasb.pqar...
http://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/18/archives/us-and-soviet-pre...
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outreach/CDPW40/CD&PW_...
https://www.newspapers.com/image/338657684/?terms=ponte%2Bsa...
https://www.newspapers.com/image/290727731/?terms=CLIMPA
https://www.newspapers.com/image/74266243/
https://www.newspapers.com/image/204959235/?terms=global%2Bc...
https://www.newspapers.com/image/43179829/?terms=cia%2Bgloba...
https://www.newspapers.com/image/338868191/?terms=the%2Bdecl...
https://www.newspapers.com/image/30003678/?terms=global%2Bco...
https://www.sciencenews.org/sn-magazine/march-1-19...