I was just in Oslo and Tromsø a couple of weeks ago. It was raining in Oslo. In February. In Tromsø, it was decidedly above freezing for a good portion of the time we were there. I don't think it's supposed to be above-freezing well up into the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter.
Where I live now (Netherlands), people tell me that just 20 years ago, there was ice-skating on the lakes/canals right now. Now, it is sunny and almost sweater weather instead of coat weather.
You could ice skate on the canals in Amsterdam in 2018 late February early March (was there for a couple of days). The Earth is definitely warming, but ymmv with anecdotal evidence.
Especially on climate, it's known for alarmist articles. Search their site for other headlines on an ice-free arctic and I bet you'll find similar doom predictions going back a long time with dates that are now in the past.
The headline suggests half of the world will become uninhabitable. The text then reveals that it will happen "if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels" and claims that the IPCC says "average temperatures could rise by 6C this century". Which isn't technically lying because they say "could", but it's the upper end of the error bars of the worst-case scenario, and as such, it doesn't support the "will" in the headline.
A quote (judge by yourself if you agree with the editor):
> One example is a complaint from Yiftah Curiel, the press attache at London’s Israeli embassy. He believes that all too often the “headlines of news pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will turn events on their head, portraying perpetrator as victim”.
> He complained about a headline on a story from the Associated Press. It was about one of four attacks on Israelis that left five Palestinians dead in one day.
> Curiel said: “We would like to request a correction of the headline ‘Three Palestinian teenagers shot dead on West Bank’. The headline obscures the relevant and pressing fact that the youths themselves had opened fire at Israeli soldiers, while the headline basically insinuates that they were executed by the soldiers.”
> (The headline to the original AP article stated: “Israel: 5 Palestinians killed while attacking Israelis”.)
> In a later email Curiel said: “In fact, the sub headline in this case makes it even worse, almost insinuating that the soldiers were lying about being attacked (“Israeli security forces allege they were under attack before the killings – though no soldiers were hurt”), as if the fact that they weren’t hurt somehow undermines the veracity of the attack”.
> I rejected the complaint because the headline is not inaccurate, nor in my view does it suggest that the three Palestinians were innocent victims. Three Palestinians are dead. But is it the whole story, no. Should headlines encapsulate the whole story? Traditionally they were required to capture the readers’ attention with the most significant part of the story: in this case the deaths. It was accepted that headlines were read in conjunction with the subheading and the article, which gave context.
I’ve been a loyal reader for years and since their reporting is so corrupt on one subject, now I feel like my worldview was partially shaped by their emotional coverage of many other subjects, which I now simply don’t trust.
We are not at the middle of this decade yet, but some climate indicators had a visible gap against previous years records since last year. If the next El Niño event is stronger than what it was in 2016 we might get around there before 2030.
Ice coverage sits in another positive feedback loop, as more (dark/heat absorbing) water is exposed compared with white ice, things become hotter, locally and globally. And the Arctic is one of the regions where the average of temperatures increased more.
In Europe, we mostly didn't have a winter this year around the Alps. It snowed 3x as much in November (and thank god for that), but has been spring temperatures (up to +10C in the mountain valleys) most of january and february and almost no precipitation.
Last winter was already very meh and extremely subpar re snowpack. Not even going into the increasing speed of glaciers melting, its up to 10m per year.
Winters as we know are disappearing, summers are getting brutal heatwaves never seen even few years ago, not within 1 person lifetime but within one darn decade. To any climate change denier... I'd love to smash that idiocy out of your head if that would help, but unfortunately we all know it won't.
Canada, very similar. We had days in January over 14C up by our cottage near Haliburton. Normally we see temps around -20C that time of year. I’ve never seen a warm winter like this. The snow mobile trails also never opened on the lake this year. Last year they opened for about 2 weeks, we all thought that was very short, until this year when they never opened.
> To any climate change denier... I'd love to smash that idiocy out of your head if that would help
Well, one must balance the downsides with the positives. Cheap energy from fossil fuels allowed humanity to flourish like never before, raising standards of living globally. And in the 50-year span from 1970 to 2019, deaths from climate-related reasons decreased to one-third[0], even as the global population more than doubled. That's one-third the absolute number, not per capita! All this mostly due to the increasing ability of the developing world to deal with extreme weather events, again thanks to cheap energy.
I posit it's entirely reasonable to disagree on what we should do about climate change.
Unfortunately, your analysis of humanity "flourishing" ignores the mass extinctions of many other species and habitats. Ultimately, we depend on our ecosystems to survive, so it remains to be seen how sustainable humanity's population level will be.
You were downvoted, but I'm not sure why. To emphasize, your post as written is not denying human-induced climate change (at this point I think it's fair to call people that do this idiots, or at least impervious to evidence), it's just acknowledging that cheap energy has been responsible for a huge surge is standards of living (and lifespans) for humans.
> I posit it's entirely reasonable to disagree on what we should do about climate change.
I think maybe you could have argued that in the past, but not so much anymore. We know now that it is possible to fully decarbonize the vast majority of our energy sources without a significant decrease in living standards - we just need to ensure the infrastructure exists that incentivizes the transition as quickly as possible, and ensure that organizations/people with large vested interests in fossil fuel extraction aren't allowed to control the direction we, collectively, take.
There are two problems: one is that cheap energy wasn’t the only factor in things like population growth or quality of life improvements and it’s also not like most of the carbon emissions were directed towards that goal. Attributing everything to cheap energy is effectively using someone in, say, India getting access to antibiotics, water filtration, and fertilizer as an excuse to ignore just how much of the global carbon footprint went not to providing the global poor with the huge reductions in childhood mortality but rather to things like Americans eating beef multiple meals a day and driving inefficient vehicles everywhere. Whether or not that was their intention it reads like an attempt to whitewash our highly disparate contribution to global carbon levels.
The other problem is the future: it’s mostly the same places which saw those gains which are also critically at risk from flooding, drought/famine, dangerous heat levels, etc. so there’s very much a “the future is longer than the past” aspect to this conversation where, say, 3-6 good decades shouldn’t be accepted as an excuse for the much larger number of worse decades which have already started.
For a brief moment on the geological timescale we managed to create a lot of wealth for billionaires. »That was worth it«, it will say on the tombstone inside the flame-moated residence of the last man standting, a billionaire.
Most of Iran/Pakistan will become unlivable outside during summer (maybe it will shock you most most world doesn't have AC even if its 50C outside). Same could easily go for whole Sahel. We can continue around the globe and name locations where a billion+ people live.
Please explain those cool positives you see to them. You won't have to, they will mostly not lay around and wait for collapse and death, instead they will stand up, turn towards also your home and march to a good and safe location (TM). I would do exactly the same in their place. Bear in mind that those folks will be absolutely desperate with nothing to lose.
This will be a catastrophe for all developed nations, and I don't see any way to avoid it now.
> (maybe it will shock you most most world doesn't have AC even if its 50C outside)
The solution is, again, more energy abundance so that most of the world can have AC. To paraphrase another HNer, I wish for the average Bangladeshi or Nigerian to have the living standards of the average Texan or Swiss; not the other way around, which would be what I foresee as the result of "degrowth" in the name of saving the climate.
There's virtually no point in the hand-wringing that the developed world engages in with electric cars and rooftop solar, when the developing world, where the majority of people are, are emitting more per capita CO2 emissions year after year. China alone netted over 40GW of coal power plants last year.
> Same could easily go for whole Sahel
The Sahel isn't home to all that many people, because it's not very friendly to civilization to begin with. Countries with territories in the Sahel have quite a lot of people, but that's entirely different.
> I don't see any way to avoid it now
More energy, preferably emission-free, but with emissions if we must. More nuclear power plants. More research into fusion.
Well, we have had a great winter in Utah this year and last year, average temperatures and all time record amounts of snow. I am not a denier of human caused climate change but winters disappearing in a decade is not true, at least broadly.
We’ve known much longer than that, that it will happen. But since we keep pumping more and more green house gases into the atmosphere we are no longer talking about centuries or 50 year time spans, but now things are happening much faster.
"20 years ago they said these events were 30 years away, and now they're saying they're just 10 years away, can't these climate scientists ever get it right!"
I think by definition we'd be officially out of the ice age then? If I remember my climate class accurately, average temperature out of ice age is significantly higher...
We'd be out of the ice age if we had no ice caps. There's ice at the south pole too.
I don't know what the definition would think of a situation where we usually had ice caps, but sometimes didn't. I tend to assume that would still count as an ice age, but presumably right on the threshold.
We need to put the sulfur back in the cargo ship fuel ASAP. Since the ban ocean water and global air temps have shot up like a rocket, far beyond the normal swings in El Niño weather patterns .
That would require policy makers admitting they were wrong, and having to take some initiative on the subject of climate engineering. I don’t see either happening any time soon.
This is a very popular take on here, IANAS but I’m not sure it’s that well supported.
For one, there’s a significant lag which means that we’re only seeing a fraction of the effect from the drop in emissions. To attribute the majority of this year’s warming would suggest an enormous effect size that’s not supported by our best models.
The majority of models suggest between 0.03 and 0.06 degrees of warming over the next 30 years, due to the drop in SO2 from marine shipping. At the very top end, models which anticipate a large amount of radiative forcing at the end of the confidence ranges still only anticipate around +0.18C by 2030.
Carbon Brief suggests other factors being more influential:
> [drop in marine shipping SO2] is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.
> Rather, there are a number of other factors likely contributing to current record-warm ocean temperatures. These include the end of a moderate La Niña event at the start of the year and a developing El Niño, a shift which tends to result in higher global temperatures.
> Stratospheric water vapour from the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and an unusual absence of dust from the Sahara Desert over the tropical North Atlantic may also be helping drive the ocean heatwave.
That is a quote from the underlying publication. If you look at the total area of the arctic sea, it means that there are only minimal amounts of ice left on the ocean. As the ice doesn't have a homogeneous thickness, it is expected that the last amounts only would completely go away when the arctic stops freezing at all.
No, it is about doing proper science. Where you usually don't deal with absolutes, but values within an interval. Which they named in the publication.
That scientists want to "scare" is the narrative of the climate change deniers.
It was likely removed because it used harsh words to criticize the quality of The Guardian. Someone inquired why they are calling Guardian [redacted]. Since the top comment disappearing also hid my response, here it is, because I agree that the Guardian is [redacted]:
---
Especially on climate, it's known for alarmist articles. Search their site for other headlines on an ice-free arctic and I bet you'll find similar doom predictions going back a long time with dates that are now in the past.
The headline suggests half of the world will become uninhabitable. The text then reveals that it will happen "if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels" and claims that the IPCC says "average temperatures could rise by 6C this century". Which isn't technically lying because they say "could", but it's the upper end of the error bars of the worst-case scenario, and as such, it doesn't support the "will" in the headline.
---
Edit: and since I don't want this to be just my opinion, https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ rates their "Factual Reporting" as "MIXED", same as Fox News or the German "BILD".
Thanks, fixed the link. I don't think it's an error, the alarmism is too consistent for that and as I said, the article text is misleading even when it isn't outright lying. This is just one random example I found, but it's a pattern I've noticed specifically with the Guardian's reporting on climate.
I believe the Guardian likes reporting what its readers want to hear, with facts often taking a backseat to that.
> Especially on climate, it's known for alarmist articles. Search their site for other headlines on an ice-free arctic and I bet you'll find similar doom predictions going back a long time with dates that are now in the past.
Now if anyone gets a wrong impression here: I checked the linked article. It does not talk about an ice-free arctic. It doesn't even mention the word "arctic". It also does not make any predictions for a date that is now in the past.
It essentially explains that extreme temperature increases would make parts of the world uninhabitable due to the wet bulb temperature. Which is, well, not particularly controversial, as it is a fact that can be derived from very basic physics, and was as true in 2009 as it is today.
We have good reasons to be concerned when looking at the sudden rise in ocean temperatures seen since early 2023 that closely track the worst-case scenarios. Given the stakes, I prefer to be overly cautious (aka. alarmist).
Speaking of credibility, it’s always conspicuous when someone copy-pastes a list of quotes without attribution and especially not noting the denial site where you copied that list from.
That’s important because what you’re doing is incredibly dishonest, representing quotes by individual people as representative of entire scientific fields. For example, your first quote is the lede in an Australian newspaper’s coverage of an unspecified person’s testimony before the U.S. Congress which was considering funding an Arctic mission during the international geophysical year, the kind of thing which would collect data needed to make better predictions and quite notably was not a consensus position in the field.
Similarly, your second was from an editorial by John Kerry, not a climate scientist, and rated false at the time because few climate scientists actually shared that aggressive timeline:
For things like this, what matters is consensus - science always has disagreements but over time converges on accuracy. If you look at the IPCC reports from the late 1980s and early 90s, for example, we can see they pretty closely track what we’ve observed in the decades those were published.
The third quote is from the same exact same source as the parent article is from. If the third link is bullshit, the parent article is bullshit.
That's the point. You're making a motte and bailey argument. When people respond to a news media article with other past news media articles, people claim they aren't consensus science. Well neither is the parent article. The IPCC disagrees with the conclusions of the parent article.
If consensus science matters, then people should flag non-consensus science articles from the same popular press sources that have been wrong in the past over and over and over again, for longer than I, as an old person have been alive.
I'm tired of the bullshit and the only thing I trust about the news media is that they are lying to me.
One of your mistakes is thinking that The Guardian is the source rather than a news organization covering the actual sources. They clearly describe that relationship and link to the source where you can learn more about the data and confidence:
As a reader, you have to make decisions about trust - one thing here is recognizing that, for examples, climate change deniers have been wrong for decades and keep moving from one wrong explanation to another whereas over the last half century the scientists working on climate change have made increasingly accurate estimates and each new source of data has corroborated rather than contradicting the other sources. The climate is very complex but the trend is clear and we have no reason to expect a sudden and dramatic reversal:
Now, if you really care about lying, perhaps it’s a good time to ask yourself why you find comfort in fossil fuel industry propaganda to the point that you are voluntarily spending your time and reputation sharing it but are unwilling to recognize the scientific consensus which has been established for decades by a community without anything like the powerful conflicts of interest which fuel the denial campaign.
That’s coverage of the source. The third paragraph links to the source and the fourth summarizes the range of predictions. You can see that the Nature article is a review article covering the range of predictions in the field along with discussing which ones they think are more likely. There’s a table here which is useful for comparing the ranges:
No, the source is the parent link, which is the Guardian's news media coverage of the environment. My third link was also a link to the Guardian's news media coverage of the environment.
You then questioned my credibility for posting a link to the same news media source that the parent article is from.
Looking at the past climate reporting of the Guardian when evaluating it's current climate reporting is a perfectly fair and reasonable thing to do. Implying that I can only use articles from climate scientists to criticize climate reporting in the news media is the motte and bailey argument I was mentioning.
If someone wants to post a link to the Nature article, we'll discuss that. And when we do that, we can discuss Nature's scientific credibility (also not great).
Again, you’re mixing up sources with coverage of those sources. This is an important concept to understand because it allows the reader to conclude that a review paper in Nature is more representative of the field than a single paper, and in both cases you’ll get a more nuanced understanding than fits in a single sentence.
This is also why the quote mills like the one you copied that from don’t cite their quotes, because their goal is not understanding but to continue collecting a paycheck for delaying action on climate change.
No, I'm not mixing up sources with coverage of sources. I am comparing one news media article in the Guardian to another news media article in the Guardian, and I am comparing current popular reporting on climate to past popular reporting on climate.
Which I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and which you think means I lack credibility. That's the issue here.
The Guardian now, and in the past, has a history of apocalyptic predictions such as "Ice-free summers in Arctic possible within next decade, scientists say". They haven't proven true in the past, and this one won't either.
Because what the Guardian is doing, now and in that past, is to pick outliers and the most extreme predictions in order to generate clickbait headlines. They do this in order to make money, and in order to support their ideology.
And it has caused real harm. People who know nothing of consensus climate science will read the headline "Ice-free summers in Arctic possible within next decade, scientists say" and it will cause them needless worry, the way the headline about "the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years" caused them needless worry over a decade ago.
And the journalists and editors writing these garbage pieces that have turned out to be false for the last 75 years will face no consequences for publishing lies.
That's the part I am calling bullshit on. These lies affect peoples lives. And, as I pointed out in my original post, "Liars are not believed even when they speak the truth".
There's no article that the Guardian could conceivably publish that would get me to take climate change more seriously.
You can always find quotes from people who are off in their estimates, but even a glance at the data [0] should convince you that things are not going well and that all of these predictions were at the very least directionaly correct.
Genuine question, have you never looked at the actual data behind those claims, or have you seen it and still don't find it convincing? My practice has been that whenever I see a sensational headline (or even academic article), I go dig up the underlying data and see if it's convincing. While undoubtedly media reporting is sensationalist (both direction depending on the news), it didn't take long plotting a wide range of different data sets to convince me that things are not looking good.
And that was ~10 years ago. I've personally been shocked how rapidly the climate has measurably and visibly impacted human life since then.
Wonder what the economics are if deep water ports around the arctic circle. Might be a modern gold rush of sorts to have that area of the ocean open for shipping year round and in a direct path over the pole.
I'm not saying it is, but it would be sad if the economics of ports was your first thought, and not the permanent obliteration of an entire ecosystem of continental scale.
The title is nothing essential ly. Anything is possible within next decade. Even I observe that climate might change, It is a shame to listen to this type of people.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadWhere I live now (Netherlands), people tell me that just 20 years ago, there was ice-skating on the lakes/canals right now. Now, it is sunny and almost sweater weather instead of coat weather.
https://weatherspark.com/h/s/68697/2002/3/Historical-Weather...
https://weatherspark.com/h/s/68697/1999/3/Historical-Weather...
The weather is (hotter|colder) than my perceived normal for this time, therefore climate change is (real|a hoax)!
A random example I found: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/12/global-w...
The headline suggests half of the world will become uninhabitable. The text then reveals that it will happen "if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels" and claims that the IPCC says "average temperatures could rise by 6C this century". Which isn't technically lying because they say "could", but it's the upper end of the error bars of the worst-case scenario, and as such, it doesn't support the "will" in the headline.
Here’s an article from 2019 https://david-collier.com/guardian-israel-bias-obsessive/
Here's a book from 2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disenchantment:_The_Guardian_a...
here’s their own attempt to say that it’s not bias https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/22/accusa...
A quote (judge by yourself if you agree with the editor):
> One example is a complaint from Yiftah Curiel, the press attache at London’s Israeli embassy. He believes that all too often the “headlines of news pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will turn events on their head, portraying perpetrator as victim”.
> He complained about a headline on a story from the Associated Press. It was about one of four attacks on Israelis that left five Palestinians dead in one day.
> Curiel said: “We would like to request a correction of the headline ‘Three Palestinian teenagers shot dead on West Bank’. The headline obscures the relevant and pressing fact that the youths themselves had opened fire at Israeli soldiers, while the headline basically insinuates that they were executed by the soldiers.”
> (The headline to the original AP article stated: “Israel: 5 Palestinians killed while attacking Israelis”.)
> In a later email Curiel said: “In fact, the sub headline in this case makes it even worse, almost insinuating that the soldiers were lying about being attacked (“Israeli security forces allege they were under attack before the killings – though no soldiers were hurt”), as if the fact that they weren’t hurt somehow undermines the veracity of the attack”.
> I rejected the complaint because the headline is not inaccurate, nor in my view does it suggest that the three Palestinians were innocent victims. Three Palestinians are dead. But is it the whole story, no. Should headlines encapsulate the whole story? Traditionally they were required to capture the readers’ attention with the most significant part of the story: in this case the deaths. It was accepted that headlines were read in conjunction with the subheading and the article, which gave context.
I’ve been a loyal reader for years and since their reporting is so corrupt on one subject, now I feel like my worldview was partially shaped by their emotional coverage of many other subjects, which I now simply don’t trust.
Ice coverage sits in another positive feedback loop, as more (dark/heat absorbing) water is exposed compared with white ice, things become hotter, locally and globally. And the Arctic is one of the regions where the average of temperatures increased more.
Last winter was already very meh and extremely subpar re snowpack. Not even going into the increasing speed of glaciers melting, its up to 10m per year.
Winters as we know are disappearing, summers are getting brutal heatwaves never seen even few years ago, not within 1 person lifetime but within one darn decade. To any climate change denier... I'd love to smash that idiocy out of your head if that would help, but unfortunately we all know it won't.
Well, one must balance the downsides with the positives. Cheap energy from fossil fuels allowed humanity to flourish like never before, raising standards of living globally. And in the 50-year span from 1970 to 2019, deaths from climate-related reasons decreased to one-third[0], even as the global population more than doubled. That's one-third the absolute number, not per capita! All this mostly due to the increasing ability of the developing world to deal with extreme weather events, again thanks to cheap energy.
I posit it's entirely reasonable to disagree on what we should do about climate change.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/records/item/57564-wmo-atlas-of-mort...
> I posit it's entirely reasonable to disagree on what we should do about climate change.
I think maybe you could have argued that in the past, but not so much anymore. We know now that it is possible to fully decarbonize the vast majority of our energy sources without a significant decrease in living standards - we just need to ensure the infrastructure exists that incentivizes the transition as quickly as possible, and ensure that organizations/people with large vested interests in fossil fuel extraction aren't allowed to control the direction we, collectively, take.
Instead of saying "It's not happening." the GP is saying "It's happening but it's no big deal. good stuff came from it."
Which to be frank, is a complete waste of time not worth responding to. What they've said has been a meme for 30 years at this point.
https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
The other problem is the future: it’s mostly the same places which saw those gains which are also critically at risk from flooding, drought/famine, dangerous heat levels, etc. so there’s very much a “the future is longer than the past” aspect to this conversation where, say, 3-6 good decades shouldn’t be accepted as an excuse for the much larger number of worse decades which have already started.
Please explain those cool positives you see to them. You won't have to, they will mostly not lay around and wait for collapse and death, instead they will stand up, turn towards also your home and march to a good and safe location (TM). I would do exactly the same in their place. Bear in mind that those folks will be absolutely desperate with nothing to lose.
This will be a catastrophe for all developed nations, and I don't see any way to avoid it now.
The solution is, again, more energy abundance so that most of the world can have AC. To paraphrase another HNer, I wish for the average Bangladeshi or Nigerian to have the living standards of the average Texan or Swiss; not the other way around, which would be what I foresee as the result of "degrowth" in the name of saving the climate.
There's virtually no point in the hand-wringing that the developed world engages in with electric cars and rooftop solar, when the developing world, where the majority of people are, are emitting more per capita CO2 emissions year after year. China alone netted over 40GW of coal power plants last year.
> Same could easily go for whole Sahel
The Sahel isn't home to all that many people, because it's not very friendly to civilization to begin with. Countries with territories in the Sahel have quite a lot of people, but that's entirely different.
> I don't see any way to avoid it now
More energy, preferably emission-free, but with emissions if we must. More nuclear power plants. More research into fusion.
Thanks for taking Ontario's Canadian winter this year
I don't know what the definition would think of a situation where we usually had ice caps, but sometimes didn't. I tend to assume that would still count as an ice age, but presumably right on the threshold.
/s, and I dearly hope that doesn’t happen, but these days it feels like it’s just a matter of time.
For one, there’s a significant lag which means that we’re only seeing a fraction of the effect from the drop in emissions. To attribute the majority of this year’s warming would suggest an enormous effect size that’s not supported by our best models.
The majority of models suggest between 0.03 and 0.06 degrees of warming over the next 30 years, due to the drop in SO2 from marine shipping. At the very top end, models which anticipate a large amount of radiative forcing at the end of the confidence ranges still only anticipate around +0.18C by 2030.
Carbon Brief suggests other factors being more influential:
> [drop in marine shipping SO2] is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.
> Rather, there are a number of other factors likely contributing to current record-warm ocean temperatures. These include the end of a moderate La Niña event at the start of the year and a developing El Niño, a shift which tends to result in higher global temperatures.
> Stratospheric water vapour from the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and an unusual absence of dust from the Sahara Desert over the tropical North Atlantic may also be helping drive the ocean heatwave.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2...
A million square kilometers of ice is not “ice-free.” Stop misusing words.
They think the lie is justifiable to get people scared. I disagree. Scientists lying will only make people distrust the science.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
1 million square km is pretty far from zero.
It was likely removed because it used harsh words to criticize the quality of The Guardian. Someone inquired why they are calling Guardian [redacted]. Since the top comment disappearing also hid my response, here it is, because I agree that the Guardian is [redacted]:
---
Especially on climate, it's known for alarmist articles. Search their site for other headlines on an ice-free arctic and I bet you'll find similar doom predictions going back a long time with dates that are now in the past.
A random example I found: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/12/global-w...
The headline suggests half of the world will become uninhabitable. The text then reveals that it will happen "if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels" and claims that the IPCC says "average temperatures could rise by 6C this century". Which isn't technically lying because they say "could", but it's the upper end of the error bars of the worst-case scenario, and as such, it doesn't support the "will" in the headline.
---
Edit: and since I don't want this to be just my opinion, https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ rates their "Factual Reporting" as "MIXED", same as Fox News or the German "BILD".
I believe the Guardian likes reporting what its readers want to hear, with facts often taking a backseat to that.
> A random example I found: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/12/global-w...
Now if anyone gets a wrong impression here: I checked the linked article. It does not talk about an ice-free arctic. It doesn't even mention the word "arctic". It also does not make any predictions for a date that is now in the past.
It essentially explains that extreme temperature increases would make parts of the world uninhabitable due to the wet bulb temperature. Which is, well, not particularly controversial, as it is a fact that can be derived from very basic physics, and was as true in 2009 as it is today.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/21/arctic-w...
Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist (2013)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...
Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within four years (2012)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-c...
On the topic of possible inaccurate climate models used in IPCC reports https://youtu.be/4S9sDyooxf4?si=qEIMzCg-oI4y8pbo
That’s important because what you’re doing is incredibly dishonest, representing quotes by individual people as representative of entire scientific fields. For example, your first quote is the lede in an Australian newspaper’s coverage of an unspecified person’s testimony before the U.S. Congress which was considering funding an Arctic mission during the international geophysical year, the kind of thing which would collect data needed to make better predictions and quite notably was not a consensus position in the field.
Similarly, your second was from an editorial by John Kerry, not a climate scientist, and rated false at the time because few climate scientists actually shared that aggressive timeline:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/sep/02/john-kerry...
The third is again based on a single researcher who had a more aggressive timeline than most of their peers:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/m...
For things like this, what matters is consensus - science always has disagreements but over time converges on accuracy. If you look at the IPCC reports from the late 1980s and early 90s, for example, we can see they pretty closely track what we’ve observed in the decades those were published.
The third quote is from the same exact same source as the parent article is from. If the third link is bullshit, the parent article is bullshit.
That's the point. You're making a motte and bailey argument. When people respond to a news media article with other past news media articles, people claim they aren't consensus science. Well neither is the parent article. The IPCC disagrees with the conclusions of the parent article.
If consensus science matters, then people should flag non-consensus science articles from the same popular press sources that have been wrong in the past over and over and over again, for longer than I, as an old person have been alive.
I'm tired of the bullshit and the only thing I trust about the news media is that they are lying to me.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-023-00515-9
As a reader, you have to make decisions about trust - one thing here is recognizing that, for examples, climate change deniers have been wrong for decades and keep moving from one wrong explanation to another whereas over the last half century the scientists working on climate change have made increasingly accurate estimates and each new source of data has corroborated rather than contradicting the other sources. The climate is very complex but the trend is clear and we have no reason to expect a sudden and dramatic reversal:
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/16arctic/logs/ju...
Now, if you really care about lying, perhaps it’s a good time to ask yourself why you find comfort in fossil fuel industry propaganda to the point that you are voluntarily spending your time and reputation sharing it but are unwilling to recognize the scientific consensus which has been established for decades by a community without anything like the powerful conflicts of interest which fuel the denial campaign.
That's the source. That's the Guardian.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-023-00515-9/tables/1
You then questioned my credibility for posting a link to the same news media source that the parent article is from.
Looking at the past climate reporting of the Guardian when evaluating it's current climate reporting is a perfectly fair and reasonable thing to do. Implying that I can only use articles from climate scientists to criticize climate reporting in the news media is the motte and bailey argument I was mentioning.
If someone wants to post a link to the Nature article, we'll discuss that. And when we do that, we can discuss Nature's scientific credibility (also not great).
This is also why the quote mills like the one you copied that from don’t cite their quotes, because their goal is not understanding but to continue collecting a paycheck for delaying action on climate change.
Which I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and which you think means I lack credibility. That's the issue here.
The Guardian now, and in the past, has a history of apocalyptic predictions such as "Ice-free summers in Arctic possible within next decade, scientists say". They haven't proven true in the past, and this one won't either.
Because what the Guardian is doing, now and in that past, is to pick outliers and the most extreme predictions in order to generate clickbait headlines. They do this in order to make money, and in order to support their ideology.
And it has caused real harm. People who know nothing of consensus climate science will read the headline "Ice-free summers in Arctic possible within next decade, scientists say" and it will cause them needless worry, the way the headline about "the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years" caused them needless worry over a decade ago.
And the journalists and editors writing these garbage pieces that have turned out to be false for the last 75 years will face no consequences for publishing lies.
That's the part I am calling bullshit on. These lies affect peoples lives. And, as I pointed out in my original post, "Liars are not believed even when they speak the truth".
There's no article that the Guardian could conceivably publish that would get me to take climate change more seriously.
Genuine question, have you never looked at the actual data behind those claims, or have you seen it and still don't find it convincing? My practice has been that whenever I see a sensational headline (or even academic article), I go dig up the underlying data and see if it's convincing. While undoubtedly media reporting is sensationalist (both direction depending on the news), it didn't take long plotting a wide range of different data sets to convince me that things are not looking good.
And that was ~10 years ago. I've personally been shocked how rapidly the climate has measurably and visibly impacted human life since then.
0. https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org/