Uprated because the creative workarounds ("If so, this anonymous dreadfulness would, scientists say...") made me laugh, and point to the absurdity of banning language.
Well, in many cases banning language or words is considered quite the right thing to do. Different ends of the political spectrum just want to do away with different words or phrases.
Just consider how embarrassed Benedict Cumberbatch was when he accidentally used two words in wrong order ("colored people" is insulting, "people of color" is okay).
Water vapor is a much larger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2. But it also cycles through the atmosphere on the order of weeks. So if we were to accidentally increase the atmospheric concentration of water vapor, we'd be out of trouble in a couple of weeks after the excess rained out.
Carbon cycles through the atmosphere on the order of centuries. So if we put too much CO2 in the atmosphere we have to live with the consequences for what will seem to us like a long time. That's why people focus on CO2 as the "climate change gas."
My wife and I visited the Tellus Museum in North Georgia yesterday, and the planetarium presentation we watched did a great job of calling out climate change denial for the absurdity that it is. I'd imagine that the moral of the video flew over the heads of most of the children in attendance, but I'd like to think that it smacked their parents right in the head.
Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I hear so many deniers claiming that "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" and I just have to shake my head at their ability to dismiss something that's right in their faces. As the video we watched said, human industrialization pours 100 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the volcanoes on Earth, and the volcano emissions themselves do modify climate patterns in a measurable way. Basically, we're accelerating this planet's transition into something resembling Venus.
> Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse.
I don't know that I can actually agree with this. I see a lot of snow, and a lot of cold, and a winter that started really late. But I've only lived in this part of the states for a few years. Who am I to know whether these weather patterns are normal or not? This isn't the Little Ice Age[1] - our crops aren't dying.
I do believe that our climate is changing, but I believe that because there is a scientific consensus that this is so, not from any personal observations which wouldn't be rigorous anyway, and would (and should) hold about as much sway as an idiot in Congress bringing a snowball for his show-and-tell.
And this isn't mentioning the awful science that was sometimes brought out as evidence of global warming (mixed in with the good, it was hard to pick them apart). It took me two years after seeing Al Gore's TED talk to consider that global warming might be a real thing.
Not quite, I'm in New York and I visited Boston shortly after their record snowfall. But by the time I got there, there was no snow - plus it was downtown. It all looked pretty much like I would expect that part of the world to look like in March.
Looking out my window in downtown Boston right now and there's still a bunch of snow steadily melting everywhere, but it's not nearly as bad as it was even two weeks ago.
Climate doom is as silly a dogma as climate denial. Hyperbole has poisoned the debate on both fringes, the center is much more reasonable but not as exciting as indignant outrage.
I suppose I wasn't disagreeing with you, save that I disagree that the centrist position is "not as exciting".
My only point is that even the modest, "non-alarmist" positions are pretty alarming to any reasonable individual. That ain't hyperbole. It's just basic statistics.
Unfortunately it's the case that the extreme hyperbole on both ends drowns out the genuine alarm people should be experiencing at the very realistic effects of a warming climate.
Basically, by recalibrating everyone's expectations to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE", when you tell them "well, not everyone is gonna die, but a lot of people are gonna get screwed", the response is either "oh, you lied before, I don't believe anything you say now", or "well that doesn't so bad... I'm gonna go rollin' coal."
>> Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated.
The projections for warming over the last 15 years have not panned out. There was no rise. So the earliest projections from the alarmists have proven to be wrong.
No, he's cherrypicking a start date for measuring global temperature rise--selecting 1998, which was an exceptionally strong El Nino year, resulting in an anomalously high yearly average global temperature--and then comparing subsequent yearly average temperatures based on that epoch. In essence he's comparing a trendline to a single outlier, and using that to come to an invalid conclusion.
Using that sort of reasoning, it's pretty trivial to show no "warming". But it's nothing more than statistical trickery. When you look at the overall trend, it's pretty clear that global warming has continued apace, right in line with predictions made decades ago. It's actually pretty impressive how closely reality has hewed to those predictions:
The argument that climate scientists claim x% of warming every decade is a straw man.. that is not a claim they have made and then failed at. They have claimed longer-term warming with short-term fluctuations (considering that carbon emissions are only one factor among many), and if you pull out to a 100-year view, that claim has been maintained. In fact, when carbon emissions as a factor is removed from model predictions for the last 15 years or so, they predict cooling.. so the "flatness" in comparison indicates that carbon emissions brought the average temperature up.
In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.
I'm not sure how a Google search for a series of loosely related graphs addresses either of my arguments. I assume you are thinking that their existence refutes them somehow, but I don't see anything on the first page that contradicts anything I said.
>> I'm not sure how a Google search for a series of loosely related graphs addresses either of my arguments.
Your argument was that my argument was a strawman. Those graphs all show projections that have not panned out. To be definitive, either of us would need to locate the original claims from a reliable source.
Those graphs don't show a prediction of an x% increase for a particular decade, however. It seems you're interpreting them as literal average temperature predictions for a decade, when they represent where a linear regression line would pass through when that decade's averages are considered alongside previous decades' temperature data.
In case you don't grok the difference, the difference is that a relatively flat decade followed by a huge temperature jump will have the linear regression line for that decade be higher than the actual temperature, because the of the later jump. This is what is (likely) happening now (and what happened in 77-86, and 87-96). The most popular theory as to this seems to be that the heat is stored in the deep ocean, and then releases in a burst into the surface atmosphere.
Which takes me to my second point, that even with your interpretation (which is generally the interpretation of the graphs used to make the 'no warming in 15 years' argument), the graphs being used are surface temperature, and don't include ocean warming. As I mentioned above, including ocean temperatures shows a rise even in static decade temperature, without even involving linear regression.
If you'd like a source, the intended interpretation of the results are all in the IPCC reports, most of which have (reasonably) short summaries. http://www.ipcc.ch/
I don't disagree with you; there are a lot of unanswered questions. I lean more towards the hard science, being an amateur weather tracker, but I try to ignore extremism on any front.
That said, I will take the word of a consensus of climatologists and meteorologists over that of politicians and religious leaders with a populist agenda, on principle alone.
I sometimes wonder if we did ourselves a disservice by focusing so much on the likelihood that current climate change is (in part) human-induced - it's very easy for people to get defensive when there's a blame game. Perhaps we should have marketed it as "human-mitigable climate change" - regardless of who or what is responsible, there are concrete things we can do to slow it down and prepare for it.
Perhaps we could blame it on the prehistoric life forms that turned into fossil fuels. Then we can sell it as DGW using CGI of battling against rotting zombie Utahraptors that are coming out of the ground to destroy us.
If a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian can come up with the best justification for legalizing (not decriminalizing, but full-on legalization) of marijuana, I have to believe it's possible.
Genesis 2:15 says "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it."
Note the KEEP it part.
Numbers 35:33 says "You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it."
Apparently, there's already a fundamental religious case for environmental protections.
This shouldn't be difficult. At least for Christians they're supposed to consider themselves stewards. What good is a steward that's actively destructive towards their charge? Recycling, green (as in more plants and less concrete) development, reducing air and water pollution are all reasonable things from that perspective.
> "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!"
Both of them are true, the missing part is whether human is any part of either of those processes. I've been wondering for a while that whether the common slogan of "save the Earth" would have served better had it been "save the Human". Yes, it's just semantic, but it's the same as the change to calling "climate change" rather than "global warming" - human easily get caught up in language, most of the time probably just subconsciously. It also helped with not being on the extreme: it's also bad if the changes wipe out 50% of the human being on earth, which is probably magnitude more likely than wiping out 100% of us.
Even if we literally nuke ourselves out of existence, chance are something will still be leftover on the Earth (unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet).
Exactly. Carlin (George, not Dan) put it nicely in one of his last standups:
> The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doin’ great! It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, and meteors, world-wide floods, tidal waves, world-wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
> The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, Folks, we’re goin’ away. We won’t leave much of a trace either, thank god for that. Maybe a little styrofoam, maybe, little styrofoam. Planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul de sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doin’? Ask those people at Pompeii, who were frozen into position from volcanic ash. How the planet’s doin’. Wanna know if the planet’s alright, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia, or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who built their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room. The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cuz that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us.
> unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet
We are very, very, very, very much unable to do that. We can fuck up the surface a bit but that's about it. Consider: the Chicxulub impactor delivered an estimated 100 teratons of equivalent TNT. And it didn't come close to blowing up the planet. How To Destroy The Earth[0] estimates that we'd need 25,000 gigatonnes of antimatter to blast the planet to pieces.
Actually some animal fat is good for us. Cutting out all animal fat leads to a poor diet.
This is why science is so important. Science is about questioning everything. While we used to think animal fat was bad we've since learned otherwise.
Even if we are pretty sure about something it is dangerous to shut out debate. Except that which must not be named. Any questioning of this basic fact of reality is a sure sign you are not a man of science.
Only an idiot would be stupid enough to inquiry and debate. True science lovers accept the messages they heard on a video without question.
Haha, don't worry I knew. Your post had fantastic delivery. I wanted to congrat you for the incredible joke. This isn't reddit I figured that comment was the best way to do so. It comes off as innocent yet re-enforces the message.
Who said anything was settled? Like any science, we are always learning new things about it, and that was my point. Climate change deniers refuse to even consider the possibility that we're endangering ourselves.
Fair enough, there are extremists on both ends, that's for sure. My personal viewpoint is that global warming and negative climate change is observable, but we don't know everything about it yet and likely never will. That's what makes it a science and not a religion. I just get frustrated when it gets turned into a religious or political topic, something it should never be.
Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility? Climate scientists question it themselves[1,2]. They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change.
We should question it; that's what science is all about. But there's a huge difference between questioning something and flat out denying its existence due to politics or ignorance, or both. Those same scientists you linked to aren't throwing their hands up in the air, declaring that climate science is all a lie. Rather, they continue to study, to innovate, to question their own methods so they can improve their models and understand climate change.
> Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility?
Because the vast majority of it (just about all of it outside of actual climate scientists, really) is but one more round of professional doubt-sowing, in the long line of tobacco, leaded gas, CFCs or SO2 (and with very similar people in the roles of professional doubters).
> They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change.
They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity.
They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity.
Whoa there. If their models don't do a good job of predicting climate change, then that has a direct impact on the predicted consequences and the impact on humanity, no?
Yes and no. Because climate is a chaotic system full of feedback loops and we're probably still unaware of much of it (either because we don't have the tools or data points to measure them, or because it comes into play in circumstances we're not in) it's hard to make precise predictions about the effects of climate change in specific locales. That's why you see climate scientists predicting everything and its inverse with respect to hurricanes: we're not even close to a global or even a superlocal understanding the ocean or the atmosphere, let alone the complex interplays of both. So at a "local" level it's almost impossible to make excellent predictions.
At a global level though, we can see the energy being dumped into the system (making it more chaotic and more violent) and we can see ice covers literally melting before our eyes, both reducing global albedo and ultimately ending up swelling the seas. The global ice melt on its own is sufficient for pants-shitting terror.
Also, we built our civilisation in a specific (climatological and ecological) set of environments, climate change means these are likely to change fast, and regardless of an eventual steady state at the end there's absolutely no guarantee we'll come out ahead (or even at all) at the end of the ride.
That's one of the things which gets my goat about modern conservatives, they hate conservation.
At a global level though, we can see the energy being dumped into the system
How do we measure that? From the article I posted above, climate scientists readily admit that the temperature increase they expected with their models has not come to fruition (as a global, non-local measure).
And thus, if the temperature models haven't been that accurate, how accurate are the sea-level models? Even those estimate a very wide range of potential outcomes (I'll readily admit the minimum is still a significant sea level rise).
In Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything he makes the point that for most of its history the earth has been much colder than at present, including times where the oceans have frozen. We are living in a temporary thaw.
For all we know we are helping to perpetuate this thaw rather than slip back into another ice age. Maybe human generated global warming would have had to be implemented anyway to save the species. There's just so much we don't know.
Climate change denial reminds me of Lysenkoism. The facts must serve the ideology, and if they don't then it is the facts that are in error. The obvious solution, then, is to ban talking about the facts.
I really liked John Oliver's take on this. The term "Climate Change" (edit: specifically as part of the public discourse on the topic) is an invention of the American right wing, in an attempt to rename "Global Warming" so as to make it sound less alarming.
On the one hand it worked. The Senate, this year, happily passed a resolution that "climate change is real and not a hoax", but of course Republican reps gleefully pointed out that, of course the climate changes, no one is disputing that...
But now that "Climate Change" is, to the public, basically just "Global Warming", Florida is now working to ban the very term their political wing invented.
Except "climate change" was in use in scientific papers back in 1979 and defined as "a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth", including "global warming" and other changes.
I doubt the American right wing influenced Mr Charney in his naming conventions.
How language is used in studies, versus how it's used colloquially, are two different things.
The use of the term "climate change" as part of the public discourse (as opposed to scientific discourse) is as a result of a right wing PR campaign in the 1980s.
I don't think it was the Right that changed the terminology. In fact, it's my impression that it was the environmentalists. It was in response to the ironic questions "if it's global warming, then where is this polar vortex coming from?". The new terminology is more accurate.
But if it is so absurd then why have we switched from "global warming" (oops maybe not a good term) to "climate change" (oops climate always changes) to "extreme weather"? And why do we suddenly have superstorms? Because the storms are not sufficiently bad to be called hurricanes?
Being in science has made me very sceptical of a lot of science, especially science that is hyped and suddenly has a lot of money to divide among participating scientists. Publish-or-perish is very perverse stimulus.
And even here I see things like F-ing republicans. He man, we are supposed to be skeptical, you know, skeptic magazine is for the "in crowd", right!? But not of human induced climate change, noooo... And heaven forbid don't mention that you think things will solve itself with better nuclear reactors, solar power and such, Nooo, we are a bad species, we are a tumor. Even though we solved acidic rain and the hole in the ozon layer.
"We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW (anthropogenic global warming), 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming." ... "Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming."
Edit: Yes this post is a bit of an emotional rant but I hate how being a skeptic is bad depending on the subject.
> Even though we solved acidic rain and the hole in the ozon layer.
You realize that these were situations that we caused, right? Messing things up and then cleaning up our mess doesn't make us some sort of super race of benevolent beings.
The point is that it should be ok to be skeptical but it seems that climate change has become a religious debate with believers and non-believers. the science is not all that black-white. And even if it were I'd still recommend people to be skeptical and wonder "from where the money comes."
We know now that many of the published models overestimated the rising temperatures. The governments are changing policies based on these faulty models. There are real and bad consequences from these changed policies. Meanwhile politicians don't understand climate science at all. It is a dangerous situation. I just want to say that there is reason to be optimistic. In the 80s I had kids in class crying in their beds at night over the hole in the ozone layer. Images in my head of skin cancers everywhere... I'd rather put some nicer images in the heads om my children. Sure they should appreciate nature but it is better to work on nuclear fusion than spending energy on the banning of fossil fuels and get that ridiculous situation you have in the US where you waste precious soil on ethanol "bio"fuels. Or this situation in Europe where you can get monstrously large vehicles on the cheap (you pay less taxes) because they can drive some kilometers on a crappy electrical engine before switching to gasoline.
Meanwhile I can't be a critic of climate change without getting a retard or f-ing republican stamp on my forehead (I see that that guy deleted his comment by the way).
> In the 80s I had kids in class crying in their beds at night over the hole in the ozon layer. Images in my head of skin cancers everywhere..
The Ozone layer is a shining example of success driven by a nearly identical discussion to today's climate change one. Scientists showed a clear mechanism for Ozone depletion, a clear (but expensive) fix for the issue by removing CFCs from all goods, and then worked over years to convince politicians to ignore the business interests casting FUD over their work and actually regulate CFCs.
The Ozone layer didn't fix itself; massive, coordinated action by nearly every country on earth in the form of the Montreal Protocol did. A nice summary of the tactics taken by 'skeptics' that time around: http://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/ozone_skeptics...
It just so happens there is much more money at stake with the Climate Change debate so the opposition is much stronger.
Ok, I agree, so climate change is different. The examples I gave (superstorm, failing models) point towards a more marketing than scientific approach from the anthropocentric climate change camp. To me that suggests money at stake from the pro camp as well. Like the increasing amount of money spend on climate scientists.
I'm not very convinced of our role in climate change and I'm even less convinced of the the fact hat we can forecast climate changes by what ever means they are induced.
I'm not saying clean energy is a bad long term investment. I'm saying some people are going to far and we should be careful that we don't trade welfare for predicted long term effects that actually have a very small probability of ever becoming reality. We should not base important decisions on models that are proving inaccurate.
What we should do, from time to time is ask who is making these flashy climate change movies that the neuron rubbing guy watches. Who is funding those? Do people ever ask themselves that?
> What we should do, from time to time is ask who is making these flashy climate change movies that the neuron rubbing guy watches. Who is funding those? Do people ever ask themselves that?
We do ask that. All the time. The information is publicly available.
Two neurons guy saw the movie, "Dynamic Earth" which was produced by the following:
Dynamic Earth is the result of a two-year long collaboration
between Spitz Creative Media, the Advanced Visualization
Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) at the University of Illinois, NASA’s Scientific
Visualization Studio, and Thomas Lucas Productions, Inc.
Produced in association with the Denver Museum of Nature
& Science and NASA Earth Science.
Spitz Creative is a company that makes planetarium films, so the documentary was pretty much made NASA and the NCSA -- the two organizations that conduct the vast majority of climate modeling and research in the world. Literally world expert climate scientists.
I challenge you to do the same for anti-AGW documentaries..
You're mixing scientists with abstracts. Obviously many abstracts won't have any position on AGW, regardless of the position of the authors, simply because it's not relevant.
>> It has been nine years since Florida was hit by a proper hurricane. Could that be a coincidence? Sure. Or it could be because of … something.
Remember when we had that record hurricane season and it was blamed on ... something. And we were supposed to have a lot more in the future because of ... something.
These people have to stop blaming everything on something. It's warmer, it's colder, record hurricane season, no hurricane in 9 years, everything is always blamed on ... something. And then they wonder why there are people who don't believe them.
Yeah, but even if nobody in a field blames everything on something, as long as many people have a propensity to investigate if something was because of something and publish, then it ends up looking to the uninitiated that the field is blaming everything on something even when it isn't.
Coastal Floridian checking in. I don't deny global warming but at the moment there is no widespread immediate threat to property caused by rising sea levels where I live. Not to say there won't be in a generation or so.
The more immediate threat is the environment effects of overpopulation and pollution in the waterways. I remember fishing in the lagoon by my house when I was a kid and the water being super clear and full of fish. Now, it's been overfished; you can only catch undesirable bottom feeder type fish. It's also a constant brown caused by runoff from residential areas.
Coming from a family of scientists and having a background in science as well, it's a bit terrifying (but not surprising) how many skeptics of anthropogenic climate change (or of the extent and severity of its effects) there are here. There are a few really good posts in here making good points about climate science, but there are also a bunch of really dishearteningly poorly informed comments too. It's dismaying to see and then to be reminded that the US populace in general is even more skeptical of the conclusions of experts, which pretty much all point at a very bleak picture of the future--a picture which keeps being adjusted to be more bleak, since so little action is being taken to rectify the problem.
...But I wasn't referring to that list, I was referring to the people commenting on here. Also, a representative list of scientists who do not oppose the mainstream view of climate change would be far longer (note the chart on the side), and also include far more people who actually study climate change.
This is misleading (your link is broken, btw -- needs a slash between org and wiki). Before the listing it says:
"These scientists have said that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling."
So we don't know that they disagree with global warming, just that they think the projections are too inaccurate.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadJust consider how embarrassed Benedict Cumberbatch was when he accidentally used two words in wrong order ("colored people" is insulting, "people of color" is okay).
water vapor?
Carbon cycles through the atmosphere on the order of centuries. So if we put too much CO2 in the atmosphere we have to live with the consequences for what will seem to us like a long time. That's why people focus on CO2 as the "climate change gas."
Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I hear so many deniers claiming that "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" and I just have to shake my head at their ability to dismiss something that's right in their faces. As the video we watched said, human industrialization pours 100 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the volcanoes on Earth, and the volcano emissions themselves do modify climate patterns in a measurable way. Basically, we're accelerating this planet's transition into something resembling Venus.
I don't know that I can actually agree with this. I see a lot of snow, and a lot of cold, and a winter that started really late. But I've only lived in this part of the states for a few years. Who am I to know whether these weather patterns are normal or not? This isn't the Little Ice Age[1] - our crops aren't dying.
I do believe that our climate is changing, but I believe that because there is a scientific consensus that this is so, not from any personal observations which wouldn't be rigorous anyway, and would (and should) hold about as much sway as an idiot in Congress bringing a snowball for his show-and-tell.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
And this isn't mentioning the awful science that was sometimes brought out as evidence of global warming (mixed in with the good, it was hard to pick them apart). It took me two years after seeing Al Gore's TED talk to consider that global warming might be a real thing.
So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that.
Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals.
But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
My only point is that even the modest, "non-alarmist" positions are pretty alarming to any reasonable individual. That ain't hyperbole. It's just basic statistics.
Unfortunately it's the case that the extreme hyperbole on both ends drowns out the genuine alarm people should be experiencing at the very realistic effects of a warming climate.
Basically, by recalibrating everyone's expectations to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE", when you tell them "well, not everyone is gonna die, but a lot of people are gonna get screwed", the response is either "oh, you lied before, I don't believe anything you say now", or "well that doesn't so bad... I'm gonna go rollin' coal."
The projections for warming over the last 15 years have not panned out. There was no rise. So the earliest projections from the alarmists have proven to be wrong.
Are you saying that sea levels in general haven't risen? Or that Florida in particular is somehow immune?
If the former, this[¹] seems to contradict you, are you saying it's wrong, or am I reading it in a different way?
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#/media/F...
Using that sort of reasoning, it's pretty trivial to show no "warming". But it's nothing more than statistical trickery. When you look at the overall trend, it's pretty clear that global warming has continued apace, right in line with predictions made decades ago. It's actually pretty impressive how closely reality has hewed to those predictions:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-c...
In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.
Thanks for playing. You lose: https://www.google.com/search?q=global+warming+prediction+fr...
Your argument was that my argument was a strawman. Those graphs all show projections that have not panned out. To be definitive, either of us would need to locate the original claims from a reliable source.
In case you don't grok the difference, the difference is that a relatively flat decade followed by a huge temperature jump will have the linear regression line for that decade be higher than the actual temperature, because the of the later jump. This is what is (likely) happening now (and what happened in 77-86, and 87-96). The most popular theory as to this seems to be that the heat is stored in the deep ocean, and then releases in a burst into the surface atmosphere.
Which takes me to my second point, that even with your interpretation (which is generally the interpretation of the graphs used to make the 'no warming in 15 years' argument), the graphs being used are surface temperature, and don't include ocean warming. As I mentioned above, including ocean temperatures shows a rise even in static decade temperature, without even involving linear regression.
If you'd like a source, the intended interpretation of the results are all in the IPCC reports, most of which have (reasonably) short summaries. http://www.ipcc.ch/
That said, I will take the word of a consensus of climatologists and meteorologists over that of politicians and religious leaders with a populist agenda, on principle alone.
Genesis 2:15 says "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it."
Note the KEEP it part.
Numbers 35:33 says "You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it."
Apparently, there's already a fundamental religious case for environmental protections.
Somehow, however, few ever seem to agree with me.
If you take atomic number, CO2 is 8-6-8. The word: תבוסת from the Torah means destruction and sums to 868.
Now all we need is a charismatic cult leader.
Both of them are true, the missing part is whether human is any part of either of those processes. I've been wondering for a while that whether the common slogan of "save the Earth" would have served better had it been "save the Human". Yes, it's just semantic, but it's the same as the change to calling "climate change" rather than "global warming" - human easily get caught up in language, most of the time probably just subconsciously. It also helped with not being on the extreme: it's also bad if the changes wipe out 50% of the human being on earth, which is probably magnitude more likely than wiping out 100% of us.
Even if we literally nuke ourselves out of existence, chance are something will still be leftover on the Earth (unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet).
Cockroaches are damn resilient.
> The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doin’ great! It’s been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, and meteors, world-wide floods, tidal waves, world-wide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
> The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, Folks, we’re goin’ away. We won’t leave much of a trace either, thank god for that. Maybe a little styrofoam, maybe, little styrofoam. Planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake, an evolutionary cul de sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doin’? Ask those people at Pompeii, who were frozen into position from volcanic ash. How the planet’s doin’. Wanna know if the planet’s alright, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia, or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who built their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room. The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cuz that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us.
> unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet
We are very, very, very, very much unable to do that. We can fuck up the surface a bit but that's about it. Consider: the Chicxulub impactor delivered an estimated 100 teratons of equivalent TNT. And it didn't come close to blowing up the planet. How To Destroy The Earth[0] estimates that we'd need 25,000 gigatonnes of antimatter to blast the planet to pieces.
[0] http://qntm.org/destroy
This is why science is so important. Science is about questioning everything. While we used to think animal fat was bad we've since learned otherwise.
Even if we are pretty sure about something it is dangerous to shut out debate. Except that which must not be named. Any questioning of this basic fact of reality is a sure sign you are not a man of science.
Only an idiot would be stupid enough to inquiry and debate. True science lovers accept the messages they heard on a video without question.
Guess it was too innocent.
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html [2] http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2...
Because the vast majority of it (just about all of it outside of actual climate scientists, really) is but one more round of professional doubt-sowing, in the long line of tobacco, leaded gas, CFCs or SO2 (and with very similar people in the roles of professional doubters).
> They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change.
They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that it's going to be a good thing for humanity.
Whoa there. If their models don't do a good job of predicting climate change, then that has a direct impact on the predicted consequences and the impact on humanity, no?
At a global level though, we can see the energy being dumped into the system (making it more chaotic and more violent) and we can see ice covers literally melting before our eyes, both reducing global albedo and ultimately ending up swelling the seas. The global ice melt on its own is sufficient for pants-shitting terror.
Also, we built our civilisation in a specific (climatological and ecological) set of environments, climate change means these are likely to change fast, and regardless of an eventual steady state at the end there's absolutely no guarantee we'll come out ahead (or even at all) at the end of the ride.
That's one of the things which gets my goat about modern conservatives, they hate conservation.
How do we measure that? From the article I posted above, climate scientists readily admit that the temperature increase they expected with their models has not come to fruition (as a global, non-local measure).
And thus, if the temperature models haven't been that accurate, how accurate are the sea-level models? Even those estimate a very wide range of potential outcomes (I'll readily admit the minimum is still a significant sea level rise).
For all we know we are helping to perpetuate this thaw rather than slip back into another ice age. Maybe human generated global warming would have had to be implemented anyway to save the species. There's just so much we don't know.
On the one hand it worked. The Senate, this year, happily passed a resolution that "climate change is real and not a hoax", but of course Republican reps gleefully pointed out that, of course the climate changes, no one is disputing that...
But now that "Climate Change" is, to the public, basically just "Global Warming", Florida is now working to ban the very term their political wing invented.
The schadenfreude is strong in this one.
I doubt the American right wing influenced Mr Charney in his naming conventions.
http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-war...
The use of the term "climate change" as part of the public discourse (as opposed to scientific discourse) is as a result of a right wing PR campaign in the 1980s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98
Anyway right now it is global warming or Cthulhu ... the article describes well both of them
Being in science has made me very sceptical of a lot of science, especially science that is hyped and suddenly has a lot of money to divide among participating scientists. Publish-or-perish is very perverse stimulus.
And even here I see things like F-ing republicans. He man, we are supposed to be skeptical, you know, skeptic magazine is for the "in crowd", right!? But not of human induced climate change, noooo... And heaven forbid don't mention that you think things will solve itself with better nuclear reactors, solar power and such, Nooo, we are a bad species, we are a tumor. Even though we solved acidic rain and the hole in the ozon layer.
You know that 99% (scientist agree) is actually 97% of the scientists that express an opinion at all (about 33%)! From: http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
"We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW (anthropogenic global warming), 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming." ... "Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming."
Edit: Yes this post is a bit of an emotional rant but I hate how being a skeptic is bad depending on the subject.
You realize that these were situations that we caused, right? Messing things up and then cleaning up our mess doesn't make us some sort of super race of benevolent beings.
We know now that many of the published models overestimated the rising temperatures. The governments are changing policies based on these faulty models. There are real and bad consequences from these changed policies. Meanwhile politicians don't understand climate science at all. It is a dangerous situation. I just want to say that there is reason to be optimistic. In the 80s I had kids in class crying in their beds at night over the hole in the ozone layer. Images in my head of skin cancers everywhere... I'd rather put some nicer images in the heads om my children. Sure they should appreciate nature but it is better to work on nuclear fusion than spending energy on the banning of fossil fuels and get that ridiculous situation you have in the US where you waste precious soil on ethanol "bio"fuels. Or this situation in Europe where you can get monstrously large vehicles on the cheap (you pay less taxes) because they can drive some kilometers on a crappy electrical engine before switching to gasoline.
Meanwhile I can't be a critic of climate change without getting a retard or f-ing republican stamp on my forehead (I see that that guy deleted his comment by the way).
The Ozone layer is a shining example of success driven by a nearly identical discussion to today's climate change one. Scientists showed a clear mechanism for Ozone depletion, a clear (but expensive) fix for the issue by removing CFCs from all goods, and then worked over years to convince politicians to ignore the business interests casting FUD over their work and actually regulate CFCs.
The Ozone layer didn't fix itself; massive, coordinated action by nearly every country on earth in the form of the Montreal Protocol did. A nice summary of the tactics taken by 'skeptics' that time around: http://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/ozone_skeptics...
It just so happens there is much more money at stake with the Climate Change debate so the opposition is much stronger.
I'm not very convinced of our role in climate change and I'm even less convinced of the the fact hat we can forecast climate changes by what ever means they are induced.
I'm not saying clean energy is a bad long term investment. I'm saying some people are going to far and we should be careful that we don't trade welfare for predicted long term effects that actually have a very small probability of ever becoming reality. We should not base important decisions on models that are proving inaccurate.
What we should do, from time to time is ask who is making these flashy climate change movies that the neuron rubbing guy watches. Who is funding those? Do people ever ask themselves that?
We do ask that. All the time. The information is publicly available.
Two neurons guy saw the movie, "Dynamic Earth" which was produced by the following:
From here: http://www.dynamicearth.spitzcreativemedia.com/Spitz Creative is a company that makes planetarium films, so the documentary was pretty much made NASA and the NCSA -- the two organizations that conduct the vast majority of climate modeling and research in the world. Literally world expert climate scientists.
I challenge you to do the same for anti-AGW documentaries..
Remember when we had that record hurricane season and it was blamed on ... something. And we were supposed to have a lot more in the future because of ... something.
These people have to stop blaming everything on something. It's warmer, it's colder, record hurricane season, no hurricane in 9 years, everything is always blamed on ... something. And then they wonder why there are people who don't believe them.
The more immediate threat is the environment effects of overpopulation and pollution in the waterways. I remember fishing in the lagoon by my house when I was a kid and the water being super clear and full of fish. Now, it's been overfished; you can only catch undesirable bottom feeder type fish. It's also a constant brown caused by runoff from residential areas.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.s...
...But I wasn't referring to that list, I was referring to the people commenting on here. Also, a representative list of scientists who do not oppose the mainstream view of climate change would be far longer (note the chart on the side), and also include far more people who actually study climate change.
"These scientists have said that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling."
So we don't know that they disagree with global warming, just that they think the projections are too inaccurate.