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Hello!
I’m a physical oceanographer which means my job is to figure out how the water moves and delivers heat through things like math and models. Paleoclimate isn’t my expertise but I figured I’d chime in on some of the climate skepticism here.
Oceanographers would be the first to admit that modeling-predicting changes in the ocean is very hard. Especially more regional features like an intensified warming in the Labrador Sea. That is because even state of the art models have coarse resolution and our initial conditions for far in the past are poor. However, anthropogenic climate change is not a regional effect.
It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?
Also I’ve seen in this thread people saying that global climate change has been overhyped. From the science side this paper does a great job of evaluating our models from the past:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288430943.pdf
If you are interested in the irreducible imprecision of climate models this paper is fun too
https://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709
I'm not sure if you're the guy to ask, but I'm sure you're aware of the continuing acidification of the oceans via CO2 absorption. From what I've heard it's highly unpredictable as to how it will actually affect ecosystems, but supposedly some molluscs are already having reproductive issues as their shells tend to dissolve at some point in the growing cycle. The predictions I've read point to a likely oceanic food chain collapse in 15-25 years, not to mention the decrease in fertility that fish seem to be experiencing from higher temperatures.
Is that roughly correct?
I heard whispers of "its too late" in the early 90s, with respect to the top meter of ocean and the biological life cycles there being broken.. yet we had the international CFC ban and that was a success at breaking the Ozone Hole, which made things better.. Let's be eyes-open on every detail, but be aware of the despair aspect too .. "collapse in X-X+10 years" is overwhelming to many ears, and we do not know the future.. hth
> "collapse in X-X+10 years" is overwhelming to many ears
"collapse in X-X+10 years" is not usually as overwhelming compared to what follows it. And usually, was follows is either we have to drastically raise taxes or abolish capitalism altogether and implement authoritarian governments, because as we know, only the capitalist societies damage ecosystems.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling or legitimately arguing for ecofascism.
Trolling. The "because as we know, only the capitalist societies damage ecosystems" was the giveaway.
Or perhaps not exactly trolling. Might be pointing out that this kind of thing is actually being seriously proposed as the solution in certain quarters.
Overfishing masks that effects also. There is not reason to think that fish fertility as a global concept would change. Some species would decrease and other increase but jellyfishes would be the real culprits in most cases if you see a big decrease or recruitment when the water is warmer.
I am often shocked how a community like HN could have so many global warming skeptics. It doesn't make sense to me because people who deal with software should understand complex systems. Should understand how hard understanding complex systems are. And should understand how dangerous it is to disrupt complex systems so dramatically like we did the climate.
The skepticism isn't focused on whether it's happening (or even scientifically possible), it's on how much hyperbole is attached to the claims being made and how does that align with observed/measured reality. When the news is shouting "omg panic!! code red!!" based on the least realistic models in the IPCC reports, anyone who is intellectually honest says "well, wait...what aren't we being told here?"
Because that happens more often than not, skepticism is further excited when you get politicians who claim to be in favor of climate change policy, only to then go and fly private jets, buy ocean front property, etc. This gets conveniently ignored by folks who have turned climate change into a religion.
Every time you even begin to say "hey, we should consider this..." people sperg out and start calling you a "climate change denier" or some other disparaging term. Literally turning their brains off to counter argument because they can't handle the idea that they're living in an incomplete reality.
There is absolutely nothing controversial about saying "let's look at all sides and evaluate carefully" (the scientific process as we've agreed upon it for millennia). People have been radicalized and frightened to the point where they no longer think rationally about the problem (and solutions) and instead get hyper-tribalistic, shouting down any reasonable discussion that doesn't automatically agree with their point of view.
That's why people are skeptical.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02990-w
A LOT of scientists believe that we're on track for a cataclysmic amount of warming. 3C of warming is nothing to fuck around with.
A lot of scientists believed we were on track for a new ice age in the 70s [1] (using the same media-driven fearmongering tactics back then, too).
The point being, don't just take what you're fed. If you dig around, you might find that a lot of the claims on scientific consensus are misrepresented (as dismissed by the quoted scientists) [2].
[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDWPOgeq7vk
[2]
Far more scientists were talking about global warming in the 70s than a new ice age.
Source:
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
I learned of this from Vertasium's video on global warming myths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU
While I think you underestimate what this means for a lot of 'other' people than 'us' (comparable rich people) it has hard/deadly affects already.
And even less human critical things are also dramatic just not for everyone. When you tell me all coral reefs are dying I really think this is very bad.
No, my opinion includes concern for developing nations. Not allowing them to access fossil fuels or other forms of cheap plentiful energy means they can't develop properly (i.e., permanent impoverishment).
This is silly. Wind and solar are cheaper than coal and in many circumstances cheaper than natural gas. Storage tech is also getting cheaper. The capital costs of decentralized renewables are also favorable to a lot of rural parts of the world VS building out transmission lines of hundreds of miles.
Africa never really built out an extensive land line telephone system, but most Africans have cell phones now. They do not need to move through an obsolete technology in order to adopt a new one.
> Wind and solar are cheaper than coal and in many circumstances cheaper than natural gas.
Now do the reliability part.
Edit: Worth reading this [1] and this [2].
[1]
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01020-z
[2]
> "omg panic!! code red!!" based on the least realistic models in the IPCC reports,
You mean articles like this _Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'_? [0]
Because that specific quote, "code red" is not BBC editorialization. It is a direct quote from UN Secretary-General AntĂłnio Guterres [1]
> Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.
People accuse you ave being a skeptic not because you are saying "hey, we should consider this...", it's because, as exemplified by this exact comment, you are deliberately misrepresenting your position to make it seem more legitimate. "Code red" is not based on the "least realistic" models, they are based on our current pathway, that was what made the most recent IPCC report so alarming.
Climate change poses an extremely serious, near term threat to our very way of life. I know that this can be hard to accept, but it is important to, at the very least, not silence those who are pointing this out.
0.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58130705
1.
https://www.un.org/press/en/2021/sgsm20847.doc.htm
> you are deliberately misrepresenting your position to make it seem more legitimate
I'm literally not. It's in the report [1]. Your condescension here is exactly what I'm getting at. You assume I'm an idiot because we disagree.
[1]
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
(Page 304, lines 15-27).
Edit: not my own math but this is important, too, and further cements my point:
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1424718032279011339
.
I'm honestly confused as to whether or not you are willfully trolling, tricking yourself, or just very scared. You're playing the exact tricks here that I just pointed out in the previous comment but I'm genuinely unsure of your motives. (btw, I don't think you're an idiot, I don't think most climate skeptics are idiots, I think they're terrified beyond what they themselves even realize)
The page you linked to says that RCP 8.5 is very unlikely, but none of the "code red" reports claim otherwise.
All of the "code red" reports claim that we are virtually certain to be unable to stay below 1.5 preindustrial. This is RCP 4.5 and above. Something that if we had this conversation 20 years ago was also viewed as very unlikely.
I think either you don't know or are wildly underestimating the severe impact that these alternative pathways will have on human populations. RCP 8.5 is as horrific as it is unlikely, but all the other pathways we are rushing towards are still absolutely "code red".
In the early 2000s most people earnestly thought we wouldn't get past 1C, now that is impossible.
It's not even worth getting into all the ways that many people agree the IPCC reports tend to be a bit conservative. I'm fine throwing out all of these concerns, and sticking with just the report, but even with just the report, even on RCP 4.5, we're in very real trouble. It is absolutely a 'code red'.
> I'm honestly confused as to whether or not you are willfully trolling, tricking yourself, or just very scared.
None of the above. I'm reading the report and forming my own opinion while factoring out the hyperbole and panic of the media, politicians, etc. My motivation is thinking for myself and considering whether all of the theatrics align with the reality in front of me (they don't).
To further elaborate on my skepticism, perfectly valid technologies that could have been implemented decades ago (while there was plenty of awareness of this problem, as well as "global cooling") like nuclear have been foolishly ignored, discredited, etc. The primary argument I hear is "too expensive" and "too long to build," yet somehow congress manages to find money for inanities to the tune of billions every year. You'd think if this was seriously catastrophic, we'd be going in to debt to finance better energy solutions.
All of what I said above combined with that tells me the motivation of the people trying to scare everyone is disingenuous. When someone's actions don't align with their speech, it's often indicative of dishonesty. Considering how much money is at stake, the probability of that is increased.
"Global warming" in the United States is a political issue that has nothing to do with science. A lot of our news reporting has so many contrary "scientific" studies that the average person doesn't know who to trust.
Thus appeals to authority have no meaning if people don't trust that authority. The end result is anyone saying stuff they like is correct and anyone that isn't is wrong.
The US also has a problem with people active trying to cripple and downsize government because it steals their money and tells them what to do.
I don't see "many contrary 'scientific' studies" in the news. What I do see is almost universal consensus among climate scientists that humans are accelerating climate change, with a few news personalities criticizing predictions that were off by a few degrees or inches of sea level rise and pretending that those errors somehow invalidate the general consensus. It's disingenuous at the very least to suggest that these errors disprove anthropogenic climate change or that there are valid studies that support both sides.
US Citizen here -- I think that science plays an important role on both sides, but the cynical manipulation of news stories by the Oil and Gas industry and their well-paid allies, is backfiring finally. Please note that four prominent Republican Senators with Big Oil ties gave a press conference this year, and did not deny Climate Change.. this is news
They dont have to deny climate change, they just have to vote like it doesn't exist and blame things like government overreach or protecting jobs or energy independence. Best of both worlds, it allows them to come off as reasonable without losing any donors.
'"Global warming" in the United States is a political issue that has nothing to do with science'
Replace Global Warming with almost any other scientific concept and you would also be right. The fact we have politicized everything in this country is not a strength and is going to have negative long term knock on effects. I see the politicization of the covid vaccine giving general anti vaxxers validation now and would not be surprised to see a resurgence of measles in the near term (couple of years). I am completely comfortable with everyone making their own choice on the covid vaccine (I am vaccinated), I get the concern and there is enough noise that I understand their viewpoint. Politicizing it though has been the wrong approach, we cant let people have their own opinions anymore, everyone that disagrees is the enemy. This is the same with climate change, immigration and presidential elections. Issue is that the political parties know that doing this makes their base rally tighter and establishes a motivational us vs them narrative. Its not going to end well.
It might be true that tech people work more intimately with complex systems than people in most other fields, but that could also mean that there is more opportunity for getting away with obfuscation or representing a false level of confidence (and also dealing with people who do this).
Maybe that understanding of complex systems could be more of an unconscious understanding that talented people can act out intuitively, or compartmentalize for a specific domain.
Propaganda and hyperbole aside, it must be clear to even the most obtuse among us that the earth is a finite system sphere with finite system resources. Even if it isn't as bad as we're being led to believe, the steps we could be taking to mitigate a positive feedback spiraling collapse in the system loop are things we should be doing anyway. I don't see how anyone here can argue that generating millions of one-time-use plastic receptacles is a good idea in any system or in any way sustainable long term, so what is the harm in making the changes we should be making now, as if it were as bad as we're being led to believe?
Why do people conflate climate change with plastic? Does creating reusable glass or metal containers use less energy or create less CO2 than making things from plastic?
Plastic pollution (particularly in the oceans) is really disturbing, but other than burning it, I don't see what it has to do with warming.
Before we were concerned with the climate, we were with the environment. The amount of plastic pollution, especially the potential impact of microplastics, is part of that, like global warming. At least in my view, I see them all as negative impact on our environment. At minimum, negative for ourselves.
Mercury, pesticides, and plastics in the ocean are horrible in my opinion. However, I've seen more than one person who seems to think recycling is going to have an effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.
There is something about software engineering, and I'm going to get hammered for this, that seems to convince people that everyone are idiots and doing it all wrong. It might be from personal experience explaining their field to family and friends, or perhaps it's brought about by constantly building things for themselves, idk. They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
Doubly so for anything vaguely related to social sciences and other fields where theorising from first principles isn't the norm. "Historical" sciences such as astrophysics and epidemiology often get short shrift here as well. Engineers in general seem to be prone to opining outside of their area of expertise, the Salem Hypothesis that a creationist with an advanced degree was more likely to be an engineer than any other field was noted back in the early days of Usenet:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
To be fair, given recent reproducibility fiasco, social sciences were scorned for a good reason.
Is there anything to indicate that computer science and computer engineering will avoid their own reproducibility fiasco?
Well... there's computer science, and then there's computer science.
All (most of?) the stuff done on P vs NP is good science that will stand up.
Studies on which language features make it better for developers are social science, because they involve those pesky _humans_. That stuff is likely to suffer from a reproducibility crisis.
what a great link. Thanks for sharing.
> They seem to have especial disdain for scientists, who have a long and stories reputation as the intellectual elite, which might just rub their egos the wrong way.
another reason could be that the level of reproducibility of results and openness and availability of sources (data, code, papers) in modern "science" branches is appallingly low for the software folks to take them (the scientists and their results) seriously by default.
I think the superiority felt by some software engineers stems from the simple fact that they are paid a lot and are seen as smart and valuable in the culture. They have economic power, and work on something that seems incomprehensible to many everyday people. The subject matter may also have something to do with it. We're taught that lots of problems can have their details reduced and abstracted away, and I think engineers can ignore the normal human elements of life that have a real effect.
This is more armchair Freudish, but I also think that a feeling of intellectual superiority makes up for other areas that are lacking in similar feelings of value and power. Life as a computer science student is not cool or fun or sexy, so you fall back on what gives you power in wider society. Sort of like the idea that poor whites fall back onto their whiteness. People jockey for position using whatever they have.
Not only are they paid a lot, but they basically start their careers being paid lavishly in places like the SF Bay Area. To a 22 year old fresh grad, what does it tell you when life immediately rewards you with a top 10% income bracket out of university?
This extends to the techno-elite as well. What drives the CEO of an electric car company to declare that the way to improve urban mobility is to build roads in tunnels underground? Well, clearly he must be doing something right, he's the richest man on earth!
I once met a developer who claimed he didn’t believe climate change was real because the software used for modelling isn’t used by many people and probably has lots of bugs. I don’t agree, but it was an interesting take.
Bugs and grad student software aside, ask anyone who thinks they can rely on a model to predict the future to implement a model of: a simple pendulum, a double pendulum, the three body problem, the stock market, and then finally the climate.
Those are roughly in order of difficulty, and if they fail at an earlier one, you shouldn't trust the later ones. The first one isn't even chaotic, and I wouldn't trust a model built from first principles alone to be in phase past a dozen cycles or so.
You can curve fit things after the fact (interpolation), but extrapolation is always on shaky ground.
Large scale climate models are more like modeling the possible energy distributions of such pendulums into the future. That can be done analytically for pendulums. You can do it analytically for very simple models of climate, too, but more complex models that include enough of the forces to be predictive require computers.
I've heard similar arguments before, but the details really matter. The amount of heat and CO2 is going to rely on things like albedo on the ground and from cloud cover, as well as plant mass and more. I think it's a mistake to ignore feedback on any of that, and it doesn't take too many moving parts with feedback to create a chaotic system.
If nothing interacted with each other, I think you could make reasonable energy-in / energy-out models. However even looking at big low-pass averages, plants/algae use CO2, and heat creates clouds, and clouds block sunlight, and so on. Unlike a double pendulum that bleeds a small amount of energy to friction, the climate bleeds a lot of energy into space, and the amount of energy it loses is a function of clouds, plant life, etc.
The bottom line is that the real impacts of climate change strike real, existential fear in a lot of HNers and many of them simply cannot handle that cognitively.
People are drawn to tech in a large part because of their belief in the power of technology and the limitless possibility of the future. The very real potential impacts of climate change in our lifetime pose as serious threat to this.
Rather than struggle with this most people here (or maybe a few loud, happy to flag comments they disagree with people) find it much easier to simply dismiss everything as excessive hyperbole.
Climate change unquestionably posses a real threat to our way of life, and at this point mitigating it does as well. People in tech are used to only thinking in terms of optimism and finding a way to solve problems and really can't deal with serious problems that might not have a solution, but rather only different forms of compromise.
Unfortunately the skeptics here are very aggressive. I have had several comments this week flagged for no other reason than disagreement (I know this because they have all been unflagged upon review).
It's somewhat ironic because this bizarre extreme reaction from this community really makes it all the more clear that something is really wrong.
And what does it tell you that sadly there are bizarre extreme reactions elsewhere on this climate question? Before the British Government was forced to insist that the police use their existing powers to stop climate protesters preventing people from going about their ordinary business which including several people trying to get to hospital for cancer treatment, we learnt about non-climate-skeptic aggression on a physical level. The leader of their group famously declared he would not move even if the motorist was carrying a dying person to hospital. That's religious fervor of a kind reminiscent of the 14th C.
We do indeed need to find ways of presenting our ideas and thoughts non-aggressively because none of us know the final truth about the immensely complex system that is the Earth's climate.
> We do indeed need to find ways of presenting our ideas and thoughts non-aggressively...
Absolutely.
> ... because none of us know the final truth about the immensely complex system that is the Earth's climate.
Even if we did know, _don't block people going to the hospital to try to prove your point_. First, it's insanely un-empathetic, to the point of sociopathy. And, theoretically, you probably claim to care about the climate because climate change is going to hurt people. Second, _it's not going to win friends for your movement or viewpoint_. It's counter-productive, no matter how urgent you think climate change is.
An understanding that dealing with super complex systems with lots of interacting variables are very hard to accurately model and prediction value is likely to be low?
Plus maybe just a general distaste for propaganda.
For my own part I believe humans are affecting the climate to some extent. I don't see how anything else would be possible.
But I'm early 50's and have been watching this closely for 30 years and don't believe the hype and doomsday predictions anymore. I don't think the models are good enough to say what will happen in sum. Should we get off fossil fuels and stop polluting? Yes as fast as practically possible. Is OMG the world ending oceans collapsing 12 years from now? Probably not and they don't actually know that.
Just because you're good at software doesn't mean you have to view the rest of reality the same way as everyone else who's good at software. This is just one aspect of life. Most people can not be completely divided into two groups, people pick and choose elements that make up their worldview which leads to many variations of belief.
> hit this window with a hammer? It will break.
Isn't this more akin to saying, the window broke before the hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have been the cause?
Don't argue the metaphor.
He's saying it's hard to predict results from certain causes because the process is chaotic.
"Don't argue the metaphor" is such a good line for so many arguments. Noted and thanks.
Yeah. But truth be told, I think the use of the word "like" makes it an analogy.
Actually the use of "like" it makes it a simile. It's the explanation that follows that makes it an analogy.
Both analogies and similies are really just overlapping categorical subsets of metaphors.
„Don’t argue with the rhetoric“
I get that, but I think you might also be missing something in the urgency to derive one particular meaning from the metaphor.
Imagine coming upon a window that was broken, and inferring that it must have been broken by "a thing". So you look for evidence - a rock, a hammer, something - all the while proclaiming that the cause was a given. All the while, you overlook that the initial fracture was there from the beginning and carried along every day by comparatively small amounts of thermal stress.
Could that also be a metaphor for some of the climate change hype? (I don't use the word "hype" to imply false. I use it in the context of "to promote or publicize extravagantly".)
> _Isn't this more akin to saying, the window broke before the hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have been the cause?_
It's not true though if you want to use your metaphor for climate change.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-clarify-starting-poin...
> _Scientists generally regard the later part of the 19th century as the point at which human activity started influencing the climate. But the new study brings that date forward to the 1830s._
This was well before the date in the article.
That's an entirely different metaphor though.
That's the point.
He's not talking about the causes of climate change or anything like that. He's explaining a specific phenomenon using an analogy. Whether or not you believe climate change is anthropocentric is immaterial to how this phenomenon manifests. And to help people understand how this phenomenon works, he used the metaphor of the shattered glass.
It actually does not matter what shattered the glass. He said hammer because a hammer would work. It could have been smashed with a frozen, medium-sized cat for all it mattered.
The point is, once the glass is shattered, you cannot predict where each piece is going to fall.
The original post that started this thread was:
> Isn't this more akin to saying, the window broke before the hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have been the cause?
Agree or disagree, it's an interesting thought exercise that took the original analogy in an interesting direction. Whether or not you agree about it being interesting or useful, it certainly wasn't "arguing the metaphor", just adding to it in a way that you may or may not appreciate.
What's your impression of the Clathrate gun hypothesis [1]? Is this something to be concerned about?
Are there any other runaway processes that could take us by surprise? Peat bogs and permafrost hydrates?
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
> It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?
I don't like this analogy. A better example might be that if we set fire to all the forests, it's going to get hotter. It's true in the short term but the long term effects can be debated. And unfortunately there's a history of predictions that haven't come true to deal with.
There are a bunch of unanswered questions around rapid warming. Like the doom and gloom scenarios of a tipping point or runaway global warming. The obvious question I have is: if this is a real possibility, why hasn't it happened in the last several billion years? The Earth has been warmer than it is now.
Another is that rapid warming over short periods isn't that unprecedented [1]:
> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
To be clear, I'm not a climate change denier. I'm a climate change fatalist. By this I mean that whatever is going to happen is going to happen and there's really nothing you can do about it now other than finding cheaper alternatives to bad behaviours (eg solar becoming cheaper than fossil fuels).
If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let other people die rather than they being mildly inconvenienced. There's no way people are going to make their lives more expensive or more inconvenient for climate change.
[1]:
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
Thanks for adding the further context here. I'd like to add context to your point:
> If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let other people die rather than they being mildly inconvenienced.
I don't believe that "anti-maskers", who you are probably referring to, are significantly more selfish than "maskers." If you understand that most of them truly believe masks are not helpful, and even some believe they are harmful, then to them it's more than just "I'd rather kill people than be inconvenienced." They don't believe they are killing anyone.
The researchers used geochemical and ecological data from ocean sediments to reconstruct the change in water column properties over the past 800 years. They precisely dated sediments using a combination of methods and looked for diagnostic signs of Atlantification, like change in temperature and salinity.
Then, from the original paper:
Here, we use lipid-based water temperature proxies (UK37
U
37
K
and TEXL86
TEX
86
L
) and benthic foraminiferal data (distribution and δ18O) to reconstruct changes in water mass properties. Specifically, we examined anomalies in our proxy records to identify diagnostic signs of Atlantification. On the basis of a precise chronology, we combine our results with other local climate records to provide an integrated understanding of Atlantification and resolve its timing. Last, our reconstructions are compared with records of ocean and atmosphere circulation patterns to investigate the connections between the high Arctic and North Atlantic dynamics.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2946
Lipid-based water temperature proxies use the distribution of lipids deposited by organisms in sediment to deduce temperature. And...
Benthic foraminifera are single-celled organisms similar to amoeboid organisms in cell structure.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/pdf/of/of99-45/foram.pdf
So the technique appears to be based on isotopic and lipid analysis of sediments deposited by certain organisms. If you can date the sediments and are confident in the link between analyte concentration and temperature, and correct for various factors, you can reconstruct a time/temperature plot.
Are they sure they have control over all the confounders? People are still fighting over 24-isopropylcholestane and oxygenation.
I agree that climate change is an issue, but I've become so disappointed in the environmentalists response to it. They simply resort to zealotry over their one "true" solution without any practical considerations. For example, the one "true" solution that they consider as only acceptable is replacing all cars with full EVs. Which is foolish considering the urgency (2050 according to IPCC is a tipping point). They ignore that the battery technology simply isn't there yet or the infrastructure. Instead of their plans, consider this much more quickly achievable alternative:
- Government policy should require a regular hybrid as the base minimum in all new cars. It's 2021, there's no excuse now for a car to be pure ICE.
- New policy to favor PHEVs. The battery in one full EV can build four PHEVs. A 50 mile PHEV gets most of the benefits of CO2 reduction of a full EV. Also no new infrastructure is required, overnight level 1 charging is good enough. The suburbs will buy PHEVs (since they have a garage), the urban areas will buy hybrids (which will now be the minimum).
- All utility type vehicles (mail trucks, garbage trucks, delivery trucks), must be full EV. These vehicles are the perfect fit for the current battery technology (overnight centralized charging, frequent stops on short routes).
- Slowly raise the gas tax. Slowly is important otherwise there will be riots. But the impact on low income population should be minimal with the increasing supply of used hybrid and PHEVs.
The key feature of this plan is that it's a fast way to reduce CO2. Instead, look at what the infrastructure bill and the proposed BBB is doing. Billions on new charging stations, current version of BBB would reduce PHEV tax credit. Is this really the best way to get quick action on reducing CO2 from cars? Aren't those billions better spent getting hybrids and PHEVs (which have none of the charging or range issues of full EVs) to the public as quickly and widely as possible? Why is the goal suddenly to make all cars full EV, isn't the actual goal to reduce CO2 as fast as possible?
> I've become so disappointed in the environmentalists response to it. They simply resort to zealotry over their one "true" solution without any practical considerations. For example, the one "true" solution that they consider as only acceptable is replacing all cars with full EVs
I'm not sure where you get that from but it's not at all what I've been experiencing. Yes, the overarching goal is to reduce green house emissions but how to get there is quite diverse and usually laid out in details in for instance the green parties' platforms, e.g.
https://europeangreens.eu/positions/climate-energy
,
https://www.greenparty.ca/en/platform/green-future
and contains more than just individual mobility. Similarly, Greenpeace:
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/issues/climate-change-impacts...
I don’t think you can consider the infrastructure bill to be a primarily environmentalist driven piece of legislation. The deciding vote is Joe Manchin, who gets most of his money from coal. And there are plenty of quotes from him on how he would never allow things like a C02 tax into law.
Personally I am still not convinced climate change is completely caused by human activity. But I think we are accelerating a natural climate change.
_“Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,”_
My takeaway: because we still know so little about the mechanisms we should be more careful about our environment. It's very naive to pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere without knowing what will happen.
Do you consider yourself in agreement with scientists that focus on studying the climate, or in disagreement with them?
From what I understand, the scientific consensus [1] is not that climate change is completely caused by human activity, for the very reason you mention: it’s complicated. :)
But like you also mention, the consensus is that we are we are at least partially causing it, even if it’s not “completely.” If we’re not causing 100% of the change, but perhaps 50%, I’m not sure if that’s much of a distinction in terms of what policy to change. Do you agree?
[1]
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus
- “Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” It does not say or imply 100% due to those human activities. The ACS says, “The Earth’s climate is changing in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and particulate matter in the atmosphere, largely as the result of human activities.” Even there, it’s not saying completely, although it’s saying largely, which definitely has a distinction.
_Do you agree?_
Absolutely!
I think we are very 'unlucky' (stupid) that we are accelerating a natural climate change that causes global warming.
I think it's interesting to consider the scenario that humans are not causing the climate to change, but it is changing catastrophically nonetheless. How is our strategy different? Is it at all?
Well lets say natural global warming will cause a rise of 5°C in the next 50 years. Then we have 50 years to adapt. But when we accelerate this change we might need to adapt in 5 years. And we might even cause a rise of 6°C instead of 5. I believe those are the big problems we are facing.
I think in that case we would focus on ways to cope with climate change. For example, air conditionning everywhere would make sense. What's difficult about the current crisis is that you can't use too much energy to fight it without making it worse.
Please elaborate how air conditioning is going to prevent a destabilization of democracy around the world as millions of climate refugees run out of places to flee too?
Let's just say for a moment that human-caused climate change is either minimal or even non-existent. At this point, would we even be able to admit that? So much political and scientific capital has been invested here that if we were to find out that maybe it's not what we think it is, it would do catastrophic damage to people's faith in science and institutions. And they are precariously positioned as is.
I think that the whole "Trust the Science" trope has already damaged people's faith in science and institutions.
If we had, instead, encouraged "Trust the Scientific Method" and taught people to think and replicate claims, we'd be in a much better place.
But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check scientist's work".
What other outcome could we have expected?
I've seen this trope of a lack of trustable science often here. But the people not trusting the science (that I've come across) would usually not have the ability to replicate science anyway, for a lack of education. The other group to not "trust the science" usually is making their money in some of the causes of global warming.
Just a few weeks back, Saudi Arabia (and some other countries I'm missing) insisted on weakening the claims made in a joint statement/study of the COP.
The lack of trust in science (imho) stems from the fact that pretty big news organisations (fox, Bild etc) are doing their best to ease the cognitive dissonance of their audience by claiming them unreliable. The ivory tower is just a propaganda trope at this point
I don’t think it’s a trope - unfortunately. There’s so many examples of people using “science” as a political football that they’ve undermined themselves. We’ve got public health experts encouraging people to protest racial justice in the height of a pandemic as if a virus cares about the nobility of your cause, and that’s just a most recent example. History is littered with us being wrong or just downright manipulative with data / science / experts.
Said to say that I think parent thread has it right - people need to have faith in the method - not the experts - and realize that the method does not yield infallible results. It’s simply the best mechanism for getting the truth with the data we currently have. And people need to be able to parse out when they are seeing data-driven conclusions over when experts are just saying dumb/political things. That can’t be a referendum on “science”.
Another significant factor is the belief we are in the end times and thus whatever we do doesn't matter (or worse, may delay the end). A large minority believes this[0], but they have outsized influence among politicians, at least in the US.
Further, they believe that their holy literature is perfect and because science changes, science must be wrong[1]. Therefore, we should just follow what the book says, which is that there will be a rapture.
0:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/07/14/jesus-chris...
where christ's return means the end times.
1: unfortunately I don't have a citation for this, but it's something I've seen a lot.
The assumption of universal ignorance on the part of non-"scientists" is ... pretty amazing.
I think we'd be pretty amazed at what people can discover, when the raw data and the analytical procedures used to draw conclusions from that data are exposed to scrutiny.
I think you're confusing something here. I'm not claiming we don't need open data nor am I claiming that the non-academic populus would be unable to make interesting observations with open data. I'm saying that of those people that deny scientifically validated claims (like climate change or the efficacy of vaccinations) the majority would not be able to make interesting (and valid) observations, nor would it be in their interest to do so.
I know how to run climate simulations, given a huge dump of climate data I would _not_ be able to draw any new conclusions out of it, I can guarantee that to you.
My point is that this idea that distrust in science stems from a lack of open data is wrong, and instead product of concerted and ongoing effort of propaganda and defunding of academia. Climate change is at this stage more a political problem than it is a scientific one.
>But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check scientist's work".
Even if raw datasets were available, I suspect 95%+ of people lack the ability to draw conclusions from them.
A majority would fail simply in the step of opening a browser and navigating the internet to get to the dataset.
And then a sizable portion would fail at figuring out which programs to use to analyze them.
And then a sizable portion of those would not understand the math to be able to understand the measurements they would be making.
The emergence of certain mostly trustworthy organizations filled with mostly trustworthy people is what has gotten us humans this far. People do not have the capacity to be able to comprehend and analyze all of nature, they will have to rely on trustworthy specialists.
That's the beauty of the Scientific Method.
It doesn't take a multitude of people to falsify an unsound claim.
It only takes _one_ counterexample.
Could it be that "Trust the Science" is simply an attempt to prop up faulty science that can't survive scrutiny?
The data should, of course, be made available so anyone can try to verify.
But at the of the day, for the most complicated topics, we will have to trust others.
> And then a sizable portion of those would not understand the math to be able to understand the measurements they would be making.
There's a sizable portion of so-called scientists that neither know nor understand math either [1]
[1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical_paper_...
We have seen this cycle play out in the past.
There was a time when you were meant to trust the church. You weren't allowed to read the bible or interpret it yourself, since that was the role of a priest.
It was not a good system, and the people who were in charge of interpreting the scripture for people used their station to enrich themselves and levy power over the people who had to come to them.
This was especially poignant in the spring of 2020 when scientists and health officials were telling people that masks were NOT effective at preventing covid-19 infection. ...and that such idiotic positions were amplified on social media and opposing opinions were silenced.
People forget this ever happened. Our memory is short. I would add to this that cloth masks barely work at all, and yet we’re still encouraging people to wear them (1). It’s this kind of thing that we need to stop doing. Just tell people the truth and encourage them to wear a surgical mask.
1)
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210907/masks-limit-covid-s...
> Let's just say for a moment that human-caused climate change is either minimal or even non-existent.
But we know that this is not the case. To me, this exercise is along the lines of wondering what the universe would be like if the cosmological constant had a different value.
It's a discussion about a theoretical world which does not exist, isn't it? What is the point then?
It would do more damage to keep lying at that point.
My biggest concern is the lack of attribution to earth’s orbit around the sun…
if our Goldielocks zone is so precious, then one would expect any deviation in the orbit to deliver measurable differences in effects caused by earth’s proximity to the sun, no?
The Goldielocks zone is not tiny by human standard. It's goes from about a third of earth orbit's radius, to 10x it's radius. However climate would be extremely different at 0.3x, 1x and 10x, which I assume is what you really meant.
The orbit of Earth is also extremely stable, barely changing, and with time the earth is getting farther from the Sun, not closer, as the Sun is slowing losing mass since it's burning fuel to produce heat and light. The speed at which we are getting further away is however ridiculously tiny: a few centimeters a year.
To give you a sense of perspective, earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest in July. It is ~5 million kilometers nearer in January, and that only amount to about 6 or 7% more solar energy received.
So, any deviation of earth orbit's over the past 100 years that would explain climate change would need to be massive. Not the kind of things we wouldn't notice, and also not the kind of things that would allow us to be talking about it today. If earth's orbit was changing that much, that would mean our solar system is not stable, probably making life impossible.
I used to think this until someone pointed out that the earth isn't a fixed distance from the Sun.. it varies throughout the orbit from a minimum of 91 million miles to a maximum of 94.5 million miles away.
So there's already a 3.5 million mile margin of error in our Goldilocks zone... we'd have to go way beyond a few miles of annual change to feel any impact.
That XKCD concatenated data from different studies with different temporal resolution, so it's very misleading. Past data came from Marcott et. all, who said:
“the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of about 120 years on average.”
“no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1,000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2,000-year periods and longer.”
Recent data came from yearly measurements, so preserves variability on a yearly basis.
In other words, the way past data was determined, sudden changes would be hidden, like the temperature spike that it shows in the 20th century.
Do you ever wonder why that comic only goes back 22,000 years? If it had gone back just a little more, say 25,000 years (a rounder number), it would be much more complicated to explain what happened.
If it had gone back 400,000 years, which is basically nothing in geological scales, it would bring up some really interesting questions.
> Personally I am still not convinced climate change is completely caused by human activity
I'm not concerned at all.
The real problem is that the silly efforts to "do something" are a collosal destruction of wealth while having no effect whatsoever on climate.
There are enormous amounts of hydrocarbons beneath the Artic Ocean and the world has known that for many decades. If those resources could be extracted without extreme complication and expense the world would have done so before now.
It makes me wonder whether the "normal state" of the Arctic is in fact lush and tropical and what we are witnessing is its return to that state, albeit accelerated by humankind's increasing presence and its invention of industrial processes that use those hydrocarbons.
Given the exploration that has already taken place over the past decades, one would assume there are core samples, or core sample data, located somewhere that indicate the true nature of the changes the Arctic Ocean has experienced and continues to express.
for reference, here's a look at what co2 emissions were 120 years ago ...
https://skepticalscience.com/EmmissionsAcceleration.html
Two things I find unsatisfactory in these data...
1. It doesn't touch on the Earth's natural absorption of CO2 - so we cannot conclude here that the additional CO2 emitted remains in the atmosphere (I mean we know that from other research, but this link is silent on that mitigation).
2. The cumulative numbers are pointless and misleading. CO2 is known to have a half-life on the order of under a century, so posting cumulative numbers gives the reader the misconception that the only way back is to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and that the situation is much more irreversible than it is in the long term.
CO2 has a half-life of 120 years, so it seems like a chart of data covering 120 years is appropriate.
None of the charts seem to take into account any absorption at all, regardless of the duration. Having a chart 120 years long, and not including absorption, means all the numbers are significantly wrong.
Also, 120 years is on the upper range of most estimates, and does not assume any increased absorption despite the fact that we've almost doubled the concentration of CO2.
It's true, there is some absorption:
https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification
and it's gonna make the situation so much worse it's hard to even imagine right now.
I find the term "half-life" in this context misleading, possibly because I am coming from a nuclear science background where half lives are stable because they are the probabilistic result of nuclear decay. The chance of a given atom decaying doesn't change no mater how many you have or what you do.
With CO2, the absorption probability is flexible and can depend on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere (as well as a large number of other factors.) To me this makes "half-life" a poor metaphor for CO2 absorption.
For more context, CO2 ppm was ~1000 less than 50m years ago.
As someone who does statistical modeling for a living (though not climate related), one thing I've found fascinating is that many climate skeptics, particularly on HN, will focus on the difficulty scientific models have in making accurate predictions about the near term impact of climate change.
While this is true (modeling a complex system such as the Earth's climate and all of it's positive and negative feed back loops is incredibly challenging), the implied assumption from people that use this critique is that uncertainty will always fall on the side of "better than expected".
People that have been closely following human ecology for the last decade or so have repeatedly found the opposite to be true. "Faster than expected" is somewhat of a joke in certain communities since it seems that the more we learn the more we realize how large the impact of rapid accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere really is, and how quickly this impact develops.
That's not to say model uncertainty == doom, but assuming that model uncertainty == "this is fine" is a more dangerous and naive assumption.
I've always been worried that estimates and predictions in the IPCC reports, for instance, are much too conservative. The reports are averages, in some sense, of thousands of peer-reviewed publications.
It's hard to get your publication accepted into the scientific mainstream if your predictions make you sound like an alarmist crank.
I've seen this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't make any sense to me. How can you "trust the science" and peer review, but only when it's scary? If it's not scary enough, you hypothesize it being biased?
How is that better than the crowd who thinks it's biased the other way? It's just as easy to imagine your publication won't get accepted into the scientific mainstream unless it conforms to the prevailing narrative.
What's the value of peer review if either of these biases (deniers or alarmists) is correct?!?
In the IPCC case, the report itself says the evidence rules out less than 1C of warming but can't rule out more than 5C of warming by the end of the century. My views are perfectly consistent with the science... it's simply that the science is very limited when it comes to analyzing "tipping point" scenarios.
But, yes, I also have some qualms about peer review.
If the science is limited in that area, why do you believe tipping points (positive feedback) will be horrific? There's just as much reason to believe that negative feedback (the good kind) will keep things from going off the charts.
Either way, it's not scientific thinking, and it isn't trusting the experts either.
I said “I’ve been worried…” not that the worry is necessarily rational. The worry is based in what I view as weaknesses in human organizations. But it is also based in scenarios outlined by IPCC, so I’m not sure why you’re going on about “trusting the experts”.
Well all be dead of Omicron before global warming gets us.
The problem is that since the sixties scientists are predicting doom and this is causing people to become skeptical about new insights.
For example, after decades of sea level doom scenario's people are saying it is "slower than expected".
"scientists"
No. Popular media. Scientists will say something like "wow, this particular study shows us hitting 1 degree of warming by 2010, and 2 degrees of warming by 2030 at the current rate, which would lead to gradual melting of the ice caps", and in the popular media that becomes "SCIENTISTS PREDICT ICE CAPS WILL BE ENTIRELY GONE BY 2010!" Because the nuance was not understood, and alarm gets readers/watchers.
I will also remind you the same people who would claim it's slower than expected because of what scientists have said in the past are the same people who will call out that in the 1960s scientists were predicting global cooling as evidence why the science is wrong. I.e., even though those positions are counter to each other, they both work in service to "the science is always wrong" narrative, and that's really the bias at play.
As I understand it, human intervention is one of the biggest unknowns in any of these projections. Despite the inadequacy of the global response, there _have_ been important human interventions since the 1960s. For example, in the US the EPA was created in 1970 and there were Clean Air Acts prior to that.
Definitely not. The 1990 IPCC report predicted between 2.0 and 7.3mm/year and satellite altimetry shows average of 3.4mm/year since then. This is an acceleration from 1890-1990 rate of 1.0-2.0mm/year. IPCC 1990 was right on the money.
> people are saying it is "slower than expected".
Can you give me some citations for this? I've looked around a bit and all I can see is "faster than expected"
In fact sea-level rise is another great example of what I'm talking about. Dr. Richard Alley gave a fantastic talk this summer about how we can expect very rapid, very sudden ice sheet collapse, and therefore should also experience potentially very rapid sea level rises[0].
However, as he repeatedly points out in the talk, because these sudden collapses are incredibly hard to simulate and predict they are excluded from all IPCC models. He doesn't deny that predicting when and exactly the impact is an incredibly hard modeling problem, but at the same time makes it pretty clear that this known unknown, so to speak, is very real and very likely to have a major impact.
Edit: you should watch at least the beginning of the talk because he explicitly mentions a 2008 piece in the guardian and other cases of "slower than expected".[1]
0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MnX_sjXMio
1.
https://youtu.be/0MnX_sjXMio?t=100
It's enhancing confirmation bias.
I must not pay attention, but how common are climate skeptics on HN?
Might be some confirmation bias on my end, but it seems common, especially if you turn on "show dead comments" in your account settings.
I didn't know dead comments was a thing. What is the correlation between dead comments and climate denialism being common on HN?
My bad, I was vague. It is *very* common to see one or two conspiratorial crazy "global warming is a hoax" comments that are just flagged and dead. It also definitely happens, but less reliably, to see "middle brow" "polite but trivially wrong" climate change denialism comments that are either downvoted or dead. I have also seen non-downvoted comments of that nature, but these were not what I was referring to (and they usually have well argued factual responses).
It's more a correlation of dead comments and value added.
I haven't seen a compelling denialist argument, so maybe they're dead because they're not compelling?
From a distance I'd estimate maybe 40-50% of commenters are in the leaning neutral sceptic to oil apologist zone but I'm probably biased.
Oh my god, I wish more people would say this, and understand it. When thinking about any projection, “might not be that bad” == “could be much worse”.
Ok but as a statistical professional don’t you thibk that all “X than expected” stories be written with a preregistered hypothesis from some earlier date which can be linked? Otherwise they are a press release.
Nobody is saying “it will be better than expected” they are saying “the models could be wrong”.
And that’s played out already? So not exactly a low probability scenario.
So far over time the climate has been warming faster and there have been more problems consistently than the median of models up to that point predicted, so "And that's played out already" is very wrong.
I seem to remember Al Gore basically telling us the world would end a while ago.
“ In 2009, Al Gore loosely cited researchers and said there was a “75% chance” the ice could be gone during at least some summer months within five to seven years.”
So if the models are wrong, and wrong in such a way that the impact of climate change is much worse than they predict, then what?
But that goes both ways?
If I told you “my model predicts a 50% chance you be diagnosed with cancer and a 50% chance you wont” how do you make a decision. When both are equally probable?
There isn't a 50/50 distribution of models predicting nothing and models predicting something negative.
Other commenters are pointing out the logic issues with your question, but I would like to provide a direct answer.
If a number of people told me that there was a 50% chance I had cancer, then I would first check their qualifications to make sure their predictions were worth my time. Then, if I found them credible, I would be really worried about getting cancer and go through all the screenings and tests necessary to figure out which side of the 50% I was on. Would you not do the same?
When the options are keep smoking or stop smoking, the obvious choice is to stop smoking to improve your odds. The positive side effects are worth it on their own.
That’s if you have solid evidence that smoking harms you.
Except here the options are not as simple as "stopping smoking" which in this context would be "stop emitting co2" doing so would cause extreme economic harm, lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY, and be very regressive to the poorest people.
Smoking is not needed for life to function, energy production, food production, heating, etc is very much needed for life to function.
> cause extreme economic harm, lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY, and be very regressive to the poorest people.
Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?
"Extreme" economic harm? Define extreme, please. Also account for all the increased economic activity related to climate change mitigation (renewable energy, carbon capture, construction).
"lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY" - Climate change will do that too. Try cooling your house cheaply, or getting enough freshwater or fresh produce when the climate goes haywire.
"be very regressive to the poorest people." - Again, needs context. The "poorest people" are precisely the ones who will suffer the most if climate change isn't averted. The Indian subcontinent, to take one example, will have acute water shortages and/or sea-level rises (in Bangladesh) which will lead to crop failures and famine.
Put another way, ignoring the risks and contining our reliance on CO2 and methane and etc emissions has put our economy and living standards in jeopardy, especially for the poorest people.
It didn't have to go down this way but certain powerful folks have been more interested in maintaining the status quo than making improvements, and that pattern continues today. Even basic economic concepts like externalities are ignored because folks embrace thought-terminating terms like "job-killing policies".
So you’re saying we can’t be sure about our models but we can be sure that they’re wrong in a certain direction.
This article, connecting a decline of sea ice to Western U.S. wildfires, has also been on my mind lately:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26232-9
Newspapers should just make section called It’s Worse Than We Thought.
How do you perform RCA on such a complex system?
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Why only 800 yrs? In terms of geological record that seems like a very small window.
It covers the industrialization era and several hundred years prior. I think it's a good window to use to determine human impact.
Maybe. But it also completely ignores the possibility it's a natural cycle, or at least hiccup.
I'm not suggesting it's not human-made. But using only 800 yrs can't really say with authority one way or another either.
If they went back 900 years they would have met the Middle Age Warm Period.
Amazing input.
very nice article.
Fear sells. The whole climate debate is about how we can distribute wealth. First step, spread fear amongst the youth because the older, mostly conservative public won't listen at first. Especially the young white females are sensitive because of their mother feelings and protective childhood.
Should be interesting to see all the climate deniers of this orange website ignore the mountains of evidence for the phenomenon, and grasp tightly the scanty data that allows them to JAQ off [0] about how ooh maaaaybe we don't need to do aaaanything! What if we're wrooooong? The idea that we're "wrong about the causes" of global warming requires denial of basic chemistry and settled paleontological records in order to support itself. Does it matter that the linked article explicitly points out the better-understood causes-and-effects of warming trends on ocean statistics? Absolutely not. The supporting links are not to the paper itself, but to "skeptic" sites. Great stuff.
Me, I wouldn't carry water for the people intentionally destroying our planet's ability to support life-as-we-know-it for less than six figures, but I suspect that these people do it for free.
[0]
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
How will increasing taxes in western society fix this? Hubris, almost Hillary levels of hubris.
> How will increasing taxes in western society fix this? Hubris, almost Hillary levels of hubris.
I think you're replying to the wrong person, except there's no one else in the thread as of now mentioning taxes. So I guess you're participating in the proud internet tradition of putting words in people's mouths.
What's really incredible is that it's not like I wrote a huge wall of text. It's not difficult to see that I didn't mention taxation or "Hillary" in my root level comment. What do you gain from this nonsense?
What other suggestions do you have for what "we" could do? China won't do anything, neither will India or Russia, by the way. So what are we doing? It'll boil down to effectively taxing companies and people. I skipped ahead a few steps in the discussion. Sorry for spoiling it.
china has a plan to be carbon neutral, they have good incentive too, their healthcare costs from coal pollution are wild
they are going nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, anything but coal
I don't think you really understand what the word "discussion" means. But I'll bite -- well, I'll nibble.
The weasel words "effectively taxing" can be twisted to cover literally every policy lever possible to deploy in our current democracy-corporatocracy, from actually taxing to removing the massive subsidies currently enjoyed by polluting industries to adding subsidies to better solutions, so between that and your baseless assertions, you're "right" by preemptive technical knockout: you "win". Since you assert that use of policy levers are all "Hilary"-class hubris, a signifier of other... "cognitive differences" between us, I don't think a discussion with you will be fruitful; you're clearly not "discussing" in good faith.
Dubai is in the desert and is more than thriving. On Average I was colder there than in Canada. Every indoor place has great Air Conditioning. Drinkable Water is converted from Ocean water. Its a model of what a future city could look like in the worst case climate change scenario, if human ingenuity is able to thrive.
Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
And the people fear mongering about the collapse of civilization to advocate for certain politics, should be more worried about the immediate threat from bioterrorism, COVID lockdowns, or even the type of civilization breakdown that is happening in South Africa.
I'm personally in support of a high energy future, and I think Nuclear Energy is
the most realistic way we will get there.
> Dubai is in the desert and is more than thriving
I'm not sure why you think that. The amount of work and resources that go in to making it partly habitable is immense. Without oil money, it would be desolate and empty. Without it we would see the slave cities, surrounding the shiny buildings, completely swept away. As a city, it's an economic sinkhole not a prosperous one.
> Every indoor place has great Air Conditioning.
And all that heat has to go somewhere. And the hotter things get, the more those air conditioners will have to work: producing more heat. Implying air conditioning is the solution to climate change is kind of like suggesting we drop ice cubes in the ocean to cool it off.
> Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
The problem is that we honestly don't know what the effects will be. How disrupting those ecosystems will impact other areas. We've already learned the devastating effects invasive species can have on areas, on how improperly planned damming and levee construction can fuck up our coastlines, suggesting that making Northern Canada a temperate zone is no big deal is just willfully ignoring all the knock-on effects that will bring.
Also, North Canada wasn't always in the North. So the fact that palm fossils were found there isn't proof that the North was once tropical, it's just proof that palms once grew there. That area could have been in the tropics. I don't remember all of the continental shifts caused by plate tectonics, but things have moved quite a bit in the some 4 billion years the Earth has existed.
It's worth noting that thermal efficiency is dictated by the delta T, so an air conditioner pushing twice the temperature difference burns more than twice the energy and produces more than twice the heat.
And the more heat we drive into urban spaces, the bigger the Heat Island Effect will be. There are twenty variables we can be tackling here and we need people tugging at all of them. More trees, better albedo on built structures, retrofitting for energy efficiency, and and and...
So just curious, how does it compare bringing 40 degrees Celsius down to 21 degrees, vs 0 degrees upto 21 degrees. Is heating more energy efficient than cooling? My practical experience has been that AC costs less, than heating a home.
Considering that if anywhere Solor panels could work well, the Dubai desert is near tops for efficiency. This also offsets any deficit. And Dubai also has seasonal temperature variations, winter they are around 29 degrees.
I wouldn't be surprised that the total energy expenditure for a home in Dubai, is less than a home in Northern Canada .
Some quick checking and Dubai is around 12,000 kwh per year per household and California is around 6000 per year per household.
My point was that A/C is really just changing the equilibrium of a small area. Making a building cooler means you have to make some other area warmer.
Harvest trillions of fish, and you remove a massive cause of ocean water sub-currents.
How do millions of salmon, halibet, swimming and moving water, huge schools of fish, change currents?
Well they're mostly gone now, compared to 100+ years ago.
What evidence is there that fish cause ocean currents?
You're arguing that fish cause ocean currents?
Are airplanes the source of wind?
Cows apparently cause a massive environmental impact. Goats, without predators, can turn plain and even forest into desert.
Animals cause impact to the environment. we've removed trillions of tonnes of active biomass from the oceans.
What impact has that?
No one is saying fish don't have an impact on the environment. You're apparently arguing that they have an impact on ocean currents, which is a claim that is out there enough that people at least expect a source.
It seems unlikely that fish are more influential than earth rotation, sun etc. The energy difference is very large.
I'm surprised this is news to people. The earth (and Arctic Ocean) has been warming ever since the last ice age. Places like the Great Lakes used to be frozen glaciers thousands of years ago.
It’s news because it’s a more nuanced claim than your “general ocean warming has occurred over thousands of years” claim.
The claim is that the marked increase in warming in the 20th century began decades earlier than was previously believed, not just that there was once an ice age and it’s warmer now.
Your flippant comment unfairly trivializes the article; either on purpose or because you didn't read it.
From the article:
“When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.”
This is fascinating! We've always blamed climate change/warming on man-made activities, but this study is saying Arctic Atlantification predates the industrial revolution (or at least occurs at the same time). Not that I want to see continued use of fossil fuels in place of more sustainable options like nuclear and solar/wind. But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
> but this study is saying Arctic Atlantification predates the industrial revolution (or at least occurs at the same time).
No, it isn't. It says it starts at the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial revolution usually dated as mid-18th to mid-19th century. The former is neither before nor at the same time as the latter.
> Not that I want to see continued use of fossil fuels in place of more sustainable options like nuclear and solar/wind. But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
There is no good reason to think that they have, and this study does not at all contravene, or even call into question, the consensus on the causes of warming.
> There is no good reason to think that they have, and this study does not at all contravene, or even call into question, the consensus on the causes of warming.
From the article:
> “Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,” said Tommaso. “We rely on these simulations to project future climate change, but the lack of any signs of an early warming in the Arctic Ocean is a missing piece of the puzzle.”
I'd generally encourage people to be skeptical of everything, but I'd call this a really good reason to be skeptical.
It can just as well be an explanation why climate models have been pretty consistently under-estimating warming of time though.
James Watt's first heat engine went online the same year as the American Revolutionary War. We might recall also that one of the uses of his machines was to keep coal mines from filling up with water (ie, increase coal production).
This has been going on for a long time, and steel production was a major factor long before Watt.
The article makes no mention of the warming predating the industrial revolution. Rather, the quote below indicates a marked change in temperature at the beginning of the 20th century.
_When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out._
> All of the world’s oceans are warming due to climate change, but the Arctic Ocean, the smallest and shallowest of the world’s oceans, is warming fastest of all.
The article talks about the Arctic Ocean. It is not denying the warming of the world's ocean due to climate change.
This article does not say global climate warming is not man-made, it just states that "Atlantification" is a process that warms the Arctic Ocean even more.
> But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
That is _extremely_ unlikely. We can measure the spectrum and intensity of incoming solar energy and of outgoing radiation from Earth, and see that we are gaining. We can see that much of that gain is due to incoming energy heating things which re-radiate that energy in infrared which we can see gets trapped by CO2.
We can tell by looking at the isotope distribution of the C in the CO2 where it comes from. CO2 from still living or recently living (say dead for only a few hundred years) has a different isotope distribution than CO2 from long dead or never living sources. This lets us tell that most of the CO2 increase over the last couple hundred years is from burning fossil fuels or an increase in geological processes that release long trapped CO2 such as volcanic activity.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that we can tell from that did not come from living or recently living things matches fairly well with what we know of volcanic activity and how much fossil fuels we burn, giving us enough data to conclude that most of the warming due to CO2 is due to human emitted CO2.
For that to be wrong would require that we have massively overestimated how much fossil fuels we use and massively overlooked a large amount of volcanic activity.
Ok, but more heat means more water vapor which means more cloud cover which means less heat. More CO2 means more plant growth which means less CO2 as the carbon is tied up.
It's not one factor you can examine cleanly in isolation. There are many many interacting factors.
It potentially explains more/better/more fine-grained how our future will look like.this will not suddenly revert our assumptions on CO2 being the fundamental factor of man made global warming.
We are not that uncertain about climate change.
In William Ruddiman's _Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum_ [0] he argues that even human agriculture has been enough to tip the CO2 scales in favor of not entering a new ice age.
> But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
This would require several, distinct and unrelated fields of science being wrong about the way CO2 and other GHG have in the past and currently regulate the Earth's temperature.
There is no question that CO2 in the atmosphere has been rapidly rising.
There is no question that humans have been the cause of this rise, it's just basic math given the wild amount of hydrocarbons we combust every year.
So while it's possible that scientists are wrong in the big picture sense it would require a sea-change in our understanding of climate from every perspective as well as being a remarkable coincidence that we are seeing the impact we are in correlation to our own CO2 emissions.
A far, far more likely explanation is that the Earth's climate is even more sensitive to small changes in CO2 on a small time scale than we have previously thought.
0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plows,_Plagues_and_Petroleum
> But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
I’m not sure we can realistically go down that road, politically speaking. Look at everything that’s happened with covid- what we said wasn’t _wrong_, you just misheard us. If anything, climate change is even more entrenched politically.
OMG. Do you know meaning of "acceleration" word in "acceleration of warming"?
What if the rate of change commonly accepted by mainstream climate scientists is off by 10%? 50%? More?
What if the alarmism and depression-inspiring shrill shrieking is doing more harm than good?
What if you're just asking questions, y'know?
A bit terrifying that your other comment which was pointing out this "just asking questions" behavior[0] was immediately flagged and removed.
It's wild to me that a group of people that tends to be educated, intellectual, and curious about complex systems instantly starts to lose it's collective mind when faced with an existential risk. It feels like living in a Lovecraft story where the only response to horror is madness.
[0]
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
Exactly! The article mentions it’s been warming since 1900 which is a scant decade after industrialization began. It seems to suggest other factors are contributing to global warming!
for context, greenhouse effect was first described in 1824 and a good approximation of the warning effect of doubling of atmospheric CO2 was made in 1896 (+2.5~4 C) [0]
From 1800 to 1900, CO2 ppm rose from 280 to 300
Of course, from 1900 til today it has risen to over 400ppm
My point is, we were burning a significant amount of coal throughout 1800s - Acid rain was happening in the 1850s [1]
[0]
http://interactive.fusion.net/200-years-of-climate-science-a...
[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
But we’ve doubled CO2 and haven’t seen a 2.5 to 4C temperature rise? What do you mean “good approximation”?
280 to 400 is not doubling
I guess I was quoting the source in saying the pencil and paper estimate is in line with modern climate models
edit: from a cursory googling, looks like 450ppm is in line with 2C warning while 600pm is the higher end at 4C warning
note also temperature lags behind co2 (since heat is captured cumulatively over time) so even if we stabilized now at ~412ppm we will continue to see warming
> The article mentions it’s been warming since 1900 which is a scant decade after industrialization began
The industrial revolution is generally dated from 1760, which is...somewhat more than a decade before 1900.
See other reply that shows CO2 emissions were negligible until 1900?
How are we driving mass warming in 1900 when CO2 emissions were barely 1% of what they are today?
> See other reply that shows CO2 emissions were negligible until 1900?
Literally, no, where? Even if I did see one claiming that, I’ve also seen the charts of net atmospheric CO2 from human activity that show a sharp rise already in progress by 1800.
Just grasping at straws. Without taking into consideration, the magnitude of co2 getting emitted, we can even blame cavemen with their cook fires for global warming.