The thing that really bugs when when discussing climate change is that it's one of the clearest examples of confirmation bias I've ever experienced as an adult. Forget geological time, if anything out of the ordinary weather-related occurs then it's because of XYZ climate change reason.
The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years are also saying that we shouldn't build any nuclear power plants, or that the root cause of climate change is "institutional racism"[1]. It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly.
Do people say crazy things about climate change? Yes. Does that mean the science is wrong? No.
People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it. And they work!
Anthropogenic climate change affords itself to a wide variety of crazy statements because it arises from, and affects such a wide variety of human activities. Basically, there is no segment of the human population that will remain unaffected in some way--either directly, by sea level rise or shifts in fresh water, or indirectly, by all the people who are being directly affected.
Because it is physically real, it can't be ignored forever. I fear that the longer we go as a society without addressing it, the higher the general level of social anxiety will rise. That could go a bad way: more and more people seize upon conspiracy theories or tune out. I hope instead we find the collective will to face our fears and take action to address them. I hope that like starting a difficult and scary project, once we see signs of progress, it will become easier to conceive of further progress.
I think your last statement is absolutely on point. If we as a species had addressed climate change when it was first raised as an important issue in the 1970's, it would not have required nearly the same level of upheaval that addressing it today will need. The later we leave it, the worse the upheaval becomes.
Basically the science says we will transition to a zero-emission society. We can either plan for it and have a managed transition, or we can be forced into it by external forces, essentially a collapse (good luck feeding 10 billion people with widespread crop failures).
The earlier we start, the smoother the transition will be. That is basically what all the protests are about, people just want to start the transition already.
> People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it.
But in the case of QM, either the crazy stuff is wrong- repeated experiments falsify it, no gadget can be built on the principle; or it is "not even wrong", i.e., irrelevant. But many of the climate change findings are either predictions with a timespan of several years or decades, or historical explanations (this and this happened because of climate change). The first type can only be put to test years from now, the second type never.
I don't actually think that the all people saying the climate will spiral out of control in 12 years are saying what you are attributing to them.
Nuclear is not a panacea, but we should build more because this is a global emergency. There is a racist component to the reaction to climate change because of who is being most immediately impacted (equatorial countries and the poor), but intent doesn't matter, because only action matters.
The science is bland and harsh, and doesn't care about how people consume it. You can put CO2 in an aquarium, seal it, and easily measure the greenhouse effect from CO2 yourself. You can even work out the basics of the relationship of CO2 concentration to degree of warming. This is happening right now - it's not predictions, it is our reality. It will happen to you regardless of how you feel about the discussion on either side of the issue.
The co2 warming effect is not in discussion, as you say. But there are cascades of events stemming from the warming itself, and those are integral part of our concern with climate change. How much sea rise will there be? How much will the weather patterns change? How, and how much this will impact catastrophic events? Which negative (or positive) impacts there will be on economies? And of which countries' economies? What will be the ecological impacts? What will be the impacts on health, on infectious diseases? What will be the societal impacts? Etc.
Some of these effects are two or three or more steps removed from the warming caused by co2, and there is a "cascade of uncertainty" in predicting them.
I agree with the GP that being climate (and atmosphere) omnipresent, it is easy and tempting to draw long causal chains from it to the most disparate effects. And that, given the theme is central to our time, and given the number of scientists of all disciplines working to study these effects, in the most rigorous fields a publication bias on the effects found must exist. In the less rigorous, most probably anything goes.
In the tropics you'll find a lot of food unsecurity. Hawaii is a good example of this, importing 80% of its food. Now, climate change brings about more than just temperature rise, we're talking about more powerful storms causing more inundation along coastlines. Hawaii is vulnerable in this way because all of the shipping infrastructure which supports 2 million people is at the coastline and could easily be knocked out by a category 5 hurricane. The flooding from such a storm can also salinate farmlands, slosh salt water, chemicals or pathogens into the aquifer. It is clear how shit goes south very quickly from there.
Closer to the equator you'll find Kiribati, where salination of farmlands and aquifers has already happened. Luckily the rest of the world is still online and willing to keep their country on life support, but the prospects for kiribati to independently support itself in the long term are non-existent.
Carbon dioxide also raises ocean acidity which kills off corals and crashes fisheries, leaving coastal communities without reliable protein sources.
I hope you can see how an indifference to climate change on the part of predominately white countries to can be construed as racist. When someone says that, he or she is talking about all the non-white people who are currently suffering due to changes in their climates.
> In the tropics you'll find a lot of food unsecurity. Hawaii is a good example of this, importing 80% of its food.
This is hilariously misled. Food must be imported into Hawaii because it's an island with very little arable land, not because it's "in the tropics." Equatorial nations have by far the greatest access to food when compared to any other place on the earth. That's why biodiversity is the greatest near the equator -- there are more resources.
> I hope you can see how an indifference to climate change on the part of predominately white countries to can be construed as racist. When someone says that, he or she is talking about all the non-white people who are currently suffering due to changes in their climates.
Yes, but they are not disproportionately affected due to some conspiracy, but rather just because money protects you from consequences. If you're poor, you can't move, and you can't buy water. That affects you less if you have a stable income and marketable skills (which are easier to access in the west).
Hawaii has enough arable land to support the number of people living here. It's their distribution that's problematic. Everything is in the wrong place to make efficient use of the land.
I live out here in the pacific, I travel all over Oahu every day. People lived here for over a thousand years without foreign goods. The food scarcity is manufactured to suck money back to the mainland U.S.
If you'd rather attribute the situation to incompetence then we can say that the food scarcity exists because the local government supports the tourism industry over agriculture, alotting more land and water resources and collapsing what was once a sustainable food system... accidentally.
When you use words like "hilarious" and "hah" I feel annoyed, because I need a little more respect and acknowledgement for the work I am doing in horticulture, food security out here in the pacific. I have a hard time listening to what you are trying to say when you are typing laughter at me. Do you want to try and share your thoughts without implying that you think my world is a joke?
I'm sorry, but how long ago was the food system of Hawaii sustainable? And how did the society of Hawaii look back then? How many Hawaiians were there at the time, how many should leave the islands to go back to that state, and how many of those who should remain would actually be in favour of this solution?
India is a current example of this btw. They've been facing much more devastating floods recently. We can also tract hurricanes in the Atlantic and is is easy to see that the frequency and intensity is increasing. Equatorial regions are also subject to more droughts. There is also a correlation between equatorial countries and many being 2nd or 3rd world countries, which do not have the technological nor economical resources that deal with these events as well as 1st worlds.
That's why there are experimental controls with different gas mixtures that measure the greenhouse effect of the CO2 and the effect the glass independently.
> It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly.
One of the biggest things that bugs me about the talk from the public about climate change is that it is all focused around what politicians say. Last week I heard graduate students talking about the major effects of plastic straws. My dad (a Fox news watcher) constantly talks about Al Gore. As a scientists I don't care about those things and those things aren't talked about in the scientific community. We're all confused at the right for not believing in it and we're confused by the left because we have prominent politicians (like Bernie and Warren) saying that nuclear and sequestration are false solutions (but these technologies are highly encouraged by the IPCC and every single climate scientist I know. Only Yang and Booker are pro nuclear?! AFAICT only Yang is pro sequestration?! This is ridiculous. All of them should be! They're all claiming to be listening to the scientists!). So I get your sentiment. Personally I just don't understand why this is happening and what we can do about it.
> The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years
If it makes you feel better, the scientists are talking about decades. And different events in different time spans. Some of the predictions have already come true, such as more intense storms, more fires, and more droughts. This will only get worse. But the spiral out of control is much further off and is more related to food/water scarcity. That's where the 1.5C-2C warming is a huge danger.
As to the racial and economical aspects to climate, there is truth there. But I think the conversation has gotten out of control. Countries like India are already being hit really hard by climate change (a lot more of their land is vulnerable to floods compared to 20 years ago). But the talk here should be really focused about how we can't just ask/expect other countries to not grow their economy for using the same tactics we did (i.e. coal, oil, and natural gas). The US is only 15% of the problem (Europe 10%) and all of us going to 0% isn't solving the problem. We have to go negative and/or ensure that there are cheap enough technologies that developing countries can use that don't pollute. At least I see this as a more humane alternative than shutting down other countries growing economies. IDK about you.
That article doesn’t argue for any sort of causal relationship between climate change and racism. Rather, it argues that a similar kind of denialism in the face of facts undermines the notion of shared truth by further entrenching people within their (a priori) belief systems.
Put another way, Kendi is pointing out different manifestations of the dangers of equating (dis)belief with knowledge.
Not just weather, but almost anything can be attributed to climate change - poverty, depression, suicide, crime, decline in insects, decline in birds, etc.
Is your point here that it's implausible that rising temperatures could cause any of those things on your list?
Because at least two of them have an obvious link to temperatures (especially if you think about what average temperatures and weather do to birds/insects' primary food sources)...
We also know that depression (and as an indirect result, suicide) have known links to weather in some territories, so it's not implausible that climate change could impact that too. Though I'd expect higher temperatures to lower depression rates, it's possible suffering through even hotter summers without A/C could exacerbate depression among poor people, since there's nothing you can do to escape it.
If back to back heat waves brought on by climate change threaten you (maybe your grandma's sick and can't take the heat), and you can't afford any of the solutions like a nice air conditioner, maybe you get desperate and turn to crime so you can find the money to keep grandma from getting injured by the heat? I wouldn't personally say 'I bet that happens' but I also wouldn't bet money against a study being able to pull it out of the data. We had old people dying in homes not too long ago as a result of a power outage in the American southeast - Florida I think? - and it was a news-level scandal.
If hot summers and reduced rainfall kill crops, that's going to boost poverty levels in farming counties...
If that bugging you is the best you can take out of all the climate change discussion, you need to change your mindset on how to read important topics. There will always be sensationalism around something as big as climate change. Of course there are going to be people shouting anything to grab your attention. Focus on the problem, not these fringe philosophical issues.
Also, the 12-year deadline is a talking point for politicians. However the IPCC said there is not some “magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate 'fine' from 'catastrophic’” [1]
Squabbling over whether we have 12 years or if it's really maybe 14 or 7 until the point of no return doesn't really change what we have to do. I don't think there are many known experts on the topic that would say the number is far off.
Edit: so you edited in some more bullshit sources. Let me look at just one. As I mentioned in another comment, we don't have time to go back and forth over every piece of bullshit since nonsense is a lot easier to write than it is to convincingly disprove (since the nonsense doesn't have to make sense). I clicked only one (so it's a random sample), and I chose it because it triggered my interest (it seemed data-based): the USCRN data link. The article helpfully links to the NOAA website where you can make your own plots. I am not a climate scientists, but the first thing that I notice is the timespan: look at the variance in that data that is linked. It jumps from -4°F to +7°F anomaly. No wonder that, over this timespan, you don't see anything. The article even mentions how variable this data is: "0.6 ± 0.9 °C". You can't say anything either way because you don't have enough data (a variance larger than your base value?!). But of course, the article sees it differently: "no statistically significant warming since the start of the record". Sure it's not significant, but neither does this disprove anything. What it definitely does not do is prove that there is no warming. If anything, the 0.6 value should tell you that it is more likely to be warming up (at a rate of 0.6°C per decade) than not (the odds of it being greater than 0.6 are equal to the odds that it is less than 0.6; and the odds that it is greater than zero (and we are indeed warming up every decade) is 83% (0.6±0.9 means it can be between 0.6-0.9 and 0.6+0.9, so between -0.3 and 1.5, so there are (rounded to one decimal) 18 possible values and 15 of them are positive, and 15/18 is around 83%). Again, all of this is uncertain because monthly data since 2004 is not a lot of data with this amount of variance, and I'm estimating uncertainty on uncertainty here, but the takeaway so far should be clear.
But that's not the end of it. The author is literally turning a blind eye to the data that we do have. First they go "we have no data, and the data we do have suggests that the earth is warming up, so let me just deny that global warming is real", but then when you click through to the website, you discover that there totally is data. See those checkboxes at the top of the options? They have data going back way beyond 2004. Select any year you like, but be sure to take a long enough range (30 years or so) so you have any sort of reasonable sample size. If it looks like a bunch of random data to you and there is no clear trend, I would agree: the author of your article picked the least clear "Time Scale" option available.
I didn't quite understand the difference between the Time Scale options "previous 12 months" and "12-Month" so I downloaded the whole dataset and computed averages per year. They match the option "Time Scale: 12-Month", so that's what that means: the year's average. You can just set that Time Scale option and don't have to go through the trouble of downloading things and validating what you think the option might mean (see what I mean by "disproving bullshit is more work than writing it"?). Now, over 30+ years and with the year's average, please tell me you see a trend there? This new USCRN data is just not active for long enough to draw conclusions, and the high-uncertainty conclusions that can be drawn (referring to the article you linked to, namely the 0.6°C per decade, give or take 0.9) suggest that it is going up rapidly.
I wonder if all this work has been for nothing, it took more time than I had hoped... I just hope it makes you rethink what you believe or look at your sources more critically (instead of only looking critically at the generally accepted sources).
Though I do agree with the sentiment that disproving bullshit is more work than writing it, the linked Google Sheet is a literal import of the raw and modified data sets freely downloadable from the NOAA ftp site.
The USCRN is a new network of 143 stations that wasn't fully completed in 2008 (started in 2001 with data becoming available 2004). The data prior to 2004 is from the historical sensor network (USHCN).
The whole reason the USCRN was built was because of the problems with the historical network. The USCRN was designed to get more reliable measurements.
The aforementioned spreadsheet illustrates the problems with the USHCN data.
Would love to see someone put there name on a list that says "these weather events were caused by climate change" and "these were not, we expected them".
So all the thousands of scientific studies out there that constantly validate this conclusion are confirmation bias? This is one of the weakest assertions against climate change I've ever heard. It's not even an argument because it doesn't present any reasoning or evidence. This kind of weak thinking is why we haven't made progress on this issue. Hard to believe this is the top comment here considering the levels of education on this hn.
The underlying architecture of mainstream media and social media that produced Trump and Brexit haven't changed.
They provide the conditions for the herd to congregate, accumulate and then stampede. And the herd will. Until the underlying architecture gets fixed. Too much attention is paid to which direction the herd is stampeding in rather than the underlying architecture that enables it.
Fascinating. With the right idiots available, I can convince people of the falseness of real things by just having the idiots defend reality. This is a useful technique. I think the right idiots are available for practically anything useful. I wonder if it's possible to attempt to get someone to make spurious claims of racism being the reason why we can't have tech unions, and use that to spike unions in tech because people will associate support for tech unions as support for the spurious claims of racism.
Can we start discussing geo-engineering strategies more seriously? Andrew Yang's mention of space mirrors was derisively put-down, but can someone lay out why it isn't a good idea?
If SpaceX and others continue to make getting things into orbit much cheaper, what's the argument against putting highly reflective barriers in the Lagrange point, which is a point constantly between the Earth and the Sun. If we deflected even 1% of sunlight, wouldn't that be enough to lower temperatures back down towards 0 C, as opposed to +1.1 C where we are now?
And why not focus the sunlight-blocking onto the poles, which we need to maintain our climate and which are experiencing even more rapid change?
Is the argument against these strategies that relying on geoengineering will take focus away from transitioning our energy system? I just think we have no hope of transitioning our energy system in time, emissions are STILL rising year over year...we have to think about how to cool the planet while we decarbonize our energy.
Well, for one thing, you would need to block out 2% of sunlight to counteract the warming effect that we've seen since the industrial revolution.
But more importantly, you are underestimating the scale. The earth is big, and L1 is far away. A device that blocks 2% of the sunlight at that distance would have to cover 4.5 million square kilometers, a disc that size would be larger than the moon, or about the size of the entire United States including Alaska.
It would also require engines that need to be constantly refueled, because solar wind, which is really strong at the scale we're talking about, would push it away in just a few months.
And the screen would need to be smart, because L1 is only quasi-stable. The actual point where there is zero differential gravity is, well, a point, and any deviation from that point will inevitably increase until the object eventually falls into a regular orbit, so to stay there you need to be constantly monitoring your own orbit and correcting for deviations. Only L4 and L5 are self-correcting (which is why there are no known natural objects at L1-3 of any two-body system)
Given the depth of our knowledge of the interlinked dynamics of earth's ecosystem, pulling out Geo-engineering is like practicing brain-surgery by whacking a baseball bat to the side of the patient's head.
But hey, I get it. There are profits to be made in Geo-engineering, while no-one will get rich quick from abstinence, right?
I have said this for years. We will not take any action until it is too late, and then we will speed up our demise by trowing a 'Geo-engineering' hail-Mary (using engineering in the name is supposed to give it some merit it doesn't deserve)
When we look back in 50 years, I believe we'll see this as a time of incredible growth and discovery. Kind of how I look back on the space age now, the moon landing. The space program was almost a complete disaster, but instead it inspires generations.
Yes, let's talk solutions! It you don't like one of these solutions, come up with a better one. Anything but working on solutions is an excuse (i.e. complaining about people that aren't on board or trolls). Don't miss out on the big adventure.
Geoengineering imply that we are better than nature. We mess up Earth and we're going to fix it not by stopping pollution and our bad habits, we'll just create this bandaid.
It's much more of a gamble too.
We only have one Earth. Why can't we just pollute less? And address the problem directly. We use too much oil and are throwing plastic into the sea.
Your proposed solution sounds like it cost a lot. I think there are other cost effective ways to go address this problem and can lead to a win-win for everybody (well except for oil industry).
One of the criticisms of Javascript developers is that they make things slow with bad practices and by adding needless frameworks to their apps. Then in order to solve that problem, they bolt additional frameworks on top to do complicated, hard-to-debug compilation steps, or to optimize specific code paths, or to defer loading to make things appear faster than they are.
What they don't realize is that all of the bloat in their apps came from things that seemed like good ideas at the time. If they were actually smart enough to engineer their way out of the problem, they would have also been smart enough not to engineer their way into it in the first place. So when they add their new speed-solutions on top of the existing codebase, often they introduce new bugs or limitations that end up making their app even worse in the long run.
Wherever possible, a solution should not be significantly more complicated than the problem. Occasionally, you can get genuine speedups from adding new libraries, but this should not be treated as the norm. Usually, the best way to make apps faster and lighter is to stop using so much stuff.
And as it is with Javascript, so too is it with climate change and geo-engineering projects.
Space mirrors are almost impossible to build right now.
Shadowing 1% of the earth would require 10 million tons of mylar foil, which would be 100,000 launches with SpaceX's yet to complete Starship at a payload capacity of 100t (as it was announced, seems to be down a lot for the prototypes) to low earth orbit. That's not doable yet - and it is just the problem of launching the mass, nothing else.
That would probably also have the effect of reflecting some of the energy leaving Earth back down onto it, essentially increasing the greenhouse effect.
Also, assuming you need to reflect 2% of the incoming light, and using 8ft diameter balloons, you would need approximately 2,744,628,480,000 balloons.
...and who will pay for that? A lot of people are upset when the government spends money to help solar panel industry, a proven technology that generates electricity right now.
I don't think these people will open their pockets to build an unproven space mirror to solve a problem they vehemently refuse to acknowledge in the first place.
* Also it won't do shit to solve ocean acidification, another serious aspect of Global Warming.
Or we could plant more trees. Seriously, of all the crazy carbon capture ideas proposed, planting trees still beats them for effectiveness.
Geoengineering will make lots of money for whoever ends up doing it, but on the scale we are talking about they are mostly infeasible decades long projects that will take why more money and political will than just stopping emissions.
As long as it doesn't get too hot from emissions first. If we get up to +3C or +4C we are talking about loosing habitability in large parts of the world for trees (and probably humans).
It's just land the size of the United States to erase our last 100 years of emissions. Trees have the side benefit of being neutral or useful in many contexts. There is plenty of room.
There are some wonderfully artful images in this post but it is woefully short of evidence of anything. The 2010 image of the east Kenyan person in water by Andrew McConnell/Panos looks staged to me. There are endless articles with 'could' and 'may' in them which are making people very anxious.
I'm all for good stewardship of the planet but am old enough to recall when we were all doomed to soon freeze to death last century
https://youtu.be/mOC7ePWCHGk
I truly do not mean to be flippant - but don’t the words under the photos provide all the necessary context? Right under the Kenyan photo, which could be staged, the article says “The ensuing floods displaced 76,000 people and left nearly 100 dead. Kenya experienced more lethal floods last year.”
This particular Nature article gives a brief overview of a number of the consequences of global warming accompanied by photographs. Every article can’t be everything all at once.
How many times we we all have to see the Times cover and this History Channel pop science piece. 99% of climatologist agree on the science and the effects of warming are plainly visible to the layman.
99% agree on the data in the WGI of the ARs because those are real scientific data. However, the interpretation published in the WGIII of each AR are decided by politicians and are known to take liberties with the factual data in WGI, which is why 32k scientists signed "Climate Change Reconsidered".
When 99% of the experts in the field agree, and that's not a compelling argument to a layman with no expertise, "skeptic" is not a word I'd use to describe that layman.
Did you take more than two seconds to think that through? If that was a compelling argument, everyone would believe in numerology because everyone that calls themselves a numerologist agrees that numerology is real.
Doesn't that then stand that you need to qualify the backing of the rest of the scientific community, then qualify the backing of those backing the backing, then qualify the backing of those who are doing the back of the backing of the backing?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but the burden of proof decreases as the claims become less extraordinary. I'd suggest "a whole line of science which until this point hasn't been controversial" can probably be trusted, and that immediately choosing to disregard a group when it says something you don't like strikes as more reactionary than skeptical. I very much doubt you considered all of climate science a hack science until it started to butt up against your personal beliefs.
>Doesn't that then stand that you need to qualify the backing of the rest of the scientific community, then qualify the backing of those backing the backing,
Nope. Once you’ve there is backing from fields that you already trust experts in, then you can be relatively sure that the field is following scientific methods closely, etc.
>a whole line of science which until this point hasn't been controversial
Any science that makes predictions on complex systems without the ability to run tightly controlled experiments is pretty controversial to many in hard sciences. To see why: see social psychology for an example of a field filled with trash.
>I very much doubt you considered all of climate science a hack science until it started to butt up against your personal beliefs.
I very much doubt you read my comment if you think this has anything to do with my beliefs. I was pointing out a fallacious argument from authority that holds zero weight to people who don’t believe that authority.
If saying that 99% of climatologists agree was enough to settle the argument, it would be enough for 99% of police to agree that police abuse isn’t a problem.
99% of the sailors on a lifeboat say, "We need to paddle West, or we'll all die."
Sure, you have every right to be skeptical. But don't you think we should probably paddle West?
If someone starts trying to paddle East, shouldn't everyone in the boat try to stop them?
Yes, the sailors may be mistaken. But given the divisions of labor we have, and our limited understanding of the world, don't you think we should follow the best advice we can get?
Is there some better way you can imagine to gather the best advice?
During China's cultural revolution, for the sake of taking a Great Leap Forward, whole country-sides melted their metal housewares and cookware (trying to make steel) and killed all their sparrows ( to eliminate farm pests ) because the people were misinformed, but also mostly because the people were severely disincentivized from disagreeing. Going against the party line at that time meant you and your family going to work-camps for re-education, not simply just getting canceled. You don't always want to follow the masses, the 99%.
In your scenario, there's no way for the sovereign individual to go East unless he can find the ones in the 99% with the cognitive dissonance. Abandoning ship would be the metaphorical equivalent of becoming a hermit and giving up on society.
Do you really think that peer-reviewed scientists, who are the experts in their field, are on the same par as a totalitarian government, in terms of how accurately they can understand and model reality and make accurate predictions?
There's no Other Earth. If Climate Change is real, then we all need to paddle in the same direction.
Climate change is real, but what level of corrective behavior are climate alarmists willing to commit to?
A man, Allan Savory, acting on what was near unanimous scientific agreement on the cause of desertification, could have remained a mere scientist raising the alarm about deserts. Thinking he knew what the solution was, and getting the approval of other scientists, he went on to kill tens of thousands of elephants.
So, since you think climate change is real, what do you think should be done?
How do you think we should decide what to do?
I say we elect representatives, and they act as though scientists are the best way we have to measure reality. If they're concerned about the proposals of the scientists, it seems to me as though they should ask for ways to try experiments out, to see if they work, and to try to scale those up. Something like that.
Yes. The USSR collapsed because they tried to use huge committees of economic experts to plan everything, and their models and knowledge were simply not up to the task.
I don't know. I believe mankind is emitting lots of CO2, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that this might well be increasing the temperature of the Earth.
Beyond that I am filled with doubt. I've read a lot about the replication crisis in science. It started with psychology but has hit medicine especially hard too. Ioanndis' paper had a big influence, where he argued 50%-90% of all research findings are false. The papers about how scientists routinely misuse statistics also. I've seen first hand how enormous quantities of what appear to be scientific knowledge, things people believed were watertight consensus truth for years or decades, simply evaporated once someone who was serious about statistics sat down and tried to replicate the findings.
Likewise with economics. Is an economist making a prediction? Unless that prediction is "the current trend will continue" they are virtually always wrong.
Put simply, I don't trust academia much. I think most people trust academics far too much. The track record of failed predictions whether it be on the economy or the climate is enormous, and there are no repercussions.
Some of the most powerful arguments climate skeptics make aren't actually criticisms of scientists. They point out that academics are frequently portrayed as saints who float above mortal vices like self-interest or greed, vs "Big Plastic" or "evil lobbyists" or whoever who are assumed to be corrupted by their salary. But climate scientists and charity workers like money too. They have the same distorting incentives everyone else does. Important predictions = grant money, it's obvious. Why do people get so upset by this basic fact?
All that said, in the end, it's right and good to move away from fossil fuels. There are plenty of arguments for this that are stronger than "scientists say we'll all die, and this time they might be right!". For instance dwindling supplies of oil, coal and natural gas in regions of the world that are friendly and stable is, by itself, a good enough reason to switch to green power. I have no problem with carbon markets or government subsidies to this end as long as they don't destabilise the grid.
I do have a problem with people presenting any random weather event as "proof" that small children shouldn't go to school though. That's not a useful next step regardless of your presuppositions.
Do you really think that peer-reviewed scientists, who are the experts in their field, are on the same par as the prophecies of a 15 year old girl and her 10 year old friend, in terms of how accurately they can understand and model reality and make accurate predictions?
Good. Highlight that. Validation by the rest of the scientific community that a field is real science goes miles further than claiming “this religious group believes in their religion so it must be the right one”.
The skeptic can go and read the relevant papers and if they find flaws in them write their own paper. If their counterarguments are compelling they'd likely convince more than one or two percent of the climate scientists.
"Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
I would describe it a sample of irrelevant pop science noise from the past, that AGW deniers like to mindlessly compare to the current well established theory of AGW.
“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.”
– New York Times, July 18, 1970
“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.”
– New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978
Here we have the paper of record making some rather official pronouncements and claiming the weight of scientific authority in said pronouncements. That sounds like more than "irrelevant pop science noise" to me.
Now, hardly a month after that second quote, we also have this one:
“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.”
– New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978
Which is a fairly significant change in position that should not go unnoticed, but it does nonetheless leave me somewhat skeptical of Wikipedia's claim (I'm still reading the source of that claim).
But even if the reporting on the state of climate science in the 1970s was wrong: why was it wrong? And what has changed to fix it?
>what are you on about with the world freezing. That's new to me.
Well, because this was a thing in the 70's, so before you were born. I remember the headlines in pop-sci magazines were screaming about "the coming ice age" and artists depictions of glaciers in New York, Chicago, etc.
It doesn't invalidate the current climate science, but plenty of people remember that old sensationalism.
We were not all doomed to freeze to death in a new ice age. I think there were a couple of news pieces about it in the late seventies here in the UK. I even bought one of the shitty conspiracy paperbacks about it in 1980-something. Just as I bought Erich von Däniken's hilarious Chariot of the Gods proving the pyramids were built by aliens.
On the other hand there were dozens and dozens of news reports, over a lengthy period, about acid rain, climate and ozone in the early and mid eighties. The world bothered to do something about two. We hear far less of those two and the Millennium Bug these days. Which is taken as proof nowadays that they were never a problem in the first place. Errr...
No one (I hope), disputes there were published papers and news reports of those papers on cooling, but it was not the consensus. It wasn't frequent. Those citations above point to a handful of reports.
At the same time there were also reports of heating, which were more frequent. Though there weren't exactly loads of those yet either.
Now, there were certainly one or two that blew it up, e.g. the remaindered paperback I picked up for 50p or something round about 1980. I'm pretty sure BBC's Horizon never touched it, though they did do the odd "out there" programme each series. They did one myth-busting von Däniken's silliness sometime in the early or mid 70s.
There is plenty of evidence, but I agree that this article specifically doesn't make a very good evidence backed argument. I also didn't find the pictures particularly emotionally poignant where they might move people to action researching the problems being described. Unfortunately, articles like this often hurt rather than help, IMO.
I am also old enough to remember how the Ozone Layer would doom us all and that even if we stopped all CFC emission immediately, it would still take 4 centuries to recover.
Reality: Even with China still misbehaving about CFCs emissions, the Ozone Layer already recovered quite a bit and it's set to be fully healed by 2060.
But well, on the bright side, at least that time, ALL nations comited to stop using CFCs. This time, the idea is: stop all emissions in the western world, and allow Asia to keep increasing theirs.
Climate change is the only thing in my lifetime to fully horrify me. I imagine those before us feeling similar horror in the face of world war. Still. They acted. I find myself going on like normal. Why am I not fighting with everything I got, if, for nothing else, for the future of my children?
There seem to be some psychological dissonance. Is the challenge just too big, the enemy just to diffuse, for us to bother?
I'll take present day living over any single point in the past. Antibiotics weren't even produced until the 1940s, and before that time a scraped knee could literally kill you.
In the cold war people built concrete bunkers in their basement for fear of a nuclear Armageddon.
In Rome, if you couldn't pay your taxes you were forced to sell your children into slavery.
And here we are, where past presidents are buying ocean-front property so clearly the elites aren't truly as concerned about it as they publicly state.
Buying beach property isn't such a big deal when you're rich - at worst, you lose it, but you're still rich.
As for living in the present... I'm in my 50s, and have a chronic respiratory illness that developed a few years ago, but it has probably been latent since childhood. Today, it's an annoyance to treat and a mild disability. As a child, it would have flat out killed me. That's the change of half a lifetime.
In the Cold War a very few rich people built concrete bunkers in their basement, and the Swiss mandated it for all properties.
It just was. It was what we were born into, and grew up with. Peace movements and CND were big in the sixties and seventies. So was John le Carre, and all those Cold War movies - good, bad, and awful. Aside from that, most of us couldn't care less. We made jokes about it. We watched Threads in 1984 without a care, after watching it however...
I'm trying to get my anxiety attacks under control over this. It's going to happen so much faster than we were thinking.
What adds insult to injury is that if the global community treated this as a life and death situation, we could probably find a way to mitigate it so that it's not too horrible. It won't happen, and that lack of activity is being led by the current "Leader of the Free World".
It might impinge on GDP by 10% come a century from now. A life or death analysis of the issue would say that development of poor developing countries is much more important, as are other pollutants that really kill.
It might impinge on GDP by 100% by ending human civilization. That 10% figure was the "median" outcome at the time, and increasingly it's looking like a hopelessly optimistic best case scenario.
Virtually every mass extinction in the history of the planet we now think was caused by climate change caused by CO2. The K-T asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs is the outlier. The worst in history, the P-T extinction that nearly wiped out all complex life, happened after a volcano in siberia flowed into a coal bed. We're currently releasing CO2 10x faster than that.
Relax. I've seen a dozen such imminent crises announced over the last half century, and nothing has changed. There is nothing different about this one.
Famous last words. I don't think humanity ever faced a similar crisis. The effects of climate change won't become too dramatic before it's already too late to change anything about it. It's a tragedy of the commons problem where you only face catastrophe decades after you had any control over the matter.
Once the permafrost starts melting in earnest, or the Greenland ice shield is gone, there is literally nothing we can do to stop the climate spiralling out of control. Right now it looks like these tipping points will be reached much sooner than we anticipated.
There is nothing differentiating this one from all the others I’ve lived thru.
We’re at a natural cyclical high, and the century-hence dire predictions are objectively well within noise levels (1° and 1 foot).
Capitalism is moving us to lowered emissions because we prefer them when possible (my office is 100% solar). Emerging nations will get there too. Strange how the imperative of radical change is directed at US, not others producing far more emissions.
I don't know, I'm much more terrified by the collapse of bird/insect/fish/etc. populations, which happens in front of our eyes, largely _not_ because of climate change, but most likely because of industrial agriculture, pesticides, habitat destruction, etc. A fully and relatively easily fixable problem, that is not even on the radar in public debate, policy discussions, and public imagination.
I'm also horrified by the amount of comments delegitimizing this important issue. Even worse, we see governments doing it.
Yes, I agree with you, it's terrible. The challenge is indeed enormous. The future looks bleak, specially to young people who will actually have to deal with it. Even worse, people in poor countries will probably be the most affected by this crisis. Is it already to late? I wonder.
Nevertheless, it's good to see people fighting for awareness. The recent protests are very important. Also, we are always seeing new technologies, and even old technologies that can help being developed and improved.
Climate change is one of two things that horrify me. The second is the nuclear sword of Damocles that has been hanging over our heads for 50 years. I don't understand why everyone thinks that now that the Cold war is over, everything's fine.
I'm incredibly concerned by the inaction, and the direction of the action being taken (Especially by climate activists), but I'll give people credit - at least there is a demand for the first problem to be taken seriously.
I don't see how the two aren't linked to be completely honest. Yeah the cold war "softened" a bit, but with conflicts arising due to climate change, the future wars could turn incredibly nasty, _especially_ with nuclear weapons and unstable people with access to them now asking why we can't use them....
It seems like the solution to both problems is the same. We need far far more nuclear power plants to get off of oil and coal. Can we convert the plutonium or whatnot in nuclear bombs into fuel for the new nuclear reactors?
Nuclear is no longer a climate solution since it unfortunately takes too long to build and scale. Modern economies do not have the skills for this.
We do have the skills for massive amounts of thin film production that's necessary for solar and lithium ion batteries. And somehow, we are massively reducing the cost of wind as we scale to ever larger turbines!
We need to lean into our current tech skills, particularly those that get cheaper as we deploy more of it. That description does not fit nuclear, as it has a negative learning curve for costs.
> We do have the skills for massive amounts of thin film production that's necessary for solar and lithium ion batteries. And somehow, we are massively reducing the cost of wind as we scale to ever larger turbines!
Don't wind farms actually warm the earth by robbing kinetic energy from the wind (which cools the earth)? I read that local climates actually get warmer where there are huge wind farms
Wind doesn't cool the Earth globally. It's just movement of air masses because of uneven heating by the sun. There are localized effects of wind farms, but they don't add any energy to the climate system.
If we can terraform Mars by nuking the poles, maybe we can use nukes to trigger huge volcanic eruptions that will cause global cooling by putting tons of dust into the atmosphere
Are you being facetious? How many people do you think would be killed by a nuclear blast of that size? How many more would die in agonizing pain as the fall-out spread over the globe? How many more from horrible cancers forty years from now? A volcanic eruption of that size would destroy agriculture and cause most of Africa, much of Asia, much of South America, and probably good chunks of North America and Europe to starve. It would also send ash contaminated with nuclear fall-out into the atmosphere.
I though ocean warming was enough of a problem as-is? Many thermo-nuclear weapons can reach temperatures exceeding one hundred-fifty million degrees. Also, that would probably wipe out the entire Pacific rim with colossal tsunamis. The radioactive fallout would then be carried throughout the world by currents, percolate throughout the ecosystems, and poison every one.
> The sudden thawing of Arctic permafrost is of great concern to scientists, who say that the methane and carbon dioxide gas that the process releases is accelerating global warming.
This type of language really bothers me. That methane and other feedbacks are accelerating global warming are proven facts.
Is that what it signals? As someone who isn't a native speaker but believes themselves close to one, I don't read it that way.
I understand that "X says that Y are Z" is less strong a statement than "Y are Z", but with something as complex as this, it's hard to state it as fact without coming across as if it is your own research or conclusion. I can write 2+2=4 without that, but I can hardly write that donald duck running a leading economy is bad for the whole planet without it seeming like an opinion to those who either looked at different examples as I did or those who are not completely convinced it is a fact. (That was exaggerated obviously, but you get the picture: if I had written the donald duck statement like "scientists say that $complexSystemThatFew(IfAnyone)CanTrulyProve", it seems more likely to be true than without it, regardless of whether it truly is a fact.)
Why? It seems like the statement agrees with yours: "The sudden thawing of Arctic permafrost is of great concern to scientists, who say that the methane and carbon dioxide gas that the process releases is accelerating global warming."
By stating that "someone else says X" it doesn't imply that X is a fact only that maybe it is. The statement is not wrong, it just bothers me that Nature of all mediums would do that on this particular topic.
It's really mindblowing that feedbacks aren't more present in conversations about climate change considering these are probably the most dangerous and IMO terrifying aspects.
Even the IPCC has been evading the subject:
> Mario Molina, who shared the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1995 for his work on depletion of the ozone layer, said: “The IPCC report demonstrates that it is still possible to keep the climate relatively safe, provided we muster an unprecedented level of cooperation, extraordinary speed and heroic scale of action. But even with its description of the increasing impacts that lie ahead, the IPCC understates a key risk: that self-reinforcing feedback loops could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system, and the other sources of climate pollution.”
I don't understand how the quoted statement and yours differ. The scientists say thawing permafrost accelerates warming, and you say that's a fact. Can you be more specific for the caffeine-deprived?
I wish people took this seriously. This is a slow moving disaster and that elicits a non-response from most of us. Once the temperatures rise beyond 2C, there are many consequences -
1. Food yields and nutrition drops significantly.
2. Entire species go extinct (we already see that happening). We cannot survive independently. An entire ecosystem is needed for us to lead a healthy and happy life. E.g. insecticides are causing die-offs of butterflies, bees etc..
3. Once wild weather becomes the norm - fires, food shortages, hurricanes etc.. massive rioting will follow. Insurance will be expensive or non-existent (they already don’t cover Act of God) and that means financial insecurity for most of us.
The other overlooked fact is that the greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for a long long time. So, once the climate changes it won’t be a 1-day/1-week or a 1-year event. We talk a lot of geo-engineering etc.. but why not make small sacrifices now (eat less meat, buy local and used stuff, no single use plastic, less air-travel etc..) and save the beautiful planet that we already have. Yes, it will cause some economic dislocations but we will be fine. Companies will adapt or healthy and environment friendly alternatives will come up.
Take this seriously folks. We don’t have another planet to go to and our children are counting on us.
My impression ist that people are talking about sacrifices for the sake of sacrafices and not to solve the problem. If the global warming (and related problems) would be (magically) solved tomorrow, they would be disappointed because no sacrifices were needed any more.
Are sacrifices even enough to solve global warming?
And sacrifices have a marketing problem. It's hard to sell them to billions of people.
I am not talking about sacrifices for its own sake. What I am saying is to do things that reduce greenhouse emissions. The problem needs to be tackled in top-down (government policies) and bottoms-up (where consumers make behavioral changes).
Europe seems to be more in tune with top-down. In the US, bottoms-up seems to be the only option. Once people change their purchasing decisions - e.g. stop buying anything that comes in individual plastic packing etc, companies will be forced to make changes. Another example - stop giving non-sensical loot bags in b'day parties or stop taking or giving gifts altogether.
Another way to think about this: Let's say I give you $100M. You can either invest responsibly in a well diversified portfolio (less risk adjust return) or play Russian roulette. Would like like to play roulette with your children/grand-children's lives or the entire living ecosystem ? Think about it for a sec.
It's ridiculous we're still not rallying around nuclear power (in addition to renewables).
"Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day. The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation.
TerraPower, the company I started 10 years ago, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and produces very little waste. We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely. We may be able to build it in the United States if the funding and regulatory changes that I mentioned earlier happen." -Bill Gates, Dec 2018 [1]
And even before that it's already the safest form of energy. [2] Fear has shot us in the foot and continues preventing us from making substantial progress.
"The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation." - this is an example of wishful thinking. We don't know how we would solve the problems, we are just assuming someone will figure out a way. That assumption is probably influenced by survivorship bias. There's a bunch of technologies where the problems weren't solved, but we don't hear about them much.
The mean time to build a reactor is about 7.5 years[1], so if you wanted to transition all remaining fossil-fueled electricity generation in 12 years, currently with 120,000 TWh of fossil fuel consumption[2], assuming 1GW of generation per nuclear power plant, you would need to start building approximately 14 thousand (edit: originally read millions, corrected as pointed out in comments) nuclear power plants today.
Nuclear can play a role, but
it's already too late to build a sufficient number of reactors, let alone wait until new reactor designs are proven. What we can do right now that doesn't have a 10+ year waiting period is reducing energy demand and building a shit ton of wind, solar, and storage. Wind turbines can be build in a matter of weeks and start reducing GHG emissions immediately. Houses can be insulated and equipped with solar panels in days. Switching heating to heat pumps can also be done in a matter of days.
If we want to we can start building reactors too, but the big changes need to start yesterday.
Unfortunately wind/solar aren't a complete solution[1]. Batteries are several orders of magnitude too expensive to solve for the Tokyo problem (days without power) and producing things like steel and concrete. Nuclear offers a solution and is deployable today. And yeah, really should've been done a long time ago.
I help run AirMiners, the world's largest community of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs working to pull carbon dixoide from the atmosphere. Check it out here: http://airminers.org
Is this all caused by us humans? I'm totally against pollution caused by us, but for global warming, who is the major source contributing to it, could it be beyond us, e.g. the solar system cycles etc. We had ice age/geenhouse eras in the past without human's existence at all?
A greenhouse period ran from 4.6 to 2.4 billion years ago.
Huronian Glaciation – an icehouse period that ran from 2.4 billion years ago to 2.1 billion years ago
A greenhouse period ran from 2.1 billion to 720 million years ago.
Cryogenian – an icehouse period that ran from 720 to 635 million years ago, at times the entire Earth was frozen over
A greenhouse period ran from 635 million years ago to 450 million years ago.
Andean-Saharan glaciation – an icehouse period that ran from 450 to 420 million years ago
A greenhouse period ran from 420 million years ago to 360 million years ago.
Late Paleozoic Ice Age – an icehouse period that ran from 360 to 260 million years ago
A greenhouse period ran from 260 million years ago to 33.9 million years ago
Late Cenozoic Ice Age – the current icehouse period which began 33.9 million years ago
We're overdoing it a bit. We should have stopped about ten to twenty years ago. Already today it's warmer than it has ever been while humans were around.
if we did not do it, could the earth be having a much cold climate then? I really want to have a balanced view on this climate topic, but either side is too extreme about supporting their one-sided points, just like the news medias.
science should be totally based on facts, but what I saw is that, some studies are sponsored by big industries, some are supported by political parties, some individual opinions are threatened, how chaotic.
Every time I read a new climate change article or headline, I think about how much of a squandered opportunity the MIT Media Lab represents. It has a budget of $80MM, access to some of the best minds on the planet, and not beholden to the perverse incentives that afflict politicians and corporate executives. Are we supposed to believe it's impossible to generate useful and commercializable IP while simultaneously tackling climate change?
If anyone wants to brainstorm... what would it take for universities to announce cross-campus climate change initiatives dedicated to rethinking basic social systems? The California-China Climate Change Institute is the only one that I know of (1).
Climate change is a symptom, the underlying problem is our divorce from Nature.
There are other symptoms: plastic is everywhere; insects and birds are vanishing; etc.
We treat the world as source and sink when it is really cyclical.
Applied ecology ("Permaculture", regenerative agriculture, "food forests", etc.) shows that we can supply most of our needs locally and within our Solar energy budget: food, waste processing, medicine, fuel, building materials, etc. And it's fun and easy.
Climate change is a process. To be clear, I believe it is happening and that human lifestyle decisions contribute to it.
That said, snapshots of floods and droughts - which happen all the time regardless - are a distraction. At an extreme, they give ammo to the deniers as they can look at such and article and say, "Floods? Droughts? No news here. Mother Nature at work."
At the time of writing, this story has 186 points and is 2 hours old. It doesn't appear on the front page of HN anymore whereas plenty of older stories with fewer votes do. This pattern can be observed with all submissions related to climate change. Can someone explain this to me?
The fact that these photos are so beautiful makes me uncomfortable. Without context, these are simply beautiful pictures of nature. With context, it's terrifying.
Probably because satellites in LEO are too low to get such a broad view, and the camera-equipped satellites that are higher up are all over the equator.
(Note: I edited out a big chunk of text that contained personal details that I am not sure I want to have set in stone online. I think the comment still makes sense, but in case it doesn't, please just ask to clarify how statement B logically follows from statement A, or in case A seems to be missing altogether, just how come I think B is true.)
My world view changed dramatically over the past, say, five years, with all the news that has been coming at us, friends that talk about it, and a tiny bit of research (actually that's just opening Wikipedia whenever someone on reddit says something that sounds off). Climate change wasn't a big topic for me before that, partially because my parents hardly talked about it, school barely mentioned it, and I didn't have to make many choices of my own. Now I do and now it's also a bunch in the news, and now I also bring it up with friends and talk about it to colleagues. It just takes time to spread through society.
I don't agree that there is a certain group of "ignorant people" that can never be taught versus <insert name for the opposing group>, especially when you put it in a way that makes it sound like the group of ignorant people on this planet that can never be taught is very large.
> I wonder if you taught them philosophy
What does that have to do with anything? I don't know exactly what philosophy is, but I'm pretty sure I don't need it to understand that the climate is going to shit from our carbon-based waste gases.
Philosophy will help, but they need facts early on. For instance a knowledge of basic chemistry would help a bunch. On social media I saw an older gentleman who's been involved in a quite technical field all his life, but he makes incorrect statements regarding climate change like "we don't know how carbon moves in the environment". The basics of chemistry would help him see that we have a very clear picture of most parts of the carbon cycle.
"Addressing climate change could help us decrease racial inequality, if we seize the opportunity. If we don’t, racism will continue to exacerbate climate change, while climate change fuels racism."
That quote in no way says that racism is a “root cause” of climate change.
It should be obvious that the impacts of climate change impact different races differently, but also, there are actually pretty good arguments to be made that racism makes climate change worse (e.g. segregation of poor minorities leads them to do desperate things to survive...like burn down rainforest). The quote isn’t irrational.
I interpret root cause to mean a causal variable that is not dependent on other examined causal variables. If racism can exacerbate something, it is playing a causal role. Since the racism does not depend on other mentioned variables, (racism is not a product of co2 emissions) it would then have to be a root cause given the context.
> climate change impact different races differently
Not it doesn’t. The climate doesn’t care if your black or white. And assuming some countries are one uniform kind of people is so wrong on so many levels.
My country was also, for many centuries (and before climate change), prone to droughts, flooding, and famine. It's not that its climate became better, it's that during the centuries we deviated entire rivers, built ten metres-high embankments around them, built dams and irrigation canals. We drained marshy areas to fight malaria and to allow for new cultivations, and we cultivate industrially, with machines and fertilizers. We also keep maps of the hydro-geological risk to either prevent people from settling in risky areas or to manage the risk of existing settlements. (We also have a problem with rare but catastrophic earthquakes, that are especially hard on towns and villages that are almost a thousand years old. We try to reinforce existing buildings and build quake-resistant ones when an earthquake happens.)
One of the problems I see with the current worldview is that many of these interventions are now so far away in time, and ongoing monitoring is so specialized, that most people simply forgot that they exist and ensure our current prosperity. But in fact we're simply profiting from the lessons of centuries of disasters and of careful engineering.
I know I will be downvoted for stating a fact but I agree with you.
The gist of the so called environmentalists is (factually, these really are their proposals when you look at their numbers): ok USA and EU, you have to urgently stop your emissions, even if that means total economic breakdown. China and specially India, it's ok you can continue your emissions, and increase then by even more than the all 1st world will cut theirs (even if they cut it to 0), that's just fine since your are entitled to it because you didn't do it in the past.
End result: a planet with even more emissions than today and a destroyed economy in the western world.
But somehow, this will save the planet according to people pushing this catastrophic scenario.
Sorry no, these people aren't pushing major climate action to save the planet, they are doing it because they think it's hip to push this idea that the Western way of life should be destroyed to give way to their political ideology.
You've broken the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) by downvote-baiting and by taking the thread further into ideological warfare. We've already had to ask you more than once about this. If you keep breaking the guidelines we're going to have to ban you.
Edit: actually, your recent history on HN consists of massive flamewar and abuse. That's extremely not ok, and I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I think your issue is the similar to the problem I've been having, where the science of climate change seems to be ignored in favor of the politics of climate change, and questioning the later means you disbelieve the former. How strongly someone "believes" in climate change shouldn't be the metric by which we judge the value a person brings to the conversation, and the data/science should not take a backseat to political convenience.
I don't want perfect to get in the way of good when it comes to this issue, but this is a multifaceted, complicated topic, with far reaching implications, and it cannot be solved via an emotional battle royal of half formed politically oriented thoughts.
Semi-related, but I played a game forever ago called "Fate of the World", which attempted to put the player in charge of a global government to address climate change. It was almost viciously hard (The game designers may have been trying to make a point) but it was extremely interesting to see how you had to try and manage emissions from various regions, as well as political/social stability, ideally without destroying their economies (you need them to keep paying taxes to fund all this) all while trying to manage/reduce the damage caused by the shifting climates.
The more I hear environmentalists talk, the more skeptical I get to be about climate change. The fact that they’ve been predicting doom and gloom since I was a kid in the 80’s makes me kind of doubt their predictive ability, but I figure that if they’re right and we don’t do anything, that would really suck, so I tune in just long enough to listen to what they say. After a few hours of “I’ll hate you forever and never forgive you if you don’t do what I say”, eventually they get around to actually saying what they want me to do: and it’s always the same. Vote liberal. Even if I bought into the climate change alarmism, I’d still doubt their sincerity when they tell me the only thing I can do is elect liberal politicians: the Democrats had a super majority in the U.S. government for years and used it to do exactly nothing about climate change. I see no confirmation in their actions that they really believe what they’re saying.
If you think that the government under Obama didn't do anything for improving quality of air and water in the US, you are just trying not to see the facts. And if you haven't noticed, there is a whole oil lobby that has been pushing money into the GOP machine trying to discredit climate change for decades. US is (for the better) a federal structure, and nothing happens by fiat forever.
Could the democrats have done better? Definitely. Are they better than the republicans in responding better to these issues? You have to be obtuse on purpose to believe otherwise.
Neither of you have legitimate arguments, and are both in fact strawmanning your "opposition". I'd suggest actually reading the IPCC report if you haven't yet, as it's all of our future.
Climate action, measuring exactly this, has China as doing "OK" and India as doing "great" when their comulative projected ”increase" by 2030 will be similar than all present emissions by USA and EU.
And have you seen the per capita emissions of each of these countries? India's emissions per capita aren't even a drop in the bucket. (Numbers in metric tonnes CO2)
1 China 6.4
2 United States 15.0
3 India 1.6
2.5 times China and almost 10 times India. Countries that are already rich enough to invest heavily in pushing renewable energy and nuclear energy need to aid countries trying to get people out of poverty. You can't do that by providing direct energy cause that is not how energy works. So you do it by allowing emissions to these countries while reducing your own to fall given that you already use so much more per capita.
You want to see hypocrisy? How about the US's hypocrisy in stopping solar subsidies to build local solar industries? This discussions is not about who is entitled to more emissions. It is about a pragmatic approach to reducing emissions. While you dish out "facts", also care to read about policy and arguments.
This is why it's so important that wind and solar costs have plummeted to below the cost of coal. If it wasn't for the introduction of fracking, they'd be much cheaper than natural gas, too.
As developing nations build up the energy base, it'll be easier and cheaper to do it with renewables than with fossil fuels. That changes the equation tremendously.
You are just validating my point with that "per capita" narrative.
The point is simple: you want to pretend your are saving the planet by allowing China and India to increase their emissions, more than USA and EU will ever be able to cut them (even if they cut it to zero).
Explain how that can possible save the planet please.
India's total emissions are a fraction of US and China's. You are guilty of the same hyperbole you claim to be fighting from the other side.
"Per capita" is not a narrative. It is a measure of how much room there is to reduce emissions while maintaining quality of life. It's not like you can just go to war with India and China and clear this up. You can't bring them to the negotiation table claiming moral superiority.
What you are suggesting is not a strategy for efficiently negotiating our way out of this deep hole, but rather a dictatorial approach which can only be enforced by a dictatorial regime across the world.
> The gist of the so called environmentalists is (factually, these really are their proposals when you look at their numbers): ok USA and EU, you have to urgently stop your emissions, even if that means total economic breakdown. China and specially India, it's ok you can continue your emissions, and increase then by even more than the all 1st world will cut theirs (even if they cut it to 0), that's just fine since your are entitled to it because you didn't do it in the past.
It is always amusing when climate change deniers, uh, sorry, I mean skeptics, cite historic climate data to try to discredit climate research.
The historical record they cite was collected by the very community of researchers whom they attempt to discredit by those facts. It is as if they think the researchers are unaware of those historical facts and that they never realized that there have been warming and cooling periods before.
It just exposes their motivations: scientists are charlatans who don't understand anything when the climate scientists support AGW, but the data from the same scientists is heralded as the real truth when the deniers/skeptics think it supports their own beliefs.
> It just exposes their motivations: scientists are charlatans who don't understand anything when the climate scientists support AGW, but the data from the same scientists is heralded as the real truth when the deniers/skeptics think it supports their own beliefs.
I don’t think that is quite correct. Most ‘climate deniers’ I have spoken with don’t question the competence of scientists, they question their motives and suspect they are simply seeking funding, attention, or both.
There is way too many people like this on hn. I guess this means that HN is essentially 'mainstream' now (at least in SV?), but it's also disappointing.
It's like discovering your close circle of scientist friends has a anti-vaxxer.
Of course, this is a bunch of nutpicked scans from newspapers with no scientific value beyond making some climate trolls feel smug. The level of science and attention given to the issue today is unprecedented and the fact that there were heatwaves in the past is not controversial. CO2 emitted by human activity is demonstrably warming the Earth in line with predictions going back 40 years, the predictions without drastic action are disastrous, and the observed is generally trending worse than predictions.
"Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity" was published in the 1960s.[0] It aligns with current models.[1]
If you don't want to read them, then in summary, describing the 2017 report (itself a followup to a similar 2014 report) Ars mentions:
> If you’re wondering what could have changed since the last report in 2014, the new Assessment highlights a list of areas in which our understanding has improved. That includes the evaluation of the human contribution to individual extreme weather events, higher-resolution climate models producing better simulations of things like hurricanes, and studies of ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica that have bumped the worst-case sea level rise estimates upward.[2]
In other words, the conclusions are the same as they've always been, except we underestimated how bad things are going to be. There is no reputable scientific position to take that says climate change isn't happening or that it isn't human caused. Even Chevron accepts that conclusion at this point.[3]
If you're claming that you know more than both >90% of the scientific community and the actual oil industry, then you are alone in that belief.
I do not believe that we can link to any sources that you have not yet already seen and disregarded. You'll just ignore them or find a different way to read plain English. Your time might be better spent finding a real conspiracy to uncover. If, of course, you really believe what you just said and are not just trolling to begin with in the hopes of wasting everyone's time.
In case I am wrong and you truly believe this stuff, I took the time to at least disprove the source that looked most trustworthy to me in another conspiracy theory comment of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21084305
You might as well ask for the primary source of my assertion that Donald Trump is the sitting president of the United States. Ergo, the answer is "the front page of any major newspaper". Now that I've tripped the wire, please do go on about how that doesn't count.
I'll take my "realclimatescience" in the form of physical evidence over a significant period (ice cores, growth rings, etc) rather then a few anecdotes about heat waves (that's weather, not climate). If that's ok?
What about what? All I'm seeing is some irrelevant local data over a period that is way too small to say anything useful about climate trends and a few political talking points about isolated incidents..
Citing cherry-picked data sources, spreading conspiracy misinformation, and making misrepresentations is not credible behavior for a wordpress blog, but I can see you're of the opinion that it is.
Source: It goes against my narrative, so it must be banned / deplatformed.
This is the new way the left "debates", unfortunately.
There are a decent amount of resources online that are skeptical about the man-made impact on the climate or whether or not CO2 is the temperature knob for the climate.
If only you could convince the deniers of that. Speaking from a US perspective, they seem to think that the "libs" just want to hobble our economy because they hate "success" and "strength" and don't actually believe there is an existential crisis at hand.
The US has lowered it's CO2 emissions 10% since 2000. Thanks to the "right" and fracking. 16% in the EU.
If you eliminated US/EU production of CO2, atmospheric CO2 levels would still rise. The slight warming that would take place as China and India modernize their life will still happen.
If you eliminate US/EU production of CO2, atmospheric CO2 levels would rise 24% slower. If you added in a carbon tax that it levied on imports from countries that don't implement an equivalent system you can bet that China would lower its emissions too. If you're very fancy you can also offer to install alternative energy in foreign countries at cost price.
>If you eliminate US/EU production of CO2, atmospheric CO2 levels would rise 24% slower.
Thank you for confirming my point.
>If you added in a carbon tax that it levied on imports from countries that don't implement an equivalent system you can bet that China would lower its emissions too. If you're very fancy you can also offer to install alternative energy in foreign countries at cost price.
So the pitch here is... Let's risk war with a Nuclear power with a tariff stick and for a carrot offer a way to a worse standard of living then US/EU. This sounds real viable.
It might expand the available land for agricultural use, but that land is not going to be in the same spots as our agriculture is now. What do you think China will do when agriculture becomes harder in China, but there is all this Russian wilderness that used to be frozen and is becoming fertile? Or the US with Canada? Where do you think hundreds of millions of Africans will go when equatorial regions become uninhabitabe without AC?
Everyone I know that supports Trump is also a climate change denier. Concerns about climate change are liberal propaganda that progressives are trying to use to raise our taxes. It is very very very much political.
If you dig down into it politics is about finding solutions to physical problems like limited resources/land/etc, preventing violence, and how to cooperate in order to do more than one human can do alone. That climate change exists and is a physical problem is not political. Solutions to this problem will need to be political in some way or another.
These are going to occur anyway (along with freezing permafrost, lowering sea levels, stable weather patterns). These are ordinary problems that we adapt to.
The problem I'm talking about is the idea that these are preventable. They're not. It's an imaginary problem. The US , for example, can _eliminate_ CO2 production and those things are still going to happen. The imaginary problem is that climate change is a problem to solve.
You make it sound like we've been through this before.. When?
> The US , for example, can _eliminate_ CO2 production and those things are still going to happen.
So, we cranked up the emissions, and these things just RANDOMLY started happening at the same time? Even though our environmental models and knowledge of physics agree with our observations??
Like.. it's just MAGIC or something? What is causing it if it's not CO2?
For example permafrost thaw - we have no idea how widespread it is. The areas we do observe have a valid, natural explanation for thaw via gas cavities. Some of these cavities get enlarged thermal-erosional piping, which can expand the cavity due to seasonal temperature changes, which can make the cavity large enough prevent re-freeze.
Neither is my car, but something has to happen to make it move.
You addressed none of my questions. What, in your opinion, is the trigger for the shift?
Edit: You edited in the part about permafrost. I did some quick googling because I had never heard of the causal link of gas cavities causing the melt. I've only seen the papers on the melt causing gas to escape which then exposes underground cavities... Still can't find any sources on cavities causing surface temperature to rise - care to share some sources? That sounds interesting!
The thing to worry about is the rate of change. I'm a fan of the visualization that XKCD did here: https://xkcd.com/1732/
When the rate of change is too fast, life struggles to adapt. Feedback loops are so tight that it accelerates even more. For instance, a slow permafrost melt means some trees die and rot, but new ones grow to replace them at similar rates. A fast permafrost melt means all the trees die and rot quickly. Their carbon is added to the atmosphere. The other plants and animals that depended on them lose all their habitat.
Think of climate like a car going 100 MPH. Climate change is changing the speed of the car. Do you want to be in a car that goes from 100 to 0 in 0.5 seconds, or in 20 seconds? The climate is changing quickly and we don't even have proper seat belts for everyone.
Eh, it's really about the relevance of temperature fluctuation to civilization. Sure humans existed earlier, but we know less about their relationship with the world around them the further back we look.
That might be what it was about, but it could've been about more. I don't think anyone claims humans were significant to CO2 or temperature more than 200 years ago, why go before that to 20,000 years and stop there?
Also US CO2 emissions are down since 2000, thanks to fracking. When you go to bed fearing climate change, thank a Republican for lowering US CO2 emissions.
Fracking might be helping with CO2, but it's also releasing a ton of methane which might not be as bad in the long term but is really really bad in the short term. If we've got a few decades before the point of no return... great! If not.. oh well, it's been a good run I guess?
Not to mention the absolute havoc it's wrecking on local environments.
It's also only good if it's a stop-gap for renewables.. so I'll thank a republican once they stop blocking measures to improve and subsidize solar, wind, and other clean energy solutions.
Do you have any source for the 1000x? What do you even mean with "efficient"? Because I'm just proposing to cover 2-5% of the land with wind turbines and solar panels while improving overall energy efficiency through building insulation and a switch to heat pumps and electric cars.
nature.com is scientific based (or at least aligned) organization. If your political stance is to ignore science, that doesn't make it political organization.
Great. You should also read through https://www.nature.com/collections/prbfkwmwvz to understand how fallible science as practiced today is. It's 100% politics and money generation.
I am not familiar with all of the reports listed, but with some of them. Science today has problems, but it had similar problems before. (gaming the system for self benefit is hardly new) And science still got done (otherwise we wouldn't be using computers or internet or electricity for that matter)
If after reading that you came up with:
> It's 100% politics and money generation.
Our world view is so different, that I am not sure that further debate has much point.
The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years are also saying that we shouldn't build any nuclear power plants, or that the root cause of climate change is "institutional racism"[1]. It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly.
1. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/xwneej/racism-climate-cha...