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.
