Climate change is real, we are warming up and should/can solve this, but I'm skeptical that apocalyptic narratives help the cause.
"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
It kind of seems like this article is saying that if we (in 1989) slow global warming by the year 2000, the worst effects of sea level rise will not happen. It's not saying that those effects will happen in the year 2000.
My understanding in 2021 is that much of that stuff is already happening, since we obviously didn't halt warming. And that it's also too late to prevent more of it from happening, because there is a lag time between prevention measures happening, and having an effect.
We are past the point where just reducing emissions will be enough, and instead will need to also harden the world against inevitable effects of climate change. This is even harder and more expensive than it would have been if we had stopped emitting earlier.
That's kind of like if I were morbidly obese, and my diet consisted of 6 big macs, 6 large Cokes and 6 large fries daily, plus a cheesecake at the end of the day for dessert, and I patted myself on the back because I went on a "diet" by cutting out the cheesecake.
Growth in CO2 emissions has recently plateaued, but the world still pumps out about 40% more CO2, every year, than we did in 2000. Stopping the growth doesn't really matter that much, we need to drastically reduce overall emissions.
It’s even worse. Not only do we need to get emissions as close to zero as possible, we need to suck a whole bunch of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The amount of effort, resources, energy, and collective action needed is extraordinary. The challenge ahead cannot be overstated.
@computerphage: Thank you for the typo correction! I am off for more coffee.
Effectively this is going to require massive and coordinated action. We are going to have to rapidly develop and share the tech, and scale it quickly.
It is also insane how long humanity has ignored this issue. At least we have seemingly moved from ‘12 years left for real action? Hah!’ To ‘Oh shit this is happening and maybe we have that 11 years’
The good(?) news here is that the ocean is a crazy good CO2 sink. If we were to stop all CO2 emissions, global CO2 levels would start to drop dramatically because the oceans would soak up the atmospheric CO2. This doesn’t work endlessly, but right now about half of the CO2 emissions end up in the oceans, and that system doesn’t just stop if we stop producing it.
That being said, it’ll definitely continue to wreak havoc with ocean acidification. But it’s important to know that it’s not necessary to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to get rid of a huge chunk that has already been emitted.
My concern around the ocean as a CO2 sink is how much longer can it absorb CO2 without pH drifting beyond what can support sea life. We keep pulling the elastic band tighter without knowing when it’s going to snap or what happens when it does (metaphorically speaking).
There’s a book called ‘The Sixth Extinction’ By Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert which talks about this. The sixth chapter is about the rise in ocean acidity.
She also details a critical acidity point (I forget the PH level but I think with current rise in acidity it is modeled to reach that point in 2100) where calcifiers cannot survive due to the acidity essentially breaking down their shells. Think oysters, barnacles, coral. Major parts of the ocean’s ecosystem that could have a ‘cataclysmic’ effect if wiped out.
What's interesting is that we already know it's going to result in economic contraction, loss of profits, and general instability in the financial sphere. So we already know that tacking it will be profitable in the long run versus the alternative.
Perhaps the conversation needs to center on how to factor the long view into capitalism. Because in my view it is pretty shit at that, with often short term profits favoured over long term and the effects of that being felt long term.
Right now our intervention option looks like direct intervention to make things less profitable in the near term, and then we run into the problem of democracy also favouring short-term popularity over long-term stewardship and the immediate pains it bring to voters.
Every politician who has attempted or done this has paid a heavy political price. We won't do enough to stop this problem until hundreds of thousands are forced to find new homes, at which point we'll have our hands full with the immediate problems we've caused by this.
It is not about economic systems, governments, or corporations. People are making choices that do not line up with the bigger things they say they want. Frankly I am getting tired of people with their SUVs, new phones, new computers, plastic everything, and huge homes bitching at me because I am "releasing carbon" when I burn wood. Don't even get me started on the people who bitch about my Nissan versa being gas powered instead of their clean battery powered alternative (Batteries, vehicle electronics, weight, tire size, and the source of their clean energy is my bitch here). People just need to shut the fuck up, live a frugal life and this problem with mitigate itself.
The carbon that has been released into the atmosphere from oil is here to stay. I am not even sure we should go looking for some energy guzzling carbon sink because we really need to give the earth time to breath and settle into the ecosystem that exists today. The earth will heal itself and balance will be restored but we can never go back to pre-industrial revolution levels of carbon.
The last big expansion of wind and solar from a percentage growth perspective happened when oil was hitting 100 USD. We shouldn't discount how efficient markets are at allocating resources. If expenditures into oil (something like 6bn USD per day) went to wind and solar, then much would change.
Government subsidies targeted at technologies perceived to be green could potentially be taking resources away from other energy innovations. In the end, some of those innovations might have resulted in greener energy.
I'm a socialist, but I hate this meme on the left. We simply do not have time to build socialism before tackling climate change, especially with the recent crushing defeats the left has suffered in Western countries. We have to do this under capitalism, or we will not be able to do it at all.
That isnt the only alternative. A state run free market like china would actually be really useful for this global problem, if of course climate change was the priority for the government.
lack of personal freedom and ease of abuse probably make this a terrible choice, but it would without a doubt be better for climate change than currently
> A state run free market like china would actually be really useful for this global problem, if of course climate change was the priority for the government.
The cure suggested here is worse than the disease.
And I'm not entirely sure. Is authoritarian rule worse than billions starving to death, with collapse of the ecosystem?
All the enlightenment ideas fall apart when we actually reach the limit of the earths resources, and can potentially cause our own extinction along with the rest of the animal kingdom
The balance is between (a) effectively addressing an issue & (b) empowering government and risking it abuse its power.
Most long-lived democracies appear to have optimized to mitigate the risk of the second, over the long run, but at the cost of limiting the first.
One thinks the Roman Republic had a pretty good thing going politically... but declaring a temporary dictator in times of crisis only worked until it didn't.
Is it capitalism, or is it our current regime?
I'm not sure that capitalism itself demands eternal growth, or that pollution not be taken into account.
Capitalism doesn't force us to continue to burn fossil fuels. We could impose massive fines or taxes against any greenhouse gas emitter, but we lack social will.
It can only be done under Capitalism, since we're at the point where drastically reducing CO2 is woefully insufficient to curb global warming in the next 50-100 years. We need technological innovation to cool the planet.
You can't do that right now. Basically what you are asking is to ask a lot of people to lose their jobs, starve, for something uncertain (scientifically proved or not) in the future.
In the same time, the only thing we can do, as individuals, is to reduce the emission from our side. But it's wrong to enforce it upon others.
Yeah man, downvote me as you wish, but LOL you won't get very far.
This comment is wrong on several levels. First, citation needed for the starvation hyperbole. There are more than a few competent people predicting that tackling climate change will actually create jobs because we will have to solve a whole host of new problems. Things like distribution, mass manufacturing, long term maintenance of equipment, design of the systems in the first place and on and on.
Second, "scientifically proved or not"? Are you really questioning whether we've proven climate change is occurring?
Finally, if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that the voices telling us that climate change is an individual problem and not a policy reform/regulation problem are basically Big Oil propaganda designed to demoralise you with guilt. It's not about individual action. I would still recommend it for spiritual and philosophical reasons, but not scientific.
I didn’t downvote but would be curious about your definition of “enforcement” that makes it wrong. I assume you mean “morally” wrong here and it seems NOT enforcing repercussions for externalities would be the immoral choice.
When you say "growth has plateaued" do you mean that year on year increases to our output are now constant? Or do you mean year on year output is now roughly constant?
I realize this distinction between derivative values is further complicated by the even more baseline measure of total accumulation. But I do ask in earnest and don't know the answer.
We're on track for a roughly 3C increase in global average temperature according to this chart from the IPCC[1] and this [2] from world data.
And that IPCC projection doesn't take into account the dozens of reinforcing feedback loops contributing to further warming. For example, the Amazon rain forest is now a net green house gas producer due to human activity [3].
And my parents keep asking when I'm giving them grandkids. Why would I make a child go through this? That these things don't keep people up at night is bewildering to me.
Go through what? Raising global temperatures may require moving away from current coastal areas or life changes like that. I've not read anything that would make it seem like a global warming future would be a hellscape not worth living in.
I have young children and have worried for them quite a bit. If they're healthy, if they're getting everything they need, if they're safe etc. I have never once considered global warming as a concern for them. While they're children I'll be able to handle any such changes. When they're adults, they will.
The 1.4 to 2.0C range is where we are going to start seeing large scale crop failures. Also massive fish die offs in the ocean. Unless we drastically change trajectories, this will occur during the lifetime of your children.
You hope you and they will be able to handle these changes, but there are going to be a lot of downstream effects from warming and sea level change.
maybe you're too young, I've heard the doom and gloom sine the 80s and those older than me have heard it since the 70's. If you look out across a sea of people there will always be a group of people holding a sign reading "Repent sinners, for the end is near".
Hearing doom and gloom since the 80s is consistent with the scientific evidence. It was in 1988 that James Hansen spoke before a U.S. Senate committee about human caused global warming. And it's not as though things have been getting better. They're getting worse, and at a faster than expected rate.
Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age, and it was also the "population bomb." If neither of those happened, we were going to have a global thermonuclear war. Doom-and-gloomers will always find reasons to preach doom and gloom.
> Yep, back in the 1970s it was the coming ice age,
No. That was an artifact of hype in the mainstream press. If you look at the research being published at the time, the consensus was fairly consistently for warming scenarios (by a factor of 2:1 during the most cooling-friendly years):
Contrarian argument, if I was given a chance at existing in a world full of death, turmoil, and instability _or_ the certainty of not existing at all, I sure know what I would want.
The post-scarcity period we experience in developed economies is very much the exception not the rule, if you look at the whole of Human History.
I understand and share you're concerns but you are removing all agency from whatever children you might have. A child born now will in all certainty reach their 20's. If they share their parents values they will most likely be an agent for change in the right direction.
Excess population and excess pollution (per capita) are not necessarily overlapping problems.
I don't about the predictions but the annual CO2 emissions are climbing yearly. 1999 - 24.43 billions tons. 2019 - 36.44 billion tons. I think that's ~49% growth in 20 years. That is a bad forecast if you go 100 years into the future.
We have also had 30+% global population growth in the last 20 years and massive reduction in property.
Around 1980 people assumed rising standards of living would result in dramatic increases in CO2 per person which didn’t happen. Even as recently as 2000 models assumed as much as 10% increases over current levels where likely.
Surely partially due to outsourcing manufacturing to outside the US/western world, and partially due to the rising living standards of the rest of the world.
Yeah consumption needs to be slowed down. Even dumb things like those Bird scooters littering cities...
I saw a t-shirt down here in New Orleans the other day that read “music, culture, industry” with a strike out line through industry. It boggles the mind.
After all how will our t-shirts and musical instruments be made?
This. So much this. We can't blame China for its emissions, while acting like we've solved ours, when all we did was shift our emissions from manufacturing to China.
The closest thing to flat you’re going to find is global CO2 produced per person is nearly flat. Global population has significantly increased, so that still represents growth in emissions but it clearly could have been much worse with massive increases in both population and CO2 per person as the 3rd world industrialized.
No, probably not. But then what's the alternative? The prediction is/was accurate, the error is in the kind of apocalyptic outcome it brings to mind. Reality is almost always far more boring. Silence doesn't seem helpful either, nor does being more vague about consequences.
Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before.
Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season.
Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
There's another important aspect to chaos. As you increase the energy in the system, which this is, you're also increasing the range over which phenomena can happen.
You cite 'tornadoes 10, 20, 50% more frequent' and you're not wrong, but it's very important to understand we're also looking at tornadoes and droughts and hurricanes (events tied to the behavior of the chaotic system of the climate) two, five, ten times more INTENSE than we're used to.
Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
With regard to specifically destructive events like tornadoes, hurricanes, storm flooding and so on, this is way more dramatic than sea level rise. Nothing we can do, even with nuclear weapons, is as powerful as what weather can do with the energy in that chaotic system… because it's way, way bigger than anything we have at our command.
The truth also brings sudden shocks. We've just not quite wrapped our head around where those are coming from, and the frequency of 'em is probably no more common than usual, but the potential intensity of these events is ramping up with the same slow build you mention. We just don't see it until it hits.
One example: I think it's very likely there are industrialized cities that would not stand against hyper-weather of this nature. We're not used to the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes ripping down tall buildings, but we will live to see the theoretical peak energy (the ten or hundred-year storm) go beyond what our cities are designed to withstand. When that happens, we suddenly have areas where ALL the skyscrapers were toppled, on a weather-event scale rather than a terrorist-act scale.
> Chaos does this. The wildest outliers are tied to how much energy is in the system. They may be no more common than before, but the increased energy and increased chaos can produce wilder variances from the norm.
if we're talking about a chaotic system then wouldn't the probability of extreme weather being better for humanity be the same as worse for humanity? Maybe an exceptionally long growing season allowing more crops to be harvested for example.
Two things;
Adding more energy to a system doesn’t tend to produce (calm, sunny, scattered showers). I believe mild weather is a low energy outcome.
Also, humans like predictable weather. Weather becoming less so, good or bad, will make things harder.
This. The chances of a nice stable peaceful growing season… nope. Things will become more volatile, which means the chances of the opposite, ruined crops, increase.
Stability and predictability are low energy things.
The mistake they keep making is focusing on sea level rise, as if that's the only real problem global warming could cause. Even at 1.5 degrees C higher than normal it will take years for enough ice to melt to cause significant sea level rise.
Meanwhile we are already seeing apocalyptic like effects of global warming: the worst droughts and fires across multiple continents as we've seen in modern history, significant increases and severity of tropical storms, increase and severity in seasonal flooding etc.
With Covid-19 a lot of this stuff fell out of the news cycle rapidly last year, but 2020 surely marks one of the worst years in history for climate related disasters.
Yeah the lack of a timestamp is definitely confusing. The page source lists a definitely incorrect timestamp, I guess the time the article was digitized.
Yes. So the argument is that this will probably happen then.
Because we didn't get it better under control by 2000.
The argument is that these island nations might actually already be lost.
Scientists estimate an around 40 year "climate lag" between cause and effect so if you think this is bad, we're only living out the happy times from the seventies with Pink Floyd and ABBA. And then, once you have it there, CO2 has an atmospheric "half life" counted in centuries. It's why climate change is so damn nasty. :-(
It also really doesn't jive well with our short election periods where after a few years, some new guy with a radically different policy will get in charge if the earlier one wasn't popular because <insert too radical climate policy here>.
If you read the headline carefully, it's the global warming that needs to be reversed before 2000; the disappearance of nations can (and will) happen after.
The reason this is true is that CO2 emissions can't really be reversed; accounting for all forms of "capture" (biomass, sea exchange, calcification) CO2 disappears in a reverse power law way, such that after 10 000 years 10% of it is still there (https://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/pics/1210_ZHfig5.jpg)
The statement isn’t that countries will go by 2000; it’s that we have until 2000 to do something about temperature rises which will eventually lead to countries going.
Then the statement is worthless! If any country is every covered in water at any point in the earth's future then it can be proved "correct".
The negative is not even true -- no one can guarantee that no countries will ever be covered in water at any point in the future, even if we had presumably gotten the rising temperatures "under control" twenty years ago.
You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't say "...entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth BY THE YEAR 2000" It says "...if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
Nonsense. Now we prepare for this to happen - by preemptively allocating places for displaced people can go. We do our best to limit how many countries are affected.
There's never a point where all we can do is throw up our hands and do nothing. There's always something to be done, even if it's not directly related to the cause of the crisis.
It said "some nations", mostly small island ones, like Tuvalu and Fiji.
That's not worldwide doom. It's just a very clear indicator of the damage that happens elsewhere, where low-lying cities like Amsterdam, New York, and much of Bangladesh have to either go elsewhere or take very expensive damage control measures.
We're at a point where it's still cheaper to prevent that at the climate level. It just grows more expensive by the day. Things can cost a lot of lives and dollars without being apocalyptic, and still worth dealing with sooner rather than later.
While some ill effects can most likely no longer be prevented, even worse things happen at higher temperatures. Every tenth of a degree makes things worse.
I like to think of it like this - some places are doomed to extreme drought and flodding and others will be mostly spared - but the environmental effects are just one piece of the puzzle, other areas of the earth will need to cope with the refugee crisis we're going to see from parts of the world becoming less habitable.
As these crises put more stress on the rest of the world we're just going to accelerate exploitation to support more people with less stuff - we're essentially burning through the world's buffer of habitability to eek out a bit more profits today.
That could be true for a few small Pacific island nations like Vanuatu. At the high end of predicted sea level rise they would be left with very little habitable land. Even if the land is above mean high tide, every little storm will wash over everything.
Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
2/3rds of Bangladesh is <5m above sea level. If that much of the country disappeared, including Dhaka and Chittagong, you could well say they don't have a country any more.
I think without concerted citizen backed action many people won't do anything. IMHO it's not about whether climate change is real or not but whether appropriate action is taken when it counts. And when only few people do anything that is not fair. Therefore I think the message has to be repeated over and over again in increasing volume.
That said, the magnitude of climate change is probably underestimated and talking about average temperatures might also contribute to that.
Sea rise is not the only effect of climate change, and the gradual rise won't be as urgent as extreme weather floods and storms episodes.
You will have also wet bulb temperature episodes, not all time, but more frequently and in bigger areas as time advances. And won't matter if the average temperature is not so high yet, once you get such peaks people (and maybe crops->famines) die.
And last but not least, this fuels positive feedback mechanisms, like less ice reflecting sunlight, more methane released in northern regions, more frequent forest fires and so on that accelerate an already pretty bad trend.
If you think it will cost a lot to try to do something about this, think how costly will be doing nothing.
Absolutely. Wet-bulb temperature episodes are exactly the sort of thing where increasing energy in the chaotic system will lead to previously unreachable spikes in the system: by increasing the ambient energy of the system X degrees, thus increasing its chaotic energy, you produce a maximum peak excursion of X*Y degrees (also accompanied by unexpectedly COLD extremes in a more irregular pattern).
Even in the absence of other weather events these exaggerated peaks and dips are dangerous to life.
It reminds me of the over-population warnings of the 1970s, where prominent scientists and politicians warned that mass starvation was right around the corner. This constant doom and gloom at an extreme level seems to cause fatigue and apathy.
That's exactly what it is. The "science" behind the climate change narrative is sponsored by groups that want to implement a global carbon tax, or any other justification they can think of to create a one-world government. It's exactly the same BS as the COVID manipulation we've endured since 2020.
Water vapor is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2 by three orders of magnitude. The current "models" do not accurately reflect the sun or water on earth.
The fatigue and apathy is because the predictions has been serially wrong. So much so they had to rebrand "global warming" to "climate change".
Normally intelligent people have let their hubris make them victims to globalist propaganda. It's disturbing to see how many people not only fall for it but parrot their programming ad nauseam and attack dissenters pointing out raw fact (like that unadulterated satellite temperate data shows the earth's temperature as relatively flat for the last 20 years, or that the 1930's were warmer than temperatures today).
The earth will be cooler in 10 years, not warmer. We're heading into a grand solar minimum. Wait and see.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and had a closer look at the first paper. I wasted about 15 minutes of my life.
> Actually, one of the aims of the paper is to show that polarization stems from political, rather than scientific, roots.
Yeah, though luck there. The paper concerns itself with more political propaganda than with climate science. Most of it is just fluff and filler, with quotes from Aristotle to Mark Twain, spends half of its actual content with the premise to discover the true definition of the word climate and then dismissing "climate change" (the scary quotes are form the "paper"). And then we come to this gem here:
> Hence, in scientific terms, the content of the term climate change is almost equivalent to that of weather change or even time change (climate is changing as is weather and time).
Yes. Really. This paper is pulling no punches. Climate is just weather. And weather changes. Thus there is no climate change. QED.
What a piece of wasted bits.
It then spends the next few paragraphs "analyzing" how climate change is actually political in nature, spending more pixels on graphs of the occurrence of the term "climate change" than on actual climate data.
No discussion of the vast body of evidence that we have gathered in the last 100 years. No examination of actual possible problems, like measurement issues, systemic issues or anything the like. Nothing.
This is not a scientific paper. This is propaganda.
You didn't read the article. You cherrypicked the parts of it that you could use to justify disregarding it. That's intellectually dishonest, lazy, and frankly typical for climate change cultists.
The bulk of the article discusses hydrology and how the sheer volume of water on the earth is more significant than C02 in terms of greenhouse effects. There's also a section about far higher historical C02 levels being present when temperatures were lower than today.
Respond to that part of the paper, not the tangent on the term "climate change" (which is also accurate, but not the meat of the argument).
> how the sheer volume of water on the earth is more significant than C02 in terms of greenhouse effects
Where do you see this? I see a long rant about the definition of climate, sprinkled in with some cultural reference and some meaningless discussions about continuous vs discrete sampling (meaningless beyond any first year university course on any scientific topic).
- It's in a journal called "Temperature" with the mandate: "Temperature publishes papers related to interactions between living matter and temperature, with focus on the medical physiology of body temperature regulation." All the other papers fit this mandate, i.e., they're on physiology.
- It's marked as an editorial, not a peer-reviewed article. There are no co-authors.
I have no idea why or how this got published! It's very weird, why would one even submit such an article to an irrelevant journal?
I'll use direct NASA/NOAA data so there's no attacking my sources this time.
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Temperature data outside the US wasn't very reliable in the 20th century, so it's best to focus on the US. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Make a mental note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C, not 1.5): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
My point is that the "climate science" we're bombarded with in the mainstream media isn't hard science. It's a political narrative fueled by financial conflicts of interest and grant money. That bothers me because 1) I like to understand reality, and 2) it is leading to massive misallocations of capital, just like with COVID over the last 1.5 years. I think we should be concerned with climate, but we need to focus more energy on our own sun. I think our sun is far more dangerous than all of the anthropogenic climate change theories combined.
Please see [1], which has before-and-after plots (page 18) that appear to match up with the differences you're seeing and describes why those adjustments were made (section 4, on page 3). For example, it fixes biases that resulted from different time-of-day for measurements, stations moving their thermometer locations over time, and a couple others.
One thing that doesn't perfectly match up is that the peak in the 1930s of the before-adjustment plot in [1] doesn't go quite as high as Fig 6 of the 1999 paper, but it does seem to match Plate A2, so I would assume it is a difference of using calendar years vs meteorological years (section A2 of the 1999 paper).
Regarding your broader point: I think skepticism is great; asking questions is how we learn new things, after all. But it's not so great to assume that climate science must be wrong (or a political narrative) just because you found something that doesn't immediately make sense. Often it simply means climate scientists know something we don't.
Also, since you mentioned concern about financial conflicts of interest, I'd encourage you to consider that the anti-climate-change narrative is just as (if not more) susceptible to those. Fossil fuels are big business.
The first article is also really weird. In the words of the second referee: this is an opinion piece!
I wholeheartedly agree. It's a tiny bit of light scientific "discussion" about vaguely related phenomena, wrapped in criticism of how culturally significant climage change has become. How the hell did this get past the very negative referee reports and get published??
I read the article. It's highly speculative, making extrapolations tens to hundreds of years with very little evidence or physics.
I have publications in this area. And given the above deficiencies, I started wondering about where it was published.
When what I noted above surfaced, I stopped, because life is too short to chase down BS.
You shouldn't be taking that article seriously! And I don't know how it was recommended to your attention, but I'd start wondering about that source as well.
From the first article (which is mostly asking “what is climate“ and “should we expect climate not to change?”) we get its only really solid prediction:
“it can be anticipated that many readers would find this paper useless, if not harmful.” Lol.
The second paper was discredited and withdrawn though that hasn’t stopped deniers citing it endlessly.
25 of the first paper's references are to other papers the author has written. No matter what field a paper is in, having 19% of the references point to yourself is suspicious. For the other references, the high amount of citations from folks as general as Aristotle and Kolmogorov make doubly sure that the paper really doesn't pass the BS test of any researcher.
Most of the reports are quite critical (although I can't tell if referee 4 is being sarcastic or not). I don't understand how this paper got published.
Wow, I don't know this journal at all, but something terribly odd is going on. Did anyone else read the referee reports [1]? I'd call that scathing. If I ever had those reports come back to me for one of my papers, I wouldn't even try to push the paper through. And I've never used that harsh language myself in my referee reports, even for absolute garbage papers. Look at this:
The article by D. Koutsoyiannis "Rethinking climate, climate change, and their relationship with water" is, quite simply, an opinion or editorial piece and most certainly not original experimental research. At that, it remains grossly incomplete given the current state of knowledge in hydrology, water resources, and their relationships with climate.
First, the author uses this article for an absurd quantity of self-citations.
At any rate: I smell a giant rat!
Edit: I started reading now. This isn't a scientific article. I totally agree with referee 2 above! This is an opinion piece! The author explicitly goes into things like google search results for the words "climate change". What the hell is that supposed to have to do with water's effect on climate change? What absolute garbage! I don't trust anything in this paper.
1) hydrology professor shows that water is the largest driver of earth's climate (besides the sun of course) and that CO2 has proven to be an insignificant factor, both based on physics and on history, where CO2 levels were far higher, but temperatures did not rise in tandem.
2) Professor Valentina Zharkova predicting that the coming grand solar minimum will lower earth's temperature by around 1 degree C, based on past minima.
Zharkova has a history of being right, by the way, which is more than I can say for the tabloid science currently being peddled in this thread.
How convenient it must be to always have a paper or two ready that show warming trends are wrong and that it will stop in the next few years. It does not matter that the previous papers in the same vein were proven wrong by facts, like the ones that attempted to draw horizontal lines over the temperature graphs. Just come up with a new theory, pick some data that fits (in paper #2, why solar cycles 21-23 and not the others? No proposed mechanism behind the theory? No problem.), and here's your new justification to do nothing.
So established science is corrupt because of grant money. Yet this Demetris Koutsoyiannis who wrote the first article, who is a professor at an established university in Greece and seemingly climbed the completely normal academic ladder, is somehow untainted by the grant money he presumably got along the way?
I'd say that this article doesn't really show even that much.
According to the article itself, "This is mainly due to using an improved temperature dataset to estimate the baseline rather than sudden changes in climate indicators."
This is an example of the past changing, rather than the present. I'm not sure how to react when the only change was the past got cooler - I wouldn't think that would change anything in the present or future.
I have an alternate hypothesis: the past didn't magically become cooler. The propagandists changed the historical temperature data (yet again) to sustain their narrative because it supports unrelated agendas.
Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality?
> Wait, so suggesting that temperature data recorded in the past was in fact accurate and shouldn't be altered to suit political narratives is far from reality?
Yes. Because it didn't happen.
> You are demanding censorship of this idea?
No. In the same way that it's cool to hear dissenting political views at the local pub, but if a guy stands up and starts raving about the children trapped by the pedophile lizard people, I kinda want him to get kicked out so that I don't have to be associated with society-destroying lunatics like that. You're that guy. That guy isn't being subjected to "censorship of his idea". He's being kicked out of the establishment for being a moron and ruining the mood.
Go write a book about your crazy ideas. Now if the government makes it illegal to publish, you can decry censorship.
Except it absolutely DID happen and I can prove it.
Here is a report published in 1999 by NOAA and NASA showing temperatures much higher in the 1930's with cooling through the end of the century. Skip to page 37 and look at figure 6. Note the high point of 1.5 degrees C in the 30's from 1999 data.
Compare this with the same data today and you'll miraculously see the 1930's as much cooler with a warming trend (again, NASA direct data - note the new high point from the 30's is 1.2 degrees C): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/graph_data/U.S....
Here is an article summarizing the alterations in case you do not want to read the NASA/NOAA report, but I know you will attack the source, which is why I published the report from 1999 and the same data from 2019 directly first. You can verify everything in this article with the original source materials using the links shared previously: https://realclimatescience.com/2020/10/alterations-to-the-us...
Before I start to even consider these sources, can you tell me in a clear yes or no answer whether they show:
(1) that the data was altered
and
(2) that the data was altered to suit a political narrative.
Only if the answer to both is yes will I even read any of this. I'll wait.
(Why am I being difficult? I believe you're a typical nutcase who sees X happening, and immediately concludes that "X is happening to fit the political narrative")
> So, I've proven conclusively that NASA altered their temperature data in the 20th century from a cooling trend to a warming trend.
So this is your new claim. Please write out in clear text that you've moved the goalposts since last time – make it clear what you're claiming now. Then I'll be happy to consider your sources. Just wanna make sure you don't move the goalposts again - as dishonest crackpots tend to.
Ah yes, the last stage of the crackpot: "do your own research"
I'm not asking you to do work for me. I'm asking you to clearly state your claim so that you can't move the goalposts again. The fact that you've done it once, makes me certain you'll do it again and thus invalidate any work I do. State your current claim in clear text, crackpot.
Well, that could be true of the Maldives[1] (which would be tragic, don't get me wrong) but clearly even flooding lots of major coastal cities wouldn't wipe most countries off the map - but it'd still be huge problem.
But that's what's happening. We take people space away.
And primarily people who did not produce the co2
Globalization brought us also much closer over all.
I saw a view documentary about it and those people are aware why it happens.
While we did a lot of fixing medicine and food for them, climate change is what they are paying for and they didn't knew but we did for a long time now.
Ok but I hope you're not saying OP's article is an apocalyptic narrative. It's a pretty mild projection given that we've already hit +1.2 degrees, and are already seeing effects from that.
I'd say the problem is not enough people understand what the solutions are. Those who push the apocalyptic narrative included, as they tend to be against nuclear energy (a clean, safe, compact, 24/7 source) and even shut down existing plants. Which have been getting replaced by coal!!
It's such a heads-I-lose tails-you-win situation. If I talk about extreme cases I'm accused of alarmism. If I talk about nearly-certain cases that fall short of extinction, I'm told it's not important.
Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point. It's time for the "we can save the world" people to stop leading everyone on, unless they can present facts and real scenarios that back up their claims (hint: they can't and never do).
You'll notice that technologically we didn't come remotely close to doing anything in the past decade that will enable us to move as fast as we'd have to. Where are the great energy & resource breakthroughs? They don't exist and by the numbers we needed them yesterday.
The world will add 2 billion people in the next ~30 years. Nearly all of those births will be in the developing world where emissions are going to continue to skyrocket. Solar, wind and electric vehicles aren't going to solve that problem.
The emissions that the US + EU cut, India will add.
China will add an entire US-worth of emissions in just the next 10-15 years. If you had a magic wand and could put the US to zero emissions tomorrow morning it wouldn't make a bit of lasting difference to the situation. This single fact of reality makes all the "we can save the world" arguments false.
And that's merely two countries. Then you have parts of Latin America, Africa and developing Asia, where emissions and population are going to continue to rise substantially.
It seems increasingly clear that the so called experts claiming this can be stopped know they're lying, and they keep lying anyway. What's their plan for immediately stopping all emissions increases across all of the developing world? There is no such plan, they have no intention of implementing or calling for such a plan. Thus, they're lying.
There is no scenario where anybody can get the math to work out on what's happening. And you'll find that nobody even attempts to, they just issue empty statements about how we need to take urgent action and then we can save the world. They'll never present you the real scenarios for the actions necessary to immediately turn back all emissions increases. It's fraudulent intellectually, it takes a small amount of time to analyze the context and know that.
Climate nihilism is the next stage of climate denial. We CAN do much to manage growth and encourage sustainable development. Wealthy western nations need to concretely embrace technology transfer and infrastructure investment. As nations develop their infant mortality decreases, people naturally invest in the children that they have and their birthrates decline to replacement level.
Already we're seeing a difference in how technology infrastructure has been distributed in developing countries. People are coming to depend upon their cellular phone and wireless data connections to be more reliable than their electricity infrastructure.
> Let's begin from the premise that the climate scientists are largely correct in their models and that climate change as a dire threat is not fraudulent.
> No, it can't be solved. That's just math. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about it realistically, and it's exceptionally obvious at this point.
So, I am seeing this set of ideas getting pushed a lot more these days, which means that a lot of the effort being put into climate change denial has started shifting to climate delay and outright fatalism (which used to mostly be a feature of evangelical "who are we to question God's plan for us?" arguments).
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot we can do in terms of slowing the growth and even reducing global CO2 (and CH4, methane) output, and a lot more we can do in terms of carbon capture, and a lot we can do in terms of mitigation and adaptation (which we will have to do regardless of how successful we are at reduction and capture) that is only going to get more expensive the longer we put it off.
This isn't a case of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it". Every proposal is competing with every other in terms of cost, feasibility, externalities, and impact, it isn't the case that committing to spending money on the problem results in checks being handed out indiscriminately.
If you have a criticism of some specific intervention, please make it, but it isn't feasible to throw up our hands and do nothing. Because even if the cost/benefit analyses are so incredibly bad that just means that ultimately we only do things in the mitigation and adaptation buckets.
It's really just a matter of money. Wind and solar are enough to produce energy; add in nuclear if you like. We also know how to make Hydrogen and Methane to store large amounts of energy over long time periods, so storage is not a technical problem either. It's just very expensive right now. WW2 was a bigger manufacturing challenge that what we would need to do to become carbon neutral. There are several studies with roadmaps to net zero emissions published. They tend to be very long and technical, so they don't get much media attention.
One interesting facet is that it’s adding an extra 0.4 percentage point a year to annual global GDP growth, which is encouraging
On the other hand annual per capita income from oil and natural gas in producer economies falls by about 75%, which sounds like something that can cause political issues
you aren't presenting any data. I don't have the faintest idea what you mean by "thats just math".
You say so confidently it can't be solved, which I'm going to infer you mean impossible and not just hard.
We could without a doubt drastically reduce co2 emmissions to near zero by switching to nuclear, and paying for nuclear plants in developing countries, banning gas vehicles. Require any current and needed hydro carbon power plants to implement carbon capture.
That is hard, very hard. Might start a war. But it is not impossible like you are stating.
"A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0