6378

How about this scientist in 1989

Or this one in 2006

Also correct? Wrong to challenge ?

The person who said I am waging a “disinformation” campaign should probably be accusing these scientists of doing that.

6379

Some of the solutions that have been proposed are not exactly cautious. Only a fool would deny that warming is occurring. The entire debate is on the solution and what action to take, because it is indeed possible to make things worse and the predictions have been consistently very wrong.

6380

Why are you acting like they have been shown to be wrong? They’re talking about coastal flooding and 1930s dust bowl situations if trends continued up to 2000. I didn’t see them saying it would happen in the year 2000?

Aren’t we starting to see exactly that?

6381

Do you understand that the effects of greenhouse gases released in previous decades are ongoing? Climate change is a problem with a lot of momentum. If we went to net zero emissions tomorrow, it would still be centuries before we saw the total scope of the changes we have wrought.

So yeah, we aren’t getting out of this without significant negative consequences. Now it’s mostly a question of how severe the consequences will be and how quickly they will come.

6382

There have been over and under-estimates, but in general, the projections have been fairly decent:

On the general subject of unreliable models, remember that error cuts both ways. We may be over-estimating the problems… or we may be underestimating them. In terms of a risk assessment, most of the risk is in the “hot” tail of the probability distribution. The median estimate is bad, but if we are wrongly discounting some positive feedback, the outcome is really catastrophic.

6383

Correct! The climate change denial movement is populated by utter fools. They are soft, moist, dumb, cuck-clowns.

Also, do you even read the articles that you link to? The predictions made in the AP News article hold up to current science and observable data. At this point I think that you are either A) dishonest or B) not competent to read and understand things.

6384

I think it’s more that Earth is a chaotic system, although the individual mechanisms are quite basic and well understood:

It’s true that there are negative feedback loops like more particulate matter in the atmosphere = less solar radiation reaching the surface = global cooling.

It’s also true that Carbon Dioxide absorbs infrared radiation coming from the ground (blackbody) hence “greenhouse effect”. More atmospheric CO2 = more greenhouse. You can measure this by global mean temperature versus insolation.

There may be some positive feedback loops such as global warming helps melt the permafrost, which releases methane, which drives global warming even higher as methane is even more potent as a “greenhouse gas” (although not as long lived, IIRC?). Anyway, that’s scary, because humans are notoriously bad at predicting things like this: if you had a chessboard and put a penny in the first square, two pennies in the second, four in the third, etc… following this pattern by the time you got to the end of the chessboard you would have trillions of dollars (thank you M. Night Shyamalan).

So… from my college-graduate level understanding, it’s sort of a question of ‘what loops are stronger’ in the near term, but in the long term things get very unpredictable a la chaos theory: how do the loops interplay?

You can also look at other discernible effects like whales showing up dead with plastic in their stomachs, great coral reef die-offs, weather catastrophes, and see that “it’s happening”:

The Amazon are more or less the lungs of the Earth: they produce something crazy like 1/5 of breathable O2. Like if that goes, breathing will become more difficult. This isn’t even touching on what this might do to the food web.

The ocean will absorb CO2 less efficiently as it warms, so there’s another positive feedback loop: atmospheric CO2 = more warming = ocean saying ‘no thanks, can’t take any more CO2’ = equals… more CO2 in the atmosphere.

So… it’s not like you are going to cook or ‘go up in blue smoke’ but you know there’s starvation… disease from poor nutrition… which is inconvenient because lack of biodiversity equals less useful medicine…

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/09/23/65-michael-mann-on-why-our-climate-is-changing-and-how-we-know/

It’s sort of like jumping off a bridge and then halfway down saying ‘well, so far so good’. I don’t think this is alarmist when talking about situations that could potentially result in some sort of Gibsonian “Jackpot” where 80% of the world’s population dies. We’re probably in the middle of the sixth great extinction. The last one took out the Dinos.

6385

I don’t think you know how logic (or possibly words, or both) works. The articles say “if we do nothing in X years, shit will be unstoppable”, not “if we do nothing, shit will happen in X years”.
Seeing how the shit™ has actually started to happen in a small scale, yes, they are very likely correct.

6386

Not caution in the sense of ‘don’t do anything,’ caution in the sense of ‘in light of potential consequences, try to reduce the rising temperature that our science tells us is happening.’ The only way to ‘err on the side of caution’ at this point, in part because of the decades of do-nothingism and/or outright disinformation that have given a fig leaf to climate denialism as a politically respectable position to take, is to take bold and even radical action.

The rest of your post is again about the fallibility of scientists. I get it, they’re human. Unfortunately we don’t have a Dr. Manhattan to sort this out for us. Yet the vast majority agree that curbing warming is a paramount goal, and that the clock is ticking. Shall we wait another 10 years before we decide to actually do anything? And if so, what will have been the consequences of that much more inaction?

6387

Why are you getting so personal? You can’t really win arguments by attacking people you do not even know. The AP article’s expert stated that we had until the year 2000. Because science is always right and it’s very wrong to question science, maybe we should stop trying to fix climate change, based on that scientist’s deadline which we have missed by 20 years.

6388

The article reads: “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. … He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.”

This is the same scare tactic that people attempt to use today. They set deadlines that get missed, then simply set new deadlines. Do you recognize where I am coming from at all?

6389

Ok , I don’t “know how logic or possible words work.” Great argument. I have been hearing for decades that we only have 10 years, and that “The Science” is infallible, and now I’m the idiot because I point out how bad the predictions have been for 30+ years. Thanks for all the personal attacks.

It would be one thing if you said that there was new reason to believe the new predictions, which some of you are saying. I can respect that! None of you seem to have any sympathy for how bad these past predictions look, though, and how they foster reasonable skepticism about “experts.”

6390

If you stop erecting straw men, you might get friendlier responses.

6391

But you are seeing the effects of Climate change impacting the world today, dude.

6392

Because you didn’t. We only had 10 years, give or take, to prevent the run-off effect that would wipe island nations of the map. Islands have indeed sunk, ergo there won’t be more because of the CO2 that won’t go away for decades? Yeah, no.

6393

When reasonable skepticism about experts is used as a fig leaf for not bothering to read the literature, or putting equal weight on the opinions of politicians who clearly debate the matter in bad faith (snow balls in Congress, etc.), or continuing to bury one’s head in the sand while our industrial engine generates short term wealth without regard for ecological consequences, then to me it doesn’t seem all that reasonable. It seems more like a stalling or obfuscatory tactic.

It is stipulated that humans are fallible and that scientists make mistakes. To therefore say we should toss their advice out the window is an odd conclusion to derive from this admitted fact.

6394

Here is the last thing I’ll say on this topic. Yes, there are some effects of climate change being witnessed today (although I have seen some things are blamed on climate change without real evidence). However, there is a total failure to acknowledge that the “expert deadlines” about the “point of no return” have been wrong so much that they have lost their persuasive power. If you can’t see that, and just want to call people stupid for pointing it out, you should take a page from the playbook of the wonderful Green Party of Canada, which is among the friendliest parties I’ve ever worked with. Defend your position, but do so respectfully. Good day!

6395

I think you misunderstand what these deadlines mean. It’s not like a date rolls around and the planet implodes. It seems like you’re expecting some sort of what exactly, disaster movie to strike at twelve? That’s not how this works. That is not some sort of end of the world date they’re giving. It’s more like… damage we can’t reverse has been done date… and it has been done.

6396

So you aren’t going to believe in care change until you can see inconvertible proof that the climate is actually permanently damaged and billions of people die.

Then what are you doing to do? Say sorry?

Because people are literally going to kill you at that point. Not because you didn’t believe scientists, but just to steal your stuff. They’re going to kill you and your family.

6397

You may be misreading these. They are saying we have a narrowing window to act to reverse climate change. They are not saying that in 10 years our coastlines will be flooded, etc. This message has been pretty consistent for the last few decades – scientists are warning that we need to act sooner rather than later to avert disaster down the road.

Anyway, isn’t it better to err on the side of caution then to disregard warnings of the effects of climate change? If the vast majority of scientists are wrong and climate change isn’t the problem they say it is, but we made painful changes to avert it anyway, isn’t that better than not doing much and having them be right and then having to deal with the catastrophic effects of climate change?