On the other hand, people have been saying that for last few decades, and the bad news hasn't had much impact.
Given the general staidness of the actual research, I think we need to worry a lot more about where climate science has underestimated the change than where they've overestimated it. The loss function will be brutal on that side.
Climate researchers have _not_ been implying that the bad effects are way out in the 21st century: they've made hundreds of testable predictions that catastrophe was at hand in the 80s, 90s, and aughts.
We were going to see the end of arctic ice, have a perpetual ozone hole necessitating sun screen when venturing outside and decimating wildlife from cataracts, see New York and other major cities drowned, etc. (Not to mention famine killing billions of people, etc.)
It is possible to think that climate research is useful and interesting even while acknowledging that they are often alarmist and full of nonsense in their predictions.
nitpick: it is actually antarctic ice we need to worry about. Arctic ice (except on Greenland) is floating and so it is already displacing its weight in water.
Thermal expansion of the ocean contributes almost half of total observed sea level rise. (1.1mm out of 2.8 mm total per year)
You should be more careful with your information sources. I'm kind of familiar with the claims of ending arctic ice, but only from straw men claims from deniers of climate science. I have not been able to find any alarmist claims from climate scientists on arctic ice, only websites that misinterpret the claims for their own propaganda purposes.
The flooding of New York and shifting of agricultural zones are not predicted to already have happened. When climate scientists talk about these things, they do not use the alarmist language that you are using.
Articles about him in legitimate media are [1][2]. Climate deniers get to say things like [3]. Other climate scientists think he is alarmist [4], and the 2013 IPCC report mentions his papers but is super dissmissive: See section 11.3.4 of the IPCC AR5, references to Maslwoski.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/21/arctic-w... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/18/ice-sc... [3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-a... [4] http://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/arctic-will-be-ice-fre...
Just to be clear, I am not asking for media reports of the scientific literature, but rather the original sources themselves, demonstrating that it is the climate scientists who have been making the kinds of predictions you mention.
I would also urge you to check any studies you do cite to make sure you are not misinterpreting stated uncertainties. It is disingenuous to claim that a study suggesting that extreme effects are possible but unlikely is "predicting" those extreme effects. One should either describe the uncertainty, or use standard summary statistics, such as the expected value.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarm...
Language in the article is quite similar to the language in the OP of this thread: "[L]ast year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin" vs. "NASA scientists suggest we've been underestimating..."
Climate science uses the West Antarctic as its poster child of global warming. Here's a scientific study that finds "an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s", and that instead "The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate... These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects":
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7612/full/nature1...
Of course, we don't call it "global warming" anymore since we're not really sure that's what's happening. Now we just call it "climate change", because if there's one thing climates do, they change, and we don't even have to make specific predictions for that. If the temperature goes up, it's proof of anthropogenic climate change (global warming). If the temperature goes down, that's also proof of anthropogenic climate change (humans messing with nature makes world temperatures more unpredictible). If the temperature stays the same, it's just the calm before the storm, and nature will be back to mess us up in a big way to make up for lost time next year or next decade.
Most of our researchers are too savvy to make testable predictions based on this, at least not any closer than 50 or 100 years out. By the time it'd be time to test these, they'll be dead or retired. Meantime it's easy to excuse by saying "climate science is an inexact science." Then you can call it science and you don't even need testable predictions! But you get quicker tenure and better pay than you would with a degree in phrenology, parapsychology, or cryptozoology.
I'll close by saying priests and shaman have traditionally held similar sway over the masses to what our climate scientists do today by predicting things like solar and lunar eclipses (although, to their credit, their predictions were a bit more on-the-money than our climate scientists have mustered yet. Our moderns rely on confirmation bias and rejiggered data from NOAA instead). It's nice to know our old ways haven't left us.
Looking online for other media reports I found this [1], which includes the choice quote from the original paper (which you can find here [2]):
"Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3 (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover."
As expected, the paper describes a central estimate, an interval describing the uncertainty, and then provides further hedging ("nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer", and the whole second sentence). I must further emphasise that the paper, and Peter Wadhams, were saying that the Arctic ice would be melted during summer, rather than year-round - I don't feel that the phrase "Arctic sea ice may be completely melted as soon as 2015" captures that important distinction.
That serious consequences are found to be possible by some predictive model, is something worth paying attention to. Both you and tjic seem to by trying to imply that climate research has produced a range of models that are wildly inconsistent with reality, but that simply isn't the case (and certainly isn't here - yet).
If you have an interest in the subject then read the literature and understand the nuance of the claims being made. The are often large uncertainties involved, both because of difficult dynamics and poor observational coverage, and no-one in the field I have ever met has ever said otherwise.
[0] http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-earth-0...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/d...
[2] http://www.oc.nps.edu/NAME/Maslowski%20et%20al.%202012%20EPS...
edit: I meant to say, I'm afraid I don't have time to look at the second case.
Global warming is very real, and still happening, and the "climate change" models predict that we will continue get global warming as we have been. You ask for testable predictions, yes, there are testable predictions but climates are notoriously difficult to model accurately, but even with disagreements over models and problems with accuracy global warming still emerges as a clear prediction.
If you want to look for confirmation bias and "rejiggered data", then what you do is you cherry-pick specific time frames and regions where you can find cooling. That's always possible. Pick a hundred regions in the world and pick a hundred spans of time for each, and then take the few combinations that show cooling and you can paint a picture that hides the truth.
Sea Ice Extent Is Near Record Lows--South as Well as North: https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/sea-ice-extent...
> have a perpetual ozone hole necessitating sun screen when venturing outside and decimating wildlife from cataracts
Antarctic ozone hole beginning to heal: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-hole-... (as mentioned elsewhere, this is thanks to the quick, decisive action taken in the Montreal protocol)
> see New York and other major cities drowned
Hurricane Sandy: http://www.weather.gov/okx/HurricaneSandy (6 ft of inundation in NYC due to storm surge)
> (Not to mention famine killing billions of people, etc.)
How Global Warming Helped Cause the Syrian War: https://www.wired.com/2015/03/global-warming-helped-cause-sy...
Sorry if some of these effects didn't occur in comically exaggerated "Day After Tomorrow" style, but that does not mean they aren't occurring.
This is embarrassing.
I agree that there's been a lot of over-exaggeration on both sides of the issue. If you listen only to pundits and talking heads, you're almost certainly getting the wrong information. The actual scientists, however, look at things a little differently.
For example, you cannot build a dam to handle any arbitrarily large amount of water. So what do you do? You look at the historic record and build your dam to survive a "1 in 500 year" flood. These sort of "1 in X year" events are all over climate science: "1 in 100 year hurricane", "1 in 500 year drought", "1 in 1000 year cold/warm streak". What I've seen most scientists say regarding climate change is that it will, essentially, shift X down for all of these. Of course, most of us are not going to live 100/500/1000 years, but if you look at all of these statistics in aggregate, you might notice that the globe would normally have, say, 3 "1 in 100 year" floods in any given year. If this year there are 5, and next year there are 4, that might be climate change.
Or it might not, because the aggregate statistics have their own statistics. For example, you might determine that a year with 5 "1 in 100 year" floods is, itself, a "1 in 500 years" phenomenon. Does that mean this year is that 1? Maybe...maybe not. But at some point, when you notice that all of the aggregations of aggregations of "1 in X" years events is a "1 in 1,000,000 year" phenomenon under non-climate change conditions, but a "1 in 10 year" or "1 in 50 year" phenomenon if climate change is occurring, then you might start thinking about attributing these events to climate change.
So: was the Syrian War caused by climate change? Maybe...maybe not. 3 years in a row of drought is probably a "1 in 500 year" type event. If climate change turns that into a "1 in 50 year" event, you still can't say for sure that climate change caused the drought...but you can say it's much more likely to have.
We'll know soon enough. If extreme weather events start causing more destabilization in more different parts of the world, we may find the long trend of decreasing incidence of conflict reverse itself...
Or maybe not, because maybe the decreasing trend will overpower the climate change induced increase, causing the overall trend to remain downward...just not as fast downward as it could have been. And really, that is what the problem with climate change is: the cost of doing nothing is greater than the cost of doing something. (The Stern Report lays this out in 700 pages of painstaking detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review .) Climate change probably won't wipe out the human race, but it will depress the progress and/or potential progress we might have made in its absence.
I find it the highest kind of irony that the main argument people make against doing anything about climate change (it will cost money) is actually the best argument for doing something to prevent it.
This was avoided the obvious way. Hardly an indictment of the prediction; the prediction was a necessary part of attacking the problem.
(Which I am as well. The bad news has had very little impact ON ME. Because I live in a part of the US with the best infrastructure. )
People are really bad at understanding nonlinear effects. For any kind of supra-linear system, "nothing" happens for a relatively long time, then "all the sudden" effects start piling up and people who say the above claim it's completely unexpected, out of the blue.
Then lets play with sea rise, the fear is always that some islands will wash away and port towns will be at further risk. Yet studies of the Marshall islands show the reverse, the islands continue to grow in the majority. What about changes leading to flooding, changes in rain fall patterns, and the like. Well the common trend is to over exaggerate unique events as if they were common place, ie Katrina leading to years of violent hurricanes wrecking the US (oops). Sixty years of studying rain falls in some central US states show no changes, the recent floods in Louisiana weren't even unusual. Even China has had an area in drought for centuries.
In other words, the climate does change but we don't know all the variables and people's whose very jobs depend on income from both studying it and "fixing it" (read : GE) will always push the numbers that support their side. Just like big oil will try to claim that oil isn't the leading cause; its cows btw.
So take it all with a grain of salt. Articles on Vice lean one direction and one direction only and tend to exaggerate . however those inclined to always believe this type of alarmism won't think otherwise.
Potentially, not anymore!
http://modernfarmer.com/2016/10/seaweed-livestock-methane-em...
2) What colors are picked for the background? We are in white now and going to red? What if the colors showed us in blue, and global warming moving us to white?
It is a total lie to say raw numbers don't lie. Every part about making an infograph lies. X axis. Y axis. Colors. Labels. We could take the same dataset and draw many different conclusions.
(Not that global warming isn't true, but that infographic isn't enough)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
The associated period of massive carbon injection into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted no longer than 20,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[3] The carbon dioxide was likely released in two pulses, the first lasting less than 2,000 years. Such a repeated carbon release is in line with current global warming.[2] A main difference is that during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, the planet was essentially ice-free.[4]
Today we talk about the temperature going up less than 1 degree °C in the last 1,400 years. This is talking about a period of warming that was 5-8 degrees and lasted over 20,000 years.
So when people start to talk about how rapidly things are changing over a few hundred or a thousand years, it's still a blip in the time frame of the planet's history. The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum happened over 55 million years ago and lasted more than 20,000 years. How can anybody say, "This is the warmest temps in the history of the planet!" when some of the cycles have happened over incredibly vast amounts of time and have been sustained for even longer?
And while I don't doubt some climate change is occurring, if you look at the scale in terms of millions of years, humans will be long gone before this planet really starts dying, and by then, it will reclaim, heal and move on from when we inhabited it. Truth is, the planet has been undergoing cooler and warming periods since it was born as a planet some 4 billion years ago.
I take no solace in thinking "humans will be long gone". Not if its global catastrophe in the next decades that trigger that.
People have talking about global catastrophe since the 1960's and some of the predictions from the first Earth day in 1970 were so alarmist it's funny to look back at those now:
"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
- Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
"At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable."
- Ecologist Kenneth Watt
"Air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone."
- Paul Ehrlich
"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
- Kenneth Watt
source: http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/barbara-boland/13-worst-predic...
That was over 4 decades ago and we're still here.
So yea it seems funny or harmless if you ignore what's happened since.
And what's the projection, will it rise 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 100, 200 or 300 meters in the next 100 years? I have seen so many numbers, I don't know what the current estimation is. Anyway I tried to make sense of the article: " This number has hovered around 0.6 inches per decade since 1900...[]...Global sea level, the paper concluded, rose no less than 5.5 inches over the last century, and likely saw an increase of 6.7 inches."
lets see, 6.7 is likely. 6.7 / 10 = 0.67 inches per decade. and no less than 0.55 (lower than measured).