It’s like if I take the Lord’s name in vain and then get sick and you tell me this shows that I shouldn’t swear. Then you lick a handle on the subway and get sick and I tell you this shows how disease is transmitted by germs. The two may look superficially similar, but the underlying reasoning is important.
There's nothing logically or philosophically or scientifically preventing both explanations for why we each got sick from being simultaneously true. You're attempting to draw a dividing line between "religious thinking" and "rational, scientific thinking". No such division existed throughout history. Even today many "scientists" think along religious terms while many religions are evidence-obsessed. Counter-examples abound.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_the_Arctic
[1] https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-cold-weather...
The last three years have been highly above average in the arctic. This isn't "arctic has one warm day!". It's "the entire year is abnormally warm in the arctic, like the past three!"
The appropriate comparison would be the US having a whole winter which is 10-20 degrees colder than normal.
The discussion is we know this is happening, what do we do to stop it?
Hot weather in July in the Northern hemisphere is not unusual and does not require explanation or study. Snow in July would be unusual and would require explanation and study.
The problem is how much and how often this happens: global warning is very likely to be caused by human activity.
Future looks ugly, everybody is (maybe unconsciously) afraid and at fault. And instead of looking for a solution I use my brain 40 hours/week to solve useless problems. Those who have also money send cars in the space. What could go wrong.
We're all sure gonna be kicking ourselves after it all goes Mad Max. Completely avoidable, yet all but inevitable with no off-switch in sight in the real world.
So yeah, we're doomed.
Insane heat waves AND insane cold snaps is very much part of 'global warming', or the consistent moderate increase in energy we're doing.
Thousand and ten-thousand-year storms and extremes become yearly or monthly events as the range of the system's outputs has changed. Expect other cold snaps… and ridiculous, dangerous heat waves… and other sorts of dangerous and destructive weather events.
The thing is the curve is moving towards higher temperatures and we get unexpected deviations more on one end than the other. And have you considered these events may be not significant - yet, because the science department is hopelessly understaffed?
Let's say your assumption is that the things we observe happen by chance. Now, we have, say 100 years of temperature records. If only the last year just happens to be the warmest year of all observations, there would be an 1:100 probability that this was by chance.
Now, Wikipedia says: "A 2013 article published in Geophysical Research Letters has shown that temperatures in the region haven't been as high as they currently are since at least 44,000 years ago and perhaps as long as 120,000 years ago. The authors conclude that "anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases have led to unprecedented regional warmth."[12][13]"
So it is way more than one warm year in 100 years.
But to comprehend the unlikelihood that this happens by chance, consider another record. Look at this graph:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Gl...
It shows that the instrumental temperature record sind 1880 to today. You see that since 1980, every year was warmer than all the years before.
What is the probability of that for the hypothesis this happened by chance? From 1880 to 2017 are 137 years. The last 37 years have higher temperatures than all the years before. Assuming that no systematic change is happening, the probability is the same as putting the numbers from 1 to 137 into a box, drawing blindly 37 from them, and discovering that you have drawn the numbers 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, and so on, until 137. What is the probability of this?
It is given by the binominal coefficient:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination
with n = 137, k=37, 1 : n! / (k! (n - k)!).
Using Python:
>>> def fak(n):
... if n <= 1:
... return 1
... return n * fak(n-1)
>>>def binom(n,k):
... return fak(n) / (fak(k) * fak(n-k))
>>> n=137
>>> k=37
>>> binom(n,k)
3902541575254646835963436276286280L
1 / 3902541575254646835963436276286280
Do you still think it happens by chance?
xkcd had a nice illustration: https://xkcd.com/1732/
I'm sorry, but it is impossible to be a truly intelligent person that also believes in any religion without serious cherry picking or psychological compartmentalization. I say this as someone that loves studying religion (I have a degree in it), but I study it as an artform of human expression or an oddity that once was, not as a serious pursuit of self-completion. Hopefully, we can one day study those that deny basic climate science and geology the same way...
I wouldn't say so. At least not in the epistemic/anti-epistemic way that parallels climate-change denialism. Most religions make a lot of unfalsifiable claims. Since opponents cannot conclusively falsify those claims, it gives religious adherents an epistemic place to hide and claim personal religious experiences, etc.
Most religions have not, in the main, been conclusively refuted, since they involve events that happened thousands of years ago, and even when something is shown to have not happened, the adherents have good precedent for claiming that a given portion is allegorical. Since religious interpretation is rife with different viewpoints, they'll even have a respected theologian to point to who called it in advance.
Flat-eartherism is a horse of a different color. It makes a bunch of falsifiable predictions, which have subsequently been falsified many different ways. Then its proponents just ignore the evidence and keep on believing their viewpoint anyway. Epistemologically, climate change denial has a lot more in common with this than it does with religion.
I say this as an anti-theist. I don't have much good to say about religion, but I'd rather deal with someone who believes things which can't be proven rather than someone who believes things that have been conclusively disproven. Religious people are in that way a lot like anyone else. They aren't as deluded as someone who can look at clear evidence and simply ignore it.
That's because most religions have as their central tenet a completely unfalsifiable claim: that there is a god.
Zero falsified things are true (plus some false negative rate)
Personally, I believe in God because it’s tautological. Saying there is a god is like saying half of children are above average. As soon as you reference a line in the universe, there is inevitably an ultimate point on it.
Edit: I will add that I don’t think God is truly omnipotent. She is bound by the laws of physics, same as us, and will die with the universe. Perhaps sooner. But my article of faith is that she will long outlast me. If I’m wrong, and God dies on my watch, that’s a bridge I needn’t worry about til I get there.
I have a hard time understanding how someone can get a degree in religion without noticing how unfalsifiable most religions are.
I'd also be interested to hear what great new evidence has arisen since the 19th century that makes religion so foolish. Take Maxwell for example. He knew about the age of the Earth and recognized the validity of Darwin's theory of evolution. Yet he was by all accounts a very religious man.
If you think, all are the same, then you are now moving towards existence of a superior being and possibly creationism.
I don’t think you need to adhere closely to one single tradition in order to be “religious” if that’s what you’re getting at.
To answer your question directly though, I was raised in a Christian church. I adhere to some basic form of that. Humility, forgiveness, we were made in Gods image, the original sin of the knowledge of good and evil, etc.
Most skeptics if not all of them agree there is climate change, most of them even agree some of it is man-made.
The discussion is how much and you won't find any consensus on that no matter how much you try to ask for it.
I mean, that would be really really nice.
This is, after all, rather like living with the sword of Damocles over my head. I'd really rather not have it dangling there, glinting menacingly at me, but wishing the sword wasn't there doesn't help one jot.
Everyone is agreeing there is climate change, in fact there have always been climate change and according to them the climate have been much worse than it is now.
Most sceptics even agree that humans affect the climate.
The discussion as far as I can understand is to what degree do humans affect it. I.e. is it enough for us to worry about it.
There is as far as I have been able to learn no actual consensus, in fact, ICSC has been lowering their projections over the last 10 year or so.
If you want to figure out whether you should worry or not may I suggest you try and find out what the official consensus on humans effect on the climate is. You will be surprised how little certainty you will find. I certainly was.
I am pretty agnostic here, but if you want me to worry I need to see more than "enough certainty" and as many say "enough significance" without ever providing any actual hard numbers.
I am not a scientist but I know that if you can't actually show any concrete numbers then you have interpretation i.e. no consensus.
It's frustrating when you are trying to figure out what's up and down in this discussion.
People still want their 24/7 AC, their steaks, their huge cars, their big heat inefficient houses, their plane flights etc.
No one does a thing.
Believing in climate change, or not believing, when reflected in the actions of people, is in my eyes completely equivalent.
For instance, the following products are worse for the environment than their alternatives:
1. Hand-crafted, locally produced goods
2. Non-factory farmed food
3. Organic food
(Sure, in the grand scheme of things, these will make small differences, but we have to cut our use of fossil fuel everywhere.)
Such a statement seems to assume that the mind is an immutable object only created in childhood.
While it certainly causes cognitive dissonance for some, an SUV driving redneck carnivore with no children has created far less emissions than a public transport using vegan environmentalist with 2 kids.
There are better ways to change minds.
Instead of buying and fueling the car, you can buy the luxury bicycle.
Instead of flying to Venice, you can rent a sailing yacht. Or whatever is local to your area.
It’s like dieting. The impulse is to reduce, naturally because you’re cutting things out, but eventually you figure out that you can fill your life with other experiences.
Despite factory-farming being one of the main drivers of CO2?
However, it is true that too few people in "developed" countries do that. And it's also true that too many people in "less-developed" countries lust after energy-intensive lifestyles. So overall, its unlikely that overall climate forcing will decrease. Unless solar energy and battery usage take off exponentially enough.
Even worse, there's already enough CO2 in the atmosphere to drive substantial climate change. And the poles are warming fast enough to drive substantial CO2 and CH4 outgassing from melting permafrost.
So maybe it's just too late. And so maybe the rational option for those alive now is to party hearty. Russia and China probably like that path.
A good comparison would be FOSS. Richard Stallman inconveniences himself to the point of absurdity, but I'm pretty sure barely anyone does anything close to it.
I changed my diet, I live in good housing, but when I put the numbers on paper, I'm not doing much at all, and could do much more.
I'm not sure that's an apt comparison. rms simply has a workflow that doesn't require the use of proprietary software. It's not that inconvenient for him.
In on-topic comparison, it would be having a lifestyle where you'd simply have no use for a car: you live close to work, enjoy riding a bicycle, etc.
Of course, finding that workflow or lifestyle might limit some options, but once you accept that, it's not all that inconvenient.
I suppose so. More home cooking, sourcing ingredients, finding small markets, knowing the right restaurants, etc.
> The thing is, one has to start somewhere, and no one starts anywhere because they see the change as inconvenient.
That's probably and unfortunately very true, in software as well as food and CO2 reduction.
People will keep eating candy. They will never eat their vegetables, unless they taste like candy. It's pointless to imagine worlds in which they eat their vegetables and everything is great because, although it's possible to write a plan to get from here to there, those worlds are strictly fantasy. The plan can not be followed. I could also write a plan for the sun to rise in the west—and it would also fail, for largely the same reason.
If you want to solve the problem, make a better, cheaper vegetable that tastes like candy.
I'm not exactly sure how candies are causing climate change.
Although, food is just one part of the equation. I've never said diet is the only change necessary to make. A person in the first world would do more by not using AC and heating than switching to a different diet, so one might optimize there. Although, not many want to optimize there, so it's easier to change the diet if they wish to lower their footprint.
How do you know?