Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea temperatures for the entire earth from 1880 to 1889.
1880 -0.19 -0.11
1881 -0.1 -0.14
1882 -0.1 -0.17
1883 -0.19 -0.21
1884 -0.28 -0.24
1885 -0.31 -0.26
1886 -0.32 -0.27
1887 -0.35 -0.27
1888 -0.18 -0.27
1889 -0.11 -0.26
I guess you could do an actual global measurement if you put a satellite fairly far out with capable of measuring the IR and optical. Then you could define a black body effective temperature, but I'm not sure that straightforwardly tells us about surface temperatures.
The linked file is simply the analysis output, the source is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, presumably their GISTEMP dataset (since that's the one about global average surface temperature).
The original GISTEMP analysis is documented here: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00700d.html
with later refinements found elsewhere on the GISS site.
In brief they simply use weather station data, and build their global average from that. They also talk about change in the average rather than the absolute value, which makes sense since you are then much less sensitive to the absolute calibration error of each station.
Then they do a lot of statistics on it to compensate for lack of coverage etc etc, read it yourself if 30 year old statistics papers are interesting to you.
Just quickly googling I found this paper that works to make historical records usable for today:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gdj3....
"Daily observations of weather and climate for the province of Québec, Canada, start in the 18th century and continue to the present day. Daily temperature observations from 12 observers ranging from 1742 to 1873 are described here."
That's why the 1880 forward data is different from other reconstructions going further back. These are measurement instruments by scientists recording temperature.
A concrete data set:
https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
This includes the following list of original source data:
https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/crutem4/stati...
So you see, a lot of things go into making that one number for 1880, and there are many stations going back much further than that.
Updating these data sets is a massive, careful, effort.
To be clear, climate science has come a long way and has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that fossil fuel burning is changing our climate in ways that already is causing damage to the livelihood of millions if not billions of people, something which will accelerate in the short term and put our capacity for adaption and human compassion to a severe test, that we will probably fail miserably.
So the core issue is not up for debate. But there are still claims that rubs me the wrong way, for example that is that this is "a fight between science and self-interested industry". Yes, to some extent. But climate science is not a mature science like (some parts of) physics. As a science it is still struggling to explain why things like ice-ages were (are?) a recurring phenomenon.
The reason is that climate science is in essence a historical science. What this means: while we can tell that the climate has behaved in a certain way historically, and many times (not always) understand why, we have no way to determine the accumulated future effects of warming beyond a certain, in geological terms, fairly short horizon. It may well, through the combination of various tipping point effects, planetary, intergalactic or even hitherto unknown extra-galactic phenomenon have the exact opposite effect, as far as we know.
So part of the drama is in my view caused by climate science trying to establish itself as a mature science with a predictability powers comparable to sciences that can perform reproducible experiments, downplaying its own nature as a historical science. The fossil burning industry (and all the other interests tied in with them) is handed a gift in a way, since they can appeal to the natural intelligence of the average person, and get an agreement that the climate science is making hyperbolic claims.
We don't know everything, and it would serve the sane discussion well to delimit what we can and can not predict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
I am not sure what you mean by "more humble approach". We do NOTHING.
It's a bit like telling people they shouldn't get so emotional about being shot by police.
We've now started making a serious effort at de-carbonization. Market forces are starting to act in favor of green technologies in some sectors. Let's hope it's not too late.
While I agree with you, I am not sure I would count that as an action. It's more like "humbly" watching market and natural forces duking it out, and hoping that the former wins, all the while making the latter stronger.
I know there are many individuals who do act, and I didn't mean that comment to include them. But sadly, the idea that we should restrict our energy usage has not entered public consciousness very much.
I'd say it's much more than a bit like that. The exact same tactics are used in both places.
It's a standard technique to complain about the technique rather than the message. For police violence, riots are (rightfully, to be clear) met with "you should protest peacefully." Then peaceful protests are met with "you shouldn't be so disruptive." Peaceful protests organized to avoid busy roads are criticized for being annoying or using up police resources for crowd control or leaving too much trash behind. Non-protest speech is criticized for being out of place. And finally we reach a point where people do nothing but kneel to draw attention to the issue, and they're still criticized for being disrespectful. The message is always, "I agree with what you say, but I don't agree with how you're saying it." But they'll never agree with how it's said.
Same deal with climate change. Supposedly well meaning critics are always saying that we should tone it down. But it doesn't matter whether the message is "We're all going to die if we don't do something drastic" or "there might be a temperature increase with a mix of good and bad effects." The message is never good enough.
But likewise there are things we do know. I know of no serious climate scientist who claims we understand the climate. But we still know that human activity is warming the globe at an unprecedented rate.
The fossil burning industry has been handed a gift not by scientists overreaching but by systematically discrediting solid science. This is no different than decades of subterfuge by tobacco to sow doubt about the health effects of smoking, and similar things with asbestos. Further peoples "natural intelligence" being really really bad at dealing with uncertainty and slow multi generational global phenomena. If you predict something to happen with 90% chance, and it doesn't happen, people naturally tend to think you were wrong. Further, the language of careful uncertainty analysis has often been twisted by parties who are interested in maximizing the profit from their historical investments.
Of course you will find individual scientists who disagree over how certain or uncertain particular results are (and who are more alarmist than others), but please, since they seem to be so irritating to you, could you actually point out cases of this supposed overreach?
Because in all honesty it sounds to me like you're more irked by scientists also being advocates.
In which case you should ask yourself, if your research shows that there is a considerable risk (which is a criterion well short of scientific certainty) of dramatic negative consequences, what is your ethical obligation as a scientist in society? Is it sufficient to publish this result in an academic journal, or do you have an obligation to ring the alarm bells?
As for examples of overreach, I was amiss in not citing anything in support, but the comment was already too long. I'll cite one such example here which I believe supports my point: The so called 'Climategate' affair, which, while scientists involved were exonerated from any direct wrong-doing, revealed a team of distinguished scientists "so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause" [0]
I'll skip your questions based on the straw-man reading if you don't mind.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=3&...
No scientific misconduct. No fraud. But yes, concern over the public relations battle that scientists have been forced into. Would you rather scientists just concede that battle?
And again, they have been fighting that battle _without scientific misconduct_. There was no hiding of uncertainties, it's all there in the papers. There are very few fields of science where uncertainties are so well studied. The sentence in the NYT article you quote is simply not backed by the facts, and it is mistaking consensus for group-think.
Opposing requests for transparency (looking at raw code and data) is unfortunately all to common in science. The culture is shifting, but it's a result of things being generally messy. Often it takes considerable experience to reliably reach judgements on what the data/code outputs mean. And that's typically not well documented. I advocate for open science at my institute wherever I can. We're getting there.
One perfect example is the "hide the decline". Anyone with statistics training knows that "the decline" is perfectly consistent with the previous trend + fluctuations + data problems. It didn't challenge anything. It's also right there in the published papers. But of course if you want to put out press releases you can't assume your audience knows that, you need to communicate that fact. The part of the audience that understands that can read the papers just fine to figure out the details (they are not hard to read).
The general scientific principle, that higher levels of CO2 in the air increases Earth's temperature, is supported by both evidence and theory.
The fossil fuel industries have been hiding, obfuscating, and denying this for the past 30 years.
The closest historical example that comes to mind, as far as physics goes, is the Manhattan Project, and there we had a clear goal in mind and a timeline that was dictated by wartime necessity. The number of lives affected by Climate Change is comperable, but there's no clear enemy dictating the an agressive timeline.
The other issue is that the people with the money to burn, so to speak, are the fossil fuel companies and they have a vested interest in delaying the changes we need as long as possible. So they put that money to use in both the media and political arenas to play up the "debate" as long as they can. This is all exactly like it was with the Tobacco industry which fought for decades to keep the dangers of smoking from being publicized. Only it's not just smokers who get killed by melting ice caps.
TL;DR: we know enough about climate change to know that it's happening, it's a big deal, and we have to make major changes to avoid massive damage to our planet. The majority of the noise about how we "don't know enough" about it is coming from the people who have a vested interest in delaying these changes as long as possible.
The fact that there still isn't mainstream discussion about how society must change, but rather eternal growth society is still the default target across the globe is depressing and gives confidence that we are going to see substantial civilisation collapse in the future.
From https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/21/18-examples-of-the-sp... >Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “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.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “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.”
Consider this prediction: if Hillary Clinton (X) gets elected president in 2016, then 10% of the population in Libya will be killed by US bombing campaigns in 2017 (Y).
Obviously X did not happen, so Y never occurred as a predicted result, but was Y ever a valid prediction? Y might be considered a valid prediction because Hillary Clinton intervened in Libya in the past, resulting in the toppling of Qaddafi and scores of civilians being killed in civil unrest, but it is a wild prediction that is extremely unlikely for many reasons.
So, is there any evidence that the World adopted specific remedies in the 1970s which averted catastrophic Y predicted?
They get out of the lake two minutes later, so X ends up not happening. Are you going to argue that my prediction was not correct? Or that it is a wild prediction?
In the case of several of the ones you cited, they were based on an assumption that pollution levels would continue their rapid rise unabated. But we actually did put in a significant effort to get pollution under control, which was fairly successful. (High levels of pollution have significant health, agricultural, and climate consequences, which is why they were a key part of the base of many of those predictions).
I'm really curious if George Wald said this at all, and if he did, what specifically he was talking about. Nuclear proliferation was another of his areas of activism, for example.
Seriously? You're going to use that phrase and then complain that others aren't trustworthy? Physician, heal thyself.
And if you're the type to just automatically dismiss such a site out of hand as being too "biased" without actually reading what they have to say with an open mind, then perhaps the problem lies with you and not with them.
This is a strange thing to say. By claiming X and not-X, it means precisely nothing, but it superficially sounds judicious.
As an example of crap, a couple of articles were recently posted there about the current Judge Alsup proceedings - articles that were quite clearly incorrect to those of us actually following the proceedings; the reader comments called out this error. I don't know if the authors of those articles ever actually went back and corrected them, but I'm thinking not - which is bad! Also, I have on occasion seen things quoted there which weren't actual quotes, but rather paraphrases (to put it nicely) - which is also bad! For the record, these days the "legitimate" press is sometimes very bad at doing this kind of thing, too, but it seems that they are rarely called out for it.
Along those lines, I once saw a place which laid out an imaginary conversation with someone in the public eye (we'll say John Doe) where they "asked questions" and John Doe "gave answers". Then they actually had the gall to lay out a headline with one of the those imaginary answers - in quotes, no less. And then that headline made it into my supposedly legitimate newsfeed.
Another time they interviewed someone who was speaking about John Doe, and they said something like (and I'm just making this up because I don't remember the actual context) "Deep down inside John Doe probably thinks that all illegal immigrants should be shot on sight!" And then the headline was 'John Doe: "All illegal immigrants should be shot on sight!"' And once again that headline made it into my newsfeed. Crap like that makes me wonder if there actually any truly legitimate news organizations left around these days.
But more importantly, the articles will typically take one plot, image, or paragraph out of context and then build a story around it. The comments are just a bunch of back-slapping.
And certainly not all of the comments "are just a bunch of back-slapping" - in fact things can get quite heated at times. Which you would know if you'd actually read the site in depth and to any great extent.
There may have been valid complaints in the past that the site was sloppy and too one-sided. But the tone has changed quite a bit over recent years, in that they now try to keep everything more balanced and in context. For example, they may print large parts of an article while highlighting and commenting on certain portions of it, rather than just presenting a few sentences from it that they think are relevant, with little or no context. They will also try and make sure to point back to original sources whenever they can, and so on. They still get it wrong sometimes, though.
"I think that alarmism has hurt climate science ever since the 1960s."
Only one person in the above quotes is talking about climate (10, 18). And you could certainly find 10 climate "skeptics" who have been horribly wrong in the 90s.
I don't understand who is exactly being hurt by alarmism. Most people choose to ignore it anyway. Maybe you could provide some example where overzealous application of ecological policies have hurt society.
I've read it, and do you know why? Because I saw an article somewhere which was just vehemently hating on the book (or more specifically its author, IIRC), and since I'd never heard of it before - and since much of that hate didn't seem to be terribly coherent to me - I went ahead and read the book for myself. I'm weird that way.
Hard pass.
Nice try, though.
I will reiterate that I read the book myself because someone was trashing it so badly. And a lot of what I read there actually made sense, in spite of what the trashing claimed!
A lesson we all should have learned from "The Wizard of Oz" - when someone insists that we "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!", it's probably a good idea to go have a chat with that man behind the curtain!
I don't think anything that the Trump administration has done has changed any of the core issues. All of the changes they have made have been pretty blatent givaways to their donors, which also happen to be alot of fossil fuel companies, but they're still rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as far as actual effects on coal. As far as Oil and Natural Gas, there's still the problem of regulatory uncertainty and the dropping cost of alternative energy, which means companies are still more likely to keep fraking going on existing wells until they're dry rather than try to actually drill in the new areas that have been opened up. They still want the option to drill later on if conditions change, but they're moving very slowly in most cases.
Just like the team can't possibly party together after work, because no one can pronounce "karaoke" correctly.
Hold the line, sweet prince, you're doing the Lord's work.
Did some theorists dramatically underestimate the complexity of the world and rely too much on simple models in the 70s? Yes. Did scientists learn their lesson? Yes. Nobody's been doing that shit for decades.
Even so, in your "alarmism" list:
> “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
10.000 deaths a year are attributable to air pollution in London alone. That is despite the widespread introduction of environmental measures that reduced the pollution this quote is warning about:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/nearly-9...
In high pollution areas, regulation and cutting emissions has drastically improved health:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Triangle_(region)
Coal combustion in China’s power plants causes an estimated 250,000 deaths per year. according to the IEA (which is _far_ from an activist/alarmist organization. On the contrary it's been hilariously underestimating renewables: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/931869221386104832).
> “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss
"The current rate of global diversity loss is estimated to be 100 to 1000 times higher than the (naturally occurring) background extinction rate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Species_loss_rate...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
"Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years."
https://www.c-span.org/video/?444172-1/california-governor-j...
As to London and the UK, the problems lately appear to be related to the cold and secondary issues caused by that. (See example article below.) So maybe air pollution shouldn't necessarily be their biggest concern at the moment.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/923627/UK-health...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/19/a-third-...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3322
Your second point, that cold deaths are also an issue, isn't in any way relevant to the discussion of pollution.
You can go on denying the science, and/or being upset that people care too much about these issues. But you wont be right, or savy, or pragmatic for it. You'll just be part of the problem instead of the solution.
(n.b. benefits of climate change due to milder winters are looked at in the IPCC as well 11.4.1.2: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/WGIIAR5-Cha...)
And I didn't make a connection between pollution and cold, either; rather I said that their priorities here might need to shift - less concern about pollution, more concern about people staying out of the cold. And "staying out of the cold" implies maybe burning more fossil fuels, which would generate more CO2, which everyone knows isn't itself pollution anyway.
As far as "problem" vs. "solution", my main goal is trying to get people to NOT buy into all of the doomsday environmental scenarios that are constantly being thrown about now. History has shown that such prognostications are almost always nonsense. (Plain old common sense should tell you that, too, but it seems a lot of people lack common sense these days.) I mean, we don't want people going off on a tangent and doing what this guy did (see below)! Amirite?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/04/1...
But sure, the real problem is a governor getting the wording of deadly heatwave slightly wrong. Were you even aware of the solid research he is alluding to, or are you above googling some facts for a few seconds because the statement rubbed you the wrong way? Is the fact that it's likely that thousands will die in heat waves somehow less concerning to you than the governors choice of words?
And no, history has not shown "such prognostications are almost always nonsense". There is simply no historical precedent here. We don't have a precedent of solid scientific consensus, backed by massive amounts of data, vast careful impact studies, etc ever even being performed in any field. But typically science done much less carefully has turned out to be overwhelmingly right.
The list given earlier (which has now disappeared from this thread, apparently) showed at least a dozen or so dire Earth Day predictions which obviously didn't come true. There's no particular reason to believe that at least the more dire of climate change predictions will come true, either, especially given that many predictions haven't come anywhere close to being true even though we were told to expect serious consequences by now. By that I mean things like "major ice loss at the poles", "polar bear population collapse", "the end of snow", "the new normal" (in various contexts), "major agricultural decline", and so on. Though it's certainly easy enough for some folks to play the "Well, maybe it didn't happen as early as originally predicted, but it will definitely happen by the year 2050 or 2100" game, isn't it?
BTW, I don't necessarily consider it a coincidence that item number 6 from that list mentioned 4 billion people, and Gov. Brown also mentioned 4 billion people in total. That's a big, scary number, but it apparently was taken at least somewhat seriously in the past, so why not just recycle it for the future?
And yes, I'm quite aware of various forecasts concerning heat and such. However, historically cold has generally been far more deadly than heat; see the following, for example.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weath...
Now see the following, which near the end makes the following bold claim: "One thing that’s clear: climate change will make things worse"
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/17/1685139...
Well, gee, folks, if cold-related deaths are historically up to 20 times higher than heat-related deaths, then common sense suggests that the above claim is just pretty much total bullshit on the face of it, since we're being told to expect cold waves to decrease while heat waves increase.
As to your "We don't have a precedent ..." statement, common sense should tell you that we probably still don't have any such situation! I've actually looked at some of that data directly myself and found it wanting. I'm somewhat hesitant to use the word "fraudulent" here (but I think that applies to at least some of it), so I will just use the words "sloppy" and “highly suspect” instead.
A funny thing about your “vast” statement: The latest numbers that I recall seeing (I’m not sure where) claimed that there are currently something like 70,000 climate scientists out there who have by now published hundreds of thousands of climate-related papers, or some such. Which is funny because just a few years ago the numbers that I recall seeing weren’t anywhere close to this; we’re talking at least an order of magnitude difference here, IIRC. So, taking these claims at face value, then you probably would have to have had a truly remarkable increase recently in the number of climate scientists (maybe they just breed like rabbits?), with an equally remarkable burst of publishing productivity on their part (maybe they’re just working really, really hard trying to save the planet?). All of this, of course, in the face of painful restrictions on research funding and competition for journal space in general. I’m just not buying said claims personally, so methinks that maybe you’re being a bit too gullible here.
Again, the IPCC report I linked above explicitly compares the expected increase in mortality in summer and the expected decrease in winter and finds the former outweighs the latter.
And yes, research into climate change, and specifically climate change impact has vastly expanded in recent years. It's still a tiny fraction of the overall research budget, so this is simply a shift in emphasize.
Of course there is sloppy science out there, not every of the 70.000 you quote (I don't know where that number comes from) is a beacon of integrity. I've refereed enough papers in my life to know that first hand. That's why IPCC reports were such an important exercise. They document consensus, not just publications.
As an unbiased, outside observer who's been a huge science nerd almost since birth, yeah I kind of am - in at least some very important respects. While I have no particular skin in this game (it's not my bread and butter, so to speak), I'm generally quite good at seeing the big picture on things (the forest vs. the trees). Plus I've rubbed elbows with enough PhD-types in my life, both inside academia and out in industry, to know that they very often don't really have a good grasp of reality. They can be pretty freaking clueless, in other words.
As a computer nerd myself, I have no fear of downloading large datasets and analyzing them - and finding them wanting, perhaps. Nor do I have any particular faith in various computer models which are being relied on so heavily these days in fields like climate science. "Garbage in, garbage out", as the old saying goes.
As a referee, how much of that kind of thing do you actually do yourself? Download the data sets and analyze them? (This amounted to thousands of files in my particular case.) Review the algorithms and the supposed logic behind them? Maybe even run the modeling software itself to see what the results look like, perhaps as you tweak various settings? Or do you just take whatever is given to you in those papers at face value? There are quite a few people out there now who have actually gone through these analysis steps - spending hours, days, maybe even weeks or whatever doing so- and they often have't been particularly impressed with what they've found.
"there is no misaligned incentive structure here."
Yeah there is, in that apparently there are quite a few researchers and others out there who will quietly tell you that they themselves may have real doubts about an issue (whatever it is), but are afraid to speak up too loudly out of fear of being beaten down professionally because of it. And then there's the whole "gravy train" problem, where folks will just jump on whatever bandwagon they think will get them funding and get their papers published and so on. This even though they themselves may not necessarily particularly qualified to speak in that area. In that I’m including things like saying “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now!”, which may not get them much traction. But change that to say “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now because of climate change!”, and then they may get lots of traction. There’s also the issue where negative results and results which go too much against the grain may rarely get published - because those peer-reviewed journals that everyone if supposedly so enamored of are first and foremost a business, after all, and they need to move product, so they will pick and choose whichever papers they think will help them do that. They also don’t want to go around ticking off their best customers (especially the ones who control the subscriptions), if publishing said research papers might make those customers look bad.
As far as the "eternal growth society", I have to completely agree. But I would say there continues to be discussion around the (de)merits of capitalism. As a counter point, there are still about a BILLION people without access to electricity (something that rarely in the mainstream discussion). Advancements in electricity access (~70% in 1990; ~87% now) is a place we can probably all agree that growth is warranted.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/science/jim-bridenstine-n...
As the old saying goes: "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones."
For those who are so torn up about the situation, nothing's stopping you from finding a piece of cheap real estate out in the middle of nowhere (maybe by a nice stream or a lake), building a yurt or whatever and then just living off the land. That's the kind of thing our ancestors often had to do, and that's the kind of thing people in underdeveloped countries still often have to do. (Hence why they are called "underdeveloped countries".)
Your argument is based on the assumption that if X and Y and Z all have a particular bad consequence, then X and Y and Z are all equally bad, with no consideration to how much of the bad consequence each has, or what other, good consequences each have.
That's not valid reasoning. I'm curious if it has a name.
> That's not valid reasoning. I'm curious if it has a name.
The type of reasoning you describe is called a false equivalence.
Not many people like to think about what they're actually swimming in when they're at the ocean. (Let someone pee in the pool, though, and everybody freaks out!) In any case, I expect that you're smart enough to know that likely not a drop of that urine is going to make it out of your back yard! And even if you peed directly into the ocean (even if you personally generated 21 million gallons of effluent), that's not really much compared to what's already out there naturally - fish pee and poop and rotting dead things and such. (Fun fact: Much of the sand on the beaches that you and your family love to play on may have itself started out as fish poop.) Even less so when you consider that most of that 21 million gallons is just water anyway.
Quick quiz: What do you think becomes of things like E. coli and other nasties when they hit seawater? (Consider issues like temperature, salinity, and pH.) And if you're worried about viruses and such, then maybe you should go ask J. Craig Venter about that.
In other words, while 21 millions gallons of untreated sewage sounds like a lot (and I personally wouldn't want to swim in it or anything), it's probably less of big deal than you think it is. It would probably be best to filter out the biosolids first, though, since those may have actual value. As might the nitrogen in urine (urea), if that could be extracted.
In any case, you're right to point out that it's troll behavior to dump all of the effects of industrial pollution and the resultant politics on a single individual's shoulders, as though one person would have a measurable impact on global climate.
~southern_cross is just framing their argument as, "if you haven't killed yourself yet, then you can't care about the environment", and that's an easy argument to ignore.
As the oil companies have rightly pointed out in the current court case (and this may matter a lot from a legal perspective), they aren't actually the ones who are emitting all the carbon - their customers are. (That would be "you" and "me".) The coal mines and the natural gas companies can make much the same claim, except their direct customers are generally the power companies.
https://qz.com/1129028/a-peruvian-farmer-is-suing-german-ene...
https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iq...
https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iq...
(from National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado)
https://www.hockeydirect.com/Catalogue/Hockey-Sticks/Grays-H...
Hockey sticks that you use to play ice hockey have a long straight line that goes up and to the right, like strong linear growth.
https://puckstop.com/product/true-xc9-acf-youth-hockey-stick