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While I can appreciate your argument, particularly how some climate change activism can appear to be bullying, you lost me at your last paragraph:

>You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm either stupid or evil? Ehhhhh, no thanks.

The fact that you exhale co2 is just not relevant. It's not your exhalation that is menacing the future of humans and other animals. It's the "exhalations" of industrial-scale energy generation (and also industrial-scale agriculture, etc) that are the problem. Surely you see that, yes?

> stupid or evil

I'm not accusing you, but there absolutely are some evil people at work here. These are people who know (and in many cases have known for decades) that what they're doing - large scale atmospheric dumping of co2 - is going to cause real harm and suffering to fellow humans, but choose to do it anyway because they personally profit from it and their wealth insulates them from the consequences within their lifetime.

> It's not your exhalation that is menacing the future of humans and other animals

I don't trust you, or anyone else, with the power to make this determination.

> These are people who know (and in many cases have known for decades) that what they're doing - large scale atmospheric dumping of co2 - is going to cause real harm and suffering to fellow humans

It is absurd to suggest that anyone "knows" what a system as complex as the Earth will be like in the future. Many people believe that this is the most likely future, and I'm sure some of them don't care.

> It is absurd to suggest that anyone "knows" what a system as complex as the Earth will be like in the future. Many people believe that this is the most likely future, and I'm sure some of them don't care.

it's absurd to suggest radiative transfer and heat retention aren't well understood scientific phenomena.

Is your argument "the earth is complicated enough that nobody can ever understand it completely, so don't even bother"? Because that's a laughable attitude.

Regarding your exhalation comment, the specific problem is not CO2 itself. The problem is liberating CO2 from fossil-fuel sinks where it has been sequestered away from the atmosphere for millions of years.

And I think your comments come to the real problem for people with controlling greenhouse gases. My dad is in this boat. He might say "I deny that my actions hurt the earth. I don't want to look at the evidence, and I don't trust anyone who says I might be doing damage by driving a gas guzzler. I deny I could be hurting things. I refuse to believe anything that leads to that conclusion".

How do you react to the internal reports and information films produced by, as it turns out, most of the major oil companies in the 1980s and 1990s?

That was the time for gradual moves to fuels with lower carbon, and a gradual shift to more consideration of the ecosystem.

Whilst the scientific consensus of how serious and urgent a problem we face was still being honed, the fossil fuel industry was pretty unequivocal about it. Clearly they don't fit the same political or activist labels yet seem to be painting a future just as unpleasant as the most strident activists. A future that is going to require regulation and restriction of some choices as "being mindful" isn't going to cut any production or output from the plastic factory, or internal combustion, or any reduction in the worst forms of agriculture (grain fed cattle).

Humanity, or more precisely, political parties and industry ignored clear warnings for 40 years. We seem to have left it much too late for gradual anything to work. We ran out of time, thanks to a succession of governments across the globe, of all colours, sweeping it under the rug. 40 years of "not on my watch".

The scientific consensus is over 97% of climate related scientists find there is an urgent problem. What should we do now?

As an aside I try not to heed much from activists, political, religious or anything else, even on issues where I sympathise. The sensible and accurate discussion is usually found a little further from the margins.

> This is a tricky subject

nope

> "We're trying to save these neanderthals and they're stupid/tricked by evil so they're going to end up killing us all."

this but unironically

> but do you really believe that all of them were fed that mantra by bad actors, and none of them are just lashing out at bullies?

ah yes, the guys with total political power are being bullied

> You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm either stupid or evil

yep

Don't have much skin in this argument, but this would convince absolutely nobody not already aligned with those beliefs. . .which was GP's point in the first place.

> Don't have much skin in this argument

Do you expect to live another 20+ years? Do you have children or young people you care about? If so, I think you have plenty of skin in the game.

Let me rephrase. I don't have much skin in erubin and oldandtired's particular talking points on this post in HN. Happy?

Yeah, I didn't really understand this comment. Every living human has a skin in this argument.

A young resident of coastal Bangladesh has a whole lot more skin in the game than a 60-year-old millionaire in Colorado.

Nearly everyone has family or friends they care about. But point taken.

You want me to support your political campaign to regulate the gas that I exhale, because otherwise there will be a doomsday, and if I don't agree I'm either stupid or evil? Ehhhhh, no thanks

This sounds like at least a mildly stupid mindset to me. "Some people associated with your movement made an assumption about me that I don't like, so I'm not going to participate regardless of its merit."

If not "stupid", how about "spiteful, stubborn, and unwilling to face hard truths"?

You might call it mild stupidity - and that may be accurate - but I'd call it being human.

Humans react differently to the same information based on how it is presented. It seems to me that activists - specifically those on the left - often fail to take this into account.

I almost always agree with those activists. I certainly agree about global warming. But - pragmatically - if your goal is to convince skeptics, you ought to be very concerned about tone. For better or worse, how you tell your story is at least as important as the evidence backing up your story.

The problem is that a lot of people simply refuse to listen. That would require them to acknowledge that their comfortable lifestyle is unsustainable and needs to change to something less comfortable.

If you agree, why don't you think of yourself as an activist?

Being an activist implies that one proselytizes or at least takes an active role. I do neither so I'm not an activist.

> From my perspective, the activists started their political campaign to regulate CO2 back when the Science (IPCC FAR) said "the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability" and I have been suspicious of their motives ever since.

The IPCC report is typically more conservative, as it requires a consensus of a large number of scientists. However, even in this case, this phrase is a qualifier that follows a number of stronger statements (and also notes that it could be hiding further warming). For example, the executive summary (we are certain of the following), point two ends with

> These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth's surface.

The earlier Charney report (1979), has in its summary

> Their consensus has been that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth

and

> If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible

Even in 1979, long before the FAR, it was clear that carbon dioxide would alter the climate. Claiming that activists were jumping the gun on the scientific case in 1990 is not fair. They may have ulterior motives, but wanting to regulate CO2 in 1990 is not evidence of this.

The science has significantly progressed since then, such that the evidence is now even clearer. There are arguments to suggest that it would be cheaper to pay for the adaptation to climate change, but unfortunately it is now very clear that the costs for that will be high.

Malthusian activism goes back at least to 1972, but I doubt that any of the early climate change research was originally planned as a political weapon.

no I think it's usually more like -

first 10 years - there's some problems here that maybe we should think about doing something about it.

second 10 years - ok heh heh, well the stuff we were talking about I guess you guys thought it was a joke but really we think there might be a cause for concern and we should somehow rein it back a notch. Please?

third 10 years - really, we're serious. Things cannot continue like this there will be real problems look at all the data that we have been amassing since we started talking about it.

forty years in - are you people kidding me? I am really starting to doubt some of your people's intentions are in the right place. This has civilization threatening consequences, at the worst maybe even extinction of human life. We need to get a handle on this now, look at the data. The people who say the data is lying are themselves lying or at worst very confused.

50 years in - We're trying to save these neanderthals and they're stupid/tricked by evil so they're going to end up killing us all.

Now I realize that someone doesn't like to hear that they're stupid or evil, but when the subject under discussion is extinction of human life and you don't want to support the political campaigns to do something about it because of the tone of that campaign?

That's like that one time my friend was walking around in the start of a hurricane hitting shore (not knowing anything because somewhat insular) and the cop said hey jerk get inside it's a hurricane and it could kill you! If my friend had then taken that warning and said well, I don't like his tone I think I will just walk around some more, when he finally died I guess everyone would think well he was stupid, and if he said I'm gonna make all these school kids walk around with me, they would have said well he was evil.

And of course if we were really to be accurate we are at least 70 years in on warnings that human activity was negatively affecting the climate at a serious level.

Here's another colorful retelling:

199X: We have proxies that show 1998 is the warmest year in history, and things are warming so fast that we're in serious trouble. Give us power!

200X: OK, luckily 1998 was an outlier but we're still warming too much on average. The sea is going to rise and the Arctic is going to be ice-free. Give us power!

201X: OK, the Arctic still has some ice but the Northwest Passage is opening up. The seas are still rising a bit, and here are some scary local flooding and erosion stories. Coral reefs are all going to die. Give us power!

Where are you getting "give us power!" from?

Are climate researchers trying to get elected into positions of power? I haven't seen any evidence of that.

As far as I can tell most people just want to stop burning down the house we live in.

It's hard to have a conversation about something important like this when anything but fervent acceptance of the party line is immediately derided as ignorant, backwards and/or deliberately obtuse. The left certainly seems to be a lot more "with us or against us" than they used to.

> with us or against us.

Bush junior’s usage comes to mind immediately.

The linked wiki article shows a fairly even divide in its use though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_either_with_us,_or_...

>"anything but fervent acceptance of the party line is immediately derided as ignorant, backwards and/or deliberately obtuse."

That's because it is.

We're realizing that we're in much deeper shit climate-wise, than we used to think. It's a literal mass extinction, and yet people continue to squabble about stupid petty nonsense. But there's money to be made by appealing to the ignorant comfortable masses.

Funny, you could say the same thing about the Right.

Plenty of examples.

Every day we read of Professors not receiving tenure because they believe in global warming. Articles that support global warming being rejected from journals. Notable commentators suggesting the belief in global warming should be criminalized.

Whatever.

Oh, definitely. The two seem to be more similar than not, once you look past the window dressing. I don't know if this is new or I'm just more cynical these days.

> The "no greenhouse gases, no global warming" people might not know how to study the climate

Good thing there's real scientists conducting this research and releasing reports. But let's instead ignore that and go off our personal brief system instead...

You want to be mindful of CO2 in the atmosphere and move toward emitting less of it, but you don’t want to regulate it? How does that work?

People used to burn mostly wood for energy, then coal, then oil. Each material has more energy per carbon molecule than the last. Natural gas releases still more energy per carbon molecule, and nuclear fission is a different paradigm that doesn't emit carbon at all during power generation. Neither of the last two has come close to reaching its full potential as an energy source.

The US met the goals in the Paris Agreement this year, mostly by using domestic natural gas. This kind of progress is not going to stop because everyone wants to go back to being covered in coal soot. We'll probably be using mostly carbon-free energy sources by the end of the century.

Or, people might try so desperately to claim the power to "save the world" that a war breaks out and we go back to burning wood for survival.

How do you know that progress won’t stop? There’s no market force encouraging lower carbon emissions.

Your statement that wood has less energy for its carbon emissions is highly misleading. It may be technically correct, but since that carbon recently came out of the atmosphere, the net emission is zero. The actual trend, then, is zero carbon emissions, then a lot, then less. That seems rather uninformative when looking at where things would head in the future.

Forests are not a linear system. If everyone still burned wood for power we'd lose millions of acres of forest very quickly, and they wouldn't grow back. Unless/until the people died off I guess.

> The US met the goals in the Paris Agreement this year, mostly by using domestic natural gas.

It certainly did not. Where did you get that information?

Yep that's wrong, my bad. Emissions are going down, but not enough for those targets.

Ironically, the current US government intervention, at least in rhetoric, is encouraging more coal -- more inefficiency, counter to the free market forces.

>"We'll probably be using mostly carbon-free energy sources by the end of the century."

That's around 60 years too late, by current estimations.

Change needs to happen a lot faster than that.

Yesterday I was at a brewery in a particularly nerdy, computer-sciency part of town. There were a couple of guys having drinks at the end of the bar, and they were conversing loudly enough that I knew they wanted to be heard.

One loud guy says to the other, “my professor at [mumbled] college told us that there’s no way that smoking can cause birth defects. He said that research would be unethical because they’d have to force women to have babies and force them to smoke. Blah blah blah ...” All the guys around him nod in agreement then go on to share screeds about how the liberals are ruining all the fun the world and violating their personal freedoms.

And, I’m thinking to myself, “What the F is going on?” They were talking confidently enough that even I second-guessed my my beliefs on smoking. So, I hit Google Scholar, read the abstracts of the top 5 papers (out of hundreds), and then felt relief that, yes, the science on this topic seems legit and well-explored. And, yes, it is dangeous for pregnant women to smoke.

But, I’m still bothered. These guys seemed like educated, and likely intelligent, people. And, yet, they’re trapped in a political belief system that is making them doubt science wholesale. Some authority figures (likely with same political stance) can tell them ‘facts’ with enough conviction that these guys buy it without question. And, worse, they go on to confidently spread memes about the unreliability of science, scientists, and the liberal political agenda.

To me, as a scientist, this is scary as hell. For 300+ years, we’ve been using science as our most reliable way to understand the world and make rational predictions. And, now, people are disavowing science if it slightly goes against their belief system. What does this means for the future? I don’t know, but I can’t imagine that it’s good.

(By the way, I don’t consider myself a ‘liberal’, although that’s what I am called these days. Generally, I just try to learn a lot about things and side with what seems like the most rational position.)

>By the way, I don’t consider myself a ‘liberal’, although that’s what I am called these days.

It seems a small minority on the left and probably slightly larger one on the right love to pigeonhole people into these categories. Meanwhile the majority don't really think of themselves in those terms and are feeling politically homeless.

Yes. That kind of labeling is a nice way of short-circuiting people's though process. If you label someone, then everybody can see that they are either friend, or enemy, and you don't have to spend further energy trying to see if what they are saying makes sense. It is terrible for rational discussion, and I wish people would just stop doing it.

Not present in this anecdote:

- The replication crisis is real

- The university system is a huge and corrupt industry

- The university is no longer a "safe space" for wrong-thinkers

But sure, whenever someone rejects good science it's the fault of those darn Republicans!

There is some truth in those comments, but it's also true that climate change is real and we are accelerating it with our choices to burn more carbon based fuels. It's basically undeniable at this stage, yet people whose lives are inconvenienced by it deny the truth. You cannot and should not use problems in certain papers as an excuse to deny the inexcusable.

I'm trying to see where he blamed Republicans, and I'm not seeing it. Do you want to rethink or reword that?

Is anyone that speaks of likely consequences an activist?

Could you name a specific person you consider to be a reasonable actor and who holds any of the beliefs you cited? Eg land use.

I can't think of anyone who actually says those things, is why I ask. People opposed to reducing emissions usually tend not to think about it or dismiss it, in my experience.

Freeman Dyson would be one example. Note that this isn't an endorsement of his positions or a statement on the general question, I'm just providing the example of someone who isn't obviously unreasonable and has clearly thought about the issues.

The original statement "the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability" seems to have come from a preliminary report in 1990. I wonder if you've had a chance to do more re-search since?