However you go one step further and attack anyone who dares question that view, and you do it with the a sense of righteousness as though you did understand the topic and applied the scientific method to get there. That's just bullying, but you get away with it because you're part of a mob. I mean it's one thing for an expert to claim certainty and argue their point of view, but you aren't actually certain - you just picked the safer bet.
To be clear, I think the world would be a lot better place with less burning coal. I care a lot about the poisoning and pollution in the oceans. I think smog is disgusting. I probably have one of the smallest "carbon footprints" of any adult you know. However, I know a fair amount about programming, math, and simulations, and I don't trust anyone who says they can predict a chaotic system 50-100 years into the future.
And concensus doesn't compel me much at all. Once upon a time in America, you could probably get a concensus (even among scientists!) that God was real.
Also the parent comment is more about risk management. The sensible thing to do in the absence of information is precisely to imagine the worst outcomes and act with them in mind. The precautionary principle is a statutory requirement in law in some jurisdictions to help avoid the worst outcomes.
Are future generations worth more than current? Should we militarily prohibit poor countries from using fossil fuels which they use to better their lives?
You can say worst outcomes with other things too, meteor, nuclear war, pandemic, terrorism, etc. you always have to find a balance.
With the climate change debate, this balance is completely ignored and people are seriously suggesting making fundamental changes to society without having any ability to know what the consequences of those will be.
Climate catastrophism is itself a potential danger.
Wind and solar constitute less than 1% of world energy consumption and doesn't have all the other properties and uses that makes oil such a fundamental and necessary ingredient for modern living. Hopefully overtime we will find something that's better, for now it's hard to find as amazing and flexible a resource as oil.
Nuclear would probably win out, then oil and coal
Possibly, but it doesn't seem likely. In most parts of the US, it's cheaper to build new solar or wind than any of the fossil fuels. In some areas, I've read that it's cheaper to build new solar or wind than to run existing fossil plants. I don't know what the rest of the world looks like though.
I would urge you, if you are really interested in the truth and a rational position on this, to go and do the research. |
I did which is why I am very very aware of the difference between speculation and demonstration and how much of the claims of wind and solars ability to power most of the worlds energy needs are a completete utopia.
Again less than 1% of the world's energy is the consumption of solar and wind, and that's with all the political tailwind it has gotten.
A lot of the cost of building nuclear is extreme bureaucracy and the kind of security metrics are being asked, yet it's still much better than solar and wind in the long run, much safer, more stable, cleaner, scalable and cheaper.
So yeah lets remove the subsidies. Wind and solar will fall apart.
There is a lot of daylight between our respective positions. I don't agree with most of your assumptions, or statements of fact. So of course I don't agree with your conclusions. Alas, our realities are so far apart, there's zero profit in trying to find common ground.
I do have a request, a suggestion: Make some predictions. Set some arbitrary horizons. Guess what you think will happen. Write it down. (No need to share with me.)
I used to be very bullish on both algae for biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol. Much disappointment. As a layperson, I don't know enough to know the why nots and what ifs. Or if those two techs can ever be viable.
Likewise, I totally didn't foresee solar doubling every 30 months. Nor the rise of the wind juggernaut.
I was wrong. I usually am. So with new data, I reluctantly have updated my worldview.
I'm curious if you can do the same.
I'm from Denmark originally I grew up with wind and understand the pros and cons pretty well and I know the reality of wind and solar which isn't what you seem to think it is.
Furthermore, now I am investing in interesting energy companies doing anything substantial and I can just tell you that it's a much harder problem than most thing and is solved by neither sun nor wind.
I am wrong about a lot of things and I will change my position when I am, however, this is not an area I am wrong about but an area I predict you will realize in 10 years from now that I was right about.
This is why I say there is no scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change we can't deal with and I have yet to hear anyone able to refute that. Climate catastrophism is going to be a joke a decade from now and we won't be leaving oil anytime soon, it's simply too valuable for human life and the ability to live with nature.
Furthermore, I seem to be one of the few people who actually care about the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion which is how much do humans affect the climate. What's the number? Where is scientifically demonstrated proof?
If you can give me that and show me it's high then you have convinced me. Until you do that then you are asking me to act on something there is no scientific evidence for.
Anyway, thank you for at least being civil about it and not (I assume) downvote me like more or less anyone do on anyone who dares say anything that isn't part of the normal spiel.
I don't know. I've seen so much fear-mongering in my life. We're all going to die from zika, n1h1, ebola, killer bees, aids, mrsa, terrorists, and so on. In each case, there's something to be afraid of, and you might actually know someone who died in one those ways, but the media and the lay people blow it way out of proportion. The people I've know who died have been from drugs, suicide, heart failure, stroke, and car accidents.
> The sensible thing to do in the absence of information is precisely to imagine the worst outcomes and act with them in mind.
I can't accept that as sensible. It's easy to contrive unacceptable courses of action by applying that rule: "The police don't know who the murderers are, so they lock up everyone to avoid the worst outcome." "The doctor isn't sure how bad the infection is, so we amputate all the limbs just in case."
America has an apocalyptical culture. Probably from the cultural imprint of our end times themed christianity during the early years. That whole book of revelations madness. (The Puritans who first colonized the New World were fruitcakes, even back then.)
But we did come very close to snuffing ourselves with nukes a few times.
And ever since I started paying attention to ecological collapse, mid 1980s, pretty much all the predictions have come true. (The only confusing bit there is we've also had amazing technical progress, masking the underlying destruction.)
I so hope that I'm just being an alarmist and it's all going to work out. I have kids, and hopefully grandkids one day. Yet I remain concerned.
Same for the ozone hole, or dying trees from acid rain. When the source of the problem is identified, we can fix it, and that's the case for greenhouse-gas-caused climate change.
Then you obviously don't know basic physics. The average temperature is much easier to predict (if some worse feedback doesn't get involved to make the development even worse, that is) than the microscopic "chaotic movements." I rather believe that what's behind your statement is that you just don't care what is going to happen in 50 or 100 years.
Ugh, if you're going to just attack me, why not jump to the big guns and call me a shill for the oil company or some other cliche.
> The average temperature is much easier to predict
If you do enough averaging over a long enough period, this can be true. I mean, we can all tell the average position of a double pendulum. I'm guessing you think 1, 10, or 100 years is enough time to average temperature. Try looking at the last 400,000 years and tell me how well you can predict those swings.
> I rather believe that what's behind your statement is that you just don't care what is going to happen in 50 or 100 years.
You can believe anything you want, but I doubt you used the scientific method to get there.
Actually if we had so reliable measurements for that period like we do for last hundred years, it would not be hard.
Your arguments have no basis, just an attempt to distract from the facts by grasping for what is not being discussed (e.g. 400 thousand years precise inference). Given the information we do have we have very good understanding of the relevant phenomena.
The use of that number is the kind of outright political manipulation that's so prevalent in this debate.
Keep in mind we aren't even talking about scientifically demonstrated conclusions, we are talking about speculated conclusions. The IPCC doesn't do any research themselves and don't check the data, its a meta-study.
What started my skepticism was when I realized they don't actually know how much human co2 emissions affect the temperature. Go try and find that number, you won't find it cause we don't know. Once I realized that and started understanding how the climate models work and saw how much interpretation and fitting and vague language was being used to obstruct the actual science, I realized that worrying about the environment was more rational. There is very very little actually demonstrated science in the climate debate it's almost entirely ideological and used by politicians to gain more power and create something to rally up voters around. In 10 years the climate catastrophism we see today will be laughed at. Just wait and see.
That is very unlikely.
There is literally no scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change that we don't know how to deal with today let alone in 10-40-100 years from now.
They may well be right, but they weren’t saying that they had reason to believe the IPCC had understated the influence carbon dioxide, methane, or some other gas has on the climate, or that predicted emissions where wrong, etc. They were complaining that the report didn’t have enough scare mongering. That’s not science, and it could easily lead to a big overcorrection in a few years.
The scientific consensus which EVERYONE agrees about even the so-called skeptics is that the climate is changing.
There is no consensus that it's human-caused, there are some indications that humans have an effect but you won't find any actual scientific proof of how much.
So the real question here is why you blindly believe something that you haven't even understood. You are literally just repeating the media not actually science which is a much more subtle discussion.
If you want to know more, you can google this. It's a discussion that, if not for the fossil fuel money being pumped into stirring up controversy (also well demonstrated, also google-able), would have been settled long ago.
As a depressing parallel, there are also HIV deniers, too. There's one prominent scientist, I think the guy who invented PCR, who claims that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, and he's got a small following. It's dwindled over the years, but he's still out there, trying to raise doubts despite the mainstream science on HIV leading to treatments and even possible cures, while his work leads to nothing.
Edited to mention: of course! There are also evolution deniers! Why does everyone dismiss them, but open their arms to skeptics of human-caused climate change? What's different about human-caused climate change and evolution?
And I don't need to google it I actually spent years looking at the material and methods. You on the other hand cause if you had you wouldn't claim things like 99% and you wouldn't actually believe consensus was science.
Not a single concrete piece of evidence for your position just claims.
Where is the scientifically demonstrated number that shows how much humans affect the climate?
"Google it".
Couldn't find it? Of course you can't cause we don't know what that number is because we haven't actually demonstrated it. Instead we are speculating that because we can't find other reasons and CO2 emissions correlate with the temperature increase then it must be that.
Yet how do you explain the 0.5 degree increase from late 1800- mid 1900 were we didn't do any significant CO2 emissions and how do you explain that the temperature haven't gotten up much more than the same 0.5 from the mid 1900?
Yes humans probably have some effect but we don't know how much.
If 100% agreed that it was humans caused that doesn't change anything unless they can scientifically demonstrate it which they can't.
All you have is namecalling. No science, no data just an attempt at bullying without anything to back you up.
I can back my beliefs up scientifically, you can't. Yet you call me the denier.
> The IPCC doesn't do any research themselves and don't check the data, its a meta-study.
The people writing the chapters are involved in doing the research. (It's not like doing that is a full-time job, mind.)
> What started my skepticism was when I realized they don't actually know how much human co2 emissions affect the temperature. Go try and find that number, you won't find it cause we don't know.
For anyone wondering, look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity
Short answer - doubling the atmospheric CO2 should lead to an increase between 1.5 and 4.5°C, though more current work I remember narrowed the range down somewhere around 2.3°C-3°C. There is a lot of work down to narrow it down further.
If you are suggesting most people should do original climate research, you are going to be disappointed.
If I get cancer, I assume that consensus medical science is going to give me the best treatments.
Simply that there is no such consensus - "'97% Of Climate Scientists Agree' Is 100% Wrong":
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-cl...
From the article:
"Bottom line: What the 97% of climate scientists allegedly agree on is very mild and in no way justifies restricting the energy that billions need...But it gets even worse. Because it turns out that 97% didn’t even say that..."
The Forbes article describes how the "97%" value was fabricated:
"Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t."
"The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested..."
Read it and weep (or laugh).
> In a September 11, 2018 piece at the CIP website, Epstein disclosed “proudly” that one of his industry clients was Tyler White, president of the Kentucky Coal Association. [22]
Also interesting:
> Alexander Epstein planned to release his “Energy Liberation Plan” for consideration by 2016 political candidates. According to an article by Epstein in Forbes, the Energy Liberation Plan seeks to combat “backwards energy and environmental policies that are anti-development, not anti-pollution.” He contends that we are “squandering the opportunity of a generation, through blind opposition to our three most potent sources of power: hydrocarbon energy (coal, oil, and gas), nuclear energy, and hydroelectric energy.” [15]
I am reading, and I am neither weeping nor laughing, because this is exactly what I expected to see.
If this is someone you expect to accurately represent climate science, I think you are mistaken in holding them in that regard.
As a counterpoint, here's another take on the "97%" figure, a review of the several meta-studies that have been done on climate science:
http://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consen...
Their conclusion is that between 90 and 100% of climate science papers agree that 1) climate change is occurring and 2) it is caused by human industrial sources.
Of course, the man paid by the Kentucky Coal Association would disagree, but in this case I would defer to Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Sources: