Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
People have viewed climate change as a political issue and its not. It’s a scientific issue. It’s the astroid hurtling toward earth in the movie Armageddon or the aliens in Independence Day. The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.
Let this sink in: We are literally adding half the renewables we need just to keep the emissions curve flat. We probably need to go 4X faster to bend the curve downwards on emissions.
Can engineers solve that? They are a piece of the puzzle, but their most fundamental innovations will take years to kick in. We need policy, we need individual behavioral changes, we need everything we can get.
The only conclusion that can be made from these IPCC projections is that we will not avoid a 2C increase because there's no chance that people would be willing to "pay the price" to achieve that.
To get close to zero emissions you'd also need to:
1) replace or remove all non-electric vehicles worldwide. That third world farmer with a thirty year old tractor who can't possibly afford to replace it with anything, much less with something new? That twenty year old pickup truck for a small storeowner? All those vehicles would have to stop being used. They would have to be pried out of their hands long before they become useless, meaningfully harming their livelihood (as replacements won't be affordable to them - they can't buy a ten-year old used truck/tractor because that's also fossil fuel based), which doesn't seem plausible without violence.
1a) Also, replace almost all ships worldwide.
1b) Also, replace all the fossil fuel based house heating systems. Poor regions without a centralised supply heating their homes with firewood? You're not allowed to burn that anymore, you need to build infrastructure to supply you with nuclear electricity.
2) Stop concrete production unless you also sequester enough carbon to compensate. That pretty much means destroying large parts of construction industry by making it prohibitively expensive, especially in poorer countries.
2a) Also, revamp all worldwide steel production.
3) Have everyone worldwide stop eating beef.
These three things won't be sufficient, but are required to even approach zero emissions. Does it seem plausible to suceed in somehow forcing everyone worldwide to implement such policies within a decade?
So governments should better finance mitigations for the consequences of climate change.
Of course, people will eventually be forced to finance mitigations or suffer the consequences unmitigated - but that's not now, that's later. Prevention is likely to be much cheaper and more effective, but as the people aren't willing to pony up the enormous resources for prevention, well, then they'll pony up enormous resources (or take enormous suffering) when the time comes. But apparently not much earlier.
And the fact that causes and effects aren't equally distributed doesn't mean that countries (both governments and people) who suffer less will be willing to finance mitigations for the countries who bear the worst of the consequences.
25% is not a small part at all and as for the 7.5 years reactor construct/expensive claim, i'm afraid you need to update you knowledge about small scale/modular nuclear reactors, this is not the 60s-70s.
If the US, which is the largest emitter per capita, and the EU, and the other first world countries can get to zero emissions while maintaining a good standard of living, that at least can provide a longer term template for the developing countries that gets is to some stable level, even if it is above 2C.
We can tell developing countries that they have 50 years where they can emit at current first world per capita levels while they raise their standard of living, but then they have to go to zero like the first world has, or they will be subject to sanctions, high carbon tariffs on their products, and things like that. Throw in good aid packages to help them develop and build their zero emissions infrastructure.
I like the sentiment, and we're always going to need newer, better tech. Part of it will be engineering, but part of if also has to be pure science, which I suspect won't be profitable enough for the private industry to pursue. Government needs to fund such efforts. I think this applies generally (not just to climate).
Appealing to government isn't just about trying to go from no help to some help. It's also about getting them to stop doing harm. The Guardian claims that the US subsidises the fossil-fuel industry to the tune of $20B each year.
As long as politicians continue to play their games, engineers won't be able to accomplish anything. Solving this problem requires a widespread increase in enlightenment, and as far as I can tell a vast majority of the population thinks that only applies to people of the other political/religious persuasion, but it really applies to all of us.
For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society--think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclear energy. This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.
In fact, James Hansen, NASA scientist and head of the Goddard Institute, got out of the science to focus specifically on the politics. He urges people to join the Citizens Climate Lobby, which has lobbied for carbon pricing legislation for over a decade now: the Energy Innovation Act has bipartisan support in Congress right now (https://energyinnovationact.org/). Many other scientists are involved in the politics these day as well (Katherine Hayhoe [atmospheric scientist], Michael Mann [climatologist]).
You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or India's populations from expanding to modern western consumerism.
Of course we can't instantly solve global carbon emissions. But we can do our (very large) part here in the U.S. By shifting where our dollars go. By moving from carbon to renewable sources, we'll drop the price of renewables, helping small economies afford to do the same.
Progress is virtually always incremental. We need to begin by stopping dragging our feet.
The “Green New Deal” is a great example. A jobs program obviously won’t do anything to seriously address climate change. Worse, it wastes money and political capital on things that could have more utility. If you spent that money on nuclear energy research and gave it away to developing nations, then you could really move the needle.
If the development of the developing world is a problem, you can't expect the solution to come from developing world. On our end, like in the example of the ship's crew, most people aren't able to contribute to a proper solution - they lack the necessary skills and opportunities. Unfortunately (in this case), we live in free market democracies, which means there isn't a body that can reallocate huge amount of resources to retraining and retooling towards mitigating climate change. The market doesn't care, so we have to do things the hard way - we have to force our governments to force the market to start allocating resources, so that engineers and scientists and logisticians can deal with the problem directly.
We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.
And then donate some of the tech and resources, too. By virtue of being first, we've cut out the developing nations from the most direct path to improving their living conditions. We do, IMO, have a responsibility to help them leapfrog the "fossil fuel" part of that path.
(Though honestly, we can revisit that point later. First, let's get to zero emissions ourselves.)
Real world example of path dependence: Supreme Court stops recount in FL --> GWB elected --> Pulling out of Kyoto protocols, starting wars --> [...] Trump elected, partially due to government mistrust seeded in GWB era--> even worse climate change policies
Addressing climate change is an abstract concept and for most people, like 80% of the population they can't grasp the abstract, so it all feels like a scam, one big flea circus. "No, no, the fleas are there you just can't see them, just trust me."
Unless someone can invent a way to capture and sequester greenhouse gases from the upper atmosphere to the tune of 50.9 gigatonnes per year I really don't see humanity making any progress, slowing growth isn't helping.
On the bright side, one US party doesn't own that issue. There are proponents and detractors on both sides.
I kind of wish we were facing a killer asteroid or alien invasion instead of climate change, because the former two would be much easier to deal with. What's killing us with climate is the level of global coordination it requires.
"No individual can be expected singlehandedly to solve this problem. It's going to require national action. And by the way -- this is why we invented government. It's for dealing with issues that are too big for each of us to do on our own."
This is a humanity scale problem and government, by way of politicians and lawyers, and yes engineers, is how we deal with humanity scale problems.
Scientists and engineers put us on the moon, but it was government that directed and enabled them to do so.
Rather: the government was arguably the only institution that could spend a sufficient amount of money for this mission. If there had existed another insitution with similar financial backing that was willing to finance such a mission: I doubt that the government would have been necessary.
We might be left with no choice but to experiment with a technological “hail mary” — but so far, none are very attractive.
Two decades ago we could have solved the problem at a relatively low cost compared to what we’ll pay now, or what we’ll pay if we do nothing. Every year it gets more expensive.
It’s like the old adage, fitting to this discussion: the best time to plant a tree is five years ago. The next best time is today.
This is utterly false. Two decades ago we could have solved the problem if economic growth in the rest of the world stopped. (And maybe not even then.) It was never a solution.
We need to move beyond the scare tactic that it’s a choice between the economy and solving climate change. We already solved this on a small scale with the ozone layer.
So stop the economic growth in the rest of the world to save the climate.
Instead, IMO we should double-down on clean tech and then give it away for free, or even with subsidies attached, to the developing world. This way they get to develop even faster, while reducing their contribution to climate issues.
I keep trying to focus on the fact the process is already starting now and WILL affect them in their lifetimes ... hurricanes, fires, wierd storms, droughts ...
How are we? We breathe cleaner air and use more petroleum than 1970.
I will be 55 in 2050, and I bet my entire fortune that the world will be better then.
Just because you can pick two things from the past that didn't turn out as expected doesn't mean the next potential danger isn't valid. Now, maybe we come up with some clever CO2 scrubbing technology and we start engineering the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean the danger doesn't need to be addressed. There was a lot of work that went into finding new ways to get oil and regulation to improve the air. Without acknowledging the problem we could have had those catastrophes.
Let natural selection do its job.
Correct, perhaps those issuing the warnings should accept the unfortunate reality that this is how average people behave and adjust their messaging. Rather than repetitive warning after warning, why not pool resources and focus on building and improving one single large educational resource that tells the whole story (including full disclosure of the uncertain and imperfect aspects, rather than having people learn of those in conspiracy forums, in order to build trust) from a variety of angles so it is approachable by people from all different intelligence and economic levels?
More of the same isn't going to work.
The layman listening to how this is covered could very easily come to the exact opposite conclusion ("97% of scientists....!!"), and much of the armchair experts seem to behave as if there was.
But this is my point: why isn't there something akin to a centralized Science Propaganda Council where the very best science on the matter is agreed upon by the experts, and open to criticism by those who disagree? Isn't this how any large project would be organized (well, the "central" part of it if not the openness to criticism)? Does having a bunch of splintered groups arguing inconsistent viewpoints seem like the optimal approach to something that may very well be an existential threat to life as we know it on the planet?
> Scientists publish studies and sometimes strongly worded letters; journalists and authors pick it up and twist into something that (then) sells publications / (now) attracts eyeballs to advertisements; people mishear these reports further, freak out and tell to each other (or, today, post on social media).
Bingo. And intelligent people sincerely wonder why this isn't having success. The situation is so utterly absurd to me, it boggles my mind that no one else seems to notice any imperfections in our current approach (and this applies to all the issues facing the world, not just this one).
I personally hope that the world will be better in in 2050, but the only way for that to come true is in my eyes very systematic action to go reneweable across the bord.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18092015/exxon-confirmed-...
So I actually don't think the "doom and gloom" is causing people not to act, if anything the younger generation are acting on that message. (Fridays for Future, etc.) Instead what is delaying action, in my mind, is that the West's middle class is disappearing and now with climate change demanding a further reduction of consumption it is casuing people to try to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle.
If any proposed solution (to climate change or anything else) relies on huge numbers of people not exhibiting pure selfishness, then it's not a solution but wishful thinking disconnected from reality. We have a good idea on how large groups of homo sapiens function. Selfishness is unavoidable. There will be lots of great unselfish, heroic, altruistic exceptions, but the mass behavior will still be overwhelmingly selfish in aggregate.
People trying "to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle" is a very important factor that needs to be taken into account for any calls to action. This is what's happening already and this will be happening - and I'm not pointing out this as something that "needs" to change; it kind of does, but it doesn't matter if it "needs" to change because it will not change, I'm pointing it out as something that's inevitable, people will try to hold on tight to unsustainable lifestyles (and fight to gain unsustainable lifestyles that they never had but others did) and any proposed solution needs to work despite that trend in order to be plausible and feasible.
This is what concerns me, calls to action that require our better nature to override our immediate self-interest require thoughtful and inspired leadership.
We have a real leadership vacuum right now: Boris and Donald, lightweight leaders in many countries (my own country, Canada, included), rise of Dictators and Fascists. We are not solving this problem with this team.
As the effects of climate change become apparent and causes economic strain either due to attempts to prevent climate change or the consequences of not preventing it, well, in times like these that's the exact type of team that people will vote for.
And even more, as the global 'tragedy of commons' scenario of splitting the burden of mitigating climate change becomes even harsher, and the very unequal burden of consequences of climate change strains relationships, we should expect that agressive nationalistic movements will become even more popular both in developed and developing countries. In short, we'll have a situation that has many parallels with the worst aspects of the 1930s and the type of autocratic leaders that people in so many countries worldwide chose back then.
Is there any data on the spread of average vs median? From my personal experience, it seems that there are two peaks: one group of people are consuming far above the average while another is far below it (e.g. some travel by plane internationally or intercontinentally two or three times a year, others maybe once every three or five years). If you nag those below the average how they need to stop over-consuming, you'll likely yield nothing but confusion that might turn to anger and fundamental opposition if you continue.
What are you doing to deal with the sun expanding and consuming the Earth?
>If you live in the West, then you are likely over consuming.
What a weird normative statement for something where there is no agreed upon bar. What is an acceptable amount of "consuming" in your mind? Does it align with a poor rural Chinese resident's view?
1) We can't afford to undermind the economy. That is, any plan that cuts back on consumption (even in the short term) is going to hurt an already hurting economy[1]. However, there aren't any "leader(s)" who want to be pinned with such things so the buck gets passed.
2) Along the same lines, we've convenience'd ourselves into a corner. At this point, sacrifices (in the context of status quo lifestyles / cultural expectations) need to be made; habits needed to be changed. But again, there's no leader willing to disrupt that which needs to be disrupted. We talk a good game when it comes to wanting change but then once the call comes in, we whine. "Leaders" that cause people to whine don't get elected / re-elected. It used to be, "at war" mean the POTUS (in the USA) had carte blanche to ask for help and sacrifice. Now we live in a world where "at war" means to keep the masses distracted by keeping up with the Kardashians.
[1] Not to get off topic (but to prove my point); there's a reason fracking hocket-stick'ed under the previous POTUS. That reason is, the Fed had shot it wad and keeping the cost of fuel down is a proxy for economic stimulation (without having to say so). Ultimately, we tossed Mother Nature under the bus to keep the economy from going tits-up. If that's what "green presidents" can get away with, then that doesn't exactly raise the bar for the rest.
Heh. This is such a brilliant phrase that perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong.
We can't afford to not afford things. :D
I'd like to add, I put "leader" in quotes but what should be done is something real leaders do. They're willing and able. Instead, we have people in charge who are no leaders, and thus we don't get leader-esque action from them. Essentially, the spineless leading the mindless.
We can push the economy a bit. We can try to replace the more emission-intensive aspects of it. But we cannot do it too hard - because if we break the economy, that's quite literally game over. After humanity emerges from ensuing wars, famines and starvation, the survivors will be left stuck with medieval-era technology on a thoroughly broken planet.
I have this feeling that people forget that economy isn't just zeroes on the accounts of bank executives; it's the food on the table of everyone, it's the medicine and the running water, and everything that keeps civilization together.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, and even more so, let's not replace the bathwater with gasoline and set it on fire.
Everything changes. The economy was different last year, in 2010, in 1950 and so on.
The country I grew up in is very different to the one that exists today.
Change is constant. No-one is talking about burning it down, the idea is more that the exceptional growth of the past few decades has likely overshot what is sustainable.
So you're running for office?, what's your tagline: "Vote for me, because they got it wrong. I'll fix the economy so that relative to expectations it underperforms like I believe it should."?
Wall Street with not donate to your campaign. No one will vote for you.
I'm not disagreeing with you. Simply pointing out We The People have a history of not supporting such things.
Think of it as doing live repair on a running engine of your airplane, mid-flight. You can do it if you're careful, but if you break it, we all die, and the airplane isn't going to fly anywhere anytime soon.
In particular, ideas like "we need to halt economic growth ASAP" I sometimes see in climate change threads are essentially suicidal.
Might not work on anti-vaxxers but it has shut down more than one stupid conversation about Y2K.
Those writing apocalyptic scare stories were poorly informed and deliberately trying to activate people’s base fears. AND there was a huge effort by very smart folks to avert it. No conflict.
But as a one-off thing it isn't really a big issue to a government, civilization or even an industry. At that level what does it matter if a few weeks are spent unnecessarily, once? Governments burn more resources than that on a slow news day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49520949?SThisFB
Since the BBC is now officially a climate alarmist organization, I think one can be sure that this report is as alarmist as one can be without blatantly disregarding easily verifiable facts.
What exactly does that mean?
(The BBC report is summarizing a report from the Australian government, and unless it's just lying its level of alarmism will pretty much track those of that report itself. So whether the BBC is "officially a climate alarmist organization", whatever that means, matters less than whether the Australian government is one. Regardless, it would be nice to know what you mean.)
Even when reporting on a report, it's possible to emphasize certain aspects, or misleadingly paraphrase its conclusions. I haven't looked at the original report to tell whether that has happened here.
Regarding the consensus, they say "The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC’s position". Here, you have to read between the lines. Do you think that this means they will "de-platform" people who are more alarmist than the IPCC? I doubt it. In that respect, it's always, "the latest research, too recent for the last IPCC report, shows that it's worse than we thought...".
The BBC is not proposing to "de-platform" everyone less alarmist than the IPCC so no, I wouldn't expect them to de-platform everyone more alarmist than the IPCC either. Here are some things they do say:
> As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate. Although there are those who disagree with the IPCC’s position, very few of them now go so far as to deny that climate change is happening. To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage
and
> There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates. These may include, for instance, debating the speed and intensity of what will happen in the future, or what policies government should adopt.
all of which seems to allow for a considerable degree of variation away from the IPCC's position before anything like "de-platforming" is on the table.
(I'd still like to know what exactly "officially a climate alarmist organization" means. By "climate alarmist", do you mean the same as "believing that climate change is real", or something else?)
Suppose my politicians fight the good fight and we enact the necessary policies. What about the other countries, especially those that aren't as well off?
Good that they did. Better to see more focus on solutions. It would be great and exciting to work on mass scale solutions and government can easily create laws to incent it
It's not technically irreversible, however, the point is that however expensive and difficult prevention might seem, reversing it after the temperature increase is going to be much, much more expensive and difficult. And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc.
If the population reduces, the emission of greenhouse gases decrease which helps to reverse the effect of climate change.
Hitting zero emissions now (which IMHO is unrealistic) would stop global warming at something like +2C level. Hitting zero emissions in 2050 will still mean a runaway global warming, and fixing that would require some effects that go way beyond zero emissions e.g. large scale carbon sequestration (effectively negative emissions), geoengineering sci-fi or something like that. In 1980 it would have been sufficient to "just" reduce the growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
About 20,000 years ago the earth was 10 celcius colder. For the last 20,000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily.
About 100,000 years ago the world was 5celcius warmer than today.
If you look at the black/red dots from the IPCC predictions. All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen. Overall on the graph what's happening is that we are more or less exactly flat.
However look at those spikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta...
Temperature on earth frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature.
So what happened to life on earth when it was 5+ celcius warmer? It was fantastic for life. Frozen wastelands like Canada and Russia thawed and became extremely livable. People moved into these northern places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene
The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14celcius warmer and life thrived better than no other time in history.
That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. Here's one example. In 1982, some of Exxon's scientists wrote a memo for their management containing a graph (figure 3, page 7, of http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-ma...) saying that by 2020 CO2 levels would be in roughly the range 400..430 ppm and global mean temperature would be up by roughly 1..1.3 degrees C compared to 1960. Here we are in 2020 and the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?
> For the last 20,2000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily
What the graph you yourself linked to shows is something very different. There are wild oscillations in the Pleistocene (i.e., before 20k years ago), ending up with temperatures much colder than the present. Then a rapid increase from 20k to 10k years ago. Then near-flat temperatures for the last 10k years. And -- though it's over so short a period that it's hard to see on that graph -- an extremely rapid increase over the last ~50 years.
> All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen
How? By whom?
> we are more or less exactly flat
This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".
> look at those spikes ... frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature
You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?
> it was fantastic for life
Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...
> The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14 celsius warmer and life thrived
... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator). At 100m, things we would lose include: about half of England and Ireland; all of the Netherlands; half of Belgium; most of western France; all of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.
I'm sure life would thrive. The human race would adapt too, no doubt; we're a very adaptable species. But a whole lot of us would have our homes under water, and large regions of what's now the inhabitable world would become inhospitable to human life. E.g., a temperature rise of 14 degrees C turns San Francisco into Death Valley.
I certainly concede that not literally 100% of the predictions will be wrong. In fact I bet I could go predicting and we'll be within similar error margins.
My assertion was more to do with consequence predictions. Sorry for being unclear.
In 2001 the IPCC predicted that wildfires would be out of control because of climate change. In that the increased temperatures would make the summers dryer and make the fires worse. Which is a really bad prediction to start with because smokey the bear is dead because the actual movement to prevent forest fires resulted in the current situation where we have too many trees. Which the IPCC in 2001 did know about fire ecology. They were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In 2012 they reiterated this flawed prediction: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120703/climate-change-s...
Except they are wrong: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629175502.h... Fires declined 24% in their prediction period. Not only did they cheat in their predictions, they were still wrong.
How about an even more wierd prediction:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11555-global-warming-...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/11/climate-chan...
Only a few years apart. The climate scientists are predicting days will get longer and shorter at the same time because of climate change. Except in the last 50 years the earth rotation has sped up and slowed down. These are patently false.
>This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".
The most common thing climate scientists like to do is show only the last 150 years. I provided much much better information showing far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all.
>You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?
The point I was making is that climate change isn't a problem. It's a good thing. The climate does change as I proved. That's not a problem.
>Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...
A couple degrees celcius isn't going to result in any problem to our ridiculous species. We already regularly live in the hottest and coldest places on earth. Winterpeg Manitoba Canada might become habitable soon if climate change doesnt get lazy.
>... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator)
Very flawed tool with so many assumptions that make it appear far worse than it really will be.
Furthermore, you are correct. 100 metres higher IF the world is 14 celcius warmer.
I actually don't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to warm the planet 14celcius warmer. In fact the graph I provided shows around 7 celcius warmer at the 8.5% increase per year rate. Which has been disproven. Their 8.5% rate is more like 0.85%. Furthermore, fossil fuels are going to run out long before their year 2100 prediction. The world is much greener today than for a long time. It's actually quite unlikely we will see more than a couple celcius increase at current predictions.
> huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.
In fact Al gore's propaganda film the inconvenient truth predictions have failed. This should have already happened: http://www.npr.org/programs/fa/features/2006/may/flaafter_lg... according to him Florida should be under water like this. Hurricane doesnt count.
1. Hotter drier summers make for more and worse wildfires in places like Yellowstone (where a big wildfire in 2012 was the context for that 2012 article). If human activity makes the climate warmer, these will be worse.
2. Increasing agriculture tends overall to lead to fewer fires, for complicated reasons that differ from one environment to another.
The climate is warming, but at the same time the population is growing and many parts of the world are getting richer and more "developed". So you get both #1 and #2 happening.
The IPCC in 2001, and Steven Running in 2012, weren't (so far as I can see) saying anything about #2. Quite possibly they never thought about the impact of increasing population and development on wildfires, which seems fair enough: that's not really their remit. I haven't seen anything to suggest that #2 is wrong. (The 2017 Science article mentioned by Science Daily reiterates that warming climate tends to increase fires; it just says that over the period they studied the effects of human activity have been larger and in the other direction.)
What's the problem here?
> an even more weird prediction
Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.
> far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all
Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".
The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.
I am curious about what you consider "no problems at all".
> I actually don't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to warm the planet 14 celsius warmer
Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.
> the graph I provided shows around 7 Celsius warmer at the 8.5% increase per year rate ... more like 0.85%
Sorry, which graph? I guess you mean the one on the Wikipedia page, which is mostly of (pre-)historical data, with IPCC projections for 2050 and 2100?
What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)
> This should have already happened
Could you be more specific? What exactly did Gore say was going to happen by when, and where did he say it?
I'll be frank: I do not believe that Gore claimed that large fractions of Florida would be underwater by now, and suspect you have been lied to. But I could be wrong!
Here's the best match I can find for that claim. Gore said something (I can't find his exact wording; it seems to have been vague, perhaps deliberately) about a 20ft (~= 6m) rise in sea levels. If there were a rise that big, then the southern part of Florida would look a little like that picture (though I'm not convinced it's very accurate). But so far as I can tell he didn't put a timescale on it, and I bet he never said or implied that it would happen within 13 years.
Now, I'm pretty sure we won't in fact see a 6m sea-level rise this century, and depending on exactly what Gore said he may have been badly wrong. But not -- unless you have more detailed information to offer that says otherwise -- wrong in the specific way you say he was wrong.
The problem is that they themselves have made predictions which contradict themselves. This is pretty much the status quo for climate change science. They predict everything to happen. When some route happens they claim success.
When you remove these nostradamus folks. You are left with virtually nothing in climate science.
The climate is changing no question, the problem is that the hippies/commies have taken over climate change and are using climate change to propose their political positions as the fix to climate change. Except they have absolutely no basis in their proposals. Go read the "new green deal" and find out why there was unanimous support at crushing it. Yet the presidential candidates are all pushing effectively the same thing in the name of climate change. The new green deal has nothing to do with climate change, it has everything to do with economic inequality.
>Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.
Point I am making is that climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.
>Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".
Actually we do; whether you think geology and archaeology is a science or not I guess would be the decider here. We know during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth. In fact the areas near the equator became more green. Which isn't a surprise, places like the congo or amazon or other places at the equator arent deserts, they are more green than anywhere else.
If we are currently at "4 nuclear bombs a second" of climate change. Obviously implying imminent and immediate death. Then the Eocene which was 14 celcius warmer would have been a desert planet. Protip; it wasnt. What this 4 nuclear bombs a second actually is... is doomsayers. It's climate alarmism that has been ongoing for 30 years. They are saying we are doomed for 30 years and it's no different than the Mayan Calendar folks.
>The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.
Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.
>Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.
How would it be bad for the human race? Even if the climate alarmists are correct(which we know they are not) and it's suddenly mad max desert out there. Humans will live just fine; we are planning to move to far more inhospitable places like mars or space.
>What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)
The report which is linked right in the graph with the 2050 and 2100 predictions literally explains itself. They predicted 5 different levels. RCP0, RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5
The predictions in the graph pretty much assume worst case scenario of 8.5.
Except this report has been out for over 10 years now. We now have the actual data to say which of them is happening. The actual number? RCP 0.8
They were off by a multiple of 10. When you look at how bad RCP 0.8 is... the 2100 prediction is like 0.5celcius warmer. Virtually none of the predictions like Al Gore's underwater florida can happen by 2100. This is from their own data. They have been completely discredited.
>Could you be more specific? What exactly did Gore say was going to happen by when, and where did he say it?
Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth said Florida would be underwater by 2014. http://www.oprah.com/g/image-resizer?width=670&link=http://s...
There's literally the picture of him standing infront of his prediction that Florida would be underwater.
As far as I'm aware we have passed 2014 and he's wrong. Just plain wrong.
>But so far as I can tell he didn't put a timescale on it, and I bet he never said or implied that it would happen within 13 years.
Actually he said it on video MANY times since the film released. To be fair, he's not a scientist. He's just entirely financially dependent on pushing climate alarmism. He was reiterating what the other climate alarmists were saying.
Here's a more recent quote of his: These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.
>Now, I'm pretty sure we won't in fact see a 6m sea-level rise this century, and depending on exactly what Gore said he may have been badly wrong. But not -- unless you have more detailed information to offer that says otherwise -- wrong in the specific way you say he was wrong.
I actually believe we will see a sea-level rise. Not because of fossil fuels but simply population and renewable energy.
When every house has solar panels and nuclear fusion is pumping out 1cent/kwh electricity. People will use more electricity and this will result in even more waste energy which will heat up the world.
Some scientists have made predictions that contradict other scientists' predictions. That happens all the time, in all fields. Eventually, with a bit of luck, experimental evidence makes it clear who was right, or someone spots the mistake one of them made. It doesn't mean that the branch of science where it happens is bullshit. (That standard would make everything bullshit. People make mistakes and work with incomplete and imperfect information. No getting around it.)
> climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.
Could be true, though frankly I see much more sign of money-motivated bullshit on the anti-climate-science side. But nothing you've said so far is any evidence to speak of for it, because all you've done is find places where scientists disagree about something. Again, that happens all the time, in every field, and the most negative thing it actually tells us is that human beings are fallible.
> during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth
Sure. But, as I already said, total amount of life is not necessarily what we want to optimize for. If every human being died and was replaced by a million fruit flies and one elephant, that would be an enormous increase in the total number, and the total size, of living things on earth, but I wouldn't regard it as an improvement.
No one is saying that climate change is going to wipe out life on earth. (Well, I dunno, you can find idiots saying pretty much anything, but it's not a common view anywhere that I know of.)
> "4 nuclear bombs a second"
The thing I think you may be missing is that, in the context of weather and climate, nuclear bombs are pretty small. A big hurricane is something like three nuclear bombs per hour (depends on the size of the hurricane and the size of the bombs, of course).
I haven't heard "4 nuclear bombs per second", for what it's worth, and if the back-of-envelope calculation I just did is right the correct figure is more like 5 x 10^-5 nuclear bombs per second. But "nuclear bombs per second" is a stupid measure because our intuitions for how much energy a nuclear bomb puts out are bad in this context.
> Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.
Then perhaps I'm not explaining it clearly. (But, first of all, no, of course I am not saying any non-negligible warming earlier than, say, 1800CE is manmade.) My point is that (1) something could be good for "life on earth" but really bad for the human race, and (2) the state that would result from 14 degrees of warming (or whatever other geologically-inspired figure you might choose) might be entirely survivable, but that doesn't mean the process of getting there in a hurry wouldn't be a big disaster.
(You could live in many other places besides the house you currently live in. But if I knocked it down, it would be a big deal for you.)
> The report [...] literally explains itself. [...] RCP8.5
It does, indeed, explain itself, and RCP8.5 does not mean anything like "8.5% per year". The "8.5" in RCP8.5 means that radiative forcing reaches 8.5 W/m^2 by the year 2100. It has nothing whatever to do with 8.5% of anything or with anything per year.
There is no possible way we could "now have the actual data", because (to repeat) the 8.5 in RCP8.5 is defined by a state of affairs in the year 2100, and it's still only 2019.
Whoever or whatever told you that RCP8.5 means an 8.5% increase of something per year and that we're only at 0.85% was lying to you. Sorry to be so blunt, but I don't think there's any alternative.
Incidentally, RCP8.5 isn't a prediction, it's one of several scenarios used by the IPCC. That is, they say "if X happens, we expect Y to happen" for various X and Y, and RCP8.5 is one choice of X, not of Y. I think it's the most pessimistic of their scenarios. (It's rather early to say how reality compares with those various scenarios; it's not that many years since RCP8.5 and the rest were first defined.) I don't know why the graph you found on Wikipedia chose to use RCP8.5 rather than one of the others, but given that the graph is mostly about past rather than future temperatures I'm betting it wasn't anyone on the IPCC :-).
I would still like to see where your "RCP0.8" figure comes from. I'd make a sizeable bet that it's wrong.
> Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth said Florida would be underwater by 2014.*
I do not believe you. Again, I'm prepared to be proven wrong; I certainly could be. But I will need more specifics than the unevidenced claim that somewhere in his movie he said Florida would be underwater by 2014. Can you give me his actual words? Can you tell me where in the movie he says them? (I think I have a copy somewhere, though I haven't watched it; if you give me something sufficiently specific I can check. I'm not going to sit through the whole thing in the hope of finding what you're referring to, though.)
> Actually he said it on video MANY times since the film
OK. Tell me where to find him saying it on video and I'll check.
> a more recent quote of his
Saying something entirely different. (And without context I've no idea how to interpret it. "Some of the models" could mean, for all I know, that they have a range of 100 models, and one of them with parameters no one much believes says the north polar ice cap is doomed in the very short term. Which could perfectly well have been true; again, scientists make mistakes just like everyone else.)
No.
I also see no evidence in the article it has hurt attitudes either way. In fact, polls show general concern about climate change. Doing something is another matter[0], but people are mindful of it. Nonetheless, the article seems to be more about the author's personal feelings than whether it influenced the movement around it either way.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechang...
Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed.
We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.
Anyway, I believe that it'll be very hard to annihilate humanity let alone the planet, but it'll be very easy to lower the living standards slowly enough that we won't notice the reasons for it.
If you plan to have children, I think it's something you should thinks of.
Ofcourse, I'd prefer a rational discussion regarding the issues. But the powers at be, which usually have what to lose, usually steer the debate to be anti rational. And then you find yourself in a position where you must exaggerate in order to gain attention to your cause. It's a tragedy...
In the 1980s the world actually came together to phase out CFCs, and fit sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations. Interestingly the builders of Battersea were the first to fit these - in 1925. They took a while to catch on.
The ozone hole has finally stopped increasing only this decade. It's trending to resolve in 50 more years, if and only if, the recent discovery of CFC use in China doesn't grow. So a century to probably solve the man-made problem.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...
If climate change stops being sold as a one sided political problem with one sided political solutions, you may see momentum on it, but speaking as a conservative, when your pitch men and women are Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Cortez, amongst others, people I don’t trust and disagree with already, people who have tried framing me as a stupid person who doesn’t get it, you have already lost me entirely on the pitch before it left their mouths.
Change the salesman and the tactic, because the current one doesn’t work, and it is doomed to failure because of that.
You are literally listening to the people who have the greatest conflict of interest on the subject and the least competence in it. It’s no wonder you’re confused.
To my knowledge the only major political party anywhere in the world to deny the science of anthropogenic climate change is the Republican Party in the United States, and those are the only people he will listen to. It’s an absurd situation.
Think of it this way: it’s impossible due to quantum uncertainty to predict the path of a single particle in a gas. Yet out of the chaos, you can still draw out nice mathematical rules like the ideal gas law PV=nRT
So is the climate well behaved like the ideal gas law, or are there complicated sources of feedback like clouds, plant growth, and albedo which make it chaotic? There are quasi-periodic alternations between the fairly cold periods of the current ice age and the interstitial we're now in, so you should recognize it's substantially more complicated than just averaging the speeds of all the molecules.
I'm all for a cleaner better world, but I'll never believe someone who says they can usefully predict a chaotic system.
Some of the actual predictions from the CoR's "Limits to Growth", according to the Wikipedia page about that document:
> Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to "sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity".
(2072 is quite a long time after 2000. I wonder whether it's a typo for 2027, given what follows, but that too is a long time after 2000.)
> Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline ... Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline
Those are all well after 2020. (The first of them doesn't seem like it's correct, thankfully. I suspect the others are some way off, too. But I'm not arguing that the CoR were right, only that they didn't say what you say they said.)
Kinda getting tired of hearing "the sky is falling" all the time from environmental folks. When you hear "the world is ending next year, it's gonna be too late" every single year, it seems like a thinly veiled push for suckers who want to make campaign donations and bad laws.
Ironic that the author makes this exact point, and then doubles down on it.
We have pretty good evidence to suggest that "bad shit" will probably happen eventually as a result of anthropogenic climate change. How bad, and how far into the future? Depends on the model.
The problem was, as you point out, that setting arbitrary deadlines led to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario. That doesn't invalidate the science indicating that the bad shit will start to happen eventually.
Jesus Himself said: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. ... Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come. But understand this: If the homeowner had known in which watch of the night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into." (Matthew 24:36-43)
You do realize you're talking about Christianity here, right? As in, people who worship a homeless man who was rejected by his own people, tortured, spat upon, and nailed to a cross beside common thieves. He died pitifully on that cross, naked and exposed. And you are saying that what gives cause to mock Christianity is ... some dude making idle predictions 2,000 years later???
"You will be hated by everyone on account of My name, but the one who perseveres to the end will be saved." (Matthew 10:22)