"...disturbances such as bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks are occurring more often, are longer-lasting and more severe.
This means coral reefs have less time to recover..."
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-gre...
"Coral reefs, for example, are projected to decline by a further 70–90% at 1.5°C (high confidence) with larger losses (>99%) at 2ºC (very high confidence)." https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
(We're on track for at least 3°C warming.)
In other words: It is extremely unlikely coral reefs will survive at all.
You should probably cite that.
> As temperatures rise, mass coral bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent. Additionally, carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean from the atmosphere has already begun to reduce calcification rates in reef-building and reef-associated organisms by altering seawater chemistry through decreases in pH. This process is called ocean acidification.
Here is a great summary from the Australian government, a government that is doing everything it can to worsen the situation yet at least acknowledges that it is something real and happening right now:
http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/climat...
Disclaimer: I _believe_ in antropogenic warming, but i'm not qualified to judge
One of the arguments that I find compelling, from individuals who would advocate for a less dramatic reading of the climate news, is that there's A LOT MORE MONEY available for researchers to find out how bad the situation is & not a lot of money (or encouragement from peers) available for folks who consistently find that there's less reason for alarm.
Bit of a confirmation bias, there? Maybe.
How often do you see private sector studies be cited by the media? The sort of people who become journalists are the sort of people who immediately write off any study funded by industry without even bothering to read it.
I can't actually remember the last time I saw an industry or thinktank funded study being cited in US media, other than maybe by Breitbart. These studies do exist: go read any climate skeptic blog and you'll find quite detailed surveys, meta-analyses and the sort of content you'd find in a published paper if these people were the sorts of people who published in academic journals (they're not). But the press normally just ignores them, and on the rare occasions they don't, it's only to paint them as science-hating bogeymen.
For instance, I linked in another comment to a study on ocean acidification by Patrick Moore, who has a PhD in ecology and used to be a regional leader of Greepeace. This paper has all the same things you'd expect to find in a normal academic paper: citations, data and it says it was subject to double-blind peer review prior to publication.
https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O...
And here's the Guardian commenting on Moore's work:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/apr/1...
The piece is titled "Ask the real experts" and starts with 9 paragraphs of hate-filled invective that compares Moore and the scientists who support him to UFO believers, Elvis spotters, calls them "crazyballs", claims they're "blinded by beliefs and ideology", states that their views should never be allowed into national newspapers, falsely claims Moore has not written any peer reviewed publications (but e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012804...), and then cites as evidence three "actual experts" who, of course, all work in universities.
The Guardian is a particularly extreme enclave of hard-left journalists who think only government-funded academics can understand a scientific topic, but the rest of the industry has similar biases.
As another example, here's a rather detailed replication and peer review of Al Gore's famous CO2 in a bottle experiment:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-...
It discovers that the original experiment was fraudulent (this isn't stated to mean anything beyond Al Gore being a fraud; the author fully accepts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas).
Patrick Moore burnt every last atom of his remaining credibility in his now famous Canal+ Glyphosate interview. Not that he had much being a paid PR consultant to various logging corporations and the nuclear industry, trying to leverage his former Greenpeace role for money.
They "falsely" claim Moore has published no papers in a mid 2015 Guardian article? Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof.
WUWT has NO credibility being one of the most well known deniers on the planet, putting out endless FUD, and infamously the instigators of the appalling shitshow that was Climategate.
That was looked into in great detail, and a series of independent investigations showed that the scientists did no wrong. Note, those investigations were UK and US, including the Science Select Committee, a Public Inquiry, the NSF and the EPA among others. All of them cleared the scientists.
It took years for the damage WUWT did with Climategate to settle.
Inadvertently I'm sure, with Moore you provide anecdotal evidence for my point. :)
Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof.
The book is a journal published by Elsevier, a major academic publisher. You know, academic papers are frequently published in books.
You're right about the date though, I hadn't noticed that. The claim may have been true at the time, but no longer is. The rest still stands. The journalist in question was never going to take anything written by a non-academic seriously.
Now, the core point you've missed yet are making for me is very important: you have to understand that most climate change skeptics (which I am not, btw) aren't really skeptical about climate change per se. They're really better described as science skeptics or more accurately still, academia skeptics.
If you really engage with their arguments, which I get the feeling most people here never have done, you'll notice that what they're actually talking about is the problems of the scientific establishment. A lot of their arguments could transfer just as well to e.g. the healthcare industry, or academic psychology. And often what they're reacting to is not lobbyists or PR spending but what they see as over-credulous belief in the moral and intellectual purity of academics.
Your post is an excellent illustration of this:
• Shoot the messenger, ignoring his arguments because he isn't paid by the government.
• Shoot another messenger, because they're "well known deniers". This is a circular argument. You're saying "anyone who disagrees with what I believe has no credibility" which is a vacuous statement.
• Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded it's all legit.
The latter part is really highlighting the underlying understanding gaps here. If you truly understand why Climategate created a whole lot of newly minted skeptics, then you'll understand that it was due to apparent duplicity and collusion in the scientific establishment, the possibility/likelihood of which is a major plank of climate skepticism. Thus saying those scientists were cleared by other scientists just like them won't convince anyone of anything, as it misses the point by a mile.
And BTW the Climategate guys weren't exactly cleared. For instance the Muir Russel review, in the words of the Guardian, concluded:
"It found the scientists had not fudged their results or silenced critics. But it found serious shortcomings in the openness with which they worked, posing a risk to the credibility of UK climate science and indicating a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century."
And it was apparent that the scientists in question had been deliberately and illegally frustrating attempts to check their work via FOIA requests:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-...
The dust from that never really settled, and it wasn't some random blog causing trouble. The behaviour exposed by Climategate was covered in all the major newspapers at the time. It did rather strengthen the basic skeptics case but only in the same way that the replication crisis in psychology and medicine strengthened the case of other kinds of "expert skeptics".
It makes no odds if a study comes from work done at Oxford Uni or Exxon if it's funded by fossil fuel interests. I, along with most others, am going to be naturally suspicious of claims without independent verification. Likewise a study of the health impacts of red meat funded by some US cattle interests (as randomly cropped up on HN a while back) carries far less weight than the same study from an independently funded source.
I don't know anyone who has an over-credulous belief in the moral purity of academics. That's absurd. There's probably more likelihood of moral purity than in an industry lab, thanks to fewer overt conflicts or agendas to push, but there's no reason to blindly believe without peer review, replication and analysis, as appropriate.
On climategate:
Yes, they were cleared of wrongdoing, Russel's investigations criticised the openness, but concluded:
The "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit were found not to be in doubt. However, the panel also concluded the scientists were insufficiently open about their work
That sounds like cleared to me. I did not claim they were found to be perfect. No human (or scientist) has yet achieved that.
It's too long ago to remember exactly what was covered by the various FoI requests, but it seems entirely inappropriate to release data under FoI for work in progress before publication with analysis and conclusions. After that, requests for both raw and processed data should be honoured. So openness will always come with limits. That would apply to work in any field, whether in academia or industry.
Science isn't, and can't be perfect. Mistakes will be made, techniques will be sloppy, occasionally there will be outright fraud etc. There are processes to catch, correct and withdraw.
Meanwhile the CATO Institute's Michaels and WUWT were pouring lies and oil onto the fire, trying to stoke maximum damage. They managed to come out of the episode with pretty much no credibility at all. Of course there were no independent studies into their behaviour, or honesty, or any consequence for their lies. In fact they appear to be held to no standards at all. How convenient.
WUWT is not a peer review journal. They are not a messenger, they are a blog with an agenda. If Watts or any of his colleagues want to put out papers into the corpus in a reputable source, their results can stand or fall on their accuracy. The few times papers proposing alternatives to AGW have come out they have not, so far, stood scrutiny. I rather hope they do, as it would be nice to discover it was all a big misunderstanding and everything will be fine really.
At this point it's difficult to conclude WUWT are acting in good faith on any level. It appears to be an intentional attempt to distract, confuse and muddy whilst taking time and energy from anyone who is trying to actually advance (or disprove) the science. It's the tobacco and asbestos playbook. When they make a credible case it'll be in Nature or some such. I won't hold my breath.
As a last point:
> Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded it's all legit.
OK, so now what? Science apparently has no checks or balances acceptable to you, or is it all a global conspiracy? It doesn't matter that the Climate Research Unit is NOT government funded. Sponsors have included BP, the Nuffield Foundation and Shell. How very strange their results have gone against the interests of their sponsors. It makes it damn awkward to build a convincing chain of corruption and conspiracy though.
That's unanswerable.
The basic argument that climate scientists wouldn't get funding to do their jobs if it weren't for their predictions of global catastrophe, is a sound one. If climate scientists were reporting "our models suggest the climate is sorta like it used to be, there's probably not much going on", it'd be a backwater with almost no funding and absolutely no media interest. If economists took a stance of, "the economy is too complex to model or predict, but we'll collect a lot of data for you" then how many economists would be employed, or have newspaper columns?
There's a structural incentive to be very confident in your ability to predict the future, if you're in certain areas of academia, as there are effectively no other employers. It's not just a climate issue.
I'd feel a lot happier and more confident in the narrative if I felt sure this structural problem was at least recognised, ideally dealt with. But I don't see it:
- The media present academics as neutral 'experts' whose word is beyond question.
- Academics themselves encourage this and never talk about their own conflicts of interest.
- Famous journals are run by academics with the same set of incentives.
This is how you get stuff like https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... happening, where 450 different studies over multiple decades investigated an effect that in the end didn't exist.
We're told "science" self corrects and will always yield the right answer in the end. That may well be true if you use a wide definition of science that includes analysis done by random bloggers and anyone else who wants to contribute. But it's not at all clear that's true for the government funded academic apparatus, on at the scales needed, or on any reasonable timescale. It's entirely possible to believe in the scientific method whilst still retaining skepticism about the output of particular groups of people who do scientific work within particular social structures.
Note: The CRU shenanigans were revealed through email hacking, not any kind of formal scientific process. In fact the researchers were deliberately evading laws put in place to try and stop that kind of thing. And even though we know ordinary science can self-correct because major faults like 5-HTTLPR are caught, it took decades. Psychology is riven with entire sub-fields that were studied since the 60s and are now known to be totally wrong. How many similar bodies of knowledge are waiting to collapse? There are plenty of examples of things thought to be "science" that evaporated when examined closely, often with scientists involved simply denying that anything had collapsed at all!
It looks especially bad when climate scientists start adjusting old datasets to make their predictions come true, as has been happening recently with the new versions of the global temperature datasets. For many years the temperature data showed that global warming had stopped: average temperates were stable. This violated all prior models predicting what would happen and was a major problem for climate science as an endeavour. Now there are new 'versions' of old temperature readings that mysteriously disappear the plateau from the public record.
There might be solid, scientific reasons for this. It might be that for many decades global temperature readings were fundamentally wrong and nobody detected it. But if something like that happens, climate scientists need to be very publicly screaming about what went wrong, and why, and what lessons they learned from it, because otherwise it looks suspicious as hell. It looks very much like they're adjusting the data to fit the models in order to preserve their own jobs.
It doesn't matter that the Climate Research Unit is NOT government funded. Sponsors have included BP, the Nuffield Foundation and Shell.
In the 1970s yes, before it was researching global warming. Currently it's a part of a university and gets its funding from governments (including the US Dept of Energy).
Given they supposedly have to find change to keep their jobs, how is it that all the research around the world is pointing to similar changes? If they're just making shit up, I'd expect predictions all over the map.
The days of constraint free government funding for Blue Skies research are long gone. The world is far worse off as a result. That doesn't mean every single project, from every source is now corrupt. It does mean that some projects and studies do indeed have an agenda.
Offer some evidence that academia is entirely corrupt. Or worse than industry.
The CRU's current About Us includes:
"sponsored by contracts and grants from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry"
To me that is not proof of "gets its funding from governments". It's one of multiple sources of funding. Regardless of how much you want to paint them as some government funded state puppet.
Yet even then I fail to see how that helps your cause célèbre, the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil. If the CRU were as corrupt as you keep claiming, the climate unit would surely be busy proving how harmless petrol and gas are, to get more of that filthy Conservative government lucre.
We're not going to reach agreement, thanks for the conversation. :)
I went looking for info on the funding of CRU. The best I could find was this:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-ch...
The Climategate docs had a spreadsheet with funding sources. So that's quite old now, but back then it was about £13 million from various sources, all of which were the government. I suppose they probably do get a bit of funding from non-government sources, but it seems it isn't likely to be much.
It shows Professor Jones, along with other academics at the university, received more than 50 separate grants with a value of £13.7 million from a number of funding bodies including the European Union, Nato, and the US department of energy. Several British bodies also gave substantial sums including the Met Office, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority and the Department for the Environment.
Perhaps this article doesn't list any private sector grantees, but there are plenty of government bodies to go around.
Re: everyone getting the same results, is academia corrupt.
The research around the world doesn't agree entirely, but it's pretty close. However, it's all based on the same datasets. There are only a few temperature datasets available, really only two major datasets and one is maintained by the CRU. It's really an incredibly influential organisation, which is presumably why someone hacked it and why it was such a splash.
Now, if the temperature record is unreliable all climate research based on that record is also unreliable. You can't argue the world is getting warmer unless you can reliably measure temperatures, that's pretty basic.
Unfortunately we know for sure the temperature record must be unreliable, because the historical temperature dataset scientists use (which goes back to about 1850) keeps being revised. If you use the dataset that was current in the 1990s, then compare the dataset to the ones being provided today, you can see that the historical temperatures have been changed.
This isn't done entirely secretly; the idea is that thermometer readings have to be adjusted to take into effect various confounding factors and that's perfectly legitimate. But there are practical problems:
1. People have been measuring temperatures with thermometers for over a century, yet scientists are still changing how they adjust the raw data today, with the result that the official temperatures seen back in the 30s and 40s, or even earlier, are still changing. The results of the adjustments are massive and fundamentally change the conclusions of the science. But by logical implication, if modern scientists are actually correct to do these adjustments then all previous analyses of the climate made until now must have been wrong. Why is nobody alerting the world to the prior wrongness of climate datasets?
2. Temperature dataset creators like the CRU have a nasty habit of claiming they destroyed or "lost" the raw, unadjusted data. They have also fought very strongly to block the release of raw datasets, and engaged in other sorts of behaviour that scientists aren't meant to engage in. That is, the only datasets available are those that have been "retouched" by people who get multi-million pound budgets because of predictions of warming.
This large conflict of interest requires enormous trust in the climate scientists. It is thus unfortunate that revisions of historical data always create warming effects where previously none existed. The apparent pause in rising temperatures was discussed by scientists for many years - the latest temperature datasets from CRU rewrite history and erase it entirely.
So you have to understand that climate skeptics are entirely understandable. Their positions aren't weird or crazy. Climate scientists are asking the world for staggeringly huge amounts of trust: to trust them about their understanding of climate trends although they're simultaneously claiming that all recorded temperature data, even as recently as 10 years ago, was wrong.
This graphic illustrates the kind of thing that happens:
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Re...
Last thing:
the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil
Hmm, did you notice Theresa May's last act before she resigned? She committed the UK to massive climate change spending:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/11/may-defe...
That's not the act of a government that's anti-AGW.
I can't imagine why the Met Office or NRA would have any interest in promoting research with an agenda. They want to forecast the weather accurately, and manage UK rivers respectively. Their interests are served by accuracy, not agenda and incorrect data. DOE was abolished by the Tories which you might well think reveals their stance.
Talking of, the Telegraph piece you link is after they stopped being a reputable newspaper with a rightwing but honest perspective, but were well along their journey to rightwing bullshit comic of today (ie after the Barclay brothers bought them). Which is a damn shame as I once used to buy Telegraph, FT and Guardian to get the spread of perspective. There isn't much available for honesty on the right from UK newspapers now. Which is not to discredit your link, I simply do not know. They still hadn't quite ditched all pretence to honesty around then. :)
> did you notice Theresa May's last act
lol. OK, I'll bite. The last act of a leader, as a "fuck you" to whoever might follow, after presiding over a famously weak government, coming shortly after the cross-party Select Committee's detailed plan to decarbonise. Greenwashing that was entirely empty words and the sound of kicking the can down the road. As significant as Boris Johnson's "I will lie in front of Heathrow bulldozers" speech. What legislation was brought to require movement towards her very distant targets?
What have the Conservative government done towards meeting that target since? What policy have they? Hint: nowt beyond the vague "so far in the future we don't care at all" target.
On other climate, renewables and efficiency related bills, the Conservatives have very consistently voted them down. They ended onshore wind completely, they removed feed tariffs for home solar - initially with no plan for replacement causing a 90%+ reduction in installations and decimating the industry, approved the Heathrow expansion, approved and promoted fracking - though even their own party membership objected to this so they wound it back somewhat, voted down the climate targets (two or three times), voted down the vehicle emission limits. It goes on, and on. You found one speech with nice words.
Also note that it was Parliament, not the Conservative Government that declared a climate emergency.
Coincidentally just today the Grauniad put up a very nice summary of how MPs have voted on recent climate issues, with an overall summary graphic: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...
The actual voting patterns reveal everything. The data allows me to stand 100% by my claim of UK government's actual stance.
It's not visible to everybody, but the government and private companies tend to fund studies at the same academic institutions.
Usually, it's not important who is paying for some research, so it tends to be hard to discover this information.
Corporations are just as capable of pumping money into universities as anyone else. The University of Kentucky let the coal industry buy naming rights to their famous basketball team's new dorm (now the "Wildcat Coal Lodge") and erect a "tribute exhibit to the coal industry," against furious objections from students and community. https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/watchdog/article44078883... Or for the opposite approach, right now the pro-oil governor of Alaska is eviscerating the University of Alaska's funding because it's a center for climate research that produces results he doesn't like. https://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-change-research-threate...
If there was solid evidence against anthropogenic climate change for universities to research, they would have been persuaded to do so.
In this case we are seeing coral reefs die in real time in front of us. Maybe they end up being more resilient than we anticipate, to which reporting that the end is nigh will seem a bit silly. But it's somewhat too late for citations and debate on whether or not they are being harmed.