NYT op-ed claiming scientists underestimated climate change lacks evidence | Hacker News Reader

NYT op-ed claiming scientists underestimated climate change lacks evidence

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34 pointssohkamyung31 comments

Scientists didn't get climate change wrong. Once modelling began in earnest, the results of the models were so extreme and alarming that scientists were ignored/silenced and only the milder scenarios were made visible to the general public.

Now evidence is making it impossible to pretend any longer that those mild scenarios are playing out. The opposite is happening, the most pessimistic models have turned out to still fall short of the mark due to the number of positive feedback loops involved in global warming.

Scientists didn't underestimate anything, they were told to shut the fuck up and stop inciting mass panic if they wanted to keep their jobs. The fact that mass panic might have been justified didn't cross the minds of the politicians involved.

Climate change is a hard, perhaps fatal, lesson that society cannot be governed by career politicians. Opinions don't matter, election cycles don't matter, personal beliefs don't matter, 'this will ruin the economy' doesn't matter. What matters is an existential threat has presented itself and the scientists best placed to address it have been suppressed by the political technically ignorant ruling class so that it can continue its existence unimpeded for just a little bit longer.

> only the milder scenarios were made visible to the general public.

The public has been given all kind of predictions, some were quite extreme ( “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”) and have failed to materialize.

There's a difference between scientific predictions and popular-press predictions. Your example (“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”) is not a scientific one, but one spread by popular press with no scientific research to back it up.

The difference is important, because inaccurate reporting by the popular press undermines science.

The question then is why Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, was saying such things to newspapers twenty years ago.

Very true, and its important to note that even the IPCC is nowhere near claiming the world is collapsing in 12, 30, 50 or 80 years.

Yep, I’m old enough to remember the global warming warnings of the 90s — one that has stuck in my head in particular was that New York City would be underwater by 2020.

Now there’s still six weeks to go, but it must be said that this prediction isn’t looking so good right now.

To be fair to those that made the prediction New York does flood in extreme weather and that's relatively new.

lol. That is exactly the direction headed for my children by comparison with my own childhood. When I grew up snow was an expected part of winter. It was rare to have a year without a snowfall of any kind.

The rarity for my kids was to have snow at all. Now in their twenties they have experienced an order of magnitude fewer snowfalls throughout their lives than I did to reach similar age. They have never experienced a snowfall that was even a level I'd have simply called normal and expected as a child, let alone the couple of memorable heavy snows.

Sure they have experienced snow, but of the most feeble kind... That's without invoking the record winters of 63 or 78 (79? I forget which).

> When I grew up snow was an expected part of winter. It was rare to have a year without a snowfall of any kind.

Same here, but some winters were without snow. The catch is, I grew up in the 70's, which were an unusually cold period. My grandparents grew up in the 20's and 30's and they'd had it much warmer in their childhoods.

>The public has been given all kind of predictions, some were quite extreme ( “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”) and have failed to materialize.

What? I remember when I was back in school it used to snow all the time. Nowadays we barely have a winter.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/19/iceland-holds-...

https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/4/graphic-dramati...

Children aren't going to know what snow is. Permafrost is now melting. The perma means 'permanent'.

The only question is whether it'll be your grandchildren or their children.

> some climate change experts predict that the Scottish ski industry will cease to exist within 20 years.

Five years to go... Is that a mild prediction?

Last year was bad, but a few seasons in this decade have seen lots of snow (and of course global warming was also blamed for that).

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/14/climatechange.sco...

> and of course global warming was also blamed for that

"Global warming" has been a poor choice of name because people lacking sufficient educational background expect there to literally be uniform warming. And then you get the 'we had an early cold snap, so much for global warming!' crowd.

What global warming actually means is that additional energy is being added to the weather system, which will amplify both low and high temperature maxima as well as causing more frequent high-severity weather anomalies like hurricanes. But on average, the global mean temperature trend will continue to go up and eventually those local minima will cease to exist.

Maybe this will help understand: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/139/graphic-globa...

> But on average, the global mean temperature trend will continue to go up

The trend is up to now in the low end of the ranges published by the IPCC since 1990, isn’t it?

What are you talking about precisely when you say that “the most pessimistic models have turned out to still fall short of the mark”?

> The trend is up to now in the low end of the ranges published by the IPCC since 1990

The 1990 IPPC 'that under a "business as usual" (BAU) scenario, global mean temperature will increase by about 0.3 °C per decade during the [21st] century'

We saw a warming of 0.8°C in 30 years, and the warming is accelerating. Which means that the BAU base forecast (from 30 years ago!) was on the mark and you should lend credence to the IPCC.

> We saw a warming of 0.8°C in 30 years

Or 0.4°C, it depends on what particular years you pick for the calculation.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

> you should lend credence to the IPCC

Note that the one saying that IPCC forecasts are completely off the mark because even the more pessimistic scenarios have proved too mild is missosoup, not me.

By the way, they also predicted the mean sea level to raise about 20cm by 2030. I think we are not even at 10cm after thirty years, sea level rise is tracking at the low end of the range they gave in 1990.

Permafrost is permanent on the timescale is years, not on the timescale of interglacial periods. Most of the permafrost we have at the moment thawed in the last interglacial period and refroze in the last ice age.

Do you have a reliable source to backup such alarming claims?

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

I'll do an eli5 summary:

Even if all greenhouse emissions ceased overnight, global temperatures would continue climbing for another century before hitting equilibrium. We are already past the point of no return unless we start actively pulling carbon back out of the atmosphere.

And this would be a net bad thing because?

Rising of the sea levels is problematic for nearly all coastal areas of the world. Another problematic result is more extreme weather scenarios. There are many more, but let's start there.

They've been repeating the same message of doom now for 30 years and it always fails to materialise. Eg 1989 "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown"

https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

Actual temperature anomaly is 0.8 degrees. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ So we're doing better than the best models predicted and we've massively increased co2 output beyond what those early modelers anticipated; Apparently those early climate modelers had not heard of China.

> They've been repeating the same message of doom

Who are they? you're citing "A senior U.N. environmental official". It is common rhetoric but it as no value. What is important to know is not what a single person said, but what the scientific consensus back then was.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [1] in 1990 "global mean temperature will increase by about 0.3 °C per decade during the [21st] century".

It seems 0.8 degrees is close enough to the 0.3 * 3 °C they predicted.

Personally, I believe the most accurate prevision we can make today, based on current knowledge, is the one made by the GIEC. I don't see any reason to think that someone else knows better. And I also think that 30 years of research gives us more reliable prediction today than before.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...

I cancelled my NYT subscription because of that article last week, and cited it as the reason. Might have to take something for my schadenfreude.

I usually don't read news article about climate change, because 1. I don't expect any breaking news on this subject, 2. I rather read what has been written and validated by an assembly of international scientists.

Everything is synthetized and well-written in the GIEC report.

That's ridiculous. If anything, scientists overestimated the climate change. There were predictions of climate change displacing 50 million refugees by the year 2010, northern snow cap should have already melted and hurricanes should have become more common, but none of that occurred.

Please cite the scientific articles (not newspapers) making such claims. I don't think there is any credible report of these allegations.

Not OP but you can find the 50 million climate refugees claim in the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development on page 20: the map itself is titled "Figure SR-P2. 50 million climate refugees by 2010" [1]. That report was backed by UNDP,UNEP, World Bank, the WHO - most people would count the report as credible, certainly more so than a newspaper article or opinion piece.

[1]: https://www.weltagrarbericht.de/fileadmin/files/weltagrarber...

I couldn’t find that specific one, though I did find this article from 2007 predicting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2013...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm

Edit: Also I just found a brand new article predicting it’ll actually happen by 2044:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1205850/Climate-chang...

I wonder what the prediction will be by 2044.

Not really. That's a well known headline taken out of context. A model predicted ice free summers by 2013, and the article includes two scientists discussing that they think the model overcooks the prediction, but both thinking it will come far sooner than previously believed. e.g. the first

"In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040."

and from the second

"A few years ago, even I was thinking 2050, 2070, out beyond the year 2100, because that's what our models were telling us. But as we've seen, the models aren't fast enough right now; we are losing ice at a much more rapid rate.

"My thinking on this is that 2030 is not an unreasonable date to be thinking of."

The Daily Express are a credible source for nothing since their purchase by Desmond.

Reminds me of this recent article I found on RealClearPolitics:

https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/11/14/the-ongoing-decline-of...

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