I imagine this is perfect for climate change deniers. Climate change is very difficult to fight because both undershooting and overshooting your predictions can come back and hurt you.
"Glaciers are projected to disappear between 2020 and 2030 based on current emission trends" would still be alarming.
"This glacier likely won't survive long enough for your kids/grandkids to see themselves"
Being over ambiguous just to be right can be just as misleading as overstating certainty. (Think Nostradamus type claims.)
It is now extremely difficult to get straight facts from both sides of this debate. Both sides feel like thy need to completely overstate and exaggerate the facts in order to create fear, urgency and hate for the other side.
Here's his most recent summary of his views, specifically how they apply locally: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-science-based-appro...
I agree.
> climate models are terrible at predicting more than 10-20 days out
Note that if your weeding is in 30 days at noon, and you want to know if it's going to rain, then you are doomed. There are no good enough models for that precision.
But if you want to estimate the total rainfall during the year the problem gets easier. Not very easy or easy, just easier than predicting which day will rain in approximately a month.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.”
As far as I can tell there is still a lot of work and debate around how much people contribute to climate change and what are the future previsions. It is important to let the ability for researcher to publish research that goes against the consensus.
The short version is that the 1.5° C target favored by climate activists is completely unrealistic, and it's harmful. We've passed the point where limiting climate change to 1.5° C is realistically feasible: it's still theoretically possible, but it would require the entire industrialized work to engage in the same level of total societal mobilization as WW2 for a whole decade. That's not even remotely feasible.
And when these activists say "it's 1.5° C or nothing", people are going to choose nothing. Voters will elect climate change deniers and/or decide that since they can't hit 1.5° C they might as well not lift a finger to stop climate change. However, it's not too late to limit climate change to 2° C, and while 2° C will have no shortage of harmful repercussions, it won't be the end of the world, and limiting climate change to 2° C is going to be way better for the planet than letting it run away to 3° C or 4° C or more. But the "1.5° C or nothing" rhetoric actively gets in the way of attempts to stop climate change at 2° C.
The perfect is indeed the enemy of the good.
"If you're in any way even slightly wrong, we're right."
Denial mixed with pride is a powerful drug and you see it in action everywhere; the amount of energy we expend on avoiding an uncomfortable truth, be it unrequited love, losing a loved one, or being found to be wrong in an argument.
It doesn't really feel like we're fighting for the survival of our humanity. Maybe just prolonging our own individual existence so we don't have to deal with change, our beloved children be damned.
If the science doesn't support a deadline, then you don't pull one out of thin air while passing it off as a scientific conclusion. To do otherwise is dishonest, even if you think you're doing it for noble ends.
The estimates might well be genuine at the time of publication, but our response to them will make the estimates inaccurate. Maybe all we're managing is to maintain equilibrium rather than positive progress.
I don't assume intentional dishonesty here because the risk of being completely discredited is way too high.
We're talking about the prediction "These glaciers will be gone by 2020".
And I'm not going to subject myself to a bunch of science denier sites to come back with a list of other failed predictions, but there are quite a few of them. Ones that are far more dire and breathless than a tourist trap going away.
If there's a risk of being discredited, it doesn't appear to apply to this topic. Intentional dishonesty? Nah, this is more like depraved indifference. There are no consequences for speaking out one's ass, and most attempts to enforce those consequences socially gets one branded as a "denier".
I don't think that's what people like myself are saying. We're saying that if you can't make accurate predictions (which there's ample evidence of), to declare you "know" what will happen is folly and self-aggrandizing.
Doomsday for lots of Kangeroos and other animals, no wolves in Oz though.
I don't know about Australia, but I know that the vast majority of fires in the US are caused directly by humans. Something like 90+% of them are started artificially(not by lightning strikes or something along those lines), which is kinda sad.
But is climate change necessarily making the situation worse? How great would the Australia fires be if this was the year 2000?
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/89757/people-cause-... https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/27/517100594...
Are the fires worse because of global warming? Kinda hard for me to say with certainty, but I doubt it makes that big of a difference at this point.
Eucalyptus trees are evolved to make oil that volatizes in heat, and makes the atmosphere of entire valleys combustible in the dry season.
Australia being on fire is just Australia.
Wouldn't a long string of failed predictions be indicative of failure to understand...?
No, the number of failures is completely meaningless, just as the number of successes is. The only thing that is relevant is the ratio of success vs. failure, somehow weighted appropriately based on the certainty claimed for the prediction and to correct for duplicated predictions.
I wonder if this comment will contain any bias?
==Wouldn't a long string of failed predictions be indicative of failure to understand...?==
Climate change deniers have a long string of failed predictions [1]. Would you say that is indicative of a failure to understand?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2017/dec/1...
No one is denying that the climate is changing. It always have and it always will.
The discussion is about how much, how big a problem it is, how much of it is because of us and to what extent we can/should do anything about it.
That's the actual debate. Calling someone a climate change denier is a cheap and sloppy shot at trying to lump a much more complex discussion into a simple pro/con.
God, no wonder why some people believe strange things.
Do you know why that is?
That's the difference between temperature averaged over thousands of years and then suddenly measuring year over year.
If you think that's a reasonable way of showing temperature changes, then I guess we have very different standards for what we consider evidence.
> [After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.
If you car is on fire, and inside temperature exceeded 70°C when all evidence points it never happened in the past 12 years you had the car, you can insist on measuring the past 24 hour average of interior temperature, because that's the granularity of past data, and claim that there is not enough evidence that anything is amiss.
Or you could just...
...hell, who am I kidding, feel free to say heat is part of nature, it's what mammals crave, and increasing temperature only means your car is more comfortable.
If you averaged that last part of the graph like the previous measurements it wouldn't show this spike.
That's the point here. It's misleading.
That doesn't mean there isn't a change in temperature.
You manage to victimize yourself while calling others "crazy lunatics." Do you see how you are engaging in the exact activity you accuse others of?
This is today's argument, because nobody believes yesterday's argument that nothing was changing. This line of attack is simply the pivot. I clearly remember Ted Cruz running around the 2016 primary saying the globe was not warming [1].
The President exposed it today when he claimed that climate change isn't "a hoax" or "a big scam" like he claimed in the past. Today he said he is a "big believer" in climate change [2].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-admits-climate-change-is...
The scientific mind is always and should always be skeptical to absolute claims like the glaciers are melting and NY is underwater soon. The "hoax" is not with regards to the climate but with regards to those who claim the glacier is melting in 2020.
The media is the biggest perpetrator of all, fueling to this frenzy that not only makes people panic unnecessarily but also creates a situation where really really really dangerous decisions potentially will be taken.
Yes the climate is changing as it always have, no it's not something we don't know how to deal with over the next 80 years.
So lets all just chill and stop letting the media control the narrative.
This is the same type of false authority you claim the media to be pushing. You do not know this to be true, why would you say it?
==So lets all just chill and stop letting the media control the narrative.==
Agreed. Let's let scientists control the narrative. What do they have to say?
That's why I say it. By all means. Let me know what we can't handle, but as far as I am aware we know how to handle the climate. In fact we've become so good at it that people who dies from climate related disaster have plummeted the last 100 years.
Scientist say that the climate is changing but it's not catastrophic and it's not something we don't know how to handle. Even the latest IPCC report has toned down their fear of the future.