Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios | Hacker News Reader

Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios

bloomberg.com

30 pointsyogthos16 comments

I don't understand why these articles don't link or at least provide a full title of the paper.

The paper itself:

An assessment of Earth's climate sensitivity using multiple lines of evidence, Sherwood et al., Reviews of Geophysics, 2020, doi: 10.1029/2019RG000678

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...

preprint manuscript: https://climateextremes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/WC...

another mainstream article on the subject https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200722112648.h... > Four years of research confidently narrows range of 1.5°C-4.5°C down to 2.3°C-3.9°C

They also ruled out the worst case scenario, but this doesn't sell equally well...

True but from what I understand of the matter (which isn't that much tbf), +2.3C is predicted to be already pretty fucking horrible, to say nothing of +3C...

+3C still sounds much better than +4.5C, which was the upper bound mentioned there.

It was +3.9.

It makes sense to phrase it like that when politics worldwilde neglected the issue presumably hoping for best case scenarios.

It makes sense to phrase it like that when politics worldwilde neglected the issue presumably hoping for best case scenarios.

Constantly banging the drum of the worst case scenario has lead to doom fatigue. That is the only explanation for the current apathy.

>It makes sense to phrase it like that

No, it's lying by omission.

Especially given that the media has been pushing a narrative that the worst-case scenarioes are our actual reality (or even worse-than-worst-case ones), so ruling them out is in fact incredibly significant - it's effectively ruling out what readers of articles like this one are likely to expect to actually happen. (To be fair, it looks like Bloomberg are slightly better than some of the rest of the press in that they seem to have rejected stuff like RCP8.5 that has already been falsified by what's actually happened, rather than pretending it matches reality.)

"Best case scenario" is a moving target when you do nothing.

That doesn't make the scenarios we're headed for any less horrific.

>They also ruled out the worst case scenario, but this doesn't sell equally well...

Fear sells better.

An imaginary doctor tells you: "You have between 2-10 years left to live."

A few months later: "Ah, we have an update, you have 4-8 years."

Yay?

It makes sense to phrase it like that when politics worldwilde neglected the issue presumably hoping for best case scenarios.

Saying this is asserting the "by any means necessary" doctrine whereby manipulation and misrepresentation are the first spots on the decent into outright propaganda and tyranny.

Why not disconnect your internet abs unplug from everything yourself if genuinely so concerned? At least prove your principled instead of just power hungry for control

Which politics neglected the issue? On an almost daily basis I hear a new statement like "UK will ban all petrol and diesel cars by 2035" [1].

Sure, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris agreement, but individual states, like California, New York or Massachusetts still have a very strong environmental agenda. For example "California bans government purchase of gas vehicles" [2].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51366123

[2] https://www.truckinginfo.com/344909/california-bans-governme...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com