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Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

Even if the world is warm enough to melt the sheet completely, that would take centuries, if not millennia; Greenland's ice is thousands of meters thick. In a bad scenario, the IPCC forecasts 21st century sea level rise to be a bit under a meter (https://www.climatecentral.org/news/zeroing-in-on-ipccs-sea-...). This will certainly cause problems, but is nothing like the complete and rapid destruction some pundits describe.

Major action on carbon emissions is long overdue, and it's great that people are taking it more seriously now. But an overly-pessimistic scenario has the same problems as an overly-rosy scenario; if we're all doomed anyway, why do anything? Michael Mann, the climate scientist who famously brought global warming to public attention, now also spends time fighting doom scenarios which also discourage action:

https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2020/...

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I like the way the 350.org science page put's it:

   1.  It’s warming.
   2.  It’s us.
   3.  We’re sure.
   4.  It’s bad.
   5.  We can fix it.

(https://350.org/science/)

Interesting that the claims get less and less certain as you go down the list.

The 'its bad' section could use some work; it isn't immediately obvious why it is bad. It says things like 10% decrease in grain yield. World population has increased by ~40% in my lifetime; so a 10% grain yield is not the biggest problem we're facing for food security.

Ditto the 10 million migrant number. Australia has 7 million migrants living here right now; 10 million globally spread over many years is not particularly devastating.

Climate change is supposed to be a threat significant enough for people to abandon their way of life, not those so-so numbers.

Is there any evidence at all that global warming is causing any migration? I look at the problems in Syria and I’m definitely not saying “Yep global warming causes that.”

The World Bank's Groundswell Report [0] from 2018 may be a useful resource for you: "Internal climate migrants are rapidly becoming the human face of climate change. According to the new World Bank report "Groundswell - Preparing for Internal Climate Migration", without urgent global and national climate action, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America could see more than 140 million people move within their countries’ borders by 2050."

[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/infographic/2018/03/19/gro...

Ok. So that infographic mentions 147 million migrants, of which 86 in sub-saharian Africa. It also says that the population of sub-saharian Africa is projected to double in the same timeframe, but of course it's easier and less expensive to decarbonize the entire world than to introduce family planning practices in Africa?

Given that one of the 10 biggest countries in the world has virtually no elevation and is already having drinking water problems (Bangladesh), a migrant crisis is certain.

The water problems of Bangladesh seem to have little to do with climate change. It's a mix of political problems with neighboring countries, arsenic contamination of the soil, lack of sanitation.

Drought is a big factor for the conflict in Syria.

Sure, it's not the fact that the US, UK and Saudi Arabia financed, trained and armed the rebels with 1 billion dollars a year [1].

Noo, it's climate change. Imagine what would happen in your country if any group of rebels or terrorists where given weapons and training for several billions to take down the government.

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

The "Arab Spring" kicked off in response to escalating bread prices following droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil. All major wheat and grain producers.

I might or even probably would have happened anyway but climate change probably accelerated it.

Crop yields have trended up for the past century. CO2 fertilization improves crop yields.

Edit reply: Yes, it has. This macronutrient myth has to do with the profile of carbs to proteins shifting by single digit percentages, whereas crops will produce more carbs per gram and less protein per gram under higher CO2. The effect is extremely minimal. In soy beans, it's just 2% difference. Either way, when your yields double and you lose 2-10% protein per gram, you are still producing more food overall. This has nothing to do with GMOs. It's just a natural effect of photosynthesis. Most plants are C3 plants, which means genetically they are optimized for CO2 levels that are at least 3x higher than modern levels. It is theorized that this is because plants evolved under these conditions for millions of years. Only very recently in geological terms, did Earth's CO2 levels drop to sub-1000 ppm.

https://www.cropsreview.com/c3-plants.html

That's yield by kg, but în tema of calories or nutrients, the yield has not improved because of CO2 (there were other improvements of you eat GMOs).

> 10 million globally spread over many years is not particularly devastating.

While I personally agree with you, the UK (news and opinion polls) regularly regard ten thousand on that island (1/10th of a fair share of 10 million worldwide) as an existential threat. Most recently, the addition of half a dozen bailing out a rubber dinghy with Tupperware are seen as so dangerous that the Royal Navy is considered an appropriate response by a majority.

> The 2011 census recorded that 2,998,264 people or 36.7% of London's population are foreign-born [0]

The politics of the situation would be brutal; but the UK has a pretty reasonable tolerance for migrants. Strategically the numbers in the article are not a global threat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London

Yet the UK voted to leave the EU largely because of immigration.

Which although probably not in UK or the EU's longterm interest, is not an existential threat. Political unrest and migration are not new.

No but it does make me question the statement "but the UK has a pretty reasonable tolerance for migrants".

I ought to have specifically said “refugees”, which is what I think people fleeing catastrophic climate change count as.

London is not the U.K.

Same all around EU. The very mention of "ten thousand refugees" = immediate EU-wide political shit storm. I can easily imagine the sudden pressure of 10 million refugees on the border could end the EU and cause atrocities to happen.

And with climate changes accelerating and yielding areas around the equator uninhabitable, I don't believe it'll stop at 10 million. Not to mention, some parts of EU itself are close to equator.

Not actually true. UK is considering offering citizenship to 3 million HK citizens. So it’s really not about immigration in general, but the kind of immigrants (e.g. “immigrans taking our jobs” or “importing terrorists”).

How are 3 million HK citizens not going to be "immigrants taking our jobs"? When you are thinking about something like the economical impact of immigration then lower numbers always mean lower impact.

There’s a big difference between immigrants that are willing to take low-paid jobs for even less money than the least educated locals (such as construction, fruit picking, ...), vs immigrants that are highly educated and can contribute to the society in novel ways (e.g. by performing research, invention, entrepreneurship, ...).

People more frequently oppose the former.

"It's us" could use much more work. Suppose you could make the case

    1. It's warming.
    2. It's not us.
    3. We're sure.
    4. It's bad.
    5. We can fix it.

What would be different? That point speaks exclusively to the morality of the issue (It's us: environmentalists are noble! - It's not us: environmentalists are evil!), not to what's happening or what should be done.

It's relevant to item 5.

How? We can only fix it if we caused it?

Imagine a building is on fire and one side firemen are spraying water on it and on the other side someone is spraying gasoline on it.

What would be different?

It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem. This has nothing to do with the morality or lack of, that's your projection.

> It would be incorrect, the evidence is clear that it is a man made problem.

This isn't how you do hypotheticals. If, in the hypothetical world, it isn't us, the claim that it isn't us is correct, not incorrect by virtue of disagreeing with the non-hypothetical world.

And you didn't even address my point that this bullet point is completely irrelevant to what's happening and to what should be done. All the recommendations are identical in either case. Why is the bullet point present in the list? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a four-item list?

You are right, you could say: "It's a problem, it doesn't matter if it's us or not, but we have to fix it".

Question is whether this helps the debate or not. It could help.

If you don't say "it's us", you generally mean that it's a natural occurring phenomenon / cycle. And with that generally comes the assumption "...therefore we don't need to fix it, because it will fix itself.".

That really isn't an assumption that people make about natural phenomena. Let's compare a swamp, anywhere:

    1. It's causing disease.
    2. It's not us.
    3. We're sure.
    4. It's bad.
    5. We can fix it.

And we do! Draining swamps is an important way to make uninhabitable land habitable. But there's no one out there saying "why bother, just wait for the swamp to go away on its own".

> 10% decrease in grain yield

Wikipedia has a good article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_agriculture

One thing to consider when you're reading anything about the predicted effects of climate change: The effects will not be uniform in space or time.

For example, warming itself has been highly nonuniform. It's not that every day, every location on earth is X degrees warmer. Rather, that's an average; some days in some places are a lot hotter, and on other days in other places, it's less hot. This means that in addition to the average temperature increasing, extremes are also more common (has to be).

See the first picture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming, or this video: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/139/video-global-...

I expect that "10% decrease in average [time and space] grain yields" would also be spiky, in time and space. That means some places and times will experience significantly more than a 10% drop.

> For example, warming itself has been highly nonuniform. It's not that every day, every location on earth is X degrees warmer.

What is happening is this:

For a location and a time somewhere on earth plot a curve depicting the probability of it's temperature. The highest point in the middle is the average, typical temperature for that day, but of course there are less probable outliers left and right, like in a normal distribution.

What climate change does is

a) it flattens that curve, meaning more varying temperatures, unusually hot or unusually cold days, become more likely and

b) it moves that entire curve to the right, so that the average overall temperature becomes hotter, even though there are more cold outlier-days than before.

> the 10 million migrant number.

Just the other day I read a long and detailed article about a predicted number of 200 million "climate migrants" by 2050, 86 million from Africa alone.

Nowhere in the long article was ever mentioned that in the same timespan Africa's population is predicted to double, adding 1.2 billion people to the current number. But of course, hey, "climate change".

10 million migrants just from sea level rise. Sea level rise is actually one of the smallest threats that arise from climate change. There are some specific countries like Bangladesh that will suffer heavily from flooding but the vast majority of countries can deal with it. Climate change involves much bigger threats than that.

Highlighting the cost alone is not sufficient. Entire Maldives and big parts of Bangladesh going underwater thus resulting in millions of refugees will generate at most a few outraged tweets and a touching article in some news outlet in USA (something similar in China).

For climate change to be taken seriously, one needs to find the lever which will move the powerful actors. For example, leaving oceanfront homes' insurance to market forces. Swing states of Florida and North Carolina will instantly propel this to a big political issue, leaving the party of Free Markets and Climate Change Denial (TM) in an awkward position.

Sadly, the politicians on all sides are way too smart to let this happen - they will instead prefer driving issues which sap electorate's attention but affect <5% of the population (transgender bathroom access, extreme cases of the spectrum of abortion issue, marginal tax rate on 0.1% of people etc).

The website starts good, but loses all credibility for not mentioning nuclear in “we can fix it”. Shame.

Normally I like to say that HN has some of the best discussion on the internet, but the pessimism here is rivaling the political Facebook groups that everyone's racist uncle's share posts from.

It is not true it must take centuries. We don't know how climate responds to changes but we know the response is highly nonlinear.

Just yesterday I read how diminishing cloud cover can very rapidly tip Earth couple degrees up. Clouds reflect large portion of sunlight back to space. Less clouds equals less reflected energy equals more absorbed energy equals hotter environment equals less clouds.

Ice takes decades to melt but clouds do not require to sink huge amount of energy and can vanish practically overnight as soon as atmosphere warms up enough.

Once atmosphere warms up due to diminishing cloud cover the ice will melt very quickly, accelerated through external stimulus versus current slow feedback loop (less ice cover, etc).

The atmosphere can warm much faster than that, but even "very quick" melting would take forever, because it's hard-packed ice that's over a mile thick. At a melting rate of two meters per summer (which is a lot, that's the equivalent of melting ~800 inches of snow), it would take over a thousand years to get to the bottom.

This is a point that we need to think carefully. The melting projections are only as good as our understanding of our planet's systems. Just look at weather, are we really good at predicting it?

We have come a long way but if we are not certain about next week's weather, how do we know what chain reactions are going to start, that can in-turn melt Greenland (Antarctic, etc.) ice way faster?

We are literally scratching the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). Our scientific models have changed recently and I am sure they will change again, soon. So why are we so sure that the melt will not accelerate to catastrophic levels?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet#Recent_obs...

> So why are we so sure that the melt will not accelerate to catastrophic levels?

This is the sort of remark that undermines the cause.

No it isn't. Your tone policing undermines the cause by making people afraid of even considering worst-case scenarios in case they get labeled as alarmists.

Undermines what and how? I am really interested in understanding this topic. I am an engineer by profession, I do not take things just because someone says so. And history is proof that humans barely have understanding of things.

Every single recent study shows that things are accelerating. There is not a single scientific study showing a slow down of the melting process - not 1 study among hundreds. If anyone can share one, I would love to read.

You want a study about something nobody has observed?

Truly catastrophic would be a sudden plunge in temperatures. A glacial period like what happened in the Younger Dryas would cause severe famine and crop shortages, loss of habitable land, and extreme pressure on habitats everywhere:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

As far as i know, no model predicts a glacial period in the next decades.

Also, inhabitable land & crop failure will happen with an increase of 3 to 4 degrees (and this is the optimistic outcome), so i don't see why it's not worth or your "truly catastrophic" characterization.

No model for weather or climate is reliable out to a few decades. Uncertainty is an exponential function of time in chaotic systems. One good super volcano and the earth would plunge into a glacial period. A series of large volcanoes over many years would keep us there for a long, long time. We have absolutely no way to predict supervolcanoes or general volcanic activity over the next several decades.

For an example of what can happen from simply a large volcanic eruption, see the Year Without a Summer in 1816: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

But that was not a super volcano. It was just one large eruption.

We have only increased by about 1 degree in the past 100 years. We are still cooler than the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings were farming parts of Greenland, and cooler than the Roman Warm Period, when they were growing wine grapes in Scotland. It's doubtful that CO2 increase of even doubling would cause catastrophic crop failure. After all, the CO2 levels were thousands of PPM for most of Earth's history, and plants evolved under those conditions before the Pliestocene. Dinosaurs were very large creatures that were supported by a rich ecosystem of plant life. CO2 is plant food. Only at extremely high levels of 7000+ ppm (20x modern levels) has there ever been any geological evidence of catastrophe and even that event is hard to disentangle cause and effect.

Careful mixing weather with climate. Depending on the model used, the Lyapunov time[0] for such a model is a couple of days. The whole climate system is a different beast, so no use comparing our predictions in one with the other.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time

Even so - I'm reminded of the post the other day about the NYC street view photos from the 1940s [0]

So little has changed in 80 years. Even given centuries of ice melt - how much cultural heritage do we lose with a 10m rise in sea levels that would devastate NYC?

Then again, a century from now, maybe we're all living in personal generative VR paradises, ensconced in an anonymous room somewhere in a city unknown where power is cheap and proximity to a datacenter determines real estate pricing.

[0] - https://1940s.nyc/map#13.69/40.7093/-73.99397

Possibly very little. The Dutch have many habitats below sea level. The main airport is 15m below.

They're also a wealthy, densely packed, small country that had foresight and has been consistently building forever now.

I think most places will just deny, deny, deny until they're ankle-deep then say there's nothing that can be done. Other places will acknowledge the problem, but not have the materials and people to do much.

New York is one place with the wealth and people to build a sea barrier, but whether it'll be politically viable against the focus-on-the-economy-of-today opponents is another matter.

> They're also a wealthy, densely packed, small country that had foresight and has been consistently building forever now.

And they've done most of it with primitive technology compared to today's options.

I agree though: it's a political decision, the engineering and building isn't the problem, and, I believe, neither is the budget. If your 16th century farming community could afford to build dikes, so can the 21st century techo-dystopian mega-cities.

Fifteen meters is a bit too much, the lowest point is about 22 feet below (6.7m). Quoting Wikipedia:

The Netherlands is geographically very low relative to sea level and is considered a flat country, with about 26% of its area and 21% of its population located below sea level, and only about 50% of its land exceeding one metre above sea level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands

I live below sea level myself. Most Dutch don't feel too worried, and think that with rising sea levels we'll just fix things on our shores and dikes. And good chance we will, by throwing huge amounts of money at infrastructure projects.

And here you have the problem with climate change, and destruction of our world in general: the richer you are, the less affected you are.

The poor fall from the map first. It is places like Bangladesh and inhabitants of tropical islands that'll fall victim before us rich folks do.

For the absolute biggest polluters, the big barons, oligarchs and plutocrats, this problem does not exist. There will always be a tropical paradise island to own, bluefin tuna to eat, and elephants and lions to hunt.

> And here you have the problem with climate change, and destruction of our world in general: the richer you are, the less affected you are.

I see it the other way around: climate change is only going to increase by a few percentage points the misery of populations that already live in unacceptable conditions. Of course those few percentage points make huge absolute numbers when projected on the global population. But by focusing on the increase in misery, we lose sight of the baseline misery, which constitutes the bulk of the issue and that has entirely non-climate change dependent origins, and can be entirely solved with much less expensive local actions.

Example: years ago a WHO "Global Burden of Disease" report projected 400k excess deaths due to climate change every year. A huge number, right? But reading the report it turns out that the vast majority of those come from a few percentage points increase in the incidence of diarrhea, which already kills almost a million people a year and is preventable by vaccinations and better sanitation. So it turns out that by investing our energies on fighting climate change, we can prevent the excess deaths caused by it, without making a dent in the larger baseline. While by investing in local and specific action, we can raise out of poverty billions, ending also the problem of diarrhea.

Medicine doesn't lift people out of poverty. Government programs that focus on economic activity do. China simply declared certain areas to be economic development zones and then the rest happened automatically. Those areas weren't even anything to write home about before government intervened. They were just some poor fishing villages.

Totally agree. Medicine doesn't lift people out of poverty, and cutting our own emissions doesn't cure diseases. Creating economic development does both, and incidentally economic development means more CO2 emissions, at least on the short term.

The center of Greenland is below sea level and covered by about two miles of ice. Perhaps there could be a sudden collapse from below and two mile high icebergs strand somewhere along Florida's coast?

Sadly I am rather pessimistic but I learnt something from my wife's cancer: we all die sooner or later, so in a special way it doesn't matter if humanity is dying.

I do hope for my children that we find a way to salvage ourselves. Perhaps world-wide carbon capture and a giant freezers where neccessary?

> it's great that people are taking it more seriously now.

Quite frankly, I don't see it. Globally we emit over 36 billion tonnes of CO2 per year – this continues to increase[1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

If you're interested in a healthy dose of climate change skepticism, there's also Richard Lindzen, but he's also derided by the climatologist community. I've found the most intelligent of the entire community is skeptical, but the rest of them are convinced of their mission for ethical means, and are willing to forecast doomsday scenarios based on essentially what boils down to linear regression or maybe some very simplified model that has no chance of being reality. The more complex models are still extremely rudimentary, with fluid sims in movies and games being more robust than GCM in terms of simulation size which has a massive effect on the prediction quality. And there are gaping holes--the ocean's fluid flow effects and clouds. (edit: apparently there are some simulations with these now, but they are very rudimentary, see below)

Listen to him if you're interested though, his videos are all around YouTube.

> Typical AGCM resolutions are between 1 and 5 degrees in latitude or longitude: HadCM3, for example, uses 3.75 in longitude and 2.5 degrees in latitude, giving a grid of 96 by 73 points (96 x 72 for some variables); and has 19 vertical levels.

From Wikipedia. I don't think clouds fit into such a coarse grid. Climate is exceptionally chaotic and there are definitely processes that can't be approximated with such a low-parameter model. I dunno if the latest models are more refined, but six months ago they were still dealing with water vapor.

I've found the most intelligent of the entire community is skeptical...

I'd be interested to know how you measured that.

Let's just say a combination of a few essentially computational factors--memory, conscientiousness, and scholarship and/or expertise through experience over a significant period of time in varied contexts. But really it's just my intuition, and I'm not the most intelligent person in the world so maybe I'm wrong.

I don't really mean intelligence in the technical or usual sense, just in the sense that it applies to a climatologist that makes good predictions in this context.

Anyways, I'm just here to deliver the message, I don't really pretend to know either way--but I do tend to agree with certain experts over others because their arguments are much more robust, given my math background it appeals to my reasonable side.

edit: I thought about it some more. I think I can boil it down to one thing--high information entropy in their written work.

But really it's just my intuition

So you're really just using "intelligent" as a proxy for "says things I agree with", with no real basis for the claim. That's not a good look.

Yes, it's my opinion, and I've presented it as such, but it's entirely based on his point of view. I think the opinions of non-experts are very valuable due to the effects of group-think.

The basis for my claim I could lay down, but this is not the ground for that battle.

Do you have any reason to disbelieve certain experts over others? When they are the foremost in their field, consistently? No one is denying climate change.

In any case, I don't claim its truth, just its existence. It's obviously important to any scientific process to consider alternative theories which have better predictive power, and to criticize our existing ones, however close to reality they ultimately are.

In any case, if reasonable discussion is not permitted here maybe it's not the place for me.

edit:

> That's not a good look.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong neighborhood. Okay maybe I'll stay, seems like there's a mixed response.

> Do you have any reason to disbelieve certain experts over others?

What is important, I think, is that we shouldn't believe anyone just because they're an expert. What we believe or not should not be based on who says it, but ultimately on the data that supports it (or not).

So find the studies that (are supposed to) support a given opinion, have a look them, and have a look at how other studies in the field react to it. That last point is very important: it often reveals flaws in the study that a layman could never spot.

> In any case, I don't claim its truth, just its existence. It's obviously important to any scientific process to consider alternative theories which have better predictive power, and to criticize our existing ones, however close to reality they ultimately are.

If you go look at the climate science literature, you'll find that all different kinds of models and explanations have been proposed and studied. Those alternatives have been looked at in detail by people in the field, just like any other study. None of them have been found to better match the data.

>If you go look at the climate science literature, you'll find that all different kinds of models and explanations have been proposed and studied. Those alternatives have been looked at in detail by people in the field, just like any other study. None of them have been found to better match the data.

Because the system is chaotic and we can't predict it beyond a week. Maybe a day at best. Once you can predict hurricanes, volcanoes, and tropical storms, then let me know.

You can over-fit any data. I guess ML still has to learn this basic concept from statistics 101.

Anyways, I appreciate the discussion, thank you. I'm a bit irate this week.

You can harness chaos in space because things are really far apart. It doesn't work on Earth, or our stock market would be linear.

To summarize. The existing models just scratch the surface.

Because the system is chaotic and we can't predict it beyond a week. Maybe a day at best. Once you can predict hurricanes, volcanoes, and tropical storms, then let me know.

You're confusing weather and climate. We can't model the weather very well. It's hard. We can model the climate reasonably well (our models fit historical data really well), but the models turn out to be bad at predicting the future because we underestimate how much of an impact we're having (the article is a good example).

I'm not a reductionist so I don't conflate the weather and climate, but I'd consider hurricanes, volcanoes, tropical storms, and fluid flows in the ocean to be part of climate, not weather.

Hurricanes have a huge impact on animal populations, volcanoes have a huge impact on atmosphere and temperature of the core, and tropical storms are still big enough that the sum total of them is not negligible at the climate scale.

Chaotic systems sometimes don't have higher level descriptions--sufficiently chaotic systems can't be predicted at any level, and you can actually measure this. Look into the mathematical theory of chaos.

>The Guardian reported in June 2016 that Lindzen has been a beneficiary of Peabody Energy, a coal company that has funded multiple groups contesting the climate consensus.

from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen#Views_on_clima...

Straight up evil in my eyes, anti science.

Have you verified the other experts who are part of this "consensus" everyone always talks about but never measures? I would guarantee they're connected directly to the journalism / media industry, in fact it's blatantly obvious, the sources for all of those claims are not scientific in that Wikipedia section.

I mean, if there's nothing we can do about climate change and CO2 has no effect, none of them have a job either. The cycle goes [University PR] -> [Funding for the University] -> [Funding for anti-C02 efforts] -> [Paper] -> [University PR]. The process doesn't exist without the PR component which supports an entire industry. No wonder they have a consensus.

Also, I wouldn't trust the Guardian on something like this, as they're directly connected to these climatologists. You could probably prove it, but I'll have to sleep so no one will, and I'm not likely to come back here, I prefer to exist in reality, goodbye! Enjoy the coming economic doom in Silicon Valley.

> "healthy dose of climate scepticism". Beyond embarrassing and straight up evil in my eyes.

I don't take any point of view here ultimately, I keep having to reiterate that, there's a certain uncertainty to science. If it's evil in your eyes, maybe you're caught up in the middle of it. I think skepticism is important in any context as it's the opposite of dogmatism.

Anyways, I do have credentials, but it's a Friday night, if you're still interested in having a reasonable discussion I'd be happy to learn why I'm wrong.

'I mean, if there's nothing we can do about climate change and CO2 has no effect, none of them have a job either.'

Sure they would. Sorry, but this argument is simply void, and to be frank, stupid.

Do you really think these people are so dumb that the only job they can do is program massive climate models?

No, I don't, but you've missed the point. It's not the people who program the models who are at risk, just the one who command armies of masters students to do the trick for them and who can't do it anymore, who also take most of the pie. Not only that, there's a whole industry around writing news articles and selling ads (google) around this climate alarmism. People will literally pay a significant margin for certain products just due to its supposed greenhouse gas impact (it's usually not co2 strangely enough to me). I've seen their arguments on YouTube, and some of them are very very rudimentary and incomplete. It's perverse and real people suffer today. Not imaginary people in the future.

These models are incomplete and unscientific, it's worse than pseudoscience. We can't verify these models until we've had 100s of years of this, and by then we'll have better models we won't need to verify. The entire world is complicated, 10000 or 100000 or even 1000000 parameters is not going to cut it. And it's chaotic, so there's no reason that even if we could measure everything to that degree of accuracy precision and resolution that we'd even be able to predict anything at all. This is a mathematical topic, not even science.

edit: I drank a coffee. I gave up my valuable sleep for this. I hope you're happy ;)

Honestly, at a personal level, I kind of wish I believed you were right. I'd have more friends. People would have more jobs.

You can find articulate and sometimes convincing “skeptics” to suit any scientific viewpoint you want - for example evolution denialism or Holocaust denialism - but that’s just an example of using selection bias to confirm your belief. No reasonable person, I believe, approaching the subject with an honest desire to learn about a subject would chose to ignore the 95%+ scientific consensus in order to form a balanced opinion of it.

Well evolution is really not entirely certain so it's important to take that point of view scientifically just in-case we've made a mistake. Of course it's obviously true but who knows, I'm sure humanity has said that before.

Holocaust denialism is another topic completely unrelated to science, and this discussion.

You can't deny all denialism just by lumping it all in a big category. Skepticism is the foundation of science.

I’m talking about non-experts approaching a subject with genuine curiosity and an honest desire to form a balanced perspective. I don’t have a PhD in climate science nor biology nor history so I believe the most reasonable starting point is to try to understand the expert consensus. Scientific skepticism on the part of non-experts is just a form of cynicism or - more generally - a form of confirmation bias.

Fair enough, I don't think it's a good way to convince people to simply claim your excellence however. I'm not interested in arguments from authority. If there's a big spat in a scientific field, usually you get this distribution. It's hard to be a skeptic in science, but that's where all the action is.

Typically useful scientific fields are based in the hard sciences where this doesn't happen, I guess.

How can you even know what the consensus is?

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