How the oil industry made us doubt climate change | Hacker News Reader

How the oil industry made us doubt climate change

bbc.com

82 pointsclumsysmurf96 comments

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532612 (2 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535374 (2 days ago)

I think news/media has some of the blame too. Science reporting in general is atrocious, journalists and editors are constantly misrepresenting and exaggerating the actual claims of scientists. I wish I had a nickel for every "Scientists invent new battery 10000x better than lithium" headline I've read. Eventually people become generally skeptical of these claims and skeptical of the scientists themselves even though the scientists never made the sensational claims misleadingly attributed to them by the media.

It's a horrible fusion of the 'telephone game' and the boy who cried wolf.

This exactly.

Climate change sits exactly at the intersection of "probabilistic deniability of real-world ramifications" and "science poorly reported" (because the effects are subtle based on our day-to-day experiences, and because people don't understand or trust science) with a hefty dose of "vested interests in the opposition camp".

I think the very root cause is that the only way to tackle climate change is to reduce fossil fuel usage, which is reducing quality of life, which is against everyone’s vested interest.

After that, all the various excuses can come out like denying scientific data and whatnot. You can show all the proof to a drunk person that the next drink is going to harm them in the long run, but all they’re going to see is how to keep the high going for a little while longer.

We'll need a retrospective to know if propaganda has really gotten worse, probably.

Doubt peddling has been around for a while. The tactic itself is quite basic. Bring your own expert to contradict the majority opinion and create a dichotomy. But, I think it only worked because a partisanship preexisted.

There was already a pro-environment and pro-business side. Once it descends into political poop throwing, the content is somewhat irrelevant. It's just content. It needs to have a certain form, maybe credentials... it's a hurdle though. What matters is political backing, not the content of the arguments.

These days, we don't even need merchants of doubt anymore. A room full of oil execs crafting weasel words and uncertainty seems quaint at this point. The newer, "flood the zone with shit" variety of propaganda seems more powerful to me. It's more visceral and emotional. There's no need for consistency and you can stack unrelated "arguments" an way you want. Climate change is overstated. Climate change is natural. Climate change is a hoax. Climate change is cover for a pedovore conspiracy. Climate scientists are paid more than doctors. No one has to stand behind any of these claims, and the only reason to moderate them is to appeal to moderates. You can reach weirdos with weird claims and extremist with extremist ones.

On the whole, it's proving more capable of having effect without a priori political support. Probably much more dangerous.

Your post hurts because it's so true.

There was a time when I was hopeful that the internet would make it easier to cut out bullshit and false arguments, leaving us with substantial disagreements over meaningful tradeoffs, improving public discourse in general.

Now I just feel horribly naive. The internet is the world's most powerful tool for marketing, not a tool for knowledge.

Ah... well...

I feel it's both at the same time. My optimism about the internet has soured over the years too, but I do still see potential.

I have come around to the conclusion that big money, and amoral actors like Zuck have made a monster. One is probably bad enough though. I don't think Jack Dorsey is amoral, for example. Twitter's not that much better than facebook in this regard though.

The hope wasn't just naive though. It was in response to what the internet was like. Wikipedia was (is) an incredible tool for knowledge. I believe it's run by moral people, and I now think that they're noncommercial structure is a very effective shield. A Steve Bannon has no use for a wikipedia, and it's existence moderates the effectiveness of propaganda somewhat.(1)

(1) Please don't bring deltionism into this.

> My optimism about the internet has soured over the years too, but I do still see potential.

I believe the problem are our current conceptions of democracy.

There is a huge discrepancy between what civilians are aware of and what "the system" (or high level actors, or academia, ...) is aware of. The problem seems educational.

Any form of governance can be viewed as a big social experiment. One way to view (idealized) democracy is that it is about the population (supposedly) choosing directions, and then learning from the ensuing results. A feedback system of lessons. The problem is educational.

The facet of democracy that consults the public (voting), supposedly polls our choice. Is an uninformed choice even a choice? If a person has the "free choice" to press a purple button or pink one, is it really a choice if one is not informed about the pro's or con's? The problem is educational.

We regularly complain about increasing polarization, but I believe polarization or taking a stance in a dilemma is good.

The problem aren't dilemmas but false dilemma's. What we call polarization is really tribalism along the fracture lines of false dilemma's.

When is a dilemma not a false dilemma? When the 2 options are each others mathematical negation.

For example: either a law shall hold or it shall not hold, either a patch that changes the laws will be accepted or it will not be accepted by the democracy, either we vote that an ideal system must satisfy some property or we don't.

Those aren't false dilemmas, but dilemma's proper.

If democracy is about learning from a never ending series of social experiments. Then democracy should very much be related to learning and education.

If democracy is a social experiment, then it should be a scientific one.

If learning is a change in one's belief system, through experience, discussion, ... then a necessary requirement to participating in democracy is being open to the idea that one's belief system may need change.

To not believe one's own belief system may need improvement, is to believe one's belief system to not be falsifiable, but to believe one's belief system to be non falsifiable is to admit not adhering to the principles of science, and hence to bring no intellectual nourishment to the scientific social experiment that is democracy.

If one demands their vote (resulting from one's belief system) counts, without being open to the idea of taking into account the belief system of others, is thus not really compatible with democracy.

Can we devise a new form of democracy, such that democracy becomes an educational structure ? (i.e. it becomes a kind of school, without necessarily invalidating usual schooling).

Education is often associated with students and masters in a class room. How do we turn democracy into an educational system, without the potentially frivolous beliefs of the masters or the democratic state affecting the students?

How can we educate the public in a neutral way? How can we prevent the structure of democracy to be biased?

How do we prevent the new democratic structure from becoming a new oppressive structure through this new power of being the main fall-back educational system? How do we design this new democratic structure such that it doesn't hold a "monopoly on Truth" or a "Ministry of Truth"?

Is it possible for an educational system to be educational without having some ultimate say on whart is true or what isn't?

I believe it can.

An example: suppose I think it's not necessary to repair the dam, and you think it's necessary to repair the dam, then after hearing each other's opinions we have both learned, without knowing if the dam will break next year. But when next year comes around, I will remember you warned me it could break.

So let me define the following new form of educational informed democracy:

- Binary proposals (otherwise we get false dilemma's and tribalism) for changing the law (directly, or through requirements, ...) => there is always a PRO and CON side.

- Everyone can explore proposals online, The discussions are shaped like trees, one main branch is for the PRO side, other for the CON side.

- PRO voters need to study and be able to reproduce (in person) the top X CON arguments, CON voters need to study and reproduce the top X PRO arguments. No more blind voting.

- Within say the PRO branch only the PRO camp can vote on proposals to up- or down-vote arguments the CON camp must study and conversely for the CON branch. (in reality you are free to spend say 30% of your voting power on the PRO branch and 70% on the CON branch, if you study the top x arguments of both sides, but your voting power within each branch for say up and down voting arguments will be proportional to your actual PRO or CON voting percentage)

- No fighting about when and where we discuss what next term agenda points we agree on, like in current democracies. The vote doesn't have any date or deadline, its whatever the current voting state of the group indicates (perhaps with a Schmitt Trigger say 45%, 55%) to prevent the law from toggling back and forth at high rates as the public is on the verge of possibly changing its mind.

- As nobody has the time to check each and every change in the law and consult their feelings, at least this system guarantees that everyone who participated in voting was able to reproduce the top X arguments of the counterparty, so we can individually focus on those issues that worry us the most or affect us the most or traumatized us the most.

In order to participate the public is learning.

There are also always going to be contrarians who don't need any more motivation than a long shot at being the lone correct voice. They serve a useful purpose, but unfortunately are often too appealing to folk who want to believe a different answer that isn't fully vetted or isn't honestly taking a wholistic approach. I'm contrarian by nature but loathe to preach my crazy ideas because I'm probably wrong.

If it helps you triangulate these things, its worth keeping in mind that very little of these tactics (and even many of the actors!) are unique to the oil industry.

Merchants of Doubt [1] goes into the pattern in an almost legal/academic way: https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Ob...

Thank You For Smoking tells the same basic message but as a semi-satirical movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427944/

Yup, I can recommend these as well, on top of Adam Curtis - The Century of the Self (4 parts) & HyperNormalisation. Freely and legally available on Archive.org [1].

[1] https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Adam%20Cur...

I really wonder what people at Exxon expected to happen in the long run? How did they imagine things would end? Climate change not happening, maybe? Climate change happening but nobody notices for some reason? There seems no decent outcome possible.

It's not necessarily a question of long run. They're CEOs, not kings.

For one they expected to be rich enough to not be impacted by climate change. If you can afford to move easily, climate change will not be a big deal for you. They can also play it both sides. You milk the current situation as much as possible while at the same time keeping an eye on alternatives. I think that's what's happening.

>You milk the current situation as much as possible while at the same time keeping an eye on alternatives.

Whenever I see news releases about huge oil companies investing in alternatives, this is exactly what I see.

Deny until you have no choice but to admit. Then get into the game and make even more money trying to fix what you broke.

It's just, well, sociopathic behavior, from my perspective.

1. The models are wrong. Might as well keep making money.

2. The models are right, but I’ll be gone by the time anyone can prove it. Might as well keep making money.

With them making a bunch of money and being able to relocate to where the climate would be ok. Worked out fine for them.

Extreme, destructive selfishness. I consider it a case of misanthropy [1]. Also, psychopathy is more common among CEOs (and finance in general) than average human beings.

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

They're just buying time to make more money. And the way to maximize profit is to invest in what would keep most of your doors open right this moment. "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006. It's already 2020. Politics is also key. The difference between Hillary and Trump must have also been huge.

I'm not an Exxon employee or anything similar. I'll play devils/exxon advocate. I expect I'll be voted down because no one is allowed to ever question climate change.

Global warming was the old name; they changed it to climate change because that is happening. You cant deny climate change. Here's why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

The climate clearly changes; back about 50 million years ago the world was 14 celcius warmer. It was fantastic on earth. Northern Canada/Russia is currently a unlivable wasteland; even trees can't grow up there but back then they sure did. Life thrived across the world. Overall all of science's predictions is that the warmer periods in those graphs were fantastic for life on Earth.

For the last 50 million years the earth has drastically cooled down. This is why the name Global Warming has been ditched, because it's fundamentally wrong. Let's focus on the last 130,000 years. During the Eemian period the world was 3 celcius warmer than today. Then over the last 110,000 years it has cooled 8 celcius on average. The last glacial maximum being 20,000 years ago was the coldest Earth has been in a long time.

Over the next 10,000 years up until the holocene period the earth warmed up 6 celcius. For an unknown reason over the last 10,000 years temperatures have been very uncharacterically stable. What you are seeing is the interglacial periods. What happens is the Earth gets very warm quickly, and then cools down slowly hitting a minimum and then spikes back up like the Eemian period.

We should be spiking in temperature right now, but it's not.

You then look at those predictions on the right hand side. The 2050 and 2100 year predictions but those are IPCC AR5 RCP8.5

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

RCP8.5 is the prediction that over the next period of time that emissions INCREASE. This even at the time of publication in 2014 was thought to be quite untrue. It's expecting that we significantly discover much more coal and oil over the next century. The reality is that oil, coal, and gas run out sooner. We also have more data, RCP8.5 is absolutely not happening.

They have since created RCP7 as the baseline but even that is not accurate. In fact RCP6 is not even legitimate. RCP4.5 is what is happening. If you overlay RCP4.5 onto that graph, it makes for a quite boring graph because it barely registers and looks pretty flat just like most of the holocene. That's us basically doing nothing.

What's even more concerning is that we should expect a huge spike in temperature. Not human caused, but all part of the interglacial period system.

The problem is that environmentalists are trying to blame humans for what is likely coming without our involvement. They wish to control our economic policies. That's all that is happening.

My doubt comes from not having faith in models of complex systems. There are a lot of people who share that sentiment. If it requires a PhD and a computer model to understand some thing, it should be a given that there be skeptics.

It may require a complicated computer model to pin down exactly what the effects will be, but it doesn't take any of that to accept the basic premises that lead to accepting climate change. We know (and have known for over 100 years) that CO2 in the atmosphere slows the escape of heat energy, which means the equilibrium temperature will go up. The specifics of 1 degree or 1.5 or 1.6 are more complicated, but it's really as simple as that. When I was in grade school, we learned that there were 300 PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere, and now they're learning that there are 400 PPM of CO2.

It may take some math to figure out how much warmer you'll get, but it's simple enough to realize that if you go outside on a comfortable sunny day, and then put on a blanket, you'll get warmer.

It isn't actually that simple, though. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere in isolation, with no reaction from the environment will indeed cause warming. But we don't live in a static model. The environment reacts to things in complex ways. It's entirely possible that adding CO2 to the environment could have caused cooling, in equilibrium (by, e.g. increasing tree density in response to the increased fuel, leading to an ultimately cooler climate). It doesn't happen to work out that way, unfortunately, but it was a possibility.

Without knowing if there were some mechanism that could balance the effect of added CO2, it would indeed be possible for such a thing to exist. Without checking, you couldn't assume it didn't exist, but coming from a place of ignorance, it's not reasonable to assume such a thing does exist. So without making unfounded assumptions, upon learning that CO2 insulates, the reasonable conclusion is that the measurable increase in CO2 (~300 to ~400 PPM) will lead to warming.

There is a vast gulf between "we should assume it would be likely to cause warming, all else equal", which is more or less reasonable, and "We have proven that it would definitely cause warming".

There's no reason to assume the complex models and naive assumption don't match though, which is the point I'm trying to argue. If the first step is "we should assume it would be likely to cause warming, all else equal", then there's no reason to jump to assuming the complex models disprove that basic assumption. They might, they do in plenty of circumstances, but it's reasonable for the working assumption to start from assuming they match. The naive assumption should convince most ignorant people (which is virtually everyone, almost nobody is doing PhD level climate research, and not many more really understand that research) to listen to the PhD scientists shouting the same thing. It's not reasonable to deny the conclusion of climate change scientists with complicated models just because you don't understand them, when the simple science agrees.

There are very good reasons to do exactly that. I don't know how often you work with complex models like this - but I do all the time. They are very often wrong for very subtle reasons. It's extremely difficult to satisfactorily prove something in a descriptive analysis, especially of a complex, dynamic system.

By default, you should basically never trust any descriptive analysis of a system like climate or the economy. Climate change specifically has received so much scrutiny by now that it's probably trustworthy. But in general you should have a very low prior on this entire category of research.

You seem to be deliberately avoiding my point. The fact that some complicated models are wrong is irrelevant. The fact that you've worked with lots of complicated wrong models is irrelevant. The rational default assumption for a lay person, when the experts say that their complicated model agrees with the simplified model which can be explained to the lay person, is to tend to accept what those experts say. It makes no sense to go from "I understand the grade school science behind climate change" to "but those experts use complicated science, so they're probably wrong".

Yes, the rational default for a lay person is to accept expert consensus. But the question at hand is what weight they should give that consensus. And that weighting should change, depending on the nature of the system being understood. We're talking about credences, not point estimates of beliefs.

Every time I've seen someone suggest that plants could have taken up the load it seems trivial to demonstrate this is not the case.

For plants to take up the load, they would need to absorb and retain 30,000,000,000 tons of additional plant matter annually. A pine tree can absorb ~1 ton/year. If you put 100 per acre, and assume the trees are 100% sequestered, you'd need 30,000,000 acres (50,000 sq. miles) of additional pine forest, where none of the material was allowed to decay back into CO2 just to break even.

Plants don't generally sequester much of the carbon they capture in their lifetimes naturally. Mostly it's the root matter of the plant that stays sequestered. So, if you wanted the world to take this up without human intervention, you'd have to figure out how to get 30,000,000,000 tons of root matter generated each year.

I agree, but that's beside the point. The point is that the earth is a complex, dynamic suite of feedback loops, where changing one knob does not necessarily lead to the simplistic outcome that it might, if all else were held constant.

Please take this question in good faith, as I am not a denier, but how do we rule out unknown earth-scale homeostasis mechanisms without a full understanding of the whole system?

If you have any links or thoughts I'd appreciate it

I think most folks aren't super worried about a Venus-like runaway scenario where the planet starts boiling lead.

Instead the concern is that while the planet will reach homeostasis over the long term, in the short term it will cause mass extinctions, destroy coastal communities, disrupt food production, destabilize governments, etc.

It's like saying, "Won't a city rebuild after a major disaster?" Yes, of course. New Orleans wasn't completely eradicated by Katrina. But it was also awful. If we had it within our power to avoid a disaster, we should try to avoid it.

It's known that there were "greenhouse periods" in the distant past where substantially all the glaciers melted, so whatever homeostasis mechanisms might exist can't be strong enough to prevent that scenario.

We can look at the geological evidence from past periods when atmospheric CO2 was higher than 280 ppm. And of course that has been done in great detail.

The evidence confirms the theory.

The problematic aspects of climate change aren't its first-order effects. The worst case scenarios involve warming by a couple of degrees Celsius - much smaller than existing variations from day to day or city to city. The only reason we're concerned is that we expect, based on climate modeling, that a worldwide shift of even this relatively small magnitude will have large second order effects.

But you're getting into "why is warming bad?", when the issue is people doubting that warming might be an outcome at all.

It sounds like your doubts come from ignorance alone. There is a difference between ignorance and skepticism. For fifty years climate models have successfully predicted the future which became the now-observed past. Later models are more accurate than previous ones. The IPCC #4 models based on data known in 2000 were right on the money in predicting the subsequent 20 years. It may be true that you don't understand these models, but that does not constitute grounds for doubting them.

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...

What about, for instance, all the successful engineering that is driven by models of complex systems? We don't understand bridge dynamics at an atomic level, we have complex models that require a lot of specialized education to create, understand, and use. Same goes for microprocessor engineering. No human understands the design of a modern CPU at a transistor level, that design is also handled by computers (again guided by humans with specialized education).

We can build bridges and build microprocessors. No one has bottled up one "Earth's atmosphere" in a lab and run controlled experiments on it. It's not empirical.

We have decades of data at this point that it has been getting warmer, and that less energy has been escaping into space specifically in the spectrums that co2 traps ( from satellites), in exactly the amounts expected from the c02 delta we have measured over that time (from isotope analysis, we can tell that WE added it via burning fossil fuels)

It is as certain and clear as science ever is. The idea that it isn't is due to propaganda that is very convincing.

It is extremely far from as certain as science ever is. Randomized, controlled experiments are as certain as science ever is. This is pretty far from that.

The evidence is as good as any non-controlled experiment is going to be, perhaps. But it's pretty important that we not confuse these kinds of descriptive results with the actual certainty that comes from high powered controlled trials. It's extremely easy to make reasoning errors in descriptive data analysis, that look very convincing.

People actually did do just that. Historically, high altitude balloons where used study the atmosphere and gather temperature, pressure, etc. Then it’s just a question of shining light through various atmospheric mixes to see how they respond to sunlight. Rockets and satellites then refined our understanding over time.

The basic question of global warming is a fairly simple physics problem, it’s because people care so much about absolutely tiny differences that such complex models are used. Aka Mercury vs Venus surface temperatures closely line up with simple models, but on earth people care about +/- 0.1 C and even more so in terms of local weather patterns.

The point is that the models and their accompanying scientific descriptions provide explanatory power that is a valid source of knowledge even though it is not empirical (empiricism is a false epistemology, but that's a topic for another time). If you have a bridge design produced according to good models, and another bridge design produced without using any such models or engineering knowledge, the epistemological status of the claims "this bridge design is safe" is different between the two bridge designs. That is true even before each bridge is actually built, and if it weren't true, then there would be no reason to have laws requiring bridges to be built according to certain standards (since "we wouldn't know if it's safe until we build it").

You're right that it should be a given, given human beings' innate distrust of authority. But that doesn't mean it's not also stupid and anti-intellectual. We certainly didn't get to the moon without some PhDs and computer models.

It doesn't require a PHD, you don't have to count on models, because it has already been happening for a long time. The complex models are necessary to put tight bounds on the outcome, but that it is going to get warmer is easy to show.

Yes but should be base global policy on skepticism? Especially when the stakes are so high?

Yes. You can't run controlled experiments to study the complex system of the Earth's atmosphere. It's not empirical.

That's not what the word empirical means.

People living large on convenient, abundant, and cheap energy derived from fossil fuels largely want to doubt climate change.

The oil industry doesn't even need to make an effort to convince the public to keep using their products. It doesn't take anything to enable the masses to continue living lives they're already deeply entrenched in and thoroughly enjoying.

Frankly I'm surprised they've wasted so much money on the propaganda. The energy density of e.g. gasoline is quite a moat by itself. Perhaps it's more a liability issue?

Listen to the money. When an industry spends billions on persuading the public of some "truth" the opposite is true. Same with cigarettes and cancer. Same with lawsuits that end with massive settlements and no admission of guilt.

What I don't get is vaping. Wasn't the cause traced down to THC/CBD additives that weren't even sold by the major brands? They seemed to fold too fast for something that arguably was not their product. I must be missing something.

> What I don't get is vaping. Wasn't the cause traced down to THC/CBD additives that weren't even sold by the major brands? They seemed to fold too fast for something that arguably was not their product. I must be missing something.

We don't know the long-term effect of vaping because 1) its a recent hype 2) its difficult to clinically trace vapers and get meaningful statistics.

We do know that vaping is more healthy than smoking, regarding carcinogens / cancer.

When I went to a store which sells magazines, tobacco, etc the other day (has an embedded post office) they had a lot of commercials for vaping. I know tobacco commercials are illegal here, so I'm not so sure about this. I guess its good business for them.

You're right, the folks that died from vaping were buying weed cartridges. But I feel like the thrust of the policy discussion was that kids were vaping too much.

In discussions like that, when politicians keep saying "kids are getting addicted; people are dying", it is nearly impossible for a voice of reason to interject and remind everyone that the people dying weren't dying from flavored juul pods.

Perhaps there are multiple factors involved. For example the IPCC email scandal, or the fact that complex mathematical forecasting models involve a lot of hand-wavey guesswork (Neal Ferguson's COVID model the latest example), or that the earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling over millennia.

> Perhaps there are multiple factors involved. For example the IPCC email scandal

There was no scandal. What happened is that the University of East Anglia was hacked, and the emails of the Climate Research Unit were stolen. Climate skeptics then trolled through the archives and selected short quotes out of context, completely distorting the meaning behind the emails, which were perfectly fine and entirely unobjectionable.

How can a pseduoscandal invented by climate skeptics possibly be a reason for why climate skeptics exist?

Maybe the distortions and fake outrage did convince some people, but it still seems wrong to point to this as a valid cause.

I personally read through a zip archive of the emails, and my non selective reading they looked pretty damning.

search for "FOIA2011.zip" to read them yourself

For those interested in the actual email zip, here's one working link I found.

http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/2/FOIA2011.zip

The top level README.md contains what the compilers thought were some of the most damning texts, and give reference so you can see the context for yourself.

Here are some from the README.md:

<1939> Thorne/MetO:

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary [...]

<3066> Thorne:

I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<1611> Carter:

It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

<2884> Wigley:

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

<4755> Overpeck:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what's included and what is left out.

Do you have an example of an objectionable email to share?

only off the top of my head

i read them many years ago on one of my previoys computers

what i remember:

- exchanges about how to quiet skeptics

- the engineer's negative opinion of the codebase he was hired to clean up

maybe sometime this week i can dredge up the files to take another look, if there is interest

the zip archive may still be floating around on the web somewhere

UPDATE: found it

For those interested in the actual email zip, here's one working link I found.

http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/2/FOIA2011.zip

The top level README.md contains what the compilers thought were some of the most damning texts, and give reference so you can see the context for yourself.

Here are some from the README.md:

<1939> Thorne/MetO:

<3066> Thorne:

I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<1611> Carter:

It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

<2884> Wigley:

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

<4755> Overpeck:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what's included and what is left out.

Yes, we would like to quiet celebrity skeptics. They're a bunch of dipshits who are not acting in good faith and we're running out of time.

The internet works even though its built on a horrifyingly rickety series of dependencies. People complain about other people's code. The only code that doesn't have someone complaining about it is signed Knuth, and Djikstra would probably complain about something if you asked him.

great, that confirms the scandal then

Oh honey, bless your heart.

At no point did I say the science was wrong. It isn't. If anything, the projections are too rosy.

There are types of speech that are legitimately harmful, and discussing how to protect people from its harms is part of being in a functioning society. Programmers complain about code, but that doesn't make the results wrong. I guess I could explain why the models aren't can't be exactly predictive, but nobody wants a deep dive on epistemology. But the deeper problem is this isn't a great use of anyone's time: "You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into."

Your not understanding something doesn't make it wrong. Your skepticism is based on some combination of fear and pride, not reason, but it's ok. I'm not mad at you. I'm sure you're doing your best.

Have you read the emails?

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/climategate-email-warm...

Of course this will be downvoted to oblivion, to punish me for pointing it out. Because it's now an ideological debate.

Of all FUD about human caused climate catastrophe I especially don’t get why “over millennia” is an argument when we’re basically talking about a fifty year window.

What worries me is the current trend of thinking we are all powerless against the mighty climate and that the only way we can survive is to aim for less and lower or collective standard of living.

I object to the idea that a lower-carbon lifestyle is necessarily a lower standard of living. A lot of of our carbon emissions come from doing things that aren't even good for us or actively make us unhappy: long car commutes, excessive meat consumption, buying too much cheap stuff.

If there were reasonable technologies on the immediate horizon for carbon capture then there might be an argument that our present consumption could be sustained while mitigating climate change. Unfortunately we have no such technology and we are not appropriately funding efforts that could get us there.

Present consumption can be sustained by switching to nuclear.

> the IPCC email scandal

What was this scandal?

one of the engineers hired to clean up the climate model code leaked a bunch of internal emails and files

he also left personal messages expressing his dislike of the codebase :D

Lol. The state of the codebase was the scandal?

no i just thought that was an amusing part of the leak

search for "FOIA2011.zip" to read them yourself

scandal was contents of the email, which demonstrated attempts to shut down critics

Did they?[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...

they did a similar thing with recycling: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielcassady/2020/09/11/plasti...

There they pushed for recycling while knowing that it won't work.

Please ban this whole subject, as it's no longer possible to have a constructive discussion about it. Few people want to get downvoted for pointing out undisputed, inconvenient facts.

I know there’s a lot of hate for big oil but the battery industry is not run by saints.

Weird take on the issue.

The word battery is not even present in the linked article - why the distraction from the topic here?

Everyone interested in the topic should give State of Fear by Michael Crichton a read. Its one of my favorite books, it helped me realize that there are other sides. I grew up watching shows like Captain Planet, never understood the propaganda in shows like these.

One question I regularly keep asking here, who made us doubt nuclear. Are all green parties funded by Big oil.

> One question I regularly keep asking here, who made us doubt nuclear. Are all green parties funded by Big oil.

I've posted this before in response to this conspiracy, but I have to ask. In the US, why do people think the environmental movement had anything to do with stopping nuclear?

The environmental movement, though hardly a monolithic group, was unable to stop the expansion of coal, fracking, offshore drilling, or so many pipelines from the fossil fuel industry over the past half century. It's clear when money was on the table, the fossil fuel industry won time and time again.

So if nuclear were such an attractive and cost-effective option, how was an entire industry, led by some of the biggest companies in the world, derailed by a movement that's never had much national political power?

The simpler answer to me is that it either

* building multi-billion dollar nuclear power plants is not as safe or cost effective as proponents make it out to be.

* actual powerful players like big gas and oil saw a threat and crushed it like every other big industry, through captured politicians crafting favorable regulation

>building multi-billion dollar nuclear power plants is not as safe

All nuclear plants blowing up will be safer than amount of pollution we create in a day. We have to realize nothing is worse than the pollution.

I am not saying green groups are the driving force or promoting a conspiracy. its more of disappointment that green groups and oppose nuclear.

> Everyone interested in the topic should give State of Fear by Michael Crichton a read

I did and it only made me lose a lot of respect for an author who wrote such classics as The Andromeda Strain, Timeline, and Jurassic Park.

Yup agreed this book has that effect on some people. You can see it happening on Goodreads. I personally think its due to cognitive dissonance. He is a whistle blower like Assange.

Nah, it just made me feel sad that a medical doctor and respected writer began to believe conspiracy theories over peer-reviewed science. Like yeah, media and scientists are actively lying to us while the industries that would most benefit from covering up climate change are beacons of truth. Hmm...maybe he is like Assange..

> He is a whistle blower like Assange.

He is (and was) neither of those things; Assange isn't a whistleblower, he is, at best, a conduit for information some of which might originate with whistleblowers; and Crichton was neither that nor a whistleblower, but a popular author who, as he gained the popularity to be granted relatively free rein by publishers, took increasingly to using his fiction increasingly as a partisan soapbox.

Like Tom Clancy, but starting as a better fiction writer and ending up worse, so the fall is much more pronounced.

Crichton's later works had that effect on me, too.

For me it was the contrast between what I'm looking for in a SciFi book and what Crichton writes. I like SciFi that asks an interesting question and then tries to (speculatively) answer it. What would the world be like if <X> was different?

Crichton pretty clearly adopted a pattern of "OMG THIS TOPIC IS A DISASTER!!1!!1!! READ THIS THRILLER TO SEE THE DISASTER!!11!!". I exaggerate, but not by much. At some point each of his novels had a theme, and each theme was some well-written disaster porn. What if genetics goes awry (Jurassic Park)? What if nanotech goes awry? Etc, etc.

Which was sad for me - he was a good writer, and I enjoy reading his novels. It's just not what I'm looking for anymore.

> What if genetics goes awry (Jurassic Park)?

That was the movie, not the book. The book was "What if profit-motivated biotech startups go awry." In the book Hammond is an unsympathetic greedy asshole who causes a disaster by cutting corners and evading regulators/oversight, all to get filthy rich. His reward is being devoured alive by petty scavenger dinosaurs at the very end of the book when everybody is is being rescued. The book is more a critique of capitalism than it is science. A critique of the commercialization of science.

Predictably, these themes were diminished for the Hollywood adaptation. Hammond becomes a naive manchild who loves dinosaurs and is more a victim than a villain.

You get that it's a novel right? Pointing to it as an example like this is like pointing to Jurassic Park as an example of why GMO food is bad.

Yes, it was pretty impactful for me at that age. If someone is worried about GMO, they will stop eating it. I don't see that with climate change activist. I don't see any change in most of these peoples lifestyle. Over that when they oppose nuclear it makes me think what's going on.

I am a big believer in polluting less and using as much as you need. Live in small houses, use cooling only above 40 degree centigrade and heating below 0 degree. Walk more have less children.

> I don't see that with climate change activist. I don't see any change most of these people lifestyle.

How many have you looked at? Have you done studies to determine that "most of these people" haven't changed their lifestyles? Does it matter if activists change their lifestyles when considering the truth of whether or not climate change is happening? They're independent things, right?

>If someone is worried about GMO, they will stop eating it.

not if the industry prevents you from knowing you are eating it

> who made us doubt nuclear.

Ask yourself, who stood to lose a lot if nuclear power became successful?, and the question answers itself: coal.

Remember Kahneman and Tversky's research into human reasoning. Loss aversion is a far greater motivating force than hope of gain.

My grandfather and father were both miners. I grew up in an company coal town. Believe me I have seen the effects closely, that's why I am perplexed. Germany recently started a coal plant after closing a nuclear one.

Did your grandfather and father run mining companies, or did they work "at the coalface"?

My guess is that is was closer to the latter than the former.

The decision-makers make the decisions.

> Everyone interested in the topic should give State of Fear by Michael Crichton a read. Its one of my favorite books, it helped me realize that there are other sides. I grew up watching shows like Captain Planet, never understood the propaganda in shows like these.

Ah, but have you yet understood the propaganda in State of Fear?

It’s always amazing how people will insist that climate scientists, who are specifically trained to be impartial and accurate, are part of some kind of vast conspiracy while simultaneously believing whatever they are told by oil industry mouthpieces, the exact people who have the most obvious motivation to lie.

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