Sixty years of climate change warnings | Hacker News Reader

Sixty years of climate change warnings

theguardian.com

61 pointsdredmorbius48 comments

NASA Study Goes to Earth's Core for Climate Insights (2011)

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20110309.htm...

"The researchers found that the uncorrected temperature data correlated strongly with data on movements of Earth's core and Earth's length of day until about 1930. They then began to diverge substantially: that is, global surface air temperatures continued to increase, but without corresponding changes in Earth's length of day or movements of Earth's core. This divergence corresponds with a well-documented, robust global warming trend that has been widely attributed to increased levels of human-produced greenhouse gases."

Other links:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/680/nasa-study-goes-to-ear...

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-study-goes-to-earths-core...

https://www.co2levels.org/

A 18 year old I know is visiting the west coast. I said: 'You picked the hottest summer in history for a visit!'

They said: 'That's true. But it's also the coolest summer of the rest of my life.'

Ouch. Look what inaction and politics has bequeathed to them. It's outrageous; it's sickening.

I have to admit, I'm always a little nervous when I see this kind of techno-utopianism:

> A star among these tools – sparkling alongside solar panels, heat pumps, policy systems and activist groups – is modern climate science.

Obviously it's important not to simply give up and do nothing. There's plenty that can be done, now, to limit temperature rise below truly catastrophic levels.

But it's also very easy to look at technology as a get out of jail free card, which is probably why you see so many carbon-intensive industries focusing on things like carbon capture: it let's us just layer new technology onto our existing, unsustainable practices. And then there's the whole topic of geoengineering...

Science and technology give us a lot of tools, but ultimately it's our ability to wield those tools in a coherent fashion across the entire planet that will determine if we're successful at putting a lid on global warming. Unfortunately, after 60 years of inaction, I have little faith that humanity will pull it off... I suspect it's far more likely that, in 100 years or so, we'll look back on this time as the peak of human development while we look to a much diminished future as we try to cope with the world we've made for ourselves...

A number of the references from the article can be found online.

The 1974 CIA report "A Study of Climatological Research as It Pertains to Intelligence Problems" (33 pp., PDF)

https://www.governmentattic.org/18docs/CIAclimateResearchInt...

Background on "The Jasons":

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/jason-secretive-grou...

It's a long well-written article, and its contents perfectly matches its title.

The essay is an exerpt of a book published in the coming week by the author, Alice Bell, titled Our Biggest Experiment.

Given this sample, the book looks to be excellent.

https://guardianbookshop.com/our-biggest-experiment-97814729...

While buying new property, I looked at the potential flood map w.r.t increase in sea levels. And now I think even that would not predict the true scale of destruction. sad but true.

I hate to say it, but climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Countries are economically incentivized to "cheat". Until "we" are willing to, literally, go to war to enforce global emissions standards and other policies, it's hopeless.

Quite apart from the fact that wars tend not to go the way that the aggressors predict (Afghanistan comes to mind...) war is massively carbon intensive. I get your point about tragedy of the commons, but going to war about it is probably a good deal worse than doing nothing. I have so many questions too - who's going to go to war? What or who are they going to fight? It's such a strange idea.

Speaking of the war: the Afghan conflict cost somewhere in the region of $1tn.

Counterfactual, but I wonder how much that money would do for fighting climate change.

Plenty of countries implement climate change protections, and do other things to protect the commons, especially the environment. It's a commonplace thing. It's really the US that is the exception on climate.

There's some fetish about violence these days, despite living in a world where the international order and democracy, both non-violent solutions to politics, have built freedom and prosperity many orders of magnitude beyond anything in human history.

We can do it. Let's stop talking about how hopeless we are and just get to work.

> It's really the US that is the exception on climate.

I don't think it is. For exemple, Brazil and China are both terrible from a climate perspective. Africa is also not reducing their numbers of births. The USA may be behind Europe, but the rest of the world still exists.

> Africa is also not reducing their numbers of births.

African birth rates have declined steadily since the 1950's:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFR/africa/birth-rate

There have also been lots of state/local-level initiatives in the US. USA is still an innovative driving-force of the world even though some leaders have tried to sabotage it.

Africa still has birth rates 3 times higher than Europe. That's a lot.

> There have also been lots of state/local-level initiatives in the US. USA is still an innovative driving-force of the world even though some leaders have tried to sabotage it.

They are, which is why I initially replied to the comment that singled it out.

I don't think significantly poorer countries are a fair comparison; they can't afford to do better. The US is the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

Among wealthy countries, the US is the exception (maybe there's one I'm not thinking of).

> It's really the US that is the exception on climate.

China’s pumping out more than twice as much CO2 as the USA is.

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

Per Capita paints a completely different picture:

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

Yes, if you look at it per capita, the US is #16 instead of #2. That is a great point that makes it even clearer that the US is not some horrible exception to the worldwide trend.

The climate doesn't care if it's 100 people emitting 1 unit of CO2 or 1 person emitting 100, it's going to have the same effect either way. China does not get a free pass because it has a lot of people or it likes to pretend it's still a developing nation, it's just as responsible as any western nation for fixing this mess

Simply divide by sqrt(Capita) if you want an average between these stances.

Good point btw.

Yeah, but where is the world's factory? Where was your shiny phone, or your kid's Nerf gun (or whatever plastic toy they have), made?

Yes, China does have an economic incentive to pollute, that is correct.

Unfortunately the US is not an exception. Pretty much no one is on track to limit warming to 2°: https://climateactiontracker.org/

Can someone point me to a journal paper that proves an given event was due to climate change? Would be good to have.

Everything is statistical so you won't find absolute proof, but there are many such papers. Noah Diffenbaugh's group has a bunch related to droughts in CA.

This article is disingenuous. 60 years ago, scientists were predicting global cooling, not global warming. Not to cover all avenues, its been changed to just "climate change."

That’s actually a myth. Global cooling was a small minority of published papers in climatology at the time. They were many more papers discussing warming.

Source: https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf

P.S. I learned this watching the excellent video by Veritasium on climate change misconceptions:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU

"They still had hope back then. Reading that hope today hurts." - why? Nothing severe has happened yet. Article probably cherry picks the "best" predictions, too.

What would be severe to you?

Cities like Venice and countries like the Maldives having to be evacuated because of sea level rise? But it remains to be seen if we can stop that from happening with the agreements currently in place...

Regions becoming uninhabitable, sea levels rising, mass extinctions.

As of now it is difficult to find any significant damage that is not actually the result of direct human mismanagement that they try to blame on climate change.

Edit: no, not climate change. Things like diverting water and pumping wells dry, planting the wrong trees and preventing small fires that leads to huge fires, for example.

Are you including climate change in the results of direct human mismanagement?

No, I mean direct "mechanical" impact, agriculture, building, deforestation and so on.

> Regions becoming uninhabitable, sea levels rising, mass extinctions.

Every single one of those things has already started happening.

Sea level rise is already starting to threaten low lying coastal areas, including places like Miami beach where sea water is more and more frequently seeping up through porous bedrock and flooding roads and other public spaces. It's also exacerbating the effects of king tides and creating far more destructive storm surges.

Parts of India are more frequently hitting the wet bulb temperature where humans can no longer survive, something which will occur with increasing frequency.

And we're smack in the middle of a major mass extinction event.

What more do you want?

"Started happening" - nothing severe has happened yet, though. And coastal regions often have other issues than rising sea levels. For example land sinking because too much water has been pumped from the wells. Also human settlements are probably expanding, at times into places that were not fit for building to begin with.

The places with "wet bulb temperature" probably are uninhabited already. Such places have always existed (death valley perhaps an example in the US).

I don't claim climate doesn't change, just the dramatic downsides don't seem to happen somehow.

> The places with "wet bulb temperature" probably are uninhabited already.

The least you could do is use Google before making uneducated claims like this:

https://news.yahoo.com/hotter-human-body-handle-pakistan-095...

> Jacobabad crossed the 35C wet bulb threshold in July 1987, then again in June 2005, June 2010 and July 2012. Each time the boundary may have been breached for only a few hours, but a three-day average temperature has been recorded hovering around 34C in June 2010, June 2001 and July 2012. The dry bulb temperature is often over 50C in the summer.

> just the dramatic downsides don't seem to happen somehow.

If you're ignoring when it happens, changing goalposts, interpreting facts to fit your preconceived notions, and dismissing things based on the No True Scotsman fallacy, I could see how you might think that.

Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching so often now it can't recover, extreme weather has become more common, glaciers are retreating, coastal areas are eroding, and on and on.

But if you want to keep ignoring what's happening right in front of your eyes, there's nothing I or anyone else can do about it except shake our heads, sigh, and continue to have no hope anything will change.

I haven't changed the goal posts, criteria were clearly stated higher up. If Jacobabad gets abandoned, perhaps we can talk. Although in "Collapse" you can read about places that were abandoned after thousands of years in the past, so even such a thing is not proof that we are doomed.

Once those things have happened, it's way, way too late to stop things from getting worse.

There is an infinite number of alarmist scenarios. We can not react to all of them. The argument that it would be too late if some thing x would really happen is not very useful for decision making.

For example a meteorite could hit earth and wipe out all life. Clearly we should pour all resources into building space ships.

> Nothing severe has happened yet.

That sounds like the man who jumped off a tall building, and at each foor on the way down was heard to say "so far, so good..."

We can not continue listening to the alarmists. There is an infinite number of things that can go wrong. Yet here we still are.

> Yet here we still are.

By we, you are talking middle to upper income countries not the poor countries in Africa and especially no the islands states in the Pacific. Or maybe you are not one of the relatives of the poor souls were lost in 50C heatwave in Canada last week.

If those do not apply to you, sure we are here. Just add, at the moment.

Those are also still here (with exception of the heat wave victims, which seem out of place in an affluent country. I would suspect failure of politics/health system. But heat waves have always happened).

We have never listened to alarmists, or the world would be carbon neutral by now.

Or the person selling umbrellas to the crowd below.

The issue is politics and nothing else, and people rationally concerned about various public welfare issues, including climate change, seem afraid to fight. So to avoid a fight, they pretend that if they present a strong enough rational argument, the right will accept it. They've kept their heads in the sand for decades, and humanity has shown they can do that perpetually.

The right is focused on politics above everything, and their singular tactic is aggressiveness at all times. They won't back down - why would they? Nobody has made them pay a price for it. To win, to do something about climate change, people will need to fight a political battle against a confident, aggressive, well-organized, well-resourced enemy. That is all that matters.

The good news is that if you punch a bully in the mouth (politically), they quickly change their tune. And the good news is that their ideas are ridiculous and corrupting (to them). But so far, I haven't seen anyone willing to throw a punch (and if someone does, such as some progressives, the rest of the non-right turns on them; they don't want to provoke a fight!).

It is politics but it’s not right or left.

I don’t see other political leanings doing much better?

Maduro, the guy in Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Iran. What are they doing fundamentally differently than we are that is affecting climate change positively?

I'm talking about political groupings in the U.S. The left clearly does much better on climate change. (That probably applies to other wealthy democratic countries, where Green parties are common.)

I'm not sure how the countries mentioned are involved, or even what their political leanings are in this context. Iran is a highly conservative authoritarian theocracy, North Korea a totalitarian dictatorship that is nominally communist. What does that have to do with climate change?

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