Comment by taylorlapeyre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylorlapeyre | Hacker News Reader

I recommend the book “Unsettled” by Steven Koonan for a more empirical look at how these computer models work, and the deficiencies of trying to predict catastrophe with them. For instance, every climate model is wildly off when it tries to predict the climate changes starting in 1950.

This article reads like a typical scare piece. The truth is, there’s just so many feedback loops in climate that we just don’t know what’s “responsible” for any particular event. It may not even be a reasonable question to ask.

There are things we know: greenhouse gases are rising because of human activity, and their presence will cause an increase in global average temperature at equilibrium. Beyond that, there is so much we can’t predict.

For instance, higher temps will cause more water vapor in the air, and therefore more cloud cover. That increases the earth’s albedo by some percentage, which is a powerful effect. Enough to hold off further warming for a while? We don’t know. No climate models agree.

There are many other feedback effects too, for example plants grow more massive faster in warmer temperatures and with higher fractions of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Despite many hysterical media reports conflating global climate change with regional droughts this can not be a global effect, higher temperatures, instead, lead to greater percipation from greater water vapour production. Thus higher temperatures at lower lattitudes could result in icecap growth in polar regions increasing albedo and thermal inertia. These are just a few of the countervailing feedback effects. The bottom line is the that the climate system as whole is extremely complicated and has been self-rebalancing for literally billions of years. I seriously doubt that a few 10s of decades of burning fossils will result in an earth that was uninhabitable.

Chixculub impactor in Yucatan 65 million years ago vaporised a huge amount of carbonate rock (eg limestone) due to the particular geology of where it hit. I wonder how that compared to the amount of carbon humans have emmited over the past several hundred years from coal and burning marine algae fossils carbon (oil, natural gas).

It is clear to me that what is really driving the "climate crisis" is rent seeking by politicians, media, scientists. Special interests always love a crisis they can benefit from.

You think climate science being driven by vague interests from every boogeyman the right gives you is more credible than the trillion dollar a year fossil fuel industry funding climate change denialism?

None of what you said is sourced. You are not a climatologist, nor are you a meteorologist. Unless you have some credential that allows you to speak from a position of authority, your words have zero value unless you have the sources to back them up. All of the science backs up climate change. Politicians and “tHe mEdIa” don’t have any interest at all in advancing policies to mitigate climate change beside a personal interest in enjoying a livable climate in the latter part of this century, as shown by how little they actually pay attention to this issue.

If you want to stand behind the science, then you must also stand behind the fact that our climate models are faulty and inaccurate. I say that as a climate activist myself.

I don't need to be a meterologist or climate scientist to know that higher average temperatures mean more water vapor production (see high school physics vapor pressure is a function of temperature) and since what goes up must come down more vapor means more percipation on a global scale. So we can categorically say climate change does not cause drought on a global scale. It may cause regional droughts.

Increased percipitation as snow in polar regions increases the albedo of the earth. Clouds may increas the albedo of the earth depending on their altitude and composition.

You also provide no scientific sources and basically appeal to the supposed scientific authority of the media. The media is not a scientific authority. It is propaganda and entertainment. Anyway I don't have time for a flamewar. People should know though that the feedback effects of global warming and increased CO2 are unknown and difficult to model.

Koonin's book is highly misleading. You'd be better off spending your time reading IPCC reports, or, frankly, staring at a wall and picking your nose, than reading that contrarian drivel.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-obama-scient...

Most of Koonin’s sources are directly from the IPCC reports, in fact they are what the book is based around.

Yes, but they are often taken out of context in a misleading way. His statements about melting in Greenland being slower than 80 years ago, for example, are highly misleading, presented in a way to lead the reader to believe that melting in Greenland is decelerating when in fact it is accelerating, it just happened to be exceptionally high for a single year, 80 years ago. Other misleading techniques are the straw-man, there he says something like tornados are not increasing in frequency, leaving the reader to assume that climate models predict increasing tornado frequency when in fact they do not predict that.

First of all, I will point out that he brings up the “context” of facts as a vehicle for an agenda early in the book. The book can essentially be described as a critical reading and overview of the IPCC reports.

And, yes, I do not agree with every point he makes. I think some of the things he says are misleading. That said, he does raise points that climate action advocates, myself included, need to address. For instance, our faulty climate models. This is not climate denial. It’s climate action, from a realistic perspective.

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