Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets
greenash.net.au
greenash.net.au
The real problem with evidence like this is that the "believer" must strive for 100% accuracy; that is really hard.
The "skeptic" only needs to have one single piece of data turn out to be inaccurate, and then can doubt the entire thing; that is really easy.
And, we can hold both things in our heads. I just went to the Newport Aquarium in Oregon. There is a terrific exhibit which shows a paleobotanist discovering fossilized palm fronds in Alaska. The climate has changed radically over time. And, it is still very possible that we are altering it for the worse. And, we should all know we will be impacted whether or not we can find the "right people" to blame for it. Let's not waste time arguing over that, but I suspect the real conspiracy is that we are arguing over that, rather than arguing over how to solve what is inevitable.
To make a perfectly secure piece of software it must be flawless. An attacker on the other hand only needs to find a single exploit, a single oversight, to break it.
Defending something is orders of magnitude more difficult than attacking something for that reason.
Over time defense will keep improving , attack on the other hand will become more difficult when common issues are no longer a problem ( say memory safety or SQL injection) when best practices become the norm.
In that HN thread you talked about someone had mentioned till sometime back even the official docs used to have examples with SQLi, which of course they don't anymore, making it slightly harder for junior devs to make those mistakes, each step is improvement.
I am not saying they already solved, I am saying it becomes harder to hack with some techniques over time as defenses become more standard and best practices become actually common place.
1. This is worthless nonsense
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.
I think many former 'skeptics' are now at stage 3.
Meaning, you can hardly deny mass deforestation. Wiping out the vast majority of wildlife and most of its habitat. The emptying of the oceans, desertification, pollution, plastics, over-population, over-consumption, the list goes on.
With this I mean to say that our entire way of life is unsustainable regardless of climate change. We have to radically change our ways in any case.
Most people intuitively agree that we are holistically unsustainable. Few would argue against it. This doesn't necessarily make people an advocate for change, but it's a start.
That apathy is extra frustrating for me.
It's basically down to two choices. One can doubt the CO2 greenhouse effect, which everyone with a basic education should know the basic principles of, and which can be demonstrated in home experiments.
Or one can doubt that humanity burns the amount of carbon that is reported, but these figures are publicly available in many forms, including the amount that is produced and sold by the oil companies themselves.
I have never heard the argument - from even the most ardent climate skeptics and deniers - that the consensus (by simple majority of climate scientists) is in fact anything other than that we are living through man-made climate change. The focus of such people is instead usually on the dissenting voices.
But then, how do such people dispose of the views of the majority? Is their belief that the dissenting voices are the correct ones based on some artifice of conspiracy? Do they doubt the bona fides of the majority? Do they think they are all bought and paid for? What exactly is the leap of logic that allows this person - the untrained and only incidentally interested layperson - to dismiss the opinions of this body of people?
Most people are good. They care about others and they have good intentions. Yes, their actions can be distorted by incentives. But on the whole people seek to do good. It seems to me that you'd have to falsify those (in my view, self-evidently fundamentally true) claims in order to dismiss the scientific consensus on climate change.
I look at my kids, then I look at my mum, and it's hard not to get pissed off.
It's well known now that science is heavily politicized, most published research is wrong[1], fraud is common[2] and largely ignored[3], and many promising scientists have been excluded from the field for a variety of reasons from politics to prejudice to simple personal conflicts with the superstars. Funding and continued employment can be endangered by publishing politically incorrect results - if those results are allowed to be published at all - while publishing the "correct" results is rewarded.
In an environment like this, it would be almost impossible for anyone who openly disagreed with the consensus to stay in the field. And once qualified people are driven out for these unscientific reasons, their opinion is no longer counted among the "consensus" of scientists, because the consensus is usually only measured among people working for a university or government agency.
In short, if you exclude everyone who disagrees, it's easy to manufacture any consensus you like (even something as completely wrong as Lysenkoism, to cite a rather extreme example of the principle).
1: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
There is definitely a process of pushback and mediation between consensus and dissenting voices in any complex field that needs to happen, but agree that that is very difficult in the current political climate. I was going to say that there should be some (self-imposed) threshold of expertise to participate in these conversations, but I guess if policies affect peoples’ lives then they should ipso facto have the right to form an opinion on them.
Personally, my concerns about the integrity of any scientific consensus generally are in this case, on balance, outweighed by the potential consequences of denying climate change and being wrong about it, versus accepting it at face value, doing something about it, then finding out later that it was wasted effort. But that’s a different (and perhaps better) argument from the one I was making above.
“The great tragedy of Science–the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” –British biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895)
This is the scientific method - theories must explain/not contradict any known facts, and must predict unexpected new facts that can be verified by experiment.
It would be a breath of fresh air for people to be open-minded and curious. Seek out cutting-edge information from experts now and then, and share that.
There's room for being concerned, but more than that, may not be too helpful for anyone.
https://www.hull.ac.uk/special/blog/why-people-still-believe...
It is denial or ignorance. They are not sceptical of anything, they wouldn't know what to be sceptical of.
Source:
- https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/equatorial-al...
: )
You could at least support your argument by offering some explanation (and evidence) for why selective breeding could lead to that particular curve. Why is it not a straight line - did we only recently learn how to selectively breed? Why does it go up then down? Did fashions change? Did people originally lean towards breeding for late blossoms, but then change their mind?
Why does the curve fit with the changes in climate, is that pure coincidence? Are cherry trees not impacted by the climate, but only by selective breeding?
Etc.
First, do we know that the date cherry trees blossom is controlled by temperature? This question isn't addressed in the linked post, or in the document it links to with the data. They seem to just assume it must be the case.
However, the fact that the dates show very little change until the late 19th century is reason to doubt that temperature controls the date, since there is other evidence that temperatures (globally, at least) varied significantly over that time.
An alternative is that the date is primarily controlled by amount of sunlight, whose seasonal variation has of course not changed over the last thousand years. Presumably, one could resolve this question by looking at actual temperatures in Kyoto versus flowering date, in recent years.
Second, the variability in the date seems to decrease quite markedly in the late 19th century. That happens to be when the Meiji restoration occurred, accompanied by huge changes in Japanese society, including industrialization. It's also when the source of the dates starts to be mostly newspaper reports.
The initial change in the late 19th century is a narrowing of the spread in dates, with no change in mean. Then the mean date starts to get earlier, declining about linearly starting around 1900. One should note that it is generally accepted that CO2 didn't start to have a substantial effect on climate until about 1950, so a decline starting in 1900 is not obviously attributable to global climate change.
Alternative explanations for the decline include local climate change (unrelated to CO2 levels, but perhaps due to industrialization), changes in reporting, and changes in which cherry trees are being looked at.
As well as the possible influences you list there are many more - changes in local water or air chemical content, changes in cultivation techniques, planting arrangements, chemical treatments (fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, etc), changes in the biology of the plant due to natural or artificial selection, changes in pests or other influences of introduced or changing balances of plants/animals/fungi/bacteria. And surely many more I haven't listed.
Come on HN, I've seen you fiercely argue the finer points of computer science, rocketry, quantum mechanics and pounce on any slight inconsistency or omission! You don't need to throw rational thinking out the window when you read something that seems like it is "on your side". There exists far stronger evidence of climate change than this.
An equivalent article that used the flowering date of a different plant to as "indisputable evidence" for the non-existence of global warming would have been rightly torn to shreds on here.
I think it’s because the trend line is smoothed out over +\-50 years data, or something like that. Or it might be hand drawn. I’m going to download the raw data and see what the trend line looks like using fewer data points.
I rather don’t like the condescending attitude but will at least applaud the use of the word “skeptic” rather than “denier”; the latter being a more religious phrasing.
Disclaimer: I do think man-made climate change is happening and something very much worth addressing. The interesting part is simply what to do about it; on which people will disagree vehemently.
In my personal opinion the definite argument for any given position on climate change (the same standard would also apply for the 'sceptics'), like any other physical domain, would be a mathematical model with decent (and not retroactive) predictive accuracy. Of course the climate is an incredibly complex system, which makes creating accurate models incredibly difficult – do we even have a quantitative model for marginal changes in the mean global temperature with respect to e.g. co2 concentration in the atmosphere at the present time? I have not paid attention in several years, but when I was reading up on this several years ago the scientists had severe problems reeling in the uncertainty in said models. Something about the sun, oceans and many different kinds of fairly local feedback systems.
Anyways, you can't argue with predictive experiments!
Disclaimer: I also think man-made climate change is happening and something very much worth addressing, and I can confirm I disagree vehemently with many well intended strategies.
The urban heat island phenomenon is well documented, and since all Japanese cities have parks with cherry trees in them, UHI alone could cause a significant shift in how early said trees bloom.
You’d have to do a careful study to disentangle the UHI effect from the climate effect in this case.
So if anything, this article is a great demonstration why real science is hard, but sensationalism is easy.
After that, the latest peak bloom day started getting earlier and the earliest peak bloom day also started getting earlier.
So right now peak blooms can occur about as earlier as their historically could, but seem much more unlikely to occur as late as they historically did. In other words, they now occur in a range that starts about the same as it did historically but ends quite a bit earlier.
So what happened around 1900?
"According to the EPA, many U.S. cities have air temperatures up to 10°F (5.6°C) warmer than the surrounding natural land cover." https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-change-impacts/...
This "urban heat island" warming has progressed at the same time as CO2-driven global warming, and its measured magnitude (5.6°C) is larger than the estimated effect of CO2 so far (up to 1.5°C).
I'm startled to read an article that claims to be "putting myself in the shoes of a climate change sceptic" without even mentioning this basic confounding factor of any urban data set.
Even CNN and MSN (those bastions of climate change skepticism) call out the urban heat island effect when talking about early blooming cherry blossoms:
"There are two sources of increased heat, which is the main factor making the flowers bloom earlier: urbanization and climate change. With increased urbanization, cities tend to get warmer than the surrounding rural area, in what is called the heat island effect. But a bigger reason is climate change, which has caused rising temperatures across the region and the world." https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/japan-just-reco... (note that this link is msn, but the authors are cited as CNN)
Thanks for the info about "urban heat island" warming, I actually hadn't ever heard that phrase before. It makes total sense. And yeah, even CNN is right, urbanisation is almost certainly just as big a factor as (if not a greater factor than) regional / global climate change, in terms of the cherry blossoms.
On that scale, of course we're on the far opposite end away from what would be called the last glacial maximum, when a bunch of global water was locked up in ice sheets across North America and Europe.
The good(??) news, of course, is that we have global coverage of the current climate, plus thousands of regional records going back to prehistory - taken together, they are truly indisputable.
Basically, no serious researcher in 2021 is trying to "prove" (or disprove) AGW, any more than trying to prove the theory of germs. It's proven. What's left is details.
As I said in the article, I was hoping to find more data sets from around the world (five different ones would have been nice), but I really couldn't find anything else comparable to the Japanese cherry blossom records.
Yes, of course, we have plenty more evidence of a different variety: paleohistorical records, temperature models, and very comprehensive modern-era measurements. But nothing else "that has been consistently recorded, in writing, more-or-less annually, for the past 1,000+ years".
I'm not trying to prove or disprove global warming either, think of my article as just the icing on the cake.
As I read it, the values here are the date that cherry blossom are first witnessed in the year. There's probably a bell-shaped distribution of when blossom appears on a given tree i.e. there will be a very small number of trees that bloom really early. If you have more people looking for it, then there's a greater chance that someone will spot a really exceptionally early tree. So an alternative explanation for the trend is just an increase in the Japanese population.
(Counter argument: when the population gets high enough that essentially all trees are witnessed, further population increases would have no further effect.)
https://twitter.com/sayakasofiamori/status/13739565776071311...
If you look into the academic papers published by Aono, you'll see that he goes into a fair bit of detail regarding both of those points: how he determined consistent historical peak bloom dates, and how he calculated consistent Gregorian dates from the ancient Japanese dates. Not being an expert in these things myself, I consciously chose not to try and explore them myself in much detail.
If anyone actually wants to persuade the other side, they need to focus on showing that the policies are likely to accomplish their goals and the least intrusive means of accomplishing those goals.
But the "we must do something" crowd can't even seem to accept nuclear energy, which people can interpret as a sign that preventing climate change is just an excuse for policy goals already desired for other reasons.
I mean… I’m finding that difficult to argue with. The rest of ”We must do something” is usually “even if it’s the wrong thing”. To which some people could say is nuclear, but I agree it’s an obvious future if it really was all about science.
Now I’m struggling to think of examples where the proposed solution isn’t a tax plan or an outright re-envisioning of society.
I’d like to find an example to see if the deniers still oppose it. I guess there are carbon scrubbers and planting trees. Are those things opposed more than they are pushed for?
We don't need humans to record something in writing. Evidence from physical processes can be used to infer historical climate and temperature, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleothermometer as a starting point.
No, we don't need humans to record something in writing. But the point I was trying to make, is that maybe there are climate change sceptics out there who will discard any and all evidence that wasn't recorded in writing by humans, as "unreliable scientific mumbo jumbo". But they can't discard this particular evidence for having that particular fault (although such folk will no doubt still end up denying this particular evidence, on account of its other faults, of which I admit there are a number).
It's certainly elegant proof. If those climate change deniers could read they would be very upset.
Articles like these help change my mind.
Well, partly. The question I keep coming to is “how do you know any of this matters, for a definition of ‘matter’ that includes widespread upheaval of human societies?” But at this point I go meh, not worth the risk.
Point is, condescending remarks only push people away from your cause. Why would you want to do that?
There's a distressing pattern: the idea that "man made climate change exists, therefore disaster."
The "disaster" part is the part I've never truly been able to convince myself of. I don't deny it -- you're right, it's more along the lines of agnosticism. But I think it's really easy to convince yourself of doom.
However, striving to be something resembling a scientist, I recognize that being ignorant is no defense. I haven't spent enough time researching the data, looking at the implications, and listening to the arguments. But every time I see a piece like this pop up, I feel this reflexive urge to question people and chase down the logic: Ok, climate change exists. How do you know we need to care?
I'm not saying we don't. I just wish people would admit "We don't really know, but it would be a good idea to take a few precautionary steps" rather than take the stance of "you're something close to Satan if you dare believe otherwise."
> I don't deny it
So, you're not a climate change denier
That was a reasonable stance in the 1970s. We have a ton more evidence now.
> I just wish people would admit "We don't really know"
Surely somebody has spent time "researching the data, looking at the implications, and listening to the arguments"? Why are you so sure they should "admit" that they don't really know? Especially when so many have come out and said that they do?
[0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/05/17/mo...
The temperature difference between now and the last ice age, at a time there was 3km of ice over much of the northern hemisphere, and sea level was 120 below current average, was 5°C. Current predictions for the temperature increase in 2100 range from 2°C, if we make a huge effort to quickly and drastically reduce CO2 emissions, to 5°C if we keep going as we are. The reality will be somewhere between, I'll let you decide what you think is likely. We don't know exactly what the consequences are gonna be, but we know they're going to be dramatic, and if you think they won't affect you personally, you're probably wrong.
This cuts both ways, depending how your phrase the assumption.
Which of these statements should we assume false, until proven true:
"Doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 will not cause meaningful negative impacts on human civilization."
"Doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 will cause meaningful negative impacts on human civilization."
Philosophy isn't going to rescue us from this. Climate science will.
Or maybe you're thinking of the burden of proof concept from jurisprudence? That is a high standard because it keeps innocent people from having their lives destroyed.
The IPCC reports [0], predicated upon the anthropogenic theory of climate change, predict a lot of people will have their lives destroyed, and the theory specifies the mechanism which will determine the magnitude. You and I as agents in democracies (I'm guessing) can help determine that magnitude - maybe whether it's millions of families displaced and destroyed or hundreds of millions.
I think the philosophical stance we should apply is the precautionary principle. If we're unsure of whether or not it is harmful that our activities are changing the composition of our atmosphere, of our oceans, and of our soil, we should at least, as a precaution, reduce the rate at which we're changing our environment.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Wildfires-...
See https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-l...
From 2018:
> During its review, the Commission found that California’s forests suffer from neglect and mismanagement, resulting in overcrowding that leaves them susceptible to disease, insects and wildfire.
https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma...
I would assume there’s also a correlation between the “don’t do anything about climate change” folks and limited government/capitalist beliefs. All of those beliefs seem distinct but they all have aligned incentives to keep the economic status quo.
I’m not trying to be condescending towards that side either, I know it’s true for myself too. I generally support change that shifts power away from the powerful, so I was always going to support something like the green new deal over a privatized solution.
Edited for clarity
There's very little doubt C02 does increase the holding of heat. There's also very little doubt the earth has gotten slightly warmer over the past century.
Where I become skeptical is in the modeling and predictions. More heat means more evaporation means more cloud cover means less heat but clouds hold heat held in. The earth tilts slightly on it's axis. Energy output from the sun varies. There are so many interacting factors. "Butterfly effect" and all.
Then you throw politics and redistribution-ism and media sensationalism on top of it all and wow what a stinky mess.
Suffice it to say I personally don't think global catastrophe is imminent from C02. Not convinced at all. I lived through the ice age scare (here's Leonard Nimoy talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0) and the start of the global warming alarm in the late 80's (which just didn't pan out as many expected 30+ years later). So I don't trust the ability to model long term climate changes and present it in an objective and non political fashion.
But I do believe humans are affecting the climate and from caution we should reduce C02 as we reasonably can without starving millions to death. It's cleaner anyway and fossil fuels are just nasty in other respects and they are limited.
Am I an illiterate unscientific "denier"? An oil company shill? Nope. Just a guy who has seen nonsense hype cycles which this certainly resembles come and go.
Also, what evidence does each side present, and how credible is this evidence?
Just relating what I do.
And yet we're making enormous policy changes with them.
So one, I don't think it's worth trying to use these models for policy. Two, sea level rise has only been 1-3 mm per year since the sixties, temp about 0.08 degrees centigrade per decade. Easily adaptable.
You can also look at the IPCC reports themselves where they admit to model "limitations". Also note the confidence level their far out proclaimations are made with. It is typically "moderate" or "low". The news pieces rarely make mention of this confidence level though.
There are plenty of articles debunking his points as outdated strawman arguments, e.g. https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/wall-street-journal-a...
Again, I think the climate is changing. And I think it will continue to change in ways that adversely affect humanity.
Thanks for the honesty. Here's some more.
Some of us don't care about your feelings at this point. It is past time for talking. There are always people with perverse incentives, or deeply held beliefs or grudges, who are unreachable. Screw 'em, it is time for action. If they want to argue, they can argue with each other.
Good luck on your "action". Isn't going to be much in the end I'd wager and the experiment will play out.
Fortunately for all of us the end effects on humanity are probably well over stated.
You helped me through a very hard time in my life a few years back, and I have thought about you often since then. Thank you. Glad to see you back here!
In my opinion, people should be less accepting of stupidity like this. There are opinions that should not be accepted so condescension is the wrong approach, rejection and ostracization are the ones that are right in my opinion.
https://medium.com/thoughts-economics-politics-sustainabilit...
What didn't we lose?
Do you require water to function? How about food?
The problem IMHO is, the climate science community doesn't connect the dots between warming -> unstable weather -> widespread upheaval.
More to your comment, I think you'll find that the wealthiest nations are the nations that are doing the most to aggressively reduce pollution while the poorest ones are emitting the most on a GDP basis. This effect is called the Kuznets Curve.
The final downward slope seems to begin about 1800. I suppose some of that is 'return to the mean', as it looks to have drifted upward slightly before then. But I'm surprised the trend seems to have started that early.