Thousands of scientists warn climate tipping points ‘imminent’ | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of scientists warn climate tipping points ‘imminent’

aljazeera.com

73 pointswebmaven47 comments

Public link to paper: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1...

But how do we make politicians aware of the seriousness?

We have to get new ones, the current group is way out of touch. Old dogs, new tricks and all that.

Become a politician or support your friends with such desires.

To play devil’s advocate, perhaps they already know it’s serious but prioritise other things because on political timescales even “a decade” is the opposite of urgent.

"politicians"? What about all of us? Climate change deniers are evil and crazy people, but even the rest of us, who admit it's real, still have to change our behaviors.

> But how do we make politicians aware of the seriousness?

Don't you think they ought to be very much aware by now? And probably they are, but are either unwilling or unable to affect true change. Unwilling because it is insufficiently in their own interest, and unable because those unwilling and their friends wield too much power. Making things move very, very slowly, at a glacial pace.

why jump to the main course when can run through decades of elections getting campaign funding arguing each side. If any problem is solved then they would have to re-canvas their population to see what other polarizing topic to use

Thanks for the question (which should be on the top, instead of the climate change deniers).

Politicians are chosen by the citizens. So the question could be rephrased to “how do we make a big portion of the world aware of the seriousness?”.

A web search for “how to convince your opponent” gives some great suggestions:

———————————————————— How to Convince Someone Ask them to share their thoughts. Match their type of reasoning -- if they're being emotional, appeal to their emotions; if they're relying on logic, be logical. Get them to lower their guard with a genuine compliment. Pose a counter-argument (without making them defensive). ————————————————————

This is quite counter intuitive: I would think that if you would tell the data and scientific method used to obtain the data you would be able to convince anyone, but not so.

Instead you have to open the discussion and have both sides on the table, which leads to ridiculous situations eg: a TV show gives a scientist who builds upon many years of research equal time to speak on some matter as a fancy vlogger with a quirky opinion.

The more noise you make the more you will be noticed. If people aren’t confronted with their actions, they have little chance to change their opinion and behaviour. It is important to be respectful while also making clear that change is needed, by each and everyone.

> “how do we make a big portion of the world aware of the seriousness?”

A big portion of the world is pretty convinced that scientific community is full of shit. It might be the case that what they are saying might be true. But it is the boy that cried wolf at this point. But unlike the story, both the boy and the farmers could end up paying the price here.

Sad.

When has the scientific community really been crying wolf on environmental matters, on a large scale?

It can certainly feel like it has, with warnings about climate change and other ecological issues getting near-constant and having more and more visibility over the last couple of decades. But that's not really the scientific community calling wolf unless they were wrong. That's just people getting jaded. That doesn't mean the warnings have been wrong, it just means things have been going on for a long time with no solution.

>When has the scientific community really been crying wolf on environmental matters, on a large scale?

Obviously I meant the scientific community in general. What is special about the "environmental matters", that make the community around it resistant to various politicisation or frauds?

I was assuming it would be about environmental questions based on the context, but that may have been a poor assumption on my part.

Nothing of course makes environmental research immune to problems.

The question then becomes the same about the scientific community in general. When and about what has it been crying wolf?

You mention fraud, but is it really as prevalent a problem in academic research as it might seem from the headlines? Fraud or other instances of gross misconduct deservedly make the headlines but all the research staff toiling away and trying to do their best don't. (The occasional sexy enough result does, but those are few and far between.) From what little I've seen of academic research, the people in there haven't seemed to be dishonest or intending to defraud. I'm sure outright fraud does happen, but is it really such a widespread problem that it counts as the entire community becoming suspect?

Questionable methodology is of course a problem, and probably a much more widespread one, although it's probably not any worse than what people generally base their opinions and views on.

I really still fail to see how the scientific community has cried wolf. I can easily see how it would seem and feel like it has, but that would be more due to poor journalism and reporting than due to the actions of most of the community itself.

Of course I may be grossly underestimating the prevalence of scientific misconduct, but this has been my impression.

> When and about what has it been crying wolf?

I can give you instances, but that would not be very efficient. Because you can then be apologetic of the examples I provide..

The real question is "can the scientific community be made to have a consensus based on politics rather than science?". I think the answer is a resounding "YES", simply because it is made up of human beings who are not less susceptible to ways of coercion, than the human beings in actual politics or other fields that we can agree that corruption exists.

>From what little I've seen of academic research, the people in there haven't seemed to be dishonest or intending to defraud.

Politicians at a high level being corrupt does not imply, or require, that every government official is corrupt. So I am not sure why you mention it.

> but is it really such a widespread problem that it counts as the entire community becoming suspect?

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...

This is not a justification or proof (as I said earlier, it would not be a very efficient use of my time), but something you can start with if you are genuinely interested and if you really have no idea how bad things are in this regard (Jeez, i wonder how can that be the case!)

Such engagement would be better than how I've generally been treated as an opponent of climate change alarmism. Historically the arguments boil down to, emotional appeals like this story. Buy now or lose the opportunity forever! We are reaching an inflection point! This is a story angle I've seen dozens of times at this point and none of the dire predictions have ever come to pass. The other major one is "you're not qualified to have an opinion on the topic".

There are numerous pieces on how various branches of science have a very broken peer review process. The academic incentives are perverse, publish or perish, and peer review is a low budget method that has lots of issues that crop in.

My main issue is, is modern science reliable enough to make such predictions? All meta science material I've seen says no, they are not. So my preference would be, fix the system so it stops producing sensationalistic garbage and then we can talk about what might need to change about fundamental economic underpinnings.

Mass (peaceful) civil disobedience?

So, what item, that mr. Johnny Average uses daily, will now be banned (or made more expensive, by having to use barely "recyclable" materials), while nothing will be done about huge industries, and other countries that pollute a lot more?

We,ve forbidden plastic bags and replaced them with reusable bags, which contain more plastic, or with cotton ones, tha thave to be reused 20.000times, to make it worth it, compared to plastic bags ( https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto... ). We've forbidden straws. So what's next?

Hopefully policy makers will target both consumers and industry in order to tackle this crisis.

Otherwise when we’re talking to our kids, and they’re asking us what we did to stop the climate crisis, all we’ll be able to say is ‘Child, I gave up unlimited free plastic bags for you, what more could I have done?’

I think the point is so far action has been limited to token actions (such as the ridiculous straw thing) targeted at consumers, and no real action targeted at companies.

Yep, this is exactly my point. Ban straws, and let the industry pollute... people notice, government is "doing something", and in the end, nothing is done.

And of course, stuff like this:

https://qz.com/690321/leonardo-dicaprio-took-an-outrageous-8...

Plastic bag charge is to prevent fly tipping / littering more than anything else. It definitely encourages bag re-use, including for plastic bags.

“Ban” is probably the wrong word. It’s really an artificial price floor of about 5c.

I see a lot more plastic bottles on the ground than bags. Usually you need a bag to take stuff home, and once there, you use it for trash, and then take the trash to the outside/large trash can. Plastic bottle.. you drink the contents, and some people just throw it away.

Some countries have returnable plastic bottles (so at worst, homeless/poor people pick them up, to make some money). Most don't.

>while nothing will be done about huge industries

But Johnny Average is what all those huge industries are ultimately there for. It all leads to production of goods for the people.

Also, straws, plastic bags etc are actually a different issue. Those are about plastic pollution and have little to do with climate change.

Also also, plastic pollution is not as big of an apparent problem in the West. Who knows with microplastic contamination though. We might be doing lead pipes 2.0.

Nah, johnny will now buy more expensive, bamboo plastic straws, in plastic packaging, in a plastic box, with multiple boxes in a plastic covered cardboard box, and all of that wrapped in plastic foil. He will also buy a reusable bag, made from much more plastic than single-use ones, and per gram of plastic, wont last as long.

Johnny will also be told not to drive his car... by a guy, who went to the interview in his private jet. Media will also praise a kid, who uses a sailing-yacht to travel, because she doesn't want to fly (due to carbon emissions), and in turn, she needs a whole team to operate the boat, which will then have to fly back home with a plane. We also pay a lot of money for recycling our goods, to be then just burned (and just stuff like copper scrapped) in 3rd world countries.

> But Johnny Average is what all those huge industries are ultimately there for. It all leads to production of goods for the people.

A lot of consumer behavior today is actually dictated by marketing, both through advertising (one of the largest industries in the world, whose purpose is entirely to distort rational consumption) or through other means (making sure you can sell things every year, by forcefully decommissioning older products, subscription models, cheap disposable parts). The average consumer can't afford to consume less, as almost everything is priced in such a way that they are forced to choose between huge investments in a durable object or continuous consumption of disposable crap - if the option of durable objects even exists.

> Also, straws, plastic bags etc are actually a different issue. Those are about plastic pollution and have little to do with climate change.

Sure, but the measures taken have been entirely irrelevant - causing slight problems for consumers, with 0 impact on the problem. Straws in particular were a massive PR stunt at a staggering scale.

Open up city zoning laws so "local" food actually effing mean local and not within 8h truck shipping distance.

Lots of city dead space, roof tops, useless alley ways that can be turned into gardens that provide simple food source

What makes this group of scientists and their warning more legitimate than these previous “imminent tipping points”

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

I would be suspicious abount anything published by "one of the Conservative think tanks funded to overturn the environmentalism of the 1960s, central to promoting climate change denial"[1]. The article is also clearly written in bad faith, with their so-called "counter-arguments" being a case of selectively choosing the information that supports their agenda and discarding everything else.

Having said that: that article cites about one scientist a year, while we are currently getting one warning a week. No scientist in their right mind would deny that global warming is real and it's here

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

> environmentalism of the 1960s,

Unfortunately is was those very environmentalists who fought hard to stop the nuclear industry - and now it may be too late even with the explosion of green-technologies.

> global warming

I believe "climate change" is a better term to use these days.

Many environmentalists have been wrong about nuclear power and nuclear industry, and still are. That doesn't really make the opponents of environmentalism any more right.

If the opponents had focused on pointing out e.g. contradictory or irrational goals (e.g. nuclear power) or on genuinely questioning environmentalist claims without having an agenda of their own, you could say they were right in some cases. But that certainly doesn't describe most of the opponents of environmentalism, and definitely not the staunchest ones.

No, more of an existence proof - the fact that people have been saying similar things since at least the 60’s should make us at least consider the possibility that the reason for the current warnings are similar to the reason for the previous warnings. Sure, maybe all those other warnings were in good faith and happened to be wrong, while the current warnings are also in good faith and might turn out to be correct. But if you can’t even consider the possibility, then we’re in the realm of religion, not science.

Here’s a climate scientist who agrees about climate change, but disagrees about the urgency and nature of the actions justified, hopefully that doesn’t define him as “not in his right mind” -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg

More realistically, all of those warnings were actually quite right, and catastrophic global warming is well on its way, with almost all recent years being the hottest that we know of.

And about this Lomborg individual, I have no idea why anyone would listen to economists (people whose entire field is predicated on models which assume no major changes in the world) about what is necessary to combat catastrophic climate change - this what his think tank is all about.

Lomborg is not a climate scientist! Besides that he's been funded by the oil industry.

No one agrees with him besides industry people.

Don't post disinformation.

It's been thirty years the IPCC is warning humanity about this. Should be about time to listen, nah?

Comparing a few dozen cherry-picked headlines over 30+ years to a specific warning by 14,000 scientists is hardly apples to apples.

Also, CEI claims the ozone hole was climate alarmism and nothing bad actually happened, but that’s because scientists warned us and we took action. Even the chart CEI cites shows the hole stopped growing and leveled off. But apparently because it didn’t disappear completely, our actions were futile?

I didn't expect climate change denialism and the most base and idiotic and tabloid-tier cherry picking of facts, here on hn.

HN is a public forum. Even with heroic moderation efforts you find idiotic tabloid-tier rants for every topic.

The CEI article cherry picks sensational headlines with failed predictions, but that does not prove that climate change is not having disastrous effects on the environment.

> What makes this group of scientists and their warning more legitimate than these previous “imminent tipping points”

Better models and more computing power?

Josh, why would you post such a fundamentally dishonest blogpost?

Those predictions are only "failed" because they were too soon.

We're good at seeing the signs of things to come, but we're bad at predicting the when.

The best way to stop global warning is through intervention by Central Banks. We need to create monetary policy which promotes incentives such as green energy and carbon capture technology. We also need to focus on improving battery technology to store excess energy for later use.

We need to introduce innovation permits to restrict who is allowed to work on green tech so that we don't waste effort reinventing the wheel. We need to bring all the top green energy minds under one roof with one director at the top who has a PhD and a proven track record of success at raising capital.

The key to innovation is to reduce competition and increase collaboration. With such focus, it's critical that we don't put the wrong people in a position of power. We need a solid proven track record in academia, politics and/or business - The only way to do this is by looking at the financial track record. The stock market is the only mechanism which we can trust for ranking top people. Mediocre people who can't achieve success in such easy economic times should not occupy positions of power. If they can't make it during such easy fiscally expansionary times, how will they perform during hard times?

We need better leaders with a proven track record and top credentials from top universities.

To summarize, you are asking for a hero to come and to save us all with the power of meritocracy. This hero of yours is a PhD executive (from a top university) with access to venture capital and will lead other eminent people to produce world changing green technologies. The stock market will be the bar for which this hero is selected.

Companies that exploit the environment already have PhD executive types (from great schools) with great track records and amazing access to capital already. That is part of the problem. These eminent people have already decided that their personal wealth now is worth destroying our future.

These geniuses have already found a solution: rampant hedonism. Squeeze out every moment of pleasure while you still can and when time is up, jet over to New Zealand and hunker down while the world is engulfed in flames.

First of all, to have any hope of of reducing global warming to mild proportions, energy usage will have to shrink, and so will the economy. We are simply too far advanced for any green energy solution and magical carbon sequestration to be able to help in time while also growing the global economy. Since we also want the global south to reach decent levels of development, the rich countries will have to accept even more shrinkage in their economy to accommodate rising consumption in the poorer ones - especially those hurt the most by the last few centuries of industrial progress.

This shrinkage will happen either way, due to the effects of global warming in theatter half of this century - today, we still have an option of doing it in a somewhat controlled manner. Tomorrow we will not.

Secondly, it is important to realize that it is theoretically impossible, not just technologically, to produce a battery that has the energy density of gasoline or most fossil fuels. The best realistic batteries we can think of are about 6MJ/kg, compared to 44-50 MJ/kg for hydrocarbons. This also means that transportation will become much more expensive in the coming decades, especially for goods - a battery powered cargo ship will transport ~10 times less cargo per journey than today, and so will an electrical truck (though the truck would likely be replaced by rail transport).

Haven't we had multiple tipping points already? It really feels weird how the tipping point is always very soon(tm).

Same thing every decade

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

It is a tradition by now

weird how no one wants to mention china either

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