Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought
cam.ac.uk
cam.ac.uk
I’m a physical oceanographer which means my job is to figure out how the water moves and delivers heat through things like math and models. Paleoclimate isn’t my expertise but I figured I’d chime in on some of the climate skepticism here.
Oceanographers would be the first to admit that modeling-predicting changes in the ocean is very hard. Especially more regional features like an intensified warming in the Labrador Sea. That is because even state of the art models have coarse resolution and our initial conditions for far in the past are poor. However, anthropogenic climate change is not a regional effect.
It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?
Also I’ve seen in this thread people saying that global climate change has been overhyped. From the science side this paper does a great job of evaluating our models from the past:
Is that roughly correct?
Are there any other runaway processes that could take us by surprise? Peat bogs and permafrost hydrates?
Isn't this more akin to saying, the window broke before the hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have been the cause?
He's saying it's hard to predict results from certain causes because the process is chaotic.
Both analogies and similies are really just overlapping categorical subsets of metaphors.
Imagine coming upon a window that was broken, and inferring that it must have been broken by "a thing". So you look for evidence - a rock, a hammer, something - all the while proclaiming that the cause was a given. All the while, you overlook that the initial fracture was there from the beginning and carried along every day by comparatively small amounts of thermal stress.
Could that also be a metaphor for some of the climate change hype? (I don't use the word "hype" to imply false. I use it in the context of "to promote or publicize extravagantly".)
It's not true though if you want to use your metaphor for climate change.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-clarify-starting-poin...
> Scientists generally regard the later part of the 19th century as the point at which human activity started influencing the climate. But the new study brings that date forward to the 1830s.
This was well before the date in the article.
That's the point.
He's not talking about the causes of climate change or anything like that. He's explaining a specific phenomenon using an analogy. Whether or not you believe climate change is anthropocentric is immaterial to how this phenomenon manifests. And to help people understand how this phenomenon works, he used the metaphor of the shattered glass.
It actually does not matter what shattered the glass. He said hammer because a hammer would work. It could have been smashed with a frozen, medium-sized cat for all it mattered.
The point is, once the glass is shattered, you cannot predict where each piece is going to fall.
> Isn't this more akin to saying, the window broke before the hammer hit it, so the hammer couldn't have been the cause?
Agree or disagree, it's an interesting thought exercise that took the original analogy in an interesting direction. Whether or not you agree about it being interesting or useful, it certainly wasn't "arguing the metaphor", just adding to it in a way that you may or may not appreciate.
We don't appreciate it when politicians twist questions to give the canned responses they've prepared, why should we accept a similar tactic amongst ourselves?
Doubly so for anything vaguely related to social sciences and other fields where theorising from first principles isn't the norm. "Historical" sciences such as astrophysics and epidemiology often get short shrift here as well. Engineers in general seem to be prone to opining outside of their area of expertise, the Salem Hypothesis that a creationist with an advanced degree was more likely to be an engineer than any other field was noted back in the early days of Usenet:
All (most of?) the stuff done on P vs NP is good science that will stand up.
Studies on which language features make it better for developers are social science, because they involve those pesky humans. That stuff is likely to suffer from a reproducibility crisis.
another reason could be that the level of reproducibility of results and openness and availability of sources (data, code, papers) in modern "science" branches is appallingly low for the software folks to take them (the scientists and their results) seriously by default.
This is more armchair Freudish, but I also think that a feeling of intellectual superiority makes up for other areas that are lacking in similar feelings of value and power. Life as a computer science student is not cool or fun or sexy, so you fall back on what gives you power in wider society. Sort of like the idea that poor whites fall back onto their whiteness. People jockey for position using whatever they have.
This extends to the techno-elite as well. What drives the CEO of an electric car company to declare that the way to improve urban mobility is to build roads in tunnels underground? Well, clearly he must be doing something right, he's the richest man on earth!
Thus appeals to authority have no meaning if people don't trust that authority. The end result is anyone saying stuff they like is correct and anyone that isn't is wrong.
The US also has a problem with people active trying to cripple and downsize government because it steals their money and tells them what to do.
Replace Global Warming with almost any other scientific concept and you would also be right. The fact we have politicized everything in this country is not a strength and is going to have negative long term knock on effects. I see the politicization of the covid vaccine giving general anti vaxxers validation now and would not be surprised to see a resurgence of measles in the near term (couple of years). I am completely comfortable with everyone making their own choice on the covid vaccine (I am vaccinated), I get the concern and there is enough noise that I understand their viewpoint. Politicizing it though has been the wrong approach, we cant let people have their own opinions anymore, everyone that disagrees is the enemy. This is the same with climate change, immigration and presidential elections. Issue is that the political parties know that doing this makes their base rally tighter and establishes a motivational us vs them narrative. Its not going to end well.
Because that happens more often than not, skepticism is further excited when you get politicians who claim to be in favor of climate change policy, only to then go and fly private jets, buy ocean front property, etc. This gets conveniently ignored by folks who have turned climate change into a religion.
Every time you even begin to say "hey, we should consider this..." people sperg out and start calling you a "climate change denier" or some other disparaging term. Literally turning their brains off to counter argument because they can't handle the idea that they're living in an incomplete reality.
There is absolutely nothing controversial about saying "let's look at all sides and evaluate carefully" (the scientific process as we've agreed upon it for millennia). People have been radicalized and frightened to the point where they no longer think rationally about the problem (and solutions) and instead get hyper-tribalistic, shouting down any reasonable discussion that doesn't automatically agree with their point of view.
That's why people are skeptical.
You mean articles like this Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'? [0]
Because that specific quote, "code red" is not BBC editorialization. It is a direct quote from UN Secretary-General António Guterres [1]
> Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.
People accuse you ave being a skeptic not because you are saying "hey, we should consider this...", it's because, as exemplified by this exact comment, you are deliberately misrepresenting your position to make it seem more legitimate. "Code red" is not based on the "least realistic" models, they are based on our current pathway, that was what made the most recent IPCC report so alarming.
Climate change poses an extremely serious, near term threat to our very way of life. I know that this can be hard to accept, but it is important to, at the very least, not silence those who are pointing this out.
I'm literally not. It's in the report [1]. Your condescension here is exactly what I'm getting at. You assume I'm an idiot because we disagree.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... (Page 304, lines 15-27).
Edit: not my own math but this is important, too, and further cements my point: https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1424718032279011339.
The page you linked to says that RCP 8.5 is very unlikely, but none of the "code red" reports claim otherwise.
All of the "code red" reports claim that we are virtually certain to be unable to stay below 1.5 preindustrial. This is RCP 4.5 and above. Something that if we had this conversation 20 years ago was also viewed as very unlikely.
I think either you don't know or are wildly underestimating the severe impact that these alternative pathways will have on human populations. RCP 8.5 is as horrific as it is unlikely, but all the other pathways we are rushing towards are still absolutely "code red".
In the early 2000s most people earnestly thought we wouldn't get past 1C, now that is impossible.
It's not even worth getting into all the ways that many people agree the IPCC reports tend to be a bit conservative. I'm fine throwing out all of these concerns, and sticking with just the report, but even with just the report, even on RCP 4.5, we're in very real trouble. It is absolutely a 'code red'.
None of the above. I'm reading the report and forming my own opinion while factoring out the hyperbole and panic of the media, politicians, etc. My motivation is thinking for myself and considering whether all of the theatrics align with the reality in front of me (they don't).
To further elaborate on my skepticism, perfectly valid technologies that could have been implemented decades ago (while there was plenty of awareness of this problem, as well as "global cooling") like nuclear have been foolishly ignored, discredited, etc. The primary argument I hear is "too expensive" and "too long to build," yet somehow congress manages to find money for inanities to the tune of billions every year. You'd think if this was seriously catastrophic, we'd be going in to debt to finance better energy solutions.
All of what I said above combined with that tells me the motivation of the people trying to scare everyone is disingenuous. When someone's actions don't align with their speech, it's often indicative of dishonesty. Considering how much money is at stake, the probability of that is increased.
I don't understand. The people in the US Congress are hamstringing themselves and can barely pass their own legislation, yet somehow that inaction and political gridlock, which existed and will exist regardless of climate change, is somehow proof that...climate change isn't as bad?
You know who else also has a ton of money and a willingness to be dishonest? Every company that produces or relies directly on coal, oil, and gas. They ensure Congress is useless and unable to act by funding a party that ensures nothing happens.
I don't understand this take. Those of us that want to solve climate change want nuclear, we want solar, we want it all. We want to give Hydrogen to Aluminum plants to supplant CO2 they release, we want to electricy cars, we want to feed seaweed to cows to stop their farts.
You might be arguing against a loud majority that is repeating dumb stuff, but surely HN attracts people that can ignore the bad policies and arguments and elevate the best?
This is a deliberate mischaracterization of my point. No. Read my initial comment. My goal isn't to say climate change isn't bad. You're doing exactly what I called out above.
If you solve that problem, then we can actually focus on what matters: making sure there isn't a real catastrophe (implementing policies that don't destroy the economy, building alternative energy solutions, etc). If everyone is terrified and panicked, you're more likely to get the whims of a totalitarian authority accepted by the population (go figure).
Instead of having "climate anxiety," kids should instead be excited and curious about what they can learn to help reduce the effects (or mitigate them away entirely).
The goal of a lot of the people here seems to be hysteria.
Hadn't you just accused others of mischaracterizing your views? Why are you doing the same to everyone arguing back?
I don't see anyone in this comment chain whose goal is to be hysterical or cause hysteria. We all simply view human caused climate change as obvious and want to solve it. I am quite curious as to how to solve climate change economically, quickly, without giving up too much way of life, liberties, or causing panic.
The public is not being hysterical. Rather the opposite, which is something you already admitted further up: people simply aren't acting at all.
You were the only person I accused. Because you did.
I suppose I could see this as saying "if it really were catastrophic, why aren't we acting like it" as opposed to "it can't be catastrophic if we aren't acting like it".
A subtle difference, but to say it is a "deliberate mischaracterization" is just not true. I read the whole comment chain and I think my initial view was an easy one to arrive at. I would avoid conflating too many things at once.
Congress is full of corrupt people who can afford to move on a whim, are in the pockets of Big Oil, and plan on retiring and dying before the worst of it hits.
It's very serious, it's just not their problem.
And even less human critical things are also dramatic just not for everyone. When you tell me all coral reefs are dying I really think this is very bad.
Africa never really built out an extensive land line telephone system, but most Africans have cell phones now. They do not need to move through an obsolete technology in order to adopt a new one.
Now do the reliability part.
Edit: Worth reading this [1] and this [2].
Anywhere pricing of electricity fluctuates with the intermittence of renewables there is opportunity to use storage to profit. The faster we drive the adoption of renewables in the 1st world the faster prices on storage tech will drop which will benefit the developing world. Especially the parts which will never have transmission lines built out from some centralized power plant 300 kilometers away.
A LOT of scientists believe that we're on track for a cataclysmic amount of warming. 3C of warming is nothing to fuck around with.
The point being, don't just take what you're fed. If you dig around, you might find that a lot of the claims on scientific consensus are misrepresented (as dismissed by the quoted scientists) [2].
Source: https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
I learned of this from Vertasium's video on global warming myths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU
1. They focused narrowly on studying the natural drivers of climate change without accounting for the affect of human beings on greenhouse gas concentrations.
2. They focused narrowly on the effects of human emissions of aerosol pollution without accounting for the effects of humans on greenhouse gas levels.
3. Bad science maybe.
Regardless the majority of scientists who accurately predicted warming did not just wind up on the right side of a 50/50 bet. They didn't just predict that there would be warming. They predicted the amount of warming that could be expected depending on the emission scenario that played out.
The planet is now hotter than it has been in over 100,000 years and it's also precisely how warm scientists said it would be at this time with this co2 level. It's one of the greatest predictions in the history of earth sciences and you disregard this because a different smaller group of scientists made a wrong prediction that got too much press. Makes sense.
Peer reviewed scientific studies examining the level of consensus among climate scientists that Earth is warming and the primary cause is human activity:
Verheggen 2014 - 91% consensus Powell, 2013 - 97% consensus John Cook et al., 2013 - 97% consensus Farnsworth and Lichter, 2011 - 84% consensus Anderegg et al, 2010 - 97% consensus Doran, 2009 - 97% consensus Bray and von Storch, 2008 - 93.8% consensus STATS, 2007 - 95% consensus Oreskes, 2004 - 100% consensus
The Cook 2016 meta analysis of consensus studies finds the rate of consensus between 90 - 100% and that agreement with the consensus approaches 100% as expertise in climatology increases.
This list is probably outdated. I put it together 5 or 6 years ago.
Then theres that survey by Science where 60% of respondents said they expect us to hit 3C of warming because of intransigence by policy makers.
I'm sure you would find results that are diametrically opposed to climate change if you looked at studies funded by say, oil companies, and there is no doubt in mind as to the bias implied in that direction.
The harsh reality is that things are more nuanced than either side would have you believe, and throwing numbers like "90% consensus" is a fallacious way to bully an argument, and isn't at all scientific on its own.
Eventually Exxon shut down the division and spent the next 35 years paying public relations agencies to spread misinformation and doubt about the science. Including the false narrative that scientists are being paid to manufacture global warming.
There have always been mercenary scientists like Willie Soon who solicite industry to produce shoddy science that protects their interests. The same thing happened with the lead, asbestos, and tobacco industries. The majority of scientists are not in it for the money. They became scientists to advance human knowledge. That's the entire point of being a scientist. Your conception of the field is cynical and not rooted in reality.
Funny how their funding stopped hmmm?
Plus maybe just a general distaste for propaganda.
For my own part I believe humans are affecting the climate to some extent. I don't see how anything else would be possible.
But I'm early 50's and have been watching this closely for 30 years and don't believe the hype and doomsday predictions anymore. I don't think the models are good enough to say what will happen in sum. Should we get off fossil fuels and stop polluting? Yes as fast as practically possible. Is OMG the world ending oceans collapsing 12 years from now? Probably not and they don't actually know that.
Likewise. And what I’ve noted is that the IPCC’s optimistic predictions keep proving far too optimistic, and their worse-outcome predictions keep coming true, sooner than predicted.
I also see corporations that are loathe to change suddenly make commitments to change, and to make those changes pretty quickly. To my eyes, that is a big indication that things have started going well off the rails.
I’m not looking forward to having to handle the wheels falling off of society in my senior years as crop failures, infrastructure collapse, and social unrest kick into high gear.
The polar ice caps were predicted to be gone. Still there. Coral reef collapse. They are flourishing. Massive rapid sea level rise. Very small, unnoticeable without measuring equipment. Increase in extreme weather events. Hasn't happened.
In short, things aren't a whole lot different then they were 30 years ago. I realize 30 years isn't that long but still, there were some really extreme predictions (and I was worried) but they don't look to be coming to pass and I don't think they will for the next 30 either.
The coral reefs are collapsing. To claim otherwise is simply ludicrous. https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(21)00474-...
Sea levels are rising an eighth of an inch a year, and over 2 ½ inches this past forty years. This is noticeable. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html
Extreme weather events have doubled in the past two decades. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/extreme-weather-events-have-inc...
You are deeply uninformed.
Neither are the coral reefs collapsing.
https://www.royalgazette.com/environment/news/article/202108...
(btw this claims sea level rise is less then 1/10 of an inch year, not 1/8).
Great Barrier reef has record levels of coral this year.
I've personally observed many sections of the second largest reef in Mexico/Belize within the past few years and the corral are healthy with many young corral and look pretty much as they did when I first saw them 30 years ago.
The reefs are not collapsing. This is reality, not propaganda, not the output of theoretical models. How do you square this with some of the more extreme predictions? It is very interesting how we both have watched over the same time period and see different things apparently.
I don't believe I'm uninformed at all. I just don't believe the hype anymore.
There is a lot hype and propaganda but hey, you have me neatly categorized as a denier, now you can safely ignore facts that don't square with your chosen ideology and go on about your week.
If you are really 50+ and have been paying attention the whole time I have no clue how you could not have some cognitive dissonance. The models weren't accurate. The extreme predictions didn't come to pass.
Catastrophe is not imminent and both of us will die with the earth pretty much as it is now to the naked eye climatewise.
* NASA: [Study Confirms Climate Models are Getting Future Warming Projections Right](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...)
* Scientific American: [Climate Science Predictions Prove Too Conservative Checking 20 years worth of projections shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has consistently underestimated the pace and impacts of global warming](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...)
* Yale University: [Can We Trust Climate Models? Increasingly, the Answer is ‘Yes’](https://e360.yale.edu/features/can_we_trust_climate_models_i...)
* Geophysical Research Letters: [Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...) — "We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations"
* MIT: [Historical Climate Models Accurately Projected Global Warming](https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/historical-climate-models-...)
But those of use paying attention to press releases and what actually happened know better.
If you are actually any older than millennial (as you claim) I'd be very surprised but it doesn't matter.
You believe whatever you like. Swallow propaganda or not, google around for links that support what you believe, doesn't matter.
The experiment with fossil fuels is going to play out for now and we will see the results. Probably a warmer wetter world in some hundreds or thousands of years. And we as a species will be fine. But in your life, and mine, we are unlikely to see catastrophic climate change.
Oh, and the reefs will still be there as well. You can go see them when you are old which is probably a ways off for you.
By when? Lots of climate hyperbole is focused on the year 2100 for some reason so perhaps that's what you had in mind. Anyway, not completely gone yet, but I can point out the following since I have it handy here:
July 2020: The last intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic fell into the sea
"We have already lost the frozen Arctic"
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/583115-climat...
> Increase in extreme weather events. Hasn't happened.
Are you just making shit up? According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, extreme events are up 74% for 2000 to 2019 vs 1980 - 1999. And "Much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters including extreme weather events: from 3,656 climate-related events (1980-1999) to 6,681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000-2019. And "The last twenty years have seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1,389 to 3,254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034. Floods and storms were the most prevalent events."
https://www.undrr.org/publication/human-cost-disasters-overv...
Also, shipping lanes opening up in the arctic for longer duration now. And of course Russia and US are considering more drilling now that it's feasible, in case anyone was confused about any real change in policy / mindset.
I don't see a clear trend in number of hurricanes. Sorry. I'd have to look at how "extreme events" were ascertained (hopefully not cherry picked) in the 2 20 year periods by the UN article you link.
I just don't see, from casual observation, an increase in floods and storms over when I was a child. Maybe it exists and I just am not picking it up but it's not "double" and the storms are certainly not worse.
I do understand the sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking for some time. Paradoxically it's not in the Antarctic. This could be partially due to warming (which I agree exists, no argument). It could also be due to dark soot accumulation on the snow/ice to some extent causing more rapid melting.
This is what I'm talking about. This kind of thing.
I see. I suspect there would have been a lot of similar articles around that time. Maslowski made that projection in 2007, a year when there was a huge drop in extent minimum over the previous year, and following successive years of lower minima before a recovery in 2008. He made the same mistake during the 2012 record minimum year (which is still the record minimum year), predicting ice free summers by 2016 if I recall correctly. He has since continued his research, but no longer makes these kinds of predictions.
So yes, sometimes there are overly aggressive projections and or outright mistakes, and on top of that there is hyperbole with the media going for the most extreme headline possible. But the fact that some predictions are overly aggressive doesn't mean the situation isn't serious. All trends based on measurement (not projection) are showing the cryosphere is in serious trouble. Glaciers are melting, permafrost is turning out to be not so "perma".
Maybe that understanding of complex systems could be more of an unconscious understanding that talented people can act out intuitively, or compartmentalize for a specific domain.
Plastic pollution (particularly in the oceans) is really disturbing, but other than burning it, I don't see what it has to do with warming.
People are drawn to tech in a large part because of their belief in the power of technology and the limitless possibility of the future. The very real potential impacts of climate change in our lifetime pose as serious threat to this.
Rather than struggle with this most people here (or maybe a few loud, happy to flag comments they disagree with people) find it much easier to simply dismiss everything as excessive hyperbole.
Climate change unquestionably posses a real threat to our way of life, and at this point mitigating it does as well. People in tech are used to only thinking in terms of optimism and finding a way to solve problems and really can't deal with serious problems that might not have a solution, but rather only different forms of compromise.
Unfortunately the skeptics here are very aggressive. I have had several comments this week flagged for no other reason than disagreement (I know this because they have all been unflagged upon review).
It's somewhat ironic because this bizarre extreme reaction from this community really makes it all the more clear that something is really wrong.
Absolutely.
> ... because none of us know the final truth about the immensely complex system that is the Earth's climate.
Even if we did know, don't block people going to the hospital to try to prove your point. First, it's insanely un-empathetic, to the point of sociopathy. And, theoretically, you probably claim to care about the climate because climate change is going to hurt people. Second, it's not going to win friends for your movement or viewpoint. It's counter-productive, no matter how urgent you think climate change is.
Those are roughly in order of difficulty, and if they fail at an earlier one, you shouldn't trust the later ones. The first one isn't even chaotic, and I wouldn't trust a model built from first principles alone to be in phase past a dozen cycles or so.
You can curve fit things after the fact (interpolation), but extrapolation is always on shaky ground.
If nothing interacted with each other, I think you could make reasonable energy-in / energy-out models. However even looking at big low-pass averages, plants/algae use CO2, and heat creates clouds, and clouds block sunlight, and so on. Unlike a double pendulum that bleeds a small amount of energy to friction, the climate bleeds a lot of energy into space, and the amount of energy it loses is a function of clouds, plant life, etc.
I politely disagree, but my non-expert arguments shouldn't carry much weight. Here's a quote from a 2018 IPCC document instead:
"The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system,
and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states
is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction
of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible
states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions." [0]
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/TAR-14.pdf
I don't like this analogy. A better example might be that if we set fire to all the forests, it's going to get hotter. It's true in the short term but the long term effects can be debated. And unfortunately there's a history of predictions that haven't come true to deal with.
There are a bunch of unanswered questions around rapid warming. Like the doom and gloom scenarios of a tipping point or runaway global warming. The obvious question I have is: if this is a real possibility, why hasn't it happened in the last several billion years? The Earth has been warmer than it is now.
Another is that rapid warming over short periods isn't that unprecedented [1]:
> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
To be clear, I'm not a climate change denier. I'm a climate change fatalist. By this I mean that whatever is going to happen is going to happen and there's really nothing you can do about it now other than finding cheaper alternatives to bad behaviours (eg solar becoming cheaper than fossil fuels).
If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let other people die rather than they being mildly inconvenienced. There's no way people are going to make their lives more expensive or more inconvenient for climate change.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
> If the pandemic has taught us nothing else, it's that many people are staggeringly selfish and are quite willing to let other people die rather than they being mildly inconvenienced.
I don't believe that "anti-maskers", who you are probably referring to, are significantly more selfish than "maskers." If you understand that most of them truly believe masks are not helpful, and even some believe they are harmful, then to them it's more than just "I'd rather kill people than be inconvenienced." They don't believe they are killing anyone.
While this is true (modeling a complex system such as the Earth's climate and all of it's positive and negative feed back loops is incredibly challenging), the implied assumption from people that use this critique is that uncertainty will always fall on the side of "better than expected".
People that have been closely following human ecology for the last decade or so have repeatedly found the opposite to be true. "Faster than expected" is somewhat of a joke in certain communities since it seems that the more we learn the more we realize how large the impact of rapid accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere really is, and how quickly this impact develops.
That's not to say model uncertainty == doom, but assuming that model uncertainty == "this is fine" is a more dangerous and naive assumption.
And that’s played out already? So not exactly a low probability scenario.
If I told you “my model predicts a 50% chance you be diagnosed with cancer and a 50% chance you wont” how do you make a decision. When both are equally probable?
Smoking is not needed for life to function, energy production, food production, heating, etc is very much needed for life to function.
It didn't have to go down this way but certain powerful folks have been more interested in maintaining the status quo than making improvements, and that pattern continues today. Even basic economic concepts like externalities are ignored because folks embrace thought-terminating terms like "job-killing policies".
Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?
"Extreme" economic harm? Define extreme, please. Also account for all the increased economic activity related to climate change mitigation (renewable energy, carbon capture, construction).
"lower living standards SUBSTANTIALLY" - Climate change will do that too. Try cooling your house cheaply, or getting enough freshwater or fresh produce when the climate goes haywire.
"be very regressive to the poorest people." - Again, needs context. The "poorest people" are precisely the ones who will suffer the most if climate change isn't averted. The Indian subcontinent, to take one example, will have acute water shortages and/or sea-level rises (in Bangladesh) which will lead to crop failures and famine.
If a number of people told me that there was a 50% chance I had cancer, then I would first check their qualifications to make sure their predictions were worth my time. Then, if I found them credible, I would be really worried about getting cancer and go through all the screenings and tests necessary to figure out which side of the 50% I was on. Would you not do the same?
For example, after decades of sea level doom scenario's people are saying it is "slower than expected".
No. Popular media. Scientists will say something like "wow, this particular study shows us hitting 1 degree of warming by 2010, and 2 degrees of warming by 2030 at the current rate, which would lead to gradual melting of the ice caps", and in the popular media that becomes "SCIENTISTS PREDICT ICE CAPS WILL BE ENTIRELY GONE BY 2010!" Because the nuance was not understood, and alarm gets readers/watchers.
I will also remind you the same people who would claim it's slower than expected because of what scientists have said in the past are the same people who will call out that in the 1960s scientists were predicting global cooling as evidence why the science is wrong. I.e., even though those positions are counter to each other, they both work in service to "the science is always wrong" narrative, and that's really the bias at play.
Can you give me some citations for this? I've looked around a bit and all I can see is "faster than expected"
In fact sea-level rise is another great example of what I'm talking about. Dr. Richard Alley gave a fantastic talk this summer about how we can expect very rapid, very sudden ice sheet collapse, and therefore should also experience potentially very rapid sea level rises[0].
However, as he repeatedly points out in the talk, because these sudden collapses are incredibly hard to simulate and predict they are excluded from all IPCC models. He doesn't deny that predicting when and exactly the impact is an incredibly hard modeling problem, but at the same time makes it pretty clear that this known unknown, so to speak, is very real and very likely to have a major impact.
Edit: you should watch at least the beginning of the talk because he explicitly mentions a 2008 piece in the guardian and other cases of "slower than expected".[1]
It's hard to get your publication accepted into the scientific mainstream if your predictions make you sound like an alarmist crank.
How is that better than the crowd who thinks it's biased the other way? It's just as easy to imagine your publication won't get accepted into the scientific mainstream unless it conforms to the prevailing narrative.
What's the value of peer review if either of these biases (deniers or alarmists) is correct?!?
But, yes, I also have some qualms about peer review.
Either way, it's not scientific thinking, and it isn't trusting the experts either.
And every time someone claims to be following the science, but discards it all with "Yeah, but everyone knows the IPCC is overly conservative", I wish they'd admit they're no more rational than "the end is nigh" religions. The documents are right there [0] [1]. It's a report specifically designed for policy makers and laymen, which states in plain understandable language what the risks are, and armchair experts think they can dismiss it because they know the term "clathrate gun".
I know standing up to this is pointless. People don't change their minds very easily. But at least you're willing to admit your worries aren't necessarily rational, so it's unfair of me to try and pin that on you.
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/11/SR1.5_SPM_Lo...
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
I haven't seen a compelling denialist argument, so maybe they're dead because they're not compelling?
From a distance I'd estimate maybe 40-50% of commenters are in the leaning neutral sceptic to oil apologist zone but I'm probably biased.
Then, from the original paper:
> Here, we use lipid-based water temperature proxies (UK37 U 37 K and TEXL86 TEX 86 L ) and benthic foraminiferal data (distribution and δ18O) to reconstruct changes in water mass properties. Specifically, we examined anomalies in our proxy records to identify diagnostic signs of Atlantification. On the basis of a precise chronology, we combine our results with other local climate records to provide an integrated understanding of Atlantification and resolve its timing. Last, our reconstructions are compared with records of ocean and atmosphere circulation patterns to investigate the connections between the high Arctic and North Atlantic dynamics.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2946
Lipid-based water temperature proxies use the distribution of lipids deposited by organisms in sediment to deduce temperature. And...
> Benthic foraminifera are single-celled organisms similar to amoeboid organisms in cell structure.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/pdf/of/of99-45/foram.pdf
So the technique appears to be based on isotopic and lipid analysis of sediments deposited by certain organisms. If you can date the sediments and are confident in the link between analyte concentration and temperature, and correct for various factors, you can reconstruct a time/temperature plot.
“Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,”
My takeaway: because we still know so little about the mechanisms we should be more careful about our environment. It's very naive to pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere without knowing what will happen.
“the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of about 120 years on average.”
“no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1,000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2,000-year periods and longer.”
Recent data came from yearly measurements, so preserves variability on a yearly basis.
In other words, the way past data was determined, sudden changes would be hidden, like the temperature spike that it shows in the 20th century.
If it had gone back 400,000 years, which is basically nothing in geological scales, it would bring up some really interesting questions.
From what I understand, the scientific consensus [1] is not that climate change is completely caused by human activity, for the very reason you mention: it’s complicated. :)
But like you also mention, the consensus is that we are we are at least partially causing it, even if it’s not “completely.” If we’re not causing 100% of the change, but perhaps 50%, I’m not sure if that’s much of a distinction in terms of what policy to change. Do you agree?
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus - “Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” It does not say or imply 100% due to those human activities. The ACS says, “The Earth’s climate is changing in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and particulate matter in the atmosphere, largely as the result of human activities.” Even there, it’s not saying completely, although it’s saying largely, which definitely has a distinction.
Absolutely!
I think we are very 'unlucky' (stupid) that we are accelerating a natural climate change that causes global warming.
If we had, instead, encouraged "Trust the Scientific Method" and taught people to think and replicate claims, we'd be in a much better place.
But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check scientist's work".
What other outcome could we have expected?
1) https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210907/masks-limit-covid-s...
Just a few weeks back, Saudi Arabia (and some other countries I'm missing) insisted on weakening the claims made in a joint statement/study of the COP.
The lack of trust in science (imho) stems from the fact that pretty big news organisations (fox, Bild etc) are doing their best to ease the cognitive dissonance of their audience by claiming them unreliable. The ivory tower is just a propaganda trope at this point
Said to say that I think parent thread has it right - people need to have faith in the method - not the experts - and realize that the method does not yield infallible results. It’s simply the best mechanism for getting the truth with the data we currently have. And people need to be able to parse out when they are seeing data-driven conclusions over when experts are just saying dumb/political things. That can’t be a referendum on “science”.
I think we'd be pretty amazed at what people can discover, when the raw data and the analytical procedures used to draw conclusions from that data are exposed to scrutiny.
I know how to run climate simulations, given a huge dump of climate data I would _not_ be able to draw any new conclusions out of it, I can guarantee that to you.
My point is that this idea that distrust in science stems from a lack of open data is wrong, and instead product of concerted and ongoing effort of propaganda and defunding of academia. Climate change is at this stage more a political problem than it is a scientific one.
I think that's certainly true, but it doesn't account of the scores of unforced errors that our institutions and academy's are making on an almost daily basis that has eroded any credibility. Here are just a few examples...
CDC tweets that masks are 80% effective at "reducing your chance of getting COVID" - which is highly selective and word smithed information AT BEST. The real number is more like 11% and only when it's surgical. CDC fails to mention at all the cloth masks are pretty inadequate - which would be actual helpful information for people... https://twitter.com/cdcdirector/status/1456645731691925518 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02457-y
American Academy of Pediatrics pushes FDA to approve vaccines and decries FDA's request for 1K more subjects to add to the 1500 in the trial. Then goes on to say Delta is "very dangerous to children" even though there is still no evidence to suggest that Delta is any more dangerous for children and rate of hospitalized chidren with serious disease hasn't changed from 2 in 100,000. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-academy-of-pediat... https://apnews.com/article/delta-variant-coronavirus-kids-40...
We could go on and on. People are not stupid. They see this stuff, know that they are being misled and that erodes trust. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if the misleading is in good faith or not.
When you push wildly experimental things by calling them "Vaccinations", when they do not confer immunity (!) but primarily reduce symptoms, and hence are not a "public good" (protect the at-risk unvaccinated population), but are a "personal good" (reduce your individual risks) -- it is, in fact, you that are destroying the credibility of public vaccination programs! People aren't stupid. Avoiding a potentially risky genetic treatment that doesn't confer community protection, when I believe effective treatments are available, is sound logic.
Likewise, creating artificial markets that penalize highly efficient, clean and non-murderous producers of hydrocarbon products (ie. Canadian), while simultaneously giving a complete pass to murderous and polluting regimes (China, Middle-Eastern) is repugnant. A "solution" which is this terrible is not acceptable, and hence will be rejected (eg. by people, for example, that don't agree with tossing gays off roof-tops or harvesting organs from undesirable people groups)
So, until "those people" who conflate rejecting insane non-immunizing experimental treatments with denying "vaccine efficacy", or conflate rejecting ineffective transfers of wealth from law-abiding oil producers to murderous polluters as rejecting "climate change" -- we're not going to reach agreement on "trusting the science".
Further, they believe that their holy literature is perfect and because science changes, science must be wrong[1]. Therefore, we should just follow what the book says, which is that there will be a rapture.
0: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/07/14/jesus-chris... where christ's return means the end times. 1: unfortunately I don't have a citation for this, but it's something I've seen a lot.
Even if raw datasets were available, I suspect 95%+ of people lack the ability to draw conclusions from them.
A majority would fail simply in the step of opening a browser and navigating the internet to get to the dataset.
And then a sizable portion would fail at figuring out which programs to use to analyze them.
And then a sizable portion of those would not understand the math to be able to understand the measurements they would be making.
The emergence of certain mostly trustworthy organizations filled with mostly trustworthy people is what has gotten us humans this far. People do not have the capacity to be able to comprehend and analyze all of nature, they will have to rely on trustworthy specialists.
It doesn't take a multitude of people to falsify an unsound claim.
It only takes one counterexample.
Could it be that "Trust the Science" is simply an attempt to prop up faulty science that can't survive scrutiny?
But at the of the day, for the most complicated topics, we will have to trust others.
There's a sizable portion of so-called scientists that neither know nor understand math either [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical_paper_...
There was a time when you were meant to trust the church. You weren't allowed to read the bible or interpret it yourself, since that was the role of a priest.
It was not a good system, and the people who were in charge of interpreting the scripture for people used their station to enrich themselves and levy power over the people who had to come to them.
But we know that this is not the case. To me, this exercise is along the lines of wondering what the universe would be like if the cosmological constant had a different value.
It's a discussion about a theoretical world which does not exist, isn't it? What is the point then?
be generous and call it 95%.
what would it take to prove to the scientific establishment that whoops, we're in that 5%!
Wrong after all.
Here's the proof, everyone can go home now.
Given the number of variables & the long timelines involved, and the depth of political entrenchment - that outcome of a widely accepted disproof seems basically impossible, doesn't it?
In which case, what are we arguing for?
if our Goldielocks zone is so precious, then one would expect any deviation in the orbit to deliver measurable differences in effects caused by earth’s proximity to the sun, no?
So there's already a 3.5 million mile margin of error in our Goldilocks zone... we'd have to go way beyond a few miles of annual change to feel any impact.
The orbit of Earth is also extremely stable, barely changing, and with time the earth is getting farther from the Sun, not closer, as the Sun is slowing losing mass since it's burning fuel to produce heat and light. The speed at which we are getting further away is however ridiculously tiny: a few centimeters a year.
To give you a sense of perspective, earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest in July. It is ~5 million kilometers nearer in January, and that only amount to about 6 or 7% more solar energy received.
So, any deviation of earth orbit's over the past 100 years that would explain climate change would need to be massive. Not the kind of things we wouldn't notice, and also not the kind of things that would allow us to be talking about it today. If earth's orbit was changing that much, that would mean our solar system is not stable, probably making life impossible.
It is also awfully very convenient to ignore the fact that Earth's climate has been ever changing since its beginning.
- Government policy should require a regular hybrid as the base minimum in all new cars. It's 2021, there's no excuse now for a car to be pure ICE.
- New policy to favor PHEVs. The battery in one full EV can build four PHEVs. A 50 mile PHEV gets most of the benefits of CO2 reduction of a full EV. Also no new infrastructure is required, overnight level 1 charging is good enough. The suburbs will buy PHEVs (since they have a garage), the urban areas will buy hybrids (which will now be the minimum).
- All utility type vehicles (mail trucks, garbage trucks, delivery trucks), must be full EV. These vehicles are the perfect fit for the current battery technology (overnight centralized charging, frequent stops on short routes).
- Slowly raise the gas tax. Slowly is important otherwise there will be riots. But the impact on low income population should be minimal with the increasing supply of used hybrid and PHEVs.
The key feature of this plan is that it's a fast way to reduce CO2. Instead, look at what the infrastructure bill and the proposed BBB is doing. Billions on new charging stations, current version of BBB would reduce PHEV tax credit. Is this really the best way to get quick action on reducing CO2 from cars? Aren't those billions better spent getting hybrids and PHEVs (which have none of the charging or range issues of full EVs) to the public as quickly and widely as possible? Why is the goal suddenly to make all cars full EV, isn't the actual goal to reduce CO2 as fast as possible?
I'm not sure where you get that from but it's not at all what I've been experiencing. Yes, the overarching goal is to reduce green house emissions but how to get there is quite diverse and usually laid out in details in for instance the green parties' platforms, e.g. https://europeangreens.eu/positions/climate-energy, https://www.greenparty.ca/en/platform/green-future and contains more than just individual mobility. Similarly, Greenpeace: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/issues/climate-change-impacts...
All cars are a problem. Most environmentalists want no cars, as they should.
Of course, convincing people to get rid of their cars, even when there are great alternatives available, is very hard.
I don't believe you. Back it up.
> as they should
What percentage of housing stock today where you live is situated where being car-less wouldn't be a major handicap? Make sure to account for people with families, people with vision/mobility issues, people who need to move materials to/from worksites regularly, etc. even if those concerns don't apply to you personally. Reducing the number of cars on the road, and the environmental impact of those that are, is a fine goal over the long term. OTOH, extreme anti-car activism - especially that which is just a cloak for a phobia about driving - quickly makes a mockery of itself.
It makes me wonder whether the "normal state" of the Arctic is in fact lush and tropical and what we are witnessing is its return to that state, albeit accelerated by humankind's increasing presence and its invention of industrial processes that use those hydrocarbons.
Given the exploration that has already taken place over the past decades, one would assume there are core samples, or core sample data, located somewhere that indicate the true nature of the changes the Arctic Ocean has experienced and continues to express.
1. It doesn't touch on the Earth's natural absorption of CO2 - so we cannot conclude here that the additional CO2 emitted remains in the atmosphere (I mean we know that from other research, but this link is silent on that mitigation).
2. The cumulative numbers are pointless and misleading. CO2 is known to have a half-life on the order of under a century, so posting cumulative numbers gives the reader the misconception that the only way back is to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and that the situation is much more irreversible than it is in the long term.
Also, 120 years is on the upper range of most estimates, and does not assume any increased absorption despite the fact that we've almost doubled the concentration of CO2.
With CO2, the absorption probability is flexible and can depend on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere (as well as a large number of other factors.) To me this makes "half-life" a poor metaphor for CO2 absorption.
The notion of half-life still works - but you are correct that the absorption is likely a product of the concentration. At any particular concentration, the half-life is still roughly representative.
A differential equation would be more accurate, but it's not as easy to convey.
The half-life of an unstable element is a fixed property of that kind of matter everwhere. The absorption rate of CO2 is in no way a property of CO2 itself, but rather a dynamic characteristic of the complex system that is the planet we live on. Instead of trying to break that down to a single number, I think we need to pay more attention to the actual mechanisms involved and the numbers behind them.
CO2 gets sequestered into underground fossil duel deposits very slowly (and possibly not at all anymore given changes in the biosphere.) Vegetative matter is a very shallow reservoir that can only hold so much before the outgassing from decay wipes out the absorption from growth. The biggest source of absorption is (I believe) the oceans. We don't really know how much the ocean can absorb or how the global rise in tempuratures will effect that. I do think that you can't really view CO2 absorbed by the ocean as "gone" in the same way as with CO2 that is sequestered in fossil fuels. (or a decayed atom that has irreversibly become something else.)
[0] https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/1999/11/Figure2a-2-...
Extent means sweet FA: *volume* is what counts. And in volume, the ice caps have a fraction of their old volume. Here is the trend line, and it shows that Arctic ice is absolutely FUBAR.
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger...
I'm not suggesting it's not human-made. But using only 800 yrs can't really say with authority one way or another either.
From the article: “When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.”
The claim is that the marked increase in warming in the 20th century began decades earlier than was previously believed, not just that there was once an ice age and it’s warmer now.
Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
And the people fear mongering about the collapse of civilization to advocate for certain politics, should be more worried about the immediate threat from bioterrorism, COVID lockdowns, or even the type of civilization breakdown that is happening in South Africa.
I'm personally in support of a high energy future, and I think Nuclear Energy is the most realistic way we will get there.
And all that heat has to go somewhere. And the hotter things get, the more those air conditioners will have to work: producing more heat. Implying air conditioning is the solution to climate change is kind of like suggesting we drop ice cubes in the ocean to cool it off.
> Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
The problem is that we honestly don't know what the effects will be. How disrupting those ecosystems will impact other areas. We've already learned the devastating effects invasive species can have on areas, on how improperly planned damming and levee construction can fuck up our coastlines, suggesting that making Northern Canada a temperate zone is no big deal is just willfully ignoring all the knock-on effects that will bring.
Also, North Canada wasn't always in the North. So the fact that palm fossils were found there isn't proof that the North was once tropical, it's just proof that palms once grew there. That area could have been in the tropics. I don't remember all of the continental shifts caused by plate tectonics, but things have moved quite a bit in the some 4 billion years the Earth has existed.
And the more heat we drive into urban spaces, the bigger the Heat Island Effect will be. There are twenty variables we can be tackling here and we need people tugging at all of them. More trees, better albedo on built structures, retrofitting for energy efficiency, and and and...
Considering that if anywhere Solor panels could work well, the Dubai desert is near tops for efficiency. This also offsets any deficit. And Dubai also has seasonal temperature variations, winter they are around 29 degrees. I wouldn't be surprised that the total energy expenditure for a home in Dubai, is less than a home in Northern Canada .
My point was that A/C is really just changing the equilibrium of a small area. Making a building cooler means you have to make some other area warmer.
I'm not sure why you think that. The amount of work and resources that go in to making it partly habitable is immense. Without oil money, it would be desolate and empty. Without it we would see the slave cities, surrounding the shiny buildings, completely swept away. As a city, it's an economic sinkhole not a prosperous one.
How do millions of salmon, halibet, swimming and moving water, huge schools of fish, change currents?
Well they're mostly gone now, compared to 100+ years ago.
Are airplanes the source of wind?
Animals cause impact to the environment. we've removed trillions of tonnes of active biomass from the oceans.
What impact has that?
By removing all that biomass in the ocean, all sorts of flora and fauna have vanished, and/or changed ratios.
If organisms on land can literally change climate, and even the windstreams over time, why not in the ocean?
When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.
We are not that uncertain about climate change.
> But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
This would require several, distinct and unrelated fields of science being wrong about the way CO2 and other GHG have in the past and currently regulate the Earth's temperature.
There is no question that CO2 in the atmosphere has been rapidly rising.
There is no question that humans have been the cause of this rise, it's just basic math given the wild amount of hydrocarbons we combust every year.
So while it's possible that scientists are wrong in the big picture sense it would require a sea-change in our understanding of climate from every perspective as well as being a remarkable coincidence that we are seeing the impact we are in correlation to our own CO2 emissions.
A far, far more likely explanation is that the Earth's climate is even more sensitive to small changes in CO2 on a small time scale than we have previously thought.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plows,_Plagues_and_Petroleum
The article talks about the Arctic Ocean. It is not denying the warming of the world's ocean due to climate change.
The industrial revolution is generally dated from 1760, which is...somewhat more than a decade before 1900.
How are we driving mass warming in 1900 when CO2 emissions were barely 1% of what they are today?
Literally, no, where? Even if I did see one claiming that, I’ve also seen the charts of net atmospheric CO2 from human activity that show a sharp rise already in progress by 1800.
From 1800 to 1900, CO2 ppm rose from 280 to 300
Of course, from 1900 til today it has risen to over 400ppm
My point is, we were burning a significant amount of coal throughout 1800s - Acid rain was happening in the 1850s [1]
[0] http://interactive.fusion.net/200-years-of-climate-science-a...
I guess I was quoting the source in saying the pencil and paper estimate is in line with modern climate models
edit: from a cursory googling, looks like 450ppm is in line with 2C warning while 600pm is the higher end at 4C warning
note also temperature lags behind co2 (since heat is captured cumulatively over time) so even if we stabilized now at ~412ppm we will continue to see warming
No, it isn't. It says it starts at the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial revolution usually dated as mid-18th to mid-19th century. The former is neither before nor at the same time as the latter.
> Not that I want to see continued use of fossil fuels in place of more sustainable options like nuclear and solar/wind. But what if scientists have been wrong about the causes of global warming?
There is no good reason to think that they have, and this study does not at all contravene, or even call into question, the consensus on the causes of warming.
From the article:
> “Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,” said Tommaso. “We rely on these simulations to project future climate change, but the lack of any signs of an early warming in the Arctic Ocean is a missing piece of the puzzle.”
I'd generally encourage people to be skeptical of everything, but I'd call this a really good reason to be skeptical.
This has been going on for a long time, and steel production was a major factor long before Watt.
That is extremely unlikely. We can measure the spectrum and intensity of incoming solar energy and of outgoing radiation from Earth, and see that we are gaining. We can see that much of that gain is due to incoming energy heating things which re-radiate that energy in infrared which we can see gets trapped by CO2.
We can tell by looking at the isotope distribution of the C in the CO2 where it comes from. CO2 from still living or recently living (say dead for only a few hundred years) has a different isotope distribution than CO2 from long dead or never living sources. This lets us tell that most of the CO2 increase over the last couple hundred years is from burning fossil fuels or an increase in geological processes that release long trapped CO2 such as volcanic activity.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that we can tell from that did not come from living or recently living things matches fairly well with what we know of volcanic activity and how much fossil fuels we burn, giving us enough data to conclude that most of the warming due to CO2 is due to human emitted CO2.
For that to be wrong would require that we have massively overestimated how much fossil fuels we use and massively overlooked a large amount of volcanic activity.
It's not one factor you can examine cleanly in isolation. There are many many interacting factors.