And as a curiosity, what happened in the late 2000s to cause belief in climate change to drop off a cliff, and then slowly creep back up?
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/am...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/climate-activists-embrace-d...
There’s also not much of attempt on the left to understand climate change better.
Every weather disaster is directly attributed to climate change, even if it scientifically can’t be directly linked.
This convinces deniers that there isn’t a problem and people are being “alarmists”.
Most people understand this. In life casual chains are rarely clear cut. "Caused A" and "made A significantly more likely" are interchangeable outside of academic debates.
One has to be severely climate change denialist to focus on such a detail. It's a strategy of sowing uncertainty.
We knew there were incorrectly sited weather sensors that fed data into the climate record, just like ASOS, receiving prop blast and jetwash. Some HCN sensors that had been correctly sited became incorrect over time due to urbanization and industrialization. The discongruence between space based observations and in-situ flawed sensors are the clearest indication of this.
This is also why we saw the rise of the HCN-Reference. We also saw a better understanding of the medieval warm period which, although potentially regionalized, is not without precedents.
The process of fixing of these flaws, we call that science. However, this has not stopped the religious cult from a rearguard action defending by whatever name they choose to call it these days.
There's the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
And Breitbart: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/06/01/media-fail-no...
And a bunch of other nonsense. Every one of these "predictions" is either a journalist trying to sell copy by exaggerating a story, or conservative media outlets clapping themselves on the back for pointing out that journalists who exaggerated were wrong.
None of these "predictions" are in any way science, and all of the climate modeling in the past 30 years has made predictions which are *more conservative than reality*.
> Every one of these "predictions" is either a journalist trying to sell copy by exaggerating a story
> None of these "predictions" are in any way science
That doesn't matter at all because this conversation is about public perception, and guess what makes it to the public?
Some of these other predictions aren't necessarily falsified.
Peak oil may have already occurred. The fact that we have to resort to offshore drilling shows the low hanging fruit have already been taken.
Another example of a debatable prediction is "Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020" - this is something that environmental groups claim is a correct prediction as they attribute certain current wars (e.g. Syrian Civil War) to have been caused by droughts caused by climate change.
Some of these predictions were not made by scientists or were clearly just meant as a slogan to galvanise action - e.g.
2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
CRU leak?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus
IIRC it was the most repeated counter-argument back then.
Of course the 2010s showed that there was no counter-argument to begin with.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700
Of course trust falls when that happens. It's correct for trust to fall. They'd been making hyper-confident assertions about the future of climate and temperature for many people's entire lives and then one day, whoops, actually, it's "we've not been measuring temperature right for the entire history of our field and it fundamentally changes the entire shape of the data".
More measured approaches on shorter timescales -- actually going after the big fish and not ignoring their excess because they are more "important" than the little people -- is taken more seriously.
Is this yet another allusion on Al Gore and his infamous private jet? Last year, 506,769 airplanes either took off or landed in LAX only. That's 1388 per day in one airport. All packed to the gill by "little people" like you and me.
Al Gore could fly his jet across the Pacific every day and it would be literally a drop in the bucket-full of little guys, in the grand scheme of things.
I'm tired of these talks of "big guys ruining the environment," which is conveniently only brought up when these big guys talk about the environment. This is plain simple "hate the message, shoot the messenger" strategy.
By "big fish" I actually meant companies (who are a prime shake-down target for carbon credits), but if for the rich, celebs, and politicians the shoe fits... They are supposed to have noblesse oblige.
Fucking yes! We need stringent government regulations, not individual moralizing.
Stop whining and moaning and vote for politicians who will put in place the taxes and regulations needed.
The good news is that even the most staunchly anti-climate-change group, conservative republicans, are nearly at 50/50 when it comes to whether it's happening at all.
Post-Al Gore, it was “don’t believe your lying eyes”. That gradually pivoted to “climate change is happening, but it’s a natural cycle”. Eventually it will pivot to “meh” or “it’s gods will”.
It’s a pattern applied to lots of issues by the reactionary elements. It works because it’s easy to deny and subsequently concede small points. We’ve trained a generation to be adept at this online.
Probably not because I just spotted something from that link that I find even more interesting: On the radios in the upper-right, switch to "policy support". There was a very sudden shift in 2013, from consistently down to consistently up.
...and now that I think about it, I think that might actually explain it: The sudden drop in the late 2000s might be due to the great recession. They may have accidentally measured "why do I care?" instead of "is it happening?", and maybe it took until 2013 for peoples' lives to stabilize enough to care again.
When the hyperbolic claims about Global Warming with runaway climate forcing failed, it was swiftly rebranded Climate Change.
At which point, the critics became accurate, since climatic periods are measured in 30 year intervals, and weather != climate. Solar Radiance being the keymost driver of earth's temperature of course, varies due to the natural cycle and supercycles of the Sun [1]
The longterm trend of deglaciation and CO2 levels rising back to nearer Earth's historical norms continues unabated.
How would you define those two terms?
When I was in my youth, that was the buzz at the time. My, how the winds have changed.
The other gets grant money in perpetuity no matter what the data says.
Solar forcing is completely accounted for in the models, in all areas (albedo, bouncing in the galactic plane, distance from the Sun).
The repeated cries of "but you didn't account for this or that, which I know as a layman, but surely PhDs in climate science didn't think about!" is inane. It's in the models. Every single variable you can name and then some are in the models.
Climactic periods are not "measured" in any kind of arbitrary 3 decade cycle. Even if you want to pretend that they are, and we are returning to some kind of baseline (which every bit of science says we are not -- we are going to dramatically overshoot it), humanity did not evolve under those "historical norms". Our society and agriculture and population patterns did not emerge under those "historical norms".
Returning to those "historical norms" will mean the largest population migration in human history, with a large amount of it from nuclear states which already have shooting skirmishes in their borderlands facing an existential crisis over water (India, Pakistan, China). Those "historical norms" are not necessarily compatible with civilization.
Before you talk about how much farmland it is going to "open", ask yourself how well the supply chain did during COVID. Then ask yourself what will happen to it during a population migration. Ask yourself what happens when deep water ports at low sea level start having problems, and how we would get crude to refineries to get bitumen to even make asphalt to create infrastructure in the new "open" land, how we'd transport concrete and steel there if there are interruptions in the supply chain which impact diesel production. Ask yourself how long it will take to transform old-growth forest and granite-filled glacial retreat zones in Canada into arable land, how easily we'll be able to get chemical fertilizers, etc.
Even if you want to talk about how this is some kind of "historical norm", the question ultimately becomes not "is this anthropogenic?" (it is, but it doesn't matter), but "how do we intend to survive this as a species?"
You made an extraordinary claim "It's in the models. Every single variable you can name and then some are in the models."
I am calling your bluff.
Please provide evidence of six variable things
(1) The change from Whitewash to semi-latex in the painting of Stevenson screens (the old paint vs the new paint) which is a feed into GHCN
(2) The change in the sizes of some Stevenson screens in some countries records (230L to 60L)
(3) Analysis of the greater accuracy of space based temperature measurement which deviate substantially from in-situ measurements
(4) The removal of corrupted data sources like ASOS from the Climate Record, as ASOS as placed on hot airfields and is hit by prop blast and jetwash
(5) Fixes to the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) readings to account for ship altitude, height, deviation from marine surface temperature, etc.
(6) Weather Station gaps used in location where urbanized city centers are extrapolated for all nearby landscape (e.g. Africa) and the large gaps in the surface temps (Antarctica, Greenland, Siberia, Sahara, Amazon, Northern Canada)
You didn't respond to a single request.
I 've been in the industry for decades now too.
That these things jumps out so readily is proof that the science around this field is truly in its infancy. Science is a process that is self-correcting over time. And I am happy for it.
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The change in course where it slowly creeped up is two fold. First, the warming became completely obvious. People could see in their own living memory very dramatic changes between their childhood and modern day. That just took time. Second, as the left became more and more radicalized toward actions to fight the threat, the right wing could take a less radical position and still claim to be holding the line against radicals. The left shifted the Overton Window left enough that the right could have a politically viable platform that included climate change.