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Comment by anonyfox | Hacker News Reader

No matter where you stand (some meat eaters tend to become extremely emotional on this):

The fact that the scientific results and recommendations get utterly censored like this before publication makes me really angry.

It’s somewhat fine for me if people/governments choose to ignore or argue against these results after publication, but this is just absurd… and is then used from people all over the world to point to „see, even scientists say it’s fine!“!

We must find a way to eliminate this lobbying/corruption, rather soon! Meanwhile, of course a vegan diet is better for the environment and renewables/green energy should be a top priority, and yes every bit counts, and if everyone would agree and do this instead of arguing we would have solved the issue already.

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The UN is literally an international political organisation. The shocking truth here is that all the work they do is political.

Whether they are helping or hindering is only a question of what your political leanings are.

Well, speaking on the report, you'll find that all these bodies and their reports are written by committees of special interests in their entirety. There wasn't some report of substance here that was muddied and made less truthful by the meat industry. It had always been this way, even the UN Declaration of Human Rights was written so as to ensure membership in the UN by the big states of the time, and not principled based on some understanding of human rights. Theyre always statements and decisions of convenience for the interests of the attendant parties.

> We must find a way to eliminate this lobbying/corruption, rather soon!

Who is the person who is caving to pressure or accepting bribes and making changes to scientific results? We could start by finding names and calling for them to become unemployable anywhere they could cause further damage.

"calling for them to become unemployable "

Good luck with that. One common form of corruption is companies hiring public officials who helped them out.

How bout punishing those handing out the bribes? Oh noes they are rich, powerful, well connected and have an army of lawyers. Let's rather fry the small fish. No snark intended.

I agree, we should go after them too, but right now it's not usually illegal to bribe people, and where companies and industries can't do it directly and openly they'll do it indirectly and quietly to get around the law.

We can try to increase regulations and enforcement, but as long as people don't face any consequence for accepting bribes, I don't like our odds getting those changes pushed through. Without the power of the law on our side, we're better off putting pressure on the small fish since it's hard to put real social pressure on corporations and industries that make more money in a year than the collective wealth of entire nations.

No matter where you stand, these type naive recommandations are responsible for some of the greatest enviornmental dissasters of the last century. "Bio"-Fuels being one of the main culprits of deforestation that has created way bigger problems than the ones they were trying to fix. In this case a Plant based Diet would require much more agricultural land for the same calorie intake than a balanced meat and plant one. And guess where that land will come from? guess how much more automation will be needed to take care of that extra agriculture, so more machinery, more pesticides, more transport etc. There is nothing scientific about a recomandation. it's a hypotesis that until gets implemented can not be called scientific. Like the the implementation of BioFules showed, that recommandation was not scentific at all. And by definition can not be scientific.

There's an inflation of the word "scientific" nowadays that is beinng used for any study that makes it almost a religion. the core concept of Scientific it is always to question and especially can not be applied to new un-tested procedures that however rigorous they might have been on planning phase, can not by definition account for all variables. Something that is un-tested by definition can not be scientific.

so you say that the amount of land and water needed to grow a cow that ultimately I can eat is LESS than if I would use that land to grow food to eat directly? thats pretty wild, I'd think. Not even thinking about the methane issues with cows and other things they add ontop of land use.

BioFuels are a joke, though, a result of lobbyism, fully agree. Individually owned ICEs on a large scale are the problem here, that BioFuel shit is just deflecting blame.

Yes I am saying that to get the same Nutritional value that you would get from a cow you would need much more amound of land to grow the plants that would subtitute it. Plants that would require a lot more care and a lot more automation/pesticides that the plants cows are eating. Even the volume of the needed transport/storage/refiregeration would be way bigger. Ask anyone living in a rural area, what amount of land/effort would be the equivalent of a cow. Hopefully everyone agrees now that BioFueld are a joke but this same discussion was held some 25 years ago and BioFuels became a reality because everyone opposing them then was beaten down with the "scientific" stick. Because we are using "scientific" to camuflage the fact that we are acting out of fear and we don't really know what to do. That would be the first step. IPCC raccomends a plant-free diet MIGHT help the enviornment? Good as long as it is clear that is a Test and we need to evaluate maybe on a smaller scale first, and not the God-given truth that allows us to stone everyone who thinks eitherwise. If the IPCC says This not Might but this WILL, that I'm gonna file it together with the Biofuels and for once be glad that some lobies, for their own interests are doing us all a favour.

are you aware that stuff like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods is a thing now? not in the "we made it work in a lab" but in "there are factories now" meaning? Also never asked yourself how iE the Dutch can be a world leader/exporter of plants/foods despite having a tiny amount of land compared to many other countries?

Just asking questions here, because it seems that your anger over the BioFuel disaster (and granted, it literally is!) seems to overshadow a bit of rationality needed here to see how stuff is going here-and-now.

The Netherland Case is specifically what I am referring to with the need for huge automatization. It's a very high tech solution, a very good one but can it be effectivly replicated world-wide without a concentrated effort? I would be enthustiacly supporting a big push toward this direction and if this result in less need for meat product, it's very welcome. But in the absence of a big Investment push what will problably happen in reality is that Brazil,Argentina etc will not push for this kind of agriculture because it is cheaper and faster to just cut some hectars of the Amazon Forest and use traditional agriculture. That is what I am afraid of, unintended consenguences that come naturally from simple raccomandation like "use a plant-based diet" withough going through the steps of making it actually sustainable.

> In this case a Plant based Diet would require much more agricultural land for the same calorie intake than a balanced meat and plant one.

Where do you think the calories in meat ultimately comes from?

That is an absurd question and may I bring the absurdity to it's final form? where do the calories in the plant then come from? Is the next raccomandation to eat CO2 and Sun Rays?

I'm pointing out that you don't seem to realise how insanely resource inefficient meat is:

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/feed-required-to-produce-... [2] https://cbey.yale.edu/our-stories/disrupting-meat

Napkin maths from the first source suggests 5kg of feed to produce a 200g steak. All while losing all but 4% of the original calories. This is of course ignoring the vast water consumption and emissions (and of course ethical problems) which are issues worth talking about in themselves.

Conclusion is quite the opposite of your original comment, it seems we could feed the world MANY times over using less land on a 'plant based' diet.

Of course it's more complicated than just naming numbers.

Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.

Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?

Don't get me wrong, I think that the bio industry has taken things to the extreme, but simply saying meat is inefficient and naming some numbers is not giving us a proper basis for discussion to really address how we can make things durable.

It was a specific rebuttal to the parent comment which seemed to not understand the reality of resources in vs resources out of animal agriculture. Of course you can caveat a lot about my comment, beef for instance is arguably the most inefficient example of meat you could cite (amongst slightly less inefficient alternatives) but illustrates the problem well. That is the nature of compressing such a complex issue into a small HN comment.

> Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.

Right - the discussion is about land use. We don't typically eat animal feed but allocate an enormous sq footage that could have been used to grow something we would might like to consume directly.

> Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?

Agree, we have plentiful access to drinking water in the UK and so have enough to allocate to irrigation and all the other water intensive activities involved to do this. Unfortunately on this particular point, the majority of the beef you eat does not come from here. This issue becomes much more pertinent if you live in say California or Spain.

That is the natural Conservation of Energy into play. Noone is saying that you get more calories than you put in. But the form of those calories is more useful for our consuption.

I'll take your example: While it takes 25KG of grass/other plant to get 1KG of meat The human body get's much more value from precessing that 1KG of meat than processing 25KG of grass. You can not just eat 25KG of corn plant and expect it to be the same as 1KG of meat.

This is not even a question. The need for Animal Proteins in our body is well documented and although many plants contain various forms of proteins they can not eliminate the need for Animal Proteins. There are various products that try to supplement this need artifically for those who oppose the consuption of animals on Moral grounds but that is another issue because there are also those who have a moral issue with consuming Plants; Why should one have more weight than the other? And this is also Why I am very sceptical of this issue because people try to push other moral views and conflate them into one.

All I care in this context is the enviormental impact. I can say with a clear conscience that I dont care about your other moral dilemas in this case because the issue is much larger than some people needs to self congratulate on their choices and their need to recruit more people into those choice to validate themselves.

Comparing the weight of animal feed and consumable meat isn’t very useful because almost 100% of animal feed isn’t edible by humans. It’s not like that 5kg of feed is going to be eaten by people instead of going the animals.

There are lots of inefficiencies that are perfectly normal. Compare the amount of sunlight needed to produce a single gram of plants. Why does that ratio matter?

It’s not valuable to compare even beans to steak as they are completely different nutrients. 100g of steak has 271 calories with 19g fat and 25g protein [0]. 100g of cooked black beans has 132 calories with 24g carb, 9g protein, and 1g fat [1].

You don’t compare these foods by weight if you’re talking about human diet.

Animals consuming massive amounts of stuff people can’t eat is a feature, not a bug. That’s the point of cows, that they graze on grass and build up nutrients for people to eat.

Now the issue of factory farming having cows in a pen being force fed is a separate problem. But meat itself is useful for feeding people.

[0] steak nutrition https://g.co/kgs/wFer2d [1] https://www.yazio.com/en/foods/black-beans-cooked.html

Hi.

Sorry a bit late to the party but IIRC certain high yield crops like dent corn are not really palatable for humans but can make up 2/3rds of the diet of a chicken.

Also low quality bushels of other cereals, legumes and even cotton seed can be turned into feed.

Edit: Although we eat too much meat now I believe the appropriate amount of meat consumption is well above 0

The problem here is, that the giant corporations can pollute the environment (eg. coca cola in a plastic bottle, with a plastic cap, with a plastic label, wrapped in a plastic 6-pack, with a plastic handle, on a plastic pallet wrapped in plastic foil), and rich environmentalists then fly their private jets to some 'green' conference and tell an 'average joe' that he shouldn't drive his car and eat meat, and should pay for plastic bags.

the point is it doesn't matter that you are right - all involved parties have to do their part. rich guys point at average Joes and vice versa, and both don't take action because "but the others".

So, how about we ban private jets, both for rich guys and average Joes?

why not? its clearly an inefficient way of travelling, probably MUCH worse than even ordinary flights, which already is a problem. Every bit counts, so lets start with that. (I'd allow some solar powered ultra-light jets (the emission-free thingys), though.)

Once enough people are making sacrifices on their own, the tolerance of assholes polluting freely should finally become less and less, this can get the ball rolling.

But we didn't.

We're pushing down on average working class of people while the rich can do whatever they want. Average joe can't get a plastic bag anymore and has to pay more for even worse alternatives (thick plasic bags need MANY reuses compared to thin plastic bags, plus joe now needs to buy plastic bin liners [0])... but coca cola (company) can still sell sugary water in ten layers of plastic, because reusable glass bottles would cut into their profits.

People are getting more and more fed up with this already.. luckily for some, there are bigger things happening, and people protest for those, but it's a mark of a wider trend happening all over the western world, where there are a set of rules for rich and influential and another for 'normal people'.

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220329142327.h...

The average joe can think about all the unnecessary suffering caused by animal agriculture. Entities do not have empathy, but humans do.

The trope of the rich environmentalist flying their private jet, is just that. I’m sure that some exist, but the vast majority take far more care of the environment than that.

https://www.businessinsider.in/sustainability/news/cop27-att...

I'm not sure about that.

I mean.. even if you look at the cars they're driving (again, those are rich people, they can easily afford anything electric):

https://www.schwarzeneggerclimateinitiative.com/

And then he drivers an SUV even larger than him:

https://www.tmz.com/2022/01/21/arnold-schwarzenegger-car-acc...

Ursula:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/02/revealed-a...

etc.

While I think it’s a positive thing for people in positions of power to speak up for the environment, I do not personally consider any of these people environmentalists. I think there is a huge difference between supporting a cause and living it.

Nevertheless, after rereading your original comment, I fully agree with you. These world leaders should be leading. It is disgusting and hypocritical that they flew 400 private jets to the COP conference.

It's not as though everyone going to the COP conference wants to lead on the environment, many of them are going for things like... preventing the recommendation of a plant based diet.

"Vast majority" is not even an applicable term here. It is specifically about green gurus with jets (which is not a myth, but observable political phenomenon), and if you're not rich enough, not politically influential, and don't fly own jet - its not about you, or anyone you know.

I don’t think it’s about green gurus. It’s about politicians. They know how big the problems are, but like most people, they don’t want to change their behaviour or privileges.

A trope means a common theme. I agree that it’s a trope because it occurs frequently (look at every climate change conference).

I think maybe you meant to say misconception or something like that where the reality is different than understanding. In this case reality is the same as understanding.

That's true, but I don't really see how the existence of assholes should give me a free pass for being an asshole myself.

Are you really an ashole if you want to eat a steak every now and then? Compared to people who use a private jet to fly 31 miles[0]?

If you want a cleaner planet, start with those who pollute the most, and then go down towards stuff normal people do and use.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/02/revealed-a...

Nice strawman. You're not an asshole if you eat a steak every now and then. You're an asshole if you don't look at alternatives even though they're available to you and you can afford them just because you love your steaks too much - regardless of what "those who pollute the most" do.

We would already be much further ahead if everyone could and would eat meat only "every now and then".

The fact that I can see greater assholes than I could ever manage to be whenever I turn on the TV does not mean I get a ticket to be a tiny asshole. It doesn't matter what others do when we're evaluating your behaviour.

I can't influence "those who pollute the most" alone, and a society full of people who don't care themselves won't have a tiniest chance of influencing them either.

> You're an asshole if you don't look at alternatives even though they're available to you and you can afford them just because you love your steaks too much

TIL I’m an asshole because I love and eat steak even though I can afford plant based alternatives that I have zero desire to eat because of how processed they are.

Glad you realized that, it's the necessary first step towards positive change. /s

See, that's a good example of why simply getting angry at the hypocritical richest will lead nowhere, as long as what they do is still socially acceptable at smaller scales. People who would do the exact same thing at their place won't succeed in fighting them.

I just don’t think it’s a binary equation because there is simply not a steak substitute that is fully natural in origin. I won’t eat plant based alternatives to meat because I would rather have a natural foodstuff then an unnatural one and frankly every one I have tried that was touted to be great…sucked.

That said, I’d consider the criticism valid if there was a fully natural product that was a reasonable substitute for a steak that had a better ratio for our planet’s stewardship. Say the discovery of some fungus that on its own and with similar preparation that can act as a steak alternative. If I was opting for steak over that with taste and price being equal, sure criticize away.

> I just don’t think it’s a binary equation

Who does? It's obviously non-binary. What matters is how selfish your choices end up being.

At decision making level, there's little difference between "I'm eating loads of meat cause plant-based steaks are too processed" and "I'm traveling by private jet cause other forms of transportation make me lose too much time". There's no alternative way to travel this fast and convenient.

There is a major difference—I am not trying to justify hypocrisy. I am not going around creating public policy and commanding and preaching to others not to eat steak while eating it myself. If anything, I encourage people to eat steak.

If that still makes me an asshole…so be it. “Asshole” is always arbitrary, hypocrisy is always evident.

These actions are harmful regardless of whether you're being a hypocrite about them or not.

In fact, from an utilitarian point of view, being a hypocrite may actually be less harmful, since you may still influence others to do better. I'm not exactly an utilitarian myself, but that's one possible way to judge.

> but that's one possible way to judge

Sure, as is one possible way for me to judge that judgement is that folks will excuse and explain away all sorts of bad behaviors of the people that they identify as allies to a specific cause they support. Doesn’t make them right, it just makes them assholes…at least from my POV.

Just because they're hypocrites doesn't mean they're wrong. Carpooling or using public transportation and reducing meat intake (especially beef) are empirically direct actions that reduce emissions. There's obviously a lot more power structures could do like stop using taxpayer money to subsidize oil and meat company profits, but that won't stop me from doing what I can with my own two hands.

Refusing to engage in good action because you don't like the messenger is teenage angst behavior, not rational decision making.

But the environmental factor of one Joe Average carpooling with a Bob Average is a lot lower than if Sir Rich Guy uses a Tesla instead of his private jet.

This is like a burning tire yard owner telling people to stop smoking cigarettes to keep the air cleaner.

Being around smokers in public places is still awful regardless of whether there are burning tire yard owners or not. These things are orthogonal to each other and both need to be tackled.

Most people who complain about rich environmentalists flying on private planes seem to be on the right. I don't quite get this: you aren't opposed to the existence of millionaires, are you?

You already accept that some people, through their hard work or inheritance or whatever, are entitled to a larger share of material goods. Why shouldn't they also be entitled to a larger share of the total emissions we decide we can handle? As long as they compensate the rest of us for the privilege, maybe - though people on the right tend not to be too excited over severance taxes either.

Assuming they're OK with great material inequality, which sadly they usually are, a rich environmentalist is not especially hypocritical for talking a bigger share of what nature can bear.

If you fly on a private jet, you atleast shouldn't come on a climate conference and tell poor people not to eat meat and drive their car.

There's really not as much of a logical connection between the two as you think. Replace "fly on a private jet" with any other rich person activity and your sentence still works. So it's not really about flying on a jet.

Did you hear what I said at all? Yes, if you are a capitalist who believes in capitalism, you aren't hypocritical for doing that. It's not a position I agree with, but it's a consistent position, as far as it goes. As long as you pay for your emissions / compensate the rest of the world in the ways we have agreed to, you're in the clear. Someone will take up the slack for you, in return for payment.

(Those ways of compensation may objectively be pathetically inadequate, but so what? It was "voluntary" so it's good enough. That's how it works for everything else things in capitalism, so of course that's how it's going to be that way for emissions as well.)

Those in power both in government and in the private sector seem to have completely lost interest in the bigger picture and are optimising for short-term personal wealth at pretty much any cost. Perhaps a benevolent AI is the only way forward.

Eating a plant based diet seems more straightforward to me.

just look even at the comments here on HN (not specifically in this thread): so many people are defending viewpoints that somewhat A is not as bad as B if only C would happen, or pulling up weird conspiracy stuff or whatever only to be able to deny what needs to be done.

We have the knowledge, the tech, the wealth, and everything possibly needed lined up to tackle the problem. But then people get somehow catched by wird arguments and turn against each other instead of simply doing what needs to be done together.

This was an ideological recommendation, not a scientific one. It's fine for scientists to also engage in political advocacy but we should be clear about which role they're playing at the time.

> Meanwhile, of course a vegan diet is better for the environment

This is not a matter of course. Humans are part of the environment, and it is not a matter of course that a vegan diet is healthy for humans. The idea (I don't want to say fact, but I believe it) that meat and dairy consumption/industry are currently happening at a scale that is harmful does not mean that meat and dairy are bad for the environment.

I don't understand the structure of your argument. What do you mean by "not a matter of course"? There is plenty of evidence that 1) vegan diets are associated with improved health outcomes, broadly speaking and 2) animal consumption has a disproportionate environmental impact for the nutrients obtained (which is unsurprising from a physics perspective, since the animals eat plants that humans could eat directly).

Perhaps these things are not "inherently" true in that one can easily come up with edge-case counterexamples, but they are true on the whole.

You say "of course" when something is a matter of course. It is similar to begging the question.

1. Compared to what?

2. Animal consumption or current patterns of animal consumption?

Note too that I do not claim that meat and dairy are proven more healthy, or better at any scale. Just that we must be careful not to let greenwashing make us think they're evil and gross as a kneejerk reaction.

Yes it would be terrible if IPCC reports were somehow to be censored or politically biased!

https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Im...

Climatologist: "We have to get rid of the medieval warm period"

https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climat...

Climategate emails (IPCC):

"It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

Is it true that only climate sceptics have political interests and are potentially biased? If not, how can we deal with this? How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that "our" reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann's work were not especially honest.

All these decisions about IPCC chairs and co-chairs are deeply political

I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

IPCC report:

https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf

"Equity remains a central element in the UN climate regime ... Prioritising equity, climate justice, social justice, inclusion and just transition processes can enable adaptation and ambitious mitigation actions and climate resilient development ... cash transfers and public works programs [are] highly feasible and increase resilience to climate change"

IPCC press release:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2023/03/IPCC_AR6_SYR...

"these choices need to be rooted in our diverse values, worldviews and knowledges, including scientific knowledge, Indigenous Knowledge and local knowledge"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/01/leaked-e...

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN's embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

Now try the real climate science.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/24/climate-epochs-....

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...

But exactly? Your first link is supporting my points and the second isn't related to it, are you aware of that or is this a sort of knee jerk reaction based on keyword matching?

The first article is about how the Medieval Warm Period did indeed happen. That isn't a rebuttal, it's support for the fact that Michael Mann's "getting rid of it" from the IPCC reports was biased censorship of scientific results, the thing the OP was complaining about. The IPCC has a long and terrible track record of blocking results that don't support the worst case scenarios (i.e. which would make their research less important to fund).

The point their article makes is only that the MWP didn't happen everywhere, so it wasn't global warming. But so what? Modern "global" warming isn't global either. Temperature changes differ in different parts of the world.

Your second article has nothing to do with the IPCC, and isn't actually meaningful anyway. Go read about the details. Exxon were using the same approaches as in academia, just reproducing their models, and concluded correctly that this sort of modelling was probably unreliable and at any rate couldn't be evaluated at the time. That's being presented as that they "knew" and "hid" the results. But the models weren't right despite claims to the contrary, so their assessment was reasonable.

i don't think you need a model to look at temperature records and see they have been increasing without a natural climate explanation. Unless there is some large igneous province spewing carbon into the atmosphere that you are aware of that the rest of us is not.

I don't quite follow, is that a reference to Exxon? They started looking at those claims in 1977 but temperatures had been falling (by the records of the time) from 1940 to 1975ish, so that would have been a big problem for concluding that fossil fuels = warming. It still is, which is why one of the things the IPCC did in its reports was start truncating its graphs and changing temperature data to try and erase the fact that climatology was once predicting a new ice age.

"they have been increasing without a natural climate explanation"

There are natural explanations, that's what the whole debate is about: how much temperature/sea level/etc change is natural vs man made. IPCC modelling starts from the assumption that the climate would be entirely stable if not for human activity which is why they were so keen on erasing the MWP.

what is the natural explanation that you are providing for the increase in global mean temperatures since industrialisation?

seems pretty obvious to me that a large igneous province is a comparable example to anthropogenic climate change (e.g., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12957-1). more carbon, higher temperatures. This has happened in the past literally every time a large igneous province has emerged. the big difference between today and the past is that the carbon being produced currently isn't from a large igneous province, it's from burning carbon fuels, making concrete, etc.

if you don't believe it, then feel free to download the data from wherever it is collected (see examples below) and prove me wrong.

https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/global-land-p...

https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/china/c...

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10154823

>> what is the natural explanation that you are providing for the increase in global mean temperatures since industrialisation?

Since industrialization i.e. the 20th century? It's quite possible that there actually hasn't been any increase if you look at the original thermometer readings and take the trend over the period since the start of industrialization. That's why the record is full of cases where climatologists went back and revised old thermometer readings (by several degrees in some cases!), to make it seem like there has been. This shows up in old documents as references to various "pauses", "plateaus", "blips" and the "global cooling" period between 1945 and 1975 that can no longer be seen in current temperature databases.

Back in 1999 NASA was complaining that there'd been no warming in America in the 20th century:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090404150607/http://www.giss.n...

How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the "answer" is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years. The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.

If you compare modern temperature graphs of the USA in the 20th century to the one they present there, you won't be able to understand what they're talking about because since then climatologists rewrote the temperature databases to create large amounts of 20th century warming in the USA. NASA has totally changed their claims about the past.

When they did that it was controversial. They justified it by saying the source data from the weather stations must be corrupted (because it didn't match their theory). A new weather station network was built in 2005 to address this concern. It also shows no warming since the day it opened. It's entirely possible the trend line for temperatures in the USA is zero since the start of industrialization.

What about elsewhere? Hard to say because long term data is sparse, often corrupted by urban development and also gets modified all the time. The NASA slider graph in your third link hides the fact that most of the temperature data they show for the globe over the 20th century is interpolated or modelled, not recorded with actual thermometers. Satellites? The show a bit of warming but also show long plateau periods where temperature doesn't move, and the data doesn't go back far enough to draw conclusions.

A trend line of zero since the start of industrialization doesn't mean temperatures don't sometimes go up. If you look at the 'real' data then you see a sine-wave like shape in the long term and a series of step changes in the short term, the so-called multidecadal oscillation and El Nino/La Nina factors. What causes it? Nobody really knows, maybe a combination of things, but there's no explanation for how human activity can cause this shape and plenty of evidence that climate has always been changing.

if you don't believe temperature data go look at pictures of glaciers that go back 100+ years https://nsidc.org/data/glacier_photo/

what makes them melt? must be photoshop of the pictures by climatologists right?

so maybe it's photoshop, but then where does all the sea ice go? probably climatologists lying about it right? are the satellites even in space? maybe they are a lie just like the moon landing.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/snow-and-ice-ext...

you linked to an article by james hansen then said you can't find what he is talking about because climatologists covered it up. james hansen is one of the most famous climate scientists ever having originally presented this to congress as a world crisis during his tenure at NASA.

i gave you links to temperature data collected in the usa, the soviet union, and china. yet you come back with no physical explanations and hint at vague conspiracies? Then you tell me to "look at the real data" when I gave you data collected by governments who have no desire to agree with each other in some global conspiracy.

so like, whatever man.

"you linked to an article by james hansen then said you can't find what he is talking about because climatologists covered it up. james hansen is one of the most famous climate scientists ever having originally presented this to congress as a world crisis during his tenure at NASA."

I know, the article I linked to is on the NASA website. That's exactly what I'm saying - guys like Hansen were distressed by the lack of warming despite their predictions to the contrary and then changed the data to create it, mostly by cooling the past. It's visible when comparing graphs of the same time period from older and newer documents. That one is an older document. You seem to think there's a contradiction here but I don't see it.

Glaciers, how do they work? Dunno, let's ask the archaeologists who know that in the past it was massively warmer where glaciers are found today:

http://www.museumgolling.at/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/9_Sch...

Oaks (Quercus) at an altitude of 1,450 metres around 2,000 years ago also indicate a climate approximately 4 to 7 °C warmer than today.

But that was in the Roman era so it can't have been CO2 making that warmth. Also very important: 4-7 degrees hotter but no runaway climate self-destruction.

Then you go off on some jibber-jabber about conspiracy theories. That's what always happens when people can't accept the truth on this topic, they try to shoot the messenger. All you need for this outcome to occur is the mundane reality that without predictions of doom nobody would care about climatology. It doesn't matter if the researchers are American or European or Chinese. Their income and prestige depends on claiming that they (a) understand the climate and (b) know how to explain all changes and (c) that those changes are controllable with sufficiently big actions. Unfortunately none of that seems to be correct.

I asked you repeatedly to provide a physical explanation for any observation such as global surface temperatures, glacier time series photos, sea ice reduction, etc. So far you provide none.

And I'm not attacking the messenger because you seem to have no message. You are only being a contrarian claiming the data doesn't exist to begin with.

So yeah, whatever man.

Non-human physical explanations for climate change can include sunspot activity, the AMO, El Nino/La Nina events, volcanic activity, internal interactions and probably many others. Some are known but most aren't. That's why I've not been giving you a comprehensive list: the climate isn't fully understood.

> the climate isn't fully understood

I give you this one. There is no absolute _proof_, we only have scientific consensus of the overwhelming majority. Granted, they all can be wrong, thats the good thing about science.

Having said that, just out of curiosity watching you discuss:

Would you agree that _just in case_ all these dudes are roughly right, we all should make at least good faith attempts to stop whatever we're doing currently or change it so that it doesn't make the situation worse?

Best case, all the scientists were wrong and we made the world a cleaner place with less pollution and sustainable tech instead of using up limited resources wherever possible. Worst case: they were not only right and even underestimated the pace (happened multiple times already), but we took measures just in time and can solve the problems just-in-time.

I mean, we could expand the problem easily to not only include warming and its effects, we do have straight pollution problems right in front of us. Toxic substances sifting into nature, rivers dying, agricultural wastes poisoning the seas, piles of garbage in poorer countries where new smallpox variants can emerge, hostile bacterias that are immune to the last antibiotics we have against superimmune things, ... .

I think even if the whole global warming story would be some super world conspiracy or mathematical error at the end, many measures to reduce that thing would also help against very obvious problems we also have (or start to have).

I think you just encountered a real "climate skeptic" in the wild. A once abundant species, but a rare sighting in 2023.

Yeah I guess I was bored while waiting on my code to finish running. Oh well. My gf would say, "why are you talking to people on the internet?"

> My gf would say, "why are you talking to people on the internet?"

I love these flashes from the old internet. Does your girlfriend live in Canada?

No she lives in The Netherlands.

If you check the polls you'll find we're pretty abundant (~30%+) and the numbers have been rising in recent years.

> Meanwhile, of course a vegan diet is better for the environment

Doesn't agriculture cause deforestation? That said what is better for environment?

With meat there is more demand on agriculture

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