Take ocean deoxygenation: it happens locally due to fertiliser runoff in places that have a history of low oxygen. It’s good to put some resources towards fixing this, but it’s not useful to think of it as an extinction level problem that we “now have.”
All the interaction of species, effects of (mass) extinctions? Invasive species? Habitat destruction, soil loss from farming, AND you can predict the impacts of human industry, economics, and technology change?
You have ALL THAT NAILED DOWN, internet expert?
Forgive me if I don't take your assurances about that as being "no big deal" with any iota of reliability.
There are literally 20 major scientific domains that all are in lockstep agreement about anthropogenic global warming, from geologists, atmospheric scientists, basic chemistry and physics, oceanographers, biologists, archaeologists, historians. A massive collection of scientific inquiry that basically all ends at the same conclusions. It's quite literally thousands of PhDs, maybe tens of thousands.
Of course, all of them don't know as much as you, internet guy.
Just a few things you get wrong: thinking models are 100% accurate, thinking scientists have everything “nailed down” and assuming that I don’t know enough to back up my opinion.
Because you, single person, do not have the ability to ingest all the data, do not have access to the necessary supercomputers, do not have the decades of time to write and adapt the simulation software, do not have the PhDs.
You are simply one brain. Who very most certainly does not have the accuracy of the current models (yours is FAR less reliable, because it is your lone opinion), you think you have everything nailed down to brazenly assert "it won't be that bad", and well, you are just one dumb internet person, so I KNOW you don't know enough to back up your opinion.
If you followed the simulations alone, you'd see that they have had a surprisingly good track, even the late-1990s models are doing disturbingly well (which were more pessimistic than what the climate scientists wanted to say back then).
Ocean acidification and the potential collapse of oceanic phytoplankton should scare the living shit out of you. Fishery health aren't really the concern if oxygen production from phytoplankton drops. The inability to eat sushi is far down the list from "inability to breathe". Hint: phytoplankton produce 70% of the oxygen we breathe, and our society is actively participating in Russian Roulette on a global scale to see if we kill ourselves with that, among other "fun games" that "you aren't concerned about".
In fact I follows many scientists who do all the things you mention and who agree with me. Some even think climate change might be good overall! Most skeptics think that it is real and that it is bad, but that it is not something worth panicking about.
As I said before, I’m always open to learning more. What predictions frighten you the most? You mention ocean acidification, when do scientists predict that this problem will become existential?
Two types, not one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_deoxygenation#Types_and_...
I wouldn’t claim I have knowledge that it’s not a problem, but I’d like to see a model where it becomes a problem and for that model to predict observations. Until then, I just mentally file this away under doomer predictions.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm3468
Global decline in ocean memory over the 21st century
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-devastating-greenland-antarcti...
'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are now losing more than three times as much ice a year as they were 30 years ago
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ocean-warming-study
the planet has accumulated as much heat in the past 15 years as it did in the previous 45 years, the majority of the excess heat has been absorbed by the oceans
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/oceans-h...
A technical chart in a chapter of the latest UN climate assessment laid out the unfathomable heat gain. Between 1971 and 2018, the ocean had gained 396 zettajoules of heat.
How much heat is that? Scientists have calculated it is the equivalent energy of more than 25bn Hiroshima atomic bombs. And that heat gain is accelerating.
A study in January found the ocean gained 10 ZJ more in 2022 than the year before – enough heat to boil 700m kettles every second.
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-climate-ocean-plankton-microbe...
Warming climate could turn ocean plankton microbes into carbon emitters
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330316398_How_fast_...
How fast are the oceans warming? - Observational records of ocean heat content show that ocean warming is accelerating
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/17/world/four-climate-charts...
Four alarming charts that show just how extreme the climate is right now
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-24/antarctic-sea-ice-lev...
Antarctic sea ice levels dive in 'five-sigma event', as experts flag worsening consequences for planet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/2...
Scientists detect sign that a crucial ocean current is near collapse
> I’d like to see a model where it becomes a problem and for that model to predict observations
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-08-16/revisiting-the...
https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/y...
"I conducted a data update to Limits to Growth (LtG), best known from the 1972 bestseller that forecasted a scenario of global societal collapse occurring around the present time if humanity did not alter its priorities. Empirical data comparisons since then indicated that the world was still heading for collapse. ... I found that the scenarios aligned closely with observed global data, which is a testament to the LtG work done decades ago. The two scenarios aligning most closely indicate a halt in growth over the next decade or so, which puts into question the usability of continuous growth as humanity’s goal in the 21st century. Both scenarios also indicate subsequent declines, but only one—the scenario in which declines are caused by pollution, including greenhouse gas pollution—depicts a collapse pattern. The scenario with the smallest declines aligned least with empirical data, however, absolute differences were rarely big and sometimes insignificant. This suggests that it’s almost, but not yet, too late for society to change course."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332655753_Limits_Re...
"We unravel the arguments that have raged for forty years in its aftermath and explore more recent findings which relate to the original hypothesis. There is unsettling evidence that society is still following the ‘standard run’ of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards. Detailed recent studies suggests that production of some key resources may only be decades away. Certain other limits to growth – less visible in the 1972 report – present equally pressing challenges to modern society. We highlight, in particular, recent work on our proximity to ‘planetary boundaries’ and illustrate this through the challenge of meeting the Paris Agreement on climate change. We also explore the economic challenge of a ‘secular stagnation’. If the Club of Rome is right, the next few decades are decisive."
> I just mentally file this away under doomer predictions
Ok :)
I see a lot of evidence that the planet has been/is warming, but still see lots of issues with the attribution / prediction / catastrophe papers. Take your KPMG report: it has lots of predictions of catastrophic trends, but cannot be used to make an actual prediction since "he LtG scenarios were thus not meant to produce point predictions, but rather to help us understand the behavior of systems in the world over time." "Although the steepness of a scenario’s decline cannot be used for predictive purposes (Meadows et al., 2004), it can be said that BAU2 shows a clear collapse pattern"
I believe the Lakatosian solution to the demarcation problem is best: judge a scientific programme by its progressiveness over time. Evidence of a progressive programme comes about through repeated confirmation of theory against evidence without adding arbitrary auxilliary hypothesis. I worry that some corners of climate change science are degenerate: when a model doesn't match predictions there is always an explanation using an auxillary hypothesis ("there are less fires than we predicted, but we now use a different metric. And our new metric is getting worse!!", "the record temps didn't appear in our model because we didn't include X, but will come eventually", "the coral didn't die because Y, but will die eventually", "the ice caps haven't melted yet because Z, but will eventually"). I'm not saying these auxillary hypothesis are necessarily wrong, just that they are used as excuses for wrong predictions. This years record heat was an opportunity for climate scientists to say: "see! We predicted this in 99% of our models, now you should trust us", instead we got "our models missed this, but because we didn't include X,Y,Z; so you should still trust the models." Even worse X,Y,Z have been known about for years so either the modeller thought they weren't important and was wrong, or thought they were important but didn't include the. Both scenarios worry me and feed my skepticism.