A climate model approximation that could change the climate movement | Hacker News Reader

A climate model approximation that could change the climate movement

climatewaterproject.substack.com

40 pointsgardenfelder19 comments

>This is a story of how the ‘Global Warming = Greenhouse Gases’ narrative came to be, and an inquiry into whether the real climate narrative should really be

‘Global Warming = Greenhouse Gases + Land Degradation affects Water Cycle’ .

> ‘Global Warming = Greenhouse Gases + Land Degradation affects Water Cycle’ .

‘Global Warming = Greenhouse Gases + Land Degradation affects Water Cycle + τ’, where τ is all the rest.

I've posted the original article to hn. Seemed to me more informative than the comment. Thanks however to poster from bringing attention to the topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37775817

The author posits that we may be worse off because deforestation. Yet forest cover is increasing from when models variables were set due to increased CO2 so perhaps the higher bounds won't be reached.

From an authors comment:

> Water also will heat up the earth too, because it is a greenhouse gas. So when water evapotranspires it is both heating up the earth and also cooling it. Its a competition. So we have to do the calculations to see which wins out, to see if the water greenhouse warms more or the latent heat infrared radiation cools more. My guess is that when they take the nonlinear dynamics of convection more into account, they will find the latent heat infrared radiation wins out. The biotic effect may also come into play here, as it can cause more convection upwards.

To me, this article classifies as FUD, even though the non-linear heat transfer of water vapor could be a significant factor, one should wait and compare the parameterized static models and non-parameterized dynamic ones in conjunction with land mass changes to call it news. As the auther notes it above themself. At most, this is a valuable contribution to the unsettled scientific discourse but not as a pop-sci article.

And even then ... wether the water dynamics beeing a net cooler or heater is insignificant for the past observation of global warming. And also insignificant to the fact that CO2 is an accumulating greenhouse gas.

Also a good indicator of FUD is, how the other commentators jump on "the climate scientist got it wrong!"

What bothers me especially about this, is that the uncertainty is targeted towards "should we even care about CO2?". Yes we should. We _have to_ take care long term of all our waste products to achieve sustainability! You can tackle climate change and many other of our problems _without even mentioning them_ simply with the logic of sustainability. But people get hooked else where...

I went to a talk by forest ecologist Suzanna Simard last year. One interesting point she made is that the carbon sequestration abilities of a woodland depends on more variables than simply the coverage. If I remember rightly, mature woodlands with a diverse ecology and rich soil environment (with plenty of fungal matter) are much better at capturing CO2. Chopping down an ancient forest cannot simply be compenstated by a huge monoculture plantation somewhere else.

Nobody who works in the field believes global warming is “only” due to greenhouse gases… So much for the premise of the article.

Well we should be moving on from CO2 because in this area the effect is nearly saturated. Doubling CO2 from it's current level won't have nearly the impact the previous doubling had.

CO2 levels are current 1.50 times pre-industrial levels, so "previous doubling" is misleading.

Right but it's not going to do much of anything temp wise from here, maybe .7C higher at worst. This is a useful tool to see this: https://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/

No. sixbrx explanation applies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37772724

It's not the saturation at the peak absorbtion frequencies that is driving the warming, it's the widening of the curves which raises absorbtion levels in nearby frequencies. The "saturated" argument was one of the first objections when the science was poorly understood. Krauss's book Physics of Climate CHange has a good account of this history. Check IPCC summaries to see how many models from the literature predict flattening at 0.7C additional warming if we don't curb emissions (spoiler alert: slim to none with many positing 5C or more additional warming in the 2100's if emissions aren't curbed).

The article is about the movement around addressing climate change and how it’s presented in public discouse, not the science itself.

> how it’s presented in public discourse

My problem is that this article is not helping in this regard.

Didn't we have to rebrand "global warming" as "climate change" because the warming part turned out to be difficult to observe?

Not exactly. Increases in average temperature are very easy to measure, [0] for a nice visualization.

The change was done to highlight the fact that the consequences are not just higher temperatures but also include, for example, an increased frequency in wild fires, droughts, and other extreme weather events.

[0]: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/300/video-climate...

And here the plot up to August 2023:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005100/a005161/GISTEM...

No. It was 'rebranded' because you have senators bringing in snowballs as a claim that global warming didn't exist because the common avenue for denying global warming is to point to the current weather.

Also because warming can increase the volatility of the weather regionally - for example, messing up the polar vortex caused surprising cold weather in parts of the United States even though the planet was overall warmer.

A lot of people would like to complacently react “oh, I’ll just turn the AC up” rather than acknowledge that it’ll mean dealing with worse storms, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com