I thought we were past that. I thought that it was now about questioning whether it was human caused, or the size of the impact.
Apparently we really are going back, and revisiting basic arithmetic.
A.1 It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.
The previous report (from 2013) only said (and much further in)
Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.
The equivalent statement from AR4 (2007) was
The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, ...
You could argue there is more of a question about what to do about it (e.g. try and mitigate climate change or just pay for the damanges). There is pretty good evidence at this point that mitigating the change through reducing CO2 emissions is a lot cheaper and comes with a host of other benefits (energy security, improved public health), but I can see wherer there might be arguments to have about this.
If they think mitigation is bad for the economy, why would the uncontrolled fallout be any better?
See how easily these people switch from "Nothing is happening" to "Oops it's too late to do anything."
It's entirely possible some of them are merely paying lip service and don't really believe that it will ever affect them personally. But taking them at their word they accept that they will be impacted one way or another.
I don't happen to agree with them but I still think it's worthwhile to understand other's reasoning. The dismissiveness that's all too common drives dogmatic behavior and polarization.
This is relatively recent progress. Go back a decade and people were straight-up denying that the climate was warming.
We are.
Before we had disagreements in the scientific community by respectable agents.
Now these are not a return to old debates, it's just that the current administration is abusing its authority to control information.
It's just a manifestation of the post truth.
This administration is abusing its authority to subvert instruments intended for specific uses in order to apply them to the trumpist agenda. The censorship of universities, sacking of govt agents that disagree with the administration, deportation of students, civilians being sent to El Salvador, the wrongful application of the Magnitsky law...
You don't need to take these threats at face value in order to stand agains them.
If you are sophisticated then they have quite elaborate, yet factually incorrect, justifications about not hurting the global poor etc. that they'll use.
But if they can get some traction with blaming the Jews for orchestrating an elaborate conspiracy or a Chinese hoax or just blatant denial of reality and recorded fact they'll keep doing that too.
Whatever works. They have the money and the political power to get away with it.
I thought we were past the question of whether the Earth was round or flat. Yet here we are.
Honest people are past that.
Are storms getting worse? No. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ace-north-atlantic-hurric...
Is drought getting worse? No. https://www.drought.gov/historical-information?dataset=1&sel...
For people who don't Fucking Love Science!™ and think climatologists are corrupted by profit, what's the killer argument that weather is getting more extreme.
The graph you link to does not support your claim.
Trend line has a slope of 0.2845587086 / year increase.
Noisy graph, correlation coefficient is 0.3003115118, but still, it does not support your claim.
> Is drought getting worse? No. https://www.drought.gov/historical-information?dataset=1&sel...
Correct. This shows decreased droughts and increased flooding. Do you expect increased droughts from increased global temperatures? If so, why? Most of the world's surface is water, more heat means more water in the air.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/understanding-...
"The UK State of the Climate report states that there are no compelling trends in storminess when considering maximum gust speeds over the last four decades. More comprehensive studies across the North Atlantic region have reached similar conclusions."
If you're going to try and argue that "no trend" isn't the same as "no compelling trend".... please, just don't. Life is short.
You've mis-interpreted the second graph. It doesn't show any increased flooding. It shows a very minor and unimportant trend in wetness. The trend is unimportant because increases in wetness don't imply increases in flooding, as the relationship is non-linear. Flooding has not increased so although I didn't mention flooding I could have added it to the list. See "Floods and Heavy Precipitation at the Global Scale: 100-Year Analysis and 180-Year Reconstruction" in JGR Atmospheres, Renard et al.
No, it is not.
More precisely: it is not justified by the evidence you chose to provide.
> A trend line calculated for any natural dataset will never be exactly zero. This doesn't mean humans need to speak in scientific notation as if we are robots. You are well aware of that, so please stop playing silly word games that don't advance the discussion. The phrase "No trend" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe storm data, which is why governments say the same thing:
You cannot say the opposite of what words mean, expect to not get called out on this (especially on a place like Hacker News), then when you are called out expect to get a positive reaction to saying "boo, stop playing word games".
The average for the first 50 years is 79.24 units. The average for the most recent 50 years is 106.64.
So, between the values of the first and last 50 years. So it backs my point and still denies yours.
This time, do you want to cherry-pick a specific date range that actually fits the results you expect from your apparently pre-existing belief there's no trend, or are you going to accept that line go up?
Save you some time, here's the rolling averages with 10, 20, and 50 year horizons: https://pasteboard.co/rQ49kvY8YeBU.png
Average is forward from any given date on the chart and standard spreadsheet use of "average" function, which is why (if you look closely) you'll see the right side is spiky and they all line up perfectly when that's clearly silly.
You can obviously compute a trend line on this data set, as with any. That doesn't mean the trend matters or can be described in normal English as "storms getting worse", which is why even people like the British government who are fully on board with Net Zero don't try the argument you're trying here. They explicitly say the trend line isn't compelling, even.
So what point are you trying to make, exactly? That they're wrong and it is compelling? Or that on HN there's a rule against describing data in normal ways?
Let's boil this down to the only thing that matters: do you think people should be alarmed by this data? If so, why, when others who have studied it don't?
Conserving the environment and taking steps to reduce our impact on the planet is a good thing. To that end, I’m ok with believing in global warming. I believe some of the narrative is used for selfish ends (green energy companies are looking to make a profit, too) and abused, but on the whole it’s a noble cause.
The replies here that are more or less “wow, can you believe these people don’t trust the word of the priests?” are extremely tiring. “Science” in this division is little different from belief. None of us (experts included) have the data nor intellect to holistically evaluate a system as complex as our planet. Our current understanding is likely wrong in some way.
There are plenty of good reasons to preserve the planet. We don’t have to resort to heretic burning and tribal shaming. It’s short sighted and intellectually lazy.
Actively rejecting the work of scientists based solely on ideology, that is religion, in the worst sense of the word. They're not heretics. They're just liars.
Rejecting or accepting based on ideology is wrong. And given we lack the technical ability to fully understand global warming, there is no objective truth here.
I'm sorry, what?
We have total understanding of global warming: 1) CO2 traps heat, we know that from basic lab experiments, and 2) we're pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which we know from countless data points, both historical and contemporary.
When it comes to the basic fact of global warming, that's all you need to know.
Everything after that is forecasting impacts and associated trend lines.
• We know the effects of CO2 on the transmission of electromagnetic radiation and how this varies by frequency. Same for the other gases in the atmosphere.
• We know how much energy is coming into the system from solar radiation, which we also know accounts for almost all incoming energy. We know the frequency distribution of this energy.
• We can measure the outgoing energy, and see that there is an imbalance with incoming higher than outgoing.
• We can measure incoming and outgoing at the surface, and at various levels in the atmosphere, to track down where that net energy increase is ending up. Infrared is in the frequency range that CO2 blocks.
• We can measure incoming and outgoing energy at various levels in the atmosphere and measure temperature and see that blocking the outgoing infrared heats the atmosphere.
• We can see that this heating effect is a function of CO2 concentration, which he can observe is going up over time, and we can see that the amount of heating increase over time closely matches the amount of heating we would expect from the increasing CO2.
The above just takes lab work (e.g., characterizing how various gases affect radiation transmission), measurements of incoming and outgoing energy flow, spectrum, and temperature of the system as a whole (satellites can do this) and at the surface and at various layers of the atmosphere.
That shows that warming is occurring, and it is almost all due to increasing greenhouse gases.
That doesn't show that humans are responsible for this increasing gases. For that we have:
• Carbon comes in different isotopes. There is an isotope with a half-life of about 5700 years that is created in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays and then spreads throughout the atmosphere. The other two isotopes common in the atmosphere are stable. By looking at the ratios of carbon isotopes in atmospheric CO2 we can determine that the large increases in atmospheric CO2 come from sources that have little or none of the radioactive carbon.
Living things and dead things that have not been dead for a very long time do have significant amounts of the radioactive isotope because living (this is the basis for carbon dating). That lets us rule out things like wildfires as a significant contribution to the increases CO2.
The major ways to get excess stable carbon isotopes in the atmosphere are volcanoes and digging up and burning fossil fuels. We know that most of the increase comes from fossil fuels rather than volcanoes or other geological activity because:
• We know how much fossil fuels are burned each year and so can calculate how much carbon that will release into the atmosphere and that accounts for almost all of the observed excess stable carbon.
• We can monitor volcanic activity and see that it is not high enough to be a major contributor. Maybe we've missed a lot of volcanoes or other geological sources, but if we have we know that they can't be omitting much because the ones we do know about plus the amount from our known fossil fuel use accounts for almost all of the observed excess.
No. Scientist seek to understand and change their beliefs as the facts become clear - the scientific method. Science is self correcting. Some people attack science for self-correcting, but that's literally the point of science.
Priests OTOH do not look to self-correct. Religion is built on myths, and without those myths it will no longer exist. The only ones relying on myths are those still denying climate change.
I think all the stuff in the above sentence is objectively true and observable.
however when you start to identify with a group, you start to reject anything that doesn't reinforce your existing stance and group think. this is a really human trait and goes back to humans needing to be able to feel things like guilt and shame and desiring things like acceptance and validation, because these traits were what allowed us to live as groups and in small societies, when being in these groups vs ostracized was the difference between life and death.
mansplaining aside, i agree. i do wish there was more honest and interesting discourse around many topics, rather than things devolving into "everything this sexual predator says is fake and wrong". which isn't to defend them, but rather to share the exhaustion that discussion that isnt focused around science and data and instead is mostly talking points from our overlords.