Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists
The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?
I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!
more importantly though, is the fact that there are enough "critics" that consider Global Warming a cycle that "man" merely accelerated by a few decades. most of these "skeptics" are also perfectly capable of discerning between the amount of energy "wasted" in office buildings and lit up skyscrapers as well as anything at the end of luxury supply chains and markets and what the rest of the world "wastes" or expends. to them, the hoax is the "man-made" part ...
it should be "some-man-made climate change"
Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.
Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.
In fact, we have records from not that long ago that at some point climate became colder after it had been warmer for a bit.
It's obvious human civilization has an impact, but the real question is more, can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life? Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.
Climate activist make it look like it's a settled issue, but the problem isn't the science; the problem is trying to use the science to enforce decision that are highly political in nature and are not to be left only to the designated god scientist, no matter how hard they cry...
Uh? Ultimate loser? When I read comments like this I'm basically confronted with the following implication "Human civilization isn't worth preserving. If you disagree, then the problem is with you, namely because you believe humanity to be redeemable".
The ultimate loser is the person who thinks that a small or almost nonexistent reduction in quality of life is a small price to pay in comparison to a large and permanent reduction in quality of life.
The ultimate winner is the person who will see his quality of life decline before his eyes.
Crazy.
Yes, no doubt! And actually doing something about it will impact our lives much less than trying to continue as usual. If we would have started 30 years ago, the transitions would have been smooth, but now it is going to be harsher. The problem is that doing something about it will affect the profits of some very big and influential corporations, and they are doing everything they can to sow FUD.
The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.
EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.
> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025ef00...
I believe people have influenced the climate, but the far left is using it as a political football to get Their Guy elected, not to actually stop it. The idea of a rising sea is a perfect disaster they can sell you the solution for. If they actually cared, 1) the Democrats would be fighting AI tooth and nail, unless it was 100% powered by renewables (not nuclear, remember their version of science denialism is no nukes.). 2) they would be worshipping Elon for bringing us EVs. Instead they take all that silicon valley AI money and tell us to save the ocean. No way San Jose!
And I'm not sure we want to put our heads in the sand and say La-La-La, against the real possibility that everything is actually going to shit.
"The people with the most power and money are hurting the planet, so there's no reason for me to inconvenience myself for the sake of others."
It's a pretty weak justification for a selfish attitude.
Perhaps you have cognitive dissonance because you've fallen for some very low quality propaganda.
Policies are not perfect, and they will be created with input from all parties. What you highlight feels like an artifact of these policies not being hard line enough. You are of course right that it is effective to show natural disasters and explain that these will be more frequent if we do nothing, when you do that people will make the wrong conclusions how that effects their daily lives. We know that we use too much resources, and this is going to have catastrophic consequences in the future if we do not change how we use them.
It is not obvious who you are arguing against, it feels to me that you are against the people who make climate policies weak, and the very same policies.
Lets talk specific, we had a plastic bag ban here in Sweden. It was vilified as not efficient. In the end it was effective according to research after the ban was lifted and an even extreme approach would have been even better.
An actual leftist party would ban private jets before it banned natural gas in homes.
The Democrats are a neoliberal conservative party. They'll always put the interests of Capital first.
I sympathize, I'm not sure what Americans are meant to do about their utterly captured government.
Every single global cooling prediction has failed, so yes, if you're that incompetent you should definitely find a different career.
> the Democrats
You have shown that you don't understand what Leftist politics means. Democrats are center-right. The USA hasn't had a meaningful Leftist party since the first half of the last century.
I’m a Leftist and I want good things for all people. I don’t want to persecute my enemies. I don’t agree with you.
But the tendency is showing: in my country, we're getting records in extreme temperatures, forrest fires and storms.
But a study 1% can be dismissed, some random in a basement 99% off can be believed. This just says: many people are just looking for a confirmation of their beliefs, not evidence. And many companies play this game (supporting the right politicians, spreading disinformation aka lies, etc), because there are billions at stake.
The CO2 hypothesis was made in the 50s, long before there was conclusive evidence, and yet we are right on the predicted trajectory.
Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.
There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.
If you care about solving climate change: instead of yelling at climate change denialist you should direct more effort into advocating for policy and messaging that acknowledges and mitigates the harms while keeping you expect people to endure
But if you want me to, I could, sure.
It doesn't sound to me like you contribute any valuable argument that would improve the "PR" for the goal of protecting environmental living conditions for humans though.
I've never seen "halting economic growth" as a suggestion for dealing with climate change that was being taken seriously. There might be some crackpots out there insisting that we need to being the economy to a halt and move into caves or something, but I think the vast majority understands that it isn't going to happen. That said, there are things that could be done which would hurt the profits of the ~50 companies who are responsible for most of the global CO2 emissions and/or trillions in climate related damages without causing the entire global economy to grind to a stop or collapse (as much as they'd love for us to believe otherwise).
The greatest societal behavior that needs to be changed is the way we allow a very small number of people get away with making insane amounts of money by causing insane levels of harm. Until that changes, the harmful systems that those people have created for themselves to profit under won't change either.
> it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it,
Sure there are fanatics spouting end-of-the-world-is-nigh stuff but fundamentally I think the problem here is it's unknown - both in terms of the physical changes [1], and perhaps more importantly second order effects due to mass migration. It might become a real problem a lot sooner than you think - we simply don't know - but I think it's certainly wrong to view the effects as a gradual rise - that average hides a lot of local/temporal variation.
[1]in terms of potential for positive feedback loops like methane release, or compensating stabilising effects like cloud cover. [2] For a region to become uninhabitable, you don't need it to be uninhabitable every day of the year - just one or two days a year may be enough - enough to kill people or crops. What's important is the occurrence of extremes during the year, not the average gradual rise.
- Climate Warming is a hoax
- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles
- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.
- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.
For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans
It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now. Elon doesn't even care, more outrage == more engagement and that's what feeds the system. It's a feedback loop of crap.
Try to create a brand new twitter account, you'll find that 80+% of the accounts that get suggested to you are right wing propaganda with climate denial being one of their greatest hits.
Not "basically" owned. Manipulation is the explicitly optimized and financed purpose.
The feed is a two-directional manipulation competition, with both directions enhancing each other, with a conflict of interest afterburner, for all parties to maximally control users. Neutrality doesn't exist.
(1) An auction for ads/influence to get your manipulative content in front of the most likely vulnerable users.
(2) A never ending competition to create addictive content, funded in direct proportion to successful impact on users.
(3) And the value in both directions is magnified by the "personalized" leverage manufactured through pervasive logging, beyond service surveillance, dossier collation, psychology hacking and real time feed manipulation.
(4) None of this is impeded by any "standards", neutrality, or a concern about external damage.
Admittedly great things for users and society, except for the four on that list that are not.
Yes, if hysteria and de-growth propaganda wins, it is bleak for the other groups
Even the US military is planning around climate change because they sure as hell believe it’s real: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/375340...
If it’s only about people then y’all better figure out the technology quick, because the gulf coast is not long for this world at the current pace
Question 2: Which species has the potential to prevent such wipeout in the future?
“Researchers found that plants’ protein content will likely decrease significantly if carbon dioxide levels reach 540 to 960 parts per million, which we are projected to reach by 2100. (We are currently at 409 ppm.) Studies show that barley, wheat, potatoes and rice have 6 to 15 percent lower concentrations of protein when grown at those levels of CO2. The protein content of corn and sorghum, however, did not decline significantly.”
Fewer nutrients https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-change-an...
"When grown under the CO2 levels expected by 2050, reductions of protein, iron, and zinc in common produce in some parts of the world could be anywhere from 3-17 percent. And if emissions continue at the current rate, in many countries, these nutrient declines could turn dire."
Source:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/climate-cha...
Climate change is already affecting global food production—unequally https://phys-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/phys.org/news/2019-0... roductionunequally.amp?amp_js_v=0.1
“The world's top 10 crops— barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat—supply a combined 83 percent of all calories produced on cropland. Yields have long been projected to decrease in future climate conditions. Now, new research shows climate change has already affected production of these key energy sources—and some regions and countries are faring far worse than others.”
Lower available omega 3 fatty acids https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090543/ Earth Ozone destruction https://psmag.com/environment/the-most-climate-resilient-cou... In other words, heat-trapping gases contribute to creating the cooling conditions in the atmosphere that lead to ozone depletion. Greenhouse gases absorb heat at relatively low altitudes and warm the surface--but they have the opposite effect in higher altitudes because they prevent heat from rising.
In a cooler stratosphere, ozone loss creates a cooling effect that results in further ozone depletion.
Less atmospheric oxygen https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151201094120.h...
Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to new research.
Health Higher suicide rates as temperatures go up https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326558963_Higher_te...
Our calculations suggest that projected changes in suicide rates under future climate change could be as important as other well- studied societal or policy determinants of suicide rates (see Fig. 5a).
In absolute value, the effect of climate change on the suicide rate in the United States and Mexico by 2050 is roughly two to four times the estimated effect of a 1% increase in the unemployment rate in the European Union20, half as large as the immediate effect of a celebrity suicide in Japan45, and roughly one-third as large in absolute magnitude (with opposite sign) as the estimated effect of gun restriction laws in the United States46 or the effect of national suicide prevention programmes in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries47. The large magni- tude of our results adds further impetus to better understand why temperature affects suicide and to implement policies to mitigate future temperature rise. Climate Change Will Expose Half of World’s Population to Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes By 2050 https://e360.yale.edu/digest/climate-change-will-expose-half...
Overall health https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311844520_Carbon_di...
Unhealthy blood CO2 concentrations causing stress on the autonomic nervous system have been measured from people in common office environments where reduced thinking ability and health symptoms have been observed at levels of CO2 above 600 ppm for relatively short-term exposures. Although humans and animals are able to deal with elevated levels of CO2 in the short-term due to various compensation mechanisms in the body, the persistent effects of these mechanisms may have severe consequences in a perpetual environment of elevated CO2. These include threats to life such as kidney failure, bone atrophy and loss of brain function. Existing research also indicates that as ambient CO2 increases in the near-future, there will be an associated increase in cancers, neurological disorders and other conditions.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-...
No. These CO2 measurement levels are at 9,000 feet, not on the surface at sea level. The CO2 concentration at the surface is much higher, and it is becoming very common for CO2 levels to exceed 1,000 ppm at the surface, going up to 4,000 ppm in closed areas, like houses.
The measured CO2 level has seasonal peaks and lows. What is important is the Mean keeps climbing. What is also important is the rise in the mean is starting to go exponential. A decade ago, the mean was increasing about 1 ppm per year. This past year, it is increasing at 3 ppm. All the projections from the 70's have been with the assumption that the CO2 level increase would be a linear ramp up, indicating when the troposphere, the breathable atmosphere, goes into Thermal Runaway, around 2070. If the ramp up is going exponential, then the conditions for Thermal Runaway move closer, possibly around 2040. The commencement of Thermal Runaway is a mass extinction event. This is the reason for all the "sooner than expected" headlines.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/extreme-heat-climate-cha...
Researchers have linked extreme heat to increased aggression, lower cognitive ability
NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 as of September 2019
Atmospheric CO2 Getting So High That It’s Weakening Human Skeletons
https://futurism.com/health-medicine/carbon-atmosphere-human...
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/under-five-mort...
Apparently civilization is adapting?
We have easy measures of that
- Real GDP.
- Global Life Expectancy
- Global Child Mortality
- Global Poverty
- Global Food Production
If you are really into science and evidence, you should be tracking that for humanity extinction/survival trends (and the effect technology is having in tackling climate change), which is what my position is
Associating action to prevent with 'de-growth' is disinformation from the deniers. Climate change itself is massively de-growth. The question is how to best prevent it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...
The goal is not to generate hysteria; but to avoid it. Hitting one or more tipping points [1] is orders of magnitude more destructive than prioritising phasing out fossil fuels, and impossible to undo.
But I do understand that some people have reasons not to care about impacts that have an outsized effect on future generations, so to your request: a recent example of a list of impact predictions is the UK Government joint intelligence committee's national security assessment [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_... [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-a...
Many factors influence economics; climate change is one part of the equation. There are many examples of climate change's direct impact so far - floods, fires, sea-level rise (requiring investment in massive public works), droughts, etc. I don't think it's debatable that these things have negative economic impact.
Climate change is expected to greatly increase its impact in many ways. Let's not wait until it overcomes all other factors in economic growth and makes our economies shrink.
The planet went through much worse climate change cycles
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/05/climate-...
And remember, climate change is not something that happens and then it is done. What we are seeing now is just a start of much worse to come.
>Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
Green growth aka energy efficiency doesn't work, so one more category.
Carbon capture doesn't work without government subsidies. Hence you need a group of people who would be willing to pay tax money to solve climate change. One more category.
Human adaptation can mean many things. People accept climate change even if it means mass immigration. One more category.
People accept climate change even if it means armed border conflicts where immigrants get shot (see Poland) due to closed border policies. One more category.
People resign and accept the negative consequences of climate change as the new normal, similar to people living in polluted cities, except globally. One more category.
These people are about to be really surprised when the bees die.
But we didn't start when we had to, and we are still doing only a fraction of what must be done. So, we are screwing ourselves over majorly. And this is not some fringe hysteria, this is the scientific consensus and has been for a long time. You can almost hear screams of frustration and desperation through the lines if you pick ut the latest IPCC report.
They would have made a lot more headway talking about clean air, clean water, jobs, and a bright prosperous future where we manufacture wind turbines, batteries and solar panels in deep red Missouri. A minority tried that, but most stuck with the catastrophizing for decades and now that they've ruined their social credit no one will listen to the message they should have opened with.
You need people emotionally invested, and it's a lot easier to get them invested in their lives than in the abstract consequences of computer models that are at least 100 years out if they're even accurate. And most people are not independent enough to direct their own lives. If they make the right decisions on abstract concepts, it was more because the incentives/disincentives in their environment were set up correctly than they actually understood the decision they were making. Message accordingly.
The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.
Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).
None of it works.
1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.
The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.
2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.
Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!
And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.
Except downplaying consequences downplays the upside, i.e. opportunity.
The dire warnings should be dire, but paired with a call to opportunity opportunity opportunity. Instead of focusing on enemies or little inconvenient things we could all do, if only we could all be uniformly focused and high minded enough as uncoordinated individuals.
That fact that virtually every way we can reduce climate damage involves new capabilities and resources with additional economic and health benefits (not to mention political disentanglements) makes positive self-interested calls to profitable action much more sensible.
And political leaders shouldn't be afraid to work with the CFO's of fossil fuel companies to create incentives they want. It might be costly, but CFO's get flexible when there is a clear path to making more money. Any costs of smoothing that path (let's be clear, in a way that would be pure corruption if the size of the problem didn't make that a value creator) are nothing compared to the costs of climate change.
China gets it. (Not uniformly of course, but more, and its paying off for them.)
These are scientists, not the government, and the US government, at least, has long opposed or been ambivalent toward climate research.
I'm not sure how rich donor influence is involved. Rich donors generally have acted to oppose climate research.
When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.
We are doomed.