People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it. And they work!
Anthropogenic climate change affords itself to a wide variety of crazy statements because it arises from, and affects such a wide variety of human activities. Basically, there is no segment of the human population that will remain unaffected in some way--either directly, by sea level rise or shifts in fresh water, or indirectly, by all the people who are being directly affected.
Because it is physically real, it can't be ignored forever. I fear that the longer we go as a society without addressing it, the higher the general level of social anxiety will rise. That could go a bad way: more and more people seize upon conspiracy theories or tune out. I hope instead we find the collective will to face our fears and take action to address them. I hope that like starting a difficult and scary project, once we see signs of progress, it will become easier to conceive of further progress.
Basically the science says we will transition to a zero-emission society. We can either plan for it and have a managed transition, or we can be forced into it by external forces, essentially a collapse (good luck feeding 10 billion people with widespread crop failures).
The earlier we start, the smoother the transition will be. That is basically what all the protests are about, people just want to start the transition already.
But in the case of QM, either the crazy stuff is wrong- repeated experiments falsify it, no gadget can be built on the principle; or it is "not even wrong", i.e., irrelevant. But many of the climate change findings are either predictions with a timespan of several years or decades, or historical explanations (this and this happened because of climate change). The first type can only be put to test years from now, the second type never.
Nuclear is not a panacea, but we should build more because this is a global emergency. There is a racist component to the reaction to climate change because of who is being most immediately impacted (equatorial countries and the poor), but intent doesn't matter, because only action matters.
The science is bland and harsh, and doesn't care about how people consume it. You can put CO2 in an aquarium, seal it, and easily measure the greenhouse effect from CO2 yourself. You can even work out the basics of the relationship of CO2 concentration to degree of warming. This is happening right now - it's not predictions, it is our reality. It will happen to you regardless of how you feel about the discussion on either side of the issue.
Some of these effects are two or three or more steps removed from the warming caused by co2, and there is a "cascade of uncertainty" in predicting them.
I agree with the GP that being climate (and atmosphere) omnipresent, it is easy and tempting to draw long causal chains from it to the most disparate effects. And that, given the theme is central to our time, and given the number of scientists of all disciplines working to study these effects, in the most rigorous fields a publication bias on the effects found must exist. In the less rigorous, most probably anything goes.
huh?!?
temperature raise is a lot more pronounced at poles, not at equator
Closer to the equator you'll find Kiribati, where salination of farmlands and aquifers has already happened. Luckily the rest of the world is still online and willing to keep their country on life support, but the prospects for kiribati to independently support itself in the long term are non-existent.
Carbon dioxide also raises ocean acidity which kills off corals and crashes fisheries, leaving coastal communities without reliable protein sources.
I hope you can see how an indifference to climate change on the part of predominately white countries to can be construed as racist. When someone says that, he or she is talking about all the non-white people who are currently suffering due to changes in their climates.
This is hilariously misled. Food must be imported into Hawaii because it's an island with very little arable land, not because it's "in the tropics." Equatorial nations have by far the greatest access to food when compared to any other place on the earth. That's why biodiversity is the greatest near the equator -- there are more resources.
> I hope you can see how an indifference to climate change on the part of predominately white countries to can be construed as racist. When someone says that, he or she is talking about all the non-white people who are currently suffering due to changes in their climates.
Yes, but they are not disproportionately affected due to some conspiracy, but rather just because money protects you from consequences. If you're poor, you can't move, and you can't buy water. That affects you less if you have a stable income and marketable skills (which are easier to access in the west).
I live out here in the pacific, I travel all over Oahu every day. People lived here for over a thousand years without foreign goods. The food scarcity is manufactured to suck money back to the mainland U.S.
Hah--oh wait, you're actually serious?
When you use words like "hilarious" and "hah" I feel annoyed, because I need a little more respect and acknowledgement for the work I am doing in horticulture, food security out here in the pacific. I have a hard time listening to what you are trying to say when you are typing laughter at me. Do you want to try and share your thoughts without implying that you think my world is a joke?
One of the biggest things that bugs me about the talk from the public about climate change is that it is all focused around what politicians say. Last week I heard graduate students talking about the major effects of plastic straws. My dad (a Fox news watcher) constantly talks about Al Gore. As a scientists I don't care about those things and those things aren't talked about in the scientific community. We're all confused at the right for not believing in it and we're confused by the left because we have prominent politicians (like Bernie and Warren) saying that nuclear and sequestration are false solutions (but these technologies are highly encouraged by the IPCC and every single climate scientist I know. Only Yang and Booker are pro nuclear?! AFAICT only Yang is pro sequestration?! This is ridiculous. All of them should be! They're all claiming to be listening to the scientists!). So I get your sentiment. Personally I just don't understand why this is happening and what we can do about it.
> The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years
If it makes you feel better, the scientists are talking about decades. And different events in different time spans. Some of the predictions have already come true, such as more intense storms, more fires, and more droughts. This will only get worse. But the spiral out of control is much further off and is more related to food/water scarcity. That's where the 1.5C-2C warming is a huge danger.
As to the racial and economical aspects to climate, there is truth there. But I think the conversation has gotten out of control. Countries like India are already being hit really hard by climate change (a lot more of their land is vulnerable to floods compared to 20 years ago). But the talk here should be really focused about how we can't just ask/expect other countries to not grow their economy for using the same tactics we did (i.e. coal, oil, and natural gas). The US is only 15% of the problem (Europe 10%) and all of us going to 0% isn't solving the problem. We have to go negative and/or ensure that there are cheap enough technologies that developing countries can use that don't pollute. At least I see this as a more humane alternative than shutting down other countries growing economies. IDK about you.
and every single climate scientist I know. Which I assume to be more than the average person.
edit: forgot that italic is single star not two
Put another way, Kendi is pointing out different manifestations of the dangers of equating (dis)belief with knowledge.
Because at least two of them have an obvious link to temperatures (especially if you think about what average temperatures and weather do to birds/insects' primary food sources)...
We also know that depression (and as an indirect result, suicide) have known links to weather in some territories, so it's not implausible that climate change could impact that too. Though I'd expect higher temperatures to lower depression rates, it's possible suffering through even hotter summers without A/C could exacerbate depression among poor people, since there's nothing you can do to escape it.
If back to back heat waves brought on by climate change threaten you (maybe your grandma's sick and can't take the heat), and you can't afford any of the solutions like a nice air conditioner, maybe you get desperate and turn to crime so you can find the money to keep grandma from getting injured by the heat? I wouldn't personally say 'I bet that happens' but I also wouldn't bet money against a study being able to pull it out of the data. We had old people dying in homes not too long ago as a result of a power outage in the American southeast - Florida I think? - and it was a news-level scandal.
If hot summers and reduced rainfall kill crops, that's going to boost poverty levels in farming counties...
You can use that with anything.
When a school shooting happens I always hear how video games and scary goth music push them over the edge.
1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolutio...
1. https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocas...
Someone at Reason read the UN/IPCC report, said there is no doomsday in it: https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a...
There's also a lot of questionable stuff.
The NOAA data adjustments and climate scientists openly discussing getting rid of the 1940s warmth: https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T86IIKK9FRg
Lack of warming trend in the raw data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDao...
The new USCRN data showing no significant warming trend in the USA in 12 years: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/08/the-uscrn-revisited/
The Canadian data purge: https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560
Edit: so you edited in some more bullshit sources. Let me look at just one. As I mentioned in another comment, we don't have time to go back and forth over every piece of bullshit since nonsense is a lot easier to write than it is to convincingly disprove (since the nonsense doesn't have to make sense). I clicked only one (so it's a random sample), and I chose it because it triggered my interest (it seemed data-based): the USCRN data link. The article helpfully links to the NOAA website where you can make your own plots. I am not a climate scientists, but the first thing that I notice is the timespan: look at the variance in that data that is linked. It jumps from -4°F to +7°F anomaly. No wonder that, over this timespan, you don't see anything. The article even mentions how variable this data is: "0.6 ± 0.9 °C". You can't say anything either way because you don't have enough data (a variance larger than your base value?!). But of course, the article sees it differently: "no statistically significant warming since the start of the record". Sure it's not significant, but neither does this disprove anything. What it definitely does not do is prove that there is no warming. If anything, the 0.6 value should tell you that it is more likely to be warming up (at a rate of 0.6°C per decade) than not (the odds of it being greater than 0.6 are equal to the odds that it is less than 0.6; and the odds that it is greater than zero (and we are indeed warming up every decade) is 83% (0.6±0.9 means it can be between 0.6-0.9 and 0.6+0.9, so between -0.3 and 1.5, so there are (rounded to one decimal) 18 possible values and 15 of them are positive, and 15/18 is around 83%). Again, all of this is uncertain because monthly data since 2004 is not a lot of data with this amount of variance, and I'm estimating uncertainty on uncertainty here, but the takeaway so far should be clear.
But that's not the end of it. The author is literally turning a blind eye to the data that we do have. First they go "we have no data, and the data we do have suggests that the earth is warming up, so let me just deny that global warming is real", but then when you click through to the website, you discover that there totally is data. See those checkboxes at the top of the options? They have data going back way beyond 2004. Select any year you like, but be sure to take a long enough range (30 years or so) so you have any sort of reasonable sample size. If it looks like a bunch of random data to you and there is no clear trend, I would agree: the author of your article picked the least clear "Time Scale" option available.
I didn't quite understand the difference between the Time Scale options "previous 12 months" and "12-Month" so I downloaded the whole dataset and computed averages per year. They match the option "Time Scale: 12-Month", so that's what that means: the year's average. You can just set that Time Scale option and don't have to go through the trouble of downloading things and validating what you think the option might mean (see what I mean by "disproving bullshit is more work than writing it"?). Now, over 30+ years and with the year's average, please tell me you see a trend there? This new USCRN data is just not active for long enough to draw conclusions, and the high-uncertainty conclusions that can be drawn (referring to the article you linked to, namely the 0.6°C per decade, give or take 0.9) suggest that it is going up rapidly.
I wonder if all this work has been for nothing, it took more time than I had hoped... I just hope it makes you rethink what you believe or look at your sources more critically (instead of only looking critically at the generally accepted sources).
The whole reason the USCRN was built was because of the problems with the historical network. The USCRN was designed to get more reliable measurements.
The aforementioned spreadsheet illustrates the problems with the USHCN data.
Would love to see someone put there name on a list that says "these weather events were caused by climate change" and "these were not, we expected them".
They provide the conditions for the herd to congregate, accumulate and then stampede. And the herd will. Until the underlying architecture gets fixed. Too much attention is paid to which direction the herd is stampeding in rather than the underlying architecture that enables it.
The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years are also saying that we shouldn't build any nuclear power plants, or that the root cause of climate change is "institutional racism"[1]. It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly.
1. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/xwneej/racism-climate-cha...