If in 50 years, we find out that the predictions made by our models had been wrong (either the measures we take to reduce CO2 don't lead to the results we expected, or the warming we see is outside of the expected ranges) - in the post-mortem of the models, what would we likely say had gone wrong?
This has already happened. Models developed in the 1990s didn't match what happened in the 21st century. The resulting controversy is called the pause. Why did temperatures stop rising when models said they should continue? We didn't stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere after all.
For better or worse, the controversy was resolved by scientists "correcting" the historical temperature datasets to erase the pause from the record. The data was brought into line with the theory. You can go read old news stories or articles about the pause and look at the temperature graphs in them, then compare to the current, up to date temperature graphs and see that they don't match.
If you like there's a talk here by a guy who started out as a skeptic because he kept spotting errors in studies, and became a peer-reviewed, published climate scientist. He's still a skeptic about the models used to predict the future (he says he thinks the basics of climatology are sound though):
https://www.nicholaslewis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lew...
That talk is quite technical but might provide some answers to how the models could be wrong. Ultimately nothing surprising: they're based on major approximations and the underlying datasets may have issues. Go read his papers for more details.
I think it's a really interesting question, even though on a charged topic and difficult to forecast.
Balance of feedback systems? There are so many feedback systems here, positive and negative all overlapping. Even if you are 95% sure you have each one figured out, after a little over a dozen factors that error compounds and you're at around 50/50 of getting something wrong.
Of course, could be wrong in the other direction too... that's why errors are bars not arrows.
Note: Feedback systems here are not under-studied, they're just hard to model. This isn't an example of a black swan that would devastate the discipline, if that's what you were looking for. Those might be... supervolcano? Nuclear war? Atmospheric scrubbing technology breakthrough? Even those have calculable effects. If there's some radical unpredicted shift I can't imagine it being along the lines of "water vapor and CO2 don't actually warm things," that's just too well confirmed.
Most likely, if climate research is found to be far off the alarming predictions made by most institutions, we'll chalk it up to political meddling/statistical fubbing and move on. If the lifestyle changes for most of the polulation are already in place by then, many will believe it was "for the best, anyway", and I'm inclined to agree with this view - our response to climate change is more important than if climate change was primarily our fault to begin with. I'm not advocating for skewing research in favor of one position or the other, but it enables a public forum of such scale that at the very least, prepares us for dealing with ever-increasing scopes of global issues that impact all life on Earth, which will come in handy when we progress to the point we're dealing with the ethics of extremely advanced technology.
Presuming we don't lose key information (e.g. deliberate erasure of the NOAA archives), we'd treat it in the same way as the current investigation; find what changes are required to the model to make it consistent with the data.
> we'd treat it in the same way as the current investigation; find what changes are required to the model to make it consistent with the data
If that is how it is currently done, I have a big issue with it. It seems like the model is not being treated as a forecasting model but rather as a purely academic one ('if we make these assumptions and have these initial conditions, how does the behavior of the system evolve'?), while being sold to the media, politicians and the general public as a forecasting model that is assumed to have very strong predictive power.
The connection isn't disputed, the causality is. Look at this graph:
https://totheleftofcentre.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/400000...
You can see that most of the time, temperature rises lead increases in CO2. This implies that rising temperature increases CO2 levels, but not necessarily the other way around.
If you zoom out even further, the correlation isn't clear anymore at all:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cx5-osJUkAAPkF8.jpg
Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts. In the interest of our descendants, we had better develop technology to deal with a tougher climate, rather than cut down on emissions so that maybe ten or twenty generations can live with a somewhat smaller fallout of manmade climate change.
Or do both. Let's make the world less hostile to live in for billions of people, whilst also providing technology & resources for them to survive.
About your graph: historical global temperature changes are not the same as anthropomorphic global temperature changes. Past periods of high CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 leads to higher global temperatures. Indeed, it confirms that there is a strong relationship between the two.
There are other sources of temperature change so you can't use one indicator to prove there is no effect. What climate scientists have done is look at ALL the possible drivers of climate change and ruled out all of the natural causes as contributing to the current very sharp and ongoing rise in temperature. Everything that's left is caused by human activity.
On the right of that graph, there is a vertical red line. That's not an axis or a border, that's the recent rise in CO2 levels, and it's unprecedented. The overwhelming majority of evidence shows that human activity, mainly greenhouse gases, is causing climate change. Misrepresenting one graph does not change that.
The relationship, at least in the smaller graph, isn't in question. The causality is. I didn't say it contradicts the causality, I say it doesn't support the causality.
If you look at the larger graph, whatever relationship there is between CO2 and global temperature becomes indiscernible.
> There are other sources of temperature change so you can't use one indicator to prove there is no effect
You can't prove a negative in the first place. Of course there's bound to be some effect, but how large is it really?
> On the right of that graph, there is a vertical red line. That's not an axis or a border, that's the recent rise in CO2 levels, and it's unprecedented.
The rise may be unprecedented, the level isn't.
> The overwhelming majority of evidence shows that human activity, mainly greenhouse gases, is causing climate change.
That's a strong statement for what it is at best a discernible correlation.
I'm willing to take it on faith. Humans cause climate change? Now what? We absolutely have to drop everything and start cooling the planet? Until the next ice age, when presumably we'll have to warm it?
> That's a strong statement for what it is at best a discernible correlation. It's a strong and very valid statement, supported by a wealth of science. In this instance it's not really possible, or wise, to run multiple randomly controlled experiments on our own planet to conclusively prove the point. Instead, we have a lot of observations and modelling that allow us to run those experiments, and the weight of those say we have a problem.
> We absolutely have to drop everything and start cooling the planet? The majority consensus is not to drop everything but to continue making substantial changes to human activity to reduce warming. You personally do not need to become an eco-warrior, just more aware of the effect you're having on the planet and try to reduce it. Cooling the planet is now beyond expectations. The aim now is for it not to warm up too much.
> Until the next ice age, when presumably we'll have to warm it? That is a terribly big false equivalency! First, yes, I expect so. Second, it's totally different! Ice ages take multiple hundreds, if not thousands, of years to get going. The next ice age is not going to affect the next generation, global warming is.
The benefits to ecological improvements and the risk of climate change vastly outweigh the costs. Less pollution related illness, our limited resources will last longer, etc... The risk alone is enough to make me think that ignoring the problem is the morally wrong choice, the benefits double the equation.
No, the weight of those say there will be an increase in temperature. Never mind that the weight of these have been wrong for more narrow definitions of the word "wrong":
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs/public...
If those models can't predict ten years into the future with any reasonable amount of confidence, how can we trust them to predict the next 100 years?
Even then, let's say these models are more or less correct, what exactly says "we have a problem"? What problem? We already have tons of problems! Not being able to emit CO2 would be a huge problem in and of itself. What are the models to predict the actual problems caused by climate change? How good are those? Do 95% of scientists agree on them?
> The majority consensus is not to drop everything but to continue making substantial changes to human activity to reduce warming.
Okay, I don't exactly feel like making substantial changes to my lifestyle based on these predictions, especially since the impact doesn't concern me much at all. Now what? Good luck getting all that political support that you will need.
Yes, it usually boils down to selfishness.
All lifeforms are selfish. If your solution only works on an imaginary selfless version of the human being, then it's not a solution. It's a fantasy.
This is such a crude, reductionist view that falls very short of reality. You know, it might just be you and minority that think this way.
Luckily reality shows time and time again that people in general (definitely excluding you here) have better motivations and take better decisions which consider other people.
1. A lot of the discussion at the moment is about action within the USA, Europe, Brazil and China. These are not poor countries. Brazil isn't doing great but is a significant economy. China is taking a lot of action already to move to greener tech. There is an acceptance amongst most that the richer nations should be doing most to tackle climate change, as well as helping other nations.
2. Green does not necessarily mean expensive. Look at the levelized cost of energy in different countries and green options are often cheaper or comparable to fossil fuels, even before the indirect costs are considered.
3. Green is often also the most practical solution for developing countries. In many, solar and wind are used as the infrastructure for power distribution does not exist, is incredibly unreliable and/or very expensive. For a lot of these countries localised green energy generation is a key factor for development.
2) If you with green mean wind and solar then yes it means expensive because both have a low capacity factor and intermittency problems which means that either coal, gas, oil og nuclear have to be there as a backup. They, of course, need to be calculated in just as things like decommission which isn't being calculated in for wind and solar but is for nuclear. In other words, green cost as it's calculated is not the true cost.
3) No green isn't the most practical solution exactly for the reasons mentioned in 2). Sure you can provide a little here and there but you cant actually build a flourishing economy on wind and solar and there isn't a single example of that being the case. With oil, gas, coal and nuclear you can. Nuclear is too expensive which leaves us with fossil fuels.
So I would claim that your 3 reasons lack reality :)
Sort the table by Renewables as a percentage of generation. There are countries with flourishing economies running with a majority of renewable power generation.
The intermittency problems for some renewables are being overcome as more solutions are invented and improved. Most new technologies have problems to overcome, so it'd be unrealistic to expect instant & perfect solutions. The speed of innovation here is impressive enough to already be delivering real world solutions which provide energy to communities and countries.
On a global scale wind and solar only handles 1% of all energy consumption and it's not expected to move to more than 3-4% in 2040.
And no the intermittency problem is not being overcome, not even by a long shot, as it's a physical boundaries problem not technology or optimization problem.
That's your claim, but you can't actually derive that from the data. It may just as well be the case that rises in temperature cause the release of more CO2, period.
> This does not in any way call into question the causality between increasing concentration of CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and increased warming as predicted by gas absorption equations which we teach in high school.
The climate on the planet isn't a simple gas absorption equation, there are other factors. Even if the greenhouse effect is a factor, it couldn't be the dominating factor.
Otherwise, how could an ice age just "end" a period of high CO2 concentration? Shouldn't the greenhouse effect prevent it? And if so, will the next ice age be "tamer" if we keep CO2 levels up? Wouldn't that be good?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A
One of the problems cited: the temperature/CO2 graph probably came from an antarctic ice core sample ... and temperature leading/lagging there is different than in non-polar locations.
Second, the climate is a complex feedback system; there isn't one independent variable and everything else is dependent. If something forces any of the variables in the feedback system it can affect the other variables. For instance, say the artificial release of CO2 by humans results in the thawing of the arctic, releasing gigatons of methane, at which point CO2 might no longer be the primary driver. Over geologic time there are different causes for these forcings, but that doesn't mean that the current forcing (human released CO2) isn't the current problem.
He covers all of that and more, much better, in 13 minutes.
[EDIT] I forgot to address "what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures?"
That is a supremely cavalier attitude. Nobody is saying AGW is going to kill off all life. In the long term life will recover. But in the short term we humans are going to have to deal with the consequences: displacement of millions of people through crop failures and loss of coast, disruption of economic systems, and more civil unrest. The US military is gaming out these scenarios because they believe the science, not because they are pinko tree huggers who hate freedom.
Specifically, he points out that CO2 lags temperature by hundreds of years in the southern hemisphere, but that temperature lags CO2 by again hundreds of years in the northern hemisphere.
CO2 is claimed to have accelerated natural warming through a feedback loop - until it didn't, and temperatures began drifting down again.
That's fair enough. That's reasonably nuanced. I'm missing the extent to which this feedback loop actually made an impact though, because clearly it can't be the dominant driver or ultimate control lever. Otherwise, we'd have had a runaway greenhouse already.
> Nobody is saying AGW is going to kill off all life.
One might get that impression from the media narrative though.
> But in the short term we humans are going to have to deal with the consequences: displacement of millions of people through crop failures and loss of coast, disruption of economic systems, and more civil unrest.
I don't think that's such a big deal, all things concerned. Sometimes, people have to move. Sometimes, crops fail. Sometimes, coasts move. Sometimes, there's civil unrest. Telling people in China or Brazil that they'll have to cut down on their emissions is going to cause civil unrest. "Vote for me, I'll make you poorer" is not a winning political provision.
> The US military is gaming out these scenarios because they believe the science, not because they are pinko tree huggers who hate freedom.
They're also gaming out scenarios of mass epidemics, or political secession. What do you expect them to do?
If the ebola infections started appearing in all the major cities with airports and seaports, would you want the experts to try their best to stop it, or would you shrug and say, eh, sometimes people live and sometimes they die,
> One might get that impression from the media narrative though. (that AGW is going to kill all life)
I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational. Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it. Second, I don't personally get the impression that even the press claims AGW will sterilize the planet. It sounds like a strawman to me.
That highly depends on what "the experts" recommend that we do. In any case, your bad analogy is bad.
> I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational.
...which is what makes me far less worried about climate change.
> Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it.
All this talk about "95% of scientists agree (that the charts point up)" and "science denial" is an argument from authority.
Given that 50% of science is estimated to be wrong[1], I'm willing to take my chances on this one, especially since there's a strong ideological component to it.
The actual simulations are drastic simplifications with wide margins of error, and even those margins have been crossed by observation even in the close term, where the margins are still narrow. All the interesting stuff happens way further down the line, however.
Perhaps a bit more humility regarding the practical limits to the scientific method is in order, at least in this case - but then how would you make your argument from authority?
The issue is the rate of change, which is unprecedented. The path we're currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop production.
Life adapts, when it can. The rate of change you mentioned ensures that a majority of life will not be able to adapt and it's not impossible that another K-T level extinction event is already taking place.
Geologically speaking, the speed at which the Earth is changing from human-induced climate change could just as well be a meteorite impact. Looking at global conflict resolution ability I fear that we have no hope to stop it.
It's also "not impossible" that a meteorite wipes us all out tomorrow. Which serious scientist is predicting a K-T level extinction event?
Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over thousands of years. That's not out of the ordinary in terms of variance for life on earth right now. Sure, some species may have to migrate, some will go extinct one way or another, but not a K-T level event.
Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over the next century. That's very different. It may be hard to separate the climate change extinctions from the regular habitat destructions that are already ongoing, though.
Perhaps over some arbitrary timeframes within the measured record. On the other hand, a volcanic eruption can immediately cause a change of 1K or more.
But let's say it is unprecedented, so what?
> The path we're currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop production.
[citation needed]
This has been predicted numerous times, it didn't come to pass. Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate, we have to deal with that issue anyway. So let's deal with the actual issue, not part of what may cause the issue, some of the time.
As for ecosystems getting "devastated" - so what? They get devastated one way or another all the time. They recover.
Here's a citation - https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9326 "Temperature increase reduces global yields of major crops in four independent estimates".
> Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
When you write "This has been predicted numerous times", do you mean, for example, the predicted famines of the mid-1900s, saved by the Green Revolution? Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech cautious us technical success in raising food production is only a temporary victory - we must also limit our population.
When you write "Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate" ... how is that even a valid argument? Where are the Canadian orange groves? How's the Brazilian maple syrup industry? They don't exist, because the climate is wrong for those crops in those areas.
You write "They recover" .. Citation needed. Simple counter-example - the Icelandic forests from the Norse era have not recovered.
Or, 10,000 years ago the Sahara was green. Now it's a desert. Why hasn't that ecosystem recovered?
No, I'm sincerely interested.
> Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
"Without adaptation" is not a plausible scenario. Of course there will be adaptation. But let's take those numbers anyway, and take a very liberal estimate of six degrees of temperature increase: That's 36% (wheat), 19.2% (rice), 44% (maize) and 18.6% (soy), respectively.
That may sound alarming if all that produce had to be turned into food that people need to live. In practice, most of it goes to livestock or even biofuel production. Being forced to have less cattle and fuel might be good for the climate, no?
> Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech cautious us technical success in raising food production is only a temporary victory - we must also limit our population.
Perhaps, but the best way to limit your population growth is to deliver a better standard of living.
> When you write "Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate" ... how is that even a valid argument? Where are the Canadian orange groves? How's the Brazilian maple syrup industry? They don't exist, because the climate is wrong for those crops in those areas.
I'm talking about actual crop production, not hypothetical crop production. Nobody is starving because farmlands that never existed stop producing. With bad weather, that's different.
If we're talking about climate and agriculture, the argument goes both ways: If global temperature rises, then new places will start making sense for certain forms of agriculture, just as old places will stop making sense. This also will happen regardless of human intervention.
On the second question, the problem with global warming is, that everybody talks about the weather, and all our systems are well adapted to the current climate. Concretely, there are farmers at the edge of the Sahara, who are adapted to a semi-arid conditions, and when the Sahara moves south, then they have to deal with desert conditions. Similar, when the Great Barrier Reef moves south, then there are dive centers without a reef north of the new location.
So we will have to adapt to a warmer climate anyhow, but not cutting down emissions is an entirely unforced error, it makes global warming worse, without any concrete benefit. Cutting down emissions is precisely the "smaller fallout of manmade climate change" you are arguing for.
If it's a positive feedback loop, then why hasn't there been a runaway greenhouse effect in the past? Something must have stopped it. What was that?
> Concretely, there are farmers at the edge of the Sahara, who are adapted to a semi-arid conditions, and when the Sahara moves south, then they have to deal with desert conditions.
Yes, they will. They'll have to move. The Sahara didn't use to be a desert for all of human history, it used to be fertile at one point. Now it isn't anymore, so we don't have agriculture there. So what?
> Similar, when the Great Barrier Reef moves south, then there are dive centers without a reef north of the new location.
First-world problems...
> So we will have to adapt to a warmer climate anyhow, but not cutting down emissions is an entirely unforced error, it makes global warming worse, without any concrete benefit.
No concrete benefit? You mean, besides the fact that our entire standard of living rests on the fact that we can emit CO2 more or less undisturbed?
> Cutting down emissions is precisely the "smaller fallout of manmade climate change" you are arguing for.
Not if you take into account the standard of living of the people calling the shots, right here and now.
If you can't see how ridiculous that sounds, you might not understand how people become skeptical about climate science.
If we really understand these physics so well, why have most of the predictions been wrong?
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs/public...
Don't trust the CATO when it comes to climate (at the very least). They are known negationists. If you understand basic level physics, read the IPCC reports and the realclimate blog.
The climate is a non-linear chaotic system it has positive and negative feedback loops.
You can't replicate the climate in a simple experiment which is why we try with models and they are depending on which initial conditions we put in.
If we understood it extremely well we wouldn't come up with a rather large range in the predictions.
FWIW, we don't have to understand it extremely well, only well enough to affect policy changes.
A 99% probability of an estimated increase of 2-4°C can be considered a rather large range, but enough certainty to know that it's a problem. (Numbers made up for demonstration purposes.)
But the idea that we should upend the use of fossil fuels without any realistic alternative is simply anti-human and will for sure cause millions to die.
I haven't heard of a single scientifically demonstrated consequence of climate change that would lead to that and thus I see no need to worry more about climate change more than pulling people out of poverty.
We should always try and make energy cleaner and less pollutant but wouldn't you agree we should always make a cost benefit analysis and weigh the positive and negative consequences of our decisions?
Poor people demand an improved environment too - it's not a special demand limited to the middle class or richer.
Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_justice#Affected... starts "Among the affected groups of Environmental Justice, those in high-poverty and racial minority groups have the most propensity to receive the harm of environmental injustice." Many of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members are poor, and they lead the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in part on environmental grounds.
Have you heard of a single scientifically demonstrated consequence of decreased CFC emissions which would lead to people being pulled out of poverty and into the middle class?
Do you support CFC restrictions, and if so, when do you regard the evidence as being strong enough to warrant those restrictions?
I agree we should "weigh the positive and negative consequences of our decisions". I disagree with your statement that there are no realistic alternatives to the current practices.
People argued that there were no realistic alternatives to CFCs. (See http://aei.pitt.edu/63734/1/WD_126.pdf from 1980 for "No satisfactory substitute has yet been found for these machines containing CFCs [11 and 12], but there is undoubtedly room for reducing emissions by making design changes.") Now, from https://www.livescience.com/62603-new-cfcs-enter-ozone-layer... :
"""Neither of the two primary CFC-11 use-cases, firefighting and refrigerators, are at all hampered today by not having the substance, Ferry said. He added that he couldn't think of any special use-case for the chemical for which there isn't already an alternative."""
There is undoubtedly room for alternatives for the current use of fossil fuels.
So you are making my point.
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador is but one of many examples which show that poor people don't need to become middle class before wanting to protect the environment. And it's the rich Western companies like Texaco/Chevron which caused the pollution they are protesting against.
But you are confusing things here. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador doesn't have the power to do anything about that as there are more people in the world than them and thus other interests. 100 year ago they would just have been wiped out. By becoming richer they have the power to have a say in the international community.
Are their lives more worth than others?
As long as you are not prepared to make a proper cost-benefit anlysis and judge what's right or wrong you aren't really taking the discussion seriously IMO.
CONAIE is an concrete example of my previous statement that "Poor people demand an improved environment too - it's not a special demand limited to the middle class or richer." It is a counter-example to your implication at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21248038 that we need to get people into the middle class first, in order that they demand we improve the environment.
I gave that one because you seemed to have rejected my earlier example of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, likely because you confused people in poverty (a large fraction of that tribe are in poverty) with the "rich society" of the US.
Respecting the rights of indigenous people is another way to let them have a say in the international community. Not that it makes a difference here since I'm pointing to their success in protecting the environment on the national stage in Ecuador.
You'll note that your "better and more modern cars" implies that all people want cars. Some indigenous people expressly do not.
You like talking about "worth". How do you balance the "worth the cost of upending the current use of ex fossil fuels" vs. the worth of indigenous lives and lifestyles?
Because the only way I see that you can do a cost-benefit analysis is to have some way to judge that balance. And my balance is far more on the side of indigenous lives than on the loss of profits to the rich.
False dichotomy. Why not do both?
Can you mention one scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we don't know how to deal with with todays let alone future technologies?
When you write "deal with", do you mean to include mass migrations, loss of populated areas, and civil unrest? Because that's how we dealt with, for example, the Dust Bowl.
One example is that there does not seem any way to save Miami in its current form, using today's technology or any realistic technology we could develop.
Quoting https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-floods-sea-level-rise-... :
> “Miami as we know it today — there’s virtually no scenario under which you can imagine it existing at the end of the century,” Goodell said. “It may be some smaller version of Miami that incorporates platform houses and floating structures.” ...
> And while there is much that Florida can learn from these other places, no one has answers to looming threats like water rising through the ground underneath. “The solutions that are going to be used to save cities like Miami Beach probably haven’t been developed yet,” Mowry said.
Or from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170403-miamis-fight-aga... :
> But the question isn’t whether this work will save every community: it won’t. Even those tasked with making their cities resilient admit that, at some point in the future, certain areas here will no longer be “viable” places to live. Rather, the challenge is to do enough to ensure that the economy as a whole continues to thrive and that tourists still come to enjoy the sun, sand – and swelling sea.
We can "deal with" that by mass migration to move. Or letting them die. But I don't think that's what you mean?
If so, then I agree that we have solutions. Mass starvation is another solution. But I wanted clarification on what "deal with" means.
We dealt with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s through mass exodus, malnutrition, widespread loss of personal land ownership, and stigmatizing the Okies and others who had to leave their homes.
Is that how we'll deal with the changes to Miami?
Or, look at the Swedish famine of 1867–1869. The government deal with it ... poorly, but it did deal with it.
So when ThomPete asks "Can you mention one scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate change that we don't know how to deal with with todays let alone future technologies?" ... what does "deal with" mean?
Because we can always deal with problems by letting people suffer. That's surely not what's meant, but just what is meant?
The companies, people, organizations, and countries who profited from mispriced costs which did not factor in externalities like the likely need to relocate most of the population of Miami?
How much should those companies, people, organization, and countries be penalized for committing fraud to suppress the true costs?
What is the cost of the emotional distress of being forced to move because of generations of pollution by others?
Or, are those who need to move the ones who bear most of the cost?
Who pays?
And, what do natural disaster have to do with it? We're talking about a human-caused disaster in the making orders of magnitude greater than Bhopal.
Surely those companies, organizations, people, and countries which profited from petroleum extraction, including by telling lies about the impact of their work, should pay compensation, yes?
Or are you one of those people who believes in privatizing profits and socializing risk?
Do you honestly think insurance will cover it? Because I remember Hurricane Andrew, when 11 insurance companies went bankrupt from the claims filed.
Again, we can look to the Okie experience - the Dust Bowl was caused by soil mismanagement by humans - as a relevant historical example. Why shouldn't we expect something like that again?
We also live places today which wasn't possible 100 year ago.
Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it. We are better at that today than any other time in history.
So the question I am trying to get answered is what have been scientifically demonstrated to be the case with climate change that we cant deal with if we don't "do anything" today?
Climate is always changing yes, the temperature have been rising yes, that will have consequences on us yes, but which changes have been demonstrated that would be worth the cost of upending the current use of ex fossil fuels to help modern civilization deliver goods and services to it's growing population and to reduce the amount of funding for new scientific discoveries or R&D in Molten or fusion?
It sounds like a Pascals wager to me but without the upside and instant damnation of the existing people inhabiting the planet.
It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before.
If so, I don't see a difference between your view and "just let things happen - some people will survive, and I don't care who."
(Actually, your "worth the cost" suggests that you care less about the world's poorest people, whose deaths have the least economic impact.)
If your view is anything at all like that, then of course we can "deal with" the effects climate change. But it's not a humane approach.
If you want to see civil unrest, just raise the taxes on gasoline, like Monsieur Macron.
As for mass migration, if there really is such a big fallout due to climate change (or anything else) rendering places uninhabitable, let the people migrate. Humans have always migrated. Why stop now?
As for mass starvation, I don't buy it. Most crops today are fed to cattle, there's a lot of leeway in terms of repurposing it for human consumption.
You'll notice that many Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe were not allowed to migrate there, nor the asylum seekers currently trying to reach the US through Mexico.
This is not new. Jews trying to flee Europe before WWII were also prevented from migrating. Chinese people were prohibited from migrating to the US. Many people resist economic migrants, to the point of wanting them killed. "Build a wall", etc.
So the question isn't "why stop now?" Why have we stopped over a century ago, and what must be done to allow migration?
But that's still not enough. I pointed out the Dust Bowl for a reason. The Okies who needed to migrate were discriminated against, even though there were no legal reasons to prevent their migration. Quoting http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/... :
> The mass of migrants that arrived in California did not receive a warm welcome from the state of California, which was already overwhelmed by the amount on people on the state’s relief roll. They were met at the state border by patrolmen who told them to turn back – that there was not enough work for them in California. Additionally, the established population of California was hostile towards the migrants due to differences in regional culture. They viewed the Okies as culturally and socially inferior, backward and uneducated – a view echoed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The term “Okie” originally had the derogatory connotation of "They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred."—The Grapes of Wrath “poor, white trash.” As the character of Tom Joad stated in The Grapes of Wrath, “Okie means you’re scum.”
So when ThomPete writes "Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it", that seems to include the Okie experience as one of the ways we deal with it.
Is that experience what the Miamians of the 2060s might have to look forward to?
There are consequences to everything we do as life and also what we don't do.
People will also die from restricting the use of fossil fuels, in fact it's much more likely. If you want to point the moral finger our way keep ind mind that three points your way.
The most predictable way of doing that is allowing them to use cheap reliable energy.
Mass starvation happens when you don't have cheap reliable energy, pesticides and other modern technologies to deal with the always ongoing consequences of climate change.
Civil unrest is what happens when people don't have access to food, right now the only societies that can ensure that are rich societies using capitalism, technology, and energy (mostly fossil fuels) to deal with that.
Mass migration happens all the time but again it's more likely to happen when you don't have the means to defend you against the always occuring challenges of the climate.
It's anti-human to hinder poor people getting access to the very resource that allow them to fight the consequences of climate change like we are able to in modern societies.
Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, it gives us a hostile and dangerous enviroment we make safe through the use of energy.
My approach is pro human flourishing.
So "deal with" means allowing humans to deal the challenges of nature.
- https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252: we have also underestimated the speed at which the climate will depart from the relatively stable Holocene equilibrium we've lived under for the past ~10,000 years
- https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-operations/usda-crop-progr...): we are already seeing consequences to crop yields in the U.S.
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/201...): heat waves are becoming more frequent and more damaging
- https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab13bf), etc: so are other extreme weather events
- https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/29/2002084200/-1/-1/1/CLI...: the DOD recognizes climate change as an extraordinary threat to the U.S.
- https://games-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/docu...: so does the intelligence community
- https://iflas.blogspot.com/2019/07/compendium-of-research-re...: a good aggregation (the commentary is speculative; read the papers)
Our global industrial society relies, more precariously than most realize or admit, on conditions which will soon diminish or disappear. For example:
- Stable, predictable weather patterns (industrial agriculture depends on this) - Just-in-time global shipping/logistics, by which food and other necessities get to supermarket shelves (threatened by extreme weather, political crises, fuel availability, etc) - Relatively cheap, easy availability of fossil fuels (extraction costs will continue to rise over time, and competition will likely grow more intense) - Plentiful fish/marine life stocks (we are destroying coral reefs extremely quickly, which are a key part of the ocean lifecycle; ocean acidification due to carbon capture also threatens sea life, as does oceanic warming) on which many rely for food - Low atmospheric CO2 content for breathability (cognitive ability decreases as CO2 levels rise) - Thriving coastal cities, as centers of both population and economic activity (many are under threat of regular flooding if not complete loss this century)
It will likely take indefinite human intervention to keep the climate system habitable for anywhere near our present numbers, if we're even capable of the sort of coordination required.
You are linking to the interpretation of data not actually scientifically demonstrated claims.
I could post rebuttals to each of them here is just one:
https://www.thegwpf.com/ignore-climate-hysteria-brazil-set-t...
but it's not really an argument about the future either.
The facts are the facts and they are:
We are better than ever to deal with unpredictable weather patterns and can produce food places that used to be impossible. We are better at living places that used to be impossible. We are better at producing food than ever, we are better at using resources than ever, we are better at dealing with floods than ever, with drought than ever, with extreme weather than ever and I could go on.
You are claiming that this will change based on speculation and single points of reference, not science and thus we can then have a speculative debate if you'd like not a scientific one.
I haven't seen any evidence that would point to us not being able to deal with the climate in the future better than we are today.
So what's your point? What's your suggestion? What is it you want me/us to do we aren't already doing that wouldn't be worse than what we are already doing?
Benny Peiser (b. 1957) is a UK social anthropologist and AGW denier listed among the Heartland Institute "Global warming experts" despite having no evident expertise in climate science or policy. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Benny_Peiser
Some of them are. Some are not, eg, they are links to newspaper articles and government publications.
But the question was "Can you post something to back up your claims from a well respected climate scientist?" That means "at least one", not "all".
walleeee's links includes claims from well-respected climate scientists. Eg, the first author of the Nature paper is https://patricktbrown.org/about/ and the first author of the PNAS paper is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Steffen .
So, I'll ask again: "Can you post something to back up your claims from a well respected climate scientist?"