First of all: to prove Hansen wrong in the articles you picked you would need to prove that we haven't already reached the tipping points he describes. Climate change is not a nuclear explosion, you can't see it explode but it might have done so with the effects being 50 or 100 years in the future.

Secondly, the temperature is actually rising steadily, which is very different from Zeno's thought experiments.

And thirdly you are not actually making an argument at all. People being wrong about tipping points might be the one's who cried wolf but in the end the wolf will still be there according to the best science available – even if there are not tipping points at all! Climate change alone is set to harm us and especially the poorest people on the planet, even if there are no additional tipping point effects.

It's not the best science available, it's the most politically consumable science , which is different.

If you haven't figured it out yet, it was never about environmentalism.

The claim is basically that hundreds of thousands of people, in thousands of research facilities, in more than a 100 countries are colluding to lie us about the climate. And I presume the governments who are making themselves very unpopular by trying to pass laws to reduce emissions are in on it, too, for some unfathomable reason? And the media! Thousands and thousands of publications are colluding to lie about climate research because it benefits them — how exactly?

The popular mantra is that some some mythical elite is making a lot of money by trying to make the world consume less. Could someone please explain this ingenious mechanism?

Most of the researchers are university students and professors with very small incomes. Research grants? In most cases you barely scrape by even if they get a grant for a year or two. A lot of them have side jobs because otherwise they couldn't pay their bills. Sh*t, I could probably come up with a 100 easier ways to make money than climate research in about 3 minutes.

It's kind of funny that in this day and age the researchers are considered the elite, and not the oil barons in their ivory towers or the politicians they have bought.

It's easy, just fire or cancel anyone's funding and boom, you get consensus.

Also nice way to conflate two different issues, all we are saying is the political engine in play gives zero shits about the environmentalism.

But what would be the motive? As Jon Stewart said: If this was about funding for scientists, the oil and gas companies would have already made it rain in nerd-town.

Governance

What exactly is your point, that these tipping points don't exist and we will never reach them? This is an extremely complex system and it's hard to predict. The fact is we're trending towards these things, not away from them. That's undebatable. So what message are you trying to convey exactly, that everything is fine and this is just scaremongering nonsense?

So you admit these things are hard to predict, yet we are running with the wild predictions anyway? Models are just a hypothesis and in no way proven. There were plenty of predictions to date that haven't come true. I see these as none other than wild speculation.

https://nypost.com/2020/01/10/the-telling-tale-of-glacier-na...

What?! No, we're absolutely not running with these wild predictions and I've got no idea what's making you think we are. If we were taking those predictions seriously then far more drastic action would be underway.

On net, yes things are fine. Look up Alex Epstein, he makes the point that the benefits humans gain from fossil fuels far outweigh the cons.

What is it we are trending towards? That we will make the sky gods really angry and the earth will go up in a blazing inferno? I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.

Ice sheets collapse raising sea levels and flooding the coastal cities in which a significant proportion of the world's population lives causing massive economic and human displacement and suffering. Warming makes the current world breadbaskets (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, USA mid-west) unsuitable for grain with no replacement available causing world famine. That's just a start. It's a long list.

None of what you said is even remotely true.

Why is it not true and how is it not true?

Different people can come to different conclusions. And maybe, in 50 years, we will know that the tipping point was well before 2008 even.

The earth is a complex system and surely you don't want to deny the massive changes that human activities do to its ecosystems. It's better to be careful than continuing the careless exploitation.

The earth is a complex system that is true, and if you know what that means, it means it is impossible to accurately predict with any consistency what will happen in the future.

I don’t think it is “being careful” to promulgate relentless doomerism with no self reflection as to whether or not your predictions panned out in the past.

I do think we should be mindful of earth ecosystems. I think it would be better to do that in ways that are concretely addressable and quantifiable. Not the climate doom religion fear mongering , buy my carbon offset, or pat me on the back for my corporate green washing.

There is no path forward for human civilization as we know it without fossil fuels any time soon.

I don’t understand this drive people have to induce this sense of anxiety and foreboding in themselves and others.

The drive is fueled by more than a century of hard science. Imagine being convinced by countless, well proven and reproducible facts, that e. g. our CO2 emissions create a greenhouse effect but seeing little effort to mitigate that. Of course the voices get more loud and panicked. Especially when you see clear patterns of drastic, fatal and irreversible changes like permafrost melting or species after species vanishing.

I don't understand how people can put up blinders and pretend there is no actual and horrific danger.

If we hit one of these tipping points and Obama could have changed that via some action in those 4 years then he did have 4 years to save the planet. Possibly he did, we just don't know it.

Generally the positive action towards climate change has delayed and minimised the predicted impacts. So Obama's administration probably gets some credit for that.

Nope. We've already passed a number of climate change milestones and then some. We are literally living the disaster: multiple once-in-a-hundred year floods and heatwaves within a decade, food shortages, global instability, entire settlemtns wiped off the map (Lytton)

>Obama had 4 years to save the planet. So I guess he figured that out, so that’s good.

I wish.

“We are living the disaster”

And yet, things have never been better.

You mean there is very little science in climate change denial?

I mean I agree, the scam of climate change denial is eroding over time, there are less skeptics than ten years ago.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/08/is-climate-denialism-...

Sure bud, and all politicians are altruistic and would never manufacture or take advantage of a crisis.

You are literally quoting the people that are taking advantage of it and have done nothing in regards to correcting it.

Remember environmentalism...probably not as it doesn't exist anymore as it was solution focused, not governance focused

Love you too man

I have trouble interpreting this comment. I feel that it is very disingenuous and ignores the changes and improvements humans have done.

For example, in 1989 there was a treaty banning the usage of chlorofluorocarbons CFCs which were the main culprit of ozone-layer degradation.

Since the publication of said articles, we have only seen an increase in weather variance. As weather variance increases, extreme events become more frequent. In fact, we saw this a few months ago with Texas freezing, and last summer with Toronto being under a heat dome. We saw precipitation that caused massive destruction in Europe, and a few months later we saw horrific draughts that resulted in historic lows. Similar events were seen in China as well.

Furthermore, one of the main culprits of such events is the far more frequent split of the jetstream above Europe which is one of the best predictors for extreme weather events.

A tipping point does not imply immediate destruction, but it means most likely irreversible changes. Accumulate enough such changes, and the extreme events that cost billions in damage, and cost human lives will be more frequent and costly.

Denial of this is akin to ostrichism, shows the inability of the human brain to think long term, and its tendency to fall for into cognitive biases.

Recommended watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx2yS2iIVSk

In a sense every change is irreversible, you can’t change the past.

I know about the CFC thing I’m not well versed on the mechanisms of what was actually going on, but if it is as commonly understood, I’m for that stuff. Clearly identified problems and clearly identified solutions.

With the climate doomerism, what exactly is the problem? What are the alternatives?

I just hear people repeating these things they’ve been conditioned to fear and no sense of the extent to which the thing they attribute all the problems of the world, fossil fuels, has in fact created nearly the entirety of the world around them.

If you think the sky gods are going to get really angry if the “greenhouse effect“ is a real thing, then what do you propose to do? “Cut emissions”? Then what aspects of modern civilization undergirded by those emissions do you propose to do without? Heating, cooling, food production, weather forecasting?

> Heating, cooling, food production, weather forecasting?

Given how irresponsibly wasteful the US is in emissions on a per capita basis, with imports adding around 8% IIRC, there's obviously a lot that can be done.

> With the climate doomerism, what exactly is the problem? What are the alternatives?

The problem that we are trying to solve is climate stability, namely decrease variance and prevent the change of the average / expected behaviour.

When climate researchers say carbon in the atmosphere, they mean carbon and the equivalent carbon required to achieve the same effect / similar behaviour. So methane is a significantly more potent green house gas than carbon (80x).

Suppose for a moment that we do nothing, and keep going on the same track. Then we can expect a severe increase in global temperature. The consequences of that are for example a more frequent split of the jetstream [1]. Normally the jetstream prevents Europe from heating up, and manages the weather. Now, a split of the jetstream is not good because it can enable bubbles of very warm saharan air getting trapped over Europe, creating a heat dome. A heat dome causes damage to local crops, is responsible for loss of life, and dries up the land. This is a major issue for Europe because most houses are not built to sustain such weather, and lots of infrastructure can collapse or endure severe damage [3].

If we do nothing with respect to methane then we will see an increase in troposphere level ozone. Ozone in the stratosphere is a good thing, protects us from UV radiation. In contrast, Ozone in troposphere (0-15km) is absolutely horrible. It causes over 1M premature deaths, is a major component of smog, is highly reactive and causes damage to crops [2].

> Tropospheric ozone is a major component of smog, which can worsen bronchitis and emphysema, trigger asthma, and permanently damage lung tissue. Tropospheric ozone exposure is responsible for an estimated one million premature deaths each year. Children, the elderly, and people with lung or cardiovascular diseases are particularly at risk of the adverse health impacts of ozone.

> Tropospheric ozone is a highly reactive oxidant that significantly reduces crop productivity as well as the uptake of atmospheric carbon by vegetation. Its effects on plants include impeded growth and seed production, reduced functional leaf area and accelerated ageing.

> Studies have shown that many species of plants are sensitive to ozone, including agricultural crops, grassland species and tree species. These effects impact on the important ecosystem services provided by plants, including food security, carbon sequestration, timber production, and protection against soil erosion, avalanches and flooding.

Furthermore, climate change will also result in 1.2 billion or so refugees which will cause further conflict in continents and further reduce our capacity to improve our societies.

I can keep going but it will probably make this reply too long, so I suggest reading up on it. If you are like me, and don't believe that overpopulation is actually an issue and believe it is better to have more humans to educate them, have more doctors and improve the living conditions of other countries, then you will see that climate change causes an enormous amount of premature deaths, lung cancer, and whatever else, effectively reducing the rate of humanity's improvement.

> has in fact created nearly the entirety of the world around them.

This is a good point, and a major point of friction with developing countries, namely, why should they not use fossil fuels when all developed countries did. The emissions of different countries follow an arch they start low, rise up as the society improves, and then start falling down while continuing the improvement. A good way to reduce expected emissions is to accelerate the growth of developing countries so that they spend less time in the developing phase, and more in the developed one. For this to be done however, it has to be done in ways that do not actually cause harm to the country as that will prolong the development period. This is supported by studies on different approaches to helping developing countries, most of which ultimately failed because there are too many things that need to be done simultaneously.

So how does one do that? By investing in better alternatives and improving efficiency of course. The developed world exploited fossil fuels, and now it's the perfect time for us to be "early adopters" of tech that will help us build a greener future. I put "early adopters" in quotes, because even with current tech we can solve the problems, it just costs a lot of money, but living in a cleaner, more stable environment is worth it for everyone.

We do not have to give up heating/cooling/food production/ etc. We need to reduce subsidies for fossil fuels wherever they exist, improve infrastructure to reduce reliance on internal combustion engines, use scale, invest in research, and start applying what we know. All it takes is legislation change.

[1] NB, we know that this is a consequence of human behaviour, this is supported by thoroughly tested and investigated causal models. See here, talk by Dr Simon Clark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5FmFuPPvdE

[2] https://www.ccacoalition.org/en/slcps/tropospheric-ozone

[3] https://www.npr.org/2022/07/20/1112411697/record-high-temper...

Meanwhile China kept pumping CFCs out all that time.

And the US has the worst emissions per capita, without even accounting for imports.

We were talking about CFCs and how supposedly eliminating them (despite not actually eliminating them) fixed the supposed problem. It's a bit like claiming lockdowns flattened the covid curves, when the exact same flattening happened everywhere that did without lockdowns.