Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty?
Treat it like the weather prediction for next month, if it happens it happens and then you can react. If it starts to show up in the weather prediction for tomorrow it is time to factor it into your present day decisions.
if you are concerned about something it does not mean you must be non stop stressed or forever abandon your life for single cause. You can be concerned and act in constructive ways (lead by example, talk about it, raise the issue, vote, etc), making strategic sacrifices but also living life. In fact you will probably be more satisfied this way than if you just felt you can't do anything and tried to not think about the white elephant. And it is the only way things change...
The only time when you have a fractional input on this is at the voting booth and even there the chance is that climate change will not be expressly put on the ballot but you get a mixture of components that you will be able to locally influence. But that sort of mechanism isn't well suited to deal with global problems. Global problems require global coordination and for everybody to play ball. For a variety of reasons (some good, some bad) this isn't going to happen. Climate change is fact. The consequences of climate change are already visible all over the globe. And yet: as long as there is money to be made by industry, wars rage all over the place and various possible checkpoints are passed no single individual that is wondering what they can personally do about it is going to make a shred of a difference by worrying about it to the point that it affects their day-to-day affairs.
Let me be blunt: the time to tackle climate change for real was when we first became aware of it. But all of the above inertia pretty much guaranteed and continues to guarantee that we will not act on a scale where it does matter until it is much, much too late. This year many people will die as a result of climate change. They have no voice but they are affected in the most drastic way possible. Next year it will be more and so on. Until the developed part of the world, and in particular the people in power in the developed part of the world is going to be personally and inescapably affected you're along for the ride.
If this particular thing concerns you and you are not non-stop stressed that only means that you haven't understood it yet.
- your "fact" that democracy is the only way out of this is actually and adequately true
- one or more persons doesn't assume your wild guess is necessarily true and launches a Plan B
It's funny: backup plans are considered good for IT Enterprises, but not for the planet they are located on. Seems illogical, but it is what it is.
Today: oh yeah, climate change is real, but we should have done something about it 20 years ago, now it's too late...
It's frustrating to me on a personal level. Back in the early '00s it was pretty clear to me that we were headed for a massive problem. I did what I could to cut all kinds of ways in which we - as a family - were contributing. But in the end it had zero effect because the real agents of change weren't budging, not even a micro meter. So here we are today. The house I live in is more than energy neutral (my plans have been accelerated a bit on account of Putin's madness). But I make myself no illusion that it will matter, it's just a token bit of resistance, a tiny drop of green in an ocean of black.
Things I wonder about (but no longer worry about): will my children make it through this crisis that we have created? Will our political institutions somehow survive? How big a population - assuming we survive in some numbers - will there be left and will there still be enough structure standing that we don't have to start all over from scratch?
If you really start to think about the possible consequences of climate change you won't be having many good nights of sleep going forward. And there isn't a thing that you personally are going to be able to do about it, except maybe as a figleaf for your personal mental health.
Very, very frustrating.
> If this particular thing concerns you and you are not non-stop stressed that only means that you haven't understood it yet.
That's a mentally unhealthy attitude. Whether something is of importance to you or not should not determine whether you are stressed over it, you can approach it on a balanced constructive way.
If these two variables are not aligned then you're actively adding noise to the system and I'd argue that you are making the system less democratic. The world is fucking complex and the devil is always in the details. You may notice that the loudest voices are not the most knowledgeable voices. They will never seek details unless it is to critique their opponents and go no further. The loudest voices are not those seeking truth, they are seeking competition. Seeking truth is a cooperative game, where the main goals are aligned and there is no singular winner. It is positive sum. But the loudest voices are playing games to win, often creating competition where there may not have been before. Usually they claim a game is zero sum, when often it is not.
The point of democracy is to distribute power, and not necessarily uniformly. Our modern industrial and economic worlds runs on specialization. At the very core. This is because these processes are so complex that no individual can obtain mastery over even a significant part of the system. There are no physicists who are experts in all of physics, no chemists who have mastered both organic and physical, no climate scientists who understand all of climate, no engineers who master electrical, mechanical, aero, and civil, there are no master full stack engineers. Do you really think political affairs are any different?
For some reason we pretend we can be experts in even larger domains where experts struggle to obtain expertise in a narrow niche. If systems are chaotic, where small differences are critical, then overconfidence has disastrous consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzOwP0phUis
At that level you can make some change that moves the needle. At the low-on-the-totempole level you're not going to be able to do much of anything without dedicating your life to it. Greta Thunberg comes to mind, though I'm not even sure if she is effective though maybe she'll inspire the next generation. Anything else is a token feel good thing that will not actually make a difference.
If you look at COVID and our collective response and realize the magnitude of that challenge versus climate change then the only valid conclusion is that we're in for a very rough ride, just how rough is the open question, possibly rougher than I can imagine hopefully less so.
It's kinda an odd characteristic that passion for a subject doesn't strongly correlate with the desire to become more knowledgeable in that subject. It's definitely there for all those that do become experts, but there's a large number of experts with high passion too. I suspect that it is partially due to our desire of wanting to know everything and believing that lack of knowledge is a blemish. To me this feels odd, it is like being upset you bought a puzzle that wasn't already assembled, a videogame that wasn't already beaten, or a book that wasn't already read.
> The harder I work, the luckier I get.
I definitely went through an existential crisis where I found that the world was dominated by noise (with complexity being just one form). But what I found meaningful from this simple saying is that if life is composed of stochastic events, I better be ready to seize upon the opportunities when and if they emerge.
Plus, I've always enjoyed learning. Not for power or any actual gain. But the same way one finds enjoyment in solving a puzzle or playing any game. Isn't that enough? I just see that the noise and complexity I can see just indicates what level of the game I'm on. Games wouldn't be fun if they didn't get more challenging as you progressed :)
I don't know if this helps. Maybe this is that random event to seize upon or maybe it is just more noise. But that's the world I guess, and there's a certain beauty to that.
First and foremost: read.
Second: don't demand certitude and table the idea that there's a universal judgement. Think: am I asking for an up/down vote on a conversation, or on an assertion?
Uncertainty can't always be driven down to 0. People usually expect this from other fields and yet understand when it is silly in their own field. (imagine: climate scientist forum noting cosmic rays, asking how any system can possibly be secure given memory safety causes security issues, and cosmic rays can flip memory bits, then hand-wringing about how they can even figure out what software research to trust)
This thread is itself a good example: OP has no issue with the research, or type of research, or anything, just is concerned how laypeople might believe it is certain and confirmed because it is in Nature. The paper itself makes no such claim, as the OP goes to great lengths to explain (c.f. it is statistical model)
For me, this summary is a lot different than the way I see this aspect talked about in the media (and on Twitter, etc) even by climate scientists.
Okay? A lot of the discourse is explicitly about the heat and cold.
It wasn’t all that long ago that interviewed climate scientists would say that you couldn’t attribute individual events to climate change. Now they constantly do. I feel like I hear it every other time I tune in to NPR.
"constantly"? It's ironic that you put these two statements together like they somehow prove your point, while you're actually undermining your own position. Here's what the climate scientists have been saying: "you can't attribute individual weather events directly to climate change. However, climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme weather events occurring".
So, if the media (note, not scientists) is "constantly" talking about extreme weather events, that does seem to prove that extreme weather events are happening more often, right? Which kinda confirms what the scientists were predicting all along? It's not the individual events that prove climate change: it is the pattern of "constant" extreme weather events.
How would one possibly do that here?
Also, I don't have access to a supercomputer (ok, well, I do, but I can't both keep my day job and also use it for re-running climate models when I have a question I want to ask myself about them).
People say "critical thinking" and "do your own research" a lot, and I always wonder what the fuck they think "research" means. Apparently not what I think it means! Or perhaps they do not need sleep, do not have to work for a living, do not have family, have access to huge teams of assistants, and own a world-class supercomputer to help satiate their skepticism, in which case, good for them :)
Hopefully they will be smarter than myself. If not, a few billion more years and we may get another shot...
This thread is a good example: the person you're replying to isn't saying it's bad work, or that the work claims certitude. In fact, it disclaims it, it's a statistical model. It's just that pop "scientists" may overestimate it its in Nature and people don't read.
Not climate scientist, but researcher in ML (another highly hyped and arguably more noisy field).
After Bourbon, the hard truth is expertise + don't.
Unfortunately journals/conferences/venues are an extremely noisy mechanism which in general aren't realistically much better than arxiv (at least over here). Peer review isn't journals/conferences, it is peers reading and evaluating the works. Reviewers are doing a service and often not giving a work significant time as they got other stuff to do. The only real way to know if a paper is valid or not is to be an expert in the subject matter (more focused than the field) and to read it __and the code__. All too often it is a nuanced point that is the crux of a paper, and would be entirely missed if you're not deep in that subcommunity. I know this answer sucks, but that's what it is.
Fwiw, I wouldn't realistically change your strategy as a layman. It's probably the best you got. Maybe only thing is don't think "journal publication == 100% true" but rather "journal publication == probably right." The process is noisy and there's no way around this.
Side note: I often say that you know when the physics undergrads start quantum mechanics because they all become alcoholics. The joke here (which has a lot of truth to it btw) is that your intuitive framework breaks down and stops helping you, so you suck it up, drink, and just trust the math. Truthfully, for any study, once you hit a sufficient level, this kinda ends up being true. You get introduced to concepts at a simple and abstracted level, which seems sufficient for modeling the world (often this is what you learn in undergrad domains, not just physics). But once you get to enough expertise you find that what seemed simple before simply gets dominated by the nuances and complexities of the system. Truth is that if anyone is trying to convince you that something is simple (especially yourself), then they are trying to deceive you -- intentionally or unintentionally (often fooled themselves). There's a reason you'll find huge books on how to pick the best screw, o-ring, or whatever seemingly simple thing.
I guess it wouldn't be a clique if it wasn't well known but people fail to internalize it: The devil is in the details.
Using that is like using 'Someone raised a concern in a meeting' as a basis for believing something.
Anyone can raise a concern, or publish a paper. What matters is whether or not other people are convinced by the paper. Consensus.
Use 'scientific consensus' as your weather-vane. (PS. The scientific consensus on climate change is 'things aren't looking great, we need to turn the bus around, we aren't turning the bus around'.)
... Or go learn and become an expert in the field for yourself. It should only take ~20,000 hours of making a lot of mistakes along the way.
Well, thankfully it is not.
There's no need for one side or the other to "win," especially at this point. Instead, likely, debate will continue until a more-nuanced view is better understood and accurately disseminated.
(Not necessarily a view "in the middle." Sometimes one side is just Right, Full Stop. But a more-nuanced view when there's strong disagreement on both sides is usually helpful for more people to understand _why_ there's disagreement.)
Maybe best not to put all your eggs in one basket, or bet your future on one strategy!
Also, the criticism is primarily a comment on methods (stats vs physical models) which can be based on lots of consideration and experience outside the context of any particular paper.
E.g. I can tell you that you've probably used the wrong optimization algorithm for particular task without spending much more than an hour glancing through your problem formulation and results. Doing that without the benefit of decades of experience would require weeks or months, but with experience I can make that determination quite quickly given a detailed write-up.
(FWIW: I think dynamical physics-based models are probably over-emphasized in climate science consensus, but I'm admittedly a complete novice whose opinion you shouldn't trust.)
And this is the only factor that will really matter.
I spent a few years studying climate models. I have lots of background in mathematical modeling and numerics, but not climate per se, so this was a big undertaking but possible. I have to admit that -- although I can now read and understand papers better -- it hasn't been particularly illuminating.
The global climate is changing. The long-term impact of these changes is difficult to know, particularly because there are many plausible bifurcation points. Beyond some basics, the TL;DR is "we just don't know exactly what will or won't happen, or when, but it's probably not going to be good for most people on the planet and things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years".
In my mind it's really just a case where being a conservative is the best approach.
That's a very strange take when we're seeing serious consequences of climate change now.
This is one of the key reasons I come to HN. Yes, for the news, obviously ;) But mostly for the various insights on that news.
However, I’ll offer an alternative perspective.
This paper identifies that IPCC does not expect a collapse in the 21st-century. That alone should be our largest biasing factor when we’re asking - from a time horizon perspective - what should we be doing?
So then, why now? I think it’s compelling that they identified two preconditions for a collapse they have been monitoring, and now are indicating that we are on the trajectory towards collapse, given what we were looking for for indications and warning.
As a former military officer, the key thing that you get from intelligence is long-term forecasting and indications and warnings for negative or dangerous actions by your adversaries and risk-taking by your allies.
So following that same logic, then if two of the largest indications and warnings for a future energy transfer collapse/flip scenario, based on the best modeling we have today, are indicating that we are on that trajectory, then it seems appropriate for the most well respected journal to relay that fact.
If Congress and the President agree to what you consider a “4-6 year lag” in whatever response we take then, the best Service and COCOM chiefs can do is give advice and then execute orders.
Call and vote for your congressperson if you want lasting change in the use of the DoD.
Does the fact that for some reason most humans literally cannot even contemplate this idea not seem like a bit of a risky situation to ignore, while representing/perceiving that we are thinking rationally??
To me, this is a recipe for disaster, the blind leading the blind.
It sounds like the 150-year-old scientific journal of record has been taken over by private equity, or by MBAs with KPIs to optimize.
They can't have a clickbait journal where they use their name to lend it credibility it would otherwise not have, and then claim no this isn't "Nature" and try to keep their credibility.
Other experts on the AMOC also cautioned that because the new study doesn’t present new observations of the entire ocean system — instead, it is extrapolating about the future based on past data from a limited region of the Atlantic — its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/2...
Simpler models can yield better predictions than complex ones, even when the complex model is more "realistic". The many tunable parameters and complex feedback loops can increase uncertainty compared to a simple model.
See for example "To explain or to predict?" by Shmueli (2010, https://doi.org/10.1214/10-STS330)
Their model equation (1) has 4 parameters. Do you have any papers at hand that model AMOC in a more physically constrained way, with a similar number of tunable parameters?
It's not worth anything, since the conservative rear guard and even outright deniers say the same thing these days. If you mean to separate yourself from such people, you'll have to put it differently.
> If a paper is rejected from one Nature journal, the authors can use an automated manuscript transfer service to submit the paper to Nature Communications via a link sent to them by the editor handling the manuscript.
> Article | Open Access
Did Einstein rocket off at the speed of light before coming up with relativity?
All those things were later refined as they were the correct cognitive framework with inaccurate physical models behind them.
Would help taking your observations seriously if you provided some credentials, studies published, etc. Otherwise, and of course I say this with all respect, you're just some guy on the internet (spreading FUD, but that's another story)
So can this happen “sooner than expected”, along with the massive raft of climate change outcomes that are cropping up 20, 50, and even 100 years “earlier than expected”?
Let’s just say that if climate change was on the stock exchange, I’d be dumping serious money into its futures. Nothing seems to be truly “off the table” anymore, even the truly outlandish outcomes are becoming terrifyingly prescient.
When I say physical models here by the way I'm referring to physically-based mathematical models as well as numerical models.
It seems that the authors have done a good job in developing their model. My issue is with Nature deciding to publish it. If this paper was not published in Nature it would receive little attention within or without climate science - in fact many such statistical models are published each year without much comment. However, Nature have published a paper that I think many ocean scientists would feel draws dramatic conclusions from a weak basis but will now inevitably draw much more attention than more insightful papers.
MIT professor Carl Wunsch accused Nature in 2010 of near-tabloid science with a tendency towards sensational papers built on weak foundations. However, I've felt that Nature's choice of publications on climate in recent years has been high quality. This paper feels like a big step-down from that standard.