more importantly though, is the fact that there are enough "critics" that consider Global Warming a cycle that "man" merely accelerated by a few decades. most of these "skeptics" are also perfectly capable of discerning between the amount of energy "wasted" in office buildings and lit up skyscrapers as well as anything at the end of luxury supply chains and markets and what the rest of the world "wastes" or expends. to them, the hoax is the "man-made" part ...
it should be "some-man-made climate change"
Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.
In fact, we have records from not that long ago that at some point climate became colder after it had been warmer for a bit.
It's obvious human civilization has an impact, but the real question is more, can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life? Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.
Climate activist make it look like it's a settled issue, but the problem isn't the science; the problem is trying to use the science to enforce decision that are highly political in nature and are not to be left only to the designated god scientist, no matter how hard they cry...
Uh? Ultimate loser? When I read comments like this I'm basically confronted with the following implication "Human civilization isn't worth preserving. If you disagree, then the problem is with you, namely because you believe humanity to be redeemable".
The ultimate loser is the person who thinks that a small or almost nonexistent reduction in quality of life is a small price to pay in comparison to a large and permanent reduction in quality of life.
The ultimate winner is the person who will see his quality of life decline before his eyes.
Crazy.
Yes, no doubt! And actually doing something about it will impact our lives much less than trying to continue as usual. If we would have started 30 years ago, the transitions would have been smooth, but now it is going to be harsher. The problem is that doing something about it will affect the profits of some very big and influential corporations, and they are doing everything they can to sow FUD.
Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.
The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.
> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025ef00...
I believe people have influenced the climate, but the far left is using it as a political football to get Their Guy elected, not to actually stop it. The idea of a rising sea is a perfect disaster they can sell you the solution for. If they actually cared, 1) the Democrats would be fighting AI tooth and nail, unless it was 100% powered by renewables (not nuclear, remember their version of science denialism is no nukes.). 2) they would be worshipping Elon for bringing us EVs. Instead they take all that silicon valley AI money and tell us to save the ocean. No way San Jose!
And I'm not sure we want to put our heads in the sand and say La-La-La, against the real possibility that everything is actually going to shit.
"The people with the most power and money are hurting the planet, so there's no reason for me to inconvenience myself for the sake of others."
It's a pretty weak justification for a selfish attitude.
Perhaps you have cognitive dissonance because you've fallen for some very low quality propaganda.
Policies are not perfect, and they will be created with input from all parties. What you highlight feels like an artifact of these policies not being hard line enough. You are of course right that it is effective to show natural disasters and explain that these will be more frequent if we do nothing, when you do that people will make the wrong conclusions how that effects their daily lives. We know that we use too much resources, and this is going to have catastrophic consequences in the future if we do not change how we use them.
It is not obvious who you are arguing against, it feels to me that you are against the people who make climate policies weak, and the very same policies.
Lets talk specific, we had a plastic bag ban here in Sweden. It was vilified as not efficient. In the end it was effective according to research after the ban was lifted and an even extreme approach would have been even better.
An actual leftist party would ban private jets before it banned natural gas in homes.
The Democrats are a neoliberal conservative party. They'll always put the interests of Capital first.
I sympathize, I'm not sure what Americans are meant to do about their utterly captured government.
Every single global cooling prediction has failed, so yes, if you're that incompetent you should definitely find a different career.
> the Democrats
You have shown that you don't understand what Leftist politics means. Democrats are center-right. The USA hasn't had a meaningful Leftist party since the first half of the last century.
I’m a Leftist and I want good things for all people. I don’t want to persecute my enemies. I don’t agree with you.
But the tendency is showing: in my country, we're getting records in extreme temperatures, forrest fires and storms.
But a study 1% can be dismissed, some random in a basement 99% off can be believed. This just says: many people are just looking for a confirmation of their beliefs, not evidence. And many companies play this game (supporting the right politicians, spreading disinformation aka lies, etc), because there are billions at stake.
The CO2 hypothesis was made in the 50s, long before there was conclusive evidence, and yet we are right on the predicted trajectory.
The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?
I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!
Most importantly, most people don't understand scientific consensus vs. individual research papers or individual scientists. A major feature of the scientific method is that when an interesting result is published, it can be independently verified by lots of other researchers, and if they come to the same conclusion, that is excellent evidence that the result accurately describes the real world.
Scientists are people, and just like people everywhere they have biases and personal motivations. But again, the scientific method is much bigger than any individual or even group of scientists. If anything, being skeptical of unexpected results is a huge pillar of the scientific method. But skepticism alone is not enough - the next step is to look for validating research, not to say "hah, science is bullshit, let's trust this YouTube rando instead." As usual, I think Jessica Knurick does a great job explaining things: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/trust-the-s...
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.
https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 (the study referenced in the article)
Substituting in social science as a proxy for your criticism takes the wind completely out of your sails.
"Physicists are super untrustworthy and biased, it's a cabal, I mean just look at astrology and these articles criticizing it!"
But I'm not. In fact I said as much. If it'll stop you from fighting phantoms, I'll make it explicit: I'm quite certain anthropogenic climate change is real, and that climate science is broadly correct about it. Yet, not even physics is fully immune from such bias, according to Feynman: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...
(Though as the charts show, in physics it has a short half-life, at least for something as straightforward as the electron charge.)
> affected by bias to such a degree
Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.
> the overall conclusion is wrong
What about the specifics of the conclusion, which specifics, what percentage of the assertions, 20%, 50%, 80%? This again allows the reader to fill in the blanks with their own biases which are likely far less rigorously tested than the conclusions of the field of climate science.
> it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased
This statement, on the topic of climate change and climate science, immediately following your above two statements, serves to further reinforce the idea that climate science is biased.
> the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination.
The quotes around the independent verification of researchers serves to undermine their work and cast doubt on it. You then state they are unreasonable in their skepticism of results they "dislike", implying these are emotional decisions rather than empirical measurements of reality.
Of course, extremely ironic as the reader meant to consume this is of course the one actually looking for emotional reinforcement of their preconceptions, but in this framing gets to project that onto the scientists.
And yeah, "cursory exmination" of course in no way reflects the reality of the last several decades of climate science, but is added in as another unsubstantiated slight.
> case in e.g. social science
And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.
I would be shocked if there was zero bias - the field is staffed by humans, and has political implications. And no, I did not leave the degree of bias up to interpretation - I set an upper bound to it, that precludes global warming skepticism.
> What about the specifics of the conclusion
To date no field has been 100% correct in everything. I already told you I'm not a global warming skeptic - what do you want, for me to pretend climate science is infallible for the benefit of morons that want to twist my words?
> And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.
On two separate occasions I explicitly wrote I believe climate science. Obviously my attempt at imparting a nuanced understanding of scientific fallibility is wasted on someone that doesn't even bother to read my posts. You want a PR statement aimed at reassuring the lowest common denominator that the scientists know what they're doing, not a discussion.
If this is how much you argue with someone who agrees with you, then, I don't know what to say. Good luck in life, man.
It's not -
"hey, we can argue about the best way to address climate change and the details of how it's going to play out"
it's -
"this entire field is biased" (you said "it's absolutely the case that entire fields can be biased"), the "independent verification of empirical data is actually untrustworthy and primarily motivated by personal dislike", "they make their scientific conclusions with cursory examinations", and "they're as reliable as the social sciences".
I'm sorry, but it beggars belief that you are not aware of what you're doing.
It's not the communication style of an engineer just trying to be technically correct, it's filled with subtle and not-so-subtle accusations and implications all driving in a single direction which is the discreditation of the entire scientific field.
Let's take a small detour. In the show Downton Abbey, there's an episode where a character may be sick. Two doctors give their diagnoses. One says she's not sick, and that he's 100% certain. The other says he thinks he knows what illness she has, but he's not totally sure - despite knowing the patient better. Still he recommends treating her for that illness. They go with the first doctor, he turns out to have been wrong, and the patient dies.
Even the humanities and English literature graduates that wrote that show understood what you do not, that the person open about their uncertainties and faults is more trustworthy than the one claiming to be perfect. Not only is more trustworthy, but is the one that people will trust, that is why they gave that characteristic to the doctor they wanted the audience to side with - the likable permanent character, not the antagonizing guest character.
That said, to address your comment in some detail:
> What really drives distrust in science is claims of infallibility and demands for total trust
This is one hypothesis. Here's another -
If we look at COVID and the anti-vax movement in general, it seems apparent that a much greater driver of that distrust is grifters and kooks actively and profitably pushing emotionally satisfying misinformation. Ironically enough, they do this with far greater claimed certainty about the veracity of their conclusions than the doctors, with far less data to substantiate those conclusions.
This is pushed out to an audience which is desperately looking for explanations for the unexplainable like why their child got autism. Reasoning and nuance goes out the window and they latch onto anything that will give them a sense of certainty.
A second element of this, is that these conspiracy theories are specifically intended to stir up distrust of scientists, "educated elites", and public institutions, and to exploit the pre-existing distrust of the aforementioned that has been steadily cultivated by the right over decades.
Finally, in the case of COVID especially, we had a whole bunch of selfish motivations that were at play which resulted in people finding it expedient to believe anything that would align with their desires to do whatever they like without anyone telling them what they can and can't do (especially business owners whose financial incentives all aligned with not shutting down, and being in positions of power, they leaned into boosting this messaging).
The CDC and the medical field has for decades very clearly communicated the statistical nature of their specialty, the rate and severity of side effects, the uncertainty of prognoses and outcomes of treatments, etc etc. Quite painstakingly. There was no industrywide claim of infallibility, and yet here we are.
> Downton Abbey [...] the first doctor, he turns out to have been wrong,
Love Downton Abbey!
Climate scientists constantly communicate error bars around their measurements and the outcomes of climate change. Creating a model that predicts with any certainty how all the countless systems of the Earth will interact in such a dynamic process is insanely difficult, especially as numerous feedback cycles individually look poised to accelerate the whole process.
These many, many, many measurements and models all tend to converge around certain facts though, which leads to the probability of those being the case being as close to truth as science is capable of getting.
As "true" as 9.8 m/s^2, the heliocentric nature of our solar system, the spherical nature of our planet, the speed of light in a vacuum, plate tectonics, evolution, germ theory, etc. etc.
These truths are that the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have been steadily rising since industrialization, that this is primarily driven by anthropogenic emissions, and that as the concentration of these gases increases, more energy from the sun will be trapped within our atmosphere resulting in a heating world.
This heating world is already, and will continue to, melt the ice caps, reducing the albedo of the poles as the darker water underneath is revealed and begins to absorb more of the sun's energy, accelerating the effect.
This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, melt the permafrost which stores ~1.4 GT of methane, which is ~80x as potent a GHG as CO2, and whose release would represent a ~2x increase of the concentration in our atmosphere, again further accelerating the process.
This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, lead to tropical forests like the Amazon beginning to emit more CO2 than they absorb, again further accelerating the process.
Etc. etc.
The consequences of all this are already, and will continue to, drive more and more extreme weather, with the 10 hottest years on record all happening in the last 10 years. This has negative consequences for food production, for the habitability of the equatorial regions, and will lead to mass migrations of people unless we think they will be content to just sit around and die, and thus destabilization of societies.
While we're on the topic of entertainment media another one came to my mind, it's called "Don't Look Up".
As opposed to your Downton Abbey example, the meteor turns out to be real, and it does hit the Earth, and everyone dies.
The reason humanity doesn't take this seriously and unite to address it is because there are countless predictable incentives to distrust the scientists and ignore the inconvenient truth of an incoming meteor. Financial incentives for the rich and powerful, engagement (and ultimately financial) incentives for the grifters and kooks pushing distrust of the scientists, a deep emotional desire in much of humanity to outright reject the horrors of this potential reality...
Anyway, not sure what made me think of that or how that's at all relevant here, but you should watch it if you haven't!
Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.
There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.
If you care about solving climate change: instead of yelling at climate change denialist you should direct more effort into advocating for policy and messaging that acknowledges and mitigates the harms while keeping you expect people to endure
But if you want me to, I could, sure.
It doesn't sound to me like you contribute any valuable argument that would improve the "PR" for the goal of protecting environmental living conditions for humans though.
I've never seen "halting economic growth" as a suggestion for dealing with climate change that was being taken seriously. There might be some crackpots out there insisting that we need to being the economy to a halt and move into caves or something, but I think the vast majority understands that it isn't going to happen. That said, there are things that could be done which would hurt the profits of the ~50 companies who are responsible for most of the global CO2 emissions and/or trillions in climate related damages without causing the entire global economy to grind to a stop or collapse (as much as they'd love for us to believe otherwise).
The greatest societal behavior that needs to be changed is the way we allow a very small number of people get away with making insane amounts of money by causing insane levels of harm. Until that changes, the harmful systems that those people have created for themselves to profit under won't change either.
> it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it,
Sure there are fanatics spouting end-of-the-world-is-nigh stuff but fundamentally I think the problem here is it's unknown - both in terms of the physical changes [1], and perhaps more importantly second order effects due to mass migration. It might become a real problem a lot sooner than you think - we simply don't know - but I think it's certainly wrong to view the effects as a gradual rise - that average hides a lot of local/temporal variation.
[1]in terms of potential for positive feedback loops like methane release, or compensating stabilising effects like cloud cover. [2] For a region to become uninhabitable, you don't need it to be uninhabitable every day of the year - just one or two days a year may be enough - enough to kill people or crops. What's important is the occurrence of extremes during the year, not the average gradual rise.