I understand the scientist's desire for rigour, but ...

Most people won't bother reading the article at all. If it's up-voted or liked enough, the title is the truth. We all do it. We all accept a sentence as truth if we trust the source enough, without checking the facts. It's impossible to check all the facts all the time.

But the WaPo article isn't about the truth. It's about beliefs. The party line.

The belief that 'I, through my sinful actions am causing the ocean to slow down'. Ridiculous, but that is what most people will get from reading that headline. And maybe it's not that bad.

It doesn't matter what the truth is, it matters what you believe the truth to be.

Some argue that the opposite is true: https://xkcd.com/164/

There are deserts on earth that have been created by humans (Iceland for example, and the "Karst", victims to wooden ship building), and large lakes that are almost gone because of human actions.

It also seems obvious that humans pollute water bodies around us to a degree that makes swimming in them or drinking from it impossible, to take up your pissing example.

The truth doesn't matter, nor does what you believe. The only thing that actually matters is how you act. You could happily say that there's only a 0.0001% chance that humanity is affecting climate change, but if that's enough to get you to stop doing things that might harm the planet just in case then that's brilliant.

The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.

That's why you need science and proof to try to know the truth, or at least do the best effort. If you don't care about the truth you can use Tarot cards or Ouija tables, that are cheaper and least wasteful than a bunch of Ph.D. that just want to put buoys and launch satellites to measure everything.

I'm not really understanding here. "measuring everything" is how science is performed. Are you for or against "science?"

>The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.

It doesn't matter if you shower less or use the AC less or use an electric car, all that pales in comparison to you not existing in the first place. So the easiest way to solve the entire issue is not having more children. I feel like this is such a big choice with huge downsides for most people that it doesn't even get talked about that often.

Offsetting your baby's lifetime CO2 footprint is actually very affordable even with the average US figure. For a more hands on alternative you could strive to raise them to a line of work that would cause them to have a net negative climate footprint.

But yes, have a good hard think about these things when considering getting children.

For lack of a more credible source,

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/sep/09/carb...

“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”

This was said by "Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week".

OK, he not only made a speech but also had a dinner with Tony Blair so it wasn't just for that speech.

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[–]horvybaby 1515 points 11 hours ago*x3

Okay, so let's get a few things correct: because perhaps Nature is behind a paywall for some people. Rahmstorf et. al. show a decrease in THC/MOC variability for the period 1970-1990, which we have then partially recovered from. The title of the Nature article is inflammatory, but the Washington Post article is significantly more so.

We do not know nearly enough about THC variability to make millenial scale arguments. We only recently actually made a measurement system that can calculate the overturning (the RAPID array).

Rahmstorf and others had some issues with THC shutdown in the 90's when previous studies, which at one point suggested a shutdown in THC or meridional overturning, turned out to be incorrect because of an aliasing from a sampling error: they just happened to be measuring at points in the seasonal cycle that were spaced in such a way so as to show a decrease when there was none. This led to our modern understanding of inter-annual variability in the THC, so it all worked out well.

The nature paper takes pains to note that the RAPID array is just 11 years old and so we can't say anything from the results. But this proxy data must be referenced to something, and the only reasonable measurement apparatus to use is RAPID. It isn't.

Using proxy data to infer something about the overturning, while reasonable, doesn't give great coherence towards present understanding of complicated, long-timescale events like the heating of the deep ocean. Furthermore, even at theirs strongest the conclusions absolutely do not support the WaPo headline. This is the sort of things that makes climate scientists like myself furious. The results end up overhyped, overblown, and for soundbites like press releases and Nature papers. This just misinforms people. Unless I hear from RAPID that the MOC/THC is reducing, I'm not trusting the authors. Just because climate change is a hot-button issue, and we want ways to convince people about its impacts, doesn't mean MOC/THC shutoffs can be pulled out of nowhere.

edit: Just want to mention: this doesn't say anything about the method of analysis. The method seems to be well done and scientific and careful, given the data at hand. The issue is rather the paper title and subsequent inflation in popular media, which is silly.

Until that, what should our policy be based on?

In case its not abundantly clear from the first line: the Reddit comment was not written by me.