> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world, including those that pollinate 75% of the world's crops, as a result of climate change and other pressures.
We're barely starting to understand bee colony collapse, and that's probably one of the more pressing and therefore better explored issues to date. I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change. It's really turning into a social and institutional catch all. Insects in particular - I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.
Weather patterns are constantly changing even in the absence of climate forcing. Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.
>> He pointed to the rapid disappearance of insect species around the world
> ...
> More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.
To be fair, "he" in your quote is Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group, not a scientist. Second, he did say "climate change and other pressures".
It matters if said "global leaders" happen to manage loads of cash.
When Blackrock's CEO states his firm will divest away from fossil fuels in 2020, this has (sadly imo) roughly the impact of e^9 climate scientists ringing alarm bells for a decade.
The Blackrock letter did not state that they are divesting from fossil fuels in 2020. It stated that they are planning to remove companies that generate more than 25% of their revenue from thermal coal production (i.e., thermal coal producers that are not diversified, meaning the large diversified thermal coal producers are not affected) from their discretionary active investment portfolios, which only accounts for a minority of their assets. Note that thermal coal is already declining in the US and other markets due to increased competition primarily from natural gas, a fossil fuel which, like oil, the letter says nothing about.
Saying that Blackrock's getting out of coal, or that it will take a position of $1T in sustainable energy is just saying that they will invest profitably.
At this point it's cheaper to build new sustainable energy plants (and sadly natural gas) than to maintain running coal plants.
“...is just saying they will invest profitably”...
Couldn’t be more false. Existing coal companies can easily make money for investors when they trade at earnings yields of 25%. no new coal plants need to be built. Coal can even be phased out. If you get 6-7 more years of earnings at a flattish 25% earnings yield you can do very well. This is why deep value investing works on average.
As a layman: Governments all over are phasing out and closing coal plants in favor of newly built sustainable energy plants. That means sustainable energy companies will be on the rise while coal will be on the decline.
Which makes intuitive sense but doesn't take into consideration the price you pay for the investment, which is the primary factor in determining your returns.
> My guess is that very few "global leaders" are scientists
Often more than you'd think. Merkel is a Physicist (where Thatcher was a Chemist), Ursula von der Leyen is a licensed doctor (which almost counts?), and Abe Shinzō has a political science degree (which probably doesn't count :-D). That's 2.5 members of the G8ish.
No: GP said "out of academia long enough." Recent newcomers to politics with extensive backgrounds in professional science (for some definition of "recent" and "extensive") could still count.
I think the point of their comment is that they had exposure to Science, which is almost as important as being a good scientist, because it alters how you think.
I disagree that plain "exposure" is worth anything. Let me bring up a sort of unrelated example. Whenever I meet someone that claims they have "some" experience with people with disabilities, it turns out they are worse then those people that dont claim that.
"Some experience with people with disabilities" implies a far lower level of commitment and immersion than the "exposure to science" that's being discussed in this thread.
If a politician claims they have a scientific background, but it turns out all they did was take gen bio in first year and follow a dozen popular scientists on Twitter, they'd be derided.
Even if they were, and/or are surrounded by advisors with science credentials, the overwhelming political pressure coming from corporate lobbyists will likely mean science will be ignored.
I think this is a major thing that people don't realize is a massive danger. People here point to disappearing fish stocks and massive forest fires, and say it's climate change when Fish farms and over fishing, and forest management have been massive contributors to the issues. You take a solve-able by a local government and make it an issue that really isn't.
Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related, the only argument anyone can have is whether it's human-caused.
But the climatic trend for the last 2 decades has consistently topping daytime temperature records, and it's been drier and hotter earlier in the bushfire season year over year (a fact which our rural fire service was warning our federal government about in July right when they were both ignored and had their funding cut).
We are having problems because of a climate trend, and the reaction of skeptics in power has been to cut funding to the groups who can do forest management to deal with the year over year reality we now face.
Definitely. Definitely.
And what about the other bushfires they've had that were over twice as large as the ones they are currently having? Like the 74-75 bushfires that were 6 times as big as the current ones? Or the ones in 69-70 that were twice as big? or 68-69 (also twice as big)?
You're talking about one of the most fire prone places in the world that has had massive bushfires documented since 1851.
edit: @mrpopo, can't reply to you. But it looks like the largest set of bush fires ever recorded in Australia (290 million hectares) occured in a year where the temperature was below average for pretty well the entire country. Far below in some parts of the country.
You mean the bushfires which have to date exceeded the total area burned in 74-75 in NSW[1]? Which are noted from that article as having a decidedly different burn characteristic then 74-75 which was mostly grassland, as opposed to the forest fires we currently have, including large areas of rainforest in Queensland which has not previously been dry enough to support a bushfire?
A significant factor in the 74-75 fires was extra plant growth from unusually heavy rainfall in the two years prior providing extra fuel[1].
Very different circumstances to the current situation.
You're actually saying that a Eucalypt forest(Kanangra-Boyd_National_Park), trees that are adapted to fire, that actually promote fire with highly combustible leaves(eucalyptus oil), whose seeds only sprout after a fire, has never been dry enough to support a bush fire. I sincerely doubt it.
Australia is a big place, you should get a little more familiar with it when you want to think about the scope of this fire. It's not the size alone that's unprecedented (because as you point out that's obviously not true), it's the fact that it's so big, so early, and in such a weird spot. Very new for that area. If all of the east coast of the US burned and we shrugged and said, "Eh, California's were bigger in '88" it wouldn't be a meaningful comparison at all.
Quicky edit: All that said, I'm no expert either. I think we're both more or less parroting sources, so feel free to respond with new info :)
I've literally been to every state in Australia. Worked in western aus (Kalgoorlie, up to Port Hedland) then up to Darwin. Spent some time in Perth, and down to Margaret River. Adelaide, Melbourne, all around Sydney and up the gold coast all the way to Cairns. Even went over to Tasmania to visit a friend. I've got really good friends who lived in Katoomba. I know the area. I'm not parroting anything.
On the other hand, automatically labeling everything temperature related as "caused by climate change" is not a proper argument as well.
I mean this is most likely actually related to climate change, but this should be verified/modelled before coming to conclusions. Even when it is absolutely obvious.
It isn’t clear that forest management would prevent bushfires. The consensus amongst the experts and royal commissions seems to be that there is no effective prevention.
There are harm minimisation strategies, but that would largely involve telling people where to live and some major restructuring of small urban centres.
I can conceive of a very expensive prevention strategy, with a real time detection system based on satellite imagery and distributed sensors, and then finding a way to put out early fires with minimum latency, maybe with advanced drones or some other very capable and numerous aerial vehicles. But that would cost billions.
The weather was getting increasingly too dry to conduct controlled-/back-burns and the burns that were set were growing more and more out-of-control. So the burns decreased and the fuel loads increased until a massive fire tore through, making this season far, far worse.
In Paradise before the Camp Fire, there hadn't been rain for 200+ days. You can't put out every fire instantly as was tried in the past because that would build up fuels to devastating wildfire amounts. Many species evolved with fire... heck, my mom's oleanders in her front yard look even healthier than before the fire a year and change ago even though they were burned to blackened crisps.
Much like smoking cigarettes, it's difficult to point to which one caused lung cancer, but surely the sum of enough of them did cause it as much as the hockey-stick CO2 and temperature increases, coral bleaching, insect/bird apocalypse and Arctic sea ice declining to an imminent blue ocean event are caused by the sum total of human activities polluting GHGs into the environment over decades.
Well I don’t think it is one or the other. Fuel reduction is important, but it doesn’t seem sufficient. My understanding is that controlled burning had been done close to the prescribed cap.
(Disclaimer: I don't mean to question that bushfires are related to climate change. I just mean that ideas should be verified no matter how obvious they seem to be.)
>Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related
Australia's bushfires are most likely related to climate change and this is probably the best hypothesis for their cause. It should be verified by actual scientists before we can say "definietly climate change" with confidence.
It can't be verified by "actual scientists" because if they find otherwise, they'll be expelled from their field. You can't have rigorous scientific inquiry under these circumstances, and the results are predetermined.
It would be evidence of climate change if Australia was no longer getting hit with droughts that induce wildfire conditions. We've got records of those going back to colonial times and fossil evidence going back thousands of years.
Minor increases in temperature do not cause wildfire conditions. Drought, wind, fuel, and a catalyst (like an arsonist or clumsy person or lightning) are all you need for fires.
Until we start controlling the rain and playing God in the sky, I doubt we're going to be able to prevent Australia from developing dry conditions from time to time.
Why would the onus be on a commentator to provide citations for a fact one could readily <branded search engine verb> for in less time than our roundtrip efforts combined?
(me not being the commentator either, to boot!)
it almost sounds like you can't believe peanut butter is sticky...
I mean, I suppose "calfiferous plankton" is kinda a giveaway that ocean acidification would affect it...
> Why would the onus be on a commentator to provide citations for a fact one could readily <branded search engine verb> for in less time than our roundtrip efforts combined?
"Conflicting" only if you want to ignore a significant part of the text behind the very link you give:
"A more recent multi-model study estimated that primary production would decline by 2-20% by 2100 A.D.[12] Despite substantial variation in both the magnitude and spatial pattern of change, the majority of published studies predict that phytoplankton biomass and/or primary production will decline over the next century.[11][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]"
(Note the majority and how many of them are cited (all the numbers in brackets) and could be checked. It's surely not "one says yes, one says no".)
The ocean is not acid, it's alkaline (about pH 8.1) so you mean lessened alkalinity. Even seawater near active volcanic CO2 vents in the Mediterranean where the CO2 is nearly 6,000 ppm is still alkaline. Between 1751 and 1996, surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14.
It's generally phrased that a decrease in alkaline is due to acidification (an increase in acid) and vice versa. The average ph is not specifically relevant.
I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change.
Climate change itself is well-established scientifically. It is indeed hard to determine exactly which changes in the earth's ecology are a direct product of climate change. But it is important avoid a jump from this to "well, not such an emergency after all". This is because a wide of ecological and local climate conditions are driven by temperature.
Indeed, the first part of his post was reasonable, it is true that other factors are extremely important or perhaps dominant in some of these cases, loss of habitat and insecticide use for the loss of insects, and for wildfires, suburban settlement into forests leading to suppression of regular burning and a consequent build-up on the fuel load.
But then he takes a totally unjustified leap into using a quote from an insurance executive to draw sweeping conclusions about academic institutions and climate science in general. Very strange.
> I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.
You might find it easier to believe, but that doesn't make it so. Ecosystems are interconnected. A degree of warming might not do much to a loan insect in a cage, but a degree can contribute a lot to the spread and range of bacterial and fungal pathogens of insects. It can change how plants behave (they can't get up and move, so have to respond physiologically to survive in the same location), and that change impacts insects. Competitors for the same resources may respond better to temperature rise or other climate related changes. Climate change also changes farmers' behaviour - more pests due to warmer conditions can mean more sprays, which have unintended consequences.
We're wired for short-term thinking and this is a good example of it. When someone hears '4 degrees of warming' they think of what 4 degrees change feels like to them in the context of a day. Which is to say, not much. Sounds kinda nice. Same thing with sea level rises. We think of a shoreline we are familiar with, and consider a future for that place where the water level is a few feet higher. Chances are what's being pictured looks like no big deal.
A person would have to make the choice to actively investigate further the marginal effects of such a change, the impact from the rate of change, and points that are less obvious such as global temperature averages incorporating the 70%-of-the-surface heatsink that is the world's oceans. That kind of prompting for further thinking is for sure already happening in classrooms worldwide, and is one of the reasons there's such a stark difference in opinions on the issue as you look across the age brackets.
One way to tackle this might be better messaging, but looking back over the attempts to pivot on that front (global warming -> Climate change) and how much of an easy target that became for criticism, I'm not hopeful.
I wonder if there would be a greater impact on the way people think about climate change if the messaging was more specific to the places in which the audience lived? For sure a big challenge here will be accuracy, even if it's possible to bring the conversation down to that level.
I know I do, and part of the problem is that everyone deals with temperature every day, so it is an uphill battle trying to get across just how dramatic a 1 degree change is. It's one degree (Celsius or 1.8°F) but my house's temperature differs by more than that from room to room, and I don't normally notice that difference. Nor does a 1 degree difference in the weather materially change how hot/cold I feel. I feel freezing cold at -1, 0, or 1°C, even though pure water won't technically freeze until it hits 0°.
Another difficulty because it's an average over time, is there's nothing I can look at to see where we are right now - the average temperature of the world right this second isn't particularly meaningful compared against the 1 degree line that we're measuring against.
When the question of why 1 degree is so significant comes up, we can sidebar to explain just how catastrophic one degree is, but the layperson isn't always up for rigorous scientific discourse. Hell, we renamed "global warming" to be "global climate change" because of the 'joke' that global warming can't be real because it's still cold in winter (and it's still not gone away). I am unconvinced that having to explain why 1 degree is catastrophic is doing us any favors, especially considering that the average temperature rise is usually presented with one or two significant figures.
What then? Short of changing human nature, which we've been trying to do for years, one possibility is to pick a different measurement, or to give additional numbers for effect. In this case, the reason the one degree change is due to how much has to be heated for that single degree change. The entire atmosphere, the water, and surface all have to warm by one degree. How much is that, actually?
Is there a standard "Earth" surface area to get the right order of magnitude for just how much extra energy 1 degree is? How much energy would it take to heat this entire Earth 1 degree? We're talking on the order of zettajoules, at least. In imperial units we're talking gigatons of TNT, or petaBTUs.
For the last point I saw that to heat the oceans as fast as we are it would take a nuclear bomb worth of energy set off every second for the last few decades.
One thing that helps for me is to consider the bell curve profile, and the fact that a small shift greatly increases the area under the upper tail part of the curve where the extreme weather events live, eg:
I think a good example is that average normal body temperature is 98.6 F (37 C) degrees, but if you have a high-grade fever which is around 103 F (39 C) degrees, you're feeling very ill, even though it's just a small raise in temperature.
A single degree increase is significant because that suggests soon it will be 2, and then 4 and then 8... etc etc
The real worry is when we get to 8 degree increase which based on everywhere we've looked in the world that suffers from a 105+ degree avg temperatures tends to suffer from sparse plant life.
Though with that being said, our assumptions about that being what happens to the whole planet if our summers on average get to be 105f on average is very very very very speculative and actually counter intuitive in the sense that one would assume that with increase temperatures you should assume more water evaporates all over the globe, and therefore more rain should occur.
Nobody has pointed out the just as likely possibility, that perhaps global warming might be a problem that fixes itself. (i.e the amazon and africa is warmer because its closest to the equator therefore it has the most densely populated plant life) That is of course after all the Democrat's real estate ends up under water. ^_^ jk jk
My point basically boils down to this, we obviously don't want to continue this trend for the next 100 years. But you could also make the argument that if we could make the planet hotter by a few a degrees and put a cap on the increase in heat, the rest of the planet should naturally become more amazonian/african habitat. Which I don't see how that is necessarily a bad thing considering that is essentially how nature is designed to balance itself out.
To understand the consequences of global warming to the fullest its worth pointing out that we need to understand how ice ages can occur and dissipate in the first place. In that phenomena we see that there is a natural balance that is occurring where nature has a way to modulate exorbitant CO2 output of animals in relation to the plant life. When trees grow in abundance and there isn't enough animals to breath o2 and produce co2 obviously the planet eventually over thousands of years grows so cold that plantlife gets concentrated to the equator. And then with evolution animals get bigger and more plentiful and therefore starts breathing more of the o2, producing more co2, the point being there has to an inequality where animals per mass consume more O2 molecules as a biological function than a plant consumes CO2. (which kinda makes sense if you think about the whole "circle of life" of cellular biology.)
That is the only way such climate changes could occur when the planet's orbit never changes in distance from the sun.
These climate changes occur reeeeeeally slow and of course that means its in an intricate balance with the slow process of evolution... but still with that being said we assume climate change is going to be a calamity only to us, but that doesn't mean its going to necessarily be something that the earth isn't already very well prepared to resolve on its own after were gone. And if it can save it self, that means we can just make sure we save ourselves by burying fallout esque vaults under ground, or going to Mars.
Is that true? I thought we were still below a degree, but had just reached the point where 1.5 was inevitable later due to delayed effects. That was depressing when I figured out that even if the world became carbon-neutral tomorrow we'd still be getting warmer for a while.
Those second and third order effects might be easier for you to believe, but until there is evidence pointing to that being the cause, shouldn’t pesticides be pretty suspect?
> I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.
It’s not that easy. The intersection of climate and other environmental issues creates a kind of feedback loop.
I agree that "Climate Change" != "Environment Concern", i.e. there are many, many other environmental impacts that we make in addition, over and above specific subset of climate change.
I notice that some articles summarize the study as "Climate threads now dominate", others as "Environmental risks now dominate", and in my mind the two are not at all the same (to me, Climate Change is a proper subset of Environmental Risks).
The original link seems to talk about "Environmental Threats" as a summation of individual concerns such as Climate Action Failure, Biodiversity Loss, Water Crises, etc. I'm OK with that summation myself.
I also agree that it's clearly possible to misattribute an environmental concern to climate change, but at the same time, it's probably reasonable to seriously investigate climate change as a cause in any significant environmental concern that does not otherwise have a clear and sufficient explanation.
It feels a bit like nutrition and health. Of course there are plenty of health problems have little or nothing to do with nutrition, but if you know that you have poor nutrition it's a reasonable cause to investigate whenever you have a non-obvious health problem.
How would you explain the insect collapse found in the Puertorican rain forest which is protected and doesn't have deforestation or or other human activity. That research concluded it must be climate since the number of extremely hot days grew a lot there.
Look at the recent fires in Australia. Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not. Should the government be held morally reprehensible based on their support for coal power? Yes, absolutely. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Politics has a lower threshold of proof than science.
Can you directly attribute the cause to climate change? Probably not.
This is actually a much easier argument to make than the political argument.
Even the Prime Minister "has always made the connection between climate change and extreme weather conditions"[1] Obviously they haven't always made that connection, but it is indicative that the PM's argument is now "yes it's climate change but we shouldn't do anything about it".
The argument is easier because in Australia it's pretty obvious that the last few summers have been hotter and dryer than usual (except in Queensland), and the record is clear that pattern has been happening for some years. Hotter and drier weather leads to bush that is drier and more flammable, and no one has even attempted to argue otherwise.
The politics are harder in Australia because of the combination of the powerful coal lobby and a large part of the press trying to portray climate change as "a leftist conspiracy". This combination has led to the election loss of the Labor party in 2013, and Malcolm Turnbull losing the Prime Ministership in 2018.
> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change.
That's technically true, but irrelevant. We already have mountains of evidence for man-made climate change, we don't really need more.
Of course, whether a particular event is linked to climate change is a different question, but even when it's invalid, it's not invalid in the same way as "cold snap->no climate change". The latter is already disproved by mountains of evidence; the former isn't.
> > Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change.
> That's technically true, but irrelevant.
I think it's very relevant. If you keep blaming all catastrophies on climate change by default, then as other causes are found one by one, you are discrediting the good name of climate change. This may lead normal non scientist people to become more sceptical of the concept of climate change.
Furthermore, it causes scientists to be scared to point out those alternative reasons. In the worst case, this puts people who fight against climate change into the situation that they have to defend things they know are wrong in order to not tarnish their name.
Climate change is a major problem and the more we fight it at this early point, the lower the toll it takes. Just don't blame everything on it. Otherwise in the long term, you are playing into the hands of the deniers.
> I wish people put as much energy into shutting down eco-deniers as they do policing other eco-advocates.
Everyone is an eco advocate today. If you check out the bp home page you find pictures of solar deployments on green meadows. If you check out shell's website you see a statement by the CEO how climate activists "give me hope". Should bp and shell be policed? Absolutely.
As for the "traditional" eco advocates, many of them are often the first to protest when you want to build a dam or a wind turbine, explaining how precious the nature is that you are destroying. This is actively harmful to the goal of stopping climate change. The more protests, the more requirements that the activists push through, the larger the cost of the project, and the longer it takes. Increased prices of the renewable energy you are providing ultimately slows down the expansion of renewable energy generation due to market effects as well as population.
The risk of climate change is far greater than the risks of fairly small ecosystem disruption to fight it. Many eco advocates don't want to realize this and believe that everyone should live like a monk and go vegan or something. They are completely removed from reality. In itself, it's good for the climate to have more vegan people, but when those advocates protest construction projects to provide green energy for the people who do not want to live like monks, they should step aside instead of standing in the way.
Of course I don't mean it in the sense that they actually support the fight against climate change. I rather mean it in the sense that everyone appears to protect the environment ("I'm Brian and so is my wife"). Even trump always talks about this "clean air" and "crystal clear water" in his speeches even though his actions are the opposite.
Agree that they are likely not related, but I think it fits in with the overall message that we seriously not to take our natural environment serious.
My understanding is that this is caused primarily by large scale industrial farming. A lot of diverse is destroyed as one creates monocultures and cut down trees, bushes, flowers and other things getting in the way of maximum utilization of a monoculture.
It is our extreme profit driven approach to everything. I think we need a combination of a tech oriented solution and a "back to nature" style approach. More of our farm land should probably be grown in the more labour intensive manner with crop rotation and diverse crops which are more favorable to insects.
Meanwhile to keep output high I think we should do more indoor hydroponics style growing. That takes less land area and so we can afford to leave larger areas producing food in a less intensive manner.
I believe we're entering a nasty turbulence zone where too many indicators and reference points are off and now everybody will start shouting whatever conclusion they believe in.
Either you're too confident and won't listen or too anxious and overreact. Well the point is, truth lies in somewhere in the middle as usual.
It's as easy as working on solutions to the climate crisis and removing it as a factor of concern then.
Yes there may be other causes to environmental issues and it would be wise of us to begin to reduce Co2 in the atmosphere so it no longer needs to be a factor in these kind of discussions.
Pesticides and climate change? Not really. Not shipping bees across the country to pollinate crops and reducing the use of round-up are things that can be done to deal with that right now.
Colony collapse is a big problem, but I don't think you can blame it on climate change. Insects are super adaptable, and it's much more likely an overuse in pesticides and other pollutants. If you stop using them and stop trucking bees across the nation, you reduce CO2 incidentally, but that shouldn't be the main focus at all.
I feel like climate change turns into "When all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails." There is a shit ton of plastic particulates in the ocean. That's not due to climate change. There are lakes of sludge in factory cities all over China. That's not due to climate change. Both of those are due to pure consumption; shipping and waste.
If you reduce other real forms of pollution, by consuming less, you incidentally reduce CO2. You focus on CO2 and the world is still going to rip itself apart as we replace CO2 for other pollution.
> If you reduce other real forms of pollution, by consuming less, you incidentally reduce CO2.
> You focus on CO2 and the world is still going to rip itself apart as we replace CO2 for other pollution.
If we try to reduce CO2 solely via reduced consumption we'll have a massive and painful collapse in standard of living, which would likely result in widespread conflict and turmoil, undermining efforts to control pollution altogether. That is an approach that will rip up the world. And it's totally unnecessary, given the scale of potential renewable resources available and the huge opportunities for greater efficiency that maintain and in many cases improve our standard of living.
Increasing solar, wind, and tightly managed nuclear doesn't replace CO2 with other pollution.
Decarbonizing electricity generation and electrifying transportation are strictly less polluting than any previous approach we've taken to energy and transportation since the industrial age.
Also, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. China is already pivoting to take its local pollution problem more seriously for the sake of its own population's health, much as Europe and the US started to do a few decades ago (therefore catalytic converters). CO2 reduction in the energy supply also reduces local particulate pollution.
>a massive and painful collapse in standard of living
If it's a single-minded focus that fails to look at the issue holistically, I agree. As in, if the approach is simply 'everything that produces CO2 is now verboten', that will likely bring us to the result you describe.
But I'm not convinced that's the only feasible approach - As you allude to there are many alternative viewpoints on how our existing political, economic and social norms might be modified to reduce consumption and waste, without throwing out the baby with the bath water. But, they require shifts away from the current track and that’s not likely until the crisis intensifies. By which time, it may be too late to make meaningful change with the benefit of stability.
But therein lies the crux of the challenge - with a 30-year lag between emissions and effects, How do you secure the buy-in for meaningful wide-reaching change ahead of those impacts being felt?
That’s fair; I concede climate change is more about whether patterns. I was trying to extend the concept to all environment-related concerns caused by human activity.
It really, truly, doesn’t matter whether it’s a little human carbon emissions driven and a little human noncarbon emissions activity like over use of pesticides. The two interact and act at different scales. Climate change from carbon and other gases has been accurately predicted to affect the weather trends to this point. The error bars on the future all indicate masses of the earth going under the rising ocean level. That’s locked in regardless of what we do. Imagine what’s locked in if we continue to do nothing. No amount of pesticide is going to lessen or worsen the realization of billions dead.
I don't think most people associate the consider the shape of the landscape and pollutant counts in air and water to be "climate". Climate usually refers to trends in temperatures, rainfall, cloud cover, humidity, pressure, etc.
Sure you could choose to define the terms that way, but I think it would cause confusion given the wide understanding that climate change refers specifically to the phenomenon formerly known as global warming.
The reason science is an improvement over previous types of thought is that it is both explanative and predictive.
Denying that climate change exists at all is what muddies the conversation. All serious scientists in this field believe in climate change, and only debate about which models are most predictive and accurate.
Isn't the real debate about the cause of climate change, and hence the best addressed aspects?
I would hope all true scientists can agree on what they see but still debate there underlying phenomena and this the predictive models
The scientific "debate" about the cause of climate change (not to be confused with insects population drop, which is a much more involved issue) at this point is similar in spirit to the "debate" about natural selection or the health impact of smoking.
In other words, there is no debate at all.
We (the human race) have known about the GHG mechanism for over 50 years. We've had the instruments to validate our understanding for well over 20 years now.
There is some disagreement between projections, the models definitely don't converge to the same point in 20-100 years, but they just don't agree on the breadth and depth of the catastrophe or the timeframe we have left to take action.
There is also disagreement wrt proposed solutions. Some things (like mass afforestation) are really too complex for us to predict the impact.
There's room for debate, but that doesn't mean there's any actual debate going on. I.e. scientists are free to publish papers showing evidence that climate change isn't happening or not caused by human activity.
Where there isn't room for debate is the claim that there's actually an ongoing debate within the scientific community about the basics of climate change. That's just not true at the moment, and claiming otherwise is mistaken at best, and corporate propaganda at worst.
Fine. Debate it. Debate creation science while you're at it. However, it's time to figure out ways to mitigate the problem. We have a working hypothesis that has enough evidence on which to act.
We have run out of room for debate in bad faith. It is unfortunate that debate in bad faith has been used to push political agendas. This is the source of the unquestionable answers I see; two much questioning of answers everyone knows is correct, including the people asking the questions for selfish gain. Thankfully the debate can still happen in the meaningful forums, such as the scientific community always looking at new studies and analysis. Just not in the political arena or media, where I haven't actually seen anything resembling an actual debate in a long time but just people arguing at cross purposes.
> Climate science has become far too unquestionable.
Seems to me climate science is constantly being questioned.
It’s questioned publicly by roughly half of the most powerful politicians of the most powerful country in the world, and t try uat country’s current leader. It was and still is questioned publicly by many of the most powerful companies in the world.
Can you be more specific? Are there particular questions or areas of research within the broad domain of climate science that you believe have been surpressed or ignored by the scientific community?
Most of my questions I have revolve around the solutions being put forth. In particular, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff in policy? I don't want the solution to the draught to be taking away cups of water in restaurants. Policy is where the controversy lies. Policy is where the difficult questions are.
It doesn't help that the text of things like the green new deal speaks so much about "ending oppression" and not about "this is exactly what's necessary to reach carbon stability". It takes what should otherwise be a scientific discussion and drags it into the mud of progressive politics.
Here's an example to what I'm talking about[1]:
> "It aims to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities and youth.”"
Sure. But if you spent some time in "climate debates" (which I do not recommend btw), you'd develop the habit of staying well within a safety margin of 30% for any stated fact (the US, a country of over 100mm people...)
the real debate is where the turning point is in cost Vs opportunity in battling climate change, it would be unwise to dump trillions now only for a couple large countries to judge the risk differently and use the added margin to boost their economy, especially in the current recession that's still looming around Europe, it would cost the continent it's last manufacturing jobs and then that's it, it would have to be shaken up from it's foundation to battle wto and protect its internal market from external pressure and internal fragmentation to have a chance to avoid collapsing into itself
==I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.==
They did add "large-scale biodiversity losses" as part of the climate change threat. Either way, what are your personal qualifications on the subject? It shouldn't be about what's "easiest to believe", but what the data shows us. Here's some data that just came out [1]: 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, continuing a global warming trend, researchers say.
"Six of the warmest years on record occurred during the past decade"
> "Six of the warmest years on record occurred during the past decade"
This data is completely relative. In the midwest, the last several years have been some of the coldest on record. So while the West Coast had some of the driest and warmest weather, the midwest has seen some of the coldest:
The climate statistics are in from the National Weather Service and winter 2013-2014 will go down as one of the coldest on record in both Missouri and Illinois.
State wide temperature data showed Missouri finished the December 2013 to February 2014 period 4.6°F below normal, which is the tenth coldest on record, and coldest since 1979. Illinois saw its 9th coldest winter on record, also the coldest since 1979, with an average winter temperature 6.3° below normal. Climate records date back to 1895.
This is a fallacy. "It's cold where I am" is not disproof of climate change. You can have locally-cold temperatures while global-average temperatures continue to rise.
In fact, "extreme weather patterns" are predicted by climate change scientists. Some areas will get really cold while other areas get really hot. Temperatures fluctuating wildly should be cause for concern.
> This is a fallacy. "It's cold where I am" is not disproof of climate change.
Agreed! It’s just unfortunate people just as often use “it’s hot where I am” to prove climate change. But they get a pass because they’re on the correct side.
>they get a pass because they’re on the correct side.
You know what, if you read an Addition Table, and memorize that 2+2=4, but you don't know how to reason it out from the base principals, field and ring theory, geometry, etc? Sure you get a pass. The experts have done the math many times, and you can trust them.
If you want to tell me 2+2=5 because you found an table from an Addition Denier online? Then yeah, you're going to be ridiculed.
Not exactly "relative". The statement that 2019 was the second-hottest on record refers to global temperatures. The midwest being colder is completely worthless as a counterargument. It's like pointing out that I'm shorter than my father in response to the claim that my generation was taller than the previous generation. Sure, my statement is true, and it's superficially about the same thing. It's worthless as an actual rebuttal, though.
And it was only not the hottest because of a neutral ENSO. ENSO (the El Nino - La Nina cycle) puts a wobble on the trend. A strong El Nino year will bust the current 2016 record.
The UK Met easily predicted this year's temps to be second-highest.
Furthermore, locally larger weather shifts (and even unseasonably cold areas) are completely consistent with, in fact expected, for increased global temperatures. That energy has to go somewhere.
Though "earth's temperature" is indeed a spoken term that hides lots of complexity, let me assure you that under no scientific discussion it is understood to be "the midwest temperature".
(hopefully this will not shock my American friends)
The people quoted in the article are named and have their titles presented. We are able to research their history and expertise if we desire. An anonymous poster on the internet has neither name or qualifications. When the anonymous poster posts "they find it far easier to believe" a theory counter to an article, knowing their qualifications helps level the playing field.
If you had to choose between investing advice from a named financial expert or from me, an anonymous internet poster, you would be wise to either go with the named expert (who you could research their qualifications) or ask me for information on my expertise.
The biggest problem I see when it comes to global warming (and countless other issues) is that there is no one place everybody knows to go to see the list of all the actual promising solutions to these kind of doomsday problems that need our support and financing.
I mean it seems like the biggest agenda right now when it comes to global warming activists is to just get everybody to accept there is a problem and/or exploit the fact that there is a problem to try and gain leverage and control over politics when it hasn't been proven that the public sector is more capable to address this kind of issue than the private sector is.
What I mean to say is how exactly does a carbon tax at the gas pump decentivize us from using gas pumps in the first place, when everything in history suggests that where there is a profit stream there is a benefactor willing to protect it no matter what? In other words, doesn't a carbon tax make the more liberal leaning political parties more dependent on fossil fuels if the taxes produced pay for other unrelated endeavors (e.g. medicare for all, canceling student debt)?
I don't mean to make this about politics because I respect the collected intelligence here enough to know that we can all agree we are the people who actually understand there is an actual tangible problem here, considering we're the lucky few who can actually do the rather straightforward math (co2 has a heavier molecular weight than everything else in the atmosphere therefore it knocks lighter molecules up and away and produces more temperature when the heavier molecules collide with each other more often due to there be more molecules present, i mean this is basic chemistry/physics 101), and know the consequences if we don't do something about it soon....
All I am saying is why aren't we personally doing more to try and solve this issue like it was any other issue?
I mean either we can figure out the solution, or literally the only alternative is we kill all the livestock, tear down all the structures made out of wood (that houses farting termites), and go back to horse back riding. (because as of right now there is nothing to indicate that Tesla can scale to our traveling/energy needs)
Realistically, we need to build a site that is heavily curated so it doesn't get heavily polluted with all the hack scholar noise and lobbyist confusion bullshit, and focus on this problem like the bug it is.
The fact that the ocean cleanup and paul stamets bee solution are both literally something I only luckily managed to stumbled upon because Joe Rogan is for whatever reason the "Bro" form that Christ chose to return this time as, shows that frankly were not doing our jobs. Literally a comedian is doing a better job at solving these kind of problems than we are right now.
Politicians aren't going to do a better job than us figuring out how to solve this issue so we really need to stop depending on them (they aren't smart enough, and none of us are willing to take on the burden of having to kill people in order to ensure a smarter class of politician is elected into office)
If we can do folding@home to simulate protein folding, we can do the same thing to figure out how to fix our carbon output problem.
Just saying. I want a website where I can go to figure out whats going on with paul stamets endeavor, whats going on with that thing Bill Gates was talking about where we use depleted nuclear fuel to make a new kind of reactor, whats going on with the ocean clean up, whats going on with the building sized CO2 suction thing in China, what is going on with fusion, what is going on with solar panel and electric car tech, etc etc.
One site, for everybody...
Were not going to be able to make every American care about this issue. They just aren't smart enough to grok it. And that means Government can't help us because they are bound to serving the will of the dumb idiot people who will never get on board with the reality that we all need to be go back to horses and vegan diets (therefore no politician will ever be able to push such hardcore measures, its a dead end.)
Which that fact alone also suggest we need an engineering solution.
If the solution is that we need to build a million building sized vacuums and a space elevator or pipe made out of carbon nano tubes, then that sounds like something we need to start doing NOW because that will probably take 30 years to build and every single tech corporation to take the first step and say "hell yes im going to put a billion dollars down on this idea".
All it will take is us coming up with an actual real solution and convincing every tech giant to drop a meager billion dollars on the crazy initiative, and then all of a sudden the rest of the world will be like "drkkkk wut r dey doin ober der O.O"????
And then they will be like oh shit this is an actual solution that doesn't require us to stop using fossil fuels. (though we probably should stop using them for the health reasons though hell crisp-r might solve that problem too?!)
Im just saying, we need to figure out either how to get the CO2 into space, into our oceans, or economically split back into C and O2.
> Defaulting to unusual event->climate change [is] evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.
That quote was from "Peter Giger, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group", not part of the "academic institution" in any way I can see.
It's also pretty cherry picked, as there is a ton of other evidence presented in that short article that you're choosing to ignore while you pick on bees.
So... tell me, what is your threshold for action? If bees, wild fires, worsening storms/floods/droughts, CO2 charts, temperature measurements, sea ice levels, etc.. don't meet your criteria for proof because they aren't certain enough, what possibly could be?
Broadly: how certain are you that your opinions are really well considered and not driven by "dogma"?
We're barely starting to understand bee colony collapse, and that's probably one of the more pressing and therefore better explored issues to date. I think it's a little unscientific to see literally every change in ecological and weather patterns blamed automatically on climate change. It's really turning into a social and institutional catch all. Insects in particular - I find it far easier to believe that the consistent global drop in insect populations has far more to do with deforestation and chemical disbursement rather than fractions of degrees of warming that we've seen so far.
Weather patterns are constantly changing even in the absence of climate forcing. Defaulting to unusual event->climate change is statistically invalid in the same way as cold snap->no climate change. More evidence that the academic institution is increasingly broken and driven by dogma.