Same here, except the shorts bit. Not sure we are winners so: never before seen droughts in summer, extreme weather events and flooding at least every other year at scales we used to call once in a hundred years events. And then we are a lot less effected by all of this than other regions.
Also, I love snow and winter, so I really do miss this!
I went to a private talk a long time ago. The main point was "climate change isn't real, but if it is, it's not our fault. And if it is our fault, then it's not that bad."
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
Many studies over years that some countries are net winners (i.e. more arable land in higher latitude etc). And sometimes winning is simply your competitors doing worse (i.e. some countries need to divert more resources than others). Competition increasingly > cooperation in geopolitics.
Do these studies consider collapsing supply chains and unequal global fossil resource distribution necessary for food security beyond arable land? Because modern agriculture sure won't do without phosphorus supply from Morocco. Is the local fauna and flora diverse and robust enough to adapt to rapidly changing ecosystems? Can those "net winners" build their MRI machines, when lethal wet bulb temperatures close rare earth mines in China? Will they have the means to defend their prosperous islands against billions of refugees and enemy soldiers at their borders? Do reactionary authoritarian governments qualify for "net winning" societies?
I presume "net winning" suggests something very misleading here. It certainly won't mean a net gain over the status quo in wealth and welfare.
Not "woke" climate change only studies designed to propagandize / mitigate climate change. But read enough disparate industry analysis and you can connect the dots. i.e. up here in Canada, we'll gain arable land with receding tundra, we have large reserve of every mineral you can imagine. Shit hits the fan, supply chains get disrupted, we will tear up indigenous ecosystems to process rare earth and play to our geoeconomic strengths while poor global south chokes from web bulb. We'll burn extremely poluting tar sands oil / discover more coal veins to gasify into fertilzer. We'll gain transit dues when North West Passage becomes reliably passable. Geographically isolated, we'll have large oceans and militant US to drown/shoot climate refugees. On balance, we have potential do significantly better when everyone else does worse. That's not pleasant, that's not what anyone respectable would write about, but when things get bad, that will be reality. Some winners can win big, or at least much more than they (and others) lose. And I'll be walking around winter in shorts, angry that I spent 100s on a nice winter jacket and feel bad for rest of world. Like that's not going to be the narrative being sold. But as soon as the economic benefits come, people who benefit will shrug, and maybe do performative protest. But in the back of their minds, they'll appreciate their good fortunes.
This sort of anecdote is exhausting. Growing up, I was skeptical of "global warming" and heard endless admonishments about how "weather is not climate" any time anyone around me made a comment about a particularly cold day proving anything about climate.
But now, it's acceptable to make this kind of anecdote on an unseasonably warm day.. and on unseasonably cold days! Now you're an idiot if you don't see that weather is climate, and no matter what the weather does, it's further proof of anthropogenic warming.
Now, I think it's quite possible that the climate crisis is real, but if every observation leads to the same conclusion it's not science, is it? Anecdotes about a warm day in January push me away from the alarmist side, because it tells me that the people promoting the crisis see evidence in everything, both real and imagined.
> because it tells me that the people promoting the crisis see evidence in everything,
Are you saying you really believe that academic papers studying the GLOBAL temperature are using individual local weather events as evidence? That if you go to the IPCC reports they'll say "it sure was hot in California this week, so our gut feeling is..."?
Are there any other fields of science where you would dismiss the science based on other non-scientists associating themselves with it making anecdotes?
I think this is how to look at it:
Step 1) The science about GLOBAL TEMPERATURE doesn't have anything to do with local weather. It's statements about what you will see as the global average. That's testable, verifiable, etc (do you want to bet that the global average is COLDER in 10 years than today? I'll take your bet...)
Step 2) Given the predictions about the global temperature -- one may point to individual weather events as illustrations -- "hey, in the future we'll see more weather like this as the increased energy in the systems changes the patterns from what we are used to in the past". That's a valid statement; but it's not meant as anecdotal proof, it's just making a statement on what you're likely to see more of now and in the future, based on science that is NOT based on local weather events, but on looking at averages for the entire planet.
I dont get it. Every scientist & 5yo kid will prove you that things accelerate with 9.81 m/s^2 when falling, and guess this is still science? Which is a proof of cobtradiction that your point doesnt hold.
It doesn't really make sense when talking about physical constants. But if someone told you that things always fall at that speed everywhere, including on space stations and on the moon, you might suspect something had gone wrong.
The point dingnut makes is that science has to be falsifiable. That means you have to be able to articulate what set of observations would lead you to abandoning your theory. If someone showed there was a place on Earth where things did not fall at that speed you would consider the claim falsified.
So what dingnuts is saying is that he feels that claims about climate are becoming unfalsifiable. If it's hot, that's evidence for climate change. If it's cold, that's also evidence for climate change. If there's no snow, climate change. If there's snow, also climate change. If it's just a sort of average week, then that's ignored and considered to not mean anything.
It's maybe more of an issue of journalists, but the trend towards presenting every possible weather event as leading to the same conclusion leads to the question of what kind of short term weather would be accepted as evidence against the theory. Is there any?
1) No, no local or short-term weather is ever going to falsify or prove anything about the global average.
2) Assuming you are already convinced by the science that the global average temperature is quickly rising; one might ask: What are the consequences? And one of the consequences is more extreme weather, as there is more energy in the weather systems..
3) So one may point to extreme weather events and say "in the future, we'll have more of those, and that's why we need to stop emitting CO2". That doesn't mean the weather event is proof of global warming in any way -- it is just pointing to an illustration of what will happen if global warming continues; as measured by the GLOBAL temperature.
Dingnuts' complaint is about (1). Your statement is true, but it's not treated as true by the media nor increasingly by governments, who are comfortable making claims of the form "this weather today is proving that the climate is changing (for the worse)".
It's a valid complaint. It's one about the practice of the philosophy of science though, not something that can be refuted with claims about temperature or CO2.
Nonlinear dynamics means that adding heat to a partially-closed system doesn't result in an even distribution of increased temperatures. Instead, we observe a net increase in temperature averaged over the planet's surface, and wild swings in local weather due to the basically infinite-dimensional state space of the planet's atmosphere being nudged. No single observation of local weather should ever be attributed to climate change, I'll give you that.
Basically, climate change is occurring, and is known to cause extreme weather events. So when there's an extreme weather event, it could be evidence of climate change. Each individual one is not proof of climate change, but in aggregate they are strong evidence. And of course they're not the only evidence.
I mean, you can read all the data instead of relying on newscasters for scientific information. The first IPCC report came out in 1990 and, to my understanding, accurately predicted both a rise in average temperature and the resulting increase in extreme weather events. Both of which have occurred at unprecedented rates. All of the Reports are available online. Just because you do not want to read the data doesn’t mean it is not there for you to debunk. The IPCC has made all sorts of predictions, along with confidence metrics, for almost every component of the climate and local weather. I mean this tongue in cheek, but if you know more than the hundreds of scientific authors and thousands of reviewers that have contributed to the Panel Reports you should help them out:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
When the normal winter climate in my area has in average 5 months of freezing temperature with an average at -4C and now it's only freezing for two weeks and I'm getting 8C to 12C instead, climate change is the reason of this insane weather change.
The changes are so big that now the weather is also the climate, they are so large that they became visible with the naked eye without any measurement.
The CO2-induced temperature rise might not be as severe as predicted. I suspect a "moral panic" over climate change. There's huge amounts of money, influence and power to be made exaggerating the problem into a catastrophe, there's a bandwagon effect.
I personally think desertification will increase, there will be problems with weather cycles in certain regions. But no end of the world, at least in my opinion.
