This article only serves to stroke the ego of people who already believe that CO2 emissions cause global warming. It does nothing for people who already deny it.
Evidence, no matter how strong doesn't serve to change the nature of a man. People would rather bend the logic and the evidence to fit their convenient perception of reality.
Which brings me to the question: "What can change a nature of a man?" Imminent danger? If an assailant had a gun pointed at your head, it'd be impossible to deny. How can this evidence about global warming be presented so that it can't be denied?
The process is sufficiently slow that an individual, especially an older individual of the sort who make up legislatures and other influential institutions, can reasonably expect to die before it does him significant personal harm. Therefore it is fairly easy for such an individual, if given the proper incentives, to dismiss or deny it. As long as there are fossil fuels in the ground that can be extracted profitably, the proper incentives exist. Whether the dismissal represents a genuine belief or simple rapaciousness is irrelevant (and it's doubtful even the deniers themselves know which).
It is quite likely that this phenomenon will continue even when the baseline conditions (those that existed during someone's youth) have degenerated dramatically relative to modern-historical norms. It's the incremental harm over the remainder of an individual's lifetime that matters, against the profits he stands to make from maintenance of the status quo. As long as that's a net win, you will have deniers (the alternative explanations or reasons offered for doing nothing may change, of course, but those aren't important anyway). They'll go away only when the rate of warming is so rapid as to make denial both utterly laughable and obviously unprofitable, at which point human extinction will probably be no more than a few centuries away.
Extinction is unlikely, given the vast amount of energy we have at our disposal (even if that energy's consumption is making it hard to be a biological construct on this earth).
No, the likely scenario is in some ways even sadder: the 1% will survive in carefully-cultivated bunkers by the thousands or tens of thousands, and the vast majority (along with an awful lot of the other life on the planet) will die.
Extinction by this effect is a possibility, but a remote one; humans react faster than the climate, and we're very good at problem solving over time when faced with existential threats. We're just bad at predicting them and solving them when they're on the horizon and a gentle nudge could have desired cumulative effect.
Unfortunately, in the past 5 years we have begun to understand the possibility that runaway greenhouse events from methane release are a not-insignificant detail which most models do not account for.
Researchers who have been working on that area have basically said that if the conditions for oceanic methane clathrate relase is met, everything could change in the span of two decades.
> The projected net impact from global warming is on the ~$2T/year range.
Such projections obviously assume that the warming stops at some point. I don't really see any reason to believe it will, at least not as long as a significant number of humans remain. Whether enough humans will die off before the effect becomes self-sustaining is still TBD.
People of all stripes have the tendency to weight the believability of the evidence based on how well it matches their beliefs instead of weighing their beliefs based on how well they match the evidence.
Which claims that the 'global warming' hiatus doesn't exist and is a surface measurement artefact. Adjusting a subset of the surface measurement data removes 'this artefact' and shows that global warming has still been on the rise. Sorry, it's paywalled, if you want a review of it perhaps try:
But when I heard this NPR article, I thought to myself, "Hold on. Aren't there non-surface measurements that have agreed with the existence of the last 10 year 'global warming hiatus'?" Indeed, the various satellite measurements (which do not suffer from as many methodological concerns) agree that the last 10 years have been relatively stagnant in terms of global warming.
Adjusting data in this fashion is extremely dangerous, and climate scientists are certainly not immune from the "tendency to weight the believability of the evidence".
> Indeed, the various satellite measurements (which do not suffer from as many methodological concerns) agree that the last 10 years have been relatively stagnant in terms of global warming.
I can't engage with the rest of what you're saying, but FWIW a 10 year period is just not a reasonable time period to attempt to draw conclusions about changes in temperature. There are multiple ten year periods of falling temperatures which can be taken out of the obvious increases in temperature which have happened over the last 60 years. Looking at a ten year period, you're going to get much more noise than signal.
I believe it's called confirmation bias, and no one is immune to it.
As long as I'm commenting, I'll note that I'm a climate change skeptic, but only because the reasonable scientist among us is ALWAYS an informed skeptic. The human condition revolves around balancing our beliefs with our observations of reality.
I am not skeptical of the impact of CO2 on the environment. I know there are better understood and more imminent ecological disasters that accompany burning coal and oil (tailing ponds, mountaintop removal, air pollution and associated chronic illness). I refuse to be badgered and guilted into choosing a side on guessing what impact CO2 and warming will have on our Spaceship Earth over the next few decades or centuries.
Reduce waste for concrete, observable reasons. Individually wrapped dounts in plastic are shitty because it's a waste of energy and resources, not because abstractly plastic is made from oil and oil production is warming our earth.
Reduce your usage of electricity so you can invest in novel, more efficient industrial practices, not because Sandy flooded lower Manhattan and you feel guilty about it.
If you understand anything about human nature, you must appreciate that it's a fool's errand to try to get everyone to agree, acknowledge, or even understand a single truth, regardless of how "right" that truth is. And it's even worse when your inconvenient truth impacts billions of people who didn't have the luxury of destroying their ecology in ignorance for a few centuries with no one to call them out in the process (Europe/US vs. China/South America).
In the meantime, we can make meaningful change NOW by working to clean up the ecological messes that today, this week, or this month will cause someone to develop a chronic illness or destroy their ability to earn a living wage.
Only if we let the ends justify the means. If we consider them as ways to learn about the world, logos beats the other two hands down.
That being said, I am slowly turning into a Machiavellian pragmatist: what can I say that will get the results I want? Mayhap that would be the best approach to change peoples' minds. Some people would call it deceitfulness; others would call it diplomacy.
There's another option, keep using calm reason. For instance, run the troposphere trend back from May 2015 and you'll see it is flat to December 1996. UAH 6.0 and RSS are the best (most accurate, least problematic, with highest coverage) sources of atmospheric temperatures we have.
I think the canon answer was 'belief', or more accurately, "Whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can." Ravel actually accepted any answer.
Yeah, when I realized that Ravel accepted other answers it was like discovering Santa Clause wasn't real. "Regret" was the answer that made by far the most sense given TNO's narrative. Anyone who played and didn't choose "regret" was wrong.
Part of the point, I think, is that there isn't a single correct answer. The answer the Nameless One chooses is the answer which is capable of changing him.
You also have to understand, with everything there is a spectrum. There are people no matter what you tell them, won't believe climate change exists, other simply say it's a cycle, just like we've had cooling and heating cycles since the dawn of time.
Also, it's hard for a lot of people to take climate change arguments seriously when you basically tell them, "Well, based on this model. . " So how do you take into effect climate cycles that go beyond recorded weather which started sometime in the 1700's? Real statistical data about the Earth just isn't available to make models very compelling. it doesn't help either when you have conflicting models. Some say we're actually in a cooling cycle, not a warming cycle:
Lastly, the thing which frustrates me to no end is most countries have been reducing their C02 emissions for years now. The real danger is not countries like the US who continue to try and reduce emissions and enforce strict EPA standards, it's countries like China and India who are doing little if anything to curb their emissions.
What can we do? Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
If you are seriously interested in learning the answers to your questions, I strongly recommend spending an hour reading the IPCC's 'Summaries for Policymakers'. Read the Synthesis Report, which covers everything, or one of the three working group reports for more detail ("Physical Science Basis", "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability", and "Mitigation of Climate Change").
The IPCC meticulously prepares these reports -- and I mean hundreds of scientists preparing reports reviewed by thousands worldwide, with extreme attention paid to wording about probabilities -- and then writes summary reports for non-scientific policymakers. If politicians have the ability and attention span to understand them, you can too. :)
The hour spent reading will save you a hundred hours reading the nonsense that is 99% of what is written elsewhere. Also much of what you say is addressed.
FWIW, my parents were rabid climate deniers, after they got cable and foolishly started watching Fox, porn for the ancient (but I digress..). Then Super Storm Sandy. Now when it is being discussed they sit silently.
Personally, it doesn't seem to me that one storm is all that persuasive, from a statistical standpoint. But we are not talking about reason here.
The interesting point here, I think is that statistical evidence aka a trend, didn't serve to convince them. I don't know their exact circumstance surrounding the storm but I would venture a guess that "great loss" was the motivating factor in this case.
Deniers get mocked for bringing up cold winters ("weather is not climate, you MORON!"), but warmists have no problem blaming every hurricane and tornado on global warming.
"Warm" = "more energetic", in every sense of the word. In my own mind, I think of global climate change in a more simplistic way: global energy change. We humans are releasing, in short order, energies that took natural processes millions of years to convert to the form that we're liberating. I can't think of any other philosophy or activity done by humankind that wantonly, aggressively and cavalierly "blows the wad" without experiencing a terrible consequence as a result of upsetting the balance.
Matter can be subject to a chemical or physical process that liberates the energies that keep it together. Temperature is one form of energy that is liberated. It's how power is generated -- we used that heat energy to, usually, make another fluid move faster, and convert that to mechanical energy by way of a turbine, and convert that mechanical energy to electricity, by way of rotating magnets inducing electrical current in a conductor. That matter that we burn/react/oxidize doesn't convert wholly to energy, though. Some of the physical waste products go into the atmosphere, changing how the air itself itself reacts to various energetic inputs, such as sunlight or radiative heat from urban centers. We literally convert matter that took millions of years to make into energies and waste matter that were not there in those quantities for those same millions of years, and the simple, basic physics of it is that the result of that conversion is waste matter and energies that serve to either directly increase heat energy (a small part of human-induced climate change) or change the energy storage properties of the largest, by mass, energy batteries around: the atmosphere and the oceans.
So, yes, when there are stronger hurricanes and more destructive tornadoes outlasting their historical durations and exceeding their historical energies, there is little else but temperature that causes that to happen. And, yes, it goes the same way for winter.
This same climate change can have a chilling effect on winters, due to the changes in the propagation of that energy-as-temperature affecting the jet stream or deep ocean currents. The atmosphere and the ocean are huge, dynamic, swirling masses of differing energies, and the weather we experience is a result of how those masses of air and water move, said motion being a product of their energies (again, temperature). Wind itself, hurricanes, storms, blizzards, tornadoes, etc. are all caused by the interaction of large masses of air at differing densities (itself one effect of temperature). The energy imparted to those air masses comes, in no small part, from the ocean.
I think if more people equated "temperature" with "energy", the layman's summaries of climate change may reach a few more skeptics. At least, the ones who want to learn.
Except that the data doesn't support what you're saying... There's no uptrend in tornados, in accumulated cyclonic energy, or in drought.
I say this as someone who doesn't really consider himself a "skeptic". The scientists who are working in the field know more than I ever will, but I do try to separate the media hype from the legitimate science that is taking place. When people say that X event was caused by climate change, I can't help but think of this data, which doesn't support those assertions.
This reminds me of Dick Cheney's stance on homosexuality.
People will deny for myriad reasons, and are able to disassociate harm caused when that harm is borne by others. But the second it effects them? The tune changes quickly.
We have deniers in our families. The reasons seem to be "I want to be salty" more than anything real.
Edit: that said, I imagine most people behind Fox News and other right-wing news sources don't actually believe the vitriol they spit on anyone who says climate change is man-made... But it's bad for business, so whip up a bunch of people into a fury and make science a political issue, because $.
Edit 2: Wow. The down-votes came fast. Is it because I said Fox News was using people?
For every Dick Cheney there are probably a thousand parents who will ostracize or disown their gay children. And probably as many who will accept their children but don't change their views on homosexuality.
I'm not sure if the left means to praise Dick Cheney for changing his mind on homosexuality, or mock him for changing his mind because he's a right winger.
Neither. It stands on its own, that the right's de facto behind-the-scenes leader doesn't get behind homosexual discrimination almost entirely because his daughter is gay. It's not praise or put-down - instead it's an example.
Parents disowning their gay children is almost entirely religious-based. The Dick Cheney example is one of pure politics, which is a prime example of where the discriminatory views from the right become equally disgusting to people on the right when they're the victims of said discrimination.
Exactly, it's all just political games to scheme money. They shill the side that brings in the most lobbyist advert cash, fame and book deals. Most of the "journalists" on cable TV newstainment are ivy school educated and know they are peddling nonsense, unlikely any of them outside the studio believe their own climate science denial.
But I can tell you one HUGE reason people still deny climate change is anthropogenic. It is because it has become such a political even religious movement and most of those pushing the agenda haven't changed their behavior AT ALL. They're still flying around the world in their big fossil-fuel-guzzling jets, driving their fossil-fuel guzzling cars. They are only concerned with using the theory to advance said agenda.
I'm sorry, if you absolutely believed that the world was being destroyed so badly by rising fossil fuel usage, you would cease using it TODAY and no later.
I think after sufficient debate, reasons behind one of the party's disagreement can be boiled down to things like:
- stubbornness
- conflict of interest
- lack of comprhension
The problem is if the party, that is logically correct, is in the minority, or if the other party has significant social strength, then a lot of social psychology (bandwagon, group think, validation, etc) also plays a role.
Yes, understandably, these are things that prevent agreement. But my question was more along the lines of: what can make someone agree with me despite those factors?
In a moment of accidental honesty, the collective thugs on HN admit that they'd like to point a gun at the head of a man who disagrees. And that it's to be done in order to change his nature - because the mind is irrelevant. What a waste.
Tut, tut. You are right of course, but you are still out of line here. Let me remind you in no uncertain terms that the correct meme is now 'climate change'.
To say 'global warming' confirms that the models predict warming. Of course, the models still DO continue to predict warming, however recent climate data suggests we are in a cooling phase.
We must be vigilant to maintain our thought controls in order to remain part of the group. You will accept that the science predicts warming in a world that is currently cooling. And to confirm to the group that you accept this contradiction, you must force yourself to always use the proper meme in your speech.
Good on you if you don't have time to read the link, but your point doesn't stand if you took a minute to read the linked article. Remaining blissfully, self-righteously uninformed in your name-calling (shaming) routine has no quarter here.
You have somehow contrived that I disagree with you on evil republicans and their wicked focus group-driven shifting of the public conversation! It's a common wickedness in politics that all sides employ that I find distasteful.
I just don't find the bone you're picking here apropos to what I actually said. Sorry I don't feel like playing your emotional appeal to logic game today. Zzzzz.
Your strident insistence now that we somehow disagree on your made-up issue is creeping me out even more. You're projecting, I guess? If you'd take a sec to do a little self-reflection, you'd see something is wrong with your thought process or how you address others or something.
That you can't just confront the creep/groupthink/fascist natures of you and the parent head-on is predictable, but troublesome. Either accept what I said or contest it, don't try to change the subject, it's lazy.
Evidence, no matter how strong doesn't serve to change the nature of a man. People would rather bend the logic and the evidence to fit their convenient perception of reality.
Which brings me to the question: "What can change a nature of a man?" Imminent danger? If an assailant had a gun pointed at your head, it'd be impossible to deny. How can this evidence about global warming be presented so that it can't be denied?