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Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

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Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#101

Post by kevinpet »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #87
kevinpet wrote: post #61

Climate change denier and climate change skeptic focus on whether climate change is happening, from the progressive technocrat view that from these facts there must naturally follow certain policies. If anyone actually wants to persuade the other side, they need to focus on showing that the policies are likely to accomplish their goals and the least intrusive means of accomplishing those goals. But the "we must do so…

> But the "we must do something" crowd can't even seem to accept nuclear energy, which people can interpret as a sign that preventing climate change is just an excuse for policy goals already desired for other reasons. I mean… I’m finding that difficult to argue with. The rest of ”We must do something” is usually “even if it’s the wrong thing” . To which some people could say is nuclear, but I agree it’s an obvious f…

Maybe they are just invisible. I can't recall ever hearing opposition to putting up solar panels (except maybe some details on net metering, subsidies, etc).

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#102

Post by swader999 »

ajnin wrote: post #100
swader999 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I'm sure the climate is changing, partly because of human activity. Where I differ is that I think the impacts of the changing climate will be so small and gradual and so easy to adapt to that it doesn't warrant the massive upheaval to economies that are being prescribed.

I'm curious: current trends predict that the temperature increase from the pre-industrial age to 2100 might be as much as it was from the last ice age (look it up, it was a very different time). And this will happen roughly within 200 years, not 20 000. What makes you think this will be small and easy to adapt to ?

It isn't current trends, it's model based predictions which are woefully inadequate. These models can't predict historical weather or climate when rewound and started any number of years ago. Different models don't agree with other models.

And yet we're making enormous policy changes with them.

So one, I don't think it's worth trying to use these models for policy. Two, sea level rise has only been 1-3 mm per year since the sixties, temp about 0.08 degrees centigrade per decade. Easily adaptable.

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#103

Post by swader999 »

AutumnCurtain wrote: post #60
swader999 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I'm sure the climate is changing, partly because of human activity. Where I differ is that I think the impacts of the changing climate will be so small and gradual and so easy to adapt to that it doesn't warrant the massive upheaval to economies that are being prescribed.

Would you say that you believe Samoa or the Maldives, for example, should anticipate a small and gradual change in climate that doesn't warrant a massive upheaval in their economy?

I honestly think they'll be fine too.

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#104

Post by swader999 »

walrus01 wrote: post #96
swader999 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sea level rise doesn't look that concerning: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/node/1506

The near term charts there seem to be operating on a ten to twenty thousand year time scale. On that scale, of course we're on the far opposite end away from what would be called the last glacial maximum, when a bunch of global water was locked up in ice sheets across North America and Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum

It's currently rising at 1-3 mm per year which of course is a rate that isn't concerning at all.

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#105

Post by clifdweller »

atoav wrote: post #48
chromaton wrote: post #36

I hate to do this but... cherry trees only live about 15-40 years. They're cultivated and bred for their blossoms, among other things. How can we be sure that we haven't selected trees for earlier blooms?

How can we be sure we have not selected them for later blooms and things are even worse than we thought? : )

Being that it is a huge tourism driver in Japan I would assume if it was being done they would go both routes to get 2 separate bloomings. An alternate theory would be to choose tress that all bloom same time and this could if early bloomers have less variability lead to average early blooming. Then would that make up 1% of the increase in data or 10 or 90

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#106

Post by jaza »

yongjik wrote: post #45

It's nice data, but I think the article is overselling it. It's an indisputable evidence of climate change at Japan . However, we do know from historical records that a regional climate can change in its own way. (E.g., the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age of Europe.) The good(??) news, of course, is that we have global coverage of the current climate, plus thousands of regional records going back to prehi…

(author here)

As I said in the article, I was hoping to find more data sets from around the world (five different ones would have been nice), but I really couldn't find anything else comparable to the Japanese cherry blossom records.

Yes, of course, we have plenty more evidence of a different variety: paleohistorical records, temperature models, and very comprehensive modern-era measurements. But nothing else "that has been consistently recorded, in writing, more-or-less annually, for the past 1,000+ years".

I'm not trying to prove or disprove global warming either, think of my article as just the icing on the cake.

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#107

Post by clifdweller »

mousepilot wrote: post #14
sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a climate change denier. A lot of us keep our opinions to ourselves, mostly because we know we don’t know enough about it. Articles like these help change my mind. Well, partly. The question I keep coming to is “how do you know any of this matters, for a definition of ‘matter’ that includes widespread upheaval of human societies?” But at this point I go meh, not worth the risk. Point is, condescending remarks onl…

I listen to experts then try to judge the experts credibility. This goes to listening to the sources of climate change believers and unbelievers. What sort of people believe climate change is real? What sort of people don't believe it? Also, what evidence does each side present, and how credible is this evidence? Just relating what I do.

This is one of the worst things about climate science as it currently stands. In General new theories are often looked about with skepticism until an experiment exists to satisfy the majority. Chemists in the early 1800s theorized matter was made of atoms but it wasn't until experiments were developed early 1900s and math worked on by Einstein got the whole community on board. Similarly we are still in a undecided state of what follows Newtonian-> relativism-> quantum mechanics. None are fully right but which is "more" right. each has their set of experiments that have been proven true or false. Climate science has very little proof because in the short time we have studied it most results cannot yet be proven to be correlation or causation. Unfortunately proof may not come for hundreds of years. The current route has been to take hypothesis and spin them as proof. I think the better route would be to split the theoretical and practical of climate change. we may not know for a long time if it is CO2 vs deforestation vs urbanization if we need to fix one or all to stop our impact/ if it will be enough at that point but that is separate from here are the impacts we see and best guess of what we will see in next 40-100 years and what can we possibly do about it. What if einstein chose not to release relativity because he knew it wasn't perfect or we ignored quantum mechanics because of it holes that are just now starting to be understood.

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#108

Post by clifdweller »

clircle wrote: post #25
sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a climate change denier. A lot of us keep our opinions to ourselves, mostly because we know we don’t know enough about it. Articles like these help change my mind. Well, partly. The question I keep coming to is “how do you know any of this matters, for a definition of ‘matter’ that includes widespread upheaval of human societies?” But at this point I go meh, not worth the risk. Point is, condescending remarks onl…

I'm not a climate change denier, but I'm not sure if climate change is man-made. I believe the climate invariable changes, my issue is that we cannot determine the fraction of this variation that is due to human interference.

It's true there really isn't any proof we have done all of it or how much is from cO2 as to more general urbanization/deforestation; but that should be left to theoretical science and could take hundreds of years to figure out. In meantime does it hurt to make the assumption we are the factor pushing climate over edge and start to prepare methods to deal with it?

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#109

Post by fomine3 »

mikaeluman wrote: post #26

Certainly evidence of climate change. The man-made part is of course not demonstrated in this piece though. I rather don’t like the condescending attitude but will at least applaud the use of the word “skeptic” rather than “denier”; the latter being a more religious phrasing. Disclaimer: I do think man-made climate change is happening and something very much worth addressing. The interesting part is simply what to do…

So possibly is it cherry-pick? :)

Re: Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets

#110

Post by Kluny »

xorcist wrote: post #93
Kluny wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. My issue is that it doesn't help persuade those who agree that climate change is real and happening, but they won't admit that it's caused by humans. The line is "change is constant, the earth is always heating and cooling, there's nothing we can really do about it, you're crazy if you think we caused it and crazier if you think we can prevent it. Better to just adapt." That apathy is extra frustrating for me.

Would you care to ask them what it is that they doubt, specifically? It's basically down to two choices. One can doubt the CO2 greenhouse effect, which everyone with a basic education should know the basic principles of, and which can be demonstrated in home experiments. Or one can doubt that humanity burns the amount of carbon that is reported, but these figures are publicly available in many forms, including the am…

It’s hard to do, cause most often it’s my dad and I have trouble staying calm because of that family dynamic. I could try asking though.
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