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Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

nature.com

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Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#61

Post by jeromegv »

president wrote: post #53
slg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The description on that episode: >Steven E. Koonin is a theoretical physicist, professor, former Chief Scientist for the BP petroleum company, and former Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration. He's also the author of "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters." I'm not sure "former Chief Scientist for the BP petroleum company" i…

Why not let scientists challenge his arguments then?

Joe Rogan isn’t exactly known to bring people that will really be challenging him. Often aligns right with his false beliefs.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#62

Post by JamesBarney »

blurker wrote: post #7

One of my concerns as someone who is part of the tech community is the innovation delusion. Many of us are focused on "magic pill" technology solutions to get us out of this. Things like fusion, carbon capture, electric cars, etc... As someone with an engineering background, I've been guilty of this type of thinking too. Whenever I encounter a problem I think about how I could apply technology to solve it. However, I…

How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? We can't pass a carbon tax in the US, imagining China or India doing that with much lower standards of livings is insane.

How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactors.

Just as management can underestimate how hard solving technology problems, technologists can wildly underestimate how hard it is to solve people problems.

Climate change is hard people problem. The effects are diffuse and far in the future. People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#63

Post by bdamm »

meatsauce wrote: post #8

Latest IPCC climate report warns that rising greenhouse-gas emissions could soon outstrip the ability of many communities to adapt. ...how did the climate alarmist reports fare over the years? 1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival…

#11 did in fact happen, and to this day there are hypoxic gyres off the coast of many large rivers. The gyre that results from the Mississippi is particularly notable.

Regardless, even today you can find alarmist idiocy without much difficulty. That doesn't mean there's nothing to be alarmed about. It reflects the reality that knowing there's a problem and being able to predict the future are two different things. There are lots of indicators of the problem, but even the best meteorologists can only accurately predict the future 12 hours out, and even that is sometimes too much to ask.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#64

Post by rilezg »

meatsauce wrote: post #8

Latest IPCC climate report warns that rising greenhouse-gas emissions could soon outstrip the ability of many communities to adapt. ...how did the climate alarmist reports fare over the years? 1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival…

I am no seer to say what will happen in the next decades, but many of the cited examples, especially those from 50 years ago, are not to do with climate change, but rather with other pollution issues that, had we not acted strongly 50 years ago to curb pollution via regulation (significant expansion of Clean Air & Water Acts, Endangered Species Act, and others), may well have seen the catastrophic predictions borne to fruition.

So, I would be very wary of taking out-of-context 50-year-old quotes as evidence that the warnings from the scientists of today amount to mere 'climate alarmism'.

Some background on those old predictions:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-didnt-firs...

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#65

Post by Sharlin »

bdamm wrote: post #32
seiferteric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to believe the opposite. Expecting the whole world to give stuff up is more of a "magic" solution than developing new technology it seems.

Not only that, but even the idea itself has become weaponized. Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, sort the trash, eat less meat, use less plastic, be smarter, be more efficient, breed more selectively, vote, drive less, bike more, take transit, read food labels, get educated, etc.} And this is completely to distract…

> Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, [...])

Not just that, ever since the 90s they have actively (and quite successfully) tried to get everybody to forget or ignore the "reuse" and "reduce" (and "repair"!) parts which, of course, would cut into their profits if people actually started consuming less. Reusability and repairability have both gone way down instead during the past 30 years or so.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#67

Post by badRNG »

atlantas wrote: post #36
throwaway5752 wrote: post #2

Scientists have had a pretty good record on this, compared to the general public, industry, and policymakers. I am happy to not throw them under the bus.

> The report also references for the first time “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism” Unfortunately these are not scientists. This just one example, but they are ideologues and activists first who wear science as a skin and bully scientists into submission. We saw how disastrous this was for Covid response with how science was treated as religion ("Believe Science"). The first thing we mus…

> Unfortunately these are not scientists.

Are we really at the point where we are going to claim that the IPCC aren't scientists? This seems to be little more than reactionary backlash at a sound observation of the social impact of climate change on communities (and the report does a great job of elaborating which communities and what impacts.) Must we "eject" every scientist who observes a social impact that someone disagrees with? Should the IPCC stop the discussion the human impact of climate change to avoid offending certain sensibilities?

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#68

Post by wbsss4412 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #42
seiferteric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to believe the opposite. Expecting the whole world to give stuff up is more of a "magic" solution than developing new technology it seems.

I agree. Telling the world to consume less while the population continues to grow doesnt work. Especially when the majority of pollution comes from corporations who have a financial incentive to continuing operating the same way.

That wasn’t the dichotomy.

It’s technical solutions vs social political ones. Not collective vs individual.

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#69

Post by jcranberry »

RappingBoomer wrote: post #6

but um global warming...err, I mean climate change...

I'm no climate scientist but a few years ago when I went through some studies they seemed to universally refer to it as anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

IPCC is a political organization so they might be trying to take a more neutral tone?

Re: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought

#70

Post by munificent »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #21
apocalypstyx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one distinction between your list and the present situation: there is a difference between the opinions of an individual scientist and scientific consensus.

Can you provide a falsifiable definition of "scientific consensus"?

This is a fascinatingly weird sentence.

You're using falsifiability here, I assume, to deliberately invoke the Popperian notion of what is and isn't science, but then applying it to a description of the science process itself.

The short answer is that, no, no one can provide a falsifiable definition of scientific consensus any more than one could devise an experiment that uses the scientific method to validate the scientific method. It's validity would have a circular dependence on its own validity.

Science is not science all the way down in some infinite regress that somehow magically stands up. It is not a self-proving Ouroboros.

Science is a particular social system—a set of rules, culture, artifacts, and participants—for establishing consensus and one particular definition of truth. It happens to have a great track record for producing predictions that correlate with objective reality. But it's still ultimately a social system.

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