Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

>That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. >the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say?

I certainly concede that not literally 100% of the predictions will be wrong. In fact I bet I could go predicting and we'll be within similar error margins.

My assertion was more to do with consequence predictions. Sorry for being unclear.

In 2001 the IPCC predicted that wildfires would be out of control because of climate change. In that the increased temperatures would make the summers dryer and make the fires worse. Which is a really bad prediction to start with because smokey the bear is dead because the actual movement to prevent forest fires resulted in the current situation where we have too many trees. Which the IPCC in 2001 did know about fire ecology. They were creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In 2012 they reiterated this flawed prediction: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120703/climate-change-s...

Except they are wrong: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629175502.h... Fires declined 24% in their prediction period. Not only did they cheat in their predictions, they were still wrong.

How about an even more wierd prediction:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11555-global-warming-...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/dec/11/climate-chan...

Only a few years apart. The climate scientists are predicting days will get longer and shorter at the same time because of climate change. Except in the last 50 years the earth rotation has sped up and slowed down. These are patently false.

>This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat".

The most common thing climate scientists like to do is show only the last 150 years. I provided much much better information showing far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all.

>You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada?

The point I was making is that climate change isn't a problem. It's a good thing. The climate does change as I proved. That's not a problem.

>Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ...

A couple degrees celcius isn't going to result in any problem to our ridiculous species. We already regularly live in the hottest and coldest places on earth. Winterpeg Manitoba Canada might become habitable soon if climate change doesnt get lazy.

>... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator)

Very flawed tool with so many assumptions that make it appear far worse than it really will be.

Furthermore, you are correct. 100 metres higher IF the world is 14 celcius warmer.

I actually don't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to warm the planet 14celcius warmer. In fact the graph I provided shows around 7 celcius warmer at the 8.5% increase per year rate. Which has been disproven. Their 8.5% rate is more like 0.85%. Furthermore, fossil fuels are going to run out long before their year 2100 prediction. The world is much greener today than for a long time. It's actually quite unlikely we will see more than a couple celcius increase at current predictions.

> huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island.

In fact Al gore's propaganda film the inconvenient truth predictions have failed. This should have already happened: http://www.npr.org/programs/fa/features/2006/may/flaafter_lg... according to him Florida should be under water like this. Hurricane doesnt count.

How about avoiding 4C, or 6C, or worse?

If the US, which is the largest emitter per capita, and the EU, and the other first world countries can get to zero emissions while maintaining a good standard of living, that at least can provide a longer term template for the developing countries that gets is to some stable level, even if it is above 2C.

We can tell developing countries that they have 50 years where they can emit at current first world per capita levels while they raise their standard of living, but then they have to go to zero like the first world has, or they will be subject to sanctions, high carbon tariffs on their products, and things like that. Throw in good aid packages to help them develop and build their zero emissions infrastructure.

OK, I read it. I don't see anything there that to me seems to justify calling them "officially a climate alarmist organization". Could you elaborate on what exactly about their position you're describing by those words?

Well, for instance, it says that the BBC has an official position that "there is very high confidence that there will be more extreme events – floods, droughts, heatwaves etc." (Presumably, by "more", they mean an increase of substantial importance, not, say, 5%.) This seems more alarmist than the scientific consensus.

Regarding the consensus, they say "The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC’s position". Here, you have to read between the lines. Do you think that this means they will "de-platform" people who are more alarmist than the IPCC? I doubt it. In that respect, it's always, "the latest research, too recent for the last IPCC report, shows that it's worse than we thought...".

I'm not sure I'm seeing the wrong predictions about wildfires; it looks to me as if there are two separate things going on.

1. Hotter drier summers make for more and worse wildfires in places like Yellowstone (where a big wildfire in 2012 was the context for that 2012 article). If human activity makes the climate warmer, these will be worse.

2. Increasing agriculture tends overall to lead to fewer fires, for complicated reasons that differ from one environment to another.

The climate is warming, but at the same time the population is growing and many parts of the world are getting richer and more "developed". So you get both #1 and #2 happening.

The IPCC in 2001, and Steven Running in 2012, weren't (so far as I can see) saying anything about #2. Quite possibly they never thought about the impact of increasing population and development on wildfires, which seems fair enough: that's not really their remit. I haven't seen anything to suggest that #2 is wrong. (The 2017 Science article mentioned by Science Daily reiterates that warming climate tends to increase fires; it just says that over the period they studied the effects of human activity have been larger and in the other direction.)

What's the problem here?

> an even more weird prediction

Again, I'm not sure what the problem is meant to be here. One scientist tried to model the effects of climate change on the length of the day. Some others did the same and also measured what the effect actually is. It seems like the first one got it wrong. Scientists in all fields get things wrong all the time. I don't see that we can conclude anything from this other than that oceanographers aren't all infallible, which is ... not a surprise.

> far larger swings in temperatures in history with no problems at all

Those are in prehistory, which is relevant because we don't have the records that would tell us whether there were "no problems at all".

The most recent of those "far larger swings" you identified is between ~20k years ago and now. That time 20k years ago was the so-called "Last Glacial Maximum", and at that point Canada was completely covered by an ice sheet, as was much of northern Europe; sea level was ~125m lower than now.

I am curious about what you consider "no problems at all".

> I actually don't know of any climate alarmist who claims we are going to warm the planet 14 celsius warmer

Sure. I used that figure because you were saying how fantastic everything was when the planet was 14 degrees C warmer. It may have been excellent in some sense, but I think it would be very bad for the human race if we returned to those conditions. I'm not saying we will (I doubt it), just disagreeing with your apparent opinion about what it would be like if we did.

> the graph I provided shows around 7 Celsius warmer at the 8.5% increase per year rate ... more like 0.85%

Sorry, which graph? I guess you mean the one on the Wikipedia page, which is mostly of (pre-)historical data, with IPCC projections for 2050 and 2100?

What is it that those projections assume an 8.5% increase of per year that's actually more like 0.85%? (I haven't found anything for which that's accurate, but I haven't looked very hard because presumably you can just tell me.)

> This should have already happened

Could you be more specific? What exactly did Gore say was going to happen by when, and where did he say it?

I'll be frank: I do not believe that Gore claimed that large fractions of Florida would be underwater by now, and suspect you have been lied to. But I could be wrong!

Here's the best match I can find for that claim. Gore said something (I can't find his exact wording; it seems to have been vague, perhaps deliberately) about a 20ft (~= 6m) rise in sea levels. If there were a rise that big, then the southern part of Florida would look a little like that picture (though I'm not convinced it's very accurate). But so far as I can tell he didn't put a timescale on it, and I bet he never said or implied that it would happen within 13 years.

Now, I'm pretty sure we won't in fact see a 6m sea-level rise this century, and depending on exactly what Gore said he may have been badly wrong. But not -- unless you have more detailed information to offer that says otherwise -- wrong in the specific way you say he was wrong.