Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

To see who's really serious about change, see who publicly admits nuclear power is a necessity.

On the bright side, one US party doesn't own that issue. There are proponents and detractors on both sides.

>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. What's the problem here?

The problem is that they themselves have made predictions which contradict themselves. This is pretty much the status quo for climate change science. They predict everything to happen. When some route happens they claim success.

When you remove these nostradamus folks. You are left with virtually nothing in climate science.

The climate is changing no question, the problem is that the hippies/commies have taken over climate change and are using climate change to propose their political positions as the fix to climate change. Except they have absolutely no basis in their proposals. Go read the "new green deal" and find out why there was unanimous support at crushing it. Yet the presidential candidates are all pushing effectively the same thing in the name of climate change. The new green deal has nothing to do with climate change, it has everything to do with economic inequality.

>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.

Point I am making is that climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.

>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".

Actually we do; whether you think geology and archaeology is a science or not I guess would be the decider here. We know during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth. In fact the areas near the equator became more green. Which isn't a surprise, places like the congo or amazon or other places at the equator arent deserts, they are more green than anywhere else.

If we are currently at "4 nuclear bombs a second" of climate change. Obviously implying imminent and immediate death. Then the Eocene which was 14 celcius warmer would have been a desert planet. Protip; it wasnt. What this 4 nuclear bombs a second actually is... is doomsayers. It's climate alarmism that has been ongoing for 30 years. They are saying we are doomed for 30 years and it's no different than the Mayan Calendar folks.

>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.

Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.

>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.

How would it be bad for the human race? Even if the climate alarmists are correct(which we know they are not) and it's suddenly mad max desert out there. Humans will live just fine; we are planning to move to far more inhospitable places like mars or space.

>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.)

The report which is linked right in the graph with the 2050 and 2100 predictions literally explains itself. They predicted 5 different levels. RCP0, RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5

The predictions in the graph pretty much assume worst case scenario of 8.5.

Except this report has been out for over 10 years now. We now have the actual data to say which of them is happening. The actual number? RCP 0.8

They were off by a multiple of 10. When you look at how bad RCP 0.8 is... the 2100 prediction is like 0.5celcius warmer. Virtually none of the predictions like Al Gore's underwater florida can happen by 2100. This is from their own data. They have been completely discredited.

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

Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth said Florida would be underwater by 2014. http://www.oprah.com/g/image-resizer?width=670&link=http://s...

There's literally the picture of him standing infront of his prediction that Florida would be underwater.

As far as I'm aware we have passed 2014 and he's wrong. Just plain wrong.

>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.

Actually he said it on video MANY times since the film released. To be fair, he's not a scientist. He's just entirely financially dependent on pushing climate alarmism. He was reiterating what the other climate alarmists were saying.

Here's a more recent quote of his: These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven 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.

I actually believe we will see a sea-level rise. Not because of fossil fuels but simply population and renewable energy.

When every house has solar panels and nuclear fusion is pumping out 1cent/kwh electricity. People will use more electricity and this will result in even more waste energy which will heat up the world.

This exactly. There was basically a run on canned goods the day before thanks to media stories, some of which didn't seem to have the slightest bit of logic to them. That doesn't mean that Y2K (and other date bugs) aren't real.

> they themselves have made predictions that contradict themselves

Some scientists have made predictions that contradict other scientists' predictions. That happens all the time, in all fields. Eventually, with a bit of luck, experimental evidence makes it clear who was right, or someone spots the mistake one of them made. It doesn't mean that the branch of science where it happens is bullshit. (That standard would make everything bullshit. People make mistakes and work with incomplete and imperfect information. No getting around it.)

> climate scientists are rolling out the bullshit train. Just to keep their government grants coming in.

Could be true, though frankly I see much more sign of money-motivated bullshit on the anti-climate-science side. But nothing you've said so far is any evidence to speak of for it, because all you've done is find places where scientists disagree about something. Again, that happens all the time, in every field, and the most negative thing it actually tells us is that human beings are fallible.

> during these warmer periods we have significantly more life on earth

Sure. But, as I already said, total amount of life is not necessarily what we want to optimize for. If every human being died and was replaced by a million fruit flies and one elephant, that would be an enormous increase in the total number, and the total size, of living things on earth, but I wouldn't regard it as an improvement.

No one is saying that climate change is going to wipe out life on earth. (Well, I dunno, you can find idiots saying pretty much anything, but it's not a common view anywhere that I know of.)

> "4 nuclear bombs a second"

The thing I think you may be missing is that, in the context of weather and climate, nuclear bombs are pretty small. A big hurricane is something like three nuclear bombs per hour (depends on the size of the hurricane and the size of the bombs, of course).

I haven't heard "4 nuclear bombs per second", for what it's worth, and if the back-of-envelope calculation I just did is right the correct figure is more like 5 x 10^-5 nuclear bombs per second. But "nuclear bombs per second" is a stupid measure because our intuitions for how much energy a nuclear bomb puts out are bad in this context.

> Do you also assert that warming since the LGM is manmade? Overall I'm not seeing the problem at all.

Then perhaps I'm not explaining it clearly. (But, first of all, no, of course I am not saying any non-negligible warming earlier than, say, 1800CE is manmade.) My point is that (1) something could be good for "life on earth" but really bad for the human race, and (2) the state that would result from 14 degrees of warming (or whatever other geologically-inspired figure you might choose) might be entirely survivable, but that doesn't mean the process of getting there in a hurry wouldn't be a big disaster.

(You could live in many other places besides the house you currently live in. But if I knocked it down, it would be a big deal for you.)

> The report [...] literally explains itself. [...] RCP8.5

It does, indeed, explain itself, and RCP8.5 does not mean anything like "8.5% per year". The "8.5" in RCP8.5 means that radiative forcing reaches 8.5 W/m^2 by the year 2100. It has nothing whatever to do with 8.5% of anything or with anything per year.

There is no possible way we could "now have the actual data", because (to repeat) the 8.5 in RCP8.5 is defined by a state of affairs in the year 2100, and it's still only 2019.

Whoever or whatever told you that RCP8.5 means an 8.5% increase of something per year and that we're only at 0.85% was lying to you. Sorry to be so blunt, but I don't think there's any alternative.

Incidentally, RCP8.5 isn't a prediction, it's one of several scenarios used by the IPCC. That is, they say "if X happens, we expect Y to happen" for various X and Y, and RCP8.5 is one choice of X, not of Y. I think it's the most pessimistic of their scenarios. (It's rather early to say how reality compares with those various scenarios; it's not that many years since RCP8.5 and the rest were first defined.) I don't know why the graph you found on Wikipedia chose to use RCP8.5 rather than one of the others, but given that the graph is mostly about past rather than future temperatures I'm betting it wasn't anyone on the IPCC :-).

I would still like to see where your "RCP0.8" figure comes from. I'd make a sizeable bet that it's wrong.

> Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth said Florida would be underwater by 2014.*

I do not believe you. Again, I'm prepared to be proven wrong; I certainly could be. But I will need more specifics than the unevidenced claim that somewhere in his movie he said Florida would be underwater by 2014. Can you give me his actual words? Can you tell me where in the movie he says them? (I think I have a copy somewhere, though I haven't watched it; if you give me something sufficiently specific I can check. I'm not going to sit through the whole thing in the hope of finding what you're referring to, though.)

> Actually he said it on video MANY times since the film

OK. Tell me where to find him saying it on video and I'll check.

> a more recent quote of his

Saying something entirely different. (And without context I've no idea how to interpret it. "Some of the models" could mean, for all I know, that they have a range of 100 models, and one of them with parameters no one much believes says the north polar ice cap is doomed in the very short term. Which could perfectly well have been true; again, scientists make mistakes just like everyone else.)