Too late.
Gee, I wonder where you get your facts.
Scientist argues that we cannot just wait for the world order to change to tackle the climate crisis
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I’m not an expert but even I can spot clear errors or misunderstandings in the claims written in those sources. Two examples:
One major misunderstanding is that past changes within narrow limits are extrapolated to future conditions where temperatures exceed the limits. For example, the claim that corals benefit from warming: " Corals like it hot. …“, " For every degree (Celsius) temperature increase, corals grow about 20% faster. …”. This may be true within past temperature limits but definitely not when temperatures exceed the critical level. In addition, ocean acidification (caused by increased amounts of CO2) is very bad for corals and many other marine creatures.
The claim that temperatures should be measured as 300-year average values is absurd. Drastically rising CO2 values and the associated warming are very recent phenomena. If you dilute it with the values from the previous 270 years, of course the situation does not look that bad.
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If more forest fires are happening due to global climate change, all the more reason for controlled burns.
By “several CLIMATE scientists?” By “the world’s most important CLIMATE SCIENTIST?”
What if I take your “several” and raise it to thousands who oppose your “several?” Or what if I deem someone else as the most important climate scientist?
The Washington Times article is highly mislead and basically a smokescreen that ignores why scientists are concerned about our current warming trend. The fact that we know so much about past climate is precisely why it is concerning now.
For example, we have this graph of historical CO2 levels going back some 400 million years:
From here you can see that some of his statements are just plain incorrect. I’ll let you try to fact-check the fact checking fact checker to see if his facts hold up to fact checking facts. It would be a good exercise for you to try to fact check the fact checking fact checker.
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Already happening. My friend even does it on his own vast property. I tried to get him to visit this forum but he can’t take a lot of nonsense.
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I suppose that the sun is also acidifying the oceans?
The fact that you think it is absurd only highlights you inability to understand the science.
Earlier in the 20th century there was a small increase in solar output and a corresponding small increase in temperature. Not that hard to understand.
In the later part of the 20th century there was a rapid and staggering increase in atmospheric CO2, a known greenhouse gas that traps heat. During that time we saw a much larger increase in temperature, even though there was a slight decrease in solar input. Not that hard to understand.
What is it about these concepts that you are having such a tough time understanding?
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Inside Climate News found that decades ago, Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research and then worked at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed. The used the playbook established by the Tobacco Companies, which successfully peddled doubt about the harm caused by tobacco and avoided responsibility for decades.
See the documentary Merchants of Doubt for more information (It’s available on Amazon Prime)
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In some cases, they even used the same scientists and publicists.
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very true. The conservative George C. Marshall Institute was also very involved in providing friendly contrarian scientists to the anti-regulation cause. And it wasn’t just oil and tobacco.
- Nearly three-fourths of the American West is grappling with the most severe drought in the recorded history* of the U.S. Drought Monitor.
*That’s only since 1999, but all you have to do is look at drastically lower lake levels and higher summer snow lines, not to mention receding glaciers, to know that it’s a long term trend and no fluke.
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The problem for the skeptic in me is the earth is billions of years old and there is a lot of natural variability in the earth system and meteorology. As a New Englander I can attest to the old adage, “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” There were plenty of meteorological disasters before industrialization. Attributing individual events to global climate change cannot be accurately done IMHO. There are lots of sinks and feedbacks, unknowns and poorly modeled parameters in our global climate models.
Establishing “long term trends” —based on how many years of data?— seems questionable to me. I’m honestly skeptical of looking at 100-150 years of hurricane data on a planet that 4.6byo.
I say this as one who does believe in human induced warming. I’m just not 100% sure I believe the models and there is a tendency by popular audiences to blame all weather events on human induced climate change as if this stuff hasn’t been going on for billions of years. Meteorology has always produced extreme events and “outliers.”
As far as the rest goes, I honestly believe we simply have to use science to adapt to climate change. We can try to slow it down a little but we aren’t stopping it and we have no right to stop or deter poorer countries via sanctions from developing using fossil fuels when their id how the rest of us came to power. That we can stop global climate change is a children’s fantasy to me.
Vinnie
P.S. I like hot showers. Heat in the winter and AC in the summer, Walmart and the ability to drive anywhere I want. I am not apologetic about it.
Me too. I’m especially thankful, as seniors during the pandemic, that we live within the grocery delivery range of the one Walmart in our town (they just started delivery here in December of 2019), even though we live outside of the city limits on the diametrically opposite side of town.
We are talking massive population and industrial increases in a period of less than 200 years, never before seen. So you cannot nonchalantly say, well, it’s only been a couple of hundred years, look at the age of the planet.
I think all the graphs of the data tell a pretty compelling story. And then there are the irreversible positive feedback loops that have been started, like thawing tundra releasing sequestered CO₂ and Greenland’s melting ice being lubricated by the meltwater and sliding faster. So there absolutely is urgency that we should not be ignoring, not that we are going to save the earth. (I expect more megacryometeors from more extreme variations in the tropopause, à la Revelation 16:21.)
You are right in that blaming all weather events on human induced climate change is incorrect as are the claims that unusually cold winters are counterevidence against climate change. What has changed are the trend (long-term warming) and the variability of weather (strength of extreme events increased, for example because of warmer oceans or more irrecular jet streams around the arctic).
Also the patterns and timings of weather events have changed. The global amount of rainfall has probably not changed much. What has changed is the location of rains and the timing of rains. Some areas get more rain and floods, others less - sorry California and Mediterranean areas, your long-term prospects do not look nice. Devastating floods and long drought periods may occur in the same areas because half of increased precipitation may happen during the six wettest days* while the length of dry periods may increase - first drowning, then drying.
*: Pendergrass & Knutti 2018. Geophysical Research Letters 45
I concur there has been a rapid and unprecedented spike of CO2 the least two hundred years that goes well beyond any natural variability we see. Of course, we don’t have any good meteorological data going back a million years. We can only look at trends over a century or so. Intuition and data are not the same in science and a limited set of data is, by its very definition limited.
My gen chem 2 teacher used to love to talk about the methane trapped in the ice. Though it has a shorter residence time, its capacity for warming is about 20x as strong as CO2 and it also gets released as the ice melts.
Yes, I also think the overall evidence is pretty clear. Still not buying the blame extreme weather events on global climate change yet though. There is a lot we don’t know about the climate system and a lot of poorly modeled stuff. To trust a limited data set based on 100 years of meteorology is a bridge built too far for me.
Also, coastlines change. It is a brute fact of history. 20,000 years ago, during the last ice age, things were very different. Florida is probably in trouble in the next few centuries. Though minimal compared to projected sea level rises, it is also sinking ~.5mm a year (NY is rising a little : isostatic rebound) from there last ice age. That will become somewhat significant combined with SLR over a few hundred years.
Honestly, thwarting global climate change seems good in the short term for coast lines in the next few hundred years but longer term for humans, we are in a warmer interglacial period that was expected to be ending any time leading to the next ice age (they’ve been occurring regularly the last 2.5 million years). Last I heard, my home state of CT was covered in ice that may have been a mile thick during the last ice age. I wonder if you can grow crops on ice?
Warming the globe a few degrees may honestly be the best thing we can do long term for future humans. Of course, that doesn’t help the people now living in Africa experiencing droughts. But we have the resources and technology to desalinate ocean water. But we are talking $1-2 per cubic meter verses change for river water. For a planet where 71% of the surface is covered in water, lack of access to water should not exist. In the end it all boils down to money, political borders and so forth.
Vinnie
This may be true enough in one sense - but using it to deny the long term trends (climate) is like using the wind-driven sloshing of waves to deny any longer term measurements of actual water level rise. The people whose inundated homes on the shores of such a lake would beg to differ with you that the effects of such rise can’t be real because “seasonal ebb or flow or even more immediate ‘wave sloshing’ is the only reality you get.” Those things are true and real enough in the moment. But that in no way obviates the also-very-real longer term rise.
And yes - over geological time scales nobody really knows what’s coming. We may get slogged by an asteroid that would then reduce all long-term prediction as nothing more than a moot point. But that is to just try to deny the middle-term predictions (the ones that actually impact your children and grandchildren) by going the other way and saying that million-year scales are the only realities that matter. But that’s not true. To human civilization right now, you should very much care about the trends we see unfolding on the level of decades and centuries. Desperately casting about for distractions to either side of that is just a “merchants of doubt” tactic.
My whole point is what is a long term trend? I’m skeptical 140 years of hurricane data qualifies when dealing with earth’s climate system.
Vinnie
That’s a good question. I think it has an anthropologically practical answer. I’ve admired the slogan at least, of a company that makes laundry detergent: “seventh generation”. The claim is that as they develop their products they want to have as their guiding principle: how will our decisions - our products - affect our children out to seven generations from now? (I can’t speak to how well that particular company actually follows their stated principle - but it is an admirable principle at least!)
There is a middle ground between crying that “the sky is falling” about every immediate ebb and flow of something (what you called “weather”), and the unrealistic pretension that we will be able to forecast thousands or millions of years into the future enough to know our effects (if any) on that. You are correct that neither of those is a practical scale for trends. But on a scale of decades and centuries, we should be very concerned about our impact on the environment - and we are culpable for not acting on information that is likely to have huge (and in many ways adverse) impacts on our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Science can and does produce compelling evidence about trends on those scales. Desperate denials of areas of strong consensus is reminiscent of tobacco executives trying to plant doubts in your mind that cigarettes really are all that hazardous to health.
Models predict that we can prevent the worst scenario by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It would be possible to even stop climate change by taking carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s a political decision that we have not been investing money to it - even a choice of not doing anything is a choice.
Stopping climate change is not a children’s fantasy. Getting the politicians and big business to invest enough of funding to it may still be fantasy, at least until the short-term costs of doing nothing outweigh the costs to act.
I admit that I’m a bit pessimistic about the possibilities to stop climate change or having anything less than a 2.5+ degree global warming. Not because it’s impossible but because short-term profits are a stronger driver than long-term profits. The CEO of a family-owned company said that their quarter in business is 25 years, not 3 months. It would be ideal if that would be true for the other companies. Yes, that is fantasy.
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There are a lot of countries in the world. Dirty energy is the best way for them to grow and give their citizens a better life. Thats a problem that is overlooked. Fossil fuels lead to a high quality of life for most and allow poor countries to grow and evolve.
Big business is about money as your post suggests. Climate change is expensive. I’m a realist. Big businesses will move to areas with less restrictions if it becomes economically beneficial to do so. There are too many moving parts here and too many places pumping CO2 into the air. It is time to adapt and invest in science to come up with a controllable way to stabilize earth’s energy budget.
The bottom line is the best thing anyone could ever do for the environment and to stop global climate change is to not have children.But telling people not to have kids is too radical even though its the best way to lower our overall carbon footprint. But Christians want to be fruitful and multiply. Someone may want to tell God to be careful of what he asks for. By not having a child I’ve already done more than any parent could ever dream of for the environment. Sooner or later, population control will rear its head in society the way we are going. [edited to add Of course we don’t need it much, the rate is slowing down because children are no longer an economic asset] 11 billion people by 2100. Small changes we make will probably be counteracted by population growth. Exactly where the balance tips I don’t know but either way I think it is mostly too late until newer technology comes along on a wider scale. I also still think averting the next ice age is a very pressing concern for the longer term future of humanity. The climate is always changing.