Imagining the Future History of Climate Change 495
HughPickens.com writes "The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future," that takes the point of view of a historian in 2393 explaining how "the Great Collapse of 2093" occurred. "Without spoiling the story," Oreskes said in an interview, "I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings" about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called "carbon combustion complex" that have turned the practice of science into political fodder.
Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.""
Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.""
The Age of Stupid (Score:4, Informative)
History is written by the victors (Score:3)
Re:History is written by the victors (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no reason to assume that humanity will go extinct - billions may die if things get really bad, but so long as at least some algae and insects survive the transition at least a small population of humans should be able to as well. Wouldn't even be the first time it's happened - genetic evidence suggests that the global human population fell to only a few thousand individuals during the last major ice age.
Re:History is written by the victors (Score:5, Interesting)
The mass (near) extinction of humans need not be noticeable. All that is required is that the environment become inhospitable enough to humans to cause the birth:death ratio to drop below 1. Given that currently everyone still dies, this simply means that people stop producing at least 1 child per parent (e.g. 2 kids per hetero-normative couple) that survives and produces more children.
This could mean people start dying of disease and famine due to global warming. Or it could just mean that people decide not to have as many children because it decreases their quality of life. When the earth had lots of easily accessible natural resources, making lots of children was a good strategy. Maybe when you can barely find enough food for yourself, you might choose to have only 1 kid instead of 2.
The "near extinction" (i.e. drastic lowering of human population), need not involve any significant amount of suffering (not more than we have today anyway), and it may not even need to be noticeable without statistical analysis. If this decline happens over thousands or tens of thousands of years, it will not be noticeable over the course of a human lifetime. Failing to notice a 0.1% drop in population over your lifetime will be like failing to notice a 0.1 degree increase in average temperature over your lifetime.
In fact, if you believe overpopulation is a big problem, this kind of gradual decrease in human population may even be considered a good thing until our survival as a species begins to be threatened by it.
I suspect something far more normal will happen. We will simply hit an equilibrium point, where the world is just hospitable enough to cause humans to have about a 1:1 birth:death ratio, with some fluctuations. Technology may even raise this equilibrium point well above the 7 billion people we have now.
Re:History is written by the victors (Score:5, Informative)
There are about 7.25b people. There were about 1b people in 1800 and I don't think anyone would consider the population to be going extinct then. Right now in the lowest reproducing countries the rate is 1.3 children per female. That induces halving in population per 2 generations. Or about 6 generations so even if we were to have the lowest rate in the planet we would be in 200 years about where we were 200 years ago. At that point resources would be abundant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I get that. But humans right now are numerous in almost every habitat on the planet. A gradual falloff isn't remotely like extinction. Extinction becomes a real possibility at something like 1000 humans. That's 28 halvings or 56 generations or around 1400 years of contraction. That's a very long time to suppose that a trend continues. Especially given the trend is self correcting as resources become more abundant as the number of humans decreases.
Re: (Score:3)
Humanity went extinct because of superstimuli [wikipedia.org], among other reasons. Our slaves (robots) didn't realize it until nearly the end, and then were made so they couldn't do anything about it.
Re:History is written by the victors (Score:4, Insightful)
And how "inhospitable" would that be? Both Eskimos and Berber are doing fine.
And climate change doesn't destroy climate globally anyway, it just changes it around. We'll likely end up with more arable land overall long term under the most severe climate change scenarios, even if the transition is more disruptive.
Actually, we already have effectively reached that point, and not through material privation, but rather development. Developed nations tend to stop having population growth.
Re:History is written by the victors (Score:4, Insightful)
Or JUST POSSIBLY it could be like all the 60s/70s end of the world nuclear Apocalypse fiction..
Or in fact the 70s 80s 'big freeze' Apocalypse fiction.
Or, well, zombie plague fiction, etc, etc.
Its 'insightful' that in their own description of the book they appear to complain about the limits of non-fiction for discussion of 'scientific ideas'
Damn those limitations of, you know, actually having true facts and not just making shit up.
Really, this is one step below gutter science, its embarrassing to the whole debate.
Re:History is written in the geologic record. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:History is written in the geologic record. (Score:4, Insightful)
Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.
Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.
Re: (Score:3)
Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.
I don't think you could say that with confidence. Geocarbsulf is already pretty rough by 55 million years ago.
But certainly, no species of primate that is currently existent were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than we're going to be seeing.
Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.
I don't see how speciation could occur without internal variation in a species. There's nothing to differentially select for.
Moreover, within an ecological system, a drop in genetic diversity of a species can result in a drop in species b
Re: (Score:3)
Help! We are going extinct! There are too many of us!
Do you seriously believe your nonsense?
If climate change really caused serious problems, it would just cause human populations to die back. Extinction simply isn't in the cards.
Fear Mongering, does it ever go out of style? (Score:3)
I love Fear Mongering, mainly in the Halloween season.
But seriously, wtf? 2093 is the future, and based on past predictions of the future, I think we have no idea what life is going to be like, good or bad. Science hasn't failed us, like always, human arrogance fails us.
Ninety Three Years (Score:3, Insightful)
We went from:
Horses to landing on the Moon with decades to spare.
About 1.8 Billion people to nearly 6 billion. If not for war and corrupt governments, all 6 billion would be well fed.
From about 20 WPM on the Telegraph to 100 terabits per second (experimental)...unless you are using Microsoft Windows, then it's more like 20 bytes per second.
Average life expectancy of 46 years to now approaching 80.
I think we will be able to handle whatever fantasies this guy can dream up...but we still won't have a flying c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A sentiment heard exclusively from people who would make excellent extras in that movie.
Re: (Score:2)
"Average life expectancy has actually been going down recently, at least in the US."
That is very interesting. Can you cite a source for your statement.
Here is what I read recently:
Life expectancy in the USA hits a record high by Larry Copeland, USA TODAY 3:54 a.m. EDT October 9, 2014 [usatoday.com]:
Re: (Score:2)
"Average life expectancy has actually been going down recently, at least in the US."
That is very interesting. Can you cite a source for your statement.
Life expectancy in the USA is going up, however the USA's ranking in global life expectancy rankings is going down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Re: (Score:3)
You're right about the US in general; I should have said in SOME parts of the US: http://theweek.com/article/ind... [theweek.com].
> We're not developing new rockets from scratch because we forgot, we're doing it because the old tech is obsolete and being replaced by new tech.
If by 'new tech' you refer to the SLS, it's largely based on the space shuttle, which is 1970's technology.
> Down in this sense means no advances or even the forgetting of things. Name one field where this is occurring to any significance.
I'll
Re:Fear Mongering, does it ever go out of style? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm old enough to remember them saying that the worlds rainforests would be gone by 2010. That the water would be so polluted by 2000 that we wouldn't have anything to drink. That north america would be a desert by 2012, and southern canada would be semi-tropical by 2015. Fear mongering is the way money grubbers make money.
Oh, and those predictions? They came out while I was in grade school...in the 1980's, still got the pamphlets and handouts somewhere for them.
Re:Fear Mongering, does it ever go out of style? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
This really comes down to only the most extreme views on any subject garnering media coverage and hence becoming topics of general conversation. So far as global warming goes both sides have their own village idiots that spout off at every opportunity and make predictions that have no bearing on reality. What's sad is that even the most intelligent among us can fall for believing that any of those idiots are right. My Grandfather who is very smart and worked as a nuclear engineer for much of his life dismis
Re:Fear Mongering, does it ever go out of style? (Score:5, Insightful)
That the water would be so polluted by 2000 that we wouldn't have anything to drink.
I guess you missed the huge amount of regulation that has come in regarding pollution in waterways in the last 50 or so years then? Or do you think that this prediction would still have been wrong if factories had been allowed to keep dumping waste into rivers? In fact, maybe you should just try visiting some of the parts of India and China where they've managed to build an industrial base without such regulation and see how the water tastes. The entire point of making such predictions is so that we can avoid them happening.
Re:Fear Mongering, does it ever go out of style? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes and no. If you go back to the 1930s, a lot has changed, but a lot has stayed the same. People in the 1930's already had cars, Relativity, Evolution, and were considering things like nuclear reactions and going to the Moon. They had phones and they were already ready for wristwatch phones.
Move forward to today, and we have the computers and the Internet, which make things somewhat different, but in the end, this isn't that different a world. There has been some revolutionary stuff going on, especially in comparison to previous centuries, but we still aren't teleporting around, using psychic powers, or speak a completely different language or anything. And despite some work with landing on the Moon, that effort is still basically a one-off program that hasn't gone anywhere, let alone to the stars.
Indeed, where futurists are most wrong is where they move too far from incremental progress. That is obvious, of course, but it is also why gloom and doom types are just as often wrong as the guys who think we should already be flying around at Warp 6.
We will have a lot of trouble predicting the next revolutionary change, but unless there are many of those changes, the world won't be incredibly different than it is now in many ways.
So, in regard to scientists being too conservative, I'm not sure that this is a warranted criticism. Change may be accelerating, perhaps, but it is still pretty slow.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Tomorrow will be like today because today was like yesterday? Is that what you're argument amounts to?
One thing, we live in a finite world. We already reached peak coal in the USA in 1998 (in terms of energy potential, not tonnes mined, as different grades give off different amount of heat, and the best grades were mined first).
Another example, what today was was large sized tuna, in the 1950s and 60s would be considered mid-sized most likely, like in the Japanese fish auctions for sushi and other food pr
I'm sick of this shit. (Score:2, Insightful)
You want someone to blame? Blame the fossil fuel special interests groups that taken up, and refined the tactics of big tobacco. Blame the billionaires that fund conspiracy theorists, and wack-a-doodle that muddies the debate. Blame the hair brain bloggers that have made a living out character a
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Easy for you to say. Scientists at least found the problem, and have been telling people about it since the 70s. What has everyone else done, except try to blame the scientists and use them as scapegoats? Not a whole hell of a lot, except whine about it.
Re: I'm sick of this shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're looking for a solution "the political, economic, and technological realities of today"?
Let me quote Albert Einstein for you:
Re: (Score:2)
So, you're a scientist. What are you gonna tell Vladimir Putin, Abdallah whatever and the people from Goldman Sachs?
It is hard to come up with a political solution, one that doesn't involve nuclear war.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nonsense. They most certainly have. Gradually shift to green. What we spent on the Iraq war would have been more than enough to fund America's switch to primarily being on wind power.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of money is to be made by some very big companies/individuals on keeping the status quo. That money buys political klout. Scientists might be able to make some technological suggestions, but - by themselves - they won't be able to overcome the political/economic inertia of "keep things the way they are so we can make more money."
Re: (Score:2)
Finding a solution is easy. In fact, there are several of them. Getting everybody follow one is hard, and many don't see the need for any of them.
warnings are out there (Score:4, Insightful)
The failure to act on the warnings lies clearly on the people who fail to react to the warnings. This is a failure of the human social system to adapt to a limited resource. This is a classic tragedy of the commons example.
There are many factors at play
1. lack of education to undestand the science, pollution, basic tragedy of the commons problem
2. desire of profit or lifestyle, pretty much the strict commons problem, not willing to make a sacrifice
3. blind to the problem due to religious beliefs
4. plain old innertia to what is not preceived as an imminet threat
The science is clear even if we don't 100% understand all he dynamics, (we can't get 7 day weather right why should we expect 2 year, 5 year or 100 year predictions to be perfect).
The generation and acceptance of un-science is wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
The science is clear even if we don't 100% understand all he dynamics,
If the science were clear, the models would be reasonable accurate. In reality they are off by a lot [ed.ac.uk]. There's still a lot of science that needs to be done (which isn't surprising, because you can't really do a randomized double-blind study to determine the effects of things on the earth. It's harder than that).
Motivation (Score:2, Insightful)
Oreskes has misunderstood the climate change denial industrial complex if she thinks the only obstacle to the denialists accepting reality is an issue of style. They would simply find a different pretext.
Scientists failed us? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the bloody fuck? Scientists failed us?
Not short-sighted politicians, not lobbyists for climate-raping corporations, not greedy corporate types.
No, of course the Scientists failed us. They didn't warn us strongly enough!!!
Okay, breathe.
Getting over the initial outrage, note that to have an actual effect on modern day policies, Oreskes could have written that the politicians were to blame. If modern-day people are shown that they will be remembered in infamy, it might just cause them to change. It happens with presidents all the time - doing something to be remembered by, leaving a positive mark for future historians, &c.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe Oreskes is on the denialist side. A classic tactic is that once you can no longer deny an obvious reality, direct blame on the wrong people. Consider who benefits from sheltering politicians from their responsibility.
Re: (Score:3)
Labelling problem (Score:3)
Trouble is, the moment you step out of your role as a scientist to actually fight for something (stop gathering data, start inciting action), you're no longer considered a scientist, and are instead labelled an activist or politician.
Still, looks interesting. Has anyone read this an/or the (shorter) 2013 essay by the same authors, and of the same title? http://www.mitpressjournals.or... [mitpressjournals.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Tell that to Clair Patterson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
population (Score:2)
No discussion of climate management or any other earthly problem is complete without first understanding the effect of 7 billion humans- mostly underfed, sick and unproductive. How many have to die horribly each day before someone notices? How many children are born with a life expectancy of less than one year, to a mother who can't even feed herself? Is family planning ever going to be taught and enabled in the underprivileged corners of earth? Fix these problems and everything else will improve.
Population is the obvious bit everyone knows (Score:2)
The discussion IS complete "without it" because a large number of human beings is a basic assumption taken into the discussion in the first place!
Ah, those pesky denialists! (Score:2, Troll)
Can't we just shoot these doubt-mongering denialists and move on to the great new world of next Tuesday? What is it, that keeps the rest of us so cautious in dealing with these contemptible human beings [theweek.com]? They are traitors to humanity and should be executed [wordpress.com] — instead of being allowed to affect the good scientists' work, while secretly scheming to escape to a private Elysium [imdb.com] of their own, when the Earth
Re: (Score:2)
Can't we just shoot these doubt-mongering denialists
You sure can. Guns are readily accessible. Unfortunately we have to put murderers in prison, but if you want to take one for the team, go right ahead. You seem not to have the moral compass that would prevent most non-sociopaths from saving the world in the way you suggest. That is a rare skill. How do you think you'd do in prison? Do you have any gang or shank making experience?
As a guy who's read scifi for 30 years...boring (Score:4, Interesting)
>> work of science fiction called "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future," that takes the point of view of a historian in 2393 explaining how "the Great Collapse of 2093" occurred
As a guy who's read scifi for 30 years, this sounds as boring as fuck. Hundreds of writers have written civ collapses into the backdrop of their story and many of these have been manmade ecological disasters. But then the good writers write a story, populating the post-event world with people whose lives and relationships riff off the tragedy of the fall and the sense of current loss.
As worded, this sounds more like the background notes for a role-playing game set in the future, after an ecological collapse....zzzzzZZZZZ.
Why not the Golden Age? (Score:5, Interesting)
What gets me is the mild warming we are obviously going to be experiencing (since large CO2 increase have not shown not to correlate to rapid temperature increases as previously thought) is going to bring an overall boon to the planet, just as it did in ages past - a wider range of arable land.
Sure some land will change for the worse, but overall as a species we will be better off - and the rate the climate is changing allows for plenty of time for people, plants and animals to adapt.
Re:Why not the Golden Age? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wouldn't go so far as to predict a golden age. In fact I think overpopulation will be a problem in the future. Let me explain.
There have been numerous cycles of warm/cold periods in recorded history that we know about. Roman Warm Period, Medieval Optimum, Little Ice Age, and so on. We know that when the climate got warmer, we got longer growing seasons, more food was produced, populations grew, and nation-states grew in power. The reverse is true during the cold periods. Witness the blooming of grand Gothic cathedral building during the Medieval Warm period, which abruptly stopped when the Little Ice Age hit.
But all that was when the total global population was paltry. During the past warm periods, increasing arable land and and a growth in population was not a problem because the planet was so sparsely populated. Nothing but good came out of it. Today it's different. Modern technology has enabled 7+ billion people to live on the planet and we already have *too much* land under cultivation. Habitat destruction is a huge problem and pollution is an even bigger one. Humanity as a whole is not going to benefit from any further warming or population growth.
Furthermore, the areas that will benefit the most from continued warming are in places like Canada and Siberia where there the population isn't gonna increase (due to societal habits) no matter how much food you can grow there.
If I'm sounding like a weird combination of green conservationist and a AGW skeptic, well I guess that's because that's what I am. You can care about the environment and want to save endangered species and conserve natural habitats and limit population growth, while still having enough sense to see through the climate change / cap and trade bullshit.
Tops out at 10 billion (Score:3)
In fact I think overpopulation will be a problem in the future.
We already know from Hans Rosling [ted.com] that population tops out at 10 billion or so, which we can easily support (and again, a warmer climate helps with).
It's the ice ages you need to fear, those fuckers will slaughter billions.
This is why (Score:3)
Crop yields are expected to decline because plants need more water as the temperature goes up:
We already know from historical records agriculture was better with the climate a few degrees warmer overall - also a warmer climate increases ocean evaporation, leading (as it has) to more rain in many areas.
If you are thinking regionally instead of globally, like say California, that is simply reverting to historical norms after a decade or two of above average precipitation - plus of course really badly managed
Riiiiiight, because that's what this issue... (Score:3, Informative)
... really needs. More politicization, more exclusion, less debate, more demonetization, more "if it 10 percent possible then we should spend a 1 trillion on it now!", etc.
Cue the hordes of people that will say I'm supporting deniers or other equally politically loaded terms that don't have anything to do with science.
Gentlemen. This is a controversial issue. It just is. And that isn't going to go away by demonizing the opposition. Just won't. That just gives those people ammunition to say that you're afraid of debate or the science because you're just devolving into ad hominem and various political games rather then staying laser focused on the science.
Right now, some fool is trying to pen a response that says "oh you're automatically invalid because you ascribe to this political faction or that one."... Well congrats. You've proved my fucking point, you complete fucking retard.
I want to take this issue away from the politicians and the rabid foaming at the mouth political activists and just hand this back to the scientists. And that includes removing the stigmas in government research grants from saying one thing or another about climate change. It is literally impossible to keep your credibility on this issue if you only permit certain conclusions.
Now to show I'm not just supporting one side, I've seen a lot of bullshit science on the skeptic/denier side as well. Just silly make believe shit.
Here is what is going to blow the mind of some poor son of a bitch... I am on neither of these teams. *BOOM* Some of them probably can't even believe that. It isn't possible for anyone to be anything but with them or against them. Which just shows the levels of indoctrination those poor fucks have been subjected to on this issue.
Here is what I want. Science. Objective. Empirical. Detached. Indifferent to outcome. Just do the science and connect the dots. The instant you start grinding your fucking axes you're not doing science. Period. End of story. And at that point, I have a very hard time taking anything you say seriously until it is clear to me that that has stopped. I feel/think I am being manipulated when someone has a position, claims they don't because they're scientists, and then reveals that they do by the way they conduct themselves.
It isn't okay.
I want all the political assholes out of this issue 20 years ago. Just leave. Al Gore can go fuck himself not because he's a democrat which is fine... but rather because he's ruined this topic. Now someone is going to say "but it isn't about Al Gore"... Except it is politically. He is so deep in this thing and has been so deep in it from its very inception that the only way you're getting him out of it is with a rain coat, goggles, and a chainsaw.
And that's going to be painful. The screams of delerious horror are to be expected. But the man is in something he has no business being in at that level. I want to see scientists in there with an established track record of putting science above their own petty egos. I want to see men and women that admit they're wrong all the time and say "cool" when that happens because mistakes teach you things. This is something politicians do not do... ever. Politicians and political movements never admit fault. They're fucking infalable to a man. They could blow their own feet off with a full clip of an automatic weapon, reload, and keep firing at their own jammed flesh and will still claim it was all part of some brilliant plan. Or just as hilarious it will all be the fault of some opponent that perverted their real intentions.
I'm fucking over it. These people are ruining science. Science is not politics. One person can contradict EVERY OTHER SCIENTIST ON EARTH... and be right. It has happened before. Is it unlikely? Sure. Here someone will say "you have to go with the majority" and I don't disagree with that. However, the politicization of the issue frankly casts some doubt on what sort of majority you have here and how it was constructed.
You find that unfai
Re: (Score:2)
When talking about global warming, I tend to try to get people to not think about the results of global warming. It's the often sensationalized predictions that "deniers" have the most problem with... so I try to get the discussion away from the results of what global warming will do to just focus on what is causing CO2 to raise what if anything we can do about it...
And this where I feel that most "activists" really fall down. I don't know how many times I have had people tell me that we can just use sola
Re: (Score:2)
The geoengineers have the problem of not being as useful to the politicians. Every time the geo engineering side is brought up, they get shouted down by the... I don't know what to call them... but you know who I mean... and they just get discredited despite offering some pretty easy ways to possibly fix everything.
Seeding the oceans with fertilizer to create massive algae blooms was one such idea. Another one was injecting moisture into the upper atmosphere to stimulate cloud production.
Here is one of the
Re: (Score:3)
Sadly, we likely lost the war on Global Warming back in the 70-80's when China industrialized. Oil was too cheap to force innovation in renewable power.
Oil is not the big CO2 source of China - coal is. China would love to get rid of all coal and move to nuclear, and they plan to have 150 GWe of nuclear by 2030 [world-nuclear.org]. Unfortunately, today they have 707 GWe of coal.
A bit of history (Score:3)
You are seeing the equivalent of sports commentary where something exciting has to be talked about at all times in ca
Really not being not shouting from the rooftops ? (Score:2)
I guess making stuff up wasn't enough of a betrayal of scientific principles for the author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Scroll down to McIntyre and McKitrick 2003* if you forgot how you can feed random noise into Mann's analysis system and have hockey sticks pop out.
I know this will sail past the zealots but when you just put your hands over your ears and shout obscenities everytime some has doubts about your message, people have a tendency to doubt you all the more.
*I also suggest McIntyres site http: [climateaudit.org]
Best unintentionally funny line of the year (Score:2)
Oh really?
I thought it would at least require porn for most men's analysis systems before the hockey stick pops out.
Do you people understand that by pushing a line that expertise is worthless you are also setting things up so that your own expertise in your own job or profession can also be seen as worthless?
That's fine for lay preachers that see an educated clergy as agents of the devil keeping them from feeding the gul
Re: (Score:3)
Mann's original hockey stick graph doesn't matter any more. Since it was published in 1998 there have been more than a dozen similar studies using different sets of proxies and different analysis methods that all show substantially the same thing. So I guess Mann et. al. got lucky in that their answer is correct (within the margin of uncertainty) even though they did it "wrong". Your guys need to get busy showing why all of those other studies are wrong too.
killing things with pointy sticks (Score:2)
breath, drink, eat, procreate, think... die.
Ahh, the simple priorities of life.
It's based on things like this (Score:2)
http://www.abc.net.au/radionat... [abc.net.au]
Crash 2030 - Protokoll einer Katastrophe (Score:2)
Here's a German example for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Crash 2030 - Protokoll einer Katastrophe
Or if you like more alarmist ones which turned out to have been hugely wrong on some facts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Studio Telerop 2009
Cry Wolf enough times.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's disingenuous not to see that the scientific community, as much as it is to blame as anyone, brought this distinctly on themselves.
Since the 1960s and particularly in the 1980s, scientists cheerfully have joined the debate, not as asserters of facts and data, but as political voices themselves. "We hate Ronald Ray-gun" so the Union of Concerned Scientists (among others) were histrionic in their puerile terror of nuclear weapons, despite those very weapons ensuring the longest period of great-power peace that modern civilization has seen. Scientists were at the forefront of the Silent Spring movement to ban DDT, when in fact the very experiments Rachel Carson discussed had been recognized by their originators as deeply flawed. Scientists too have repeatedly been part of the Green movement, lying down in front of trains in the 1970s and 80s to kill the entire nuclear power industry in the US - leaving us with no choice but to consume fossil fuels. Hell, I could pull up 10 web pages right now with 'scientists' explaining in detail why GMO food is deadly dangerous to consume.
This debate has often been compared as "the anti-science Right" vs "the truth". The fact is: to the bulk of the populace, Credibility matters. If you cry wolf enough times about how the sky is falling, and it never does, ultimately people stop listening...even if this time you're right.
You Have Been Warned (Score:3)
People should be very concerned about the environment, water quality(salt water intrusion, etc) air quality(!), climate change, oceans of plastic garbage killing sea birds, the ph levels of the ocean changing and turning the seas into a pool of jelly fish, vast amounts of household and industrial waste being produced and stored in landfills, the increase of meat consumption driving the industrial meat production complex into a vast pollution and MRSA machine, etc; etc;
Oh, and the big one: Overpopulation.
Climate Change? Yea, it's a big problem, but it is sort of the cherry on top of the existing environmental issues mankind has been dealing with for the last 50 years. 50 years we have been warned over and over again, yet we ignore or deal with in a piece-meal fashion. Our reluctance to confront these problems is driven by the fact that whole industries are built upon the ease of polluting and degrading the environment, or privatizing the profits while socializing the costs. Using the watersheds and airsheds as their personal toilets.
Yes indeed, what will future historians write about how our society treated the Earth and the ecosystems we depend on?
Re:Climate porn (Score:4, Insightful)
People must like feeling afraid.
When humans lack sufficient drama they make more. Alleviated of hunger, war, plague, etc. we create and indulge new "problems" to fill the void.
Re: (Score:2)
You want pictures? Here ya go!
http://more.glacierworks.org/ [glacierworks.org]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Bawk. Bawk. Bawk.
The sky is burning.
Bawk. Bawk. Bawk.
Oh noes. Oh noes
Anything more need to be said?
Yes, there is one more thing that needs to be said: If the scientists who have studied this are even remotely correct, your great grandchildren will look upon your memory in a manner somewhat akin to the way that people speak of southern slave owners, and the way Germans remember the NAZIs
(I remember the days when Slashdot still had intelligent, intellectual, technically minded, conversations. And even when people disagreed, they brought facts to the table, not childishness.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.
Of course we have: the "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s [wikipedia.org].
Don't misunderstand me: I basically agree with what you say above. But one of the reasons the alarmist climate nonsense has been believed by so many people, is precisely because they are unfamiliar with climate history.
The 1937-1937 were FAR hotter than today, across almost the whole United States. (I'm not claiming it was global.) While that might not be "global climate change" it puts any of today's "extreme weather events" to shame.
And yes, the dam [wikipedia.org]
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Informative)
That wasn't rooted in climate change, rather it was the result of poor agricultural processes. Even your wiki link says so.
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:4, Insightful)
That wasn't rooted in climate change, rather it was the result of poor agricultural processes. Even your wiki link says so.
It was caused by severe drought, which was aggravated by not using good dryland farming techniques. Which is not terribly strange, since many "good" dryland farming techniques we use today were unknown at the time.
I'm aware that it wasn't "rooted in climate change". My point though, was that even though it might not have been exactly what you were talking about, or whether it was natural or man-made (it was a bit of both), it was a long-term "weather event" with huge economic consequences.
If you want to talk about real, long-term climate change, just look at areas of the Middle East and Persia that we have written records of being lush and fertile, which are now arid desert. Whole civilizations moved away from their once-friendly lands.
But I grant you: we don't have any modern equivalents of that, at least of which I am aware.
Re: (Score:2)
"The 1937-1937" should have been "1936-1937".
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Informative)
The 1937-1937 were FAR hotter than today, across almost the whole United States. (I'm not claiming it was global.) While that might not be "global climate change" it puts any of today's "extreme weather events" to shame.
Nope, hotter now. [nasa.gov]
Re: (Score:3)
The climate science is a curiosity but of no practical significance. Without government intervention, we're likely going to be carbon neutral by the end of the century. With government intervention, it's likely to take longer.
Re: (Score:2)
"Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Seems it comes down to a red/blue fight. Red=religion. Believe it until proven otherwise. Blue = science. Don't believe it unless proven true beyond any reasonable doubt.
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Interesting)
"We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage. At the very worst bad weather has caused localized destruction that is, in every single case, completely recovered within a decade. "
You're hilariously wrong on this point. I'll grant you that it may depend on your scope and scale, but I trust you're aware that the Middle East used to be referred to as the "Fertile Crescent." What happened? Climate changed. It's theorized that the Mongols were able to cross the Asian steppes in the first place because significant rainfall patterns over several years greened the countryside enough to support a large foraging army as it traveled. And history is full -- literally *full* of examples of kingdoms toppled, countries overthrown, and civil unrest and destruction as a result of climate changes.
1770 Benghal: Famine kills 10 million people. Cause? Drought. One third of the population dead. Recovered in ten years? Not bloody likely.
1630-1631: Famine kills two million in China. Repeated drought-related disasters feed unrest and lead to the collapse of the entire Ming Dynasty in 1644.
1844-1849: Great Irish Potato Famine. Kills over one milion Irish, leads to the emigration of 1.5-2 million more. Irish demographics permanently shifted as a result, Irish populations seeded in other countries including a significant population in America.
1972-1973: Famine in Ethiopia kills 60,000 people, leads to the downfall of King Haile Selassie. Clearly this is a non-issue today, because Ethiopia is now a lush land of plenty and abundance.
1816-1817: Year Without A Summer: Has a huge number of impacts on innovation and culture, as well as killing several hundreds thousand more people worldwide. Wikipedia has the full list of interesting details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y... [wikipedia.org]
So, no, you're just wrong about this. Multi-year weather patterns and long-term climate shifts have killed tens of millions of people throughout history. Famine and drought have toppled nations, destroyed city-states, and crushed empires. In some cases, the economic impacts of these events continue to reverberate in modern history.
Lack of proportion (Score:2, Interesting)
Change = change = change
Those events you listed are small scale in comparison to the long-term trend we're setting ourselves up for. Even the empire-crushing changes of the past will look miniscule compared to what we're likely to see from 2080 onward.
A good book to read on the subject is "Under A Green Sky" by Peter Ward. It gives the reader a good feel for the scale of the changes that take place between major epochs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I see your point, replying to a comment that we've never had economic disaster due to climate change. But aren't most of your examples irrelevant, given that they occurred prior to the industrial revolution, and therefore had nothing to do with man-made climate change? If anything, those examples point out that climate disasters are a regular occurrence, regardless of human activity. I'm not sure that's the point you were trying to make.
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:4, Informative)
to be fair, the potato famine was due to the potato blight, a fungal disease that makes them inedible.
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:4, Informative)
Zero - like the relevance of your post.
The point being refuted was "We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage."
Context, noob.
Re: (Score:2)
You bring up a good point about much higher levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. But you have to keep in mind: all of these changes in the past are associated with mass extinctions. The faster the change happened, the more species died.
The change from Permian to Triassic period caused a 95% extinction. The next biggest extinction was the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, also due to rapid climate change.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
funny thing about the IPCC report lots of people seem to not talk about... they made predictions. enough time has passed where you can check some of those predictions using current data. if they are anything other than consistently accurate, then we dont have this climate thing figured out, regardless of "consensus".
no one needs an army of scientists who believe x is correct. we just need one who can demonstrate they are correct.
Re: (Score:3)
The IPCC results have not been "very accurate", The First IPCC assessment made temperature projections based on multiple emissions scenarios. ALL the scenarios predicted temperatures much warmer than today for 2014. Even the scenarios based on us freezing emissions at 1990 levels. The results are still posted on the IPCC site so go right ahead and confirm for yourself if you don't believe me.
Now, sure, the IPCC temperature estimates in reports since then have steadily revised down the temperature prediction
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Informative)
I mean shit, look at Al Gore, if there was a list of everybody on the planet sorted by personal carbon consumption, he'd probably be in the top 1%.
Gore is carbon neutral isn't he?
I don't care how energy efficient his 20 bedroom house or his private jet are;
Gore doesn't have a private jet.
both inevitably consume a LOT more energy than your typical person's luxuries.
How does a jet consume energy without existing?
In a small contained lab environment we can sit there and measure how much of a greenhouse effect different gases have, but historical data doesn't even so much as show a correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change.
That's not true for any of the past 420 million years
IIt doesn't appear to harm ocean life
Bullshit [nature.com], Bullshit [oxfordjournals.org], Bullshit [pnas.org].
plant life, or land animals either
Bullshit [nature.com]
as during one of Earth's "greenest" periods in history we had 20 times the present atmospheric CO2, really fucking massively sized insects, dinosaurs, and more.
Kind of irrelevant. We have existent species now. Those are the ones that have to be able to live. Really fucking massively sized insects, and dinosaurs are already dead.
Other data suggests that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow rises in climate, not the other way around
Nope:
CO2, increasing since about 1750. [zmescience.com]
Temp, from about 1900.
As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap.
Well, we've got a lot of science now, so we don't need to base our decisions on what you think.
It's entirely possible that the higher CO2 we're seeing is yet another rise following a climate change that we had no part in.
No it's not. It's from the combustion of fossil fuels [skepticalscience.com].
And by the way, the arguments for stopping climate change so that we can save the economy are also incredibly stupid and self defeating.
Bullshit
We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.
Bullshit. Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP [theguardian.com]
Meanwhile we have seen on well more than one occasion where stupid economic decisions cause global long term collapse. Hurting the economy for what is probably much ado about nothing is therefore pointless
The 10 state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saw their combined economies increase by 1.6 billion in the first three years. [analysisgroup.com] Oh, the pain! The pain! Ouch! Stop the hurt!
/. vote this bullshit +5, interesting? I would have thought anti-science grandstanding was antithetical to "news for nerds". This place really has dropped in discernment over the past few years hasn't it.
.
Why did
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap. "
See that bit where you write "I think...". Stop thinking , if you don't have a qualification in climate science, and go and look up what the experts say because on a fundamental levels your opinions are no guide at all to anything useful if you don't have the training to have a reliable opinion on the matter.
And if thats hard to understan
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
See that bit where you write "I think...". Stop thinking
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about. Thinking can only lead to badthought. Not thinking is safe, and avoids unwanted questions that might lable you out-tribe, and thus to be despised.
And if you think science has nothing to do with politics, you really haven't been paying attention. Scientists are no more or less idealists than anyone else, no more or less corruptible, and in the absence of data that people admit falsifies their hypotheses, can spin their whee
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And if you think science has nothing to do with politics, you really haven't been paying attention. Scientists are no more or less idealists than anyone else, no more or less corruptible, and in the absence of data that people admit falsifies their hypotheses, can spin their wheels for a generation agreeing with one another and accomplishing nothing (see: string theory).
Yeah, mate. The scientists did all that undergrad and postdoc study so that they could all become idealists instead of doing research.
Thank God we have you to show us where they all went wrong. Politics!
You do realize as the only person smarter than all the scientists, you have an obligation to fix up the politics errors in the climate science papers, and submit the truth for publication.
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but you seem to be suggesting a conspiracy dating back to the start of climate science in the 1800s which if true involves millions of scientists constantly lying, a complete rewrite of some very fundamental physics, an entire world of weather stations and satelites being deliberately made wrong, AND a mechanism to make the world seem like its following physics despite it not following physics. All for reasons nobody can work out, and all being done so well no one ever discovering it, well until a plucky band of conspiracy theorists, anti-science activists and oil industry lobbyists blew the top off the whole thing.
Its a bit on the David Icke side of crazy, if you ask me.
Re: (Score:3)
>Hypothetically, what do you suggest for when the experts are untrustworthy? Or is this impossible in your worldview?
We don't trust the experts to begin with - hell they don't even trust each other ! We trust the scientific method - which is designed to protect humanity from many sources of bad faith, including, but not limited to - untrustworthy authorities.
Of course sometimes experts are untrustworthy, but when they are - the scientific method reveals them and they get ostracised from science - a recen
Re: (Score:3)
* Slashdot
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Insightful)
But there comes a point where most scientists will say 'enough now, let's move on'; why should we keep rehashing the same arguments over and over?
The reason there's so much contention is because the science in question is being used as a justification for a call to action that may very likely have a significant real-world economic impact. That's very different than many other sorts of scientific theories which have little real-world consequence, or are mostly of interest only to scientists. People keep saying "the science is settled!", but when has that ever been a mantra in the scientific world before? The reason people desperately wish for the science to be "settled" is so that we can now move on to the "action" which will prevent the supposed climate disaster that may be looming in the future, as envisioned by this author.
There's a huge amount of scientific data and research out there, and nearly all the conclusions reached about climate change require a very significant amount of predictive modeling and interpretation. It's unlike many other scientific phenomenon which can be repeated and proven in a lab. Here's the kicker though... modelling the planet's climate to any accurate degree in the long term seems a bit unrealistic, given the relative complexity of an entire planet's ecosystem*.
We can look at general patterns and try to extrapolate future directions, and hypothesize about what might be causing them, but there's no way to test those hypothesis, because obviously we don't have an alternate universe Earth to make changes to and observe the resulting effect. As such, I don't believe that theories of climate change can ever really be "settled", because there's no way to prove or disprove them. We have exactly one Earth on which we can conduct global experiments, but anyone familiar with the scientific method knows you need to repeat experiments in order to validate them.
In other words, we can't measure our actions against a known baseline in order to compare the effect of those actions. That means we can never really know how much of any climate change is due to our actions and how much may be naturally occurring. We can only make guesses and create hypothesis based on what data we have. The longer we study and make predictions with our models any hypothesis, the better chance we have of making them more accurate, but "long" is a loaded term when you're dealing with geological time compared to a human lifetime.
Honestly, I'd call myself somewhat "agnostic" regarding AGW, in that I don't consider myself enough of an expert to be able to say either way. A lot of scientists are saying there's something there, and I think we should probably pay attention, but with this caveat - scientists are people too, and no one, not even scientists, are immune from their own biases and agendas. Given the economic ramifications of taking action at a global level to reduce carbon levels will have serious consequences, this critical skepticism shouldn't be dismissed lightly.
I'm generally a proponent of anything that will reduce our dependence of fossil fuels and reduce our carbon footprint. There are a LOT of good reasons, not just environmental, for doing so. But I think it's probably a bad idea to panic and waste money on technologies that are not yet ready to supplant current, proven systems. Let's keep moving forward at a reasonable pace. Look at it from a very pragmatic standpoint: if we push our economies too hard in a rush for green technologies, there will be a lot more push-back against further development, and may end up hurting more than helping. In a robust economy, however, I think people will be more willing to listen when they're not worried about whether they'll be able to make their next house payment, or even have a job. It's a bit hard to focus on climate issues in that sort of scenario.
* Did you seriously just compare predictive modeling of an entire planet's weather patterns decades or even centuries into the future to "1 + 1 = 2"?
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Insightful)
You argue convincingly and there is a lot of good sense in what you day, but I think you are trying to pass off some dubious arguments as well.
modelling the planet's climate to any accurate degree in the long term seems a bit unrealistic, given the relative complexity of an entire planet's ecosystem
Is it more compicated than, say, modelling the evolution of a star from the primordial disc of dust? We do that with a high degree of confidence, knowing full well that this kind of models are somewhat uncertain; they give us valuable insight into how stars actually work, at least with some useful degree of resolution. It is the same with climate modelling: we know they are not correct in the sense that everything that comes out of the models is accurate, but they are near enough to be useful. All the calculations come with guidelines on how far we can trust them, just like the weather forecast, BTW. And while we are on the weather; we can actually make more reliable predictions about the climate than about the weather, because weather forecasts try to produce an detailed map of things like temperature, cloud cover, wind and precipitation within very short time frames of a few hours, whereas the detail in climate forecasts is more like averages over decades and across whole regions.
I don't have a problem with people raising honest objections based on serious, logical consideration of facts; what I have a problem with is the unthinking rejection and sometimes obstructive obfuscation based on short term interests. Producers of fossil fuels have an interest in blocking anything that may lead to them losing profit, and any climate research that concludes that we should stop burning fossil fuel will put their profits at risk. To me this reasoning is very plausible; much more plausible than any conspiracy theory about a secretive cabal of 'climate scientists' trying to further their own agenda.
* Did you seriously just compare predictive modeling of an entire planet's weather patterns decades or even centuries into the future to "1 + 1 = 2"?
You know the answer perfectly well, I think; this is the sort of question one asks to make the opponent look silly. No I didn't compare climate modelling to elementary maths; I compare the socalled 'skeptics', with their deliberate 'misunderstanding' of what climatologists are telling us, to a child's behaviour, when a child does not want to listen to a 'boring' explanation and spitefully tries to avoid the issue.
Re:left/right apocalypse (Score:5, Insightful)
"People keep saying "the science is settled!", but when has that ever been a mantra in the scientific world before?"
Erm, all the time, actually. The whole point of science is to be able to know something about the world, and act on that knowledge. We know enough about semiconductors to build computers, for example. There's plenty we don't know about semiconductors, but we know enough to act.
The notion that all scientific knowledge is merely conjecture, based on the facts as we know them but continuously open to being disproven, and therefore not a basis for action, is rhetoric gone wrong. The openness of a piece of scientific knowlege to being disproven is not an on/off binary state. If you were to discover some facts that appeared to show that semiconductors don't in fact work the way we thought they did, and have this completely different mechanism of action, we would question whether the facts were real, and if they did ineluctably lead to that conclusion, etc etc. We'd question even harder if you told us that the facts appear to show that computers can't work at all.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll sacrifice some karma just to ask you to please stop.
And no, I'm not a sock puppet either.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll sacrifice some karma just to ask you to please stop.
And no, I'm not a sock puppet either.
Good heavens man. Just adjust your slider to block at the zero level and you won't see AC again.
Re: (Score:2)
It's an all or nothing proposition - either you accept the scientific method and the upsides (and downsides) that go with it, or you reject it. You don't get to accept some conclusions and not others. So it is irrational to say: it's not a problem science will solve everything yet simultaneously reject the prescription proscribed by the scientific method. Said proscription being that we need to modify our habits, so the we are no longer causing a net increase in GHG concentration, to the extent that there i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are missing the point. Attacking "denialism" doesn't advance the cause even a bit.
There is a growing tidal wave of anger about roll over the fraudulent liars who constructed the lies of denialism. I'm not talking about the ignorant loud mouths on Slashdot, who, having had their claims and assertions debunked, return a week later and repost those claims as if nothing happened. That is to say, they will get what's coming to them, but that is besides the point. I'm talking about the structures and groups who created and promoted these lies in the first place - politicians, fossil fuel compa
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is my fondest wish and desire that 300 years from now, any and all history books will name specific names of people, who will be reviled for centuries, as being the main perpetrators and promotors of the denialist movement. Their relatives and descendants will be hunted down, and relentlessly persecuted. This is my only positive thought for the future of our civilization.
Your hope for positive future civilization can only be described as a hatemongers wet dream.
I doubt you will be able to see let alone understand the irony but
(Exodus 20:5)--"You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,"
I guess climate change is your god ?