Slashdot Mirror
Imagining the Future History of Climate Change
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.""
One of Pete Postlethwaite's last movies covered the issue in a similar way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
And won't be nobody to write it by then if mankind loses. Thats the weak point of that work. Or we manage to defeat it (preferably pretty soon), or we all lose, and won't be noone to blame us in that future year.
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.
Be seeing you...
Seriously, I'm sick of scientist being blamed for crap. Especially when they've been warning about global warming from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...> the 1970s and there's been consensus since the eighties.
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 assassination, and hysterical invective against the scientist that are trying to communicate their findings to the public.
These are the arseholes you should blame. Not the scientists.
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.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
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 car.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 damage to land and property, and other economic effects, were downright devastating.
While the Dust Bowl might not have lingered long enough to be called "climate" by modern climatologists, that made utterly no difference to the displaced and the poor.
That wasn't rooted in climate change, rather it was the result of poor agricultural processes. Even your wiki link says so.
>> 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.
I'll sacrifice some karma just to ask you to please stop.
And no, I'm not a sock puppet either.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
... 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
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"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 understand, google "Dunning Krueger" for more explaination.
Until then, sorry dude, but its a reasonable reply he gave. This really has nothing to do with left or right wing politics, since science doesn't work that way.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
Extinction due to climate change? What science is that based on? During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum there was a great diversification of terrestrial life. For the majority. of the time mammals have roamed the earth it has been so warm that there have been no polar ice caps, yet life kept chugging along and adapting.
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 wheels for a generation agreeing with one another and accomplishing nothing (see: string theory).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
It got political because some people in politics were in denial of reality. Others in politics pointed that out. Then an evil bunch of pricks spent shitloads on PR opposing that because parasites feeding off the oil industry mistakenly saw discussion of climate science as a threat to their bank balance. Others loudly objected to that - and conflict sells newspapers and TV advertising time.
You are seeing the equivalent of sports commentary where something exciting has to be talked about at all times in case people switch off. That's why we've got TV time given to fucking Economists commenting on cloud formation as if they know more about it than the leading Physicists in the field. It should be as obviously ridiculous as an unpublished Physicist commenting on monetary policy.
So your rant about noise is badly misplaced, has NOTHING to do with the scientists and is best directed at Rupert Murdoch, the Heartland Institute and whatever media company is delivering the material you hate.
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, Bullshit, Bullshit.
plant life, or land animals either
Bullshit
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.
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.
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
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. 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
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.
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.
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 water rights that hate agriculture.
As for your link, good luck with the magical thinking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In fact I think overpopulation will be a problem in the future.
We already know from Hans Rosling 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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.
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.
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.
* Slashdot
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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 biodiversity of the system, and vice-versa
The experimental results, combined with natural observations, show that in this system, the maintenance of species diversity is dependent on sufficient genetic variation, because without this variation the system would become dominated by B. nigra (if sinigrin levels are uniformly high), or by other species (if sinigrin levels are uniformly low). - Mutual Feedbacks Maintain Both Genetic and Species Diversity in a Plant Community Lankau and Strauss, NATURE, (2007)
>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 recent high-profile case would be Andrew Wakefield, prior to committing fraud and ethics violations so he could get kickbacks from a lawfirm - the man was considered one of the greatest experts in his field. Subsequent to the discovery of his fraud - his career is utterly destroyed.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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"?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
-Styopa
to be fair, the potato famine was due to the potato blight, a fungal disease that makes them inedible.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
"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.
Americans in particular have been warned over and over again since the 1960's(50 years!!!) about the problems we face in the environment, and how we are degrading it.
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?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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 predictions for 2014. Don't tell me that is because their methods have improved that much though, their projections for 2014 got better and better as 2014 got closer and closer, but the projections out to 2050 and 2100 haven't changed nearly as much. We need a prediction that actually gets things right 15 years later before claiming accuracy. Right now a terribly naive pure math trend analysis on temp from 1880-1990 gives a result as accurate as the IPCC projections from 1990. When your complex and advanced model doesn't fare any better than a highschool level pure math trend projection you don't get to claim high accuracy.