honorentheos wrote:The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040,
In 2040 we are going to remember that the Republican party was the anti-science party.
It's obvious now, has been for some time. I would say it's been antiscience for all of this present millenium.
EAllusion wrote:It's top takeaway on the possibility to avert the traditional boundary on catastrophic warming is worded to be optimistic, but really says can only be avoided with rapid economic change in all major industrialized nations on a scale similar to mobilizing for war in the next few years. That's plainly not gonna happen.
One of the great ironies of the climate change debate is the constant refrain from deniers that climate scientists are “alarmists.” Gavin Schmidt (NASA climate scientist) agrees with you in a post on RealClimate: the enormous effort required to keep warming below 1.5C just isn’t going to happen. I don’t think there is any realistic chance of avoiding 2C, and the real fight will be to stay below 3C.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
EAllusion wrote:It's top takeaway on the possibility to avert the traditional boundary on catastrophic warming is worded to be optimistic, but really says can only be avoided with rapid economic change in all major industrialized nations on a scale similar to mobilizing for war in the next few years. That's plainly not gonna happen.
One of the great ironies of the climate change debate is the constant refrain from deniers that climate scientists are “alarmists.” Gavin Schmidt (NASA climate scientist) agrees with you in a post on RealClimate: the enormous effort required to keep warming below 1.5C just isn’t going to happen. I don’t think there is any realistic chance of avoiding 2C, and the real fight will be to stay below 3C.
If we get to +2º, the disruption of world physical, economic, social and political systems is likely to be very severe. It is not at all clear that under those circumstances the world's governments will have the spare bandwidth and ability to cooperate needed to put in place the kind of measures that will then be necessary to limit further temperature rises - which will in turn have really bad consequences.
The house is smouldering already. If people aren't willing to make it a personal political priority to force their governments to take action to stop the fire taking hold, later will be too late. Let's not kick this down the road.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Richard Lindzen wrote:So there you have it. An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization. What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science. Perhaps this won’t be such a bad thing after all – certainly as concerns ‘official’ science.
There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the one thing that can be clearly attributed to elevated carbon dioxide: namely, its effective role as a plant fertilizer, and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants. Meanwhile, the IPCC is claiming that we need to prevent another 0.5◦C of warming, although the 1◦C that has occurred so far has been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history. As we used to say in my childhood home of the Bronx: ‘Go figure’.
Res Ipsa wrote: One of the great ironies of the climate change debate is the constant refrain from deniers that climate scientists are “alarmists.” Gavin Schmidt (NASA climate scientist) agrees with you in a post on RealClimate: the enormous effort required to keep warming below 1.5C just isn’t going to happen. I don’t think there is any realistic chance of avoiding 2C, and the real fight will be to stay below 3C.
The American press historically has covered climate change as a controversy with the range of legitimate debate starting with climate change denialism on the right and the left being something around the IPCC's median prediction outcomes. The IPCC reports; however, are actually scientifically conservative and are written with a lot of caution towards more pessimistic outcomes built in to get as much consent as possible. The scientific debate starts with conservative IPCC impact estimates and runs all the way to scenarios where human activity is driving levels that are approaching outcomes that will destroy civilization as we know it. IPCC worst case scenarios, in other words. Until recently, the press has tended to treat those positions as so ridiculous as to only be covered as sensationalism even though they're more scientifically plausible than climate change denialism. To get to something akin to climate change denialism in terms of "out-thereness" you have to go to the folks who think that humans are on a rapid path to creating a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. That's very dubious, but then again, so is climate change denialism.
I think this coverage atmosphere is conducive to the fallacy of golden mean where people are inclined to think the truth is "somewhere in the middle" and are amenable to the idea that global warming is real and probably at least somewhat caused by humans, but something we'll eventually figure out with minimal impacts. If so, that could create a positive feedback loop where apathetic coverage drives an audience that has no problem with apathetic coverage.
I don't know if that's true though. It also might just be a bimodal distribution where young people who are very concerned about climate change aren't pandered to because old people who aren't are the major consumers of traditional media.
I went to an elementary school with a focus on environmental science. The teachers were mostly hardcore environmentalists in my recollection. It was a school after Gaylord Nelson's heart. This actually gave me a healthy skepticism towards environmentalism because I was taught about some environmental concerns by some very credulous people as a kid. That said, I remember learning a fair amount about global warming concerns in the late 80's when I was in elementary school.
In the early 90's, I took an environmental science elective in middle school because I took any science elective I could find and enjoyed biology at the time. (I'd go on to become a bio major as an adult.) This was in the early 90's and by then, global warming was a whole unit and the science had matured to be much more clear. However, you wouldn't learn much about the science unless you took that elective. Then, by high school, global warming was quite well understood and had made it into other, more standard science classes I took.
I feel like I was on the bleeding edge of when global warming entered science education. I'm in my late 30's. People younger than me likely have learned about global warming in their formal schooling assuming they've gone to decent schools. People a generation older than me probably by and large haven't unless it was in their post-secondary education.
I suspect this is substantially explanatory of the age gap in concerns about global warming, but I rarely see that mentioned in news articles on the phenomenon. Usually it's just covered as young people having more at stake for the future than old people or old people being more conservative than young people. Yet, I suspect that people who actually were taught it as a school subject might just be more prone to understand the issue than those who were not.
OK, so we are not going to hear any thoughts from Water Dog based on his reading of any material from the IPCC report. (Have you actually read any of it, Water Dog? I posted the headlines upthread, and linked to the summary for policymakers.)
Because Richard Lindzen has spoken, who is to put it mildly an outlier amongst atmospheric physicists, let alone climate specialists.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Taking the IPCC report seriously is very important. There is much more than ample evidence that the current global warming trends are both very problematic and caused by human activity and choice of energy sources. But, it is also true that transitioning to renewable sources has tremendous economic and environmental benefits and very few downsides, except to those whose main source of income is the finding, exploiting and selling fossil fuels. All things considered, even if concerns about AGW should turn out to be bogus (which seems increasingly unlikely), there are very significant net benefits worldwide if a concerted effort is made to transition away from dependence on fossil fuels. So why all this silly opposition to that?
No precept or claim is more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison
