New Book - Unsettled Science

[forkyfork]

1 hour ago, etudiant said:

That is not how I see it. The suppliers of fossil fuels can be rightfully burdened with extra costs to offset the damage they are inflicting on the environment.

However, for individuals who excoriate the use of fossil fuels and who highlight the potential adverse consequences should set an example of how to behave, rather than flaunting their complete disrespect for the message they preach. Private flights to climate conferences and purchases of lavish beachfront estates are simply inconsistent with that message.

Maybe the community needs new spokespeople.

this is a deflection tactic that works on dumb people. congrats

[forkyfork]

[rclab]

2 hours ago, forkyfork said:

just a comic response, thahkyou Stephen. As always…

[etudiant]

3 hours ago, forkyfork said:

this is a deflection tactic that works on dumb people. congrats

How is this deflection? Also why on just dumb people? Hypocritical behaviour is not well regarded by most people, even intelligent ones.

I simply state that the people who are leading the public are distancing themselves from any actual personal effort. That does not inspire confidence.

[raindancewx]

Pretty obvious that the public is never going to buy into the recommended social policy changes for climate change. Knowledge in science has no real relevance for designing or inspiring societal change. Easily possible to be a great thinker for one and a dumb-ass for the other.

The scientists leading a lot of the charge don't exactly help themselves. Mann was talking about how he coined the "AMO" recently in the 80s/90s and then spent a lot of this year regretting it since newer research shows the AMO phases are tied to volcanic eruptions (duh, the same major volcanoes erupted in the late 1890s, 1930s, 1960s, 1990s, and have started to recently. I have books from the 1950s on climate that speculated that was the mechanism. Doesn't exactly inspire faith in Mann). I think it's pretty likely a lot of the younger scientists will see many of their ideas dis-proven as well.

 

[donsutherland1]

On 6/9/2021 at 8:19 PM, raindancewx said:

Pretty obvious that the public is never going to buy into the recommended social policy changes for climate change. Knowledge in science has no real relevance for designing or inspiring societal change. Easily possible to be a great thinker for one and a dumb-ass for the other.

The scientists leading a lot of the charge don't exactly help themselves. Mann was talking about how he coined the "AMO" recently in the 80s/90s and then spent a lot of this year regretting it since newer research shows the AMO phases are tied to volcanic eruptions (duh, the same major volcanoes erupted in the late 1890s, 1930s, 1960s, 1990s, and have started to recently. I have books from the 1950s on climate that speculated that was the mechanism. Doesn't exactly inspire faith in Mann). I think it's pretty likely a lot of the younger scientists will see many of their ideas dis-proven as well.

 

How does giving a name to what once appeared to be an oscillation driven by internal variability, but is now suggested to be a forced outcome based on modeling that goes back a millennium in time, cause one to lose faith in a scientist researching it? That his research may verify earlier hypotheses should have no adverse impact on his credibility.

[raindancewx]

A lot of the climate stuff is treated as factual, in the way that a sperm and egg make a baby is factual, when it is in large part as good as the assumptions built into the models. It's much more akin to economics and social sciences that use math to help arrive at the truth, with the caveat that you can never really get replication or clean control groups to test the ideas because we can't ever have the same Earth with less greenhouse gasses, to compare to the current Earth, the way you could have near identical populations of humans split it half to test something like a COVID vaccine. Without those more rigorous methods to test ideas impacting the Earth's climate, you have the potential for massive systemic biases, and much of the research can't be proven/dis-proven or falsified. My point is that 20 years is a pretty short time for Mann to be giving up on one of his major ideas. No one is ever right about everything, but you have to expect he's probably wrong about many other things.

[chubbs]

6 hours ago, raindancewx said:

A lot of the climate stuff is treated as factual, in the way that a sperm and egg make a baby is factual, when it is in large part as good as the assumptions built into the models. It's much more akin to economics and social sciences that use math to help arrive at the truth, with the caveat that you can never really get replication or clean control groups to test the ideas because we can't ever have the same Earth with less greenhouse gasses, to compare to the current Earth, the way you could have near identical populations of humans split it half to test something like a COVID vaccine. Without those more rigorous methods to test ideas impacting the Earth's climate, you have the potential for massive systemic biases, and much of the research can't be proven/dis-proven or falsified. My point is that 20 years is a pretty short time for Mann to be giving up on one of his major ideas. No one is ever right about everything, but you have to expect he's probably wrong about many other things.

You don't have a good understanding of climate science or any science for that matter. Science is evidence-based using observations and models are together. Climate models are not like economic models. They are built on well physical laws: conservation of energy, + momentum, radiation physics, etc. When observations agree with models based on known physical laws then confidence increases. That is where we are today. We have decades of observations that match model predictions and theory closely, including observations of past climate which cover a very wide range of climactic conditions, much warmer and colder than today. There is a literally a mountain of evidence supporting the climate science consensus and zero evidence supporting a natural cause for the current warming.

This thread is poorly titled. There is no science discussed here and no evidence presented that the science is "unsettled". Instead it is mainly about the political talking points that skeptics respond to. In the past few pages experts can't be trusted because of one perceived foible or another. Instead you trust Rupert Murdoch and others in the climate denial space, who have publishing climate misinformation and discrediting experts for decades.

[donsutherland1]

14 hours ago, raindancewx said:

A lot of the climate stuff is treated as factual, in the way that a sperm and egg make a baby is factual, when it is in large part as good as the assumptions built into the models. It's much more akin to economics and social sciences that use math to help arrive at the truth, with the caveat that you can never really get replication or clean control groups to test the ideas because we can't ever have the same Earth with less greenhouse gasses, to compare to the current Earth, the way you could have near identical populations of humans split it half to test something like a COVID vaccine. Without those more rigorous methods to test ideas impacting the Earth's climate, you have the potential for massive systemic biases, and much of the research can't be proven/dis-proven or falsified. My point is that 20 years is a pretty short time for Mann to be giving up on one of his major ideas. No one is ever right about everything, but you have to expect he's probably wrong about many other things.

On this, we strongly disagree.

Dr. Mann’s revised thinking on what appeared to be a multi-decadal oscillation is a good illustration of how evidence informs scientific conclusions. It is not a defect that undermines climate science. It is testament that climate science is based on evidence and, when the evidence leads to revised conclusions, the conclusions give way to the evidence. They are constructed based on the evidence, not in spite of it. That is a far cry from the approach taken by the climate change denial movement where conclusions are built to serve political or ideological ends that are often in direct contradiction of the evidence. 

Dr. Mann’s revised thinking does not, in any way, undermine the scientific understanding of ongoing climate change and its predominant cause. There is currently overwhelming scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change. Empirical evidence includes warming surface (land and ocean) temperatures, increasing oceanic heat content, ice sheet mass loss, declining Arctic sea ice extent minima, increasing ocean acidification, and measured increases in greenhouse gas forcing. 

As expected from the Greenhouse Effect, the troposphere is warming while the stratosphere is cooling. Consistent with the burning of fossil fuels, which contain the lighter C12 isotope, atmospheric C13 has been falling relative to C12. On account of the dominant role of anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing, temperature trends can no longer be explained by using only natural forcings. Temperature trends have decoupled from solar irradiance. 

Clear scientific understanding of climate change—what is happening (warming) and why it is happening (anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions)—now exists. That’s where the debate is finished if one reviews the scientific literature.

Nuances and residual uncertainties remain. The existence of the AMO and its role provided one example. Uncertainties concern feedbacks, potential tipping points, ice sheet evolution, etc. They do not extend to the conclusion that the world is experiencing an ongoing warming event and that increasing greenhouse gas forcing (due to anthropogenic emissions that have created a persistent situation where total emissions > total uptake) is the predominant driver of that warming.

The climate change denial movement has been pushing frames as a substitute for credible scientific work—after all, this anti-science movement possesses no credible alternative explanation for the ongoing warming, even as it bears the burden of proof, if it wants the scientific debate reopened. The most common frames being advanced by the climate change denial movement are targeted at undermining the science through fear, attacks on the science, and exaggeration of uncertainty. These frames include, “climate change is a myth or scare tactic perpetuated by environmentalists, bureaucrats, and political leaders”; “Mainstream climate research is ‘junk’ science”; and, “The scientific evidence for climate change is uncertain” (Dunlap and McCright, 2015).

[csnavywx]

1 hour ago, donsutherland1 said:

On this, we strongly disagree.

Dr. Mann’s revised thinking on what appeared to be a multi-decadal oscillation is a good illustration of how evidence informs scientific conclusions. It is not a defect that undermines climate science. It is testament that climate science is based on evidence and, when the evidence leads to revised conclusions, the conclusions give way to the evidence. That is a far cry from the approach taken by the climate change denial movement where conclusions are built to serve political or ideological ends that are often in direct contradiction to the evidence. 

Dr. Mann’s revised thinking does not, in any way, undermine the scientific understanding of ongoing climate change and its predominant cause. There is currently overwhelming scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change. Empirical evidence includes warming surface (land and ocean) temperatures, increasing oceanic heat content, ice sheet mass loss, declining Arctic sea ice extent minima, increasing ocean acidification, and measured increases in greenhouse gas forcing. 

As expected from the Greenhouse Effect, the troposphere is warming while the stratosphere is cooling. Consistent with the burning of fossil fuels, which contain the lighter C12 isotope, atmospheric C13 has been falling relative to C12. On account of the dominant role of anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing, temperature trends can no longer be explained by using only natural forcings. Temperature trends have decoupled from solar irradiance. 

Clear scientific understanding of climate change—what is happening (warming) and why it is happening (anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions)—now exists. That’s where the debate is finished if one reviews the scientific literature.

Nuances and residual uncertainties remain. The existence of the AMO and its role provided one example. Uncertainties concern feedbacks, potential tipping points, ice sheet evolution, etc. They do not extend to the conclusion that the world is experiencing an ongoing warming event and that increasing greenhouse gas forcing (due to anthropogenic emissions that have created a persistent situation where total emissions > total uptake) is the predominant driver of that warming.

The climate change denial movement has been pushing frames as a substitute for credible scientific work—after all, this anti-science movement possesses no credible alternative explanation for the ongoing warming, even as it bears the burden of proof, if it wants the scientific debate reopened. The most common frames being advanced by the climate change denial movement are targeted at undermining the science through fear, attacks on the science, and exaggeration of uncertainty. These frames include, “climate change is a myth or scare tactic perpetuated by environmentalists, bureaucrats, and political leaders”; “Mainstream climate research is ‘junk’ science”; and, “The scientific evidence for climate change is uncertain” (Dunlap and McCright, 2015).

This 1000 times over. Science is a developmental process, which means you aren't going to always get it right on the first go, or it might need to be adjusted or tossed down the line. In this case, he's refuting his earlier research based on new evidence. That's called updating your priors. The only real failure would be to *not* do this.

[raindancewx]

Mann is primarily a statistician by background, I think it matters a lot that a proposed statistical explanation is not correct, especially since he went out of his way to insist on it from the prior "consensus" about volcanoes. None of these proposed 30-year oscillations like the AMO or PDO really behave in that manner if you look at the data or the maps with any level of detail, it shouldn't have escaped the eyes of a smart person. The AMO is a major indicator of snow patterns, drought, and heat waves, among others. So knowing it isn't really a 30-year cycle is not a big deal to me, as a guy with no power. But it makes the entire concept broadly useless to someone like Mann trying to advocate social policy change to help with climate change. What are you supposed to do if you are Biden, and Mann tells you all these indexes exist and can predict outcomes well, but the indexes themselves are slow and irregularly changing, and subject to constant revision by their inventors?

I don't have a problem with the Earth warming as an idea or the evidence for it. I had atmospheric physics, thermodynamics, hydrology and other pretty intensive math in college and high school. I just think as a field it is kind of useless. I can't imagine many scientists are attracted to something that is "settled", i.e. that the outcome will be changed weather and warmer temperatures, for decades. The settled science thing to me is classic double speak though. Things that are actually settled are not controversial or subject to hundreds of billions of dollars of research. The research and controversy exists because it is less clear what happens to the trends at a regional and seasonal level, which means it isn't settled, not really. People know the Earth is round. People know where babies come from. Surely these were state of the art scientific findings at some point. But they aren't now, so we don't argue about them or research them in meaningful ways.

To me science is about discovery. The truth is, the climate can only change in a hand full of ways. It can move toward more/less for moisture/heat in a given spot or overall, or more/less for entropy if the way heat is input into the system gets screwed up. So it's not actually that interesting.

You'll never see rain fall up or snow turn blue. It's not like quantum mechanics or something where you're looking for a grand unified theory of everything, which is actually interesting. Climate science is mostly about social policy. But the public has literally no use for knowing that the oceans are forecast to rise, given record populations in coastal areas. The public doesn't care about slow changes in hurricane activity or tracks, or about tornado activity or tracks since we just build better homes and issue better forecasts. I live in the West. It's undoubtedly somewhat warmer than even recent prior hot/dry periods like the 1950s, and water is scarce. But each time we need more water, another water source is found, whether it is a river or a lake that gets diverted. The same thing will inevitably happen in the future, even if it has to be through more extreme measures like cloud seeding, desalinization, or whatever the new method is. 

[skierinvermont]

18 hours ago, raindancewx said:

Mann is primarily a statistician by background, I think it matters a lot that a proposed statistical explanation is not correct, especially since he went out of his way to insist on it from the prior "consensus" about volcanoes. None of these proposed 30-year oscillations like the AMO or PDO really behave in that manner if you look at the data or the maps with any level of detail, it shouldn't have escaped the eyes of a smart person. The AMO is a major indicator of snow patterns, drought, and heat waves, among others. So knowing it isn't really a 30-year cycle is not a big deal to me, as a guy with no power. But it makes the entire concept broadly useless to someone like Mann trying to advocate social policy change to help with climate change. What are you supposed to do if you are Biden, and Mann tells you all these indexes exist and can predict outcomes well, but the indexes themselves are slow and irregularly changing, and subject to constant revision by their inventors?

I don't have a problem with the Earth warming as an idea or the evidence for it. I had atmospheric physics, thermodynamics, hydrology and other pretty intensive math in college and high school. I just think as a field it is kind of useless. I can't imagine many scientists are attracted to something that is "settled", i.e. that the outcome will be changed weather and warmer temperatures, for decades. The settled science thing to me is classic double speak though. Things that are actually settled are not controversial or subject to hundreds of billions of dollars of research. The research and controversy exists because it is less clear what happens to the trends at a regional and seasonal level, which means it isn't settled, not really. People know the Earth is round. People know where babies come from. Surely these were state of the art scientific findings at some point. But they aren't now, so we don't argue about them or research them in meaningful ways.

To me science is about discovery. The truth is, the climate can only change in a hand full of ways. It can move toward more/less for moisture/heat in a given spot or overall, or more/less for entropy if the way heat is input into the system gets screwed up. So it's not actually that interesting.

You'll never see rain fall up or snow turn blue. It's not like quantum mechanics or something where you're looking for a grand unified theory of everything, which is actually interesting. Climate science is mostly about social policy. But the public has literally no use for knowing that the oceans are forecast to rise, given record populations in coastal areas. The public doesn't care about slow changes in hurricane activity or tracks, or about tornado activity or tracks since we just build better homes and issue better forecasts. I live in the West. It's undoubtedly somewhat warmer than even recent prior hot/dry periods like the 1950s, and water is scarce. But each time we need more water, another water source is found, whether it is a river or a lake that gets diverted. The same thing will inevitably happen in the future, even if it has to be through more extreme measures like cloud seeding, desalinization, or whatever the new method is. 

Lost you at “people have no use for knowing oceans will rise.” I’d say that’s pretty critical information for city planners, zoning commissions, levee projects, insurance companies, potential homeowners, and any coastal infrastructure. Real decisions have been based on this information and many more decisions will and should be made. 
 

“each time we need more water another source is found” ... tell that to the farmers and industries closing due to water restrictions. Future water scarcity has informed water planning decisions. Water boards, farmers, businesses and the Colorado river pact would likely have made very different decisions about how to share water, build infrastructure, etc if they thought the current dry spell was just temporary and brief.

 

your attitude seems to be “well people aren’t dying in the streets and even if they were there’s nothing we could do about it so it’s not worth knowing about even if it were true”

 

also I’d like a reference on the claim of 100s of billions on research. I could believe 10s but pretty skeptical of 100s. 
 

finally, the research money is on the finer details of future effects, figuring out exactly how much change has happened and will happen. What’s settled is the core theory that they earth has warmed around 1c in the last century mostly due to co2.

[tamarack]

"Settled" and "unsettled" have unfortunately been weaponized by certain factions.  I'm no climatologist (the UMaine forestry curricula included very little on the subject when I was there in the early 70s ) but can understand the science enough to see that increasing GHGs result in warming temps, unevenly due to non-anthropogenic factors (thank you, Pinatubo) but trending upward.  Predicting just how much the climate will warm given various GHG scenarios and timeframes is a range rather than a point (like essentially all models, even on rather slow-moving entities like trees) and that "unsettled" factor is grabbed by some who ignore the settled part of the science.  Reminds me a bit like forecasting precipitation - mets are usually quite skillful at telling me when it will rain (a week ago this Mon-Tues was ID'ed, accurately) but less precise in predicting who will get how much, and the forecasts include such uncertainties.  Some wise person coined the phrase, "Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good."  AGW science isn't perfect but it's definitely good.

[donsutherland1]

On 6/14/2021 at 7:39 PM, raindancewx said:

Mann is primarily a statistician by background, I think it matters a lot that a proposed statistical explanation is not correct, especially since he went out of his way to insist on it from the prior "consensus" about volcanoes. None of these proposed 30-year oscillations like the AMO or PDO really behave in that manner if you look at the data or the maps with any level of detail, it shouldn't have escaped the eyes of a smart person. The AMO is a major indicator of snow patterns, drought, and heat waves, among others. So knowing it isn't really a 30-year cycle is not a big deal to me, as a guy with no power. But it makes the entire concept broadly useless to someone like Mann trying to advocate social policy change to help with climate change. What are you supposed to do if you are Biden, and Mann tells you all these indexes exist and can predict outcomes well, but the indexes themselves are slow and irregularly changing, and subject to constant revision by their inventors?

I don't have a problem with the Earth warming as an idea or the evidence for it. I had atmospheric physics, thermodynamics, hydrology and other pretty intensive math in college and high school. I just think as a field it is kind of useless. I can't imagine many scientists are attracted to something that is "settled", i.e. that the outcome will be changed weather and warmer temperatures, for decades. The settled science thing to me is classic double speak though. Things that are actually settled are not controversial or subject to hundreds of billions of dollars of research. The research and controversy exists because it is less clear what happens to the trends at a regional and seasonal level, which means it isn't settled, not really. People know the Earth is round. People know where babies come from. Surely these were state of the art scientific findings at some point. But they aren't now, so we don't argue about them or research them in meaningful ways.

To me science is about discovery. The truth is, the climate can only change in a hand full of ways. It can move toward more/less for moisture/heat in a given spot or overall, or more/less for entropy if the way heat is input into the system gets screwed up. So it's not actually that interesting.

You'll never see rain fall up or snow turn blue. It's not like quantum mechanics or something where you're looking for a grand unified theory of everything, which is actually interesting. Climate science is mostly about social policy. But the public has literally no use for knowing that the oceans are forecast to rise, given record populations in coastal areas. The public doesn't care about slow changes in hurricane activity or tracks, or about tornado activity or tracks since we just build better homes and issue better forecasts. I live in the West. It's undoubtedly somewhat warmer than even recent prior hot/dry periods like the 1950s, and water is scarce. But each time we need more water, another water source is found, whether it is a river or a lake that gets diverted. The same thing will inevitably happen in the future, even if it has to be through more extreme measures like cloud seeding, desalinization, or whatever the new method is. 

Michael Mann is far more than just a statistician. His educational background is:

1998     Ph.D. Yale University, Department of Geology & Geophysics (defended 1996)

1991     M.Phil. Yale University, Department of Physics

1991     M.S. Yale University, Department of Physics

1989     A.B. (double), University of California-Berkeley, Applied Math, Physics (Honors)

Why do you think the field of climate science is “kind of useless.” If anything, the demand for climate science is increasing in a world where climate change is increasingly manifesting itself in extreme events, including the ongoing drought and heat that extends from the Southwest into Alberta and Saskatchewan. Tucson is already in the midst of an extreme heat event (Clarke, et al., 2014 methodology). Last year, Phoenix experienced two such events in a single year for the first time on record. Records there go back to 1896. The changing climate has enormous macroeconomic and societal implications. Even as the primary cause of the ongoing climate change is no longer debated in scientific circles, important uncertainties ranging from feedbacks to potential tipping points exist. There is much work to be done in the field. 

Moreover, the public is looking for increasing information on climate change. And the Weather Channel is poised to integrate climate change into its programming to serve that public need.

I like your posts on El Niño and the SOI—I think highly of them—but I profoundly disagree with your statement, “research and controversy exists because it is less clear what happens to the trends at a regional and seasonal level, which means it isn't settled, not really.” Any controversy is not the result of scientists disagreeing on the big issue of what is happening and why, it is due to the climate change denial industry that is desperately seeking to prop up an unsustainable greenhouse gas-polluting fossil fuel industry. That industry, like the Tobacco one before it, has injected disinformation into the public discourse aimed at fostering doubt and delegitimizing science. That disinformation has had some impact. Moreover, the fossil fuel industry is enjoying a free ride unlike any other industry. The IMF has calculated that the fossil fuel industry receives the equivalent of an after-tax annual subsidy in excess of $600 billion per year, as the public bears the full cost of its externalities. 

https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx (p.35)

You write, “But the public has literally no use for knowing that the oceans are forecast to rise, given record populations in coastal areas.” Again, I strongly disagree. Even as coastal areas account for just 10% of the U.S. land, 127 million people reside there. This is information the public needs to know. Ignorance of such information is a recipe for disaster. 

Finally, according to the most recent GAO report on the topic, climate science research funding came to $13.2 billion in FY 2017.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-223

[donsutherland1]

7 hours ago, wxtrix said:

the science is settled for people who understand science.

the unsettled part is driven by ignorance and politics.

Welcome back to the climate subforum. I hope all is well with you.

[donsutherland1]

32 minutes ago, wxtrix said:

things are well and i hope you can say the same.

I'm back at least to defend science, lol.

Thanks. I was able to avoid the coronavirus and am now fully vaccinated. Welcome back. The more voices to defend science, the better.

Stay well.

[LibertyBell]

12 hours ago, tamarack said:

"Settled" and "unsettled" have unfortunately been weaponized by certain factions.  I'm no climatologist (the UMaine forestry curricula included very little on the subject when I was there in the early 70s ) but can understand the science enough to see that increasing GHGs result in warming temps, unevenly due to non-anthropogenic factors (thank you, Pinatubo) but trending upward.  Predicting just how much the climate will warm given various GHG scenarios and timeframes is a range rather than a point (like essentially all models, even on rather slow-moving entities like trees) and that "unsettled" factor is grabbed by some who ignore the settled part of the science.  Reminds me a bit like forecasting precipitation - mets are usually quite skillful at telling me when it will rain (a week ago this Mon-Tues was ID'ed, accurately) but less precise in predicting who will get how much, and the forecasts include such uncertainties.  Some wise person coined the phrase, "Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good."  AGW science isn't perfect but it's definitely good.

we've been very slow to change because of a "wait and see" approach that just means the changes that need to be made will have to be made on a faster trajectory.  The fact is the changes to our climate are no longer theoretical, they are very tangible now.  Megadrought in the west along with massive expansion of forest fires, much higher humidity and rainfall in the southeast and midatlantic regions including the NYC area.  Tangible rises in sea level that has lead to a rapid increase in sunny day flooding, in cities like Miami and Charleston.  Evacuations of residents being made off barrier islands off the Lousiana coast because sea level rise has made those islands uninhabitable.  Climate change causing the death of food crops in Central America resulting in mass migrations north.  Much more soon to follow.

[raindancewx]

On 6/15/2021 at 6:01 PM, donsutherland1 said:

Michael Mann is far more than just a statistician. His educational background is:

1998     Ph.D. Yale University, Department of Geology & Geophysics (defended 1996)

1991     M.Phil. Yale University, Department of Physics

1991     M.S. Yale University, Department of Physics

1989     A.B. (double), University of California-Berkeley, Applied Math, Physics (Honors)

Why do you think the field of climate science is “kind of useless.” If anything, the demand for climate science is increasing in a world where climate change is increasingly manifesting itself in extreme events, including the ongoing drought and heat that extends from the Southwest into Alberta and Saskatchewan. Tucson is already in the midst of an extreme heat event (Clarke, et al., 2014 methodology). Last year, Phoenix experienced two such events in a single year for the first time on record. Records there go back to 1896. The changing climate has enormous macroeconomic and societal implications. Even as the primary cause of the ongoing climate change is no longer debated in scientific circles, important uncertainties ranging from feedbacks to potential tipping points exist. There is much work to be done in the field. 

Moreover, the public is looking for increasing information on climate change. And the Weather Channel is poised to integrate climate change into its programming to serve that public need.

I like your posts on El Niño and the SOI—I think highly of them—but I profoundly disagree with your statement, “research and controversy exists because it is less clear what happens to the trends at a regional and seasonal level, which means it isn't settled, not really.” Any controversy is not the result of scientists disagreeing on the big issue of what is happening and why, it is due to the climate change denial industry that is desperately seeking to prop up an unsustainable greenhouse gas-polluting fossil fuel industry. That industry, like the Tobacco one before it, has injected disinformation into the public discourse aimed at fostering doubt and delegitimizing science. That disinformation has had some impact. Moreover, the fossil fuel industry is enjoying a free ride unlike any other industry. The IMF has calculated that the fossil fuel industry receives the equivalent of an after-tax annual subsidy in excess of $600 billion per year, as the public bears the full cost of its externalities. 

https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx (p.35)

You write, “But the public has literally no use for knowing that the oceans are forecast to rise, given record populations in coastal areas.” Again, I strongly disagree. Even as coastal areas account for just 10% of the U.S. land, 127 million people reside there. This is information the public needs to know. Ignorance of such information is a recipe for disaster. 

Finally, according to the most recent GAO report on the topic, climate science research funding came to $13.2 billion in FY 2017.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-223

The science for greenhouse gasses impacting the climate has been around for over 100 years in a mathematical sense. It's not terribly complicated. How long do scientists need to convince the public that it will have effects on their lives? Another 100 years? 1,000? The position that one day people will wake up, take the streets, demand action and all will be well is beyond idiotic to me, it's naive. One way to evaluate science for usefulness is to look at what problem facing humanity has been solved by the scientific research. So...what problem has been solved with climate science? We have nuclear scientists here, it's a bit ironic, but their work has contributed to a peaceful world and because countries with a-bombs don't attack either other. No war between powerful countries is a pretty big get. Meteorologists have mostly solved forecasting in short term time-frames I would say. You'll never die from a tornado or a flash flood if you have a weather radio. Engineers and scientists have solved countless communication problems with radio, tv, internet, cell phones, cars, and so on. A lot of climate science looks like curve fitting to me, or to put it another way, fudging some of the more basic physics math with assumptions about how human behavior will change. Say you'd like to think the Earth's albedo would change in predictable ways in 100 years based on the sea ice changes in the past 100 years and you used a simple static or linear model....but what if it doesn't, you know if you were just to pick on this equation as the basis for a really over simplified climate model?

I can't think of a way my life is meaningfully worse from the climate being warmer than 100 years ago because the rate of human adaption is much faster than the rate of climate change, and since I never lived through that climate I never had to adapt fully anyway. I like the heat. When I don't, I have air conditioning. If we keep seeing brief severe cold like we've had in recent Februaries in Western economies when people expect warmth all the time you're going to continue to see massive destruction to poorly planned infrastructure.  Most of what you focus on is places like Phoenix that are at the edge of climate zones in Koppen classification sense, and so the results in those places are going to be far more dire than in most places that are not moving to a new climate zone, like Boston or New York. The climate of 50 years from now will be normal to young people growing up in that era. They won't have to adapt, it will be their normal, and I'll be dead.

I saw someone said that you have water crisis for farmers and ranchers in the West. That's certainly true to some extent, but it's not new. There are ancient irrigation systems all over the state to attempt to draw water from different sources that were designed hundreds of years ago by the tribes here. Mark Twain is famous for saying that "Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river". New Mexico if you study hydrology has a "great lake" sized body of water that has been drained by stupid farming practices and other poor planning underneath. That has as much to do with the issues in the West as anything. You guys in the East always act like if we go through three to 18 month dry periods, it's the end of the world. We have cool places for water storage, on the mountain tops, and then underground thanks to all the prominent mountain ranges above the valley floor. The other issue locally is that the Rio Grande Compact was largely based on precipitation patterns during some extremely wet El Ninos, including 1940-41, which shows up on every hike I've ever taken with huge tree rings on the tree trunks and has something like top-annual rain in the last 300 years locally. The general view in the small towns in the West is that whenever a drought comes, the liberals will divert water to the cities if they are in charge, because that's their power base and the small towns and farmers will run out. There are certainly stories locally about small towns out of water already this Summer, while Albuquerque doesn't even have water restrictions. These are not climate problems, just poor planning problems. The old research I've seen implies something like 20 billion acre feet of water in New Mexico alone underground, it just can't be extracted mostly. Presumably, someone will come up with an innovation to grab it because necessity is the mother of invention.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1987/0741/report.pdf

https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2019/08/07/groundwater-levels-are-on-the-rebound-in-albuquerque/

[LibertyBell]

Use the health argument....higher asthma rates and worse air quality and higher levels of pollution and thats why we're switching to electric vehicles.  A lot of the dirty polluting fossil fuel factories are built near urban areas where minorities live and thats not by accident.

 

[A-L-E-K]

13 hours ago, raindancewx said:

The science for greenhouse gasses impacting the climate has been around for over 100 years in a mathematical sense. It's not terribly complicated. How long do scientists need to convince the public that it will have effects on their lives? Another 100 years? 1,000? The position that one day people will wake up, take the streets, demand action and all will be well is beyond idiotic to me, it's naive. One way to evaluate science for usefulness is to look at what problem facing humanity has been solved by the scientific research. So...what problem has been solved with climate science? We have nuclear scientists here, it's a bit ironic, but their work has contributed to a peaceful world and because countries with a-bombs don't attack either other. No war between powerful countries is a pretty big get. Meteorologists have mostly solved forecasting in short term time-frames I would say. You'll never die from a tornado or a flash flood if you have a weather radio. Engineers and scientists have solved countless communication problems with radio, tv, internet, cell phones, cars, and so on. A lot of climate science looks like curve fitting to me, or to put it another way, fudging some of the more basic physics math with assumptions about how human behavior will change. Say you'd like to think the Earth's albedo would change in predictable ways in 100 years based on the sea ice changes in the past 100 years and you used a simple static or linear model....but what if it doesn't, you know if you were just to pick on this equation as the basis for a really over simplified climate model?

I can't think of a way my life is meaningfully worse from the climate being warmer than 100 years ago because the rate of human adaption is much faster than the rate of climate change, and since I never lived through that climate I never had to adapt fully anyway. I like the heat. When I don't, I have air conditioning. If we keep seeing brief severe cold like we've had in recent Februaries in Western economies when people expect warmth all the time you're going to continue to see massive destruction to poorly planned infrastructure.  Most of what you focus on is places like Phoenix that are at the edge of climate zones in Koppen classification sense, and so the results in those places are going to be far more dire than in most places that are not moving to a new climate zone, like Boston or New York. The climate of 50 years from now will be normal to young people growing up in that era. They won't have to adapt, it will be their normal, and I'll be dead.

I saw someone said that you have water crisis for farmers and ranchers in the West. That's certainly true to some extent, but it's not new. There are ancient irrigation systems all over the state to attempt to draw water from different sources that were designed hundreds of years ago by the tribes here. Mark Twain is famous for saying that "Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river". New Mexico if you study hydrology has a "great lake" sized body of water that has been drained by stupid farming practices and other poor planning underneath. That has as much to do with the issues in the West as anything. You guys in the East always act like if we go through three to 18 month dry periods, it's the end of the world. We have cool places for water storage, on the mountain tops, and then underground thanks to all the prominent mountain ranges above the valley floor. The other issue locally is that the Rio Grande Compact was largely based on precipitation patterns during some extremely wet El Ninos, including 1940-41, which shows up on every hike I've ever taken with huge tree rings on the tree trunks and has something like top-annual rain in the last 300 years locally. The general view in the small towns in the West is that whenever a drought comes, the liberals will divert water to the cities if they are in charge, because that's their power base and the small towns and farmers will run out. There are certainly stories locally about small towns out of water already this Summer, while Albuquerque doesn't even have water restrictions. These are not climate problems, just poor planning problems. The old research I've seen implies something like 20 billion acre feet of water in New Mexico alone underground, it just can't be extracted mostly. Presumably, someone will come up with an innovation to grab it because necessity is the mother of invention.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1987/0741/report.pdf

https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2019/08/07/groundwater-levels-are-on-the-rebound-in-albuquerque/

 

dusty garbage state

[Brian5671]

On 6/7/2021 at 12:40 PM, The Iceman said:

And liberals claim they care about the environment yet continue to fly in private jets to speak at these "climate events" and live in mega mansions near the ocean. Weird. You'd think if they were really that concerned about a "climate emergency", they'd practice what they preach. 

Do as I say, not as I do.

[donsutherland1]

15 hours ago, raindancewx said:

The science for greenhouse gasses impacting the climate has been around for over 100 years in a mathematical sense. It's not terribly complicated. How long do scientists need to convince the public that it will have effects on their lives? Another 100 years? 1,000? The position that one day people will wake up, take the streets, demand action and all will be well is beyond idiotic to me, it's naive. One way to evaluate science for usefulness is to look at what problem facing humanity has been solved by the scientific research. So...what problem has been solved with climate science? We have nuclear scientists here, it's a bit ironic, but their work has contributed to a peaceful world and because countries with a-bombs don't attack either other. No war between powerful countries is a pretty big get. Meteorologists have mostly solved forecasting in short term time-frames I would say. You'll never die from a tornado or a flash flood if you have a weather radio. Engineers and scientists have solved countless communication problems with radio, tv, internet, cell phones, cars, and so on. A lot of climate science looks like curve fitting to me, or to put it another way, fudging some of the more basic physics math with assumptions about how human behavior will change. Say you'd like to think the Earth's albedo would change in predictable ways in 100 years based on the sea ice changes in the past 100 years and you used a simple static or linear model....but what if it doesn't, you know if you were just to pick on this equation as the basis for a really over simplified climate model?

I can't think of a way my life is meaningfully worse from the climate being warmer than 100 years ago because the rate of human adaption is much faster than the rate of climate change, and since I never lived through that climate I never had to adapt fully anyway. I like the heat. When I don't, I have air conditioning. If we keep seeing brief severe cold like we've had in recent Februaries in Western economies when people expect warmth all the time you're going to continue to see massive destruction to poorly planned infrastructure.  Most of what you focus on is places like Phoenix that are at the edge of climate zones in Koppen classification sense, and so the results in those places are going to be far more dire than in most places that are not moving to a new climate zone, like Boston or New York. The climate of 50 years from now will be normal to young people growing up in that era. They won't have to adapt, it will be their normal, and I'll be dead.

I saw someone said that you have water crisis for farmers and ranchers in the West. That's certainly true to some extent, but it's not new. There are ancient irrigation systems all over the state to attempt to draw water from different sources that were designed hundreds of years ago by the tribes here. Mark Twain is famous for saying that "Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river". New Mexico if you study hydrology has a "great lake" sized body of water that has been drained by stupid farming practices and other poor planning underneath. That has as much to do with the issues in the West as anything. You guys in the East always act like if we go through three to 18 month dry periods, it's the end of the world. We have cool places for water storage, on the mountain tops, and then underground thanks to all the prominent mountain ranges above the valley floor. The other issue locally is that the Rio Grande Compact was largely based on precipitation patterns during some extremely wet El Ninos, including 1940-41, which shows up on every hike I've ever taken with huge tree rings on the tree trunks and has something like top-annual rain in the last 300 years locally. The general view in the small towns in the West is that whenever a drought comes, the liberals will divert water to the cities if they are in charge, because that's their power base and the small towns and farmers will run out. There are certainly stories locally about small towns out of water already this Summer, while Albuquerque doesn't even have water restrictions. These are not climate problems, just poor planning problems. The old research I've seen implies something like 20 billion acre feet of water in New Mexico alone underground, it just can't be extracted mostly. Presumably, someone will come up with an innovation to grab it because necessity is the mother of invention.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1987/0741/report.pdf

https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2019/08/07/groundwater-levels-are-on-the-rebound-in-albuquerque/

Although the value of knowledge is realized more broadly than within the field in which the knowledge was developed once that knowledge is applied, that does not mean that such knowledge lacks intrinsic value. The potential value from understanding of the changing climate and its predominant cause would be unlocked from taking the appropriate steps to move toward net zero emissions. The value of the benefits would be substantial. 

In the fossil fuel-centered status quo, there are enormous adverse externalities (health effects, disasters from extreme events attributed to climate change, reduced productivity during heat events, agricultural losses from more frequent/expansive/intensive drought, fire damage, etc.). Those externalities are covered by society at large, rather than the major fossil fuel producers. That’s why they go unnoticed, but not unpaid.

An IMF working paper estimated that the post-tax value of such externalities in the U.S.  currently exceeds $640 billion per year (and $4.7 trillion per year globally). That’s about 3% of GDP. Realization of net zero emissions would eliminate that massive externality. That societal saving would represent a benefit of climate science understanding.

https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx

That confirmation bias/other cognitive biases, motivated reasoning and an unethical disinformation campaign waged by climate change denial sources (barriers over which climate scientists have little influence) impede a timely human response, does not diminish the value of climate science. It only impedes realization of that value. 

[csnavywx]

I have a problem with a lot of economic studies and projections concerning climate change because they do not incorporate risk of ruin. The amount of risk and potential damage goes up exponentially with each degree of warming. I think it would be nigh impossible to calculate warmings of 4-6C just because of the non-linearities involved. Even 2-3C could really be stretching it.

[LibertyBell]

14 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

Although the value of knowledge is realized more broadly than within the field in which the knowledge was developed once that knowledge is applied, that does not mean that such knowledge lacks intrinsic value. The potential value from understanding of the changing climate and its predominant cause would be unlocked from taking the appropriate steps to move toward net zero emissions. The value of the benefits would be substantial. 

In the fossil fuel-centered status quo, there are enormous adverse externalities (health effects, disasters from extreme events attributed to climate change, reduced productivity during heat events, agricultural losses from more frequent/expansive/intensive drought, fire damage, etc.). Those externalities are covered by society at large, rather than the major fossil fuel producers. That’s why they go unnoticed, but not unpaid.

An IMF working paper estimated that the post-tax value of such externalities in the U.S.  currently exceeds $640 billion per year (and $4.7 trillion per year globally). That’s about 3% of GDP. Realization of net zero emissions would eliminate that massive externality. That societal saving would represent a benefit of climate science understanding.

https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx

That confirmation bias/other cognitive biases, motivated reasoning and an unethical disinformation campaign waged by climate change denial sources (barriers over which climate scientists have little influence) impede a timely human response, does not diminish the value of climate science. It only impedes realization of that value. 

Coastal cities were mentioned- those coastal cities may not even exist 50 years from now!

 

[Vice-Regent]

On 6/17/2021 at 11:17 AM, Brian5671 said:

Do as I say, not as I do.

He's using this as a means to disqualify the idea based on the bad merits of a few opportunists. While it proves that he is here on good faith sadly the world does not operate on good faith. The main obstacle facing conservatives is realizing that they handicap themselves by trying to work from within the system to achieve the change they desire or worse yet doing nothing and expecting the system to self-correct.

Synergetically combine the best of both worlds in the hope that you can actually overthrow the system (liberal pathology) and build/maintain something to replace it (conservative pathology). Or better yet don't replace it with anything and let nature run it's course. We are all guilty worldwide in some respects we've bloodied our hands and we deserve everything coming to us.

Not only this we went to war with the very people trying to save us and sided with monetaried interests and slave drivers hoping to get our piece of the pie so to speak which does a huge disservice to the sacrifices of the people who actually want love and prosperity for this planet.

[raindancewx]

One way I think of the climate models that incorporate human behavior for future outcomes is in terms of precision and accuracy. You can have an accurate model that predicts warmth...because it will probably be warmer. But there is so much that happens unexpectedly when humans are involved, that you'll never have much more than a setup where the model says "it should be warmer" and "it is warmer". 

I wouldn't expect these things to happen, but would someone in 2000 have forecast planes flying into sky scrapers, the following endless wars, and massive pandemic deaths for the next 20 years? This is just a run down of basic things that could impact climate as a system in the next century:

- Nuclear/Chemical/Biological War

- Population growing faster or slower than expected, or declining.

- Pandemic that is less controllable than COVID with a 5 or 10 year period for a vaccine or cure instead of a year. Think 10s of millions of deaths, with a second Great Depression.

- Meteor/Space Debris hitting the Arctic / Antarctic and melting a lot of ice.

- Massive increase or decrease in green house gasses that is not expected currently.

- Major volcanic eruptions in succession in the tropics to offset the current quiet period since 1991 or so.

- Ability to remove green house gasses from the air.

- Commercial space travel to keep human population at a sustainable level could begin.

- Unexpected "unknown unknown" technologies. There is a rock, Peridotite that mostly is in the mantle of the Earth that shows up in Oman that removes Carbon Dioxide from the air. You could remove an enormous amount of it with enough of the material. Enough to offset huge amounts of emissions.

You can also get into the weird science fiction-y stuff - time travel (doubt it), alien contact (doubt it), or even some kind of movement away from technology as a way of life, think of it as people getting sick of looking at their phones all day. Short of the White House being under 100 feet of water in 2050, I don't think you'll see much change from the past 30 years regarding how people behave in the next generation or two.

[donsutherland1]

If there were any question that the book’s author is profoundly out of touch with contemporary climate science understanding, this interview should erase all reasonable questions:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/physicist-tells-tucker-carlson-climate-change-is-fiction-of-the-media.amp

[Bhs1975]

If there were any question that the book’s author is profoundly out of touch with contemporary climate science understanding, this interview should erase all reasonable questions:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/physicist-tells-tucker-carlson-climate-change-is-fiction-of-the-media.amp

Yeah he's a tool.

[raindancewx]

On 6/17/2021 at 10:40 AM, donsutherland1 said:

Although the value of knowledge is realized more broadly than within the field in which the knowledge was developed once that knowledge is applied, that does not mean that such knowledge lacks intrinsic value. The potential value from understanding of the changing climate and its predominant cause would be unlocked from taking the appropriate steps to move toward net zero emissions. The value of the benefits would be substantial. 

In the fossil fuel-centered status quo, there are enormous adverse externalities (health effects, disasters from extreme events attributed to climate change, reduced productivity during heat events, agricultural losses from more frequent/expansive/intensive drought, fire damage, etc.). Those externalities are covered by society at large, rather than the major fossil fuel producers. That’s why they go unnoticed, but not unpaid.

An IMF working paper estimated that the post-tax value of such externalities in the U.S.  currently exceeds $640 billion per year (and $4.7 trillion per year globally). That’s about 3% of GDP. Realization of net zero emissions would eliminate that massive externality. That societal saving would represent a benefit of climate science understanding.

https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx

That confirmation bias/other cognitive biases, motivated reasoning and an unethical disinformation campaign waged by climate change denial sources (barriers over which climate scientists have little influence) impede a timely human response, does not diminish the value of climate science. It only impedes realization of that value. 

The proposals you see from a lot of the advocacy groups would more than offset any 3% GDP hits. If you taxed oil companies heavily enough, with something like a wealth tax or special income tax, they would pass on the cost to consumers. My personal view is that scientists should stay in their lane, focus on improving your field, and leave social policy to better thinkers. A state like New Mexico gets 40% of tax revenue from an oil. You really want to confiscate that money from a school or a road to lower the temperature of the Earth by a fraction of a degree over a 100 years? It's bad ethics. There are actually states with far more share of their budget coming from oil companies than here. It's not just "states" either, there are entire countries reliant on oil money for their economic development, and their not domestic companies, so the taxes from us, or Biden's proposed "global taxes" would hit them pretty hard. Telling people that they are losing the high paying oil job because a scientist is concerned that the Earth will be hotter in a 100 years is also insane to do politically. We're supposed to be a country where the society at large decides how to proceed. This non-sense with a few people getting to dictate how the entire country is ripe with ethical issues and political illegitimacy. You can see it with COVID too, the governors all magically decided they could do emergency orders without consulting the "people" via the state law makers. I always like the wisdom of the masses, if you asked a bunch of barbers how to come up with solutions for any negative impacts from the climate warming, you'd have a much better solution that stripping states of their oil money, which seems to be your solution via taxing externalities. This obsession with oil companies is also bad ethics and bad economics, since we as a people who drive cars and fly on airplanes demanded that the oil companies provide their product as cheaply as possible. It's the same bullshit as when people talk about how much they care about human rights and they spend three hours on their Chinese slave labor produced Iphone yelling at people on Twitter who won't even pretend to agree. Apple could produce Iphones in the US if you were willing to spend thousands of dollars per phone. The modern world is built on people getting what they want even if they have to make some difficult decisions. It's not always pretty, but the foundation is grounded well.

Europe is also far less dynamic than the US with $7-$9 per gallon oil costs per gallon. That type of cost would destroy the US economy. Gas is a low percentage of costs for wealthier people but it would hit poor people and rural people hard. Frankly $640 billion is an irrelevant number and I don't particularly like their method for calculating it either. For a person making $40,000 a 3% hit per year, it's $100 a month. I would call that irrelevant next to the benefits that have been accrued via the processes that warmed the Earth - cars, airplanes, computing power increases, electrical grids, better buildings, and so on. The type of re-invention of society that is proposed to reduce greenhouse gasses would be extremely destabilizing, if for no other reason than it punishes people innocent of any major wrong doing for past mistakes. You're trying to make a moral argument that because of a culmination of past poor lifestyles, modern people have to live less luxuriously to save the Earth. It's the same ethical issue as slave reparations, or when modern Christians attack modern Jews for killing Jesus, or for calling young Germans in 2021 Nazis over something like an EU trade dispute. You're punishing people in the modern world for something you don't like that mostly happened in the past. It doesn't matter if changing the system would solve some of the issues, you're still advocating for a  "two wrongs make a right" type of setup. Ethically, the solutions that tell people they can't have the lifestyle they want because of a culmination of mistakes from prior generations amounts to hot garbage in both practical and political terms. 

[Vice-Regent]

Very well said my brother. Honestly this is a relief for me to see such wisdom propagate across the internet and eventually the world. We need to escape the ideological bubbles which only act to our detriment.

No solutions presented to date have ever promised a shade of viability (we need that cooling shade now more than ever). It's retooling broken and patch-work mentality that we are fighting to survive against not climate change. That's unfortunate because our best years are now and we are squandering them. Civilization is an evil construction. I don't think many here would disagree whilst enjoying modern conveniences.

The problem is civilization is an idea not a structure or country it's a self-propagating idea which is not readily destroyed. Only something as massive as climate change can break the back of civilization forever.