Climate Emails Stoke Debate

[goDel]

don't forget to read this part

Quote

But ExxonMobil disagrees that any of its early statements were so stark, let alone conclusive at all. “We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest,” ExxonMobil spokesperson Allan Jeffers tells Scientific American. “The thing that shocks me the most is that we’ve been saying this for years, that we have been involved in climate research. These guys go down and pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.”

 

[Brisbot]

Lol, well that is probably the only response I'd ever expect from one of their spokespeople. True or false that is what Allan Jeffers was always destined to say and probably the best possible response from them regarding this.

I just have trouble trusting the research of a huge company who have nothing to gain from climate change being a legit issue. From googling it they denied it for a long time too, though it seems they changed their tune. But I still don't care for their opinion when they have everything to lose. I'd rather defer to third parties.

Generally scientists not associated with oil corps are more impartial. There for sure are reasons for them to be biased toward climate change being a thing, but 97% is a huge bias. 

 

'

Edited May 27, 2019 by Brisbot

[may be rude]

I wanted to address goDel's points on my refutation of his assertion that "the milankovitch parameters are way more important with respect to causing changes in climate."

 

20 hours ago, goDel said:

First: look at the scales of the x and y axes on all the charts you've posted. the milankovitch cycles chart has different scales on the x-axis. which distorts the image and therefore what you read into it.

The hockeystick curves: in the last graph you have two different y's and both of them don't start at zero. Which is important to notice when trying to understand what you're looking at and how big the effect is. It basically makes the spike appear bigger than it is. which is unnecessary btw, as even with the y-axes starting at 0, the spike would still be visible. although less pronounced.

And wrt respect to the hockey stick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

Which is basically what the threadstarter was about as well. Apart from scientific controversy, it's a highly politicised issue. Obviously. And as such, I'm merely a sceptic. Which is based on a number of issues already explained. Apart from ignoring evidence on other factors influencing climate change (milankovitch), and starting at year 0, it looks at smaller differences as well.

So the focus is on the last 2000 years and differences of .5 degrees instead of the 5-10 F of the milankovitch cycle. You should ask yourself how fast climate has changed on average in the last 250 mln years (how many years did it take to change 5F). And than look at those other charts. Is that hockeystick noise, or evidence of an outlier. My argument would be that we actually don't know. And can't know. Simply because the differences in timescale. 

 

 

 

19 hours ago, goDel said:

Also, this chart comes from the wiki page about the little ice age. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age)

It doesn't specify the meaning of those different lines. That thick black line is that the global average temperature measured from 1800? Those other lines seem to get stuck around 0 at the year 2000. Without the black line, the hockeystick is basically gone as those other lines have returned to pre-little ice age levels. Perhaps i'm reading this wrong, but i haven't seen  a good explanation other than "different studies".

Also from that page:

Yeah, tentatively. Or in other words, we're still doing research because we don't know. (here comes that question again on what the scientific community currently broadly agrees, because it's still not clear to me, tbh.) 

If you want to continue this discussion, that's fine. But I hope you at least understand my scepticism by now. You don't have to agree with me or anything. I mean, I'm more in the I don't know camp. But that's a camp that's different to the "believe in climate policies" camp. 

With respect to the political side of the debate, I'd prefer to talk about policies about energy and the environment. If government could come to agreements on those issues I'm happy. Policies with respect to climate change however seems rather cartoon like in its understanding of climate change itself. Especially when you consider politics works in 4-year cycles. Every 4 years there's another government. 4 years. That's nothing in milankovitch cycles. Politics and climate change is a silly combination.

 

 

 

my responses to those points:

• the "Temperature of Planet Earth" chart does have a telescoping x axis, which is marked accordingly. i posted it because it supports your claim of milankovitch cycles affecting temperature, albeit at a slow rate of over 100,000 years, and with an apparent affect of 5-10 degrees. the different scales of the x axis are clearly marked. the y axis is consistent for the entire chart.
• the two hockey stick charts having different Y's is unavoidable - of course they have different Y's. the point, which the charts support, is that there is a correlation in the pattern of increasing greenhouse gas concentration and increasing global temperature.
• the hockey stick controversy that you linked to a wiki on seems like the obvious talking point for anyone wanting to discount the best data we have. of course we are not omniscient of the past. scientists never claimed absolute accuracy of derived estimates. i should note that greenhouse gas concentration data is actually pretty good, coming from ice cores. temperature data is less direct.
• your argument that we don't know and can't know the answer to the question of whether or not the hockey stick pattern of temperature increase is noise, "simply because of the timescale," does not make sense to me. i've addressed the timescales of the milankovitch cycles and the "hockey stick" (of both temperature rise and greenhouse gas concentration increase). those 2 timescales are different by 3 orders of magnitude - the milankovitch cycle takes place over 100,000 years, and the "hockey stick" pattern (of both temperature increase and greenhouse gas increase) takes place over a couple hundred years.
• the "Reconstructed Temperature" chart - this is the Wiki page on the chart, which lists the keys for the colored lines. they are various published historical temperature reconstructions
• in the "Reconstructed Temperature" chart, black is instrument data through '04. the colored lines stop decades prior to '04, which is why the black line continues.

 

posting these here again, for reference.

 

Edited May 27, 2019 by very honest

[caze]

21 hours ago, goDel said:

First: look at the scales of the x and y axes on all the charts you've posted. the milankovitch cycles chart has different scales on the x-axis. which distorts the image and therefore what you read into it.

The hockeystick curves: in the last graph you have two different y's and both of them don't start at zero. Which is important to notice when trying to understand what you're looking at and how big the effect is. It basically makes the spike appear bigger than it is. which is unnecessary btw, as even with the y-axes starting at 0, the spike would still be visible. although less pronounced.

The fact that the y-axes don't start at zero is irrelevant, that's only because there are no data points below 250 or 600 on those axes. If you started them at zero you'd just add a bunch of blank space, it wouldn't affect the apparent size of the spike at all, the only way to do that would be to make the axes non-linear (which would actually decrease the apparent size of the spike), but they're both linear.

The differing scales on the x-axis of the other graph isn't relevant either, they're clearly labeled and they account for time scales in thousands of years and more, whereas the other graph is for hundreds of years, the difference between the two is obvious. There's nothing in long-scale data that shows those minkowski cycles that can explain the current spike, it's obviously caused by human activity, as corroborated by lots of other data. Dumping a huge amount of extra energy into the climate over such a short time span is going to have a big impact, it's just basic physics.

 

On the general point you're somewhat correct to be sceptical about the predictive ability of current climate models, the more data we get it looks like the uncertainty in these models increases a lot. That's not necessarily a good thing though, while on the one hand it might mean less warming and sea level rise over the next hundred years, but on the other hand it could just as likely lead to far greater problems than currently thought. Either way there's no doubt about the cause of recent warming, and given the risks we need to be sorting this shit out yesterday.

[chenGOD]

22 hours ago, goDel said:

No disagreement on human impact on co2 levels. Just that the milankovitch parameters are way more important with respect to causing changes in climate. The Al Gore story about temperatures following the co2 levels is just bonkers. We would have been fried by now. Correlation is no causation.

It's hard to pinpoint the exact influence of humans on climate change. Any outcome will likely be within the margin of error, I'd argue. Just like the impact of any policy will have wrt reducing co2 levels. We're looking at this issue at timescales less than 100 years, which imo, is nonsense. Climate will keep on following milankovitch cycles and a next ice age will come eventually. Climate scientists in the 70s/early 80s of last century were even thinking we were already moving into the next one. As climate seemed to be getting colder at that point in time. Which only shows one of the big issues when it comes to following climate changes on a smaller timescale. There just isn't any model with 200 years of data which is sufficient in explaining what's going on, or predicting where we're heading. The best models in explaining climate change are based on the milankovitch parameters and cover periods 100K/millions of years.

As far as I'm concerned, science isn't there yet to explain changes in smaller timescales. At least, I haven't seen convincing evidence. They are trying though. But if the next decade will show a global cooling, which is a possibility, we can't explain why and worse, some might argue the next ice age might be coming (or some other end of the world scenario).

Entirely possible that Gore was using hyperbole to drive his point home. It's not too hard to see that through the increase in CO2, there has been a reduction in the Earth's albedo, leading to an increase in average temperature globally, which leads to more sea ice melting, which decreases Earth's albedo further. This positive feedback loop is widely acknowledged - here is a good report on why it the lessening of the albedo matters. https://www.amap.no/documents/doc/AMAP-Climate-Change-Update-2019/1761

If anything, the length of the Milankovitch cycles is a complete justification for human-driven climate change. Those swings take hundreds of thousands of years, yet we are seeing equivalent ones on such a smaller time-scale that it's difficult not to correlate them with human activity.

 

As to your comment on the Scientific American journal (that hard bastion of anti-capitalism), is it any surprise that a company that has spent millions on promoting anti-climate change science propaganda would say something along those lines?

[goDel]

2 hours ago, caze said:

The fact that the y-axes don't start at zero is irrelevant, that's only because there are no data points below 250 or 600 on those axes. If you started them at zero you'd just add a bunch of blank space, it wouldn't affect the apparent size of the spike at all, the only way to do that would be to make the axes non-linear (which would actually decrease the apparent size of the spike), but they're both linear.

The differing scales on the x-axis of the other graph isn't relevant either, they're clearly labeled and they account for time scales in thousands of years and more, whereas the other graph is for hundreds of years, the difference between the two is obvious. There's nothing in long-scale data that shows those minkowski cycles that can explain the current spike, it's obviously caused by human activity, as corroborated by lots of other data. Dumping a huge amount of extra energy into the climate over such a short time span is going to have a big impact, it's just basic physics.

 

On the general point you're somewhat correct to be sceptical about the predictive ability of current climate models, the more data we get it looks like the uncertainty in these models increases a lot. That's not necessarily a good thing though, while on the one hand it might mean less warming and sea level rise over the next hundred years, but on the other hand it could just as likely lead to far greater problems than currently thought. Either way there's no doubt about the cause of recent warming, and given the risks we need to be sorting this shit out yesterday.

about y-axis not starting at 0

It matters in terms of visual interpretation. i'll put the rest into spoilers, because you'll prolly get the gist of where i'm going with this.

Spoiler

if you start at anything other that 0, you can create a narrative that there are relatively huge differences. starting at 0 is important to give an honest narrative. it matters. depending on the point to make. 

you can visually exaggerate the issue by not starting at 0. which - as i already argued - was unnecessary (read: i'm NOT arguing there's nothing happening, as it's obvious there is a change.) the point can be however, is that the significance of it has been exaggerated visually. You might argue from the logic there's nothing happening below the chosen cutoff points, but see here for further discussion: https://www.data-to-viz.com/caveat/cut_y_axis.html (in other words; in dataviz this *is* important the story changes when chosing different cutoffs.)

this is especially important when you want to make a comparison with another graph with lets say the global temperatures. which is what we're currently doing. it's simply not useful the arbitrarily use cutoff-points because you'll end up comparing apples with oranges.

Similar argument holds for the x-axis for the other chart. it's just not good dataviz practice to do this. because it forces the viewer to correct these changes in their head when interpreting. for example, when you're wondering whether there are anomalies, or interested in the stability of certain trends. whether you agree with me or not, when visualising you're looking for patterns and (relative) changes. if you have an x-axis where stuff like this happens, you change the visual patterns. and patterns you see can become meaningless. it goes against the goal of visualising. 

if we're looking for a hockeystick in the multimillion year chart with a uniform x-axis, you're not going to find it. and what's interesting in the current chart, is if you look at the periodic spikes in temperature starting from a million years back, you see an increase in maximum temperature during the warm spikes. and if you compress the x-axis such that it's the same to the one last used in pleistocene, we're living in a spike starting 20.000 years ago.

Spoiler

you can thank malkovich for that

;p

Coming back to those hockeysticks, what strikes me is that you can't see the medieval warmer period and the little ice age following. at least not in the sense of the other graph with different studies/temperatures. scaling is important here though! (again) so to make a fair visual comparison, it'd be interesting to plot the greenhouse gasses similarly to the global temp. meaning in terms of absolute anomaly (compared to the average, i guess).

currently, the correlation is rather poor, if you ask me. greenhouse gasses has been stable until recently, while on the other hand we had a medieval warm period followed by a little ice age. wouldn't it be fair to see a stronger effect? especially when making an argument for the importance of greenhouse gasses! there might be some wobbles during the little ice age, but the amount of methane seems to grow during the little ice age. nitros oxide as well, i'd argue. you can discuss about co2 as there's more going on. but let me put it this way, we didn't have a medieval warm period and a little ice age because of changes in greenhouse gasses. by visually comparing you'd come to the conclusion greenhouse gasses played a week role in those climate changes. it's more likely stuff happening which caused greenhouse gas levels to change during those event. 

in all fairness, the hockeystick at the end is an entirely different beast. and to be clear, i do think it's fair to do something about it. (but again, stop calling that climate change policies. it's about the environment, stupid.)

 

@chenGOD: malkovich-cycles are bigger (rise in temp roughly factor 10) than the ones we're seeing since year 0. from a malkovich perspective, there's not much of a hockeystick. yet.

 

 

Edited May 27, 2019 by goDel

[chenGOD]

26 minutes ago, goDel said:

  Reveal hidden contents

if you start at anything other that 0, you can create a narrative that there are relatively huge differences. starting at 0 is important to give an honest narrative. it matters. depending on the point to make. 

you can visually exaggerate the issue by not starting at 0. which - as i already argued - was unnecessary (read: i'm NOT arguing there's nothing happening, as it's obvious there is a change.) the point can be however, is that the significance of it has been exaggerated visually. You might argue from the logic there's nothing happening below the chosen cutoff points, but see here for further discussion: https://www.data-to-viz.com/caveat/cut_y_axis.html (in other words; in dataviz this *is* important the story changes when chosing different cutoffs.)

this is especially important when you want to make a comparison with another graph with lets say the global temperatures. which is what we're currently doing. it's simply not useful the arbitrarily use cutoff-points because you'll end up comparing apples with oranges.

  Reveal hidden contents

you can thank malkovich for that

 stop calling that climate change policies. it's about the environment, stupid.

 

@chenGOD: malkovich-cycles are bigger (rise in temp roughly factor 10) than the ones we're seeing since year 0. from a malkovich perspective, there's not much of a hockeystick. yet.

 

 

But climate change affects the environment - and they are different things. So why wouldn't you have different policies?

 

I don't know how John Malkovich slipped in here but the milankovitch cycles seem to indicate that swings are between -8C to 2C, over the course of 100K years...but we've had 1 degree of warming since 1880, with the majority of it happening in the past 40 years. So that positive feedback loop seems to be working as predicted.

Also, I'm unsure why you're willing to put so much trust in the Milankovitch cycles, which still poses many questions in its theory. As the wiki article on it says: " If orbital forcing causes climate change, science needs to explain why the observed effect is amplified compared to the theoretical effect."

[dingformung]

I think he just likes the controversy

[goDel]

about the malkovich thing: you there's still stuff that needs to be explained. i mentioned this earlier as well, btw. it explains a lot. which is something as it spans more than 200 million years. to give a sense of the scale.

and again, the importance is that even without the human-impact factor, we still don't fully understand the changes from the past. to a large extent it's malkovich, but not everything. so my critique was wrt to current human-impact theories is that apart from the lack of historical data (since we started f-ing with fossil fuel is simply too short), we don't know the full story about what the world would look like without human involvement with screwing the environment. which is necessary, i'd argue. 

so the problem with current models explaining human-impact is that it is based on such a small timescale, that it's mostly trying to model noise in a way. climate change works over 10.000s years.

i could understand the argument however when you say: that might be, but the current anomalies wrt greenhousegasses is really concerning. what could happen? that's fair. but the imo honest scientific explanation is: we don't know. and at this point we return to the paris agreement. where i'd argue: yeah, lets do something about co2 and what not. but please, don't argue we can have a serious impact on the way the current climate is changing. really, it's more rational to assume the impact is going to be immeasurably small.

[goDel]

5 minutes ago, darreichungsform said:

I think he just likes the controversy

if you want to see some nobel laureates making similar argument, go to youtube and search for "nobel climate". 

also, here in the netherlands there's quite a bunch of people in science very sceptic about climate science. which results amongst other things in netherlands really toetailing the international community in implementing policies, btw. it's not just politicians, it's also the experts being more sceptic. now, you might argue the experts in the netherlands are a bunch of idiots. fair, i guess. but please take into account that rising sea levels is pretty important for a country half of which is below current sea levels. we tend to take that stuff seriously. believe it or not. 

[caze]

1 hour ago, goDel said:

It matters in terms of visual interpretation.

No it doesn't. The graph shows more than a doubling of the total methane level, and a 35% increase in the CO2 level, over a hundred years, that is the significant feature of the data that you should take away from the graph, and that would remain so even if you added in a bunch of empty space below all the data points. A 35% increase of a small amount wouldn't be a big deal, but we know from the effect of CO2 on the climate throughout the earth's history that this represents a significant increase.

Your own link proves my point btw (did you even read it?), there are cases when cutting the y-axis can distort the picture (where you actually have a relatively small difference between the data points); this isn't one of them, the relative difference between the data is huge in terms of their effects. Always starting axes at zero would be an entirely arbitrary decision, what matters is what the numbers, and differences between them, mean in the real world. In many charts starting at zero would be meaningless, a zero quantity may be physically impossible for example, so including it in your graph as the baseline imparts no useful information.

There is a window of acceptable CO2 concentration (in terms of allowing humans to live comfortably, or at all, in all the various places in which they currently live), this window probably extends below the bottom of that graph, it does not extend much past the top.

 

The medieval warm period and little ice age are also pretty well understood btw, the former wasn't even that warm (at a global level it was below current average temps, there just happened to be higher temps in northern latitudes, it was probably caused by changes in sea currents or upper atmospheric changes). The latter was caused by increased volcanic activity and low solar activity. Somewhat similarly is the possibility that continued global warming could cause lower temperatures in many parts of the northern hemisphere, again due to changes in the gulf stream and ocean currents, while still raising global average temperatures and causing rising sea levels.

 

You're still missing the point re the other graph too, the important feature is that there is evidence for long-scale, slow moving, fluctuations (due to various orbital shit), there is no evidence for orbital differences causing short-scale fluctuations of the same amount (as seen in the hockey stick). There were certainly many incidents which caused short scale fluctuations in the distant past, due to volcanic activity and meteor impacts and such, but not orbital mechanics; the only thing we have any evidence for wrt to recent warming is manmade CO2, and it's very strong evidence. And even if Milankovitch cycles were playing a part in the climate now, then the climate should actually be cooling, not warming (this was why there was a global cooling scare before we understood the climate was actually warming); because our current orbit sees upper latitudes receive less sunlight.

Edited May 27, 2019 by caze

[Brisbot]

Woah this debate. So which of you are INTJ or INTP?

Got goDel pegged as an INTP. Well it's my guess anyway. 

 And no, I don't have a point. Took the test a few hours ago and it's just on my mind.

Edited May 27, 2019 by Brisbot

[goDel]

hey caze, thanks for the response, but lets play nice. no need for the " have you even read it yourself!?". the link showed the discussion of whether or not to start at 0 matters. and explains there's more to it than just "it's irrelevant" and "there's nothing happening below so you can skip it". which was what you were arguing. right? and btw, i wasn't arguing to always start at zero. so please don't put me into that box.

the point was: it depends. which implies that the message of the visualisation is key in making decisions like that. imo, that is way more nuanced than "there's nothing happening below, so you are allowed to skip". blindly following that logic you'd be happy with that fox example. which you won't argue, i'm sure. not trying to put words in your mouth, just following the logic of your initial statement.

following your argument: if there's a 35% increase, like you say, you'd need a similar impact on temperature, one might argue. looking at temperatures, I've seen numbers of 288K avg from year 1800 to 288.8K now (increase 0.8K in 200 years). certainly no 35% increase. so lets call it 3%. is there also a significant hockeystick visible in global temperatures? it changes, yes. but is the change big enough to rise above the level of uncertainty within the data? lets use the nasa page as a reference for a bit https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/DecadalTemp

the link on nasa is interesting because it is open about it's assumptions. one of them being:

Quote

Global temperature records start around 1880 because observations did not sufficiently cover enough of the planet prior to that time. The period of 1951-1980 was chosen largely because the U.S. National Weather Service uses a three-decade period to define “normal” or average temperature. The GISS temperature analysis effort began around 1980, so the most recent 30 years was 1951-1980. It is also a period when many of today’s adults grew up, so it is a common reference that many people can remember.

sounds like a poor reference to me, btw. i can understand the pragmatism behind it. but from a scientific point of view, it's a really weak argument, imo. we can't falsify whether it's a good or bad reference. the 3 decade period itself is debatable. and it's debatable to define that period as "normal". we really don't have a good normal. and therefore, it's unscientific, imo. it's political. and perhaps even very anthropocentric. the point is, i'm not convinced about hockeysticks, tbh. i'll come back to this point later, because the malkovich-science is relevant for the hockeystick discussion.

the milankovitch graph:  "long-scale, slow moving, fluctuations" is not what milankovich predicts, btw. the 41k cycle (or the 100k cycle) might take long, but that's different to "slow moving". as there are multiple parameters which can inhibit or enhance each other. allowing for sudden changes when they do enhance. than there's also stuff about positive and negative feedback loops with other factors influencing climate. which is also visible in the graph. the warming spikes come relatively sudden. and they tend to be followed by a slower drop off. temperatures tend to drop slowly, and rise pretty steep, i'd argue. which is especially visible in the pleistocene period, btw. The period before has a different scaling such that you can't really tell what's going on there. (which is why i'd prefer an x-axis with a uniform scale. but lets skip the dataviz arguments for a bit)

more recent, given the greenland temps (NGRIP, light bleuish/green) there have been a number of "hockeystick"  events in the past (holocene, 15k/10k years ago) the blue one also, but less pronounced. the odd thing, to me, is the relative stability in the last 10k years. just from looking at this graph alone, this relative stability is an anomaly on it's own. so the upwards curve (although too short, id argue), ironically, is more a return to the usual change. and the anomaly is the relative stability of the last 10k years. sounds like im trolling here, but there is some logic here. like it or not.

so, if change in climate is a given, stability is the anomaly. our current hockeystick might not be as unique as assumed. and this is also problematic with choosing the 1950-1980 period as the normal, btw. add to this that our hockeystick starts exactly at the moment we start recording temperatures (1800ish). so the assumption we're in a unique hockeystick, which is caused by humans/greenhouse gas seems premature to begin with. we can't even tell whether this anomaly is significant with respect to the normal variation as far as i can tell. we lack the data to be able to establish that. there's simply not enough evidence one way or the other. and again, this also goes back to the discussion on what is "normal". i think it's fair to argue, the normal is very much an anthropocentric one. which is understandable. but a political choice. not scientific.

looking at the projections (2050, 2100) it's not difficult to conclude they seem highly dependant on those studies based on the change in the last 200 years. and again, it simply boils down to extrapolating the change from the last 200 years into the future. i'm simply not convinced this is right, at this point. are these projections also assuming the 1951-1980 period to be "normal"? you've made some comments about those projections as well. and they seemed sensible, so lets leave it at that.

so the argument becomes "but the scientific community says". and my answer is: that's actually problematic because it has become too politicised. unscientific stuff is mixed with the science. read the first paragraph of the nasa page, for instance. it explicitly leaves open the cause for the rise in temperature (could be normal variation, it even says!). is that a scientific statement, or a political one? fact is, i can't tell. which is deeply troubling. what nasa says, should be based on science. now i read that first paragraph, and i'm forced to wonder whether that's the science, or some watered down version which is politically safe. 

the same holds for the ipcc reports, btw. science mixed with politics. that's just plain awful, imo. science has become harder to trust as a consequence. and climate science in particular, has become as trustworthy as medical science, for instance. which is problematic.

coming back to my first post, science should be open to contrarianism. which it is not the case in the context of climate science. from the perspective of a contrarian, the current consensus could also imply a strong bias within the community. driven by politics and the goal to publish and get funding for more research, instead of the science itself. (again, take the medical science community as an example here. the impact of bias is big) to think even that consensus itself is part of science. karl popper would turn in his grave!

lastly, despite my criticisms wrt paris agreement, i do think it's politically better to keep it in place. (although i'd prefer a less outcome driven approach) not because of the science. but because of the politics. it would really help though if people stop bullying others with a bit of a sceptic outlook on these issues. scepticism is healthy. in both ways. (read: don't you f-ing agree with me!)

don't think i'll be responding as extensive as i have. i only hope it's ok to be sceptic. people can have a healthy sense of scepticism wrt the climate issues without being alt-right/populist/nationalist/whatever is essentially all i'm arguing here. others might just trust on the scientific consensus. that's also fine. this is not some snarky argument to prove my opinion is better than others. i just tend to be a bit more sceptical. rightfully or wrongfully. and that should be ok on itself, i'd argue. or rather, should be welcomed even.

[Brisbot]

So where should I start if I want to get into this debate? which season... er page.

[goDel]

It's a 4 page thread? I started f-ing things up on the second page, if thats what your asking.

[Brisbot]

Lol I read it as 40 pages. No clue why.

[goDel]

feels like it, doesn't it

[Brisbot]

32 minutes ago, goDel said:

feels like it, doesn't it

I'm impressed by these wall to wall posts. Every time I go to read them I just can't make it through the whole thing. I blame social media and youtube videos for lowering my attention span.

I read Don Quixote in middle school which has around 850 pages, and I can't read thru some of these posts.

[may be rude]

 

 

developments in the arctic are really concerning. the shrinking ice cap creates a new mechanism for warming - less light reflected to space. 

 

another, similar chain reaction - as temperatures rise, clouds will be sparser, also reflecting less light to space

 

another chain reaction relating to the arctic region - methane trapped in permafrost will get released.

 

these accelerators could jump climate change to be much more drastic than the horrible forecasts already projected. we could literally fuck the earth. if the threat of calamitous natural disasters is not enough.

 

the argument of anti-activists that "humans can't destroy the environment" is based on nothing. species damage their habitat to their own detriment all the time. 

Edited June 10, 2019 by very honest

[goDel]

Came across this talk by Stephen Schneider which is really interesting. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, btw.

To give you a hint, his answer to the title question is that it's a stupid question. ;)

So he's basically talking from a position beyond the standard dichotomies you get from the media. In other words, it's lovely stuff. Goes more into explaining how to interpret what he calls "systems science" and labels climate policies as "risk management". Again, interesting watch.

 

[may be rude]

was surprised by this million year chart of co2 concentration

 

 

[Squee]

This thread is almost 10 years old. Holy shit. 

[Joyrex]

52 minutes ago, Squee said:

This thread is almost 10 years old. Holy shit. 

And we're ever closer to the brink of disaster than before...

[goDel]

Climate change takes time, squee.

[marf]

John malkovich has nothing to do with global warming, this is getting ridiculous