I'm old enough to remember we were all "science" supposed to be entirely underwater by now. Yet here we are quibbling about millimetres? First it was "the coming ice age", then "global warming", now its "climate change".
What's next? The "millimetre sea-level imbalance catastrophe"?
I'm over it. I've lost my respect for climate science, and the field has done that to itself. It needs to take full responsibility for its repeating cycle of "alarmism -> failed prediction -> u-turn" that caused me to.
I've lost my respect for people like you who'd rather deny the very real effect climate change is having and will have on hundreds of millions of people.
Or is it the very real effect continued geo-engineering is having and will have on hundreds of millions of people? Look up China's participation in that.
Or is it the solar cycle - how much impact does the primary core driver of earths climate moods have on earths climate? Look that up.
Or is it a mix of these and other possible causes, some potentially those identified by so-far very unreliable dogmatic climate science?
You can't solve problems with science if you are so mired in the current "correct" way of thinking you can't think objectively continuously, and especially during those times it seems like everyones got it "figured out".
(And even more especially when those same people can be demonstrated to have been consistently wrong for decades.)
> I'm old enough to remember we were all "science" supposed to be entirely underwater by now.
The science never really said that. Bad PopSci reporting did. The science said that was a worst case possibility. Kind of "if we do the worst things possible as much as possible, then this is the worst case scenario".
Then you read hacks--and paid disinformation spreaders, which we have documentation of various oil companies in particular doing I might add--reporting that as if it was a sure thing. Because clickbait isn't a new concept.
Also - we actually DID change what we did. We did things like ban CFCs, etc. It made a significant difference to models! Hooray us for doing the bare minimum.
We're not quibbling over millimeters, not unless you're completely misunderstanding or misrepresenting the topic anyhow. We're pointing out the rate of change is increasing and we haven't even seen the worst case effects yet (like CO2 release from the oceans, Greenland melting, etc).
The global temperature is going up, rapidly, and we're at the point were these effects are already starting to be seen. That's... a tipping point.
Unfortunately, if we take what prestigious climatologists have said as "the science" then you're wrong. They have in fact said exactly that. Here's just two examples, of many.
James Hansen is perhaps the most famous climatologist, he worked at NASA and testified to Congress about global warming at the end of the 1980s. Back then he was telling people that by ~2010 highways in New York would be underwater, there'd be tape on the windows due to high winds and that crime would have increased due to the heat.
Not that it might happen, or there was a worst case possibility that it would happen. That it would definitely happen.
None of that occurred (and in fact crime in New York went down a lot) but he didn't learn anything. Here he is in 2008. "Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years the Arctic will be free of ice in the summer".
It's now 35 years after his first prediction and 15 years after his second. New York isn't under water and the Arctic isn't ice free in the summer.
When people claim that scientists never get it wrong, that when people remember bad predictions it actually never happened and if it did it was all the journalist's fault, then they are making the problem worse because it teaches scientists that they can be wrong without consequence, that people will side with them over the journalists who in most cases were directly quoting what they had said.
It's pretty telling that all you've linked to are news stories with zero direct quotes about underwater highways or an "ice free arctic" and very little context to the alleged claims.
The point being made, that many people have been largely misinformed about the science and what it predicts by media that misrepresented those things, still stands. The good news though is that even if James Hansen did run around telling everyone wild theories (and some argue that many of his predictions have held up remarkably well https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...) we don't have to depend on anyone's comments to the press, there is actual research being reviewed, modeled, and reassessed constantly that just doesn't get the attention alarmist news stories or interviews by authors trying to cash in on climate fear will generate.
That isn't to say that scientists don't get things wrong. Some scientists are just plain bad at their job, some scientists get paid to falsify data and bury results unfavorable to the person signing their paychecks, and some just make mistakes, and those are all things we should be working to minimize, but I'd be shocked if our best understanding of the impacts of our changing climate hadn't changed several times over the last 35 years.
Scientists getting things wrong isn't some gotcha that proves science is broken, it shows that science is working. Getting things wrongs is just one step of the process. All science does is provide the tools to give us the best understanding of something we can get with the information we have at the time. The more we learn, the more data we have, the more our understanding will change and evolve. People don't like uncertainty and some might wish science was all about dictating indisputable truths that cannot be wrong or questioned, but that's never been what science does or what it's for.
>> Scientists getting things wrong isn't some gotcha that proves science is broken, it shows that science is working.
See this is the attitude that causes people to give up in disgust:
If scientists make correct predictions, that's science working!
If scientists make wrong predictions, that's also science working!
Literally no matter what they do or what happens, they cannot lose.
>> People don't like uncertainty
People are fine with scientific understanding being uncertain. They are not fine with being told by scientists that The Science is so certain it's undisputable, that the only people who disagree are paid to do so, that the world should undergo massive changes on the back of this 100% certain science and then when their predictions are all invalidated it's "hey, being wrong is all just part of the process, if you don't understand that you don't understand science!".
If scientists make a confident prediction and then turn out to have been woefully misjudging their own competence, it is correct and right that their reputations are trashed and they should get defunded. But that doesn't happen. Instead we get the Believe Science brigade who insist that all those bad predictions never happened, if they did happen it wasn't a problem and anyone saying otherwise needs to be suppressed.
And BTW both quotes come with literally an entire article of context, and Hansen wrote a whole article for the Guardian in which he makes the same predictions about Arctic ice. So please don't try to claim he never said these things. He's on record as doing so, many times in many contexts.
> Literally no matter what they do or what happens, they cannot lose.
Well... yeah, because either way we learn something! When predictions work out, it strengths a theory, but getting some new piece of data that shatters a current theory and changes how we look at something forever is way more exciting. Science just isn't about winners and losers.
> They are not fine with being told by scientists that The Science is so certain it's undisputable,
No scientist ever says this. In fact, they're more likely to say "Please prove me wrong!"
> that the only people who disagree are paid to do so
They don't say that either, but let's face it, people getting paid to lie and spread misinformation is a big problem. Scientists disagree with each other all the time and that's totally fine! It's desirable even! Here's the catch though, if you want dispute science and be taken seriously, you have to be able to back that up with evidence. Blindly questioning or disagreeing for no reason or for purely emotional or ideological reasons is worthless. You can always fight science with science, but somebody has to be able to check your math, review your methods, and reproduce your results. If your data or your work is weaker, it's not going change many minds.
> that the world should undergo massive changes on the back of this 100% certain science
Again, science isn't going to be 100% certain about anything, but realistically, based on what information we have, it can still be pretty damn sure about things. It's only logical to take advantage of the best understanding we have and to let it guide our choices and our policy. "Ignore what we know is most likely correct" is just a bad strategy.
> If scientists make a confident prediction and then turn out to have been woefully misjudging their own competence, it is correct and right that their reputations are trashed and they should get defunded.
If a scientist continuously makes careless mistakes, then I'd say it should tarnish their reputation and that funding should to go to better qualified researchers, but predictions can turn out to be wrong without there being any mistakes at all and without misjudgements about competence too. Testing our understanding of how we think things work is a critical part of the process, and by necessity sometimes those tests fail and those failures further shape and refine our understanding leading to new tests.
Getting something wrong doesn't make a scientist a failure, and we're supposed to have guardrails in place to help prevent and catch avoidable errors. We should have people performing meaningful peer-review, and there should be many eyes on important research, with many people replicating studies to confirm results, and others trying to poke holes in those theories wherever they can.
Right now, we absolutely aren't doing enough of that. There's a lot of problems with how science is being done and how it's funded, but again, if something has become widely accepted and you want to dispute it, you'd better come with data and be ready to accept that disproving someone's theory isn't going to turn into a witch hunt. Even if you are successful at proving that a popular theory is wrong, people are just going to adjust their models, update the text books, and use it as an example of science working as intended, because that's literally a case of science working as intended. I do wish we did more about cases of actual fraud though.
>> No scientist ever says [the science is beyond dispute, that only people who are paid shills disagree], you can always fight science with science
I wish real scientists behaved in the way you imagine they do. The world would be a better place for it. Unfortunately, real scientists do all these things and more. They call themselves scientists, but don't live up to the role. Here's the same article I cited elsewhere in the thread (beyond a now flagged/killed post), by James Hansen in 2008. A famous scientist indeed but just one example of many possible examples.
- "Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99%."
- "fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming."
Impossible to get clearer than that: exactly the kinds of statements I was complaining about.
And what of checking their data, reviewing their methods, reproducing their results? In short, why not fight science with science? Again, sadly you're describing imaginary scientists, the sort of people we would hope do climatology. Actual climatologists do NOT allow their science to be fought with science and actively go out of their way to prevent people checking their maths, reviewing their methods and reproducing their results.
Here's an old story that sums up what happens when someone - an invited IPCC reviewer no less - actually tries to do that kind of review
One of the most important IPCC representations is the supposedly tremendous quality control of its review process. I’ve mentioned in passing on a number of occasions that, when I sought to obtain supporting data for then unpublished articles, IPCC threatened to expel me as a reviewer.
[...]
Osborn immediately replied, calling the request that the data be archived an abuse of my position as an IPCC peer reviewer. Rosanne D’Arrigo (CG2-2590) wrote to Osborn and Briffa, advocating that I be “fired” as an IPCC reviewer. D’Arrigo urged the Climategaters to be “very cautious about our emails as Lord V will stop at nothing”
Universities don't care if their professors are engaged in pseudo-science so these stories never have happy endings. The bad apples always win, are never fired and media/politics repeats their bogus claims ad nauseum.
It really does seem IPCC has some bad actors, and a huge transparency problem. I'd like to think however that the kinds of politics and incentives for corruption that exist at that international scale don't apply to most scientists in their day to day work. Especially in areas where the science doesn't threaten the fossil fuel industry or the profits of multinational corporations.
>> perhaps a likely one, if we didn't change course somewhat... which we did
We didn't. CO2 has continuously risen and the rise accelerated with time. Hansen's predictions should therefore have absolutely come true if he was right, but they didn't. Or do you think the graph of CO2 I showed you in the other post is misleading as well?
W.R.T. the quotes, now you're getting really desperate. Sure, sure, those poor innocent scientists keep getting ascribed word-for-word predictions they never made and they're all just too polite to complain about having words put in their mouth like that. Come on, wake up! He wasn't being misquoted. Here he is in another 2008 article written by himself in which he makes exactly the same prediction:
"As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer."
Lots more CO2 was added, 15 years passed, the Arctic is not ice free. Nor are ice levels falling. Here's the data from Hanen's own former employer showing that summer ice sea levels stabilized around 2010, which should not have been possible according to these people:
Yeah. A great example of the corruption problem is the story of Tuvalu. Here's a research paper from 2018 that looked at the size of the islands using radar data:
"Sea-level rise and climatic change threaten the existence of atoll nations. Inundation and erosion are expected to render islands uninhabitable over the next century, forcing human migration"
but then just two sentences later:
"Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5 ha (2.9%) [in the past 40 years], despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls"
Tuvalu got bigger! It goes on to explain that Tuvalu has grown due to other factors that were not previously considered. Yet the field is so corrupt that a paper literally reporting that Pacific islands are getting bigger has to start by repeating the claim that those very same islands will be "inundated" and "rendered uninhabitable". It goes on to argue that maybe the biggest problems the islands face is not climate change per se but rather "the historic imprint of colonial agendas and entrenched land tenure systems".
That was in 2018. It had no effect on the narrative whatsoever. In 2019 the Guardian wrote a huge story telling its readers that Tuvalu is going to be drowned by climate change and how angry they are at Donald Trump because in future they'll have to evacuate their homes:
“Tuvalu is sinking” is the local catch-all phrase for the effects of climate change on this tiny island archipelago on the frontline of global warming.
The entire story is misinformation, but you'd never know that if you didn't double check these things and the Guardian not only never will but actively tells its readers that people who do double check are evil.
What's next? The "millimetre sea-level imbalance catastrophe"?
I'm over it. I've lost my respect for climate science, and the field has done that to itself. It needs to take full responsibility for its repeating cycle of "alarmism -> failed prediction -> u-turn" that caused me to.