8 ms·

Out of curiosity for those that don't believe global warming is human caused, what evidence would convince you to change your mind?

tosseraccount 11y ago
Temperature changes that are accurately predicted by models with significant anthropogenic pollution variables.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  The first suggestion that CO2 might drive climate change was made by Tyndall in 1859. The first crude but usefully predictive model was created by Arrhenius in 1896. That's 1896. How much more evidence does it take?
  - SmokyBorbon 11y ago
    The 1800s is the worst cenutry for junk science. It's the century when Westerners started to believe in a young earth, for example. Anthropogenic global warming is fraud.
  - barney54 11y ago
    As tosseraccount wrote, "Temperature changes that are accurately predicted by models..."
  - ci5er 11y ago
    That's true. CO2 photo-thermal effects have been known for a long time. I have no dog in this hunt - but I believe that short- and medium- term projections that start diverging from actuals almost on the first day are a problem for getting broad support for the hypothesis. And it's a very interesting question, don't you think? Why aren't temperatures going up more? Is the earth modulating it somehow? The biosphere appears to attempt to maintain some kind of thermal homeostasis, and appears to be better at cooling the hot than warming the cold. How does that work?
    - Hondor 11y ago
      Homeostasis could be achieved by a balance of waver vapor and cloud cover which are both strong factors on temperature but acting in the opposite directions. "Thus the possible positive and negative feedbacks associated with increased water vapor and cloud formation can cancel one another out and complicate matters. The actual balance between them is an active area of climate science research." http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesciencenarratives/its-water-vapor-not-the-co2.html http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatescie...
      - ci5er 11y ago
        At the macro-level, sure. That's one effect. At the micro (?) level, there's an interesting effect where stands of trees (and rain forests) will emit cooling aerosols directly into their canopy. Pretty cool!
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Why would an accurate model have anything to do with causation? If humans are causing climate change it will happen if we have a good model or not and vice versa.
  - sathackr 11y ago
    How would you establish causation?
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      How do you establish causation with any experiment?
      - sathackr 11y ago
        Generically? Elementary school scientific method: By formulating a hypothesis, then testing the hypothesis. Hypothesis: The recent rise in global average temperature is caused by man-made increase in emissions of CO2. Now, how do you test? Well, we could just stop making CO2, wait 50 years and see if the temperature goes down. But then that's only one data point, and you haven't controlled other potential factors. One big one: The sun doesn't always put out the same amount of energy. So now you need to make sure the sun's heat output remains constant in order to test if a 50 year elimination of CO2 output stops the global temperature rise. But wait...what if the sun's output has been increasing over the last 50 years? That could have caused the temperature rise you formed your hypothesis about. If you stop the increase of the sun's output, and you stop the CO2 output, now you have two variables that you've changed, and you can't say, with any sort of certainty, which one caused the temperature to quit rising. Neither of these options are really practical, so, instead, we try to create a mathematical model of the entire system, feed it the data that we do have, and try to model the expected results. Models fail routinely. Lets take hurricane models for example: They're right, sometimes, their kinda right, sometimes, and their wrong, a lot. Why do you think that is? Their inaccurate and don't have sufficient data points. A perfect model would take every single variable in an entire system, know with certainty their effect on the system as a whole, and it would never be wrong. Some systems we have that luxury. Earth's atmosphere is not one of those. We do not know even know what every single variable is. We don't know with certainty what effect the variable has on the system, so we can only model it with a best-guess approach. If someone in 1980 looked at this[1] chart, they would conclude with a great deal of certainty that solar activity is the cause of temperature fluctuations over the last 100 years. After 1980, that no longer appears to be true. But global carbon emission have been sharply increasing since 1880[2]. So what logic concludes that CO2 can go up for 100 years, without causing an increase in global temperature, but as soon as the global temperature stops tracking solar output, assign the cause to CO2? I'm not saying CO2 isn't the cause. I'm certainly not qualified to make that determination, and a qualified person probably wouldn't make that determination because they wouldn't have enough information to do so. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to eliminate our reliance on burning hydrocarbons for energy. This has more benefits than just reducing CO2 output. We need better data and a better model, since we can't actually experiment. [1] http://icons.wxug.com/metgraphics/climate/facts/Solar_vs_Temp_basic.gif http://icons.wxug.com/metgraphics/climate/facts/Solar_vs_Tem... [2] http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global.total.gif http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global.total.gif
cconcepts 11y ago
I saw a cartoon of congress where someone is standing up and saying "Wait! What if this is all a hoax and we're building a better world for nothing!?" Or words to that effect. Seems to be the only argument that has had any impact on the deniers that I've had discussions with.
- hueving 11y ago
  Capping CO2 comes at an energy cost. If it were true that CO2 had no impact on the environment, we would be putting an undue burden on developing countries and low-income people in general. Even if the richer countries subsidize the poorer countries, that's money that could be spent towards other research. Nearly every person who argues against global warming research is doing it because of this. They think we are making sacrifices for no purpose. If eliminating CO2 emissions came at no cost, there would be almost no debate at all because the majority of the people who didn't believe in the effects of CO2 wouldn't care.
  - whitneyrzoller 11y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "Capping"; if you mean "reducing" (CO2 emissions) then I'd disagree: my choice to ride a bike to work rather than drive comes at an energy savings not cost. Not that it matter anyways, folks will re-invest that savings on some garbage on Amazon that they'll have shipped same-day on prime.
    - hueving 11y ago
      >Not sure what you mean by "Capping"; Regulatory limits on CO2 emissions - "cap and trade". >my choice to ride a bike to work rather than drive comes at an energy savings not cost. Most people in the US cannot ride their bike to work, and it's not because they are overweight. About half the people commute > 10 miles, which is not reasonable for a daily bike commute in <40F weather, and even when it's warmer that's a miserable amount of time to be forced to commute every day. This also ignores people that need to pickup/dropoff kids. So people will not choose to give up driving because the alternatives suck. It would have to be forced. Otherwise they would be riding their bikes now.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
graycat 11y ago
(1) It would help to have solid evidence that temperature was stable before the start of the industrial revolution and the resulting CO2 from human activity. So, we'd have to get rid of the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period. (2) We would have to get rid of the big temperature changes going back 500,000+ years from the Vostok ice core data that Al Gore plotted and where the CO2 concentrations went up about 800 years after the temperatures went up. (3) It would also help to cancel the global cooling from about 1940 to 1970 while CO2 concentrations were going up. E.g., from these examples, IMHO, the temperature record and the record of CO2 concentrations don't support that CO2 concentration changes caused the temperature changes.
- btilly 11y ago
  (1) You ask for us to lie? Climate is not stable, and any model that says it is is clearly broken. Instead you have to produce the best models you can that can explain both the past and project the future. Then test those models. Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming, and are passing various kinds of sanity checks. (2) You want us to oversimplify? Climate is still not stable, and CO2 isn't the only thing that is involved. The main cause for the start/end of ice ages are orbital shifts. CO2 rise was a lagging result, that then amplified the warming. (3) You still want us to oversimplify? Aerosols are known to cause cooling, and in that period rapidly expanding aerosol use caused a significant amount of cooling. Various countries then passed clean air acts which reduced the levels of aerosols in the air. (They also fixed a pretty major acid rain problem.) In fact one of the proposed solutions for global warming is to deliberately inject aerosols in the stratosphere. From these examples, it looks like your mind is made up. You don't even want to find out what the science says. Instead you engage in a game of oversimplification and gotcha to convince yourself that what they are saying doesn't make sense.
  - graycat 11y ago
    > You ask for us to lie? No. I was just responding literally to the question. Or, for a more socially acceptable response, the Vostok data has me have trouble with the idea that humans are causing climate change. > Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming, and are passing various kinds of sanity checks. The data I have on that indicates that essentially all the models ("uniformly") are wildly wrong. They predicted that by now the temperature would be much higher. Some of that data is reviewed in http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop# http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020430140457717... The way too high predictions are plotted in http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/ http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-clima... > Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming Not all the models. There is a model that fits the data much better -- at least since the last ice age: The model claims that the variation in rates of sun spots causes the temperature changes and that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with climate. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas -- it absorbs in three narrow bands out in the infrared and, thus, absorbs some of the infrared radiation from the Planck black body radiation of the surface of the earth warmed by the sun. But according to the model I am mentioning, this effect from CO2 is tiny. Instead, again from the model I am mentioning, overwhelmingly, the main driver of global temperature since the last ice age has been just clouds, and they have varied with the sun spots. Just why is a longer argument made clear, e.g., in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg So, that is another model that needs to be tested. For now, that model seems to fit the temperature data much better than the CO2, greenhouse gas, Navier-Stokes, atmospheric diffusion, etc. models. To me, the CO2 models fit the data so poorly we have to reject CO2 as relevant to climate change and look elsewhere for the significant cause(s) of climate change. For now, to me, the best model is the one I mentioned here based on sun spots -- you didn't mention sun spots.
ghufran_syed 11y ago
I found this book pretty convincing: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sell-Your-Coat-Surprising-ebook/dp/B0072VSQFQ#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1462936873778 https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sell-Your-Coat-Surprising-ebook/...
- danieltillett 11y ago
  mmm. So what evidence would change your mind?
Hondor 11y ago
I'm a climate change skeptic and what would convince me is - less trying to convince people - less calls to action - less promotion of the tiny irrelevant bad things that it's doing - less hiding of the good things it's doing - more promotion of engineering solutions The fact that the media presentation of it is so clearly biased in these ways makes me automatically distrust it. I know they're trying to mislead people, and you surely do too. Why would you believe someone who you know is trying to deceive you? We have no reliable predictions of any serious consequences of global warming. According to the IPCC, it's not going to be a big deal within 100 years. Beyond that time frame, there's plenty of opportunity for us to adapt, fix it, or be wrong in our predictions. The current estimate for sea level rise is about 70cm by 2100. That won't flood very much at all. A few sandbars, sprawling beaches and already-flood-prone river deltas, but not many actual cities. New York for instance won't be flooded by a 70cm sea level rise even though it was flooded by a recent hurricane. 70 cm is smaller than regular tide heights, smaller than wave heights, it's just not very significant for most coastal cities. Where it is significant, they can just build more land. I come from a city which has metal plaques on the road in the middle of town saying "this is where the shoreline used to be". We can just modify our shorelines with earthworks. The current estimate for temperature rise is 2-6 degrees C by 2100. 6 degrees is the extreme case and probably won't happen, so maybe we get 3 degrees. What will that do to agriculture? I don't know, but we do know that food grows over a much wider range of climate across the world so it can't completely destroy it. Furthermore, it will come gradually, giving farmers many decades to adapt. What will it do to people directly? Nothing because it's negligible compared to daily and seasonal variations. More tropical diseases? People in the tropics already suffer from those and we don't care about them today so why would we care about other people having them in the future? More severe storms? We already have severe storms and construction in high risk areas is designed to cope with them. We'll just adjust the building codes as the risk changes. Worried that people won't adapt until it really hurts them? No, property owners won't want to be left holding the bag when their land becomes worthless, so the market will sort that out. Whoever's farm stops producing or whoever's house get washed out to sea pays for it out of their own pocket so they'll be strongly incentivized to protect it or sell it long before that happens. So this is my concern with global warming - yes it's happening and man-made or not, it probably won't hurt us enough to worry about. There's no room for that position in the 2-extremes view of the debate.
throwaway_exer 11y ago
> believe global warming is human caused Why am I expected to believe something when you don't include a link to actual data? The reason most intelligent, scientific people that I talk to are skeptical is that scientists have done such a bad job of communicating the data/evidence. It's not up to the person in the street to prove anything or believe anything without data.
guscost 11y ago
Have you asked yourself the corresponding question? I think humans influence the climate by using energy and land at least, and one effect of this influence may be net warming. I have no compelling reason to believe that humans cause net warming, or that they cause net cooling. As a member of Popper's school of science philosophy and considering the complexity involved, I'm not sure what evidence could reasonably confirm the AGW hypothesis, especially since we don't have a "control planet" to work with. Also the politics around this stuff has been the bigger issue for a long time, and either way I do not agree that stopping global warming should take priority over other human concerns.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  >Have you asked yourself the corresponding question? Yes I have. There is in fact lots of things that would change my mind. 1. The laws of physics were proven to false and it turned out the CO2 does not trap energy in the atmosphere. 2. The sun was proven to be increasing significantly in solar output and this explained the warming we have seen to date. 3. The planet stopped warming and started cooling. 4. The source of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere was found to not be the result of burning fossil fuels. 5. We had highly predictive and accurate models that showed that warming via the accumulation of CO2 is not possible. Is there any evidence that if you became aware of would change your mind?
  - guscost 11y ago
    We won't live to see any of those things happen except maybe number 3 (although it could be more specific, i.e. which data or index shows the cooling trend and for how long). And I think you may have missed my point. The hypothetical evidence you listed is mostly "proof of X" and "confirmation of Y" which suggests we disagree about how science works. I'm of the opinion that science does not advance by proving new theories correct, it advances by proving old theories incorrect. A new theory that cannot itself be proven incorrect is not scientific. The empirical evidence you have suggested with number 3 is one possible way to falsify the AGW theory, but it is somewhat vague and might mean waiting for a long time. Additionally, without the AGW theory we have no good reason to expect either warming or cooling in particular, so either one is not what Popper called a "risky prediction". I get the impression that you want me to go along with political action and engineering projects that I don't agree with. Perhaps you will continue to do so until some as yet unspecified temperature measurement shows a cooling trend for some as yet unspecified period of time, or we are both dead. From my perspective the theory has not made any risky predictions, and that has to happen before we can speak of confirming it. The situation is fundamentally biased against the activist politics. Not surprisingly, lots of the same activists have been trying to declare Popper "obsolete" for some time. I encourage you to read his essay and consider for yourself: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.htm... "Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory." It is an interesting question though - what risky prediction can be or has been made based on the AGW theory? The "polar ice will disappear by X year" statements are the closest thing I can think of.

tosseraccount 11y ago

Temperature changes that are accurately predicted by models with significant anthropogenic pollution variables.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
The first suggestion that CO2 might drive climate change was made by Tyndall in 1859. The first crude but usefully predictive model was created by Arrhenius in 1896. That's 1896. How much more evidence does it take?
- SmokyBorbon 11y ago
  The 1800s is the worst cenutry for junk science. It's the century when Westerners started to believe in a young earth, for example. Anthropogenic global warming is fraud.
- barney54 11y ago
  As tosseraccount wrote, "Temperature changes that are accurately predicted by models..."
- ci5er 11y ago
  That's true. CO2 photo-thermal effects have been known for a long time. I have no dog in this hunt - but I believe that short- and medium- term projections that start diverging from actuals almost on the first day are a problem for getting broad support for the hypothesis. And it's a very interesting question, don't you think? Why aren't temperatures going up more? Is the earth modulating it somehow? The biosphere appears to attempt to maintain some kind of thermal homeostasis, and appears to be better at cooling the hot than warming the cold. How does that work?
  - Hondor 11y ago
    Homeostasis could be achieved by a balance of waver vapor and cloud cover which are both strong factors on temperature but acting in the opposite directions. "Thus the possible positive and negative feedbacks associated with increased water vapor and cloud formation can cancel one another out and complicate matters. The actual balance between them is an active area of climate science research." http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesciencenarratives/its-water-vapor-not-the-co2.html http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatescie...
    - ci5er 11y ago
      At the macro-level, sure. That's one effect. At the micro (?) level, there's an interesting effect where stands of trees (and rain forests) will emit cooling aerosols directly into their canopy. Pretty cool!
danieltillett 11y ago
Why would an accurate model have anything to do with causation? If humans are causing climate change it will happen if we have a good model or not and vice versa.
- sathackr 11y ago
  How would you establish causation?
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    How do you establish causation with any experiment?
    - sathackr 11y ago
      Generically? Elementary school scientific method: By formulating a hypothesis, then testing the hypothesis. Hypothesis: The recent rise in global average temperature is caused by man-made increase in emissions of CO2. Now, how do you test? Well, we could just stop making CO2, wait 50 years and see if the temperature goes down. But then that's only one data point, and you haven't controlled other potential factors. One big one: The sun doesn't always put out the same amount of energy. So now you need to make sure the sun's heat output remains constant in order to test if a 50 year elimination of CO2 output stops the global temperature rise. But wait...what if the sun's output has been increasing over the last 50 years? That could have caused the temperature rise you formed your hypothesis about. If you stop the increase of the sun's output, and you stop the CO2 output, now you have two variables that you've changed, and you can't say, with any sort of certainty, which one caused the temperature to quit rising. Neither of these options are really practical, so, instead, we try to create a mathematical model of the entire system, feed it the data that we do have, and try to model the expected results. Models fail routinely. Lets take hurricane models for example: They're right, sometimes, their kinda right, sometimes, and their wrong, a lot. Why do you think that is? Their inaccurate and don't have sufficient data points. A perfect model would take every single variable in an entire system, know with certainty their effect on the system as a whole, and it would never be wrong. Some systems we have that luxury. Earth's atmosphere is not one of those. We do not know even know what every single variable is. We don't know with certainty what effect the variable has on the system, so we can only model it with a best-guess approach. If someone in 1980 looked at this[1] chart, they would conclude with a great deal of certainty that solar activity is the cause of temperature fluctuations over the last 100 years. After 1980, that no longer appears to be true. But global carbon emission have been sharply increasing since 1880[2]. So what logic concludes that CO2 can go up for 100 years, without causing an increase in global temperature, but as soon as the global temperature stops tracking solar output, assign the cause to CO2? I'm not saying CO2 isn't the cause. I'm certainly not qualified to make that determination, and a qualified person probably wouldn't make that determination because they wouldn't have enough information to do so. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to eliminate our reliance on burning hydrocarbons for energy. This has more benefits than just reducing CO2 output. We need better data and a better model, since we can't actually experiment. [1] http://icons.wxug.com/metgraphics/climate/facts/Solar_vs_Temp_basic.gif http://icons.wxug.com/metgraphics/climate/facts/Solar_vs_Tem... [2] http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global.total.gif http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global.total.gif

cconcepts 11y ago

I saw a cartoon of congress where someone is standing up and saying "Wait! What if this is all a hoax and we're building a better world for nothing!?" Or words to that effect. Seems to be the only argument that has had any impact on the deniers that I've had discussions with.

hueving 11y ago
Capping CO2 comes at an energy cost. If it were true that CO2 had no impact on the environment, we would be putting an undue burden on developing countries and low-income people in general. Even if the richer countries subsidize the poorer countries, that's money that could be spent towards other research. Nearly every person who argues against global warming research is doing it because of this. They think we are making sacrifices for no purpose. If eliminating CO2 emissions came at no cost, there would be almost no debate at all because the majority of the people who didn't believe in the effects of CO2 wouldn't care.
- whitneyrzoller 11y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "Capping"; if you mean "reducing" (CO2 emissions) then I'd disagree: my choice to ride a bike to work rather than drive comes at an energy savings not cost. Not that it matter anyways, folks will re-invest that savings on some garbage on Amazon that they'll have shipped same-day on prime.
  - hueving 11y ago
    >Not sure what you mean by "Capping"; Regulatory limits on CO2 emissions - "cap and trade". >my choice to ride a bike to work rather than drive comes at an energy savings not cost. Most people in the US cannot ride their bike to work, and it's not because they are overweight. About half the people commute > 10 miles, which is not reasonable for a daily bike commute in <40F weather, and even when it's warmer that's a miserable amount of time to be forced to commute every day. This also ignores people that need to pickup/dropoff kids. So people will not choose to give up driving because the alternatives suck. It would have to be forced. Otherwise they would be riding their bikes now.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

graycat 11y ago

(1) It would help to have solid evidence that temperature was stable before the start of the industrial revolution and the resulting CO2 from human activity. So, we'd have to get rid of the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period. (2) We would have to get rid of the big temperature changes going back 500,000+ years from the Vostok ice core data that Al Gore plotted and where the CO2 concentrations went up about 800 years after the temperatures went up. (3) It would also help to cancel the global cooling from about 1940 to 1970 while CO2 concentrations were going up. E.g., from these examples, IMHO, the temperature record and the record of CO2 concentrations don't support that CO2 concentration changes caused the temperature changes.

btilly 11y ago
(1) You ask for us to lie? Climate is not stable, and any model that says it is is clearly broken. Instead you have to produce the best models you can that can explain both the past and project the future. Then test those models. Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming, and are passing various kinds of sanity checks. (2) You want us to oversimplify? Climate is still not stable, and CO2 isn't the only thing that is involved. The main cause for the start/end of ice ages are orbital shifts. CO2 rise was a lagging result, that then amplified the warming. (3) You still want us to oversimplify? Aerosols are known to cause cooling, and in that period rapidly expanding aerosol use caused a significant amount of cooling. Various countries then passed clean air acts which reduced the levels of aerosols in the air. (They also fixed a pretty major acid rain problem.) In fact one of the proposed solutions for global warming is to deliberately inject aerosols in the stratosphere. From these examples, it looks like your mind is made up. You don't even want to find out what the science says. Instead you engage in a game of oversimplification and gotcha to convince yourself that what they are saying doesn't make sense.
- graycat 11y ago
  > You ask for us to lie? No. I was just responding literally to the question. Or, for a more socially acceptable response, the Vostok data has me have trouble with the idea that humans are causing climate change. > Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming, and are passing various kinds of sanity checks. The data I have on that indicates that essentially all the models ("uniformly") are wildly wrong. They predicted that by now the temperature would be much higher. Some of that data is reviewed in http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop# http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020430140457717... The way too high predictions are plotted in http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/ http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-clima... > Those models uniformly project human-caused global warming Not all the models. There is a model that fits the data much better -- at least since the last ice age: The model claims that the variation in rates of sun spots causes the temperature changes and that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with climate. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas -- it absorbs in three narrow bands out in the infrared and, thus, absorbs some of the infrared radiation from the Planck black body radiation of the surface of the earth warmed by the sun. But according to the model I am mentioning, this effect from CO2 is tiny. Instead, again from the model I am mentioning, overwhelmingly, the main driver of global temperature since the last ice age has been just clouds, and they have varied with the sun spots. Just why is a longer argument made clear, e.g., in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg So, that is another model that needs to be tested. For now, that model seems to fit the temperature data much better than the CO2, greenhouse gas, Navier-Stokes, atmospheric diffusion, etc. models. To me, the CO2 models fit the data so poorly we have to reject CO2 as relevant to climate change and look elsewhere for the significant cause(s) of climate change. For now, to me, the best model is the one I mentioned here based on sun spots -- you didn't mention sun spots.

ghufran_syed 11y ago

I found this book pretty convincing: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sell-Your-Coat-Surprising-ebook/dp/B0072VSQFQ#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1462936873778 https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sell-Your-Coat-Surprising-ebook/...

danieltillett 11y ago
mmm. So what evidence would change your mind?

Hondor 11y ago

I'm a climate change skeptic and what would convince me is - less trying to convince people - less calls to action - less promotion of the tiny irrelevant bad things that it's doing - less hiding of the good things it's doing - more promotion of engineering solutions The fact that the media presentation of it is so clearly biased in these ways makes me automatically distrust it. I know they're trying to mislead people, and you surely do too. Why would you believe someone who you know is trying to deceive you? We have no reliable predictions of any serious consequences of global warming. According to the IPCC, it's not going to be a big deal within 100 years. Beyond that time frame, there's plenty of opportunity for us to adapt, fix it, or be wrong in our predictions. The current estimate for sea level rise is about 70cm by 2100. That won't flood very much at all. A few sandbars, sprawling beaches and already-flood-prone river deltas, but not many actual cities. New York for instance won't be flooded by a 70cm sea level rise even though it was flooded by a recent hurricane. 70 cm is smaller than regular tide heights, smaller than wave heights, it's just not very significant for most coastal cities. Where it is significant, they can just build more land. I come from a city which has metal plaques on the road in the middle of town saying "this is where the shoreline used to be". We can just modify our shorelines with earthworks. The current estimate for temperature rise is 2-6 degrees C by 2100. 6 degrees is the extreme case and probably won't happen, so maybe we get 3 degrees. What will that do to agriculture? I don't know, but we do know that food grows over a much wider range of climate across the world so it can't completely destroy it. Furthermore, it will come gradually, giving farmers many decades to adapt. What will it do to people directly? Nothing because it's negligible compared to daily and seasonal variations. More tropical diseases? People in the tropics already suffer from those and we don't care about them today so why would we care about other people having them in the future? More severe storms? We already have severe storms and construction in high risk areas is designed to cope with them. We'll just adjust the building codes as the risk changes. Worried that people won't adapt until it really hurts them? No, property owners won't want to be left holding the bag when their land becomes worthless, so the market will sort that out. Whoever's farm stops producing or whoever's house get washed out to sea pays for it out of their own pocket so they'll be strongly incentivized to protect it or sell it long before that happens. So this is my concern with global warming - yes it's happening and man-made or not, it probably won't hurt us enough to worry about. There's no room for that position in the 2-extremes view of the debate.

throwaway_exer 11y ago

> believe global warming is human caused Why am I expected to believe something when you don't include a link to actual data? The reason most intelligent, scientific people that I talk to are skeptical is that scientists have done such a bad job of communicating the data/evidence. It's not up to the person in the street to prove anything or believe anything without data.

guscost 11y ago

Have you asked yourself the corresponding question? I think humans influence the climate by using energy and land at least, and one effect of this influence may be net warming. I have no compelling reason to believe that humans cause net warming, or that they cause net cooling. As a member of Popper's school of science philosophy and considering the complexity involved, I'm not sure what evidence could reasonably confirm the AGW hypothesis, especially since we don't have a "control planet" to work with. Also the politics around this stuff has been the bigger issue for a long time, and either way I do not agree that stopping global warming should take priority over other human concerns.

danieltillett 11y ago
>Have you asked yourself the corresponding question? Yes I have. There is in fact lots of things that would change my mind. 1. The laws of physics were proven to false and it turned out the CO2 does not trap energy in the atmosphere. 2. The sun was proven to be increasing significantly in solar output and this explained the warming we have seen to date. 3. The planet stopped warming and started cooling. 4. The source of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere was found to not be the result of burning fossil fuels. 5. We had highly predictive and accurate models that showed that warming via the accumulation of CO2 is not possible. Is there any evidence that if you became aware of would change your mind?
- guscost 11y ago
  We won't live to see any of those things happen except maybe number 3 (although it could be more specific, i.e. which data or index shows the cooling trend and for how long). And I think you may have missed my point. The hypothetical evidence you listed is mostly "proof of X" and "confirmation of Y" which suggests we disagree about how science works. I'm of the opinion that science does not advance by proving new theories correct, it advances by proving old theories incorrect. A new theory that cannot itself be proven incorrect is not scientific. The empirical evidence you have suggested with number 3 is one possible way to falsify the AGW theory, but it is somewhat vague and might mean waiting for a long time. Additionally, without the AGW theory we have no good reason to expect either warming or cooling in particular, so either one is not what Popper called a "risky prediction". I get the impression that you want me to go along with political action and engineering projects that I don't agree with. Perhaps you will continue to do so until some as yet unspecified temperature measurement shows a cooling trend for some as yet unspecified period of time, or we are both dead. From my perspective the theory has not made any risky predictions, and that has to happen before we can speak of confirming it. The situation is fundamentally biased against the activist politics. Not surprisingly, lots of the same activists have been trying to declare Popper "obsolete" for some time. I encourage you to read his essay and consider for yourself: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.htm... "Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory." It is an interesting question though - what risky prediction can be or has been made based on the AGW theory? The "polar ice will disappear by X year" statements are the closest thing I can think of.