4 ms·

I lived on a hill in Los Angeles in the 70's and 80's, putting me inside the regularly Stage One-alert smog layer there. It was horrible, but we cleaned up our

I lived on a hill in Los Angeles in the 70's and 80's, putting me inside the regularly Stage One-alert smog layer there. It was horrible, but we cleaned up our act since then. More people live in L.A. now than ever and pollution is down. Not a dire enough situation, try again during summertime when it's hot.

pas 10y ago
LA? Still terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_the_United_States#Los_Angeles_Air_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_the_United_St... The air is still killing people there, even if it doesn't feel hard to breathe. The same goes for the climate, I guess, if you don't feel it, it must be okay. But it's not.
- EdSharkey 10y ago
  You have no idea how choking the air was in the 70's and 80's. They still had Stage 3 smog alerts in the early seventies where you were not supposed to go outdoors. Our treatment of the earth has improved and it will continue to improve with technology. All the (incomplete) computer models since the 90's predicting runaway warming due to human inputs to the system have not been borne out, and every year they aren't, you'll find yourself screaming louder and louder just to be heard. Real science will prevail, not the politicized stuff, and won't it be a bummer when you find you've been duped all these years?
  - pas 10y ago
    You think the IPCC is not real science? Why would it be a bummer that something in the "human extinction" category was taken on the "let's make sure it really doesn't happen" side instead of the "oh, those hippies are screaming since the 80s, because they took the scary predictions of some models seriously, and we're still here, so fuck them, and also fuck the 95+% of vastly more advanced and sophisticated models of today, because air quality is improving in urban centers". It's great to see things improving, but CO2 has not much to do with smog. And that's actually a problem, because people who take the lazy approach to global climate models like you - let's call these people the Peter Wilsons (because an article of his is the [second] thing on Google if you search for co2 and smog) - will insist on having clean air and on doing nothing with regards to CO2.
    - EdSharkey 10y ago
      So, you're admitting some of the computer climate models WERE flawed? Glad to hear some intellectual honesty. I suspect I don't see the world as statically as you do. If we humans pump more CO2 in the atmosphere, I assume it doesn't necessarily accrete there year-over-year. Also, I don't assume that a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere from year to year means humans are to blame since there are volcanoes and rotting vegetation all over the place. And surface temperatures are bound to fluctuate mainly because the sun is not a constant energy source from year to year. Do I think the IPCC is real science? I'm sure there is something like science and data gathering going on there. I will note that IPCC has "government" and "climate change" in the name, which is a dead giveaway that politics are a driver in any conclusions made by the panel. You give them the benefit of the doubt, clearly. I say, "show me reproducible experimental results or there was no science." Reproducibility in this case requires the models to be accurately predicting future trends, which, to-date they have not been. And that brings me to ... > Why would it be a bummer that something in the "human extinction" category was taken on the "let's make sure it really doesn't happen" side instead of the "oh, those hippies are screaming since the 80s, because they took the scary predictions of some models seriously, and we're still here, so fuck them, and also fuck the 95+% of vastly more advanced and sophisticated models of today, because air quality is improving in urban centers". Look, cussing isn't necessary. I want clean air and water. I have asthma, I know how bad pollution can be. I'm not a bad guy. I just don't appreciate being lied to and what you said there can be summed up as, "I know a lot of false claims were made on inaccurate models, but good things happened and I'm satisfied." Here's the thing, I don't like being made to worry over unfounded claims. (And I get super grumpy when my kids are made to worry!) So, scale your message wayyyy back or you lose any credibility. Heck, the "stop pollution" message is sufficient, and why not? There's a legit/obvious pollution problem worldwide, so you have moral superiority there. Planetary destruction is not imminent though (at least not due to man-made CO2 emissions) and you've got no leg to stand on there.
      - pas 10y ago
        People usually admit guilt, and I don't think I have anything to do with those models, as some of those are older than me. Of course they were flawed. Models are always imperfect, but the important things is, are they useful? Well. Ultimately, we shall see the usefulness of these climate models, and those old models were useful to show some the extremes, huge swings, big effects. Solar cycles, big non-sea ice melts (Greenland, Antarctica), no reduction in emissions, a lot of CFC (used for refrigerators, you probably remember them). Furthermore, it's kind of hard to experimentally test the crude models, as you'd need to copy the universe, and do this or that in a lot of copies. Those models were simple, but still full of statistics, so the chances are still chances, just there are hundreds of millions of people who don't want to put Earth on a roulette table. Hm, I never considered my worldviews as static. What suggests that? So, now those are concrete scientifically explorable questions. First, sure, the CO2 content of the atmosphere is increasing a lot slower than we're adding it, so it goes somewhere. Vegetation, oceans, and some could escape to space, but it's basically zero. So from a CO2 standpoint, Earth is a closed system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Dominant_atmospheric_escape_and_loss_processes_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Dominant_at... ). There are thousands of people working on determining the composition of the atmosphere in the past. We have very good data for about the last half million of so year. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere#/media/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo... ) And getting better and better estimates for the longer timescales (hundreds of millions of years). The main point of this whole global climate change/warming/alarm/denial is that humans are very busy and we are doing something very fast. Big quick changes. We released so much CO2 and CH4 (methane) and other gases, that it is having an effect, much larger than whatever would happen to any natural cause. (Volcanoes release yearly less than a gigaton of CO2 (about 0.3 Gt per year) and we have good data for the last 50 years, and there was no significant increase in CO2 after big eruptions. So, they released a lot during the millions of years, but that largely went down into the sediments at the bottom of the oceans.) The Sun has many cycles, the short 11-year sunspot cycle is not that interesting, it happened in the last century ~9 times, and nothing interesting happened (<0.1% total irradiance change from cycle min to cycle max). The big cycles are the Milankovitch cycles (various periodic changes in the orbital position of Earth relative to the Sun), those are important for big Ice Ages, as total irradiance can change ~25%, but these are slow, take 20 000 year or longer. And the models are of course not perfect for what these orbital cycle things mean for the climate on Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Problems So, all in all, we released more CO2 in the last 50 years than "nature played with" in the last 400k yearly, as in we released a half a teraton (500 Gt) in total and the yearly variation was 200 Gt. Each year we release ~35 Gt, that has to go somewhere or accumulate in the atmosphere. (And as you noted, not all of it is accreting, hence all this text and discussion.) (Furthermore, the average temperature change we're talking about takes into account the seasonality from the Sun, so the trendline is statistically separated from the baseline.) Well, I treat the IPCC as the aggregation of climate scientists. (Best data, best models, most rational interpretations, and so on.) They are internationally funded (there's a breakdown of contribution by country, it's chartered by the UN, but the world meteorological organisation pays its yearly budget), so far they are pretty cheap, as of 2014 they received about 138 M CHF (136 M USD at current exchange rate). But probably a review of their work could be crowdfunded pretty easily. (Though we'd have to discuss what is a good method of estimation and what isn't, what is a good way to model this or that and what isn't, but of course these points of concern should be listed, and .. there is a list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_A... ) After the IPCC's 4th report in 2009, there was a lot of scrutiny of their work, conflicts of interest and so on, and their process benefited from this, as the 5th report now uses better data, better sources, a more unified probability framework (so probability estimates are consistent with each other), and so on. I believe that when thousands of scientists endorse a result, and spend time talking about it, spend energy explaining it, how it came to be, and why specific "counter" papers are flawed, then that result is okay. The times are changing, I don't know what'll happen in the future after this mini-collapse of intelligent discourse, now that truth and English are basically arbitrary, now that Enlightenment values of clarity and rational attention to detail no longer matter, with the rise of the complex charlatans that are willingly or unwillingly put certain issues before scientific integrity. Now that more and more people are forced to make less and less optimal compromises with supporters of ideologies foreign to theirs. But that's a bit too doomsaying and offtopic. Back to models. The IPCC reports are based on technical models integrated into a bigger reporting framework. And those models were covered in a lot of papers, and the best models were chosen, and then computationally run. (See the Climate Model Intercomparison Project, also, "When using blended temperatures the observations lie well within the 90% range of RCP8.5 runs for the whole of the last decade" -- RCP8.5 is what IPCC used, and the blended things is about estimating air temperature (the models predict air temp) from sea temp (what satellites measure when they look at the sea) -- http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/95782/1/blend_paper.pdf http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/95782/1/blend_paper.pdf ) That said, SCIENCE IS FUCKING SUCKS when it comes to presenting results. (Compare to "tech": https://areweideyet.com/ https://areweideyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ http://www.arewewebyet.org/ http://www.arewewebyet.org/ vs http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/publications.html http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/publications.html and https://cmip-publications.llnl.gov/search?type=project&option=CMIP5 https://cmip-publications.llnl.gov/search?type=project&optio... there's no one-liner. Yet the question is pretty easy "how accureate are models on some metric, and what does that mean".) "I know a lot of false claims were made, [...]" .. I haven't said that. I know the models were simple, so crude, bad, inefficient, inaccurate are not surprising to me. Not to mention there was not enough computational capacity in the 90s. My message is, logic is powerful, but that doesn't mean simple. It means we can say that there are more and more possibilities. Such that if someone is screaming more and more, it doesn't mean that they are just trying to scaremonger more, it might mean things are getting worse and worse. (That's how this subthread started.)
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  Right. Who are you going to believe, Wikipedia or your lying eyes? I'm guessing you aren't old enough to remember how awful the state of the environment was in the United States back in the '70s. It's like night and day to compare then and now.
  - pas 10y ago
    As I've replyed to the sibling comment, CO2 has not much to do with air quality, and that's actually a problem, because if it'd be linked to local air pollution, we'd have already insisted on less CO2 output long ago. EdSharkey replied that the dire days are over. Yeah, in air pollution, great, applause, bravo, but not in climate things, like ocean acidification, storms and hurricanes and so on.

pas 10y ago

LA? Still terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_the_United_States#Los_Angeles_Air_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_the_United_St... The air is still killing people there, even if it doesn't feel hard to breathe. The same goes for the climate, I guess, if you don't feel it, it must be okay. But it's not.

EdSharkey 10y ago
You have no idea how choking the air was in the 70's and 80's. They still had Stage 3 smog alerts in the early seventies where you were not supposed to go outdoors. Our treatment of the earth has improved and it will continue to improve with technology. All the (incomplete) computer models since the 90's predicting runaway warming due to human inputs to the system have not been borne out, and every year they aren't, you'll find yourself screaming louder and louder just to be heard. Real science will prevail, not the politicized stuff, and won't it be a bummer when you find you've been duped all these years?
- pas 10y ago
  You think the IPCC is not real science? Why would it be a bummer that something in the "human extinction" category was taken on the "let's make sure it really doesn't happen" side instead of the "oh, those hippies are screaming since the 80s, because they took the scary predictions of some models seriously, and we're still here, so fuck them, and also fuck the 95+% of vastly more advanced and sophisticated models of today, because air quality is improving in urban centers". It's great to see things improving, but CO2 has not much to do with smog. And that's actually a problem, because people who take the lazy approach to global climate models like you - let's call these people the Peter Wilsons (because an article of his is the [second] thing on Google if you search for co2 and smog) - will insist on having clean air and on doing nothing with regards to CO2.
  - EdSharkey 10y ago
    So, you're admitting some of the computer climate models WERE flawed? Glad to hear some intellectual honesty. I suspect I don't see the world as statically as you do. If we humans pump more CO2 in the atmosphere, I assume it doesn't necessarily accrete there year-over-year. Also, I don't assume that a rise in CO2 in the atmosphere from year to year means humans are to blame since there are volcanoes and rotting vegetation all over the place. And surface temperatures are bound to fluctuate mainly because the sun is not a constant energy source from year to year. Do I think the IPCC is real science? I'm sure there is something like science and data gathering going on there. I will note that IPCC has "government" and "climate change" in the name, which is a dead giveaway that politics are a driver in any conclusions made by the panel. You give them the benefit of the doubt, clearly. I say, "show me reproducible experimental results or there was no science." Reproducibility in this case requires the models to be accurately predicting future trends, which, to-date they have not been. And that brings me to ... > Why would it be a bummer that something in the "human extinction" category was taken on the "let's make sure it really doesn't happen" side instead of the "oh, those hippies are screaming since the 80s, because they took the scary predictions of some models seriously, and we're still here, so fuck them, and also fuck the 95+% of vastly more advanced and sophisticated models of today, because air quality is improving in urban centers". Look, cussing isn't necessary. I want clean air and water. I have asthma, I know how bad pollution can be. I'm not a bad guy. I just don't appreciate being lied to and what you said there can be summed up as, "I know a lot of false claims were made on inaccurate models, but good things happened and I'm satisfied." Here's the thing, I don't like being made to worry over unfounded claims. (And I get super grumpy when my kids are made to worry!) So, scale your message wayyyy back or you lose any credibility. Heck, the "stop pollution" message is sufficient, and why not? There's a legit/obvious pollution problem worldwide, so you have moral superiority there. Planetary destruction is not imminent though (at least not due to man-made CO2 emissions) and you've got no leg to stand on there.
    - pas 10y ago
      People usually admit guilt, and I don't think I have anything to do with those models, as some of those are older than me. Of course they were flawed. Models are always imperfect, but the important things is, are they useful? Well. Ultimately, we shall see the usefulness of these climate models, and those old models were useful to show some the extremes, huge swings, big effects. Solar cycles, big non-sea ice melts (Greenland, Antarctica), no reduction in emissions, a lot of CFC (used for refrigerators, you probably remember them). Furthermore, it's kind of hard to experimentally test the crude models, as you'd need to copy the universe, and do this or that in a lot of copies. Those models were simple, but still full of statistics, so the chances are still chances, just there are hundreds of millions of people who don't want to put Earth on a roulette table. Hm, I never considered my worldviews as static. What suggests that? So, now those are concrete scientifically explorable questions. First, sure, the CO2 content of the atmosphere is increasing a lot slower than we're adding it, so it goes somewhere. Vegetation, oceans, and some could escape to space, but it's basically zero. So from a CO2 standpoint, Earth is a closed system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Dominant_atmospheric_escape_and_loss_processes_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Dominant_at... ). There are thousands of people working on determining the composition of the atmosphere in the past. We have very good data for about the last half million of so year. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere#/media/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo... ) And getting better and better estimates for the longer timescales (hundreds of millions of years). The main point of this whole global climate change/warming/alarm/denial is that humans are very busy and we are doing something very fast. Big quick changes. We released so much CO2 and CH4 (methane) and other gases, that it is having an effect, much larger than whatever would happen to any natural cause. (Volcanoes release yearly less than a gigaton of CO2 (about 0.3 Gt per year) and we have good data for the last 50 years, and there was no significant increase in CO2 after big eruptions. So, they released a lot during the millions of years, but that largely went down into the sediments at the bottom of the oceans.) The Sun has many cycles, the short 11-year sunspot cycle is not that interesting, it happened in the last century ~9 times, and nothing interesting happened (<0.1% total irradiance change from cycle min to cycle max). The big cycles are the Milankovitch cycles (various periodic changes in the orbital position of Earth relative to the Sun), those are important for big Ice Ages, as total irradiance can change ~25%, but these are slow, take 20 000 year or longer. And the models are of course not perfect for what these orbital cycle things mean for the climate on Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Problems So, all in all, we released more CO2 in the last 50 years than "nature played with" in the last 400k yearly, as in we released a half a teraton (500 Gt) in total and the yearly variation was 200 Gt. Each year we release ~35 Gt, that has to go somewhere or accumulate in the atmosphere. (And as you noted, not all of it is accreting, hence all this text and discussion.) (Furthermore, the average temperature change we're talking about takes into account the seasonality from the Sun, so the trendline is statistically separated from the baseline.) Well, I treat the IPCC as the aggregation of climate scientists. (Best data, best models, most rational interpretations, and so on.) They are internationally funded (there's a breakdown of contribution by country, it's chartered by the UN, but the world meteorological organisation pays its yearly budget), so far they are pretty cheap, as of 2014 they received about 138 M CHF (136 M USD at current exchange rate). But probably a review of their work could be crowdfunded pretty easily. (Though we'd have to discuss what is a good method of estimation and what isn't, what is a good way to model this or that and what isn't, but of course these points of concern should be listed, and .. there is a list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_A... ) After the IPCC's 4th report in 2009, there was a lot of scrutiny of their work, conflicts of interest and so on, and their process benefited from this, as the 5th report now uses better data, better sources, a more unified probability framework (so probability estimates are consistent with each other), and so on. I believe that when thousands of scientists endorse a result, and spend time talking about it, spend energy explaining it, how it came to be, and why specific "counter" papers are flawed, then that result is okay. The times are changing, I don't know what'll happen in the future after this mini-collapse of intelligent discourse, now that truth and English are basically arbitrary, now that Enlightenment values of clarity and rational attention to detail no longer matter, with the rise of the complex charlatans that are willingly or unwillingly put certain issues before scientific integrity. Now that more and more people are forced to make less and less optimal compromises with supporters of ideologies foreign to theirs. But that's a bit too doomsaying and offtopic. Back to models. The IPCC reports are based on technical models integrated into a bigger reporting framework. And those models were covered in a lot of papers, and the best models were chosen, and then computationally run. (See the Climate Model Intercomparison Project, also, "When using blended temperatures the observations lie well within the 90% range of RCP8.5 runs for the whole of the last decade" -- RCP8.5 is what IPCC used, and the blended things is about estimating air temperature (the models predict air temp) from sea temp (what satellites measure when they look at the sea) -- http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/95782/1/blend_paper.pdf http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/95782/1/blend_paper.pdf ) That said, SCIENCE IS FUCKING SUCKS when it comes to presenting results. (Compare to "tech": https://areweideyet.com/ https://areweideyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ http://www.arewewebyet.org/ http://www.arewewebyet.org/ vs http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/publications.html http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/publications.html and https://cmip-publications.llnl.gov/search?type=project&option=CMIP5 https://cmip-publications.llnl.gov/search?type=project&optio... there's no one-liner. Yet the question is pretty easy "how accureate are models on some metric, and what does that mean".) "I know a lot of false claims were made, [...]" .. I haven't said that. I know the models were simple, so crude, bad, inefficient, inaccurate are not surprising to me. Not to mention there was not enough computational capacity in the 90s. My message is, logic is powerful, but that doesn't mean simple. It means we can say that there are more and more possibilities. Such that if someone is screaming more and more, it doesn't mean that they are just trying to scaremonger more, it might mean things are getting worse and worse. (That's how this subthread started.)
mzw_mzw 10y ago
Right. Who are you going to believe, Wikipedia or your lying eyes? I'm guessing you aren't old enough to remember how awful the state of the environment was in the United States back in the '70s. It's like night and day to compare then and now.
- pas 10y ago
  As I've replyed to the sibling comment, CO2 has not much to do with air quality, and that's actually a problem, because if it'd be linked to local air pollution, we'd have already insisted on less CO2 output long ago. EdSharkey replied that the dire days are over. Yeah, in air pollution, great, applause, bravo, but not in climate things, like ocean acidification, storms and hurricanes and so on.