4 ms·

Former climate change deniers, what changed your mind?

11 points by carlosgg 9y ago

jressey 9y ago
tl;dr: "I had a cultural bias that I overcame with critical thinking."
valuearb 9y ago
When I first heard about climate change, I knew that there were essentially three things that needed to be proven. 1) That climate change is happening, i.e. the world is getting warmer. 2) That it's not a natural phenomenon, i.e. driven by human behavior. 3) That it's a bad thing, i.e. not a positive thing for the world. Fairly quickly I accepted 1) based on the evidence. Over time I accepted 2), again based on evidence, but mostly on CO2 levels which I knew were well correlated with warm periods historically and logically should be, given it's a green house gas. Much later I started to accept 3). I still think the negatives are over-done, an ice age is far worse than global warming and we have no idea how close we are to the next one. But species extinction simply can't be fixed after the fact, so preventing it trumps all.
lighttower 9y ago
I'm not convinced that the climate model is accurate - climate modeling is a billion times more complex than a 3 body problem which we can't solve. Nor am I convinced that the increase in co2 is human driven. Or that we know how the atmosphere will react with such increase
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  Computer global climate models are not accurate. They are the best approximations we can do today given the theoretical knowledge and data we have available. This often trips up engineers, who associate computer modeling with the concept of a known system. But climate models are scientific, not engineering. They exist to explore uncertainty. The theory of anthropogenic climate change does not depend on global climate models. If they did not exist at all, we would have the same concerns about climate change. The models are based on the theory, not the other way around.
  - jamez1 9y ago
    The feedback loops that cause everyone to worry come from global climate models. How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without studying the local effects? The world is full of positive and negative feedback loops, discussing linear effects on the earth without taking into account these loops won't get us very far.
    - snowwrestler 9y ago
      They mostly don't. The models help us make detailed predictions, but you don't need a computer model to know that warmer air holds more water vapor, or that reducing snow cover reduces albedo. A lot of the biggest questions about how climate change will play out can't be well-modeled yet--like cloud formation, methane deposits in deep ocean or permafrost, etc. We need to learn more, and as we do, we feed that into the models and they improve. > How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without studying the local effects? We know that plants aren't absorbing all the excess CO2 because we directly measure CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and they are going up.
- bantunes 9y ago
  That's preposterous. If it's not human influence, what is it then? What is this magical alternative to the emissions right in our face? What else has made the Arctic ice sheet shrink over the years? Are we magically absorbing more heat than 200 years ago? Getting closer to the Sun? Axial tilt shift? Gremlins? Wake up.
  - basurihn 9y ago
    Dansgaard-Oerscher cycles?
bantunes 9y ago
I think we're being naive over most climate change 'denial'. These people are not dumb, they just want to keep the debate going while being fully aware climate change is happening. By delaying society's mustering of will to face it, they a) confirm their notion that we can't do anything about it (because in their minds, fixing it requires the kind of kumbaya UN cooperation they loathe) and b) cash out while there are still profits to be made in dirty industries and practices. And we're enabling them by continuing to make this a debateable matter.
brianmurphy 9y ago
I'm not a denier by thinking no change is happening. However, I do deny the more aggressive estimates are true. This is easily fact-checked by going back 20 years and see who predicted 2017 correctly. It just seems fishy that the most vocal proponents of global warming are always pushing models that overestimate the amount of change. That kind of constant inaccuracy needs to be questioned. http://www.snopes.com/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ http://www.snopes.com/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/

11 points by carlosgg 9y ago

tl;dr: "I had a cultural bias that I overcame with critical thinking."

When I first heard about climate change, I knew that there were essentially three things that needed to be proven. 1) That climate change is happening, i.e. the world is getting warmer. 2) That it's not a natural phenomenon, i.e. driven by human behavior. 3) That it's a bad thing, i.e. not a positive thing for the world. Fairly quickly I accepted 1) based on the evidence. Over time I accepted 2), again based on evidence, but mostly on CO2 levels which I knew were well correlated with warm periods historically and logically should be, given it's a green house gas. Much later I started to accept 3). I still think the negatives are over-done, an ice age is far worse than global warming and we have no idea how close we are to the next one. But species extinction simply can't be fixed after the fact, so preventing it trumps all.

lighttower 9y ago

I'm not convinced that the climate model is accurate - climate modeling is a billion times more complex than a 3 body problem which we can't solve. Nor am I convinced that the increase in co2 is human driven. Or that we know how the atmosphere will react with such increase

snowwrestler 9y ago
Computer global climate models are not accurate. They are the best approximations we can do today given the theoretical knowledge and data we have available. This often trips up engineers, who associate computer modeling with the concept of a known system. But climate models are scientific, not engineering. They exist to explore uncertainty. The theory of anthropogenic climate change does not depend on global climate models. If they did not exist at all, we would have the same concerns about climate change. The models are based on the theory, not the other way around.
- jamez1 9y ago
  The feedback loops that cause everyone to worry come from global climate models. How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without studying the local effects? The world is full of positive and negative feedback loops, discussing linear effects on the earth without taking into account these loops won't get us very far.
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    They mostly don't. The models help us make detailed predictions, but you don't need a computer model to know that warmer air holds more water vapor, or that reducing snow cover reduces albedo. A lot of the biggest questions about how climate change will play out can't be well-modeled yet--like cloud formation, methane deposits in deep ocean or permafrost, etc. We need to learn more, and as we do, we feed that into the models and they improve. > How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without studying the local effects? We know that plants aren't absorbing all the excess CO2 because we directly measure CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and they are going up.
bantunes 9y ago
That's preposterous. If it's not human influence, what is it then? What is this magical alternative to the emissions right in our face? What else has made the Arctic ice sheet shrink over the years? Are we magically absorbing more heat than 200 years ago? Getting closer to the Sun? Axial tilt shift? Gremlins? Wake up.
- basurihn 9y ago
  Dansgaard-Oerscher cycles?

bantunes 9y ago

I think we're being naive over most climate change 'denial'. These people are not dumb, they just want to keep the debate going while being fully aware climate change is happening. By delaying society's mustering of will to face it, they a) confirm their notion that we can't do anything about it (because in their minds, fixing it requires the kind of kumbaya UN cooperation they loathe) and b) cash out while there are still profits to be made in dirty industries and practices. And we're enabling them by continuing to make this a debateable matter.

brianmurphy 9y ago

I'm not a denier by thinking no change is happening. However, I do deny the more aggressive estimates are true. This is easily fact-checked by going back 20 years and see who predicted 2017 correctly. It just seems fishy that the most vocal proponents of global warming are always pushing models that overestimate the amount of change. That kind of constant inaccuracy needs to be questioned. http://www.snopes.com/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ http://www.snopes.com/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/