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Can you cite any actual science to back that up? And make sure you exclude any sources that say "as early as 2000". Or is this the new denialist meme? Instead
by flukus 9y ago
Can you cite any actual science to back that up? And make sure you exclude any sources that say "as early as 2000".
Or is this the new denialist meme? Instead of "in the 70s they were warning us about a new ice age" it's evolved into "in the 70s they said we'd have drowned by now".
I suppose it's getting slowly closer to the actual state of science.
- mirimir 9y agoClimate models back in the 70s were very crude. There were only about two decades of atmospheric CO2 measurements. And, as I recall, predictions were stated with far greater uncertainty. So I wouldn't be surprised if some high-end estimates are clearly wrong by now. Edit: But maybe initial models were decent enough: The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-f...
- flukus 9y ago> And, as I recall, predictions were stated with far greater uncertainty. The bigger problem is people taking the upper bound of that uncertainty and concluding they were wrong because reality turned out to not be near the upper bound. Kind of like how political polls are "wrong", even when the result falls within the margin of error.
- mirimir 9y agoTrue. But some writers (even science writers) sensationalize by focusing on upper-bound estimates. And most people never see primary sources, even abstracts or executive summaries.
- flukus 9y agoIn headlines maybe, the articles almost always include phrases like "as early as 20xx" that communicate the uncertainty.
- viridian 9y agoCan we not assume bad faith on behalf of other commenters? I've heard similar things from a grandparent, an older science teacher, and a CS prof I knew well. Everyone knows that science reporting is in a terrible state today, but I honestly don't think it was much better 40-50 years ago. The problem has always been that the non expert journalists that publish the stories exaggerate the outcomes of research, across the board. Painting people's experiences of popular climate science in the 70's as denialism is nonconstructive and needlessly insulting.
- flukus 9y ago> Can we not assume bad faith on behalf of other commenters? I'll try with this one, but at a certain point things just become willful ignorance, as is the case with the "in the 70's it was all about the new ice age" trope. In fact, willful ignorance would summarize OP's whole post.
- chiph 9y agoWe had the same thing being reported in the late 70's. There was a travelling exhibit that visited my high school which was an analog computer - you could set your energy sources (coal, hydro, nuclear, solar) and see how long society could run before we re-entered the Dark Ages (literally - no more electric lights!). Thinking about it - the consumption side was likely a rising wave function which predicted steadily-increasing use of electricity. This was around the time when the EPA's Energy Star program got started, and I suspect it did a lot to counter the increase in demand. You can also look at the films of the 70's to get some of the zeitgeist of the era - "Soylent Green", "Silent Running", "No Blade of Grass", "Damnation Alley", and so on, all with the theme that the Earth no longer nourishes life.
- moduspol 9y agoWho knows? Maybe it'll eventually get so close that the claims made actually match up with reality. Then maybe even some of those "denialists" will get on board.