7 ms·

Since it's come up in the comments and it's one of my pet peeves: there's some incredible confirmation bias around claims of personally observing climate change

Since it's come up in the comments and it's one of my pet peeves: there's some incredible confirmation bias around claims of personally observing climate change. Historical temperature fluctuations are huge, so no, you are almost certainly not "observing" climate change in your hometown. Human-caused climate change is expected to cause steady changes in the average, almost invisible in short time periods compared to the wild fluctuations that would anyway occur year to year, decade to decade, in any area. Climate change has now become a religion though, so I'm not surprised that the faithful are having the equivalent of apparitions. (This doesn't mean it's not real, just that it's a point of political dogma for some, which I think is unfortunate because it only makes doubters more skeptical by foreclosing opportunities for persuasion.)

jimjimjim 9y ago
The world could actually be on fire and some people would claim that climate change doesn't exist.
- lowpro 9y ago
  That's because if the world was on fire all at once it would be weather, rather than climate.
throwaway5752 9y ago
You would be probably well served by linking to scientific data and publications when dismissing something so blithely.
- jjawssd 9y ago
  Climate change data https://imgur.com/a/nUDmA https://imgur.com/a/nUDmA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_palaeotemps.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala... The data is not fake. ps: weather is not political. EDIT: If you find this post to be of interest to you, please upvote. There are many people which disagree with the information I posted without posting a retort. How can we function as a healthy society without the willingness to question what we are told. Must we have sacred cows?
  - hashmap 9y ago
    Man, what a mishmash of non sequiturs, bad reading of charts, inability to research, and lack of scientific understanding; sure, the data may not be fake, but the words are stupid: > There is absolutely no evidence that humans are having any impact on the climate whatsoever. Starting off real strong. Maybe climate scientists themselves don't exist either. > In order to establish an actual human impact in a statistically significant way, you must show a modern trend that deviates from a baseline of appropriate duration. Pick a site, any site. This one's good: > As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/pag... > Not only are we not in a period of "record high temperatures", we are in one of the coldest periods in the past 65 million years. Which means... what, exactly? We are experiencing record high temperatures within recent history, and that's what matters to our survival. We are not equipped to deal with the speed of the change that is happening. > The earth had had ice caps for maybe about half of the time over the past 500 million years. Again, so what? We have ice caps now and them melting quickly is problematic for us. I don't have enough time to address all the nonsense 4chan can come up with. The rest of it is left as an exercise for the reader. That being said, there are no sacred cows in science. Questioning conclusions is important; however, when the science has been settled by mountains of evidence and there is scientific consensus, continually questioning those conclusions in the absence of new and contradictory data is a waste of time. You could likewise argue that the earth is flat for all eternity, and "round earthers" wouldn't be holding their conclusions as a sacred cow just because they dismiss your arguments. Like the earth being round or gravity being real, man-made climate change isn't really a debate.
  - jimjimjim 9y ago
    for god sake. don't try and pass off 4chan posts as data!
    - nathanaldensr 9y ago
      4chan may be the medium, but those charts were generated with some data. It's unfortunate the charts don't include their source; I'd love to see the underlying data/reports.
lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
You're being needlessly pedantic. True year to year (or even half decade to half decade) fluctuations are pretty huge; but there's plenty of people on this board 50+ and it doesn't take much warming to go from "the lake froze over every winter when I was a boy" to "the lake don't freeze no more". Ironically, the people most vocal about denying climate change are the ones in the best position to have directly observed it.
- tertius 9y ago
  If it were true then yes (and data some cases tell us so). But memory has a tendency to be selective, anecdotes should not be trusted.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    The telling things are signs like the failure of Georgia's peach harvest; peach trees are sensitive to how much time each year the weather is in certain temperature ranges, and use it as a trigger for their seasonal behaviors. The number of sufficiently-cool hours each year is now less than half of the historical average: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-a-warm-winter-destroyed-85-percent-of-georgias-peaches/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-a-warm-winter-destr...
    - throwaway5752 9y ago
      And the success of the new england peach harvest in the same season; direct photographic evidence of glacial retreat, too.
    - tertius 9y ago
      Two points. One year is an outlier. That's about bell curves work. Sorry for the peach harvest in Georgia, but that's nature. Comparing that one year (and the year before) to "historical average" from 1998-2017 is stupid. That is a ridiculously small sample size and reeks of bias. I'm not claiming that they're wrong, but it's not convincing. Bias kills so much of what well meaning people try to do.
QAPereo 9y ago
It might be helpful to cite some examples of that confirmation bias, otherwise it does seem a bit like flailing at a strawman for the sake of pedantry. Edit: Just downvotes... charming.
- nnfy 9y ago
  We have about a hundred or so years of high frequency data, and then we have high uncertainty, gap filled evidence of past temperatures in the form of core, tree, and fossil data and such. And basbased on this tiny trend over the past century, we are extrapolating a trend which normally occurs over tens of millions of years. More so, we are using this spotty data to predict the evolution of a massive, poorly understood, highly chaotic system. Modern climate science seems dogmatic because, in spite of the objectively poor data in comparison to the trend we are attempting to model, there is almost no healthy skeptical science. I challenge you to find more than a handful of papers exploring potential benefits of climate change, or challenging the consensus, as you would expect in any other healthy science. You likely won't, because the subject is a taboo. I searched as a college student some 5-7 years ago when I had access to journals and was astounded to find nothing. Healthy science requires skepticism.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    A moving speech, but totally tangential to the much more limited request I made.
throwaway613834 9y ago
> Human-caused climate change is expected to cause steady changes in the average, almost invisible in short time periods Really now? All this polar ice melting before our eyes is just a coincidental year-to-year fluctuation? You'd have expected this 200 years ago?
- nnfy 9y ago
  The phenomenon of climate evolves on a scale of millions of years. We simply do not have historic data with high enough frequency and accuracy to truely conclude that this is an unprecedented rise rate. Nor do we actually know if it is catastrophic. Some of the most bioproductive eras in the history of the earth had higher carbon concentrations and temperatures than we do now. But any time you bring something like this up, you're slandered as a denier because of the taboo. Edit: predictable down votes, illustrating my point. How do you expect to solve problems if you deliberately avoid certain questions?
- jjawssd 9y ago
  Not 200y ago. 100ky ago. Earth's temperature naturally oscillates and we are in a colder period. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_palaeotemps.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...
nickthemagicman 9y ago
The entirety of the world's scientific community agrees on global warmings alarming impact...so if you're calling science a religion you're pretty much hopeless already..
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
hashmap 9y ago
That certainly would be news to the IPCC https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-direct-observations.html https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm... And innumerable scientists who are in the business of documenting the climate change they observe. This sort of inflammatory, unsubstantiated nonsense doesn't belong here.
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  I'm talking about individuals making observations of weather in terms of "gee, it's sure been warmer around here lately." Notice the average temperature change in those diagrams: we're talking about less than a couple of degrees Celsius over two centuries. Observable globally by carefully taking tons of measurements and averaging, yes. But not observable by noticing that it's been warmer or wetter for a few years during a particular season.
  - empath75 9y ago
    Higher average temperature partially manifests as hotter hottest days and those are definitely noticeable.
  - abalone 9y ago
    Which has nothing to do with this article about climate scientists.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    While you can't directly observe an average temperature difference that small, observing the effects on the local environment is different. Particularly if we're talking "frozen" versus "not frozen". People who grow things outdoors will notice when the last frost is in the spring and when the first frost is in the fall.
    - refurb 9y ago
      I think the point is that if you go back before the industrial revolution, these same big swings were happening back then too. Year after after of mild winters, followed by a few years of severe winters. Same thing with hurricanes. Some seasons have 3x the average and other seasons have none. There is huge variability in climate regardless of global warming.
graeme 9y ago
The expected changes are higher at more northern latitudes. It's certainly true that people can mistake a mere swing for a long run change. But, that doesn't mean changes are invisible! Here in Quebec and New Brunswick the leaves have been turning later, and there have been warm days later into autumn. When it feels warm, we can check historic temperature records to confirm whether it's abnormal or not. There are already noted effects on fall leaves: https://www.wsj.com/articles/leave-it-to-the-heat-to-dull-autumns-glory-1507899600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/leave-it-to-the-heat-to-dull-au... In Canada's north, the coast is eroding, and building foundations are shifting: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/thawing-permafrost-sinks-buildings-hikes-costs-in-north-1.1108686 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/thawing-permafrost-sinks... We also have ticks moving up from the south, and other invasive species that used to be unable to live up north. What latitude do you live in?
craigyk 9y ago
Additional energy in a chaotic system does not distribute itself as a nice "average". The way I like to think about it is a massive billiards table, and as you add more moving balls (more energy) things just get crazier. On average, sure there is more movement, but what you'll mostly notice is the increasing frequency and energy of collisions.
ocschwar 9y ago
Glaciers, permafrost, and the like are the kind of low-pass filter that lets people observe the underlying signal without a Matlab window open. For me, it's the fact that the young children in my neighborhood have given up on hockey and now play pickup games of lacrosse on their driveways. See, older generations in Boston used to play on the ponds every winter. Today's kids cannot (ice thickness on the ponds is another low pass filter), and with only so much rink time to go around, they've largely switched sports. THey don't know the signal they're giving me, because they weren't around when hockey was the main game to play. But to me, they are the low-passed signal.
- graeme 9y ago
  Good point. It's gotten hard to make plans to skate with friends in Montreal. The days aren't consistently cold enough for good ice conditions.
woodandsteel 9y ago
I want to ask you something, but first let me say that I've noticed a pattern among those who deny the world is getting warmer. When people use scientific data to argue it is getting warmer, the deniers often pull out personal anecdotes to the the contrary. And then when there are personal anecdotes supporting warming, the deniers often claim the statistics are not there. So let me ask you, what sort of evidence would persuade you that the world is getting warmer? Or is it your view that it is simply impossible, so no evidence could persuade you?
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  I lean pretty strongly toward agreeing with anthropogenic climate change. I can't be any more certain than that since I'm not a climate scientist and I'm depending on the "consensus" of a highly politicized area, and I have seen, in areas I am more knowledgeable of, how truth can become the victim of politics. In any case, the risks of climate change are high enough to warrant action. I tend to disagree with the commonly proposed solutions, which tend to involve global redistribution of wealth and loss of advantage for the United States and other Western powers. From what I know, renewed investment in nuclear energy is a required part of a solution that doesn't squander America's lead over our competitors. A shift to electric cars also seems essential. I also think you could persuade climate change skeptics (or deniers or whatever you want to call them) of the utility of these policies in terms of things other than climate change, such as energy sovereignty[1], environmental cleanliness, and the potential for breakthroughs like fusion energy or extremely efficient fission reactors. This would probably be more effective than demonizing them. [1] So that our economic security is not tied to the stability and friendliness of Middle East regimes. So that Russia cannot extort Europe with its natural gas supply.
jupiter90000 9y ago
I'd recommend people to actually look at their locale's weather data as a time series, to inform yourself. Here's a good resource for the past 100+ years in USA (usually available). https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us The mental stories & symbolism and related emotions around this subject are really interesting. For the record, I am aware climate change is real -- just wary of anecdotes and things like "man it was warm/cold until November last year, so it must mean X..."
KGIII 9y ago
You can observe climate change. It's pretty easy. You can't easily attribute it to human activity, however.
- richardw 9y ago
  Incontrovertible is hard, especially when many make a living from not seeing the evidence. That's why the tobacco industry was able to hang on for so long. This is more important but we'll waste decades convincing the holdouts.
  - refurb 9y ago
    especially when many make a living from not seeing the evidence Doesn't that cut both ways?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - KGIII 9y ago
      I'll give you a serious response. It can and there is quite a bit of politics involved, unfortunately. Your best bet is to take the time and do some learning in your own, at least that is what I did. I'd suggest not paying much attention to the extremists on either side. Chances are really good that AGW isn't going to result in human extinction. Chances are really good that AGW is real. The journalism is generally terrible and I do have a negative opinion about some of the more vocal scientists. However, I have a stronger opinion about the people who refuse to acknowledge the results. The planet is absolutely warming and we are almost certainly adding to that warming. Our contribution to this warming is due to our adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is well studied and can be replicated. Models aren't certainties and can only make broad predictions. Anyone citing them as absolute fact is poorly representing the science. There are multiple models, many data sets, and variable results. More greenhouse gases will increase the rate of warming. Global warming is only one part of global climate change. The exact results aren't entirely known and the models attempt to predict this. The system is very large and very complicated. We don't even know the initial starting state. So, they make approximations, which is what these kind of models do. When I modeled traffic, I couldn't tell you when you'd get to your destination. I could accurately predict the results, however. They would be largely true for everyone. On an individual scale, they could be wrong but they were much more likely to be true. We had a high confidence in the results. Modeling the climate is a bit like that, only bigger and more complicated. It is also politically charged - another similarity with traffic modeling. But, the end result is we are, almost certainly, going to get to our destination unless we change our route. I am not a climate scientist and was a bit skeptical of the claims of accuracy and certainty. I have since put in a lot of effort to learn. I am really, really certain that the climate is changing, we are speeding that up, and that the models are accurate enough to where we should reduce our output of unconstrained greenhouse gases. Make of this what you will. I've tried to be as clear as I can. I'm not suggesting you trust me. I'm suggesting that you'll reach the same results if you put the effort into learning.

jimjimjim 9y ago

The world could actually be on fire and some people would claim that climate change doesn't exist.

lowpro 9y ago
That's because if the world was on fire all at once it would be weather, rather than climate.

throwaway5752 9y ago

You would be probably well served by linking to scientific data and publications when dismissing something so blithely.

jjawssd 9y ago
Climate change data https://imgur.com/a/nUDmA https://imgur.com/a/nUDmA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_palaeotemps.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala... The data is not fake. ps: weather is not political. EDIT: If you find this post to be of interest to you, please upvote. There are many people which disagree with the information I posted without posting a retort. How can we function as a healthy society without the willingness to question what we are told. Must we have sacred cows?
- hashmap 9y ago
  Man, what a mishmash of non sequiturs, bad reading of charts, inability to research, and lack of scientific understanding; sure, the data may not be fake, but the words are stupid: > There is absolutely no evidence that humans are having any impact on the climate whatsoever. Starting off real strong. Maybe climate scientists themselves don't exist either. > In order to establish an actual human impact in a statistically significant way, you must show a modern trend that deviates from a baseline of appropriate duration. Pick a site, any site. This one's good: > As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/pag... > Not only are we not in a period of "record high temperatures", we are in one of the coldest periods in the past 65 million years. Which means... what, exactly? We are experiencing record high temperatures within recent history, and that's what matters to our survival. We are not equipped to deal with the speed of the change that is happening. > The earth had had ice caps for maybe about half of the time over the past 500 million years. Again, so what? We have ice caps now and them melting quickly is problematic for us. I don't have enough time to address all the nonsense 4chan can come up with. The rest of it is left as an exercise for the reader. That being said, there are no sacred cows in science. Questioning conclusions is important; however, when the science has been settled by mountains of evidence and there is scientific consensus, continually questioning those conclusions in the absence of new and contradictory data is a waste of time. You could likewise argue that the earth is flat for all eternity, and "round earthers" wouldn't be holding their conclusions as a sacred cow just because they dismiss your arguments. Like the earth being round or gravity being real, man-made climate change isn't really a debate.
- jimjimjim 9y ago
  for god sake. don't try and pass off 4chan posts as data!
  - nathanaldensr 9y ago
    4chan may be the medium, but those charts were generated with some data. It's unfortunate the charts don't include their source; I'd love to see the underlying data/reports.

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago

You're being needlessly pedantic. True year to year (or even half decade to half decade) fluctuations are pretty huge; but there's plenty of people on this board 50+ and it doesn't take much warming to go from "the lake froze over every winter when I was a boy" to "the lake don't freeze no more". Ironically, the people most vocal about denying climate change are the ones in the best position to have directly observed it.

tertius 9y ago
If it were true then yes (and data some cases tell us so). But memory has a tendency to be selective, anecdotes should not be trusted.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  The telling things are signs like the failure of Georgia's peach harvest; peach trees are sensitive to how much time each year the weather is in certain temperature ranges, and use it as a trigger for their seasonal behaviors. The number of sufficiently-cool hours each year is now less than half of the historical average: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-a-warm-winter-destroyed-85-percent-of-georgias-peaches/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-a-warm-winter-destr...
  - throwaway5752 9y ago
    And the success of the new england peach harvest in the same season; direct photographic evidence of glacial retreat, too.
  - tertius 9y ago
    Two points. One year is an outlier. That's about bell curves work. Sorry for the peach harvest in Georgia, but that's nature. Comparing that one year (and the year before) to "historical average" from 1998-2017 is stupid. That is a ridiculously small sample size and reeks of bias. I'm not claiming that they're wrong, but it's not convincing. Bias kills so much of what well meaning people try to do.

QAPereo 9y ago

It might be helpful to cite some examples of that confirmation bias, otherwise it does seem a bit like flailing at a strawman for the sake of pedantry. Edit: Just downvotes... charming.

nnfy 9y ago
We have about a hundred or so years of high frequency data, and then we have high uncertainty, gap filled evidence of past temperatures in the form of core, tree, and fossil data and such. And basbased on this tiny trend over the past century, we are extrapolating a trend which normally occurs over tens of millions of years. More so, we are using this spotty data to predict the evolution of a massive, poorly understood, highly chaotic system. Modern climate science seems dogmatic because, in spite of the objectively poor data in comparison to the trend we are attempting to model, there is almost no healthy skeptical science. I challenge you to find more than a handful of papers exploring potential benefits of climate change, or challenging the consensus, as you would expect in any other healthy science. You likely won't, because the subject is a taboo. I searched as a college student some 5-7 years ago when I had access to journals and was astounded to find nothing. Healthy science requires skepticism.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  A moving speech, but totally tangential to the much more limited request I made.

throwaway613834 9y ago

> Human-caused climate change is expected to cause steady changes in the average, almost invisible in short time periods Really now? All this polar ice melting before our eyes is just a coincidental year-to-year fluctuation? You'd have expected this 200 years ago?

nnfy 9y ago
The phenomenon of climate evolves on a scale of millions of years. We simply do not have historic data with high enough frequency and accuracy to truely conclude that this is an unprecedented rise rate. Nor do we actually know if it is catastrophic. Some of the most bioproductive eras in the history of the earth had higher carbon concentrations and temperatures than we do now. But any time you bring something like this up, you're slandered as a denier because of the taboo. Edit: predictable down votes, illustrating my point. How do you expect to solve problems if you deliberately avoid certain questions?
jjawssd 9y ago
Not 200y ago. 100ky ago. Earth's temperature naturally oscillates and we are in a colder period. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_palaeotemps.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...

nickthemagicman 9y ago

The entirety of the world's scientific community agrees on global warmings alarming impact...so if you're calling science a religion you're pretty much hopeless already..

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

hashmap 9y ago

That certainly would be news to the IPCC https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-direct-observations.html https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm... And innumerable scientists who are in the business of documenting the climate change they observe. This sort of inflammatory, unsubstantiated nonsense doesn't belong here.

marcoperaza 9y ago
I'm talking about individuals making observations of weather in terms of "gee, it's sure been warmer around here lately." Notice the average temperature change in those diagrams: we're talking about less than a couple of degrees Celsius over two centuries. Observable globally by carefully taking tons of measurements and averaging, yes. But not observable by noticing that it's been warmer or wetter for a few years during a particular season.
- empath75 9y ago
  Higher average temperature partially manifests as hotter hottest days and those are definitely noticeable.
- abalone 9y ago
  Which has nothing to do with this article about climate scientists.
- skybrian 9y ago
  While you can't directly observe an average temperature difference that small, observing the effects on the local environment is different. Particularly if we're talking "frozen" versus "not frozen". People who grow things outdoors will notice when the last frost is in the spring and when the first frost is in the fall.
  - refurb 9y ago
    I think the point is that if you go back before the industrial revolution, these same big swings were happening back then too. Year after after of mild winters, followed by a few years of severe winters. Same thing with hurricanes. Some seasons have 3x the average and other seasons have none. There is huge variability in climate regardless of global warming.

graeme 9y ago

The expected changes are higher at more northern latitudes. It's certainly true that people can mistake a mere swing for a long run change. But, that doesn't mean changes are invisible! Here in Quebec and New Brunswick the leaves have been turning later, and there have been warm days later into autumn. When it feels warm, we can check historic temperature records to confirm whether it's abnormal or not. There are already noted effects on fall leaves: https://www.wsj.com/articles/leave-it-to-the-heat-to-dull-autumns-glory-1507899600 https://www.wsj.com/articles/leave-it-to-the-heat-to-dull-au... In Canada's north, the coast is eroding, and building foundations are shifting: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/thawing-permafrost-sinks-buildings-hikes-costs-in-north-1.1108686 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/thawing-permafrost-sinks... We also have ticks moving up from the south, and other invasive species that used to be unable to live up north. What latitude do you live in?

craigyk 9y ago

Additional energy in a chaotic system does not distribute itself as a nice "average". The way I like to think about it is a massive billiards table, and as you add more moving balls (more energy) things just get crazier. On average, sure there is more movement, but what you'll mostly notice is the increasing frequency and energy of collisions.

ocschwar 9y ago

Glaciers, permafrost, and the like are the kind of low-pass filter that lets people observe the underlying signal without a Matlab window open. For me, it's the fact that the young children in my neighborhood have given up on hockey and now play pickup games of lacrosse on their driveways. See, older generations in Boston used to play on the ponds every winter. Today's kids cannot (ice thickness on the ponds is another low pass filter), and with only so much rink time to go around, they've largely switched sports. THey don't know the signal they're giving me, because they weren't around when hockey was the main game to play. But to me, they are the low-passed signal.

graeme 9y ago
Good point. It's gotten hard to make plans to skate with friends in Montreal. The days aren't consistently cold enough for good ice conditions.

woodandsteel 9y ago

I want to ask you something, but first let me say that I've noticed a pattern among those who deny the world is getting warmer. When people use scientific data to argue it is getting warmer, the deniers often pull out personal anecdotes to the the contrary. And then when there are personal anecdotes supporting warming, the deniers often claim the statistics are not there. So let me ask you, what sort of evidence would persuade you that the world is getting warmer? Or is it your view that it is simply impossible, so no evidence could persuade you?

marcoperaza 9y ago
I lean pretty strongly toward agreeing with anthropogenic climate change. I can't be any more certain than that since I'm not a climate scientist and I'm depending on the "consensus" of a highly politicized area, and I have seen, in areas I am more knowledgeable of, how truth can become the victim of politics. In any case, the risks of climate change are high enough to warrant action. I tend to disagree with the commonly proposed solutions, which tend to involve global redistribution of wealth and loss of advantage for the United States and other Western powers. From what I know, renewed investment in nuclear energy is a required part of a solution that doesn't squander America's lead over our competitors. A shift to electric cars also seems essential. I also think you could persuade climate change skeptics (or deniers or whatever you want to call them) of the utility of these policies in terms of things other than climate change, such as energy sovereignty[1], environmental cleanliness, and the potential for breakthroughs like fusion energy or extremely efficient fission reactors. This would probably be more effective than demonizing them. [1] So that our economic security is not tied to the stability and friendliness of Middle East regimes. So that Russia cannot extort Europe with its natural gas supply.

jupiter90000 9y ago

I'd recommend people to actually look at their locale's weather data as a time series, to inform yourself. Here's a good resource for the past 100+ years in USA (usually available). https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us The mental stories & symbolism and related emotions around this subject are really interesting. For the record, I am aware climate change is real -- just wary of anecdotes and things like "man it was warm/cold until November last year, so it must mean X..."

KGIII 9y ago

You can observe climate change. It's pretty easy. You can't easily attribute it to human activity, however.

richardw 9y ago
Incontrovertible is hard, especially when many make a living from not seeing the evidence. That's why the tobacco industry was able to hang on for so long. This is more important but we'll waste decades convincing the holdouts.
- refurb 9y ago
  especially when many make a living from not seeing the evidence Doesn't that cut both ways?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - KGIII 9y ago
    I'll give you a serious response. It can and there is quite a bit of politics involved, unfortunately. Your best bet is to take the time and do some learning in your own, at least that is what I did. I'd suggest not paying much attention to the extremists on either side. Chances are really good that AGW isn't going to result in human extinction. Chances are really good that AGW is real. The journalism is generally terrible and I do have a negative opinion about some of the more vocal scientists. However, I have a stronger opinion about the people who refuse to acknowledge the results. The planet is absolutely warming and we are almost certainly adding to that warming. Our contribution to this warming is due to our adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is well studied and can be replicated. Models aren't certainties and can only make broad predictions. Anyone citing them as absolute fact is poorly representing the science. There are multiple models, many data sets, and variable results. More greenhouse gases will increase the rate of warming. Global warming is only one part of global climate change. The exact results aren't entirely known and the models attempt to predict this. The system is very large and very complicated. We don't even know the initial starting state. So, they make approximations, which is what these kind of models do. When I modeled traffic, I couldn't tell you when you'd get to your destination. I could accurately predict the results, however. They would be largely true for everyone. On an individual scale, they could be wrong but they were much more likely to be true. We had a high confidence in the results. Modeling the climate is a bit like that, only bigger and more complicated. It is also politically charged - another similarity with traffic modeling. But, the end result is we are, almost certainly, going to get to our destination unless we change our route. I am not a climate scientist and was a bit skeptical of the claims of accuracy and certainty. I have since put in a lot of effort to learn. I am really, really certain that the climate is changing, we are speeding that up, and that the models are accurate enough to where we should reduce our output of unconstrained greenhouse gases. Make of this what you will. I've tried to be as clear as I can. I'm not suggesting you trust me. I'm suggesting that you'll reach the same results if you put the effort into learning.