5 ms·

Global warming is real and humans contribute to it. Just stating that so I am not called a 'denier' as I have been before. That being said, the computer models

Global warming is real and humans contribute to it. Just stating that so I am not called a 'denier' as I have been before. That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts. Since I was a kid I've heard in the news that in the next 5 years or 10 years there will be all these catastrophes linked to global warming and I have yet to see them come true. I remember the BBC reporting years ago that the children of today would only know snow from what they've seen in snow globes, things like that. I think part of the reason for inaction is due to the news media over simplifying the problem and reporting (perhaps even exaggerating) the worst long term predictions.

wilsonnb2 8y ago
Yeah the media's bias for sensationalism has really bitten us on the ass on this one. Of course they're going to heavily report anything that can be interpreted as "the world is ending", and now there is a boy who cried wolf effect whenever they report anything on global warming. The media should be more responsible about this kind of thing.
seanalltogether 8y ago
With regards to England, it is slowly going that direction. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/often-does-snow-fall-uk-getting-rarer/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/often-does-snow-...
Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
The numerous one-in-a-thousand-year floods don't get you? The super-typhoons and unprecedented hurricanes? Drought and the human migration motivated by drought and flood? Species extinction? Wildfires? Loss of islands? I think it was the photos of disinterred coffins floating through the flooded streets of New Orleans that first really hit me: it's here.
- danielmg 8y ago
  I don't think you read all of his comment. Picking a single event like New Orleans isn't great evidence. I lived through a once in 300 years hurricane in southern England in '87 - that tells us nothing. But the increasing frequency of adverse events and once in a x years events is starting to nod its head in the direction of the impacts of global warming starting to manifest. The point he made is a good one - media sensationalism, supported by people who should know better; it does more harm than good. The future looks bleak as we, in the west, can go 100% nuke, zero carbon etc but it's like a fart in a jacuzzi compared to what China will bring as its economy scales to western per-capita size.
  - kojon99 8y ago
    Tough sanctions are the solution to that.
- pyk 8y ago
  To piggyback the above comment, the recent Nature[1] article about centuries-old baobab trees mysteriously dying over the past decade of warmer-then-even-warmer temperatures is what hit me. A potential litmus test for our future as a species. I suspect we will see more and more accumulation of research on impacts rather than just predicted impacts as we continue to experience increased temperatures. Although you do not have to touch a flame to know it will burn, more and more real world instances of getting "burned" are harder and harder to ignore. "The researchers found no signs of an epidemic or disease, leading them to suggest that changing climates in southern Africa could be to blame — but they stress that more research is needed to confirm this idea." [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05411-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05411-7
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
As another commenter noted, you're just lucky. There's been once-in-a-x-hundred-year weather events left and right in the past years. We'll see parts of the Carribean become uninhabitable in this generation - especially if the US keeps ignoring e.g. Puerto Rico and Haiti. The big storms will keep hitting those and part of the mainland to a point where the rebuild will not have been finished before the next one hits, forcing people to emigrate inland. In my situation, temperatures have gone up, with heat records being broken left and right. Used to be we only got like two or three weeks of >30 weather, now it's a multiple of that. You can see it in the sales of AC units and such.
xoa 8y ago
>That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts. Eh? Models have consistently underestimated the timeline. What exactly random individual articles in the bait-crazy science-ignorant general media may exclaim isn't particularly relevant to the actual state of the science. I mean, you don't read about computer science or bio or whatever stories there, see them get something hilariously wrong, then immediately flip to the next page and take their expertise on some other technical subject as gospel do you? The IPCC reports have been very conservative and used significant error bars. They've even consistently indulged in the fiction that somehow the world would come together and suddenly deal with emissions rather then just letting it run. Interest backed media constantly have played down any possible consequences or flat out asserted it'd be a net positive, that there'd be lots of new farmland say. The old lie of "back in the 70s they said we'd see a new ice age!!" still gets trotted out. The picture you paint seems the pretty much the polar opposite of the media reality over the last few decades.
- blixt 8y ago
  As you two have somewhat opposite memories/knowledge on the historical actions of media and science, maybe it'd be good to get some sources out in terms of old reports and articles?
  - dbingham 8y ago
    Climate predictions, the accepted scientific ones, have consistently been more conservative than what has actually happened: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
jefurii 8y ago
What I'm hearing from scientists is that we're already seeing unusual weather patterns that are due to global warming. For the past decade or so nearly every year has been warmer than the year before, and nearly every year is a record-breaking warm temperature. We're seeing more and more "exceptional" or 1000-year events happening every year. This is what you'd expect from global warming. Global warming is a slow-moving problem, which humans are terrible at dealing with. It's unfolding over a time span that it hard for humans to perceive in their lifetimes unless they're personally keeping track, and large segments of our population have been trained to distrust scientific reporting.
- Clanan 8y ago
  Per my comment above, we actually just experienced the largest 2-year drop in temp in the last 100 years. The danger with a hugely complex system like "global warming" (i.e. world climate) is that it can be attributed to be the cause of anything.
  - michrassena 8y ago
    Here's what seems to be a chart of the last hundred and thirty-six years of global land-ocean temperature. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ It seems some years are cooler than others, but the general trend is upwards. I don't see where the last two years indicate much of a temperature drop. Do you have a source of information for your statement?
    - Clanan 8y ago
      NASA GISS surface temp data [0]. Feb 2016 to Feb 2018. It's a noteworthy occurrence (and not something the news cycle would pick up) since the focus is always on warming. It certainly doesn't refute the short-term trends present. https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
      - DeRock 8y ago
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
I'm not a denier but ...
dbingham 8y ago
The over-sensationalization is purely the media. It's not coming from the models or the scientists running them. Please don't over generalize your anecdotal experience to an entire field. Especially not with something this important. The models have consistently undershot the mark: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p... As for climate disasters, we've had Katrina (2005) - 3rd most intense landfalling storm in the US in 100 years [1], Irma (2017) - the strongest observed in the Atlantic in terms of maximum sustained winds since Wilma [2], Wilma (2005) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone recorded in the Western Hemisphere, after Hurricane Patricia in 2015 [3], Patricia (2015) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone on record worldwide [4], Harvey (2017) - tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record[5] - which also caused "500 year floods" (3rd time in 3 years [6]). And that's just a sampling. For a while now, we've gotten a new "hottest month on record" every few months. And we've pretty consistently gotten "hottest year" on record every few years (increasingly every year or every other year). If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades. With those records have come any number of record breaking heatwaves, many of which have been very deadly. One of the most recent occurred in Pakistan and saw a temperature of 50.2C (122F) in the city of Nawabshah. [7] Seriously, just google the term "record breaking heatwave" and do some reading. You may not have experienced the extreme effects over-exaggerating TV anchors talked about in your childhood, but the world is experiencing climate effects as bad as the models predicted, or worse. Please don't use your personal anecdotal experience to undercut the validity of climate models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irma [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Wilma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Wilma [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houston-is-experiencing-its-third-500-year-flood-in-3-years-how-is-that-possible/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ca3ad04bdbe0 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houst... [7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/02/pakistani-city-breaks-april-record-with-day-of-50c-heat-nawabshah https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/02/pakistani-city...
ska 8y ago
Media representation is very different from the science. I fully believe you heard some fantastical reporting when you were a child, but that is a reflection on the journalism, not the science. Overall the modeling has been quite conservative, and has had good accuracy for such domains.
oldcynic 8y ago
Hmm. Yet snow is becoming rare in UK winters compared to the norm even 30 or 40 years ago, and we've had a succession of warmest November, December, etc on record reports over recent years. What are you expecting? Course if the Gulf Stream gets shut down we'll start getting similar snow amounts to Norway
mrfusion 8y ago
Along a similar vein the rain forests were supposed to have disappeared 10 years ago and I think we were all supposed to suffocate. That’s what I remember hearing as a kid in the 90s. I wonder what went wrong with those predictions? Did we end up taking enough action to stop that?
- mkempe 8y ago
  Since CO2 is an essential nutrient for the kingdom of plants, the rise in CO2 level has caused land-based vegetation to increase 14% globally over 30 years, and phytoplankton to increase tenfold in the North Atlantic over 50 years.
Clanan 8y ago
Since everyone is arguing their beliefs without evidence, and throwing out random storms and climate events as counter-evidence, here are some actual facts: 1. Recent studies on current climate models show they consistently over-predict carbon impact on global warming (source: Nature, Nov 2017: Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C). The article shows that the previous carbon budget was off by a factor of 4 for the next few years, and always predicted higher temps. In other words, the models over-fit the data and thus lose predictive capabilities. 2. Increase/decrease in drought occurrence is inconclusive (Trenberth et al in Nature, 2013): "Two recent papers looked at the question of whether large-scale drought has been increasing under climate change. A study in Nature by Sheffield et al entitled ‘Little change in global drought over the past 60 years’ was published at almost the same time that ‘Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models’ by Dai appeared in Nature Climate Change (published online in August 2012)." 3. On storms, SREX p. 159: The present assessment regarding observed trends in tropical cyclone activity is essentially identical to the WMO assessment (Knutson et al., 2010): there is low confidence that any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. 4. The greatest two-year cooling event of the last 100 years just occurred in Feb, per GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data. Global avg temp dropped 0.56 deg C.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Yes, I agree. In the late 70s, it was thought there would be a period of global cooling. Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on the next coming ice age. Climate change is real, but we have to be more careful about politicizing and forecasting what will happen. The 'imminent danger!' storyline has been played out since the turn of the century (nearly 20 years now) with many failed famous predictions. To be taken seriously (and it should be) we must be conservative and accurate in prognostications. Further exaggeration is only doing harm.

wilsonnb2 8y ago

Yeah the media's bias for sensationalism has really bitten us on the ass on this one. Of course they're going to heavily report anything that can be interpreted as "the world is ending", and now there is a boy who cried wolf effect whenever they report anything on global warming. The media should be more responsible about this kind of thing.

seanalltogether 8y ago

With regards to England, it is slowly going that direction. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/often-does-snow-fall-uk-getting-rarer/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/often-does-snow-...

Jill_the_Pill 8y ago

The numerous one-in-a-thousand-year floods don't get you? The super-typhoons and unprecedented hurricanes? Drought and the human migration motivated by drought and flood? Species extinction? Wildfires? Loss of islands? I think it was the photos of disinterred coffins floating through the flooded streets of New Orleans that first really hit me: it's here.

danielmg 8y ago
I don't think you read all of his comment. Picking a single event like New Orleans isn't great evidence. I lived through a once in 300 years hurricane in southern England in '87 - that tells us nothing. But the increasing frequency of adverse events and once in a x years events is starting to nod its head in the direction of the impacts of global warming starting to manifest. The point he made is a good one - media sensationalism, supported by people who should know better; it does more harm than good. The future looks bleak as we, in the west, can go 100% nuke, zero carbon etc but it's like a fart in a jacuzzi compared to what China will bring as its economy scales to western per-capita size.
- kojon99 8y ago
  Tough sanctions are the solution to that.
pyk 8y ago
To piggyback the above comment, the recent Nature[1] article about centuries-old baobab trees mysteriously dying over the past decade of warmer-then-even-warmer temperatures is what hit me. A potential litmus test for our future as a species. I suspect we will see more and more accumulation of research on impacts rather than just predicted impacts as we continue to experience increased temperatures. Although you do not have to touch a flame to know it will burn, more and more real world instances of getting "burned" are harder and harder to ignore. "The researchers found no signs of an epidemic or disease, leading them to suggest that changing climates in southern Africa could be to blame — but they stress that more research is needed to confirm this idea." [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05411-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05411-7

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

As another commenter noted, you're just lucky. There's been once-in-a-x-hundred-year weather events left and right in the past years. We'll see parts of the Carribean become uninhabitable in this generation - especially if the US keeps ignoring e.g. Puerto Rico and Haiti. The big storms will keep hitting those and part of the mainland to a point where the rebuild will not have been finished before the next one hits, forcing people to emigrate inland. In my situation, temperatures have gone up, with heat records being broken left and right. Used to be we only got like two or three weeks of >30 weather, now it's a multiple of that. You can see it in the sales of AC units and such.

xoa 8y ago

>That being said, the computer models predicting what the consequences of global warming will be, have greatly over estimated (at least the timeline of) real world impacts. Eh? Models have consistently underestimated the timeline. What exactly random individual articles in the bait-crazy science-ignorant general media may exclaim isn't particularly relevant to the actual state of the science. I mean, you don't read about computer science or bio or whatever stories there, see them get something hilariously wrong, then immediately flip to the next page and take their expertise on some other technical subject as gospel do you? The IPCC reports have been very conservative and used significant error bars. They've even consistently indulged in the fiction that somehow the world would come together and suddenly deal with emissions rather then just letting it run. Interest backed media constantly have played down any possible consequences or flat out asserted it'd be a net positive, that there'd be lots of new farmland say. The old lie of "back in the 70s they said we'd see a new ice age!!" still gets trotted out. The picture you paint seems the pretty much the polar opposite of the media reality over the last few decades.

blixt 8y ago
As you two have somewhat opposite memories/knowledge on the historical actions of media and science, maybe it'd be good to get some sources out in terms of old reports and articles?
- dbingham 8y ago
  Climate predictions, the accepted scientific ones, have consistently been more conservative than what has actually happened: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...

jefurii 8y ago

What I'm hearing from scientists is that we're already seeing unusual weather patterns that are due to global warming. For the past decade or so nearly every year has been warmer than the year before, and nearly every year is a record-breaking warm temperature. We're seeing more and more "exceptional" or 1000-year events happening every year. This is what you'd expect from global warming. Global warming is a slow-moving problem, which humans are terrible at dealing with. It's unfolding over a time span that it hard for humans to perceive in their lifetimes unless they're personally keeping track, and large segments of our population have been trained to distrust scientific reporting.

Clanan 8y ago
Per my comment above, we actually just experienced the largest 2-year drop in temp in the last 100 years. The danger with a hugely complex system like "global warming" (i.e. world climate) is that it can be attributed to be the cause of anything.
- michrassena 8y ago
  Here's what seems to be a chart of the last hundred and thirty-six years of global land-ocean temperature. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ It seems some years are cooler than others, but the general trend is upwards. I don't see where the last two years indicate much of a temperature drop. Do you have a source of information for your statement?
  - Clanan 8y ago
    NASA GISS surface temp data [0]. Feb 2016 to Feb 2018. It's a noteworthy occurrence (and not something the news cycle would pick up) since the focus is always on warming. It certainly doesn't refute the short-term trends present. https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
    - DeRock 8y ago

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

I'm not a denier but ...

dbingham 8y ago

The over-sensationalization is purely the media. It's not coming from the models or the scientists running them. Please don't over generalize your anecdotal experience to an entire field. Especially not with something this important. The models have consistently undershot the mark: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p... As for climate disasters, we've had Katrina (2005) - 3rd most intense landfalling storm in the US in 100 years [1], Irma (2017) - the strongest observed in the Atlantic in terms of maximum sustained winds since Wilma [2], Wilma (2005) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone recorded in the Western Hemisphere, after Hurricane Patricia in 2015 [3], Patricia (2015) - the second-most intense tropical cyclone on record worldwide [4], Harvey (2017) - tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record[5] - which also caused "500 year floods" (3rd time in 3 years [6]). And that's just a sampling. For a while now, we've gotten a new "hottest month on record" every few months. And we've pretty consistently gotten "hottest year" on record every few years (increasingly every year or every other year). If you go look at Wunderground's calendar view, you can see the historic temperature records for each day - lows and highs. With few exceptions, the records have all been set in the past few decades. With those records have come any number of record breaking heatwaves, many of which have been very deadly. One of the most recent occurred in Pakistan and saw a temperature of 50.2C (122F) in the city of Nawabshah. [7] Seriously, just google the term "record breaking heatwave" and do some reading. You may not have experienced the extreme effects over-exaggerating TV anchors talked about in your childhood, but the world is experiencing climate effects as bad as the models predicted, or worse. Please don't use your personal anecdotal experience to undercut the validity of climate models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irma [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Wilma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Wilma [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houston-is-experiencing-its-third-500-year-flood-in-3-years-how-is-that-possible/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ca3ad04bdbe0 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houst... [7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/02/pakistani-city-breaks-april-record-with-day-of-50c-heat-nawabshah https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/02/pakistani-city...

ska 8y ago

Media representation is very different from the science. I fully believe you heard some fantastical reporting when you were a child, but that is a reflection on the journalism, not the science. Overall the modeling has been quite conservative, and has had good accuracy for such domains.

oldcynic 8y ago

Hmm. Yet snow is becoming rare in UK winters compared to the norm even 30 or 40 years ago, and we've had a succession of warmest November, December, etc on record reports over recent years. What are you expecting? Course if the Gulf Stream gets shut down we'll start getting similar snow amounts to Norway

mrfusion 8y ago

Along a similar vein the rain forests were supposed to have disappeared 10 years ago and I think we were all supposed to suffocate. That’s what I remember hearing as a kid in the 90s. I wonder what went wrong with those predictions? Did we end up taking enough action to stop that?

mkempe 8y ago
Since CO2 is an essential nutrient for the kingdom of plants, the rise in CO2 level has caused land-based vegetation to increase 14% globally over 30 years, and phytoplankton to increase tenfold in the North Atlantic over 50 years.

Clanan 8y ago

Since everyone is arguing their beliefs without evidence, and throwing out random storms and climate events as counter-evidence, here are some actual facts: 1. Recent studies on current climate models show they consistently over-predict carbon impact on global warming (source: Nature, Nov 2017: Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C). The article shows that the previous carbon budget was off by a factor of 4 for the next few years, and always predicted higher temps. In other words, the models over-fit the data and thus lose predictive capabilities. 2. Increase/decrease in drought occurrence is inconclusive (Trenberth et al in Nature, 2013): "Two recent papers looked at the question of whether large-scale drought has been increasing under climate change. A study in Nature by Sheffield et al entitled ‘Little change in global drought over the past 60 years’ was published at almost the same time that ‘Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models’ by Dai appeared in Nature Climate Change (published online in August 2012)." 3. On storms, SREX p. 159: The present assessment regarding observed trends in tropical cyclone activity is essentially identical to the WMO assessment (Knutson et al., 2010): there is low confidence that any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. 4. The greatest two-year cooling event of the last 100 years just occurred in Feb, per GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis data. Global avg temp dropped 0.56 deg C.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Yes, I agree. In the late 70s, it was thought there would be a period of global cooling. Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on the next coming ice age. Climate change is real, but we have to be more careful about politicizing and forecasting what will happen. The 'imminent danger!' storyline has been played out since the turn of the century (nearly 20 years now) with many failed famous predictions. To be taken seriously (and it should be) we must be conservative and accurate in prognostications. Further exaggeration is only doing harm.