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It's hard for me to take climate science seriously when 1. We know of the state of crisis that all other soft sciences are in (p-value abuse, publish or perish

It's hard for me to take climate science seriously when 1. We know of the state of crisis that all other soft sciences are in (p-value abuse, publish or perish, institutional bias, replication crisis) [3] 2. We know that the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (with accompanyingly higher CO2 levels) and life thrived [2] 3. We know that we've been coming out of an ice age since long before the industrial revolution [1] 4. It is nearly impossible to find studies for possible benefits of a warmer earth, because the subject is, frankly, taboo. For example, expansion of arable land from melting permafrost. 5. We are extrapolating a ~hundred year old trend in a system which normally evolves on scales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, and sudden historic shifts are likely beyond the resolution of geologic records (ice cores only get you ~<1ma, older records have substantially lower temporal resolution) Modern climate science is extremely biased, does not allow for skepticism, and is therefore bad science. Of course, none of that precludes erring on the side of caution. But dogma is bad for everyone. 1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_glacial_retreat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_glacial_retreat 2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Cha... 3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328717301969 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632871...

YaxelPerez 8y ago
In response to #2 and #3: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ Also, yes. Earth has been substantially warmer in the past. Earth's atmosphere also had higher oxygen levels in the past[1], but it would be very bad for most life on earth if we suddenly returned to those conditions[2]. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity
- fromthestart 8y ago
  >Exposures, from minutes to a few hours, to partial pressures of oxygen above 1.6 bars (160 kPa)—about eight times normal atmospheric partial pressure—are usually associated with central nervous system oxygen toxicity You need 8 times current oxygen levels. This is a non issue.
vemv 8y ago
Not unreasonable, but what about the mass animal extinction we are currently undergoing? Is that something that routinely happens? And in the precise historical moment of peak human activity?
- fromthestart 8y ago
  Correlation does not equal causation. We have plenty of other ways of harming the environment that can explain mass extinctions, like contamination from pesticides, plastics, antibiotics, etc. Not that bleaching isn't a problem, but CO2 based ocean acidification should not be conflated with climate change.
rland 8y ago
I'm just a layman, not a climate scientist, but I don't think the magnitude of the warming is our big issue. The issue is how quickly it's changing. Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurred over thousands or tens of thousands of years. Ours is happening a couple orders of magnitude faster. We can look back, not at the geological record, but at the biological record. Large, fast shifts like this one cause big extinctions. The biosphere cannot react quickly without huge, unpredictable changes. I'm sure there are conceivable benefits to a warmer earth, but we have to get from here to there without dying and that's what everyone is chiefly concerned about.
- cbkeller 8y ago
  Coming from a geologist, you're exactly right!
  - fromthestart 8y ago
    As a fellow geoscientist, you especially should be aware of the dating limitations of rock and fossil records. We simply do not have the resolution currently to know whether this kind of warming speed is truely unprecedented. Hell - a huge part of petroleum exploration is understanding conditions of the surface during deposition of sediment. We're lucky to get 10Ma uncertainty for 100Ma old formations. I've witnessed firsthand the degree of non scientific handwaving that plagues petroleum geoscience - in both geology and geophysics; and this is in a practical, applied field, where there is some degree of [loose] validation in the form of exploration success/failure. In an unfalsifiable field like climate science, where "validation" consists of retroactively adjusting models with hundreds of variables that can quite literally be tweaked to show almost any outcome? It is simply irrational to not be at least somewhat skeptical.
    - cbkeller 8y ago
      > We're lucky to get 10Ma uncertainty for 100Ma old formations. Maybe a few decades ago. Ironically, much of my background is in U-Pb CA-ID-TIMS geochronology. The current state of the art in my community is between 0.05 and 0.01 % two-sigma relative, i.e. 10 to 50 ka at 100 Ma. To give one example, the chronology of the P-T extinction (the big one) is now constrained to the decamillenial level even though it we're talking about an extinction 252 million years ago [1]. Of course, 50,000 years is still quite long compared to modern anthropogenic effects, but the timescale bias of the geologic record is neither poorly known nor taboo (there are well cited papers about this exact problem [2]). I should probably also reiterate that many records of interest to climate science are (1) much younger, so absolute precision is much higher than at 252 Ma and (2) may come with a built-in relative chronometer with annual resolution, as in ice cores, tree rings, varves, and some speleothems. Imputing incompetence or bad faith to the entire field of climate science is not productive. While I'm not a climate scientist myself, I know many of them, and find them to be both honest and competent. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3316.short http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3316.short [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227093/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227093/
rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
1. Do you discard all sciences then? 2. Were there mammals living on Earth at these times? 3. Did temperatures rise this fast after the previous ice ages? If so, how did the most complex organisms adapt? Did they survive? 4. Is global warming taboo enough for the fossil fuel industries to look for benefits in all directions? 5. Maybe we're studying the effect of climate change on a shorter time period because the current trend is much faster than previous shifts?
- fromthestart 8y ago
  1. No, but one must be aware of limitations before making decisions 2. Yes, of course, and thriving, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous 3. One of my points is that because of limitations of time resolution of our current data sources, we really don't know. 4. I'm not sure what you mean 5. Again, we don't know. More importantly to this point, you're looking at less than <.001% of time series data and treating it as a trend. This could very easily be a transient spike.
ip26 8y ago
2. We know that the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (with accompanyingly higher CO2 levels) and life thrived Nobody is worried that all life on Earth will end for good. We're worried it's going to be a pretty miserable place for humans to live, and that it will take a couple million years for diversity to return. Life can handle +10F (silver bullet ants anyone?), but humans have a temperature limit.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
It's hard for me to take your comment seriously when you're a layman dismissing the findings of thousands of highly trained scientists. The scary reality is that views like yours are not uncommon amongst the Fox News crowd, meanwhile IF you are wrong and the 1000's of climate experts are correct, we are headed for a global catastrophe. So, there is really very little benefit to your viewpoint, and very little from qualified individuals to support its skepticism.

YaxelPerez 8y ago

In response to #2 and #3: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ Also, yes. Earth has been substantially warmer in the past. Earth's atmosphere also had higher oxygen levels in the past[1], but it would be very bad for most life on earth if we suddenly returned to those conditions[2]. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity

fromthestart 8y ago
>Exposures, from minutes to a few hours, to partial pressures of oxygen above 1.6 bars (160 kPa)—about eight times normal atmospheric partial pressure—are usually associated with central nervous system oxygen toxicity You need 8 times current oxygen levels. This is a non issue.

vemv 8y ago

Not unreasonable, but what about the mass animal extinction we are currently undergoing? Is that something that routinely happens? And in the precise historical moment of peak human activity?

fromthestart 8y ago
Correlation does not equal causation. We have plenty of other ways of harming the environment that can explain mass extinctions, like contamination from pesticides, plastics, antibiotics, etc. Not that bleaching isn't a problem, but CO2 based ocean acidification should not be conflated with climate change.

rland 8y ago

I'm just a layman, not a climate scientist, but I don't think the magnitude of the warming is our big issue. The issue is how quickly it's changing. Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurred over thousands or tens of thousands of years. Ours is happening a couple orders of magnitude faster. We can look back, not at the geological record, but at the biological record. Large, fast shifts like this one cause big extinctions. The biosphere cannot react quickly without huge, unpredictable changes. I'm sure there are conceivable benefits to a warmer earth, but we have to get from here to there without dying and that's what everyone is chiefly concerned about.

cbkeller 8y ago
Coming from a geologist, you're exactly right!
- fromthestart 8y ago
  As a fellow geoscientist, you especially should be aware of the dating limitations of rock and fossil records. We simply do not have the resolution currently to know whether this kind of warming speed is truely unprecedented. Hell - a huge part of petroleum exploration is understanding conditions of the surface during deposition of sediment. We're lucky to get 10Ma uncertainty for 100Ma old formations. I've witnessed firsthand the degree of non scientific handwaving that plagues petroleum geoscience - in both geology and geophysics; and this is in a practical, applied field, where there is some degree of [loose] validation in the form of exploration success/failure. In an unfalsifiable field like climate science, where "validation" consists of retroactively adjusting models with hundreds of variables that can quite literally be tweaked to show almost any outcome? It is simply irrational to not be at least somewhat skeptical.
  - cbkeller 8y ago
    > We're lucky to get 10Ma uncertainty for 100Ma old formations. Maybe a few decades ago. Ironically, much of my background is in U-Pb CA-ID-TIMS geochronology. The current state of the art in my community is between 0.05 and 0.01 % two-sigma relative, i.e. 10 to 50 ka at 100 Ma. To give one example, the chronology of the P-T extinction (the big one) is now constrained to the decamillenial level even though it we're talking about an extinction 252 million years ago [1]. Of course, 50,000 years is still quite long compared to modern anthropogenic effects, but the timescale bias of the geologic record is neither poorly known nor taboo (there are well cited papers about this exact problem [2]). I should probably also reiterate that many records of interest to climate science are (1) much younger, so absolute precision is much higher than at 252 Ma and (2) may come with a built-in relative chronometer with annual resolution, as in ice cores, tree rings, varves, and some speleothems. Imputing incompetence or bad faith to the entire field of climate science is not productive. While I'm not a climate scientist myself, I know many of them, and find them to be both honest and competent. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3316.short http://www.pnas.org/content/111/9/3316.short [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227093/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227093/

rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago

1. Do you discard all sciences then? 2. Were there mammals living on Earth at these times? 3. Did temperatures rise this fast after the previous ice ages? If so, how did the most complex organisms adapt? Did they survive? 4. Is global warming taboo enough for the fossil fuel industries to look for benefits in all directions? 5. Maybe we're studying the effect of climate change on a shorter time period because the current trend is much faster than previous shifts?

fromthestart 8y ago
1. No, but one must be aware of limitations before making decisions 2. Yes, of course, and thriving, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous 3. One of my points is that because of limitations of time resolution of our current data sources, we really don't know. 4. I'm not sure what you mean 5. Again, we don't know. More importantly to this point, you're looking at less than <.001% of time series data and treating it as a trend. This could very easily be a transient spike.

ip26 8y ago

2. We know that the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (with accompanyingly higher CO2 levels) and life thrived Nobody is worried that all life on Earth will end for good. We're worried it's going to be a pretty miserable place for humans to live, and that it will take a couple million years for diversity to return. Life can handle +10F (silver bullet ants anyone?), but humans have a temperature limit.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

It's hard for me to take your comment seriously when you're a layman dismissing the findings of thousands of highly trained scientists. The scary reality is that views like yours are not uncommon amongst the Fox News crowd, meanwhile IF you are wrong and the 1000's of climate experts are correct, we are headed for a global catastrophe. So, there is really very little benefit to your viewpoint, and very little from qualified individuals to support its skepticism.