13 ms·

Extreme climate change has arrived in America

155 points by moltensodium 7y ago

Arrezz 7y ago
I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is mind-boggling, I guess the profit motives were too strong. I wonder how they rationalized it to themselves, if we don't do it then someone else will?
- fromthestart 7y ago
  >I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. I'll keep posting about it untill this hysteria dies, though I fear that given social pressures regarding anything representing "denial" will keep it alive indefinitely. No one knew about an incoming crisis in the 80s. People were aware about the possibility of climate change in the 80s. It took 30 years of data collection, research, and computational modeling on increasingly modern hardware, which allows for exponentially larger and more precise models, before we had amassed enough evidence in a totally model driven field to conclude that we may be terraforming on the scale of 100 years.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    The IPCC was formed in 1988 and published their first report two years later where they already concluded that anthropogenic climate change is happening. I think it's fair to say that scientists knew about this by the late eighties and probably earlier. The confidence intervals have been getting ever smaller since then, but the effect was already known.
  - vidanay 7y ago
    Yeah, it's like a 12 year old kid taking a first drag off a cigarette in 1938 and exclaiming "That shit will kill you" as he hacks and coughs. Not the same thing as factual scientific evidence.
  - mturmon 7y ago
    Your wording is somewhat oblique ("this hysteria"), and you are making distinctions that are not clear ("no one knew" vs. "people were aware of the possibility"; "terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Let's correct two of these. Of course there are empirical observations related to climate. There is a definition of 54 "essential climate variables" (ECVs), see [1]. One of these is greenhouse gases [2]. At the bottom of the link, you can see observing programs for CO2 and CH4, both in situ and satellite. These are well-measured variables, with well-characterized error bars, and models are tested against these observations. For instance, the ~400 ppm CO2 ECV is measured to within 1ppm quite regularly and has been for many years. This is how we improve the models. The same kind of monitoring/model-improvement feedback loop is in place for almost all of the ECVs, including clouds and sea surface properties like temperature and salinity. Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the problem. See [4], from 1983. [1] https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables [2] https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/s3fs-public/ghg_ecv_factsheet_201905.pdf?TJO3Z20j79hzWgwL4sT.qEhqWA3rf3Dz https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/... [3] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html [4] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of-the-carbon-dioxide-assessment-committee https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of...
    - fromthestart 7y ago
      >terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), Not true, please don't put words in my mouth. I use the term terraforming to emphasize the magnitude of the claim. We are fundamentally changing the properties of an entire planetary atmosphere, inadvertently. >and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Also not true. The point is that climate science by nature cannot be experimental. We can only make predictions and then proof amounts to measuring how well decades of measurements line up with predictions/models. >Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. Again, given the non experimental nature of climate science, this was a massive claim which requires decades of data collection and modeling to verify before committing to sweeping social and economic policy reform which has costs of its own. People underestimate the fact that climate change is one of the most radical ideas ever proposed by the modern scientific establishment, in terms of the scale of the changes, the disastrous predicted consequences, and the scale of societal change required for mitigation. We're talking about a potential irreversible, runaway global extinction accidentally triggered by humans 100-1000+ times faster than any measured natural rate. Due diligence, in a non experimental field, limited by 80s modeling hardware, took time. Meanwhile we all benefited from the fossil fuels we (and our parents) burned.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    I think "terraforming" means "changing planetary climate to be more like Earth climate". We are doing something rather opposite. You can use "geoengineering" if you want a sarcastic term similar to how rocket people use "rapid unplanned disassembly" instead of "crash".
  - specialist 7y ago
    Some of us were paying attention. -- My 4th grade teacher (1978) was brain washing us into being tree huggers. Conserve water while brushing our teeth was "magic". Turn down the heat. Recycle. Etc. I recall hippie flavored propaganda in the school library asking if we wanted Earth to become a Red Planet (industrial) a Green Planet (farming) or Blue Planet (natural ecosystems), or some combination. My (much older) cousin was a physicist studying submarine acoustics. He's always known, patiently explained the whatnots to us younger skeptics. I worked at a civil engineering firm while still in high school (1980s). All the adults seemed to know what was happening, even if we didn't yet know all the causes. I vividly remember my boss (from Canada) telling me his childhood neighborhood lake was no longer safe to play hockey on. I volunteered thru the 1990s at an org trying to save the PNW salmon. The staff scientists knew our local snow packs were shrinking. (Need the melt for salmon runs.) Now our mountains are bare most of the year, of course. Terrifying. Maybe because I read a lot of sci-fi, I've always "known". Most memorable to me have been John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. But of course, post-apocalyptic is a popular storyline, so there have been zillions others. -- PS, for the down voter(s), one of the minor plot lines from the TV show Dallas was Bobby Ewing's renewable energy efforts, in opposition to older brother JR Ewing's doubling down on carbon. In debating with Bobby in front of Daddy Ewing, JR's money quote was "We've been running out of oil since the first oil well." So, ya, climate change was part of the (most) popular culture too.
    - okmokmz 7y ago
      This is a weird comment... am I understanding right that you do believe in climate change and believe that people were aware in the 1980's? The first couple lines where you talk about a teacher "brain washing" you into "tree huggers" and seeing "hippie flavored propaganda" comes off a lot like how ignorant, far-right climate change deniers sound. However, towards the end it sounds like you are saying that you knew about global warming. Care to clarify?
      - specialist 7y ago
        I've long wondered how and why I became a tree hugger. Despite the dominant culture. It wasn't from my family, church, peers, media. Growing up, my father just poured used motor oil into the sewer (ffs). My best guess is that one teacher slyly taught environmentalism on the down low. It certainly wasn't part of the curriculum. And some how her message stuck with me. Given my own experience, and my readings about "Language is a virus", Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, memetics, Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation, Luntz's Words of Power, etc: It's mostly a waste of time and effort and goodwill trying to persuade any body of anything. It's better to focus imprinting kids with the values and ideals they'll need to better compete in the future. For better or for worse. Mostly for worse.
  - akuchling 7y ago
    People often don't realize how old the science behind climate change is. There's an excellent discussion at https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ ; quoting from that paragraph: "Returning to old records, in 1986 the group produced the first truly solid and comprehensive global analysis of average surface temperatures, including the vast ocean regions, which most earlier studies had neglected. They confirmed that there had been considerable warming from the late 19th century up to 1940, followed by some regional cooling in the Northern Hemisphere. Global conditions had been roughly level until the mid 1970s. Then the warming had resumed with a vengeance. The warmest three years in the entire 134-year record had all occurred in the 1980s."
- jackstraw14 7y ago
  Corporations like Exxon aren't rational, they only exist to make more money, so that's what they did.
  - donclark 7y ago
    Do publicly traded corporations have different interests than actual human beings? Is there main concern only money/profits? If not, what is it?
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      Humans have different interests from other human beings. Take a wide enough sampling of humanity (i.e. not people who already know each other) and you'll find a wide variety of divergent interests. But the prime directive of any entity - whether it's a living being, or abstract idea like a corporation or nation state - is to continue existing. After all, every entity that failed in this is no longer with us. Society moving away from oil is an existential threat to ExxonMobil-the-corporation. Climate change is only an existential threat to a large fraction of humanity, and a largely disjoint one from individual decision-makers at Exxon. So their incentives are somewhat misaligned here.
      - Retric 7y ago
        > to continue existing That seems obvious, but suicide and extreme risk taking demonstrates many other things are considered more important. In the corporate world banks fail all the time because the people running them don’t care about failure nearly as much as their next bonus. This is also why pensions and other long term liability’s are generally under funded.
        nostrademons 7y ago
        You can explain both of those by moving up a level from individuals to systems. Suicide is a consequence of shame. Human beings have evolved an emotional mechanism that lets them function as groups; this mechanism functions by giving each individual an unconscious sense of whether they "measure up" to the standards of the group around them. One consequence of that is that some fraction of individuals won't, oftentimes with tragic results for the individual. But groups that have this mechanism killed or absorbed all individuals that don't (well, not quite - psychopathy is the absence of shame, and it's usually maladaptive but some high-functioning psychopaths can blend in among normal society), and so the world we live in includes suicide. Banks serve financial markets. It's okay for individual banks to fail as long as the market as a whole continues to function; in fact, proper functioning of the market requires some banks to fail. It's the same as ant colonies or human microbiomes. When you step on an individual ant, the colony doesn't care, because the unit of survival is the colony. When you crap out intestinal bacteria, you don't shed a tear, because the unit of survival is the individual human and not the bacteria within them. In fact, the perspective with which you look at the world says a lot about the degree of interaction within the system. We think of a human as an individual entity; it took us a long time to think of a cell as an individual entity; and unless you're a dedicated biologist you probably don't think of a mitochondria as its own entity, despite them being independent bacteria at one time. You could look at global capitalism as being one super-organism, much like an ant colony, and individual humans are, well, workers. Capitalism doesn't care if it chews up and spits out human lives, because there will always be more of them. Its prime directive is to sustain capitalism itself. (Note also that global capitalism doesn't care if ExxonMobile lives or dies, and it's highly likely that it'll die. It'll just get replaced by some solar energy company. This conflict between levels goes all the way up the hierarchy - the interests of your cells are not necessarily aligned with yours, your interests are not necessarily aligned with your employer, your employer is not necessarily aligned with the market.)
- philipov 7y ago
  The extrapolation of I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone is "By the time it's a problem, we'll be dead."
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  They did act. IIRC they started sponsoring anti climate change material producing organizations and supporting its dissemination. A wildly succesful project that has probably paid itself back with a large factor.
  - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
    They also (as i read) started building their ocean based drilling platforms a little bit taller to account for sea-level rise.
    - kleton 7y ago
      Oil rigs float.
      - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
        some are floating some are actually platforms with legs that touch the ground. furthermore, i was wrong to write "drilling" platforms... as those are only used during the field's construction, until the wells are in place.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I think a good strategy is to sponsor anti climate change activities to keep current profits flowing while at the same silently investing in businesses and tech that will do well in the world climate change creates. I think that's what they are doing.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      I mean... yea, it's a good strategy for them it isn't a good strategy for everyone else though.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        That’s usually not a concern.
- ekr 7y ago
  I still find it mind-boggling how some people can be so surprised by the fact that people in general act in their own interest. A normal, healthy human being is exclusively concerned by its own well-being and that of its immediate family. To the extent that we witness altruistic behavior, it is executed for signalling purposes (this is the reason why there's virtually no completely anonymous charity, see "The elephant in the brain"). There is a part of the brain that is responsible for integrating events into a continuous narrative. That part of the brain is why we perceive ourselves as an integral being and not a set of parts, but that part is also severely biased in healthy humans, biased to paint ourselves as kinder, more altruistic, more intelligent, while also rewriting the motivation we cite for our past actions, so as to put ourselves in the best possible light. But no, there's nothing special about those Exxon researches, that's just normal human behavior. And to go further, acting against ones own interest requires going over a strong emotion. The body let's you know that you shouldn't be doing something through a gut feeling. Repeatedly ignoring or repressing those emotions is not healthy for the nervous system, and much has been written on this subject. LE: And regarding claims that stopping global warming was in their own interest back in the 1980s, there's the hyperbolic discounting effect (among other things).
  - komali2 7y ago
    This implies one needs to act against one's interests to take action on climate change. Lack of imagination on Exxon's part could explain this as well. They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations.
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      > They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations. i.e., acting against their own interests. Spending the last 40 years using their strength against environmental research meant that the people who in 1980 owned and managed Exxon extracted great benefit to themselves (at the cost of others) for the rest of their lives (either they're already dead, or will be before any serious consequences may hurt them); doing what you propose would have benefitted the world but greatly hurt their own interests.
- lacker 7y ago
  What would you have done about it, if you were the CEO of Exxon in 1982?
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Why was the CEO of Exxon allowed to do this in 1982? And why didn't the government fund science to figure this out first?
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      The government knew about it, as did most of the population. Al Gore sponsored the first congressional hearings on climate change in 1976, and I remember putting on a play about environmental issues (including global warming) in 4th grade (1990). It's very difficult to rally people around a problem until they see tangible evidence of it in their own lives. Global warming was an abstraction in the 80s; we knew it was happening, we knew it would have a big impact, but we were too busy trying not to get nuked by the Soviets (or rather, trying to make them think we were gonna nuke them so they bankrupted themselves). In a democracy you can't get political support for policies until a majority of people agree with you. When it comes to giant systems like the environment, that's too late. There are probably a number of other problems that can see right now that we are doing nothing about - trust pollution (where you have no idea what's true anymore), mass migration (which I guess we're doing something about, but that "something" is putting kids in cages), erosion of the rule of law, potential infectious diseases, a looming demographic crisis, etc. But all of these are too big to wrap our head around a solution until they become a crisis - we're too busy dealing with climate change - and so they'll just blow up society and we'll be left to pick up the pieces.
    - inscionent 7y ago
      He was the CEO of Exxon. He had economic power. He used it. Why would the government bother? The experts from the companies who helped get them elected told them it wasn't a problem. > In 1981, he was appointed to President Ronald Reagan's National Productivity Advisory Committee and later served on the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.[6] He served as Chairman of The Business Council in 1983 and 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin
- aczerepinski 7y ago
  Exxon not taking it seriously in the 80s seems less extreme than politicians denying it in 2019 when the physical evidence is all around us.
- justin66 7y ago
  > The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is mind-boggling, I guess the profit motives were too strong. You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. We were still fighting about whether cigarette smoke causes cancer (correlation is not causation!) and we had a president who claimed that trees pollute the environment more than cars do (who went on to be reelected). Politically influential Christian public figures rationalized how the deadly sin of greed should be considered a virtue while also blathering about how HIV was a manifestation of God's wrath toward homosexuals. And everyone kind of assumed our odds of surviving the cold war weren't great anyway, so you want to worry about something about temperature increasing, and also didn't you say there was going to be an ice age or something, blah blah blah? It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer given the level of stupidity we were operating at. A person aware of current events and capable of making analogies might question how much progress we've truly made, but that's a separate topic.
  - mncharity 7y ago
    > You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. Circa 1982? Some months ago, the NYTimes did a story on Coke/Pepse/Nestle sugar drink/food causing simultaneous systemic obesity and malnutrition in Central/South America. Company leadership was quoted as expressing surprise at this "unexpected" impact. TPP had ISDS provisions to permit companies to sue governments to recover profits lost to health policies. And so it goes. Today.
  - coffeecat 7y ago
    I have a non-rigorous pet theory that the combined effects of lead plumbing and leaded gasoline produced generations of Americans, from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, whose population-wide intelligence levels were adversely affected by lead exposure.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    >It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer I'm not sure you can say that we ceased destruction of the Ozone layer. Certainly slowed, and in some cases ozone is increasing but not universally. Ozone levels in the upper levels have been slowly increasing, but the lower levels are still being depleted and there is evidence of an increase of short-lived ozone depleting substances. https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/ https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/
- inscionent 7y ago
  It isn't mind boggling. It is contemptuous and greedy but exactly in line with keeping and maintaining economic power. This isn't about the environment.
patientplatypus 7y ago
https://www.wsj.com/articles/usda-report-sees-dire-climate-change-impact-on-u-s-crops-11563917840 https://www.wsj.com/articles/usda-report-sees-dire-climate-c... Unchecked climate change could mean that the weather conditions hurting farmers this year will become increasingly common and result in higher costs for the federal government, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. The report, issued by the USDA’s Economic Research Service, found that if greenhouse gases are allowed to continue to increase, U.S. production of corn and soybeans—which are more susceptible to extreme heat during growing season—could decline as much as 80% in the next 60 years. This is a problem. The US has some of the most fertile growing regions in the world and if we stop exporting cheap grain there will be global hunger and strife. Shits about to get real yo.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Not sure why you seem to be greyed: https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
  - patientplatypus 7y ago
    TBH I've been posting stuff warning about climate change and environmental damage. I think there are corporate propagandists on the site that are down voting this information as a paid propaganda campaign. He who controls the Spice controls the Universe.
effnorwood 7y ago
It hasn’t.
ccbthr77673 7y ago
What I find quite interesting is that there are numerous high-profile politicians and media figures, along with vast numbers of trolls, who deny that climate change exists, and block meaningful action to control it. At what point do we learn the lesson that’s deeply embedded in our collective consciousness (Noah’s Ark, the ant and the grasshopper) and decide that modern states are not capable of dealing with the problem, assuming that climate change is going to result in serious disruption, and look to make contingency plans for ourselves and our families?
- grecy 7y ago
  As a society we need to make the decision to take the microphone away from people who are just plain wrong or stupid. If we just ignore them, they can't do any harm. Yes, even when it's a celebrity or elected official, we should just utterly ignore them. Whenever I hear about a celebrity breakup like it's actual news I shudder.
  - User23 7y ago
    As a society we are split roughly 50/50 on who is stupid and wrong, so this really just means “silence those who disagree with me.” Anecdotally, the hn community does have an obvious majority on most issues, including this one, but is still good about allowing dissenting opinions to be heard, because it is necessary for the mission of satisfying intellectual curiosity.
    - FussyZeus 7y ago
      If you don't understand or believe climate science at this point, it can no longer be written off as being uninformed. You are purposefully remaining ignorant and should be deemed unqualified to hold public office. There has to come a point where a consensus is so solid that continuing to play devils advocate is a disqualifying act. We know the planet is changing, and we know we are doing it. This is no longer a subject to be debated, end of.
    - grecy 7y ago
      At this point I think it's well understood that >90% of scientists and experts agree that climate change is a real thing and going to be a severe problem. It's not about "Those who disagree with me" it's "Those who disagree with widely accepted facts." and are causing real harm by doing so.
mcfunk 7y ago
This average increase mark is obviously very useful and important, but there's another dimension to add on to that when it comes to temperature trends. In the Twin Cities, for instance, the altered jet stream has greatly increased both colder-than-usual and hotter-than-usual patterns that stick around for longer. So although our average increase looks low, for instance this summer espeially we are having unusually hot streaks followed by unusually cold streaks (and the winters have been very bad over the past several years, with two 'polar vortex' years due to arctic air masses displacing on us, which is greatly impacted by climate change and arctic warming). TL;DR I'd be very interested to look at the data shifts in temperature more deeply and see which areas are impacted by both hotter AND colder weather, which wouldn't show up in an examination of averages.
- jihadjihad 7y ago
  I think the key concept is variance -- the mean might change a little but if the variance changes a lot, there will be "extreme" events with more regularity.
- cknoxrun 7y ago
  I agree, in my city (Edmonton), the weather forecast even 1 day in advance has effectively become useless this summer. It has been record breaking in terms of the amount/days of rain, and I can say with confidence on at least half of those days rain was not in the forecast. The system has become completely unstable to the point where weather models no longer seem to be able to output accurate results.
specialist 7y ago
I like that this article states the warming has been a long time coming. Filed under believe but cannot prove: Agriculture interrupted the background warming & cooling cycle. If humanity is to survive climate crisis, we'll need to actively manage the entire carbon cycle. aka Garden Earth.
- shanxS 7y ago
  > we'll need to actively manage the entire carbon cycle. aka Garden Earth. This I agree with. In all this turmoil and disappointment that we screwed up our ecosystem, regardless of whoever is at fault, it's about time we step up to evolve into a specie which can control their home planet's climate to a large extent. I may be day dreaming but I see controlling climate as next progression in our evolution. And when I say "controlling climate", I don't mean it at expense of arresting development or hoping that people will just stop indulging themselves etc.
- DanTheManPR 7y ago
  I agree with this. We have become such a significant geophysical force that we will have to take a more active role in managing the resource and energy currents of the biosphere. Climate change is a result of a failure to do just that.
programmertote 7y ago
Not just in America, but in SE Asia as well. My gf grew up in one of the largest cities on coastal area in our home country in SE Asia. Her city got flooded every year for third year in a row now whereas it wasn't the case before then. This year is the hardest one among three; the water rises up to chest level and lives were lost. I worry that poor countries like my home country, which has not much resource to migrate people in mass, will face serious issues in the near future. Having said that, I also believe in the resilience of the people there. They have been through military dictatorship and whatnot, so I have faith that they will survive albeit with huge cost of lives and property... Climate change will disturb world's political and economic systems, and I hope (and kind of believe) that the humanity can survive through this ordeal. In my honest opinion, it's too late to stop climate change, and the best we can do is to do our individual parts to mitigate the effects and come up with ways to cope with it the best we can.
- colmvp 7y ago
  Yeah it's been a while since I've read up about the growing number of refugees but IIRC climate change has the potential to dramatically increase the amount of migration to countries which won't have enough resources to properly with the influx of people and put even more stress on local resources (i.e. water, food).
  - phry 7y ago
    the far-right in Europe is resurgent largely on the back of anti-migrant racism and hysteria, and that's with a crisis involving 5-6 million people. now imagine things with 25 million people, or more, and not just focused in Europe. it's going to be very bad.
- kaybe 7y ago
  > In my honest opinion, it's too late to stop climate change, .. Climate change is not a binary thing, it's a process. We absolutely still have the opportunity to stop it from getting much much worse. So let's not give up and fight on that front as well!
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
444bradly 7y ago
Anthropogenic warming hypothesis states: 1) Human activities have a net warming effect 2) that effect is large I have read 2007 IPPC report and evidence of the above two claims is burried under mountains of fear mongering and dire predictions about the consequences of the claims being correct. The actual evidence is barely addressed and comes down to trusting a handful of computer models that only a few dozen people understand. Recent warming amount and rate is not unusual for the earth's recent pre-human past. When you add to this the myriad of political causes that have latched on to anthropogenic hypothesis being true, its pretty reasonable that informed individual is sketical. Especially with authoritarians calling for violence and censorship against"climate deniers".
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  It's interesting that you chose a report more than a decade out of date rather than one of the more recent reports they have published.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Well, he kind of had to in order to make his point. As long as I’ve been alive (four and a half decades), they’ve been insisting that we have “only a decade years to save the planet” - so going back to a report from 10 years ago and comparing their 10-year-predictions against right now is a good way to figure out how concerned you should about their current 10-year-predictions.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      "Save the world" has shifted goal posts considerably during this time.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I feel the same way - I’m somewhat skeptical partly because it’s good to be skeptical of most things, especially something that you can’t really see, but mostly because when I ask the climate change people what I should do in order to combat climate change, their first and only answer tends to be “vote democrat and never vote republican!” That being said, I still mostly do what (I think) the climate change people say I ought to do such as recycle, prefer energy efficient alternatives, and try to walk when I can. To the extent it doesn’t hurt us, we all might as well be “environmentally conscious” even if it turns out we didn’t actually have to be.
_hardwaregeek 7y ago
It's insane how many intelligent, thoughtful people I've met who still parrot the line that "oh our children will be screwed". Or even worse, they make some random allusion to scientific progress or God and claim it will all be okay. No. Science will not save us. God will not save us. It will not be okay. And unless you're currently on your deathbed, you will feel the effects of climate change. You will be fucked. I suspect only drastic, world wide, almost revolutionary political change could effectively halt the massive carbon generating machine that is human industry. Except the problem with massive revolutions is that they tend to cause conflict, which tends to increase emissions (tanks don't exactly run on solar). Man, I'm pretty damn close to joining a doomsday cult.
- deadmetheny 7y ago
  Except it will be ok. Things will change, but things always change. If we can turn things back and reign in the major contributors to warming, great, but we can't change the past, and all of the doom and gloom kvetching everyone loves to do here does nobody any good.
- clarkmoody 7y ago
  You might try reading channels that are more optimistic about human ingenuity and place less faith in the political process. Here's an alternative approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism
  - _hardwaregeek 7y ago
    Has there been any precedence of this? I know the US and China both have/had pretty terrible pollution without regulation. Has there been any good example of a country that has successfully implemented free market environmentalism? Because at a cursory glance it appears to be the same platitudinous "the market will resolve everything". I can't accept that when the future of the human race is at stake.
  - inscionent 7y ago
    Can one LOL harder at this idea? > Free-market environmentalists therefore argue that the best way to protect the environment is to clarify and protect property rights. This allows parties to negotiate improvements in environmental quality. I would not hold my breath waiting for ExxonMobil, the Saudi Royal family, or any other powerful entity to give up property rights. This outcome is worse for them than turning the planet into slag. > Owners face a strong incentive to take care of and protect their property. They must decide how much to use today and how much to use tomorrow. Everybody is trying to grow value. Corporate value and share price is based on their anticipated future profits. Owners with the possibility of transferring their property, either to an heir or through sale want their property to grow in value. Property rights encourage conservation and defend resources against depletion, since there is a strong incentive to maximize the value of the resource for the future. Just like a CEO would never risk the long term sustainability of the company for fat short term bonus. /s If humans were rational and were maximizing for future value we wouldn't be in this position.
mattferderer 7y ago
One challenge is that those in the Midwest seem to welcome the idea of "global warming" & several Midwestern states seem to be key to winning the presidential election.* I think that is a very hard marketing battle to win since the idea of climate change to many people just means warmer temperatures. I think a lot of people in colder climates feel they have little to lose. The actual massive scale effect is extremely difficult to comprehend, even after watching excellent documentaries. I think it is only something most voting citizens will care about when it effects them personally & by then it would be far to late. * Based on living in the Midwest - Edit - Giving this more thought I wonder if these articles need to be less about temperature changes & reflect more about increases of extreme weather & effects on farms.
- wott 7y ago
  Isn't the most of the Midwest already in normal times quite hot in the summer? I mean, in my European eyes looking at weather stations reports and temperatures maps, 95% of the US land is too hot in the summer, and the Midwest climate is very continental, i.e. cold winters but hot summers too. But yes, people have been indoctrinated in associating warmth and heat with "good". I trace it back to the post-WW2 era, with the development of paid holidays and tourism in the sun. Before that, the part of population who could afford holidays would either go to spa resorts in the mountains or to the North Atlantic shores; i.e. they would go to places which were cooler than the places they usually lived, not to places that are hotter than those places where they lived which are already hot in in summertime. From the 60's to the 80's, sun was promoted as an extremely positive value. The more sun you could get, the healthier you would be. You'd have to get more and more tanned. Previously, people protected themselves from the sun. Hat, scarfs, long sleeves were worn. Shades were looked after, and large trees were planted along the roads and most squares. Houses (also for practical reasons) had smaller windows, unlike the fad of large window bays which make the room behind unbearable as soon as the sun shows up. There has been lately a little bit of back-pedalling on a few of those aspects, but the main principle ("sun, heat, and light are good for you") has not changed much and remain quite deeply ingrained in most people. I find it infuriating that in 2019, TV and weather forecast anchors still always present long streaks of hot, dry and cloudless days as a "beautiful weather" for which we should rejoice. It doesn't matter if the main news theme of the previous days has been climate change/warming, or the drought hitting farmers, nope, 24 h later they use the same wording again. I mean, they could finish their sentence with "a beautiful weather for those who fancy this or that activity", that would be fine, but they never do: in their mind it is must be good and welcome for everyone. At the same time, as a fair scale gardener I see half of my crops die from the drought or the heatwave, because it has rained only once in 8 weeks, despite the fact that I am supposed to live in one of the chamber pots[1] of my country... :-( I think it indicates a huge cultural inertia, even though this culture was only (IMO) recently born, in the second half of the XXth century. Despite the awareness which has been rising in the last 15 years, it hasn't yet translated into the common mental model. -------- [1]: not sure how well it translates in English: a place where it rains very often.
jbay808 7y ago
While watching the HBO Chernobyl dramatization, I was struck by the Soviet government's contradictory response of publicly denying the problem existed and minimizing its extent, while at the same time giving the science team almost carte blanche authority to requisition resources to solve the problem. 5000 tons of boron? Helicopters are on their way. The entire country's supply of liquid nitrogen? It's yours. Robots? If they'll help, sure. The show made a big deal about how communist secrecy and denial obstructed the solution, made the problem worse, and even allowed it to happen in the first place. "A nuclear disaster cannot occur in the Soviet Union". But when I think about how we're reacting to climate change, it really seems like we're pretending the problem doesn't exist the same way they did, but without the corresponding succeed-at-all-costs extreme problem solving.
danans 7y ago
I recently learned on a trip to the United Kingdom that former hop-growing areas of the Southern UK have been purchased by French winemakers to grow grapes, because global warming has made that region amenable to it [1], while regions in France previously associated with viniculture are finding it increasingly difficult to grow traditional wine grape varieties [2] 1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/english-sparkling-wine-will-better-champagne-climate-warms-says/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/english-sparklin... 2. https://www.france24.com/en/20180914-down-earth-climate-change-bordeaux-wine-future-merlot-grape-variety-winegrowers https://www.france24.com/en/20180914-down-earth-climate-chan...
- Balgair 7y ago
  I've family in Napa, Ca. One of the high schools is literally called Vintage High and their mascot is the Crushers, after grape crushing machines [0]. Winemaking is as a part of Napa as the soil and air. Wineries are moving up into Oregon and Washington now, following the climate [1]. It takes ~7 years for the grapes to get to a point where you can make wine out of them, hence moving up there now and planting. This climate crisis is going to ruin Napa and already kinda is. ~81% of the grapes can't manage in the heat by 2080 [2], that's 4 of every 5 vines just dying in the sun. Meanwhile, the Napa Valley Vinters Association's head is firmly in the sand [3] and remains steadfastly confused that climate is weather. [0] https://vhs-nvusd-ca.schoolloop.com/ https://vhs-nvusd-ca.schoolloop.com/ [1] https://apnews.com/2a2da3558a1c47f6a2aeec8d409e47c2 https://apnews.com/2a2da3558a1c47f6a2aeec8d409e47c2 [2] https://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/napa-valley-ca-usa.html https://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/napa-... [3] https://napavintners.com/about/climate_change.asp https://napavintners.com/about/climate_change.asp
netwanderer3 7y ago
The physical size of the Earth will never increase, yet human's ability to multiply ourselves is infinite in theory. Something gotta give. Going by evolutionary theory, that means the more our total population increases the smaller average human body size must shrink, so we would consume less input resources and produce less waste individually. Same reason why giant dinosaurs went extinct yet little cockroaches survived. Those T-Rex'es required massive calories consumption to sustain themselves, yet there was no longer enough resources in the environment to fuel them. The problem is for any of those biological changes to take place and for human to evolve (assuming the evolutionary theory is true), that process will be a slow and gradual one, likely to take hundred thousands or even millions of years. Climate change certainly doesn't operate within even a remotely similar time frame. Once it hits, resources will become scarce so in the worst case if we cannot stop climate change, the only possible solution is to practice reducing average consumption level to minimum, or to forecast optimal numbers of the world's total population that can still be accommodated by the Earth at each level of damage produced by climate change, then find a way to relentlessly control that number to keep it within limit. I sincerely hope we will never have to come to that scenario as countries which own nuclear power will possess massive advantages over others.
- scott_s 7y ago
  Humans are not predicted to grow infinitely. As areas industrialize, more people have less children. Projections I have read predict we will level off at about 12 billion people by 2100. But the areas of the world now with less population growth (such as the US) also consume much more resources than the areas with higher population growth. So resource consumption is a big problem. But I think it's not helpful to frame it as a "population" problem, as we expect the population to level off.

155 points by moltensodium 7y ago

I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is mind-boggling, I guess the profit motives were too strong. I wonder how they rationalized it to themselves, if we don't do it then someone else will?

fromthestart 7y ago
>I still find the fact that Exxon internal researchers knew about the incoming crisis since 1982. I'll keep posting about it untill this hysteria dies, though I fear that given social pressures regarding anything representing "denial" will keep it alive indefinitely. No one knew about an incoming crisis in the 80s. People were aware about the possibility of climate change in the 80s. It took 30 years of data collection, research, and computational modeling on increasingly modern hardware, which allows for exponentially larger and more precise models, before we had amassed enough evidence in a totally model driven field to conclude that we may be terraforming on the scale of 100 years.
- adrianN 7y ago
  The IPCC was formed in 1988 and published their first report two years later where they already concluded that anthropogenic climate change is happening. I think it's fair to say that scientists knew about this by the late eighties and probably earlier. The confidence intervals have been getting ever smaller since then, but the effect was already known.
- vidanay 7y ago
  Yeah, it's like a 12 year old kid taking a first drag off a cigarette in 1938 and exclaiming "That shit will kill you" as he hacks and coughs. Not the same thing as factual scientific evidence.
- mturmon 7y ago
  Your wording is somewhat oblique ("this hysteria"), and you are making distinctions that are not clear ("no one knew" vs. "people were aware of the possibility"; "terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Let's correct two of these. Of course there are empirical observations related to climate. There is a definition of 54 "essential climate variables" (ECVs), see [1]. One of these is greenhouse gases [2]. At the bottom of the link, you can see observing programs for CO2 and CH4, both in situ and satellite. These are well-measured variables, with well-characterized error bars, and models are tested against these observations. For instance, the ~400 ppm CO2 ECV is measured to within 1ppm quite regularly and has been for many years. This is how we improve the models. The same kind of monitoring/model-improvement feedback loop is in place for almost all of the ECVs, including clouds and sea surface properties like temperature and salinity. Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. That's just one publication. Throughout the 1980s there were broad-based studies, mandated by Congress, that indicated the scope of the problem. See [4], from 1983. [1] https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables https://gcos.wmo.int/en/essential-climate-variables [2] https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/s3fs-public/ghg_ecv_factsheet_201905.pdf?TJO3Z20j79hzWgwL4sT.qEhqWA3rf3Dz https://ane4bf-datap1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wmod8_gcos/... [3] https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html [4] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of-the-carbon-dioxide-assessment-committee https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18714/changing-climate-report-of...
  - fromthestart 7y ago
    >terraforming" as a feel-good substitute for unplanned global climate change), Not true, please don't put words in my mouth. I use the term terraforming to emphasize the magnitude of the claim. We are fundamentally changing the properties of an entire planetary atmosphere, inadvertently. >and claims that are very strong, sweeping, and incorrect ("totally model-driven field"). Also not true. The point is that climate science by nature cannot be experimental. We can only make predictions and then proof amounts to measuring how well decades of measurements line up with predictions/models. >Another correction, relating to "no one knew" about a future crisis in the 1980s. Here is a paper [3] from James Hansen in Science magazine, in 1981, that clearly warns of crisis-level consequences. From the abstract -- In the 21st century, we will see "creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage." For whatever it's worth, this appeared on the NYTimes front page in 1981. Again, given the non experimental nature of climate science, this was a massive claim which requires decades of data collection and modeling to verify before committing to sweeping social and economic policy reform which has costs of its own. People underestimate the fact that climate change is one of the most radical ideas ever proposed by the modern scientific establishment, in terms of the scale of the changes, the disastrous predicted consequences, and the scale of societal change required for mitigation. We're talking about a potential irreversible, runaway global extinction accidentally triggered by humans 100-1000+ times faster than any measured natural rate. Due diligence, in a non experimental field, limited by 80s modeling hardware, took time. Meanwhile we all benefited from the fossil fuels we (and our parents) burned.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  I think "terraforming" means "changing planetary climate to be more like Earth climate". We are doing something rather opposite. You can use "geoengineering" if you want a sarcastic term similar to how rocket people use "rapid unplanned disassembly" instead of "crash".
- specialist 7y ago
  Some of us were paying attention. -- My 4th grade teacher (1978) was brain washing us into being tree huggers. Conserve water while brushing our teeth was "magic". Turn down the heat. Recycle. Etc. I recall hippie flavored propaganda in the school library asking if we wanted Earth to become a Red Planet (industrial) a Green Planet (farming) or Blue Planet (natural ecosystems), or some combination. My (much older) cousin was a physicist studying submarine acoustics. He's always known, patiently explained the whatnots to us younger skeptics. I worked at a civil engineering firm while still in high school (1980s). All the adults seemed to know what was happening, even if we didn't yet know all the causes. I vividly remember my boss (from Canada) telling me his childhood neighborhood lake was no longer safe to play hockey on. I volunteered thru the 1990s at an org trying to save the PNW salmon. The staff scientists knew our local snow packs were shrinking. (Need the melt for salmon runs.) Now our mountains are bare most of the year, of course. Terrifying. Maybe because I read a lot of sci-fi, I've always "known". Most memorable to me have been John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up, and Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. But of course, post-apocalyptic is a popular storyline, so there have been zillions others. -- PS, for the down voter(s), one of the minor plot lines from the TV show Dallas was Bobby Ewing's renewable energy efforts, in opposition to older brother JR Ewing's doubling down on carbon. In debating with Bobby in front of Daddy Ewing, JR's money quote was "We've been running out of oil since the first oil well." So, ya, climate change was part of the (most) popular culture too.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    This is a weird comment... am I understanding right that you do believe in climate change and believe that people were aware in the 1980's? The first couple lines where you talk about a teacher "brain washing" you into "tree huggers" and seeing "hippie flavored propaganda" comes off a lot like how ignorant, far-right climate change deniers sound. However, towards the end it sounds like you are saying that you knew about global warming. Care to clarify?
    - specialist 7y ago
      I've long wondered how and why I became a tree hugger. Despite the dominant culture. It wasn't from my family, church, peers, media. Growing up, my father just poured used motor oil into the sewer (ffs). My best guess is that one teacher slyly taught environmentalism on the down low. It certainly wasn't part of the curriculum. And some how her message stuck with me. Given my own experience, and my readings about "Language is a virus", Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, memetics, Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation, Luntz's Words of Power, etc: It's mostly a waste of time and effort and goodwill trying to persuade any body of anything. It's better to focus imprinting kids with the values and ideals they'll need to better compete in the future. For better or for worse. Mostly for worse.
- akuchling 7y ago
  People often don't realize how old the science behind climate change is. There's an excellent discussion at https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#M_35_ ; quoting from that paragraph: "Returning to old records, in 1986 the group produced the first truly solid and comprehensive global analysis of average surface temperatures, including the vast ocean regions, which most earlier studies had neglected. They confirmed that there had been considerable warming from the late 19th century up to 1940, followed by some regional cooling in the Northern Hemisphere. Global conditions had been roughly level until the mid 1970s. Then the warming had resumed with a vengeance. The warmest three years in the entire 134-year record had all occurred in the 1980s."
jackstraw14 7y ago
Corporations like Exxon aren't rational, they only exist to make more money, so that's what they did.
- donclark 7y ago
  Do publicly traded corporations have different interests than actual human beings? Is there main concern only money/profits? If not, what is it?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Humans have different interests from other human beings. Take a wide enough sampling of humanity (i.e. not people who already know each other) and you'll find a wide variety of divergent interests. But the prime directive of any entity - whether it's a living being, or abstract idea like a corporation or nation state - is to continue existing. After all, every entity that failed in this is no longer with us. Society moving away from oil is an existential threat to ExxonMobil-the-corporation. Climate change is only an existential threat to a large fraction of humanity, and a largely disjoint one from individual decision-makers at Exxon. So their incentives are somewhat misaligned here.
    - Retric 7y ago
      > to continue existing That seems obvious, but suicide and extreme risk taking demonstrates many other things are considered more important. In the corporate world banks fail all the time because the people running them don’t care about failure nearly as much as their next bonus. This is also why pensions and other long term liability’s are generally under funded.
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        You can explain both of those by moving up a level from individuals to systems. Suicide is a consequence of shame. Human beings have evolved an emotional mechanism that lets them function as groups; this mechanism functions by giving each individual an unconscious sense of whether they "measure up" to the standards of the group around them. One consequence of that is that some fraction of individuals won't, oftentimes with tragic results for the individual. But groups that have this mechanism killed or absorbed all individuals that don't (well, not quite - psychopathy is the absence of shame, and it's usually maladaptive but some high-functioning psychopaths can blend in among normal society), and so the world we live in includes suicide. Banks serve financial markets. It's okay for individual banks to fail as long as the market as a whole continues to function; in fact, proper functioning of the market requires some banks to fail. It's the same as ant colonies or human microbiomes. When you step on an individual ant, the colony doesn't care, because the unit of survival is the colony. When you crap out intestinal bacteria, you don't shed a tear, because the unit of survival is the individual human and not the bacteria within them. In fact, the perspective with which you look at the world says a lot about the degree of interaction within the system. We think of a human as an individual entity; it took us a long time to think of a cell as an individual entity; and unless you're a dedicated biologist you probably don't think of a mitochondria as its own entity, despite them being independent bacteria at one time. You could look at global capitalism as being one super-organism, much like an ant colony, and individual humans are, well, workers. Capitalism doesn't care if it chews up and spits out human lives, because there will always be more of them. Its prime directive is to sustain capitalism itself. (Note also that global capitalism doesn't care if ExxonMobile lives or dies, and it's highly likely that it'll die. It'll just get replaced by some solar energy company. This conflict between levels goes all the way up the hierarchy - the interests of your cells are not necessarily aligned with yours, your interests are not necessarily aligned with your employer, your employer is not necessarily aligned with the market.)
philipov 7y ago
The extrapolation of I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone is "By the time it's a problem, we'll be dead."
Gravityloss 7y ago
They did act. IIRC they started sponsoring anti climate change material producing organizations and supporting its dissemination. A wildly succesful project that has probably paid itself back with a large factor.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  They also (as i read) started building their ocean based drilling platforms a little bit taller to account for sea-level rise.
  - kleton 7y ago
    Oil rigs float.
    - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
      some are floating some are actually platforms with legs that touch the ground. furthermore, i was wrong to write "drilling" platforms... as those are only used during the field's construction, until the wells are in place.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think a good strategy is to sponsor anti climate change activities to keep current profits flowing while at the same silently investing in businesses and tech that will do well in the world climate change creates. I think that's what they are doing.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I mean... yea, it's a good strategy for them it isn't a good strategy for everyone else though.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      That’s usually not a concern.
ekr 7y ago
I still find it mind-boggling how some people can be so surprised by the fact that people in general act in their own interest. A normal, healthy human being is exclusively concerned by its own well-being and that of its immediate family. To the extent that we witness altruistic behavior, it is executed for signalling purposes (this is the reason why there's virtually no completely anonymous charity, see "The elephant in the brain"). There is a part of the brain that is responsible for integrating events into a continuous narrative. That part of the brain is why we perceive ourselves as an integral being and not a set of parts, but that part is also severely biased in healthy humans, biased to paint ourselves as kinder, more altruistic, more intelligent, while also rewriting the motivation we cite for our past actions, so as to put ourselves in the best possible light. But no, there's nothing special about those Exxon researches, that's just normal human behavior. And to go further, acting against ones own interest requires going over a strong emotion. The body let's you know that you shouldn't be doing something through a gut feeling. Repeatedly ignoring or repressing those emotions is not healthy for the nervous system, and much has been written on this subject. LE: And regarding claims that stopping global warming was in their own interest back in the 1980s, there's the hyperbolic discounting effect (among other things).
- komali2 7y ago
  This implies one needs to act against one's interests to take action on climate change. Lack of imagination on Exxon's part could explain this as well. They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    > They could have started ringing alarm bells and used their massive strength to push for environmental research and favorable regulations. i.e., acting against their own interests. Spending the last 40 years using their strength against environmental research meant that the people who in 1980 owned and managed Exxon extracted great benefit to themselves (at the cost of others) for the rest of their lives (either they're already dead, or will be before any serious consequences may hurt them); doing what you propose would have benefitted the world but greatly hurt their own interests.
lacker 7y ago
What would you have done about it, if you were the CEO of Exxon in 1982?
- munk-a 7y ago
  Why was the CEO of Exxon allowed to do this in 1982? And why didn't the government fund science to figure this out first?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    The government knew about it, as did most of the population. Al Gore sponsored the first congressional hearings on climate change in 1976, and I remember putting on a play about environmental issues (including global warming) in 4th grade (1990). It's very difficult to rally people around a problem until they see tangible evidence of it in their own lives. Global warming was an abstraction in the 80s; we knew it was happening, we knew it would have a big impact, but we were too busy trying not to get nuked by the Soviets (or rather, trying to make them think we were gonna nuke them so they bankrupted themselves). In a democracy you can't get political support for policies until a majority of people agree with you. When it comes to giant systems like the environment, that's too late. There are probably a number of other problems that can see right now that we are doing nothing about - trust pollution (where you have no idea what's true anymore), mass migration (which I guess we're doing something about, but that "something" is putting kids in cages), erosion of the rule of law, potential infectious diseases, a looming demographic crisis, etc. But all of these are too big to wrap our head around a solution until they become a crisis - we're too busy dealing with climate change - and so they'll just blow up society and we'll be left to pick up the pieces.
  - inscionent 7y ago
    He was the CEO of Exxon. He had economic power. He used it. Why would the government bother? The experts from the companies who helped get them elected told them it wasn't a problem. > In 1981, he was appointed to President Ronald Reagan's National Productivity Advisory Committee and later served on the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.[6] He served as Chairman of The Business Council in 1983 and 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_C._Garvin
aczerepinski 7y ago
Exxon not taking it seriously in the 80s seems less extreme than politicians denying it in 2019 when the physical evidence is all around us.
justin66 7y ago
> The fact that they didn't act upon the information to me is mind-boggling, I guess the profit motives were too strong. You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. We were still fighting about whether cigarette smoke causes cancer (correlation is not causation!) and we had a president who claimed that trees pollute the environment more than cars do (who went on to be reelected). Politically influential Christian public figures rationalized how the deadly sin of greed should be considered a virtue while also blathering about how HIV was a manifestation of God's wrath toward homosexuals. And everyone kind of assumed our odds of surviving the cold war weren't great anyway, so you want to worry about something about temperature increasing, and also didn't you say there was going to be an ice age or something, blah blah blah? It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer given the level of stupidity we were operating at. A person aware of current events and capable of making analogies might question how much progress we've truly made, but that's a separate topic.
- mncharity 7y ago
  > You're seriously overestimating Americans, circa 1982. Circa 1982? Some months ago, the NYTimes did a story on Coke/Pepse/Nestle sugar drink/food causing simultaneous systemic obesity and malnutrition in Central/South America. Company leadership was quoted as expressing surprise at this "unexpected" impact. TPP had ISDS provisions to permit companies to sue governments to recover profits lost to health policies. And so it goes. Today.
- coffeecat 7y ago
  I have a non-rigorous pet theory that the combined effects of lead plumbing and leaded gasoline produced generations of Americans, from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, whose population-wide intelligence levels were adversely affected by lead exposure.
- okmokmz 7y ago
  >It's a minor miracle that we managed to cease the destruction of the ozone layer I'm not sure you can say that we ceased destruction of the Ozone layer. Certainly slowed, and in some cases ozone is increasing but not universally. Ozone levels in the upper levels have been slowly increasing, but the lower levels are still being depleted and there is evidence of an increase of short-lived ozone depleting substances. https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/ https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/18/1379/2018/
inscionent 7y ago
It isn't mind boggling. It is contemptuous and greedy but exactly in line with keeping and maintaining economic power. This isn't about the environment.

patientplatypus 7y ago

https://www.wsj.com/articles/usda-report-sees-dire-climate-change-impact-on-u-s-crops-11563917840 https://www.wsj.com/articles/usda-report-sees-dire-climate-c... Unchecked climate change could mean that the weather conditions hurting farmers this year will become increasingly common and result in higher costs for the federal government, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. The report, issued by the USDA’s Economic Research Service, found that if greenhouse gases are allowed to continue to increase, U.S. production of corn and soybeans—which are more susceptible to extreme heat during growing season—could decline as much as 80% in the next 60 years. This is a problem. The US has some of the most fertile growing regions in the world and if we stop exporting cheap grain there will be global hunger and strife. Shits about to get real yo.

mcguire 7y ago
Not sure why you seem to be greyed: https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
- patientplatypus 7y ago
  TBH I've been posting stuff warning about climate change and environmental damage. I think there are corporate propagandists on the site that are down voting this information as a paid propaganda campaign. He who controls the Spice controls the Universe.

effnorwood 7y ago

It hasn’t.

ccbthr77673 7y ago

What I find quite interesting is that there are numerous high-profile politicians and media figures, along with vast numbers of trolls, who deny that climate change exists, and block meaningful action to control it. At what point do we learn the lesson that’s deeply embedded in our collective consciousness (Noah’s Ark, the ant and the grasshopper) and decide that modern states are not capable of dealing with the problem, assuming that climate change is going to result in serious disruption, and look to make contingency plans for ourselves and our families?

grecy 7y ago
As a society we need to make the decision to take the microphone away from people who are just plain wrong or stupid. If we just ignore them, they can't do any harm. Yes, even when it's a celebrity or elected official, we should just utterly ignore them. Whenever I hear about a celebrity breakup like it's actual news I shudder.
- User23 7y ago
  As a society we are split roughly 50/50 on who is stupid and wrong, so this really just means “silence those who disagree with me.” Anecdotally, the hn community does have an obvious majority on most issues, including this one, but is still good about allowing dissenting opinions to be heard, because it is necessary for the mission of satisfying intellectual curiosity.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    If you don't understand or believe climate science at this point, it can no longer be written off as being uninformed. You are purposefully remaining ignorant and should be deemed unqualified to hold public office. There has to come a point where a consensus is so solid that continuing to play devils advocate is a disqualifying act. We know the planet is changing, and we know we are doing it. This is no longer a subject to be debated, end of.
  - grecy 7y ago
    At this point I think it's well understood that >90% of scientists and experts agree that climate change is a real thing and going to be a severe problem. It's not about "Those who disagree with me" it's "Those who disagree with widely accepted facts." and are causing real harm by doing so.

mcfunk 7y ago

This average increase mark is obviously very useful and important, but there's another dimension to add on to that when it comes to temperature trends. In the Twin Cities, for instance, the altered jet stream has greatly increased both colder-than-usual and hotter-than-usual patterns that stick around for longer. So although our average increase looks low, for instance this summer espeially we are having unusually hot streaks followed by unusually cold streaks (and the winters have been very bad over the past several years, with two 'polar vortex' years due to arctic air masses displacing on us, which is greatly impacted by climate change and arctic warming). TL;DR I'd be very interested to look at the data shifts in temperature more deeply and see which areas are impacted by both hotter AND colder weather, which wouldn't show up in an examination of averages.

jihadjihad 7y ago
I think the key concept is variance -- the mean might change a little but if the variance changes a lot, there will be "extreme" events with more regularity.
cknoxrun 7y ago
I agree, in my city (Edmonton), the weather forecast even 1 day in advance has effectively become useless this summer. It has been record breaking in terms of the amount/days of rain, and I can say with confidence on at least half of those days rain was not in the forecast. The system has become completely unstable to the point where weather models no longer seem to be able to output accurate results.

specialist 7y ago

I like that this article states the warming has been a long time coming. Filed under believe but cannot prove: Agriculture interrupted the background warming & cooling cycle. If humanity is to survive climate crisis, we'll need to actively manage the entire carbon cycle. aka Garden Earth.

shanxS 7y ago
> we'll need to actively manage the entire carbon cycle. aka Garden Earth. This I agree with. In all this turmoil and disappointment that we screwed up our ecosystem, regardless of whoever is at fault, it's about time we step up to evolve into a specie which can control their home planet's climate to a large extent. I may be day dreaming but I see controlling climate as next progression in our evolution. And when I say "controlling climate", I don't mean it at expense of arresting development or hoping that people will just stop indulging themselves etc.
DanTheManPR 7y ago
I agree with this. We have become such a significant geophysical force that we will have to take a more active role in managing the resource and energy currents of the biosphere. Climate change is a result of a failure to do just that.

programmertote 7y ago

Not just in America, but in SE Asia as well. My gf grew up in one of the largest cities on coastal area in our home country in SE Asia. Her city got flooded every year for third year in a row now whereas it wasn't the case before then. This year is the hardest one among three; the water rises up to chest level and lives were lost. I worry that poor countries like my home country, which has not much resource to migrate people in mass, will face serious issues in the near future. Having said that, I also believe in the resilience of the people there. They have been through military dictatorship and whatnot, so I have faith that they will survive albeit with huge cost of lives and property... Climate change will disturb world's political and economic systems, and I hope (and kind of believe) that the humanity can survive through this ordeal. In my honest opinion, it's too late to stop climate change, and the best we can do is to do our individual parts to mitigate the effects and come up with ways to cope with it the best we can.

colmvp 7y ago
Yeah it's been a while since I've read up about the growing number of refugees but IIRC climate change has the potential to dramatically increase the amount of migration to countries which won't have enough resources to properly with the influx of people and put even more stress on local resources (i.e. water, food).
- phry 7y ago
  the far-right in Europe is resurgent largely on the back of anti-migrant racism and hysteria, and that's with a crisis involving 5-6 million people. now imagine things with 25 million people, or more, and not just focused in Europe. it's going to be very bad.
kaybe 7y ago
> In my honest opinion, it's too late to stop climate change, .. Climate change is not a binary thing, it's a process. We absolutely still have the opportunity to stop it from getting much much worse. So let's not give up and fight on that front as well!
SubiculumCode 7y ago

444bradly 7y ago

Anthropogenic warming hypothesis states: 1) Human activities have a net warming effect 2) that effect is large I have read 2007 IPPC report and evidence of the above two claims is burried under mountains of fear mongering and dire predictions about the consequences of the claims being correct. The actual evidence is barely addressed and comes down to trusting a handful of computer models that only a few dozen people understand. Recent warming amount and rate is not unusual for the earth's recent pre-human past. When you add to this the myriad of political causes that have latched on to anthropogenic hypothesis being true, its pretty reasonable that informed individual is sketical. Especially with authoritarians calling for violence and censorship against"climate deniers".

makerofspoons 7y ago
It's interesting that you chose a report more than a decade out of date rather than one of the more recent reports they have published.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Well, he kind of had to in order to make his point. As long as I’ve been alive (four and a half decades), they’ve been insisting that we have “only a decade years to save the planet” - so going back to a report from 10 years ago and comparing their 10-year-predictions against right now is a good way to figure out how concerned you should about their current 10-year-predictions.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    "Save the world" has shifted goal posts considerably during this time.
commandlinefan 7y ago
I feel the same way - I’m somewhat skeptical partly because it’s good to be skeptical of most things, especially something that you can’t really see, but mostly because when I ask the climate change people what I should do in order to combat climate change, their first and only answer tends to be “vote democrat and never vote republican!” That being said, I still mostly do what (I think) the climate change people say I ought to do such as recycle, prefer energy efficient alternatives, and try to walk when I can. To the extent it doesn’t hurt us, we all might as well be “environmentally conscious” even if it turns out we didn’t actually have to be.

_hardwaregeek 7y ago

It's insane how many intelligent, thoughtful people I've met who still parrot the line that "oh our children will be screwed". Or even worse, they make some random allusion to scientific progress or God and claim it will all be okay. No. Science will not save us. God will not save us. It will not be okay. And unless you're currently on your deathbed, you will feel the effects of climate change. You will be fucked. I suspect only drastic, world wide, almost revolutionary political change could effectively halt the massive carbon generating machine that is human industry. Except the problem with massive revolutions is that they tend to cause conflict, which tends to increase emissions (tanks don't exactly run on solar). Man, I'm pretty damn close to joining a doomsday cult.

deadmetheny 7y ago
Except it will be ok. Things will change, but things always change. If we can turn things back and reign in the major contributors to warming, great, but we can't change the past, and all of the doom and gloom kvetching everyone loves to do here does nobody any good.
clarkmoody 7y ago
You might try reading channels that are more optimistic about human ingenuity and place less faith in the political process. Here's an alternative approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism
- _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  Has there been any precedence of this? I know the US and China both have/had pretty terrible pollution without regulation. Has there been any good example of a country that has successfully implemented free market environmentalism? Because at a cursory glance it appears to be the same platitudinous "the market will resolve everything". I can't accept that when the future of the human race is at stake.
- inscionent 7y ago
  Can one LOL harder at this idea? > Free-market environmentalists therefore argue that the best way to protect the environment is to clarify and protect property rights. This allows parties to negotiate improvements in environmental quality. I would not hold my breath waiting for ExxonMobil, the Saudi Royal family, or any other powerful entity to give up property rights. This outcome is worse for them than turning the planet into slag. > Owners face a strong incentive to take care of and protect their property. They must decide how much to use today and how much to use tomorrow. Everybody is trying to grow value. Corporate value and share price is based on their anticipated future profits. Owners with the possibility of transferring their property, either to an heir or through sale want their property to grow in value. Property rights encourage conservation and defend resources against depletion, since there is a strong incentive to maximize the value of the resource for the future. Just like a CEO would never risk the long term sustainability of the company for fat short term bonus. /s If humans were rational and were maximizing for future value we wouldn't be in this position.

mattferderer 7y ago

One challenge is that those in the Midwest seem to welcome the idea of "global warming" & several Midwestern states seem to be key to winning the presidential election.* I think that is a very hard marketing battle to win since the idea of climate change to many people just means warmer temperatures. I think a lot of people in colder climates feel they have little to lose. The actual massive scale effect is extremely difficult to comprehend, even after watching excellent documentaries. I think it is only something most voting citizens will care about when it effects them personally & by then it would be far to late. * Based on living in the Midwest - Edit - Giving this more thought I wonder if these articles need to be less about temperature changes & reflect more about increases of extreme weather & effects on farms.

wott 7y ago
Isn't the most of the Midwest already in normal times quite hot in the summer? I mean, in my European eyes looking at weather stations reports and temperatures maps, 95% of the US land is too hot in the summer, and the Midwest climate is very continental, i.e. cold winters but hot summers too. But yes, people have been indoctrinated in associating warmth and heat with "good". I trace it back to the post-WW2 era, with the development of paid holidays and tourism in the sun. Before that, the part of population who could afford holidays would either go to spa resorts in the mountains or to the North Atlantic shores; i.e. they would go to places which were cooler than the places they usually lived, not to places that are hotter than those places where they lived which are already hot in in summertime. From the 60's to the 80's, sun was promoted as an extremely positive value. The more sun you could get, the healthier you would be. You'd have to get more and more tanned. Previously, people protected themselves from the sun. Hat, scarfs, long sleeves were worn. Shades were looked after, and large trees were planted along the roads and most squares. Houses (also for practical reasons) had smaller windows, unlike the fad of large window bays which make the room behind unbearable as soon as the sun shows up. There has been lately a little bit of back-pedalling on a few of those aspects, but the main principle ("sun, heat, and light are good for you") has not changed much and remain quite deeply ingrained in most people. I find it infuriating that in 2019, TV and weather forecast anchors still always present long streaks of hot, dry and cloudless days as a "beautiful weather" for which we should rejoice. It doesn't matter if the main news theme of the previous days has been climate change/warming, or the drought hitting farmers, nope, 24 h later they use the same wording again. I mean, they could finish their sentence with "a beautiful weather for those who fancy this or that activity", that would be fine, but they never do: in their mind it is must be good and welcome for everyone. At the same time, as a fair scale gardener I see half of my crops die from the drought or the heatwave, because it has rained only once in 8 weeks, despite the fact that I am supposed to live in one of the chamber pots[1] of my country... :-( I think it indicates a huge cultural inertia, even though this culture was only (IMO) recently born, in the second half of the XXth century. Despite the awareness which has been rising in the last 15 years, it hasn't yet translated into the common mental model. -------- [1]: not sure how well it translates in English: a place where it rains very often.

jbay808 7y ago

While watching the HBO Chernobyl dramatization, I was struck by the Soviet government's contradictory response of publicly denying the problem existed and minimizing its extent, while at the same time giving the science team almost carte blanche authority to requisition resources to solve the problem. 5000 tons of boron? Helicopters are on their way. The entire country's supply of liquid nitrogen? It's yours. Robots? If they'll help, sure. The show made a big deal about how communist secrecy and denial obstructed the solution, made the problem worse, and even allowed it to happen in the first place. "A nuclear disaster cannot occur in the Soviet Union". But when I think about how we're reacting to climate change, it really seems like we're pretending the problem doesn't exist the same way they did, but without the corresponding succeed-at-all-costs extreme problem solving.

danans 7y ago

I recently learned on a trip to the United Kingdom that former hop-growing areas of the Southern UK have been purchased by French winemakers to grow grapes, because global warming has made that region amenable to it [1], while regions in France previously associated with viniculture are finding it increasingly difficult to grow traditional wine grape varieties [2] 1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/english-sparkling-wine-will-better-champagne-climate-warms-says/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/02/english-sparklin... 2. https://www.france24.com/en/20180914-down-earth-climate-change-bordeaux-wine-future-merlot-grape-variety-winegrowers https://www.france24.com/en/20180914-down-earth-climate-chan...

Balgair 7y ago
I've family in Napa, Ca. One of the high schools is literally called Vintage High and their mascot is the Crushers, after grape crushing machines [0]. Winemaking is as a part of Napa as the soil and air. Wineries are moving up into Oregon and Washington now, following the climate [1]. It takes ~7 years for the grapes to get to a point where you can make wine out of them, hence moving up there now and planting. This climate crisis is going to ruin Napa and already kinda is. ~81% of the grapes can't manage in the heat by 2080 [2], that's 4 of every 5 vines just dying in the sun. Meanwhile, the Napa Valley Vinters Association's head is firmly in the sand [3] and remains steadfastly confused that climate is weather. [0] https://vhs-nvusd-ca.schoolloop.com/ https://vhs-nvusd-ca.schoolloop.com/ [1] https://apnews.com/2a2da3558a1c47f6a2aeec8d409e47c2 https://apnews.com/2a2da3558a1c47f6a2aeec8d409e47c2 [2] https://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/napa-valley-ca-usa.html https://www.climatehotmap.org/global-warming-locations/napa-... [3] https://napavintners.com/about/climate_change.asp https://napavintners.com/about/climate_change.asp

netwanderer3 7y ago

The physical size of the Earth will never increase, yet human's ability to multiply ourselves is infinite in theory. Something gotta give. Going by evolutionary theory, that means the more our total population increases the smaller average human body size must shrink, so we would consume less input resources and produce less waste individually. Same reason why giant dinosaurs went extinct yet little cockroaches survived. Those T-Rex'es required massive calories consumption to sustain themselves, yet there was no longer enough resources in the environment to fuel them. The problem is for any of those biological changes to take place and for human to evolve (assuming the evolutionary theory is true), that process will be a slow and gradual one, likely to take hundred thousands or even millions of years. Climate change certainly doesn't operate within even a remotely similar time frame. Once it hits, resources will become scarce so in the worst case if we cannot stop climate change, the only possible solution is to practice reducing average consumption level to minimum, or to forecast optimal numbers of the world's total population that can still be accommodated by the Earth at each level of damage produced by climate change, then find a way to relentlessly control that number to keep it within limit. I sincerely hope we will never have to come to that scenario as countries which own nuclear power will possess massive advantages over others.

scott_s 7y ago
Humans are not predicted to grow infinitely. As areas industrialize, more people have less children. Projections I have read predict we will level off at about 12 billion people by 2100. But the areas of the world now with less population growth (such as the US) also consume much more resources than the areas with higher population growth. So resource consumption is a big problem. But I think it's not helpful to frame it as a "population" problem, as we expect the population to level off.