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>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 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.
  - mturmon 7y ago
    You said Climate Science is a "totally model-driven field" and I provided facts correcting that sweeping claim. It's not uncommon to hear this kind of claim on HN - sometimes people seem to not really have on-the-ground information about how climate science works, and are instead going by how they might imagine it works -- a bunch of modelers working in isolation. That's not how climate science is done. For more on the relationship of climate models to observations, see an old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 -- Your reply says that you meant to say that Climate Science "cannot be experimental". This, it turns out, is also not true. There are cases where nature runs the experiment for us. For instance, the large methane leak recently in the LA area allowed us to understand the effectiveness of the inversion algorithms that are used to turn observations of concentrations into observations of the emissions that caused those concentrations. For instance, to understand the correctness of wind models. Wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and ENSO onsets often serve as nature-given checks on climate science predictions. They basically provide a "step function" input that is a tool to characterize the system response to a shock. For instance, we got a lot of science out of the varying climate-system responses to different volcanic eruptions. -- You said that "no one knew" about a possible future crisis in the 1980s. I supplied links showing that this is not the case -- the science establishment, the Congress, and the readers of the front page of major newspapers knew. Your reply counters with "what should we have done". That's another question, isn't it?
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."

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.
- mturmon 7y ago
  You said Climate Science is a "totally model-driven field" and I provided facts correcting that sweeping claim. It's not uncommon to hear this kind of claim on HN - sometimes people seem to not really have on-the-ground information about how climate science works, and are instead going by how they might imagine it works -- a bunch of modelers working in isolation. That's not how climate science is done. For more on the relationship of climate models to observations, see an old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613090#15620293 -- Your reply says that you meant to say that Climate Science "cannot be experimental". This, it turns out, is also not true. There are cases where nature runs the experiment for us. For instance, the large methane leak recently in the LA area allowed us to understand the effectiveness of the inversion algorithms that are used to turn observations of concentrations into observations of the emissions that caused those concentrations. For instance, to understand the correctness of wind models. Wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and ENSO onsets often serve as nature-given checks on climate science predictions. They basically provide a "step function" input that is a tool to characterize the system response to a shock. For instance, we got a lot of science out of the varying climate-system responses to different volcanic eruptions. -- You said that "no one knew" about a possible future crisis in the 1980s. I supplied links showing that this is not the case -- the science establishment, the Congress, and the readers of the front page of major newspapers knew. Your reply counters with "what should we have done". That's another question, isn't it?

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."