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And yet, all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true. According to some, by now Great Britain should be underwater. Will th

And yet, all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true. According to some, by now Great Britain should be underwater. Will they never be true? No one knows, because predicting the future is not our best skill. They might well be someday. But the track record, for now, is dismal, which makes me thing they are more driven by ideology than by science.

throwaway5752 7y ago
I think you have made a couple of errors. First, how many satellites did we have 50 years ago? How many advancements have there been in sensors over that time? How much has compute capacity increased? Our level of data and observation has increased - trying not to exaggerate - a million-fold. With that, the algorithms and models have improved, too. It's like comparing a Pinto to a Tesla. Second, 50 year old forecasts have held up remarkably well. I will just point to Exxon's forecasts, under "Select ExxonMobil documents": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy#Select_ExxonMobil_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... They actually did a fair job in the 1970s and 80s of modeling the warming we've seen just based on first principals of measured CO2 greenhouse effects and atmospheric concentrations. Third, we are actually quite good at predicting the future! We can predict where a planet will be in a million years. It's basic Dunning-Kruger bias to think these professional trained scientist building these models don't understand nonlinear systems maths and the ways these systems diverge, couple, and otherwise interact. Fourth, "According to some" is the source of so many flawed conclusions. According to some, the world is flat. According to some, reality is based on the theory of the Time Cube. You can't go around quoting cranks to attack non-cranks. I don't know who or what you are talking about, but I have a very hard time believing a qualified individual thought GB would be under water in 2020 in 1970. And even if they did, times change and we know much more now. I hate to be out ahead of the mass psychology of awareness of the magnitude and criticality of climate change. It is very hard to digest how bad things are. This is data driven, though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Cyberdog 7y ago
Growing up in California in the '80s and '90s, I recall seeing maps showing how rising ocean levels would flood the Sacramento valley with ocean water and turn the California coastline into a chain of islands by 2010 or so. One has to wonder for how long these alarmists will be able to get away with these doomsday predictions which continually fail to materialize before they go back to the basics; let's keep the water and air clean because we gotta drink and breathe that stuff. Maybe you can't get the big research bucks with arguments like that, but I think you'll get far better results in terms of actually changing human activity.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  Some of the extremely dangerous sources of pollution actually get away with it due to the focus on CO2 and global warming, e.g. shipping - its CO2 emissions contribution is insignificant, but: > Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9% of the sulphur oxides.[2][28] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings Nobody thinks about this anymore when they buy their fancy new PV panels from China, or their organically grown tropical fruit.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    I don't think you appreciate the relative risk from CO2 pollution (or really, warming in general which then brings CH4 and water vapor into the mix). Marine shipping uses the dregs of refining: bunker fuel. The have absolutely enormous two-cycle engines that run on something in the neighborhood of tar and motor oil. It is an inefficient combustion with trash fuel. NO2 and SO2 is bad, but it's nowhere near the danger of global warming, and shipping is otherwise extremely efficient in terms of carbon intensity/kg/km cargo shipped. Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells (ie, building local factories, the cost of time until they are operating, cost of building up upstream supply chains, and then more prosaic PV vs baseline grid carbon intensity per kwh consumed?). I think you'd find there is some nuance in what is optimal. Shipping produce vs local and seasonal is a big waste, agreed. All of that is refrigerated multi-modal, too, and ships are hardly the worst offenders in that logistic chain. I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to get pulled out as a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.
usrusr 7y ago
Predicting some eventual outcome isn't quite as difficult as predicting its precise timing. This is common knowledge regarding market bubbles, but really applies to more than just economic questions. We can't just shrug off past predictions because they failed to get the timing right when the trends they foresaw are clearly observed, just not quite as strong as predicted. The UK is still more united than underwater, but the poles are melting nonetheless.
yodsanklai 7y ago
> all the predictions .. According to some .. I'm sure that all types of predictions have been made, including very bad ones. I'm not aware of something of the scale of the GIEC studying climate change 50 years ago. You are comparing hypothetical past predictions (when? from whom?) with a scientific effort of unprecedented scale. > predicting the future is not our best skill It depends. We can predict many future events very accurately. > they are more driven by ideology than by science I think that not listening the scientific consensus is ideological. I have no reason to believe that the GIEC predictions are less valid than those of some random dude on the internet.
ajdegol 7y ago
Are you able to cite these predictions?
heavyset_go 7y ago
> all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true What predictions? The predictions about ozone layer depletion and how to address it successfully? Those were accurate. Predictions about warming and sea level rise? Those are accurate. > According to some Who? Don't use weasel words[1] like "all the predictions" and "according to some" You clearly have specific issues in mind, so why don't you let us know what they are so we can address them, and not have to rely on your interpretation of "all the predictions" and whoever "some" of these people are. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
- masklinn 7y ago
  Also acid rains and their mitigation.
- justsubmit 7y ago
  Thou foul hypocrite and deceiver. I won't throw Wikipedia links at you for those terms, because you obviously know how to (ab)use it.
  - dang 7y ago
    We've banned this account for obvious reasons. Could you please not create accounts to break HN's guidelines with? It's not hard to use the site as intended, if you want to, and it's in your interest to do that, since breaking down the threads with comments like this will just lead it to informational heat death. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - justsubmit 7y ago
      Well, dang, would you please enforce the guidelines fairly, then? You didn't chastise the poster of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21215968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21215968 for his disingenuous cherry-picking and condescending, flamebait accusations of using weasel words. But you ban this account for calling him out on his deception and lies. Oh, but no one "flagged" his comment, so you probably didn't see it, right? That's always your excuse: you can't see everything, so you act on what other users flag. Well, guess what, the users who flag things are disingenuous. So when you act on what's flagged and not on what the flaggers approve of, you act in an unfair, biased way. It's two-faced for you to accuse me of causing "informational heat death" when you do nothing about the comment I linked. It should be you calling him out for that, not me; but here I am doing your job, and you ban my account and do nothing to his. Shamefully dishonest of you. An excellent example of HN moderators' bias. You need not worry about death, because this place is walking dead. It's dead at heart, because lies can only rally people for so long. As more people find out the truth about HN, they will find and make alternatives.

throwaway5752 7y ago

I think you have made a couple of errors. First, how many satellites did we have 50 years ago? How many advancements have there been in sensors over that time? How much has compute capacity increased? Our level of data and observation has increased - trying not to exaggerate - a million-fold. With that, the algorithms and models have improved, too. It's like comparing a Pinto to a Tesla. Second, 50 year old forecasts have held up remarkably well. I will just point to Exxon's forecasts, under "Select ExxonMobil documents": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy#Select_ExxonMobil_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... They actually did a fair job in the 1970s and 80s of modeling the warming we've seen just based on first principals of measured CO2 greenhouse effects and atmospheric concentrations. Third, we are actually quite good at predicting the future! We can predict where a planet will be in a million years. It's basic Dunning-Kruger bias to think these professional trained scientist building these models don't understand nonlinear systems maths and the ways these systems diverge, couple, and otherwise interact. Fourth, "According to some" is the source of so many flawed conclusions. According to some, the world is flat. According to some, reality is based on the theory of the Time Cube. You can't go around quoting cranks to attack non-cranks. I don't know who or what you are talking about, but I have a very hard time believing a qualified individual thought GB would be under water in 2020 in 1970. And even if they did, times change and we know much more now. I hate to be out ahead of the mass psychology of awareness of the magnitude and criticality of climate change. It is very hard to digest how bad things are. This is data driven, though.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Cyberdog 7y ago

Growing up in California in the '80s and '90s, I recall seeing maps showing how rising ocean levels would flood the Sacramento valley with ocean water and turn the California coastline into a chain of islands by 2010 or so. One has to wonder for how long these alarmists will be able to get away with these doomsday predictions which continually fail to materialize before they go back to the basics; let's keep the water and air clean because we gotta drink and breathe that stuff. Maybe you can't get the big research bucks with arguments like that, but I think you'll get far better results in terms of actually changing human activity.

lazyjones 7y ago
Some of the extremely dangerous sources of pollution actually get away with it due to the focus on CO2 and global warming, e.g. shipping - its CO2 emissions contribution is insignificant, but: > Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9% of the sulphur oxides.[2][28] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings Nobody thinks about this anymore when they buy their fancy new PV panels from China, or their organically grown tropical fruit.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  I don't think you appreciate the relative risk from CO2 pollution (or really, warming in general which then brings CH4 and water vapor into the mix). Marine shipping uses the dregs of refining: bunker fuel. The have absolutely enormous two-cycle engines that run on something in the neighborhood of tar and motor oil. It is an inefficient combustion with trash fuel. NO2 and SO2 is bad, but it's nowhere near the danger of global warming, and shipping is otherwise extremely efficient in terms of carbon intensity/kg/km cargo shipped. Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells (ie, building local factories, the cost of time until they are operating, cost of building up upstream supply chains, and then more prosaic PV vs baseline grid carbon intensity per kwh consumed?). I think you'd find there is some nuance in what is optimal. Shipping produce vs local and seasonal is a big waste, agreed. All of that is refrigerated multi-modal, too, and ships are hardly the worst offenders in that logistic chain. I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to get pulled out as a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.

usrusr 7y ago

Predicting some eventual outcome isn't quite as difficult as predicting its precise timing. This is common knowledge regarding market bubbles, but really applies to more than just economic questions. We can't just shrug off past predictions because they failed to get the timing right when the trends they foresaw are clearly observed, just not quite as strong as predicted. The UK is still more united than underwater, but the poles are melting nonetheless.

yodsanklai 7y ago

> all the predictions .. According to some .. I'm sure that all types of predictions have been made, including very bad ones. I'm not aware of something of the scale of the GIEC studying climate change 50 years ago. You are comparing hypothetical past predictions (when? from whom?) with a scientific effort of unprecedented scale. > predicting the future is not our best skill It depends. We can predict many future events very accurately. > they are more driven by ideology than by science I think that not listening the scientific consensus is ideological. I have no reason to believe that the GIEC predictions are less valid than those of some random dude on the internet.

ajdegol 7y ago

Are you able to cite these predictions?

heavyset_go 7y ago

> all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true What predictions? The predictions about ozone layer depletion and how to address it successfully? Those were accurate. Predictions about warming and sea level rise? Those are accurate. > According to some Who? Don't use weasel words[1] like "all the predictions" and "according to some" You clearly have specific issues in mind, so why don't you let us know what they are so we can address them, and not have to rely on your interpretation of "all the predictions" and whoever "some" of these people are. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

masklinn 7y ago
Also acid rains and their mitigation.
justsubmit 7y ago
Thou foul hypocrite and deceiver. I won't throw Wikipedia links at you for those terms, because you obviously know how to (ab)use it.
- dang 7y ago
  We've banned this account for obvious reasons. Could you please not create accounts to break HN's guidelines with? It's not hard to use the site as intended, if you want to, and it's in your interest to do that, since breaking down the threads with comments like this will just lead it to informational heat death. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - justsubmit 7y ago
    Well, dang, would you please enforce the guidelines fairly, then? You didn't chastise the poster of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21215968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21215968 for his disingenuous cherry-picking and condescending, flamebait accusations of using weasel words. But you ban this account for calling him out on his deception and lies. Oh, but no one "flagged" his comment, so you probably didn't see it, right? That's always your excuse: you can't see everything, so you act on what other users flag. Well, guess what, the users who flag things are disingenuous. So when you act on what's flagged and not on what the flaggers approve of, you act in an unfair, biased way. It's two-faced for you to accuse me of causing "informational heat death" when you do nothing about the comment I linked. It should be you calling him out for that, not me; but here I am doing your job, and you ban my account and do nothing to his. Shamefully dishonest of you. An excellent example of HN moderators' bias. You need not worry about death, because this place is walking dead. It's dead at heart, because lies can only rally people for so long. As more people find out the truth about HN, they will find and make alternatives.