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the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate ch

by b0sk 7y ago

the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change. Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.

CamperBob2 7y ago
His point is, for every place that gets worse, someplace else will get better. Small consolation if you live in one of the former places, of course. But he's not wrong. Earth as a whole is a bit colder than it would be in the best of all possible universes. Other effects like ocean acidification are harder to hand-wave away. I hate cold weather, myself, but it's not just about terrestrial climate.
- Daishiman 7y ago
  His point has been debunked time and time again. "Better" is a definition for the organisms that may inhabit a certain environment. Under no reasonable time frame for human existence is his claim even close to valid.
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    His point has been debunked time and time again. ... by arguments that themselves are subject to debunking. You've used a thought-terminating phrase here. The fact is, we've been coming out of an ice age for the past several millennia, and life has generally gotten better as a result. The rate at which that process happens is very important, though. If Dyson did overlook any important counterpoints, that seems like a big one.
    - Daishiman 7y ago
      Yeah, he's overlooking the entire field of climate science and all the associated environmental sciences that predict to an amazing level of detail the impact of climate change in each and every imaginable location in the planet. We know exactly what the Arctic is going to look like and its impacts. We have known and are observing the melting of glaciers in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas to catastrophic effects in downstream environments. Anything is subject to debunking if you're unwilling to look at the most sophisticated evidence available. Unfortunately, there is no model that will tell you that a 4 degree increase in average temperature won't end most of human society as we know it.
      - vixen99 7y ago
        If you read the literature it's clear that model determinations of very high climate sensitivity (4°C, 5°C, 6°C and up) have increasingly been determined to be in error. Moreover, “Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world – possibly none – have a sufficiently thorough, 'big picture' understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.” (Roy Spencer)
        Daishiman 7y ago
        So? The predictions of the current heating have been spot on for models that are 20 years old. I'm sorry but I'm not gonna take seriously people who want to criticize model sensitive as a reason to ignore climate change when the current glacial melt, the ongoing ocean acidification and all the phenomena that have already been unleashed by the existing levels of climate change continue unabated.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
gus_massa 7y ago
> seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change The sea level raise has been approximately 3 inches from the 1993 level. That is much less than the change due to the tides.
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  Well, all that matters is the level at high tide, right? Everything near the seashore is constructed on that basis.
  - gus_massa 7y ago
    I agree. There are also spring and neap tides, so the important level is the high tide of a spring tide. But if the wind is blowing from the sea/river to the land, it can increase the level, specially during a storm, in some places a few meters. And the waves during a storm can be also a few meters high. [Hi from Buenos Aires! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudestada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudestada ] So a few inches was never enough to ensure that your city will not be flooded.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  and the city of Ur use to be right on the coast, but now it's way inland. The Ganges River use to lead right up to Red Fort and now it doesn't. The location of certain geological features or bodies of water is a really poor indicator of environmental damage, because these things have changed constantly throughout time. However the tons of plastic we dump into the oceans, the lakes of sludge outside of Chinese factory cities and the massive amounts of e-waste shipped every year to Africa where kids and adults extract metals and plastic in very unsafe conditions and smelters should be of great concern to everyone. There is environmental disaster looming, and so much of it is much more radically evidence than CO2. We need to stop over-consumption. Consumerism and planned/negligent obsolescence is destroying this planet. Solving for the real problems will also reduce CO2, but focusing on CO2 is like trying to cure the sniffles when you're dying of the Flu.
  - didericis 7y ago
DoreenMichele 7y ago
There are plant species that are dependent upon fire for reproduction. Such species begin to die if all fire is suppressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte https://www.gardenguides.com/97493-eucalyptus-trees-australia.html https://www.gardenguides.com/97493-eucalyptus-trees-australi... https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-forests-magazine/how-trees-survive-and-thrive-after-a-fire https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo... https://www.quora.com/What-seeds-need-fire-to-germinate-like-a-forest-fire https://www.quora.com/What-seeds-need-fire-to-germinate-like... https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-needs-fire-to-grow https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-n... When the Iraqis set the Kuwait oil wells on fire as they left, it was predicted that they would burn for years and be a global environmental disaster. They were put out in six months. This was never celebrated. The news just moved on to something with more drama. In the aftermath of the fires, the combination of ash and water used to put many of them out caused the desert to bloom like no one had seen in at least twenty years. This also was not widely promoted as some kind of good news. When I was pursuing environmental studies, there was a cartoon in one of my textbooks depicting microbes giving off oxygen and some of the microbes protesting that they were destroying their environment and needed to stop. Microbes that off-gassed oxygen are how we got an oxygen atmosphere on earth. One of my professors once said "We're like fleas on the butt of a dog trying to figure out which way the dog is going." The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this.
- titzer 7y ago
  > The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this. This comment is essentially self-refuting, since it would mean that you don't know as much as you like to pretend you do, and you are presenting a story in a biased fashion. Considering that its evidence includes a second-hand account of what one of your professors saying we are fleas on the butt of a dog, I'm gonna put it squarely in the "stories" category. When I want to know what is happening with the climate and fires, I'm gonna trust billions of CPU hours of simulations based on computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods, satellite observations, and the laws of thermodynamics, economic modeling, and the scientific peer review process just a little bit more than the model your professor presents. Yeah, Earth is complicated. Fleas? Not helping the discussion.
asdkjh345 7y ago
>the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia Are no hotter than many other years, decades ago. >resulting in bushfires, famine and drought There is no evidence linking the fires to "climate change". And I can find no evidence of any such famine even existing. Droughts are caused by depleting the water supply, not by warm weather. Warm weather increases rain. >seas taking over the cities Has not happened. The rate of sea level rise has been stable for the 120 years we have good data. It has not accelerated. >are all demonstrable effects of climate change None of them are. They are things people insist MUST be caused by "climate change", but do so only using "common sense", rather than any actual evidence. Demonstrable requires evidence, not "common sense".
- titzer 7y ago
  >>the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia > Are no hotter than many other years, decades ago. Well there is a whole damn Wikipedia article about the subject if you are into reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Australia And yeah, the summers are ridiculously hot and are actually hotter than many other years, decades ago, and keep getting hotter. One outlier from the 1970s doesn't invalidate the overall trend that it's fucking hot as hell, year after year. The outliers from those decades are the new normal now. Droughts are multi-year trend. And yeah, that's climate change, dude. >>seas taking over the cities > Has not happened. The rate of sea level rise has been stable for the 120 years we have good data. It has not accelerated. Bull [https://www.sbs.com.au/news/never-seen-anything-like-that-venice-faces-new-exceptional-flooding https://www.sbs.com.au/news/never-seen-anything-like-that-ve...]. Fucking [https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/08/analysis-sea-level-rise-is-combining-with-other-factors-regularly-flood-miami/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/08/analysis-s...]. Shit [https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level...]. >>are all demonstrable effects of climate change > None of them are. They are things people insist MUST be caused by "climate change", but do so only using "common sense", rather than any actual evidence. Demonstrable requires evidence, not "common sense". Please go argue with the thousands of people whose work the distilled news articles and Wikipedia articles are based on. They aren't sitting around churning out hackernews comments using "common sense" but are undertaking a very serious and organized scientific effort to understand just what the fuck is going on instead of absurd denialism.
IGotThroughIt 7y ago
> Australasia resulting in bushfires Ah yes, the same fires started by loony arsonists to promote climate change hysteria.
versteegen 7y ago
Famine in Australasia?? No idea where you got that. I live in NZ.
auntienomen 7y ago
He lived in Princeton NJ. In the last several years, it has stopped snowing in the winter in central NJ. Direct consequence of global warming messing up the arctic air currents.

by b0sk 7y ago

CamperBob2 7y ago

His point is, for every place that gets worse, someplace else will get better. Small consolation if you live in one of the former places, of course. But he's not wrong. Earth as a whole is a bit colder than it would be in the best of all possible universes. Other effects like ocean acidification are harder to hand-wave away. I hate cold weather, myself, but it's not just about terrestrial climate.

Daishiman 7y ago
His point has been debunked time and time again. "Better" is a definition for the organisms that may inhabit a certain environment. Under no reasonable time frame for human existence is his claim even close to valid.
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  His point has been debunked time and time again. ... by arguments that themselves are subject to debunking. You've used a thought-terminating phrase here. The fact is, we've been coming out of an ice age for the past several millennia, and life has generally gotten better as a result. The rate at which that process happens is very important, though. If Dyson did overlook any important counterpoints, that seems like a big one.
  - Daishiman 7y ago
    Yeah, he's overlooking the entire field of climate science and all the associated environmental sciences that predict to an amazing level of detail the impact of climate change in each and every imaginable location in the planet. We know exactly what the Arctic is going to look like and its impacts. We have known and are observing the melting of glaciers in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas to catastrophic effects in downstream environments. Anything is subject to debunking if you're unwilling to look at the most sophisticated evidence available. Unfortunately, there is no model that will tell you that a 4 degree increase in average temperature won't end most of human society as we know it.
    - vixen99 7y ago
      If you read the literature it's clear that model determinations of very high climate sensitivity (4°C, 5°C, 6°C and up) have increasingly been determined to be in error. Moreover, “Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world – possibly none – have a sufficiently thorough, 'big picture' understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.” (Roy Spencer)
      - Daishiman 7y ago
        So? The predictions of the current heating have been spot on for models that are 20 years old. I'm sorry but I'm not gonna take seriously people who want to criticize model sensitive as a reason to ignore climate change when the current glacial melt, the ongoing ocean acidification and all the phenomena that have already been unleashed by the existing levels of climate change continue unabated.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

gus_massa 7y ago

> seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change The sea level raise has been approximately 3 inches from the 1993 level. That is much less than the change due to the tides.

CamperBob2 7y ago
Well, all that matters is the level at high tide, right? Everything near the seashore is constructed on that basis.
- gus_massa 7y ago
  I agree. There are also spring and neap tides, so the important level is the high tide of a spring tide. But if the wind is blowing from the sea/river to the land, it can increase the level, specially during a storm, in some places a few meters. And the waves during a storm can be also a few meters high. [Hi from Buenos Aires! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudestada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudestada ] So a few inches was never enough to ensure that your city will not be flooded.
djsumdog 7y ago
and the city of Ur use to be right on the coast, but now it's way inland. The Ganges River use to lead right up to Red Fort and now it doesn't. The location of certain geological features or bodies of water is a really poor indicator of environmental damage, because these things have changed constantly throughout time. However the tons of plastic we dump into the oceans, the lakes of sludge outside of Chinese factory cities and the massive amounts of e-waste shipped every year to Africa where kids and adults extract metals and plastic in very unsafe conditions and smelters should be of great concern to everyone. There is environmental disaster looming, and so much of it is much more radically evidence than CO2. We need to stop over-consumption. Consumerism and planned/negligent obsolescence is destroying this planet. Solving for the real problems will also reduce CO2, but focusing on CO2 is like trying to cure the sniffles when you're dying of the Flu.
- didericis 7y ago

DoreenMichele 7y ago

There are plant species that are dependent upon fire for reproduction. Such species begin to die if all fire is suppressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte https://www.gardenguides.com/97493-eucalyptus-trees-australia.html https://www.gardenguides.com/97493-eucalyptus-trees-australi... https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-forests-magazine/how-trees-survive-and-thrive-after-a-fire https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo... https://www.quora.com/What-seeds-need-fire-to-germinate-like-a-forest-fire https://www.quora.com/What-seeds-need-fire-to-germinate-like... https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-needs-fire-to-grow https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-n... When the Iraqis set the Kuwait oil wells on fire as they left, it was predicted that they would burn for years and be a global environmental disaster. They were put out in six months. This was never celebrated. The news just moved on to something with more drama. In the aftermath of the fires, the combination of ash and water used to put many of them out caused the desert to bloom like no one had seen in at least twenty years. This also was not widely promoted as some kind of good news. When I was pursuing environmental studies, there was a cartoon in one of my textbooks depicting microbes giving off oxygen and some of the microbes protesting that they were destroying their environment and needed to stop. Microbes that off-gassed oxygen are how we got an oxygen atmosphere on earth. One of my professors once said "We're like fleas on the butt of a dog trying to figure out which way the dog is going." The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this.

titzer 7y ago
> The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this. This comment is essentially self-refuting, since it would mean that you don't know as much as you like to pretend you do, and you are presenting a story in a biased fashion. Considering that its evidence includes a second-hand account of what one of your professors saying we are fleas on the butt of a dog, I'm gonna put it squarely in the "stories" category. When I want to know what is happening with the climate and fires, I'm gonna trust billions of CPU hours of simulations based on computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods, satellite observations, and the laws of thermodynamics, economic modeling, and the scientific peer review process just a little bit more than the model your professor presents. Yeah, Earth is complicated. Fleas? Not helping the discussion.

asdkjh345 7y ago

>the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia Are no hotter than many other years, decades ago. >resulting in bushfires, famine and drought There is no evidence linking the fires to "climate change". And I can find no evidence of any such famine even existing. Droughts are caused by depleting the water supply, not by warm weather. Warm weather increases rain. >seas taking over the cities Has not happened. The rate of sea level rise has been stable for the 120 years we have good data. It has not accelerated. >are all demonstrable effects of climate change None of them are. They are things people insist MUST be caused by "climate change", but do so only using "common sense", rather than any actual evidence. Demonstrable requires evidence, not "common sense".

titzer 7y ago
>>the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia > Are no hotter than many other years, decades ago. Well there is a whole damn Wikipedia article about the subject if you are into reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Australia And yeah, the summers are ridiculously hot and are actually hotter than many other years, decades ago, and keep getting hotter. One outlier from the 1970s doesn't invalidate the overall trend that it's fucking hot as hell, year after year. The outliers from those decades are the new normal now. Droughts are multi-year trend. And yeah, that's climate change, dude. >>seas taking over the cities > Has not happened. The rate of sea level rise has been stable for the 120 years we have good data. It has not accelerated. Bull [https://www.sbs.com.au/news/never-seen-anything-like-that-venice-faces-new-exceptional-flooding https://www.sbs.com.au/news/never-seen-anything-like-that-ve...]. Fucking [https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/08/analysis-sea-level-rise-is-combining-with-other-factors-regularly-flood-miami/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/08/analysis-s...]. Shit [https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2680/new-study-finds-sea-level...]. >>are all demonstrable effects of climate change > None of them are. They are things people insist MUST be caused by "climate change", but do so only using "common sense", rather than any actual evidence. Demonstrable requires evidence, not "common sense". Please go argue with the thousands of people whose work the distilled news articles and Wikipedia articles are based on. They aren't sitting around churning out hackernews comments using "common sense" but are undertaking a very serious and organized scientific effort to understand just what the fuck is going on instead of absurd denialism.

IGotThroughIt 7y ago

> Australasia resulting in bushfires Ah yes, the same fires started by loony arsonists to promote climate change hysteria.

versteegen 7y ago

Famine in Australasia?? No idea where you got that. I live in NZ.

auntienomen 7y ago

He lived in Princeton NJ. In the last several years, it has stopped snowing in the winter in central NJ. Direct consequence of global warming messing up the arctic air currents.