7 ms·

Central America (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-straight-year-of-central-american-drought-helping-drive-migration/ https://blogs.sc

Central America (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-straight-year-of-central-american-drought-helping-drive-migration/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-...), Syria (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262981...), Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...), and Alaska https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/sockeye-salmon-and-climate-change https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/sockeye-salmon-and-cli... might beg to differ, among others. It is happening now. It's happening in line with predictions by IPCC. It gets pretty bad. I can't help what people have said that has been wrong, but the world is measurably and visibly warming and that itself was denied for a long time. Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the timeframe of human lifetimes. It feels like the zoonotic coronavirus situation played out over 50 years, rather than the 15 or so since SARS. Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are. A large group of experts in another field is telling us a similar thing with similar urgency. That's my only point.

jshevek 7y ago
Your reply, while valid in isolation, isn't a meaningful response to the parent post. There is no single "global warming prediction", there have been thousands. The parent was speaking to those, not whichever one ends up being closest to the truth. >>consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
- mempko 7y ago
  There have been thousands of predictions, but only a subset of them have consensus. The IPCC is that consensus across varying stakeholders. It's looking like the consensus has been too conservative with it's predictions and that's the scary part.
  - shakermakr 7y ago
    Science and proof is not based on consensus. It’s not a vote. A best bet. Until then we should of course act towards the most probable act and cause but remain healthy in our skepticism of the effect of global warming and our faith in computer modeling of inherently chaotic systems.
    - rriepe 7y ago
      I see this sentiment a lot. It seems really obvious to me that no, science is actually about consensus now. If you disagree, you're shunned and labeled "dangerous." Maybe this is in conflict with what science should be. But it's also definitely what science is now.
lliamander 7y ago
> Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the timeframe of human lifetimes. The consensus regarding climate change (and human's role in it) has been exagerated[0] [0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falseh...
- admax88q 7y ago
  Your source is a random blogspot.com who claims that there's ambiguity because they consider the term "caused by" to be ambiguous. I stopped reading there.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - lliamander 7y ago
    David Friedman is an economist at Santa Clara University. The argument relates not to climate science itself, but to the methodology on study measuring the consensus of climate scientists. It's pretty easy to follow.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
      David Friedman is a well known libertarian and sometime anarchocapitalist whose moral and political philosophy is notably at odds with the concepts invoked by those who call for large action to tackle climate change. The fact that he's smart doesn't change the conflict of outlooks.
      - lliamander 7y ago
        He happens to believe (or accepts) the IPCC findings, he just disagrees about the economic implications, which is his prerogative.
pdonis 7y ago
> Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening None of these "experts" have a track record of correct predictions that justifies taking their current predictions seriously. Remember we are not talking about the fact that the climate changes: yes, it does, it always has, and it always will (unless at some point in the distant future we learn how to control it accurately). We are talking about the dire predictions of catastrophe that have been made to try to justify spending many trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. Those predictions have never come true. > Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are. To know whether these were useful predictions, we would need to know more details. Did they predict when it would happen? Did they predict how it would spread? A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful. AFAIK no epidemiologists were making predictions much more precise than that. Looking at the actual frequency of epidemics of various sizes in the past, we might very roughly estimate that we will have one serious enough to involve a significant portion of health care resources once every decade or so. But you don't have to be an epidemiologist to do that; you just have to do the simplest possible extrapolation of the data. We had H1N1 about 10 years ago, and SARS about 18 years ago. That's still not a very strong prediction, but it would seem to be as good a basis for public policy discussion (which is to say, a fairly weak one but not negligible) as anything more complicated that has come from epidemiologists.
- MattRix 7y ago
  >A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful Yes it is, if taken seriously.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    What does "taken seriously" mean? We don't even know that from a prediction that vague. If the prediction is "we can expect a serious epidemic once every 10 years", then we have something definite that we can plan for, or at least discuss the costs of planning for. There's no way to discuss the costs of planning for "this will happen, some time in the future" without more detail.
d_burfoot 7y ago
Do you even read these papers before posting? Here's what the Syria paper actually concludes: > In light of the above we can now return to our main questions: is there clear and reliable evidence that climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory factor in the onset of the country's civil war?; and, if and where yes, was it as significant a contributory factor as is claimed in the existing academic and expert literature? On each step of the claimed causal chain, our answers are no. We find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in northeast Syria's 2006/07–2008/09 drought; we find that, while the 2006/07–2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will have contributed to migration, this migration was not on the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation than drought; and we find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment, there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country's civil war.
shakermakr 7y ago
Science isn’t consensus! Proof isn’t determined by “very nearly 100% of scientists agree”. Just ask Copernicus. We don’t vote on scientific proof. Yes evidence leads us to believe climate change is happening, but why and predicting it’s trajectory and effect should be met with scientific standards not scaremongering and “CLIMATE DENIER” hyperbole. If the pursuit of scientific rigour and fact has taught us anything over our history it’s that skepticism and challenging the status quo is necessary and should be welcomed. In today’s climate debate it it’s nothing but derided.
- sfkdjf9j3j 7y ago
  I think you're not reading his comment in good faith. He's clearly not suggesting that whether or not something is true is decided by a vote of scientists. He's saying that the people who are most familiar with the science overwhelmingly believe that the evidence suggests that global warming is in fact real. Further, people are wise to be skeptical or even dismissive of climate denialist claims because there is a long history of politically motivated people making deliberately but subtly specious arguments for it. Given both the overwhelming consensus and the glut of misinformation, it makes sense to filter it with a very high bar.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  You are right. It is decided because not only do almost 100% of climate scientists agree, but there in indisputable proof of the basic method of action (CO2, CH4, H20 greenhouse effects) and we can measure that effect in the lab and then correlated it to measured climate change that normalized for various known climate cycles. The consensus in the fields is driven by the overwhelming evidence of the multidisciplinary field results, experiments, and modeling. The benefit of science (reproducibility, falsifiability) has been hacked by commercial interests. This isn't even in dispute (Heartland, IER, many others). Groups that dispute climate change are all funded by CO2 emitters and the results are coordinated by enormous lobbying and donation campaigns. Flat earth proponents are not operating within a scientific framework of doubt and proof, and neither are climate change deniers.
  - pdonis 7y ago
101404 7y ago
As long as everybody who has even a question about the topic is publicly yelled at and insulted, there will be many people who will simply ignore the topic. The main reason global warming isn't taken more seriously is because of the way it is discussed.

jshevek 7y ago

Your reply, while valid in isolation, isn't a meaningful response to the parent post. There is no single "global warming prediction", there have been thousands. The parent was speaking to those, not whichever one ends up being closest to the truth. >>consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.

mempko 7y ago
There have been thousands of predictions, but only a subset of them have consensus. The IPCC is that consensus across varying stakeholders. It's looking like the consensus has been too conservative with it's predictions and that's the scary part.
- shakermakr 7y ago
  Science and proof is not based on consensus. It’s not a vote. A best bet. Until then we should of course act towards the most probable act and cause but remain healthy in our skepticism of the effect of global warming and our faith in computer modeling of inherently chaotic systems.
  - rriepe 7y ago
    I see this sentiment a lot. It seems really obvious to me that no, science is actually about consensus now. If you disagree, you're shunned and labeled "dangerous." Maybe this is in conflict with what science should be. But it's also definitely what science is now.

lliamander 7y ago

> Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the timeframe of human lifetimes. The consensus regarding climate change (and human's role in it) has been exagerated[0] [0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falsehood-you-can-check-for.html https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falseh...

admax88q 7y ago
Your source is a random blogspot.com who claims that there's ambiguity because they consider the term "caused by" to be ambiguous. I stopped reading there.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lliamander 7y ago
  David Friedman is an economist at Santa Clara University. The argument relates not to climate science itself, but to the methodology on study measuring the consensus of climate scientists. It's pretty easy to follow.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    David Friedman is a well known libertarian and sometime anarchocapitalist whose moral and political philosophy is notably at odds with the concepts invoked by those who call for large action to tackle climate change. The fact that he's smart doesn't change the conflict of outlooks.
    - lliamander 7y ago
      He happens to believe (or accepts) the IPCC findings, he just disagrees about the economic implications, which is his prerogative.

pdonis 7y ago

> Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening None of these "experts" have a track record of correct predictions that justifies taking their current predictions seriously. Remember we are not talking about the fact that the climate changes: yes, it does, it always has, and it always will (unless at some point in the distant future we learn how to control it accurately). We are talking about the dire predictions of catastrophe that have been made to try to justify spending many trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. Those predictions have never come true. > Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are. To know whether these were useful predictions, we would need to know more details. Did they predict when it would happen? Did they predict how it would spread? A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful. AFAIK no epidemiologists were making predictions much more precise than that. Looking at the actual frequency of epidemics of various sizes in the past, we might very roughly estimate that we will have one serious enough to involve a significant portion of health care resources once every decade or so. But you don't have to be an epidemiologist to do that; you just have to do the simplest possible extrapolation of the data. We had H1N1 about 10 years ago, and SARS about 18 years ago. That's still not a very strong prediction, but it would seem to be as good a basis for public policy discussion (which is to say, a fairly weak one but not negligible) as anything more complicated that has come from epidemiologists.

MattRix 7y ago
>A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful Yes it is, if taken seriously.
- pdonis 7y ago
  What does "taken seriously" mean? We don't even know that from a prediction that vague. If the prediction is "we can expect a serious epidemic once every 10 years", then we have something definite that we can plan for, or at least discuss the costs of planning for. There's no way to discuss the costs of planning for "this will happen, some time in the future" without more detail.

d_burfoot 7y ago

Do you even read these papers before posting? Here's what the Syria paper actually concludes: > In light of the above we can now return to our main questions: is there clear and reliable evidence that climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory factor in the onset of the country's civil war?; and, if and where yes, was it as significant a contributory factor as is claimed in the existing academic and expert literature? On each step of the claimed causal chain, our answers are no. We find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in northeast Syria's 2006/07–2008/09 drought; we find that, while the 2006/07–2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will have contributed to migration, this migration was not on the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation than drought; and we find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment, there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country's civil war.

shakermakr 7y ago

Science isn’t consensus! Proof isn’t determined by “very nearly 100% of scientists agree”. Just ask Copernicus. We don’t vote on scientific proof. Yes evidence leads us to believe climate change is happening, but why and predicting it’s trajectory and effect should be met with scientific standards not scaremongering and “CLIMATE DENIER” hyperbole. If the pursuit of scientific rigour and fact has taught us anything over our history it’s that skepticism and challenging the status quo is necessary and should be welcomed. In today’s climate debate it it’s nothing but derided.

sfkdjf9j3j 7y ago
I think you're not reading his comment in good faith. He's clearly not suggesting that whether or not something is true is decided by a vote of scientists. He's saying that the people who are most familiar with the science overwhelmingly believe that the evidence suggests that global warming is in fact real. Further, people are wise to be skeptical or even dismissive of climate denialist claims because there is a long history of politically motivated people making deliberately but subtly specious arguments for it. Given both the overwhelming consensus and the glut of misinformation, it makes sense to filter it with a very high bar.
throwaway5752 7y ago
You are right. It is decided because not only do almost 100% of climate scientists agree, but there in indisputable proof of the basic method of action (CO2, CH4, H20 greenhouse effects) and we can measure that effect in the lab and then correlated it to measured climate change that normalized for various known climate cycles. The consensus in the fields is driven by the overwhelming evidence of the multidisciplinary field results, experiments, and modeling. The benefit of science (reproducibility, falsifiability) has been hacked by commercial interests. This isn't even in dispute (Heartland, IER, many others). Groups that dispute climate change are all funded by CO2 emitters and the results are coordinated by enormous lobbying and donation campaigns. Flat earth proponents are not operating within a scientific framework of doubt and proof, and neither are climate change deniers.
- pdonis 7y ago

101404 7y ago

As long as everybody who has even a question about the topic is publicly yelled at and insulted, there will be many people who will simply ignore the topic. The main reason global warming isn't taken more seriously is because of the way it is discussed.