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Just a friendly reminder that the consensus estimates about climate change have been reasonably accurate. Not perfect but decent enough as decision making tools

Just a friendly reminder that the consensus estimates about climate change have been reasonably accurate. Not perfect but decent enough as decision making tools. See for example the IPCC report from 1990: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report There have certainly been very dramatic (all overly well reported) warnings representing a minority of researchers which have not been accurate. These should not invalidate the whole lot of predictions.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Sure. And while opinion polls are lagging, almost everyone in decision-making positions is on board with the minimal predictions in this report. (Even a lot of people normally considered climate change deniers are on board - according to Wikipedia, the report doesn't rule out that climate change is largely driven by natural variability!)
- pdonis 7y ago
  > the minimal predictions in this report Those minimal predictions don't justify spending trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. They basically say "the climate is going to change, so be ready to deal with it".
  - chimprich 7y ago
    This is a false economy. Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects. Switching to low- and zero-carbon fuels, achieving greater efficiencies and so on, is expensive, but still a lot cheaper than e.g. moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding, dealing with huge numbers of migrants, dealing with massive changes in agriculture, worse natural disasters, and so on. Plus even if you deal with the effects for decades, your problem has not gone away. The situation is worse, and the planet is still heating.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects. Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming, plus economic and sociological models that have even less predictive power. > moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. How is that all of a sudden a climate emergency? > your problem has not gone away I've already said climate change is something we're always going to have to deal with, just as humans have had to deal with it during all of human history. The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.
      - chimprich 7y ago
        > Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming Models in general haven't overpredicted warming, as several people in this discussion have tried to educate you. > If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. I'm not at all clear what your point is here. It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem. Surely that can't be it though, because that makes no logical sense. From an economic sense it's just as expensive. > The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous. A strawman argument. That is not what I wrote. The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet. Dealing with the effects is also much more difficult now compared to most of human history. When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging. It's just a lot easier and cheaper to avoid breaking something in the first place than it is to try to fix it afterwards.
        pdonis 7y ago
        > Models in general haven't overpredicted warming Yes, they have. We're obviously not going to agree on this point. > It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem. No, I'm arguing that the problem is not new, and it's not a climate problem. It's a problem of misgovernment and has been around for quite a while. But that doesn't stop cities and countries to try to get the rest of us to pay for fixing it by trying to claim that it's a cimate problem. > The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet. This is ludicrous. Nobody has the data to back this up, and there is plenty of data contradicting it. > When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging. When the "problem" you're talking about is a degree of so of temperature rise and a foot or two of sea level rise over the course of a century, to call dealing with it "challenging" is an egregious misuse of language. This is simply not that big a deal compared to all the other things we humans have to deal with. And the things we will need to do anyway to deal with those far more challenging problems--like how to bring billions of people out of poverty and how to make our infrastructure more robust--will end up adapting us to the change anyway. If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody regardless of what happens with the climate, instead of on a huge CO2 mitigation boondoggle that will transfer a lot of money from your and my pockets to the pockets of politicians and "green" business executives, but won't actually help much of anything.
pdonis 7y ago
> the IPCC report from 1990 Which overpredicted the warming that has occurred from 1990 to now (though its predictions overall were certainly much milder than the catastrophic ones that are being trumpeted as reasons to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation). Not to mention that there have been four more assessment reports since then (and the sixth is in the works now), and the more alarmist ones (in particular the third and fourth) are the ones that climate change alarmists are basing their predictions of catastrophe on. (Even though the fifth report actually backed off in some respects, particularly in admitting--though as obliquely as possible--that the climate model predictions were not matching the data.)
- torpfactory 7y ago
  Yes, but it's not like the 1990 model was massively wrong or something. The (now historical) observations are riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990, but even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century. All models are wrong and some are useful. Even a 3C rise would be pretty bad. Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models?
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > The (now historical) observations are riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990 No, they're lower than the low end of the predicted range. Plus, the low end of the predicted range was based on assumed CO2 emissions that were significantly lower than what has actually occurred since then. So we have more CO2 than predicted and less warming than predicted even from the lower than actual CO2. > even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century That's not 3C rise from where we are now. It's not even 3C rise from where we were in 1990. It's 3C rise from the "pre-industrial" temperature, i.e., the mid to late 1700s, i.e., in the middle of the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have already risen (largely due simply to coming out of the Little Ice Age) by about 1.6C since then, so that low estimate is about 1.4C rise from now to 2100. And, as noted, actual temperature rise is running below the low end estimate. We're looking at roughly a degree C rise in a century. The idea that humans cannot adapt to that so we have to spend trillions of dollars to stop emitting CO2 right now is laughable. > Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models? We should not be using the models to drive public policy decisions with multi-trillion dollar costs. They're simply not good enough for that.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

Sure. And while opinion polls are lagging, almost everyone in decision-making positions is on board with the minimal predictions in this report. (Even a lot of people normally considered climate change deniers are on board - according to Wikipedia, the report doesn't rule out that climate change is largely driven by natural variability!)

pdonis 7y ago
> the minimal predictions in this report Those minimal predictions don't justify spending trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. They basically say "the climate is going to change, so be ready to deal with it".
- chimprich 7y ago
  This is a false economy. Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects. Switching to low- and zero-carbon fuels, achieving greater efficiencies and so on, is expensive, but still a lot cheaper than e.g. moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding, dealing with huge numbers of migrants, dealing with massive changes in agriculture, worse natural disasters, and so on. Plus even if you deal with the effects for decades, your problem has not gone away. The situation is worse, and the planet is still heating.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects. Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming, plus economic and sociological models that have even less predictive power. > moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. How is that all of a sudden a climate emergency? > your problem has not gone away I've already said climate change is something we're always going to have to deal with, just as humans have had to deal with it during all of human history. The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.
    - chimprich 7y ago
      > Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming Models in general haven't overpredicted warming, as several people in this discussion have tried to educate you. > If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. I'm not at all clear what your point is here. It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem. Surely that can't be it though, because that makes no logical sense. From an economic sense it's just as expensive. > The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous. A strawman argument. That is not what I wrote. The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet. Dealing with the effects is also much more difficult now compared to most of human history. When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging. It's just a lot easier and cheaper to avoid breaking something in the first place than it is to try to fix it afterwards.
      - pdonis 7y ago
        > Models in general haven't overpredicted warming Yes, they have. We're obviously not going to agree on this point. > It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem. No, I'm arguing that the problem is not new, and it's not a climate problem. It's a problem of misgovernment and has been around for quite a while. But that doesn't stop cities and countries to try to get the rest of us to pay for fixing it by trying to claim that it's a cimate problem. > The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet. This is ludicrous. Nobody has the data to back this up, and there is plenty of data contradicting it. > When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging. When the "problem" you're talking about is a degree of so of temperature rise and a foot or two of sea level rise over the course of a century, to call dealing with it "challenging" is an egregious misuse of language. This is simply not that big a deal compared to all the other things we humans have to deal with. And the things we will need to do anyway to deal with those far more challenging problems--like how to bring billions of people out of poverty and how to make our infrastructure more robust--will end up adapting us to the change anyway. If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody regardless of what happens with the climate, instead of on a huge CO2 mitigation boondoggle that will transfer a lot of money from your and my pockets to the pockets of politicians and "green" business executives, but won't actually help much of anything.

pdonis 7y ago

> the IPCC report from 1990 Which overpredicted the warming that has occurred from 1990 to now (though its predictions overall were certainly much milder than the catastrophic ones that are being trumpeted as reasons to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation). Not to mention that there have been four more assessment reports since then (and the sixth is in the works now), and the more alarmist ones (in particular the third and fourth) are the ones that climate change alarmists are basing their predictions of catastrophe on. (Even though the fifth report actually backed off in some respects, particularly in admitting--though as obliquely as possible--that the climate model predictions were not matching the data.)

torpfactory 7y ago
Yes, but it's not like the 1990 model was massively wrong or something. The (now historical) observations are riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990, but even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century. All models are wrong and some are useful. Even a 3C rise would be pretty bad. Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models?
- pdonis 7y ago
  > The (now historical) observations are riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990 No, they're lower than the low end of the predicted range. Plus, the low end of the predicted range was based on assumed CO2 emissions that were significantly lower than what has actually occurred since then. So we have more CO2 than predicted and less warming than predicted even from the lower than actual CO2. > even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century That's not 3C rise from where we are now. It's not even 3C rise from where we were in 1990. It's 3C rise from the "pre-industrial" temperature, i.e., the mid to late 1700s, i.e., in the middle of the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have already risen (largely due simply to coming out of the Little Ice Age) by about 1.6C since then, so that low estimate is about 1.4C rise from now to 2100. And, as noted, actual temperature rise is running below the low end estimate. We're looking at roughly a degree C rise in a century. The idea that humans cannot adapt to that so we have to spend trillions of dollars to stop emitting CO2 right now is laughable. > Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models? We should not be using the models to drive public policy decisions with multi-trillion dollar costs. They're simply not good enough for that.