14 ms·

> but I suspect we'll see, like many climate estimates, that number ends up being a bit too conservative. Good. When scientists and politicians publicize scar

> but I suspect we'll see, like many climate estimates, that number ends up being a bit too conservative. Good. When scientists and politicians publicize scary, doomsday numbers that aren't ever realized, the public's natural response is to be more critical of the things those people say in the future. That sort of thing results in climate deniers, anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, and a whole slew of conspiracy theories. If you want people to take climate change seriously, you need to publish conservative numbers and ring the bell when things end up worse than you predicted. Include a word of caution that things could be worse when you publish the conservative numbers, but don't start out with the worst-case scenario if you want to be taken seriously in the future. Of course you can be too conservative with your predictions, but I don't see a lot of that except as a knee-jerk reaction to the overly-alarmist predictions.

yongjik 6y ago
I agree with you that climate scientists are being too conservative, but I fail to see why that's good. Imagine an aviation engineer being "too conservative" with potential dangers (i.e., accept too much risk) because if you raise an alarm and it turns out to be not as bad as predicted, you will have cost the company $$$ and hurt your career. Would you call that a good thing?
- CivBase 6y ago
  Funny enough, I actually am a software engineer for avionics. Those are not reasonable comparisons. Climate change predictions amount to milestones on our slow journey to oblivion. Ideally we want to be spot-on with all our predictions, but being on the "too conservative" side doesn't immediately put human lives at risk.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  My high school science teacher told us all the world economy would collapse in 10 years because the oil would run out. It didn't. My classmates remembered -- and updated their priors accordingly. At this point, it's pretty clear that despite his good intentions he hurt the cause. Fundamental attribution error tempts you into believing that it's OK to lie for a good reason. Others see it differently.
  - stripline 6y ago
    Tell your high school science teacher to read The Doomsday Myth. https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Myth-Economic-Institution-Publication/dp/081797962X https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Myth-Economic-Institution-Pu...
jjoonathan 6y ago
Yes. Climate change is catastrophic, but "human extinction by 2030" is absurd. If we don't treat it as such, reasonable people stop listening.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Could you post a link to a reasonably reliable source (that is, scientific or government backed) that says this? thanks.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    No reasonably reliable source says it. That's why I called it absurd. It's a "kids these days" thing (parent post was about scientists and politicians -- this isn't off topic, as politicians are involved, but kids account for the numbers). They call themselves "doomers," and though some of them base their predictions of doom firmly in reality, there's a large faction that doesn't. "Human extinction by 2030" (or its predecessor, "human extinction is inevitable by 2030") are memes in that circle. They cross-pollinate, as memes do, so you might have seen a few, but may not have internalized that a double-digit percentage of kids believe wholeheartedly in them. Back when I was in high school, the eco-panic 10 year prediction was that oil would run out and the world economy would collapse. It didn't. I see some of my classmates on facebook from time to time. They remembered this instance of crying wolf and updated their priors accordingly. Now they ignore legitimate climate worries. It's unfortunate.
    - thedmstdmstdmst 6y ago
      I think the "Human extinction by 2030" is a confusion of what is being claimed by serious people. If the current trend continues and nothing done by 2030 the repercussions will be so severe to the environment they threaten future organized human existence. So basically we still have time to avoid the worst outcome, the loss of the ability for organized human existence. Not that we will all be dead by then.
      - 6y ago
bambataa 6y ago
...So what climate scientists have been doing for decades? Yet they were still ignored. So people state more alarming predictions and get told “if only you’d been more moderate and reasonable”. The truth is that most (Western) people simply don’t care that much.
- CivBase 6y ago
  > So what climate scientists have been doing for decades? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-free_summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-fre... > Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge is among these scientists; Wadhams in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear," Wadhams and several others have noted that climate model predictions have been overly conservative regarding sea ice decline. A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, predicted removal of summer ice by 2013; subsequently, in 2013, Maslowski predicted 2016 ±3 years. Looks to me like there have been plenty of overly-alarming predictions about a Blue Ocean Event over the last two decades.
  - claydavisss 6y ago
    > in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear And what could the human race have done in 2014 to prevent that?
  - Daishiman 6y ago
    That's not overly-alarmy; it's a demonstration of the astounding capabilities of climate models to describe incomprehensibly complex phenomena to a remarkable degree.
    - julienb_sea 6y ago
      Given the references in the comment you are replying to, I think more people might interpret as a demonstration of the astounding degree that climate models can totally miss the mark. And calls into question the degree to which we should base policy decisions - with major negative consequences - on those models.
hannasanarion 6y ago
Where are the "alarmist doomsday predictions" that never came true? Climate Change deniers claim that these exist all the time, but I have never seen an actual example. Predictions over the last 20-30 years have been almost universally spot-on.
- CivBase 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-free_summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-fre... > Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge is among these scientists; Wadhams in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear," Wadhams and several others have noted that climate model predictions have been overly conservative regarding sea ice decline. A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, predicted removal of summer ice by 2013; subsequently, in 2013, Maslowski predicted 2016 ±3 years.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    I think you should have included the preceding line explaining that 'ice free' is a synonym for under '1m square km of ice.' Even then the wikipedia article is abstracting away a lot of nuance in the reporting (fortunately easily accessible through the excellent citations). This year the minimum extent is about 2.4m sqkm and the downward trend is steady. If only people would devote half as much energy to debunking denialists as they do scolding 'alarmists'.
- simonsarris 6y ago
  > Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013' (2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm > Warming expert: Only decade left to act in time (2006) https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14834318 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14834318 > (1989) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. > He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
majormajor 6y ago
> If you want people to take climate change seriously, you need to publish conservative numbers and ring the bell when things end up worse than you predicted. Include a word of caution that things could be worse when you publish the conservative numbers, but don't start out with the worst-case scenario if you want to be taken seriously in the future. Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"? This seems to give up on any rational attempt at handling risk solely because you're giving in to the least rational instincts of the herd... Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability. No, that doesn't mean that we (and especially leaders) don't have a responsibility to do better.
- CivBase 6y ago
  > Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"? No. It's basically saying "do not erode the public's trust in you by making frightening predictions that probably wont come true". > Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability. I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability. I'd be much less concerned about overly-alarming predictions if they were published with an associated probability and margin of error.
  - moultano 6y ago
    I don't understand the expectation that every prediction from a climate scientist should be able to hit inherently stochastic dates precisely. On the scale of geologic time and the level of inherent randomness and epistemic uncertainty, predicting things within a few decades is amazing. > I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability. Honestly, if this is true, then it seems like the only thing you have ever read about climate are popular press articles. The error bars on every single prediction are on every graph or study that climate scientists produce. Mean sensitivity itself still has large error bars, but beyond that the amount of emissions we produce is inherently unpredictable. It is not possible for a climate scientist to say with any certainty how much coal we are going to be burning in 40 years.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tzs 6y ago
It's worse than that. If you say something bad will happen unless we do something about it, and then we do something about it and it doesn't happen, then years later when you say something else bad will happen unless we do something about that...people will say the earlier bad thing didn't happen so why should we believe you this time? For example, in the 50s and 60s we had rapidly rising levels of smog and other particulate matter pollution in the US, and scientists warned that bad things would happen if we didn't get this under control. We did get it under control, and indeed massively reduced it, and the bad things did not come to pass. And now, bringing up those predictions from back then and saying that since they did not come to pass we shouldn't worry about current predictions on climate change or do anything about them is a staple of climate change denial arguments.
- Afforess 6y ago
  >We did get it under control, and indeed massively reduced it, and the bad things did not come to pass. Checked Asthma rates lately in the United States? 1 in 8? Higher? That is not normal, and indeed a "bad thing".
BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
> Good. No, not good. Just because it will make people take climate change seriously, this is not, by any measure, good. It's a dangerous and irreversible change and if most people want to deny climate change or downplay it, it shouldn't take a catastrophe to change their minds. The data is there, just because people find the prospect of awful things happening in 2030 not scary enough, doesn't mean we should be happy these things will happen sooner. COVID probably changed a lot of people's minds on healthcare and politics. Would we classify that as 'good' as well?
- CivBase 6y ago
  You assume that making less conservative, more alarming predictions will stop the bad things from happening as soon. But how do you enact change at a national level when the voting population doesn't trust you? And why do you think I'd be happy if bad things happen sooner?
doktrin 6y ago
So you're saying that conspiracy theorists - who regularly consume news from sources that outright fabricate stuff - are being driven to believe this literal fiction because a climate model was off by a few years?
- CivBase 6y ago
  There are all sorts of conspiracy theories - some based entirely in fiction like you suggest. However, the most powerful ones are based in mostly truth. "The earth goes through natural warming and cooling cycles." "This year has been abnormally cold." "They said X thing was going to happen years ago, but it still hasn't." It's hard enough to address these legitimate doubts without creating even more ourselves.

yongjik 6y ago

I agree with you that climate scientists are being too conservative, but I fail to see why that's good. Imagine an aviation engineer being "too conservative" with potential dangers (i.e., accept too much risk) because if you raise an alarm and it turns out to be not as bad as predicted, you will have cost the company $$$ and hurt your career. Would you call that a good thing?

CivBase 6y ago
Funny enough, I actually am a software engineer for avionics. Those are not reasonable comparisons. Climate change predictions amount to milestones on our slow journey to oblivion. Ideally we want to be spot-on with all our predictions, but being on the "too conservative" side doesn't immediately put human lives at risk.
jjoonathan 6y ago
My high school science teacher told us all the world economy would collapse in 10 years because the oil would run out. It didn't. My classmates remembered -- and updated their priors accordingly. At this point, it's pretty clear that despite his good intentions he hurt the cause. Fundamental attribution error tempts you into believing that it's OK to lie for a good reason. Others see it differently.
- stripline 6y ago
  Tell your high school science teacher to read The Doomsday Myth. https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Myth-Economic-Institution-Publication/dp/081797962X https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Myth-Economic-Institution-Pu...

jjoonathan 6y ago

Yes. Climate change is catastrophic, but "human extinction by 2030" is absurd. If we don't treat it as such, reasonable people stop listening.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
Could you post a link to a reasonably reliable source (that is, scientific or government backed) that says this? thanks.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  No reasonably reliable source says it. That's why I called it absurd. It's a "kids these days" thing (parent post was about scientists and politicians -- this isn't off topic, as politicians are involved, but kids account for the numbers). They call themselves "doomers," and though some of them base their predictions of doom firmly in reality, there's a large faction that doesn't. "Human extinction by 2030" (or its predecessor, "human extinction is inevitable by 2030") are memes in that circle. They cross-pollinate, as memes do, so you might have seen a few, but may not have internalized that a double-digit percentage of kids believe wholeheartedly in them. Back when I was in high school, the eco-panic 10 year prediction was that oil would run out and the world economy would collapse. It didn't. I see some of my classmates on facebook from time to time. They remembered this instance of crying wolf and updated their priors accordingly. Now they ignore legitimate climate worries. It's unfortunate.
  - thedmstdmstdmst 6y ago
    I think the "Human extinction by 2030" is a confusion of what is being claimed by serious people. If the current trend continues and nothing done by 2030 the repercussions will be so severe to the environment they threaten future organized human existence. So basically we still have time to avoid the worst outcome, the loss of the ability for organized human existence. Not that we will all be dead by then.
    - 6y ago

bambataa 6y ago

...So what climate scientists have been doing for decades? Yet they were still ignored. So people state more alarming predictions and get told “if only you’d been more moderate and reasonable”. The truth is that most (Western) people simply don’t care that much.

CivBase 6y ago
> So what climate scientists have been doing for decades? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-free_summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-fre... > Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge is among these scientists; Wadhams in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear," Wadhams and several others have noted that climate model predictions have been overly conservative regarding sea ice decline. A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, predicted removal of summer ice by 2013; subsequently, in 2013, Maslowski predicted 2016 ±3 years. Looks to me like there have been plenty of overly-alarming predictions about a Blue Ocean Event over the last two decades.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  > in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear And what could the human race have done in 2014 to prevent that?
- Daishiman 6y ago
  That's not overly-alarmy; it's a demonstration of the astounding capabilities of climate models to describe incomprehensibly complex phenomena to a remarkable degree.
  - julienb_sea 6y ago
    Given the references in the comment you are replying to, I think more people might interpret as a demonstration of the astounding degree that climate models can totally miss the mark. And calls into question the degree to which we should base policy decisions - with major negative consequences - on those models.

hannasanarion 6y ago

Where are the "alarmist doomsday predictions" that never came true? Climate Change deniers claim that these exist all the time, but I have never seen an actual example. Predictions over the last 20-30 years have been almost universally spot-on.

CivBase 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-free_summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-fre... > Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge is among these scientists; Wadhams in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear," Wadhams and several others have noted that climate model predictions have been overly conservative regarding sea ice decline. A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, predicted removal of summer ice by 2013; subsequently, in 2013, Maslowski predicted 2016 ±3 years.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  I think you should have included the preceding line explaining that 'ice free' is a synonym for under '1m square km of ice.' Even then the wikipedia article is abstracting away a lot of nuance in the reporting (fortunately easily accessible through the excellent citations). This year the minimum extent is about 2.4m sqkm and the downward trend is steady. If only people would devote half as much energy to debunking denialists as they do scolding 'alarmists'.
simonsarris 6y ago
> Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013' (2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm > Warming expert: Only decade left to act in time (2006) https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14834318 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14834318 > (1989) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. > He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

majormajor 6y ago

> If you want people to take climate change seriously, you need to publish conservative numbers and ring the bell when things end up worse than you predicted. Include a word of caution that things could be worse when you publish the conservative numbers, but don't start out with the worst-case scenario if you want to be taken seriously in the future. Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"? This seems to give up on any rational attempt at handling risk solely because you're giving in to the least rational instincts of the herd... Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability. No, that doesn't mean that we (and especially leaders) don't have a responsibility to do better.

CivBase 6y ago
> Isn't that basically saying "just pray that it's not that bad, and that you can react fast enough if it is bad"? No. It's basically saying "do not erode the public's trust in you by making frightening predictions that probably wont come true". > Yes, people are bad at dealing with probability. I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability. I'd be much less concerned about overly-alarming predictions if they were published with an associated probability and margin of error.
- moultano 6y ago
  I don't understand the expectation that every prediction from a climate scientist should be able to hit inherently stochastic dates precisely. On the scale of geologic time and the level of inherent randomness and epistemic uncertainty, predicting things within a few decades is amazing. > I rarely see climate change projections tempered by probability. Honestly, if this is true, then it seems like the only thing you have ever read about climate are popular press articles. The error bars on every single prediction are on every graph or study that climate scientists produce. Mean sensitivity itself still has large error bars, but beyond that the amount of emissions we produce is inherently unpredictable. It is not possible for a climate scientist to say with any certainty how much coal we are going to be burning in 40 years.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tzs 6y ago

It's worse than that. If you say something bad will happen unless we do something about it, and then we do something about it and it doesn't happen, then years later when you say something else bad will happen unless we do something about that...people will say the earlier bad thing didn't happen so why should we believe you this time? For example, in the 50s and 60s we had rapidly rising levels of smog and other particulate matter pollution in the US, and scientists warned that bad things would happen if we didn't get this under control. We did get it under control, and indeed massively reduced it, and the bad things did not come to pass. And now, bringing up those predictions from back then and saying that since they did not come to pass we shouldn't worry about current predictions on climate change or do anything about them is a staple of climate change denial arguments.

Afforess 6y ago
>We did get it under control, and indeed massively reduced it, and the bad things did not come to pass. Checked Asthma rates lately in the United States? 1 in 8? Higher? That is not normal, and indeed a "bad thing".

BelleOfTheBall 6y ago

> Good. No, not good. Just because it will make people take climate change seriously, this is not, by any measure, good. It's a dangerous and irreversible change and if most people want to deny climate change or downplay it, it shouldn't take a catastrophe to change their minds. The data is there, just because people find the prospect of awful things happening in 2030 not scary enough, doesn't mean we should be happy these things will happen sooner. COVID probably changed a lot of people's minds on healthcare and politics. Would we classify that as 'good' as well?

CivBase 6y ago
You assume that making less conservative, more alarming predictions will stop the bad things from happening as soon. But how do you enact change at a national level when the voting population doesn't trust you? And why do you think I'd be happy if bad things happen sooner?

doktrin 6y ago

So you're saying that conspiracy theorists - who regularly consume news from sources that outright fabricate stuff - are being driven to believe this literal fiction because a climate model was off by a few years?

CivBase 6y ago
There are all sorts of conspiracy theories - some based entirely in fiction like you suggest. However, the most powerful ones are based in mostly truth. "The earth goes through natural warming and cooling cycles." "This year has been abnormally cold." "They said X thing was going to happen years ago, but it still hasn't." It's hard enough to address these legitimate doubts without creating even more ourselves.