8 ms·

Earth's energy imbalance removes almost all doubt from human-made climate change

34 points by CarCooler 5y ago

didibus 5y ago
It's fun to be able to know if the cause is man made, or just bad luck (happening naturally), but what is more important either way is what can we do to reverse or mitigate the negative impact of the changes to the climate? Now I don't think there's many left who deny that the climate is changing at all. But I think there are still some who aren't sure the changes to the climate will have a negative impact on humanity. I think this aspect I don't often hear discussed, after all, the climate changing could be good, or it could be bad, or it could be a mix of those in different places or different use cases. And once we start to agree that some of the changes will be bad, it also becomes important to discuss what could be done to mitigate the negative effects? The actual cause being man-made isn't that important, except possibly as a way to understand how to remediate the change. Like if we stopped all CO2 emissions would it really help? Off course, this is where things will get political, because any policy to attempt to mitigate the negative effects (current or predicted) will inevitably affect someone's bottom line (their money). So expect a lot of push back from the people who'd lose money, and a lot of promotion from the people who would make money. That political dance will make it really hard to figure out which are the actually good solutions and which aren't. Edit: It's true, beyond just financials, policies could also have an impact on people's lifestyles and life affordances and conveniences, that will also play a lot in the political dance.
- Retric 5y ago
  You can’t “solve” climate change via mitigation as the simple act of building infrastructure has an associated cost. The only thing you can do is minimize cost. Canadians buying air conditioners for example would reduce the numbers of dead in coming heat waves, but they’re not free. It’s not even just about economic impact. Mandating all roofs be painted white for example has a tiny mitigating effect, but while the economic cost is low enough to justify people don’t want to be forced to paint their roofs white.
  - didibus 5y ago
    I didn't use the word "solve" anywhere in my comment, can you clarify what you're referring too?
    - Retric 5y ago
      Mitigation means to reduce something. Building a taller levy reduces flooding associated with increased rainfall variability, but a taller levy doesn’t mitigate climate change as you still have not changed rainfall or climate. In other words mitigating impacts isn’t (solving/reducing) climate change.
      - didibus 5y ago
        > Mitigation means to reduce something [...] mitigating impacts isn’t (solving/*reducing*) I don't really understand what you're getting at, it seems you're contradicting yourself? Mitigating the painful impact of climate change to humanity is what we care about. What we need are solutions that can help with that. What about this do you disagree? Edit: Not sure, but after rereading you I think you're thinking by mitigating impact I somehow exclude options of the solution space that would be able to reverse, halt or slow down the change of climate? If so, I am not, stopping the change on climate or controlling how it changes in ways that reduce the negative impact of the current change in climate are definitely valid solutions if they can be implemented and work and have the right trade offs against others etc.
        Retric 5y ago
        > I somehow exclude options of the solution space I really don’t think their are mitigation options. The classic example of an attempt to reverse climate change is to put a large sunshade in space at L1. That sounds like a direct solution as it lowers the global temperature except climate is more complex than just average global temperatures. The ratio of energy released into space at the equator vs the poles changes as you alter the worlds CO2 concentration. A sunshade has a huge range of less obvious knock on effects due to this which alters jet streams, rainfall, etc. Thus, you still end up with a huge shift in climate even if the temperature is returned to normal. Similarly, reducing the rate of CO2 release isn’t mitigation because there isn’t improvement. Gaining weight slower isn’t weight loss. Now, reversing climate change by having net negative human CO2 emissions is an actual solution. Except to reach that point we would need to have zero net emissions at some point which on it’s own stops climate change. Personally, I wouldn’t call building a levy after a flood ends as mitigating the flood, but that’s more of a semantic argument. PS: I know that seems silly, but consider this. Diversified investing is a risk mitigation strategy because risk is actually reduced. On the other hand if if your broke and don’t invest then there isn’t any investments at risk which IMO isn’t risk mitigation. Carbon capture after zero net emissions seems like that to me.
- haskaalo 5y ago
  > Like if we stopped all CO2 emissions would it really help? I assume yes. Right now CO2 emissions outnumbers the rate plants transform CO2 to O2.
  - loopz 5y ago
    No, it would take a hundred year for CO2 concentrations in the troposphere to start going down significantly. Cutting all emissions today won't help us enough as thresholds are being triggered that will release more and more greenhouse gases, reduce earth's albedo and acidify the oceans.
asaddhamani 5y ago
And yet the climate change deniers will find a way. I don’t see why this has to be made into such a political issue when we have hard numbers and objective facts to back up the claim that we are causing global warming, it’s clearly observable. The situation gets worse every passing year and we’re still trying to appease the “doubters”. Concrete and drastic measures need to be taken, it is high time.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  > a political issue > climate change deniers > appease the “doubters” I'm not sure if you're going to convince people about the correctness of a position if you utilize name-calling with negative connontations. That kind of approach is frankly unproductive.
- celeritascelery 5y ago
  In my experience, the reason climate change doubters are so opposed is because of the “concrete and drastic measures” proposed. It has very little to do with “hard numbers and objective facts”. People are reluctant to give up their lifestyle or lose a job for the sake of “global warming”, so they focus on the possibility of it not being real instead.
  - sprafa 5y ago
    69% of Americans believe climate change is real. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans... That's an overwhelming majority. The 'doubt' is media-created FUD being replicated to pretend to be an issue.
    - prophesi 5y ago
      Conversely, 31% of Americans don't believe in climate change, which would be over 100 million people. That's pretty concerning. Though I also completely agree that the division is further exacerbated by the media.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
I'm going to get down voted for not sensationalizing climate change like the doomers want... even though I do believe it is happening.. But what's interesting is that the average temperature right now is estimated to be among the coolest the Earth has ever been. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte... Just because something is happening doesn't automatically make it a scary big deal.
- runlevel1 5y ago
  The linked page discusses it on the scale of millions of years. Humans have only been around for about 300k years and have only had permanent settlements for about the last 10k of them.
- it_citizen 5y ago
  The hottest/coldest day matters but the timescale matters too. Ecosystems (and probably humans) can adapt when those changes happen slowly. But human-made climate change happens way too fast. Here's a great way to visualize things: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    This is a great point and gets down to the fundamental truth of it all. Its 'save the humans' not 'save the planet'. It's a sensational catchphrase. The planets going to be just fine. It's the humans that are screwed. Depending on ones level of misanthropy this may or may not be a big deal to you.
lmilcin 5y ago
There wasn't any doubt for decades. Normal thinking people understand cause and effect. Understand basic science of greenhouse effect. Understand if energy is not reflected to space it is stored and that you can't do that forever with impunity.
- tommiegannert 5y ago
  I mostly agree, but I think this falls under the Black and White fallacy. Just because we understand the mechanism doesn't mean that the magnitude is large enough to matter. It could be that clouds or normal volcano erruptions have such a large impact on trapping energy that greenhouse gases don't matter. What you also have to show is that the basic cause is actually sufficient to explain the effect, and that's difficult when it's on a (planet) scale most people never think about. Many times I see experts spend lots of time explaining the simple casue and effect relationship, only to gloss over the large amount of work they've done to convince themselves that it actually is significant. University PR departments and ads-driven media aren't helping.
biasedbrain 5y ago
One group of scientists, who can't imagine that their self invented model could be wrong, can't imagine any other reasons than man made changes for the results of their model simulation. How you get from that to "removes almost all doubt" is beyond me. Such hyperbole does more damage than good. I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions, so I am sorry, but for me it doesn't remove "almost all doubt".
- jt2190 5y ago
  It’s unfortunate when we glom onto the headline and start arguing from there, because (assuming that NBC follows the traditional newsroom workflow) the scientists didn’t write the headline, and the journalist didn’t write the headline, the news editor did, and the news editor wrote the most attention-grabbing (a.k.a. “clickbait”) thing they could. Now maybe if we dig into the article and the paper we’ll see that the headline is really an honest reflection of the content, but I’ll bet it’s not. Edit: The words “remove all doubt” do not occur in the article, just the headline.
  - em500 5y ago
    I don't disagree with you, but but at the same time I think that if the editor used "Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance" as the headline, probably nobody would have clicked, let alone read it. Heck, it probably wouldn't have made HN either.
    - biasedbrain 5y ago
      And you think it is important that it should have been clicked and read? Why?
- alecst 5y ago
  >I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions So you didn't read the paper, you don't know who wrote it, and you're commenting on a paraphrase in the headline. What exactly are you contributing to the discussion?
8jef 5y ago
Groups and people who oppose climate change apparently do so because their livelihood depends on fossil fuel being produced and sold without much restriction. Then, there's too much money to be made from the effects of climate change. It's already a booming business. Supplying water and air purifying systems, sheltering, organizing future population movements, securing the affluent from the needy masses, etc. While the naïve worry about saving the planet, most people just think about saving their own arses. And for the moment, they are winning.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Chaos is a ladder? Ok, Baelish.
  - 8jef 5y ago
    Exactly. Real life Baelish being: ...

34 points by CarCooler 5y ago

It's fun to be able to know if the cause is man made, or just bad luck (happening naturally), but what is more important either way is what can we do to reverse or mitigate the negative impact of the changes to the climate? Now I don't think there's many left who deny that the climate is changing at all. But I think there are still some who aren't sure the changes to the climate will have a negative impact on humanity. I think this aspect I don't often hear discussed, after all, the climate changing could be good, or it could be bad, or it could be a mix of those in different places or different use cases. And once we start to agree that some of the changes will be bad, it also becomes important to discuss what could be done to mitigate the negative effects? The actual cause being man-made isn't that important, except possibly as a way to understand how to remediate the change. Like if we stopped all CO2 emissions would it really help? Off course, this is where things will get political, because any policy to attempt to mitigate the negative effects (current or predicted) will inevitably affect someone's bottom line (their money). So expect a lot of push back from the people who'd lose money, and a lot of promotion from the people who would make money. That political dance will make it really hard to figure out which are the actually good solutions and which aren't. Edit: It's true, beyond just financials, policies could also have an impact on people's lifestyles and life affordances and conveniences, that will also play a lot in the political dance.

Retric 5y ago
You can’t “solve” climate change via mitigation as the simple act of building infrastructure has an associated cost. The only thing you can do is minimize cost. Canadians buying air conditioners for example would reduce the numbers of dead in coming heat waves, but they’re not free. It’s not even just about economic impact. Mandating all roofs be painted white for example has a tiny mitigating effect, but while the economic cost is low enough to justify people don’t want to be forced to paint their roofs white.
- didibus 5y ago
  I didn't use the word "solve" anywhere in my comment, can you clarify what you're referring too?
  - Retric 5y ago
    Mitigation means to reduce something. Building a taller levy reduces flooding associated with increased rainfall variability, but a taller levy doesn’t mitigate climate change as you still have not changed rainfall or climate. In other words mitigating impacts isn’t (solving/reducing) climate change.
    - didibus 5y ago
      > Mitigation means to reduce something [...] mitigating impacts isn’t (solving/*reducing*) I don't really understand what you're getting at, it seems you're contradicting yourself? Mitigating the painful impact of climate change to humanity is what we care about. What we need are solutions that can help with that. What about this do you disagree? Edit: Not sure, but after rereading you I think you're thinking by mitigating impact I somehow exclude options of the solution space that would be able to reverse, halt or slow down the change of climate? If so, I am not, stopping the change on climate or controlling how it changes in ways that reduce the negative impact of the current change in climate are definitely valid solutions if they can be implemented and work and have the right trade offs against others etc.
      - Retric 5y ago
        > I somehow exclude options of the solution space I really don’t think their are mitigation options. The classic example of an attempt to reverse climate change is to put a large sunshade in space at L1. That sounds like a direct solution as it lowers the global temperature except climate is more complex than just average global temperatures. The ratio of energy released into space at the equator vs the poles changes as you alter the worlds CO2 concentration. A sunshade has a huge range of less obvious knock on effects due to this which alters jet streams, rainfall, etc. Thus, you still end up with a huge shift in climate even if the temperature is returned to normal. Similarly, reducing the rate of CO2 release isn’t mitigation because there isn’t improvement. Gaining weight slower isn’t weight loss. Now, reversing climate change by having net negative human CO2 emissions is an actual solution. Except to reach that point we would need to have zero net emissions at some point which on it’s own stops climate change. Personally, I wouldn’t call building a levy after a flood ends as mitigating the flood, but that’s more of a semantic argument. PS: I know that seems silly, but consider this. Diversified investing is a risk mitigation strategy because risk is actually reduced. On the other hand if if your broke and don’t invest then there isn’t any investments at risk which IMO isn’t risk mitigation. Carbon capture after zero net emissions seems like that to me.
haskaalo 5y ago
> Like if we stopped all CO2 emissions would it really help? I assume yes. Right now CO2 emissions outnumbers the rate plants transform CO2 to O2.
- loopz 5y ago
  No, it would take a hundred year for CO2 concentrations in the troposphere to start going down significantly. Cutting all emissions today won't help us enough as thresholds are being triggered that will release more and more greenhouse gases, reduce earth's albedo and acidify the oceans.

asaddhamani 5y ago

And yet the climate change deniers will find a way. I don’t see why this has to be made into such a political issue when we have hard numbers and objective facts to back up the claim that we are causing global warming, it’s clearly observable. The situation gets worse every passing year and we’re still trying to appease the “doubters”. Concrete and drastic measures need to be taken, it is high time.

OrvalWintermute 5y ago
> a political issue > climate change deniers > appease the “doubters” I'm not sure if you're going to convince people about the correctness of a position if you utilize name-calling with negative connontations. That kind of approach is frankly unproductive.
celeritascelery 5y ago
In my experience, the reason climate change doubters are so opposed is because of the “concrete and drastic measures” proposed. It has very little to do with “hard numbers and objective facts”. People are reluctant to give up their lifestyle or lose a job for the sake of “global warming”, so they focus on the possibility of it not being real instead.
- sprafa 5y ago
  69% of Americans believe climate change is real. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans... That's an overwhelming majority. The 'doubt' is media-created FUD being replicated to pretend to be an issue.
  - prophesi 5y ago
    Conversely, 31% of Americans don't believe in climate change, which would be over 100 million people. That's pretty concerning. Though I also completely agree that the division is further exacerbated by the media.

nickthemagicman 5y ago

I'm going to get down voted for not sensationalizing climate change like the doomers want... even though I do believe it is happening.. But what's interesting is that the average temperature right now is estimated to be among the coolest the Earth has ever been. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte... Just because something is happening doesn't automatically make it a scary big deal.

runlevel1 5y ago
The linked page discusses it on the scale of millions of years. Humans have only been around for about 300k years and have only had permanent settlements for about the last 10k of them.
it_citizen 5y ago
The hottest/coldest day matters but the timescale matters too. Ecosystems (and probably humans) can adapt when those changes happen slowly. But human-made climate change happens way too fast. Here's a great way to visualize things: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  This is a great point and gets down to the fundamental truth of it all. Its 'save the humans' not 'save the planet'. It's a sensational catchphrase. The planets going to be just fine. It's the humans that are screwed. Depending on ones level of misanthropy this may or may not be a big deal to you.

lmilcin 5y ago

There wasn't any doubt for decades. Normal thinking people understand cause and effect. Understand basic science of greenhouse effect. Understand if energy is not reflected to space it is stored and that you can't do that forever with impunity.

tommiegannert 5y ago
I mostly agree, but I think this falls under the Black and White fallacy. Just because we understand the mechanism doesn't mean that the magnitude is large enough to matter. It could be that clouds or normal volcano erruptions have such a large impact on trapping energy that greenhouse gases don't matter. What you also have to show is that the basic cause is actually sufficient to explain the effect, and that's difficult when it's on a (planet) scale most people never think about. Many times I see experts spend lots of time explaining the simple casue and effect relationship, only to gloss over the large amount of work they've done to convince themselves that it actually is significant. University PR departments and ads-driven media aren't helping.

biasedbrain 5y ago

One group of scientists, who can't imagine that their self invented model could be wrong, can't imagine any other reasons than man made changes for the results of their model simulation. How you get from that to "removes almost all doubt" is beyond me. Such hyperbole does more damage than good. I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions, so I am sorry, but for me it doesn't remove "almost all doubt".

jt2190 5y ago
It’s unfortunate when we glom onto the headline and start arguing from there, because (assuming that NBC follows the traditional newsroom workflow) the scientists didn’t write the headline, and the journalist didn’t write the headline, the news editor did, and the news editor wrote the most attention-grabbing (a.k.a. “clickbait”) thing they could. Now maybe if we dig into the article and the paper we’ll see that the headline is really an honest reflection of the content, but I’ll bet it’s not. Edit: The words “remove all doubt” do not occur in the article, just the headline.
- em500 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you, but but at the same time I think that if the editor used "Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance" as the headline, probably nobody would have clicked, let alone read it. Heck, it probably wouldn't have made HN either.
  - biasedbrain 5y ago
    And you think it is important that it should have been clicked and read? Why?
alecst 5y ago
>I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions So you didn't read the paper, you don't know who wrote it, and you're commenting on a paraphrase in the headline. What exactly are you contributing to the discussion?

8jef 5y ago

Groups and people who oppose climate change apparently do so because their livelihood depends on fossil fuel being produced and sold without much restriction. Then, there's too much money to be made from the effects of climate change. It's already a booming business. Supplying water and air purifying systems, sheltering, organizing future population movements, securing the affluent from the needy masses, etc. While the naïve worry about saving the planet, most people just think about saving their own arses. And for the moment, they are winning.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Chaos is a ladder? Ok, Baelish.
- 8jef 5y ago
  Exactly. Real life Baelish being: ...