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Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact. At that point, numerous studies dating back to the 50s h

Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact. At that point, numerous studies dating back to the 50s had confirmed the effect, and there was mostly bipartisan support for environment preserving legislation. So oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter, calling it "just a theory": https://www.climatefiles.com/denial-groups/ice-ad-campaign/ https://www.climatefiles.com/denial-groups/ice-ad-campaign/ And now we live in a world where you simply can't talk about climate science without running into spin and having to sink to that level to counter it.

twofornone 5y ago
This is misleading. No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact". We have evidence which suggests that climate is changing and humans may be responsible. But the global climate system is complex, constantly oscillating on periods ranging from days to eons, and our data is sparse, especially going back 20+ years. The certainty behind this consensus has been drastically overstated by ideologues who have taken it upon themselves to prioritize action over accurate reporting. There fundamentally is no proof that the changing climate will be catastrophic or result in runaway, especially when our historic temperature data is not fine grained enough to measure abrupt changes on the scale of 100 years. Though it is taboo to discuss, there is in fact evidence that such a rapid change is not unprecedented, that the earth has been hotter than it is now in the past, and that past sudden temperature swings clearly did not result in a venuslike earth. The fact that virtually all major climate change model forecasts published in the last decade or two have significantly overpredicted temperature increases is telling of the bias in mainstream climate science. I similarly take issue with this revisionist history wherein oil companies "knew" of climate change 60 years ago and deliberately ignored the danger. A claim of catastrophic anthropogenic terraforming requires evidence collection and modeling capability that simply did not exist 60 years ago, and given the periodic nature of climate, we simply will not know if this warming will indeed continue and/or become catastrophic without a lens into the future. Our current modeling capabilities are still inadequate.
- derriz 5y ago
  Anthropogenic global warming is scientific orthodoxy at this stage. You vastly underestimate the amount of evidence there is for this.[1] You're wrong about climate change models. The first 1990 one was based on a simplistic energy balance model and did overestimate warming. But all the later models have proven to have been uncannily accurate. [2] [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-cycles-cant-explain-earths-current-warming/ https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
  - twofornone 5y ago
    The fact that it is indeed an orthodoxy is why the research is blatantly one sided. There is far less interest in, for example, unlocking millions of square miles of fertile, arable land. Instead its all doomsday - and the issue is systemic, publish or perish and orthodoxy are a dangerous combination, for any field.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  Ironic opening statement, there. > No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact". You talk about "scientific fact" and "proof" like this is mathematics. The best empirical science can do is to gather as much data as possible and arrive at a probability that a conclusion is true given what is known. And what is known is that there is a greater than 99% chance that global warming is anthropogenic: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1QE1ZU https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1QE1ZU (Actual paper is paywalled and if you cared you'd go find it) You're right that our instruments and data have only gotten better over the last 70 years, but studies from the 50s conducted by oil companies already suspected that that global warming was happening and experimentally confirmed that CO2 released by fossils fuels were a likely contributing factor: https://www.slideshare.net/SimoneBoccuccia/cabon-dioxide-echange-between-atmosphere-and-ocean-and-the-question-of-an-increase-of-atmospheric-co2-during-the-past-decades https://www.slideshare.net/SimoneBoccuccia/cabon-dioxide-ech... So much for "revisionist history". But all of that is beside my point about media propaganda, much of which you are simply reciting in your own comment. My point is that the propaganda works, so thank you for taking the time to illustrate that.
exporectomy 5y ago
It is just a theory. There's no such thing as "scientific fact". That's simply not what science is capable of, and you're showing you're anti-science by promoting those ideas.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  You're being pedantic about terminology which I've already demonstrated my understanding of in this thread. In the context of the general populous, "scientific fact" means that a random lay person on the street, despite not doing any of the research themselves or reading any of the literature on the matter, accepts the conclusions of the scientific community as the truth. It's a scientific fact that the world is round even though most of us have not taken any measurements to verify this, and almost none of us have been to space. We just trust the wealth of data produced by professionals in several different domains which all point to the same conclusion. You're also being disingenuous if you think "just a theory" isn't a phrase constructed to mislead. Your comment implies that you understand that a theory is literally the strongest model that science can give us about a topic, but saying something is "just X" implies that there is something else beyond X. So which is it? Is a theory as strong as it gets, or can science do better? If it can't do better, then never use the phrase "just a theory".
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    I agree about the "just". You're right. It's about the same level of misleading as "scientific fact". People used to use "just a theory" to discredit relativity or evolution, exploiting the fact that the alternative terms like laws of physics or truth sounded stronger even though they weren't. I still think it's harmful to general understanding to put any scientific knowledge on a pedestal of being unchallengeable fact. How can we know where we might be wrong? The earth is round, is it? What if that's just a slice of it in 3 dimensions and it's actually some other higher dimensional shape? Future people might laugh at our simplistic belief based on only seeing a little part of it - similar to ancients believing the Earth was flat because it was flat as far as they could see.
pdonis 5y ago
> Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact. No, they didn't. In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". The "global warming" narrative wasn't really being pushed until the late 1980s, and it wasn't until well into the 90s that discussion of the overall issue of what the climate might be like in the future was widespread. > oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter, So did global warming activists--in fact they did it sooner (what started the "global warming" debate in the late 1980s was a Congressional hearing purposely staged by activists to occur during a summer heat wave--and the A/C for the hearing room just "happened" to not be working that day). We are awash in propaganda on all sides of this issue.
- magicalist 5y ago
  > In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". No, there was much more uncertainty in the 70s, but the idea that global cooling was even a moderately dominant idea was a narrative constructed largely in the 2000s. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > there was much more uncertainty in the 70s Tell that to all the people that were talking about the next Ice Age coming. They seemed pretty confident. However, even if we accept "much more uncertainty in the 70s", you're agreeing with me that the post I was responding to, which said that global warming was accepted as "scientific fact" back then, was wrong.
    - teawrecks 5y ago
      You're falling prey to yet another disinformation tactic: "Is it warming or is it cooling? Make up your mind science!" The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate by burning fossil fuels. What has always been uncertain is what impact this would have on the environment/animals/humans long term. Will it heat everyone up? Will it trigger an ice age? Didn't matter, everyone agreed that more information was needed and we had to take action UNTIL a lot of money went into dovetailing that uncertainty into doubt about the whole thing. And here we are still arguing at square one 30 years later.

twofornone 5y ago

This is misleading. No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact". We have evidence which suggests that climate is changing and humans may be responsible. But the global climate system is complex, constantly oscillating on periods ranging from days to eons, and our data is sparse, especially going back 20+ years. The certainty behind this consensus has been drastically overstated by ideologues who have taken it upon themselves to prioritize action over accurate reporting. There fundamentally is no proof that the changing climate will be catastrophic or result in runaway, especially when our historic temperature data is not fine grained enough to measure abrupt changes on the scale of 100 years. Though it is taboo to discuss, there is in fact evidence that such a rapid change is not unprecedented, that the earth has been hotter than it is now in the past, and that past sudden temperature swings clearly did not result in a venuslike earth. The fact that virtually all major climate change model forecasts published in the last decade or two have significantly overpredicted temperature increases is telling of the bias in mainstream climate science. I similarly take issue with this revisionist history wherein oil companies "knew" of climate change 60 years ago and deliberately ignored the danger. A claim of catastrophic anthropogenic terraforming requires evidence collection and modeling capability that simply did not exist 60 years ago, and given the periodic nature of climate, we simply will not know if this warming will indeed continue and/or become catastrophic without a lens into the future. Our current modeling capabilities are still inadequate.

derriz 5y ago
Anthropogenic global warming is scientific orthodoxy at this stage. You vastly underestimate the amount of evidence there is for this.[1] You're wrong about climate change models. The first 1990 one was based on a simplistic energy balance model and did overestimate warming. But all the later models have proven to have been uncannily accurate. [2] [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-cycles-cant-explain-earths-current-warming/ https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-... [2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
- twofornone 5y ago
  The fact that it is indeed an orthodoxy is why the research is blatantly one sided. There is far less interest in, for example, unlocking millions of square miles of fertile, arable land. Instead its all doomsday - and the issue is systemic, publish or perish and orthodoxy are a dangerous combination, for any field.
teawrecks 5y ago
Ironic opening statement, there. > No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact". You talk about "scientific fact" and "proof" like this is mathematics. The best empirical science can do is to gather as much data as possible and arrive at a probability that a conclusion is true given what is known. And what is known is that there is a greater than 99% chance that global warming is anthropogenic: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1QE1ZU https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1QE1ZU (Actual paper is paywalled and if you cared you'd go find it) You're right that our instruments and data have only gotten better over the last 70 years, but studies from the 50s conducted by oil companies already suspected that that global warming was happening and experimentally confirmed that CO2 released by fossils fuels were a likely contributing factor: https://www.slideshare.net/SimoneBoccuccia/cabon-dioxide-echange-between-atmosphere-and-ocean-and-the-question-of-an-increase-of-atmospheric-co2-during-the-past-decades https://www.slideshare.net/SimoneBoccuccia/cabon-dioxide-ech... So much for "revisionist history". But all of that is beside my point about media propaganda, much of which you are simply reciting in your own comment. My point is that the propaganda works, so thank you for taking the time to illustrate that.

exporectomy 5y ago

It is just a theory. There's no such thing as "scientific fact". That's simply not what science is capable of, and you're showing you're anti-science by promoting those ideas.

teawrecks 5y ago
You're being pedantic about terminology which I've already demonstrated my understanding of in this thread. In the context of the general populous, "scientific fact" means that a random lay person on the street, despite not doing any of the research themselves or reading any of the literature on the matter, accepts the conclusions of the scientific community as the truth. It's a scientific fact that the world is round even though most of us have not taken any measurements to verify this, and almost none of us have been to space. We just trust the wealth of data produced by professionals in several different domains which all point to the same conclusion. You're also being disingenuous if you think "just a theory" isn't a phrase constructed to mislead. Your comment implies that you understand that a theory is literally the strongest model that science can give us about a topic, but saying something is "just X" implies that there is something else beyond X. So which is it? Is a theory as strong as it gets, or can science do better? If it can't do better, then never use the phrase "just a theory".
- exporectomy 5y ago
  I agree about the "just". You're right. It's about the same level of misleading as "scientific fact". People used to use "just a theory" to discredit relativity or evolution, exploiting the fact that the alternative terms like laws of physics or truth sounded stronger even though they weren't. I still think it's harmful to general understanding to put any scientific knowledge on a pedestal of being unchallengeable fact. How can we know where we might be wrong? The earth is round, is it? What if that's just a slice of it in 3 dimensions and it's actually some other higher dimensional shape? Future people might laugh at our simplistic belief based on only seeing a little part of it - similar to ancients believing the Earth was flat because it was flat as far as they could see.

pdonis 5y ago

> Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact. No, they didn't. In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". The "global warming" narrative wasn't really being pushed until the late 1980s, and it wasn't until well into the 90s that discussion of the overall issue of what the climate might be like in the future was widespread. > oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter, So did global warming activists--in fact they did it sooner (what started the "global warming" debate in the late 1980s was a Congressional hearing purposely staged by activists to occur during a summer heat wave--and the A/C for the hearing room just "happened" to not be working that day). We are awash in propaganda on all sides of this issue.

magicalist 5y ago
> In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". No, there was much more uncertainty in the 70s, but the idea that global cooling was even a moderately dominant idea was a narrative constructed largely in the 2000s. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bams2370_1.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...
- pdonis 5y ago
  > there was much more uncertainty in the 70s Tell that to all the people that were talking about the next Ice Age coming. They seemed pretty confident. However, even if we accept "much more uncertainty in the 70s", you're agreeing with me that the post I was responding to, which said that global warming was accepted as "scientific fact" back then, was wrong.
  - teawrecks 5y ago
    You're falling prey to yet another disinformation tactic: "Is it warming or is it cooling? Make up your mind science!" The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate by burning fossil fuels. What has always been uncertain is what impact this would have on the environment/animals/humans long term. Will it heat everyone up? Will it trigger an ice age? Didn't matter, everyone agreed that more information was needed and we had to take action UNTIL a lot of money went into dovetailing that uncertainty into doubt about the whole thing. And here we are still arguing at square one 30 years later.