6 ms·

More than 99.9% of studies agree: Humans caused climate change

33 points by bjourne 5y ago

Proven 5y ago
Wut? Who cares how many % agree. You could find a bunch of losers, give each $100 - okay, make that a $100K research grant - and get 100% of studies that agree on whatever you want. The problem is there's no cost effective way to change global temperatures. That's all.
awestroke 5y ago
It's a funny feeling to try to live life as if nothing is happening while knowing that I'll see a blue ocean event in somewhere between 5 and 20 years, causing runaway warming and all the incredible impacts it will have on human civilization. I feel completely powerless to do anything about it.
- freemint 5y ago
  The climate scientists I talked to are off the impression that a blue ocean event is not a thing they are concerned about. There are certainly experts who think it is a problem but I am not sure how fringe those are compared to the ones not worried about a blue ocean event.
mam3 5y ago
I hate these authority arguments. Im pretty sure i can find examples where consensus was wrong. Edit: ah found it, "Trump has 3% chances to be elected". Edit 2: there are also a dozen examples in the medical field, especially heart medicines.
- Natsu 5y ago
  The methodology here appears to have been doing a keyword search among some 88k papers published between 2012 and 2020. It's obvious to me that humans have caused changes, but this methodology seems awfully lazy.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  You do know that there's a difference between an opinion poll and a research study, right? Edit; Since most of the comments in this thread are garbage concern trolling about the nature of scientific consensus that literally could've been written by Exxon's PR team, here's a link to the actual study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
  - mam3 5y ago
    I 100% think humans caused global warming. But still the argument is bad
- pharrington 5y ago
  In addition to the sibling comment, a low percent chance is very different from a 0% chance. Think of it as Trump being a first-time gambler who wins the jackpot.
  - mam3 5y ago
    You are coping. Trump had more votes than an averahe republican
strombofulous 5y ago
I am really suspicious of this 99.9% number. Most journals allow a ~5% margin of error so even if humans caused climate change (which they most likely did) we should only see 95% of these studies finding this result. Also this doesn't account for the fact that people and organizations have their own biases and that it's possible to construct "experiments" to give you whatever result you want, so we should be seeing some experiments showing that climate change isn't real or whatever, bringing that 95% number down even further. If this number is accurate and not just chosen for PR reasons, it would lend credence to the idea that anti-human-climate-change research is being suppressed. Is this bad? Probably not, but it's probably a more accurate conclusion than declaring climate change the correct conclusion.
- machinerychorus 5y ago
  Did you even read the article? It gives a brief explanation of the methodology. The full paper is found here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
  - strombofulous 5y ago
    I'm not saying that the authors were dishonest I'm saying that if this is an honest outcome from the paper's authors (which it probably is) then the result we should expect should be closer to 95% than 99.9%. That it's this off from the expected value indicates that something external to this paper is inaccurate, even if these authors measured the inaccuracies correctly.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > Most journals allow a ~5% margin of error so even if humans caused climate change (which they most likely did) we should only see 95% of these studies finding this result. Well, for a phenomenon strong enough, any measurement you make will find it. It's like taking a 1m long board and trying to assert the hypothesis that it's 20cm long. It doesn't matter that you accept a 0.05 p-value, you don't have an instrument noisy enough to reach it.
- 5y ago
jrd79 5y ago
That is a high level of consensus for a field where the predictive models (which have been getting published since the 1980s) are extremely bad at predicting the future. Last time I looked into it was about 10 years ago, but at that time, the models were garbage at actually predicting anything. The climate is a complex system that is hard to model and hard to predict. Scientists in the field should admit this rather than overstating their certainty about any particular conclusion. And catch-all statements that "we all agree on X!" seem particularly suspect. The merit of a scientific assertion is established by the clear exposition of reproducible facts, not survey results. [EDIT] To be clear, the predictive power of the models is relevant to the question of causality because absent a controlled experiment (obviously impossible) or an exhaustive list of relevant statistical controls (also obviously impossible), establishing causality can only be done by developing an accurate (and thus predictive) model and using that model to measure causality.
- machinerychorus 5y ago
  It's not a prediction about the future, it's based on measuring what has happened. "Humans caused climate change". This statement implies nothing about what will happen in the future
  - jrd79 5y ago
    The same approaches and models that are used for predictions are used to establish the attribution of cause. But while the latter cannot be tested, the predictive power of the models can be tested and is thus a suitable proxy for the power of the models to attribute cause accurately.
    - tzs 5y ago
      There are other ways to find causes. For instance CO₂ from burning fossil fuels does not contain ¹⁴C. CO₂ from other sources other than volcanoes does contain ¹⁴C. If you see the fraction of atmospheric CO₂ that has ¹⁴C going up more than can be accounted for from volcanoes you've got a smoking gun pointing to humans.
glitchc 5y ago
While I agree with the thesis, that humans are more likely than not to have caused climate change, I’m also forced to note that consensus is not a scientific approach for establishing matters of fact. It does discredit to scientific research to publish papers like this and claim that “the science is settled.”
kuratkull 5y ago
Not trying to be the devils advocate, but at one point almost everybody agreed that the sun revolved around the Earth.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  To be fair, most physicists today will agree that the geocentric and heliocentric world views are equivalent, they are just different frames of reference, both non-inertial.
janto 5y ago
How do you get any scientific field to agree 99.9%? I don't think you could even get these numbers for particle physics. Is science no longer about attempts at falsification? Or is the game derision of those with non-apocalyptic perspectives?
- machinerychorus 5y ago
  The article explains that they searched 88k peer-reviewed studies.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  You think more than one in a thousand studies particle-physics studies deny the existence of the electron? The studies might disagree around the edges, but I think there's overwhelming consensus on theories for which there's overwhelming evidence.
  - janto 5y ago
    The words "deny" and "evidence" cannot be used with scientific models. "deny" presupposes truthfulness of a proposition (a big no-no), and "evidence" is not the same as "absence of falsifying observations".
- mrkramer 5y ago
  To be honest peer consensus means nothing unfortunately. For example scientific consensus in Medieval Europe was that the Earth is flat. Dogmas are dangerous and I'm afraid this one is very dangerous too.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    Even if what is being pushed turns out to be true, this method sets a very dangerous precedent and the "believe in science" is creating a new religion.
    - LinuxBender 5y ago
lanevorockz 5y ago
Isn't Climate Change a pleonasm ? It's a bit obvious a temporary thing changes. Also there is very little doubt that humanity as a whole is a major force accelerating it. Yet, I don't think that CO2 models proven to be accurate. It's way more likely that the Ultra Urban Cities are a big factor. Displacing all fauna and flora, creating a micro climate surrounding it and tons of garbage daily.
unpolloloco 5y ago
And instead of dealing with climate change (with EASY and ROI-positive approaches like incentivizing wind/solar adoption, pushing electric cars along, etc.) we focus our energy on getting rid of straws. Or...instead of working across the aisle to peel off a moderate Republican (tell me there isn't one Republican that won't go for a bill that gives their district a new military base or national lab?), we bend over backwards to coal interests (Manchin) instead of passing a climate-oriented bill! It's like our politicians just want to bluster and point fingers instead of actually working to pass sensible legislation...
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  You need one Republican Senator who doesn't have a district to bribe - he/she represents an entire state. I'm sure if the Democrats could find one and not deal with Manchin, they absolutely would -- but the nature of a 50:50 Senate for reconciliation and the filibuster threat on stand-alone bills for a highly ideological issue means there are zero Republicans who will join them. This demonstrates the issues with American politics very pointedly though. Even though 49/50 Democrats in the Senate want to pass the bill you describe, since 1/50 opposes it (along with 50/50 Republicans) - you blame "our politicians". The blame for inaction lies entirely on one political party but we have to pretend like it's some sort of failure by both sides to negotiate.
  - eadmund 5y ago
    > Even though 49/50 Democrats in the Senate want to pass the bill you describe, since 1/50 opposes it (along with 50/50 Republicans) Yes, when 51% of the votes are opposed to a course of action it is not followed. Are you advocating that for a submajority vote to suffice? That seems like it would have interesting consequences.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      Nah, just saying that when 98% of one party's higher chamber wants to make minimal progress toward doing the right thing, and 0% of the other one does -- it's pretty dumb in an /r/enlightenedcentrism kind of way to blame "our politicians" for failing to take action. Given the responses in this thread - it makes sense why hapless "both sides" politicians like Andrew Yang were so popular on HN.
lastofus 5y ago
The amount of immediate unsupported skepticism showing up in these comments is incredibly disheartening. I feel rather certain at this point humanity as a whole is unable/unwilling stop this impending disaster due to the perverse insentives that existm that allow people to continue to bury their heads in the sand, and pretend everything is fine.
- jrd79 5y ago
  Skepticism doesn't require being supported. It is the default perspective when facing a scientific assertion. Conversely, affirmative scientific assertions require the support of relevant reproducible facts. Appeals to authority or consensus are not a source of such support, and should not form part of our scientific discourse.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  The disaster you imagine is not materializing. The CO2 is having a greening effect on planet earth: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... Deaths from natural disasters are still near historic all time lows (despite population being at all-time highs): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat... Sea level rise trend is consistent (and not accelerating) at 2.24mm / year for the last 120 years. That's equivalent to a change of 0.73 feet in 100 years (not an emergency by any stretch): https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/est/est_station.shtml?stnid=8724580 https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/est/est_station.shtml?stni... Crop yield and productivity is up 50% or more since 1991: Corn - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl... Rice - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl... Soybeans - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld... Wheat - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld.... Of course, that's to be expected, because CO2 (essential ingredient of photosynthesis) and warmth are generally good for plants, so long as there's sufficient sunlight and precipitation, which there has been. So tell me, how is your life worse off than your ancestors from the pre-industrial era?
mrkramer 5y ago
Did humans cause ice age too? Down with caveman people! >Support for the Alliance for Science is provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Thanks for letting me know.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Well the ice age we're in now started about 2 million years ago, around the same period homo sapiens emerged. So you might be onto something.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Devils advocate: The eocene period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene was roughly 50 million years ago and the Earth was 15 celcius warmer than it was today. We are worried about 1.5celcius, not 15 celcius. From that time, the Earth became ~20 celcius colder about 20,000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum Which was 6 celcius colder than today. Did humans cause the 6 celcius in warming between 20 and 10 thousand years ago? For the last 10,000 years the Earth has bounced around +- 1 celcius and current day climate change in the last couple hundred years ago is less than that bouncing back and forth. What exactly have humans caused? The standard deviation of temp in the last 10,000 years has not changed. We can't be blamed for any of the other actual climate change. The climate changes and so far humans havent changed anything.
fareesh 5y ago
The more interesting debate is whether the purported solutions to climate change are worthwhile, worse, or better than the status quo. There is a lot of money to be made in this space, and so I am skeptical of anyone who presents their magic device or process, as a tangible solution. Based on the pie chart on this page, it seems like a greedy approach and tackling energy (via something like nuclear power) is going to be a large part of the solution, yet I almost never hear climate activists prioritize it, which leads me to agree that the problem is very real, but the purported solutions appear to be hoaxes either intentional or misguided/unintentional. https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
photochemsyn 5y ago
I'm not sure what the point of this study is. Despite serious efforts at obfuscation by the fossil fuel sector over the past 40 years, it's now widely know that the basic science of climate was solved by the late 1970s (1). Everything since then has been a refinement of the fundamental concept, i.e. that infrared-absorbing atmospheric gas concentraion is a primary control on a planet's surface temperature (along with other factors like albedo, soot and dust levels, etc.). Humans have, primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels, steadily pushed towards a doubling of the levels of the long-lived IR-absorbing gases CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere. This should take place (we hit 560 ppm) around 2050 at the earliest. Perhaps a betting pool would be the thing? Fossil fuel combustion is the main driver of global warming, as we can see by noting the reduction in 14C in the atmosphere due to dilution with 14C-lacking fossil-sourced CO2 emissions. That also was known by 1980 (2). 1. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/10/05/princetons-syukuro-manabe-receives-nobel-prize-physics https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/10/05/princetons-syukuro... 2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/effect-of-anthropogenic-co2-and-14c-sources-on-the-distribution-of-14c-in-the-atmosphere/1D7E05C4973B4AC2766A5A6F2C18553B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...
Phil_Latio 5y ago
> The research updates a similar 2013 paper revealing that 97% of studies published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering Earth’s climate. That was a fraudulent or at least dishonest claim already (everyone knows right?!), so I doubt this new one does any better. Just the line "caused climate change" is dishonest: It implies every person which worked on a study and who falls into the 99,9%, believes that the rising temperatures are 100% caused by humans, while the other faction apparently denies any influence or denies climate change as a whole. That's just BS.
jzellis 5y ago
I love the contrarians on here. "Hrmm, um, well, you know, erm, I find this methodology suspect-" Good thing none of y'all are the ones trying to solve this existential crisis, then, isn't it? Go back to pissing around with crypto mining or whatever the fuck it is you people do and leave this to the adults in the room. And for the record, there, Ilya Prigogine? It's not hard to model complex systems. I was warning people for the past decade that water levels in the Colorado Basin were going to reach crisis levels far sooner than most people suspected. Of course, I wasn't basing my reasoning on my deep desire to continue profiting off the system that brought us to this point - I was out in the goddamn Mojave looking at the high water marks and reading historical studies on the subject. From there, it's pretty easy to extrapolate what happens next unless you're an idiot or bury your head in the sand because you're more concerned with your own economic ideologies than reality. I don't bother trying to convince climate collapse denialists, though, for the same reasons I don't try to talk a dog out of eating its own shit in the street. Life and our remaining time to sort this out are both too short for that kind of nonsense.
tmaly 5y ago
Without stirring up any controversy I think we can confirm the giant island of plastic in the Pacific ocean is caused by humans.
sigsergv 5y ago
Of course they agree, otherwise they would be cancelled.

33 points by bjourne 5y ago

Wut? Who cares how many % agree. You could find a bunch of losers, give each $100 - okay, make that a $100K research grant - and get 100% of studies that agree on whatever you want. The problem is there's no cost effective way to change global temperatures. That's all.

awestroke 5y ago

It's a funny feeling to try to live life as if nothing is happening while knowing that I'll see a blue ocean event in somewhere between 5 and 20 years, causing runaway warming and all the incredible impacts it will have on human civilization. I feel completely powerless to do anything about it.

freemint 5y ago
The climate scientists I talked to are off the impression that a blue ocean event is not a thing they are concerned about. There are certainly experts who think it is a problem but I am not sure how fringe those are compared to the ones not worried about a blue ocean event.

mam3 5y ago

I hate these authority arguments. Im pretty sure i can find examples where consensus was wrong. Edit: ah found it, "Trump has 3% chances to be elected". Edit 2: there are also a dozen examples in the medical field, especially heart medicines.

Natsu 5y ago
The methodology here appears to have been doing a keyword search among some 88k papers published between 2012 and 2020. It's obvious to me that humans have caused changes, but this methodology seems awfully lazy.
mikeyouse 5y ago
You do know that there's a difference between an opinion poll and a research study, right? Edit; Since most of the comments in this thread are garbage concern trolling about the nature of scientific consensus that literally could've been written by Exxon's PR team, here's a link to the actual study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
- mam3 5y ago
  I 100% think humans caused global warming. But still the argument is bad
pharrington 5y ago
In addition to the sibling comment, a low percent chance is very different from a 0% chance. Think of it as Trump being a first-time gambler who wins the jackpot.
- mam3 5y ago
  You are coping. Trump had more votes than an averahe republican

strombofulous 5y ago

I am really suspicious of this 99.9% number. Most journals allow a ~5% margin of error so even if humans caused climate change (which they most likely did) we should only see 95% of these studies finding this result. Also this doesn't account for the fact that people and organizations have their own biases and that it's possible to construct "experiments" to give you whatever result you want, so we should be seeing some experiments showing that climate change isn't real or whatever, bringing that 95% number down even further. If this number is accurate and not just chosen for PR reasons, it would lend credence to the idea that anti-human-climate-change research is being suppressed. Is this bad? Probably not, but it's probably a more accurate conclusion than declaring climate change the correct conclusion.

machinerychorus 5y ago
Did you even read the article? It gives a brief explanation of the methodology. The full paper is found here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
- strombofulous 5y ago
  I'm not saying that the authors were dishonest I'm saying that if this is an honest outcome from the paper's authors (which it probably is) then the result we should expect should be closer to 95% than 99.9%. That it's this off from the expected value indicates that something external to this paper is inaccurate, even if these authors measured the inaccuracies correctly.
marcosdumay 5y ago
> Most journals allow a ~5% margin of error so even if humans caused climate change (which they most likely did) we should only see 95% of these studies finding this result. Well, for a phenomenon strong enough, any measurement you make will find it. It's like taking a 1m long board and trying to assert the hypothesis that it's 20cm long. It doesn't matter that you accept a 0.05 p-value, you don't have an instrument noisy enough to reach it.
5y ago

jrd79 5y ago

That is a high level of consensus for a field where the predictive models (which have been getting published since the 1980s) are extremely bad at predicting the future. Last time I looked into it was about 10 years ago, but at that time, the models were garbage at actually predicting anything. The climate is a complex system that is hard to model and hard to predict. Scientists in the field should admit this rather than overstating their certainty about any particular conclusion. And catch-all statements that "we all agree on X!" seem particularly suspect. The merit of a scientific assertion is established by the clear exposition of reproducible facts, not survey results. [EDIT] To be clear, the predictive power of the models is relevant to the question of causality because absent a controlled experiment (obviously impossible) or an exhaustive list of relevant statistical controls (also obviously impossible), establishing causality can only be done by developing an accurate (and thus predictive) model and using that model to measure causality.

machinerychorus 5y ago
It's not a prediction about the future, it's based on measuring what has happened. "Humans caused climate change". This statement implies nothing about what will happen in the future
- jrd79 5y ago
  The same approaches and models that are used for predictions are used to establish the attribution of cause. But while the latter cannot be tested, the predictive power of the models can be tested and is thus a suitable proxy for the power of the models to attribute cause accurately.
  - tzs 5y ago
    There are other ways to find causes. For instance CO₂ from burning fossil fuels does not contain ¹⁴C. CO₂ from other sources other than volcanoes does contain ¹⁴C. If you see the fraction of atmospheric CO₂ that has ¹⁴C going up more than can be accounted for from volcanoes you've got a smoking gun pointing to humans.

glitchc 5y ago

While I agree with the thesis, that humans are more likely than not to have caused climate change, I’m also forced to note that consensus is not a scientific approach for establishing matters of fact. It does discredit to scientific research to publish papers like this and claim that “the science is settled.”

kuratkull 5y ago

Not trying to be the devils advocate, but at one point almost everybody agreed that the sun revolved around the Earth.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
To be fair, most physicists today will agree that the geocentric and heliocentric world views are equivalent, they are just different frames of reference, both non-inertial.

janto 5y ago

How do you get any scientific field to agree 99.9%? I don't think you could even get these numbers for particle physics. Is science no longer about attempts at falsification? Or is the game derision of those with non-apocalyptic perspectives?

machinerychorus 5y ago
The article explains that they searched 88k peer-reviewed studies.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
You think more than one in a thousand studies particle-physics studies deny the existence of the electron? The studies might disagree around the edges, but I think there's overwhelming consensus on theories for which there's overwhelming evidence.
- janto 5y ago
  The words "deny" and "evidence" cannot be used with scientific models. "deny" presupposes truthfulness of a proposition (a big no-no), and "evidence" is not the same as "absence of falsifying observations".
mrkramer 5y ago
To be honest peer consensus means nothing unfortunately. For example scientific consensus in Medieval Europe was that the Earth is flat. Dogmas are dangerous and I'm afraid this one is very dangerous too.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  Even if what is being pushed turns out to be true, this method sets a very dangerous precedent and the "believe in science" is creating a new religion.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago

lanevorockz 5y ago

Isn't Climate Change a pleonasm ? It's a bit obvious a temporary thing changes. Also there is very little doubt that humanity as a whole is a major force accelerating it. Yet, I don't think that CO2 models proven to be accurate. It's way more likely that the Ultra Urban Cities are a big factor. Displacing all fauna and flora, creating a micro climate surrounding it and tons of garbage daily.

unpolloloco 5y ago

And instead of dealing with climate change (with EASY and ROI-positive approaches like incentivizing wind/solar adoption, pushing electric cars along, etc.) we focus our energy on getting rid of straws. Or...instead of working across the aisle to peel off a moderate Republican (tell me there isn't one Republican that won't go for a bill that gives their district a new military base or national lab?), we bend over backwards to coal interests (Manchin) instead of passing a climate-oriented bill! It's like our politicians just want to bluster and point fingers instead of actually working to pass sensible legislation...

mikeyouse 5y ago
You need one Republican Senator who doesn't have a district to bribe - he/she represents an entire state. I'm sure if the Democrats could find one and not deal with Manchin, they absolutely would -- but the nature of a 50:50 Senate for reconciliation and the filibuster threat on stand-alone bills for a highly ideological issue means there are zero Republicans who will join them. This demonstrates the issues with American politics very pointedly though. Even though 49/50 Democrats in the Senate want to pass the bill you describe, since 1/50 opposes it (along with 50/50 Republicans) - you blame "our politicians". The blame for inaction lies entirely on one political party but we have to pretend like it's some sort of failure by both sides to negotiate.
- eadmund 5y ago
  > Even though 49/50 Democrats in the Senate want to pass the bill you describe, since 1/50 opposes it (along with 50/50 Republicans) Yes, when 51% of the votes are opposed to a course of action it is not followed. Are you advocating that for a submajority vote to suffice? That seems like it would have interesting consequences.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Nah, just saying that when 98% of one party's higher chamber wants to make minimal progress toward doing the right thing, and 0% of the other one does -- it's pretty dumb in an /r/enlightenedcentrism kind of way to blame "our politicians" for failing to take action. Given the responses in this thread - it makes sense why hapless "both sides" politicians like Andrew Yang were so popular on HN.

lastofus 5y ago

The amount of immediate unsupported skepticism showing up in these comments is incredibly disheartening. I feel rather certain at this point humanity as a whole is unable/unwilling stop this impending disaster due to the perverse insentives that existm that allow people to continue to bury their heads in the sand, and pretend everything is fine.

jrd79 5y ago
Skepticism doesn't require being supported. It is the default perspective when facing a scientific assertion. Conversely, affirmative scientific assertions require the support of relevant reproducible facts. Appeals to authority or consensus are not a source of such support, and should not form part of our scientific discourse.
chrisco255 5y ago
The disaster you imagine is not materializing. The CO2 is having a greening effect on planet earth: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... Deaths from natural disasters are still near historic all time lows (despite population being at all-time highs): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat... Sea level rise trend is consistent (and not accelerating) at 2.24mm / year for the last 120 years. That's equivalent to a change of 0.73 feet in 100 years (not an emergency by any stretch): https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/est/est_station.shtml?stnid=8724580 https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/est/est_station.shtml?stni... Crop yield and productivity is up 50% or more since 1991: Corn - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl... Rice - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl... Soybeans - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld... Wheat - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld.... Of course, that's to be expected, because CO2 (essential ingredient of photosynthesis) and warmth are generally good for plants, so long as there's sufficient sunlight and precipitation, which there has been. So tell me, how is your life worse off than your ancestors from the pre-industrial era?

mrkramer 5y ago

Did humans cause ice age too? Down with caveman people! >Support for the Alliance for Science is provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Thanks for letting me know.

akvadrako 5y ago
Well the ice age we're in now started about 2 million years ago, around the same period homo sapiens emerged. So you might be onto something.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Devils advocate: The eocene period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene was roughly 50 million years ago and the Earth was 15 celcius warmer than it was today. We are worried about 1.5celcius, not 15 celcius. From that time, the Earth became ~20 celcius colder about 20,000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum Which was 6 celcius colder than today. Did humans cause the 6 celcius in warming between 20 and 10 thousand years ago? For the last 10,000 years the Earth has bounced around +- 1 celcius and current day climate change in the last couple hundred years ago is less than that bouncing back and forth. What exactly have humans caused? The standard deviation of temp in the last 10,000 years has not changed. We can't be blamed for any of the other actual climate change. The climate changes and so far humans havent changed anything.

fareesh 5y ago

The more interesting debate is whether the purported solutions to climate change are worthwhile, worse, or better than the status quo. There is a lot of money to be made in this space, and so I am skeptical of anyone who presents their magic device or process, as a tangible solution. Based on the pie chart on this page, it seems like a greedy approach and tackling energy (via something like nuclear power) is going to be a large part of the solution, yet I almost never hear climate activists prioritize it, which leads me to agree that the problem is very real, but the purported solutions appear to be hoaxes either intentional or misguided/unintentional. https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

photochemsyn 5y ago

I'm not sure what the point of this study is. Despite serious efforts at obfuscation by the fossil fuel sector over the past 40 years, it's now widely know that the basic science of climate was solved by the late 1970s (1). Everything since then has been a refinement of the fundamental concept, i.e. that infrared-absorbing atmospheric gas concentraion is a primary control on a planet's surface temperature (along with other factors like albedo, soot and dust levels, etc.). Humans have, primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels, steadily pushed towards a doubling of the levels of the long-lived IR-absorbing gases CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere. This should take place (we hit 560 ppm) around 2050 at the earliest. Perhaps a betting pool would be the thing? Fossil fuel combustion is the main driver of global warming, as we can see by noting the reduction in 14C in the atmosphere due to dilution with 14C-lacking fossil-sourced CO2 emissions. That also was known by 1980 (2). 1. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/10/05/princetons-syukuro-manabe-receives-nobel-prize-physics https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/10/05/princetons-syukuro... 2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/effect-of-anthropogenic-co2-and-14c-sources-on-the-distribution-of-14c-in-the-atmosphere/1D7E05C4973B4AC2766A5A6F2C18553B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...

Phil_Latio 5y ago

> The research updates a similar 2013 paper revealing that 97% of studies published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering Earth’s climate. That was a fraudulent or at least dishonest claim already (everyone knows right?!), so I doubt this new one does any better. Just the line "caused climate change" is dishonest: It implies every person which worked on a study and who falls into the 99,9%, believes that the rising temperatures are 100% caused by humans, while the other faction apparently denies any influence or denies climate change as a whole. That's just BS.

jzellis 5y ago

I love the contrarians on here. "Hrmm, um, well, you know, erm, I find this methodology suspect-" Good thing none of y'all are the ones trying to solve this existential crisis, then, isn't it? Go back to pissing around with crypto mining or whatever the fuck it is you people do and leave this to the adults in the room. And for the record, there, Ilya Prigogine? It's not hard to model complex systems. I was warning people for the past decade that water levels in the Colorado Basin were going to reach crisis levels far sooner than most people suspected. Of course, I wasn't basing my reasoning on my deep desire to continue profiting off the system that brought us to this point - I was out in the goddamn Mojave looking at the high water marks and reading historical studies on the subject. From there, it's pretty easy to extrapolate what happens next unless you're an idiot or bury your head in the sand because you're more concerned with your own economic ideologies than reality. I don't bother trying to convince climate collapse denialists, though, for the same reasons I don't try to talk a dog out of eating its own shit in the street. Life and our remaining time to sort this out are both too short for that kind of nonsense.

tmaly 5y ago

Without stirring up any controversy I think we can confirm the giant island of plastic in the Pacific ocean is caused by humans.

sigsergv 5y ago

Of course they agree, otherwise they would be cancelled.