11 ms·

For 110 years, climate change has been in the news

50 points by Kaibeezy 4y ago

aceon48 4y ago
- __s 4y ago
  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Co2-temperature-records.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Co2-temp... 800000
- andylynch 4y ago
  Yes, long-term climate cycles also exists but the important difference we’re confronted by with man-made climate versus the longer trends you refer to is that this is happening on a vastly quicker timescale, meaning that ecosystems (and our own societies) are unable to adapt. For instance on geologic timescales plants and creatures evolve, forests move, mountains sink and new reefs can grow, but when similar changes happen in the order of decades this is not just going to happen and everything relying on those ecosystems is going to have a real problem.
- ben_w 4y ago
  While the earth does indeed have its own cycles, the reason we know about them is the same reason we know we don't want to add a few degrees in a century. And not just because a timescale of "the dinosaurs" is enough for "India collides with Asia forming the Himalayas which creates a rain shadow over what is now the Gobi desert". Claiming it's about fear and control is a very easy way to ignore it — fact is, it's much easier to create fear (for the purpose of control) with human boogiemen: post WW2 British tabloids made hay by going "Communists and Germans! The Irish! Gays! Single mothers! The disabled! Muslims! Millennials! The EU!", while mostly saying that anyone concerned about the environment (even more broadly than CO2) was scaremongering.
andrewclunn 4y ago
Considering the period of concern over global cooling (from last century), claims of "we've known this, but have pretended not to for a hundred years" are just historical revisionism. When you lie about facts in favor of pushing a "more important truth" you don't convince people. You just give people more reason to doubt other things you're claiming.
- bjt2n3904 4y ago
  Combined with the apocalyptic histrionics of "we've only got ten more years before it's too late forever, we have to do something now!" And that something being banning lawn mowers...
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    Huh what? It is never too late to do something and try to improve, sure, but it actually is practically already now too late to not crash the 2° goal. I'd really be more empathetic to the ones who will need to inhabit this future and not turn this into ridicule, even if you won't be there then..
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    "Just don't talk about nuclear power, it's yucky, we're way past that and on to renewables + unspecified future quantum leaps in battery technology + a complete, multi-decade revamp in how our grid operates, mkay?" (Also known as the 'environmentalist' take on tackling climate change)
- igorkraw 4y ago
  The fact is that oil companies have been knowingly sabotaging the discourse and scientific process about this in a similar way that the tobacco companies kept 'having the debate' for as long as possible to not change their business model, externalities be damned. To downplay this is the real historical revisionism and lie
  - eej71 4y ago
RappingBoomer 4y ago
I heard the latest ice age was rough too
- titzer 4y ago
  Oh, for sure. A sudden ice age would definitely ruin global civilization. But that's not the issue, and the opposite of an ice age, a rapid period of warming with huge disruptions to ecosystems, is not good either. It's almost like huge disruptions to ecosystems is the problem and independent from the red team/blue team political polarization culture-war horseshit.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    No it is not much about the rate of disruption, the end state we are aiming at will be painful and not much would adapt even if it would be 1000 years?! That it happens so quickly within one generation and is caused by us is icing on top.. It seems we had 5 mass extinction events on earth so far, one caused by an asteroid, and the 4 others by climate change. Sure, something will survive, regrow or be newly created.. if we go for 4°C expectations for earth to recover on its own to something similar we had now are just another 30 million years ;)
    - BenoitP 4y ago
      > No it is not much about the rate of disruption I believe it is. The rate at which iso-climate lines are moving north is faster than a lot of species can move. Most fauna could be ok by that criteria alone, but most flora can't move so rapidly (a lot of tree species can only move 10m/10years). And when the flora goes, a lot fauna does too. Sure, the human species will survive. It certainly did with a few million of individuals for most of the time. But I believe we're already in the 6th mass extinction event, perhaps the biggest so far. We're going to get a lesson from nature. The only question is how tough will it be. I believe large famines, wars, and a partial civilization collapse are coming.
origin_path 4y ago
"Arrhenius estimated doubling CO₂ would produce a world 5℃ hotter. This, thankfully, is higher than modern calculations but not too far off, considering he wasn’t using a sophisticated computer model!" This is talking about the variable called "equilibrium climate sensitivity". Climate sensitivity is a key question in any fact-based discussion of climate change. There are three problems with this statement: 1. ECS calculations based on empirical measurement come in far, far lower than 5 degrees, more like 1.7-2.5 degrees and this has been falling over time, e.g. measurement based estimates of ECS in 2001 were higher than they are today. 2. ECS calculations based on models (which scientists should consider weaker evidence than observational data, but don't) are extremely uncertain, with estimates ranging from 2 to 4 degrees. 3. The range of values models use for ECS are getting wider over time, not narrower as you'd expect. So it's really tough to say that Arrhenius was close given that modern climatologists have no idea what the correct value for ECS is even though they've been studying it intensively for 40 years, that their "sophisticated computer models" disagree very deeply about the right value and this is getting worse with time, and that all those values are still too high when compared to studies that aren't modelling based. It's also worth noting that even the headline is totally misleading. Today climate change is used as a synonym for global warming but for long periods scientists were telling the world that "climate change" meant a new ice age. As late as 1975 (when the switch from cooling to warming was well underway) Newsweek was telling readers that "To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down". http://www.denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf http://www.denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf So the article is trying to make it seem like scientists have been talking about global warming for over a century, but that isn't true. We could call it misinformation, perhaps. The physics of CO2 were understood for a long time but there's so much more to the climate than just CO2 that this isn't enough to be able to make accurate predictions.
- defrost 4y ago
  Congrats on unearthing a 1970s example of O&G disinfomation and propaganda disseminated via the pop media. You assert it represents what scientists of the time were saying, it clearly misrepresents J. Murray Mitchell: > Mitchell was a pioneer in investigation and understanding of climate change, and from the 1960s onwards sought to alert the public to issues of global warming. > In 1976 he described the conjecture of global cooling as irresponsible, and around that time supported other scientists in warning of the damaging effects of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Murray_Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Murray_Mitchell Is this a delibrate ploy by yourself, or were you merely ignorant?
edgefield 4y ago
It’s striking to me that Hacker News has a significant audience of flat earthers. Don’t look up, right? Let’s be clear, human caused climate change is very real. Rigorous science confirms this and CO2 + methane levels are now driving very visible and catastrophic weather all over the world.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”
- origin_path 4y ago
  Don't Look Up is a film with a story that makes absolutely no sense and constantly contradicts itself, so it might not be the best slogan to use: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    > Don't Look Up is a film with a story that makes absolutely no sense and constantly contradicts itself Honestly that sounds like a pretty good model of my life so far.
    - throw827474737 4y ago
      And a pretty good model of how humanity is acting :-)
  - carapace 4y ago
    That's a bad review. The movie was a satire, it's not supposed to make sense like a normal movie would, rather it's holding up a funhouse mirror to current events. For example, SA presents as a contradiction: > It depicts elites as simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent. But this is exactly what we see in the real world. Take the iPhone for example: a marvel of technology with a cretinous supply chain and amoral-at-best business model. Or VW, great cars but we could do without the emissions scandal. Or the tech industry, great tech (mostly) but they turn around and have a that "no poaching" scandal. Bankers have their LIBOR scandal, etc. Really, "simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent" is the order of the day, yeah?
88840-8855 4y ago
What is not being posted in news often enough are the options that we have to mitigate the effects. the only thing i read is that we need yo drive down co2. fact is: we are not gonna reach the targets in a reasonable timeframe. hence, we must start preparing to mitigate effects. instead we are caught by climate catastrophies like the current draught in europe, us and china and we are running around like headless chicken. let us setup multi generational projects on international scale to develop mitigations. this os mot being covered well enough in media. the only thing i see in 80% of the articles is status quo reporting of climate change effects (fires, draughts, rain) and YET ANOTHER climate change warning... and ofc some aggressive climate terrorists that are getting too much coverage, too.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Humanity hasn't been good at multigenerational projects for some time.
  - Dig1t 4y ago
    Generally it seems those kind of concerted efforts are more easily accomplished under dictatorships rather than in democracies.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      I actually disagree, I think we’re conflating dictatorships and social cohesion. Concerted efforts have functioned better under social cohesion(the NHS, social security, etc), but social cohesion isn’t valuable in a modern system because it’s not an efficient use of labor (think: young people leaving their extended families for work elsewhere, not inheriting family farms and businesses which are then bought by conglomerates).
  - GenerocUsername 4y ago
    Well if I've learned anything from the tech industry,maybe we need more Scrum Masters in politics /s
  - 4y ago
AlexandrB 4y ago
It was very eye opening to see how many groups and individuals who "just want to have a debate" on the reality of climate change are funded by fossil fuel companies[1][2][3][4]. We are being lied to, and it's working. Just see the first few comments in reply to this article. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-donated-millions-climate-sceptics https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-d... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-skeptic-idUSTRE75R2HD20110628 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-skeptic-idUST... [3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-skeptic-pat-micha_b_684013 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-skeptic-pat-micha_b_6... [4] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/global-warming-skeptic-organizations https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/global-warming-skeptic-orga...
- origin_path 4y ago
  Your first link claims Koch Industries is "a little-known, privately owned US oil company". That's the sort of lie you've got to expect from the Guardian. Quoting Wikipedia: "Koch Industries, Inc. (/ˈkoʊk/) is an American privately held multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill.[2] Its subsidiaries are involved in the manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizer, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, cloud computing, finance, commodity market trading, and investments. Koch owns Flint Hills Resources, Georgia-Pacific, Guardian Industries, Infor, Invista, KBX, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, Koch Engineered Solutions, Koch Investments Group, Koch Minerals & Trading, and Molex. The firm employs 122,000 people in 60 countries, with about half of its business in the United States" The Guardian states that the Koch brothers aren't directly funding climate related stuff, but they do fund libertarian and conservative groups. This is, in their eyes, immoral. Is it terrible for wealthy billionaires to fund people with particular perspectives on what to do about the climate? If you believe so then your biggest criticism must be in the other direction, because the money flows to support pro-doom climate journalism are vast. The Gates Foundation literally directly gives money to news companies that can only be used to hire people to write about climate and vaccines (in his preferred direction). Amongst the recipients of Gates' largesse is, of course, the Guardian. https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu... "I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups."
jtbayly 4y ago
- crummy 4y ago
  Were many scientists insisting that global cooling was a problem?
  - blkhawk 4y ago
    not as far as the rest of the world or the scientists at the time were concerned. From what i read it was mostly a US news-media thing.
  - random314 4y ago
    Apparently everyone alive today were also alive in the 70s and reading the latest scientific reports from climate journals. They somehow also managed to miss all the papers on global warming, while the 2 papers on cooling left a huge impression.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    They all insisted that the world was cooling because that's what official data at the time showed. Only some insisted it was or could be a problem, but of course those were the ones that got media and political attention. The same is true today. Almost all scientists believe the world is warming. Only some extrapolate that into a crisis, but those are the ones who get media and political attention. There are lots of claims being made in this thread that aren't true, e.g. - only two papers talking about global cooling (wrong) - journalists were inverting what scientists believed (wrong) - there was no consensus on cooling (wrong; see how none of the papers discussing the cooling trend note any disagreement on its existence) and so on. For examples of media reports and scientific papers talking about global cooling see my other posts.
- ben_w 4y ago
  The newspapers printed those stories in the 1970s, but they didn't reflect general scientific consensus at that time. Or were you thinking of a different decade?
ahnberg 4y ago
Sadly the fact that it HAS been written about for so long just fuels the fire (no pun intended) for the sceptics. Something I often hear when trying to talk to people who refuse to believe the impact we have: "See these domsday prophets have been ranting about this for over a century and we're still here enjoying life!"
- rullelito 4y ago
  The same with "we only have 10 years left". After 30 years this doesn't carry much weight.
  - rob_c 4y ago
    This just makes the problem worse because little remember this 30 years later and think you're a liar or idiot because you pushed exaggerated claims. In the 80s in the UK acid rain was hyped up, in the 90s it was 20 years of oil reserves in the education system. Both now have generated adults distrusting education because they're not an academic and they just remember what a fool told them at face value without nuance. One of the biggest recently being reports that we will have millions dead unless X which doesn't match reality which is just going to create more anti intellectual fear
    - random314 4y ago
      Are you aware that acid rain problem was solved by regulatory action? It didn't automatically disappear.
      - rob_c 4y ago
        Yes, Im painfully aware of this. Christ I wouldn't be making the point of I wasn't this aware of it! (My own personal anger aside here) I have a strong educational background and a head on my shoulders. However from the mainstream public perception it just "disappeared one day" and transformed into "fossil fuels will be gone" which turned into "global warming" which is now "climate change". This is obviously complete nonsense to anyone with a science background but is the result of decades of broken outreach combined with poor public education.
rob_c 4y ago
I... It's yet another discussion or "debate" or shock healine about something which won't change based on discussion... Yet another "shock" headline is just a waste of effort which polarises yet more people into bad positions on all sides even more... What's wrong in just making the planet nicer for everyone?
jokoon 4y ago
I'm already trying to imagine how society will adapt with climate change. I see mostly rich people shielding themselves from the hot climate in developed countries and feeding themselves. Meanwhile, other countries are going to be left to die or left to generalized social unrest, drought and hunger. Massive migrations with a massive security apparatus. I'm guessing human population will fall below two billion or less before 2080 or before, until we can build a green industry while protecting people from this new climate. I don't think it will be a "collapse" like it's often talked about by the collapse movement, but it will be a slow disaster, which will be much more "tolerable" and avoid dangerous, unstable crises or large conflicts. Intelligence agencies are going to carefully plan all of this. Hawks are going to say "it won't be so bad" and that "only the fittest shall survive". It won't be very civilized, but individualism will go away and be replaced by communities who focus on survival at the expense of outgroups. It will probably look like dystopian movies, minus the glory, the heroes and the adventure.
aught 4y ago
Here is a post detailing a time line of military and intelligence concerns on climate change https://climateandsecurity.org/2017/01/chronology-of-the-u-s-military-and-intelligence-communitys-concern-about-climate-change/ https://climateandsecurity.org/2017/01/chronology-of-the-u-s... Great list of references
kodyo 4y ago
If there are solutions that don't involve authoritarian communism, I'm all ears. Encouraging nuclear seems like a really good idea.
josephcsible 4y ago
I notice that a lot of past predictions took the form "if we don't hit metric X by time T1, then easily-observable bad thing Y will happen by time T2". These were concrete, falsifiable (assuming we don't actually hit the metric in question, which in practice we never did), and basically left no room for interpretation. These days, the predictions we get seem way more wishy-washy and completely unfalsifiable.
mmh0000 4y ago
For me, the XKCD chart "Earth Temperature Timeline"[0] really put things into perspective: [0] https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/

50 points by Kaibeezy 4y ago

__s 4y ago
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Co2-temperature-records.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Co2-temp... 800000
andylynch 4y ago
Yes, long-term climate cycles also exists but the important difference we’re confronted by with man-made climate versus the longer trends you refer to is that this is happening on a vastly quicker timescale, meaning that ecosystems (and our own societies) are unable to adapt. For instance on geologic timescales plants and creatures evolve, forests move, mountains sink and new reefs can grow, but when similar changes happen in the order of decades this is not just going to happen and everything relying on those ecosystems is going to have a real problem.
ben_w 4y ago
While the earth does indeed have its own cycles, the reason we know about them is the same reason we know we don't want to add a few degrees in a century. And not just because a timescale of "the dinosaurs" is enough for "India collides with Asia forming the Himalayas which creates a rain shadow over what is now the Gobi desert". Claiming it's about fear and control is a very easy way to ignore it — fact is, it's much easier to create fear (for the purpose of control) with human boogiemen: post WW2 British tabloids made hay by going "Communists and Germans! The Irish! Gays! Single mothers! The disabled! Muslims! Millennials! The EU!", while mostly saying that anyone concerned about the environment (even more broadly than CO2) was scaremongering.

Considering the period of concern over global cooling (from last century), claims of "we've known this, but have pretended not to for a hundred years" are just historical revisionism. When you lie about facts in favor of pushing a "more important truth" you don't convince people. You just give people more reason to doubt other things you're claiming.

bjt2n3904 4y ago
Combined with the apocalyptic histrionics of "we've only got ten more years before it's too late forever, we have to do something now!" And that something being banning lawn mowers...
- throw827474737 4y ago
  Huh what? It is never too late to do something and try to improve, sure, but it actually is practically already now too late to not crash the 2° goal. I'd really be more empathetic to the ones who will need to inhabit this future and not turn this into ridicule, even if you won't be there then..
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  "Just don't talk about nuclear power, it's yucky, we're way past that and on to renewables + unspecified future quantum leaps in battery technology + a complete, multi-decade revamp in how our grid operates, mkay?" (Also known as the 'environmentalist' take on tackling climate change)
igorkraw 4y ago
The fact is that oil companies have been knowingly sabotaging the discourse and scientific process about this in a similar way that the tobacco companies kept 'having the debate' for as long as possible to not change their business model, externalities be damned. To downplay this is the real historical revisionism and lie
- eej71 4y ago

RappingBoomer 4y ago

I heard the latest ice age was rough too

titzer 4y ago
Oh, for sure. A sudden ice age would definitely ruin global civilization. But that's not the issue, and the opposite of an ice age, a rapid period of warming with huge disruptions to ecosystems, is not good either. It's almost like huge disruptions to ecosystems is the problem and independent from the red team/blue team political polarization culture-war horseshit.
- throw827474737 4y ago
  No it is not much about the rate of disruption, the end state we are aiming at will be painful and not much would adapt even if it would be 1000 years?! That it happens so quickly within one generation and is caused by us is icing on top.. It seems we had 5 mass extinction events on earth so far, one caused by an asteroid, and the 4 others by climate change. Sure, something will survive, regrow or be newly created.. if we go for 4°C expectations for earth to recover on its own to something similar we had now are just another 30 million years ;)
  - BenoitP 4y ago
    > No it is not much about the rate of disruption I believe it is. The rate at which iso-climate lines are moving north is faster than a lot of species can move. Most fauna could be ok by that criteria alone, but most flora can't move so rapidly (a lot of tree species can only move 10m/10years). And when the flora goes, a lot fauna does too. Sure, the human species will survive. It certainly did with a few million of individuals for most of the time. But I believe we're already in the 6th mass extinction event, perhaps the biggest so far. We're going to get a lesson from nature. The only question is how tough will it be. I believe large famines, wars, and a partial civilization collapse are coming.

origin_path 4y ago

"Arrhenius estimated doubling CO₂ would produce a world 5℃ hotter. This, thankfully, is higher than modern calculations but not too far off, considering he wasn’t using a sophisticated computer model!" This is talking about the variable called "equilibrium climate sensitivity". Climate sensitivity is a key question in any fact-based discussion of climate change. There are three problems with this statement: 1. ECS calculations based on empirical measurement come in far, far lower than 5 degrees, more like 1.7-2.5 degrees and this has been falling over time, e.g. measurement based estimates of ECS in 2001 were higher than they are today. 2. ECS calculations based on models (which scientists should consider weaker evidence than observational data, but don't) are extremely uncertain, with estimates ranging from 2 to 4 degrees. 3. The range of values models use for ECS are getting wider over time, not narrower as you'd expect. So it's really tough to say that Arrhenius was close given that modern climatologists have no idea what the correct value for ECS is even though they've been studying it intensively for 40 years, that their "sophisticated computer models" disagree very deeply about the right value and this is getting worse with time, and that all those values are still too high when compared to studies that aren't modelling based. It's also worth noting that even the headline is totally misleading. Today climate change is used as a synonym for global warming but for long periods scientists were telling the world that "climate change" meant a new ice age. As late as 1975 (when the switch from cooling to warming was well underway) Newsweek was telling readers that "To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down". http://www.denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf http://www.denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf So the article is trying to make it seem like scientists have been talking about global warming for over a century, but that isn't true. We could call it misinformation, perhaps. The physics of CO2 were understood for a long time but there's so much more to the climate than just CO2 that this isn't enough to be able to make accurate predictions.

defrost 4y ago
Congrats on unearthing a 1970s example of O&G disinfomation and propaganda disseminated via the pop media. You assert it represents what scientists of the time were saying, it clearly misrepresents J. Murray Mitchell: > Mitchell was a pioneer in investigation and understanding of climate change, and from the 1960s onwards sought to alert the public to issues of global warming. > In 1976 he described the conjecture of global cooling as irresponsible, and around that time supported other scientists in warning of the damaging effects of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Murray_Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Murray_Mitchell Is this a delibrate ploy by yourself, or were you merely ignorant?

edgefield 4y ago

It’s striking to me that Hacker News has a significant audience of flat earthers. Don’t look up, right? Let’s be clear, human caused climate change is very real. Rigorous science confirms this and CO2 + methane levels are now driving very visible and catastrophic weather all over the world.

UncleEntity 4y ago
“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”
origin_path 4y ago
Don't Look Up is a film with a story that makes absolutely no sense and constantly contradicts itself, so it might not be the best slogan to use: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  > Don't Look Up is a film with a story that makes absolutely no sense and constantly contradicts itself Honestly that sounds like a pretty good model of my life so far.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    And a pretty good model of how humanity is acting :-)
- carapace 4y ago
  That's a bad review. The movie was a satire, it's not supposed to make sense like a normal movie would, rather it's holding up a funhouse mirror to current events. For example, SA presents as a contradiction: > It depicts elites as simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent. But this is exactly what we see in the real world. Take the iPhone for example: a marvel of technology with a cretinous supply chain and amoral-at-best business model. Or VW, great cars but we could do without the emissions scandal. Or the tech industry, great tech (mostly) but they turn around and have a that "no poaching" scandal. Bankers have their LIBOR scandal, etc. Really, "simultaneously incompetent and omnicompetent" is the order of the day, yeah?

88840-8855 4y ago

What is not being posted in news often enough are the options that we have to mitigate the effects. the only thing i read is that we need yo drive down co2. fact is: we are not gonna reach the targets in a reasonable timeframe. hence, we must start preparing to mitigate effects. instead we are caught by climate catastrophies like the current draught in europe, us and china and we are running around like headless chicken. let us setup multi generational projects on international scale to develop mitigations. this os mot being covered well enough in media. the only thing i see in 80% of the articles is status quo reporting of climate change effects (fires, draughts, rain) and YET ANOTHER climate change warning... and ofc some aggressive climate terrorists that are getting too much coverage, too.

mmastrac 4y ago
Humanity hasn't been good at multigenerational projects for some time.
- Dig1t 4y ago
  Generally it seems those kind of concerted efforts are more easily accomplished under dictatorships rather than in democracies.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    I actually disagree, I think we’re conflating dictatorships and social cohesion. Concerted efforts have functioned better under social cohesion(the NHS, social security, etc), but social cohesion isn’t valuable in a modern system because it’s not an efficient use of labor (think: young people leaving their extended families for work elsewhere, not inheriting family farms and businesses which are then bought by conglomerates).
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  Well if I've learned anything from the tech industry,maybe we need more Scrum Masters in politics /s
- 4y ago

AlexandrB 4y ago

It was very eye opening to see how many groups and individuals who "just want to have a debate" on the reality of climate change are funded by fossil fuel companies[1][2][3][4]. We are being lied to, and it's working. Just see the first few comments in reply to this article. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-donated-millions-climate-sceptics https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/30/us-oil-d... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-skeptic-idUSTRE75R2HD20110628 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-skeptic-idUST... [3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-skeptic-pat-micha_b_684013 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-skeptic-pat-micha_b_6... [4] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/global-warming-skeptic-organizations https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/global-warming-skeptic-orga...

origin_path 4y ago
Your first link claims Koch Industries is "a little-known, privately owned US oil company". That's the sort of lie you've got to expect from the Guardian. Quoting Wikipedia: "Koch Industries, Inc. (/ˈkoʊk/) is an American privately held multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill.[2] Its subsidiaries are involved in the manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizer, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, cloud computing, finance, commodity market trading, and investments. Koch owns Flint Hills Resources, Georgia-Pacific, Guardian Industries, Infor, Invista, KBX, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, Koch Engineered Solutions, Koch Investments Group, Koch Minerals & Trading, and Molex. The firm employs 122,000 people in 60 countries, with about half of its business in the United States" The Guardian states that the Koch brothers aren't directly funding climate related stuff, but they do fund libertarian and conservative groups. This is, in their eyes, immoral. Is it terrible for wealthy billionaires to fund people with particular perspectives on what to do about the climate? If you believe so then your biggest criticism must be in the other direction, because the money flows to support pro-doom climate journalism are vast. The Gates Foundation literally directly gives money to news companies that can only be used to hire people to write about climate and vaccines (in his preferred direction). Amongst the recipients of Gates' largesse is, of course, the Guardian. https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu... "I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups."

jtbayly 4y ago

crummy 4y ago
Were many scientists insisting that global cooling was a problem?
- blkhawk 4y ago
  not as far as the rest of the world or the scientists at the time were concerned. From what i read it was mostly a US news-media thing.
- random314 4y ago
  Apparently everyone alive today were also alive in the 70s and reading the latest scientific reports from climate journals. They somehow also managed to miss all the papers on global warming, while the 2 papers on cooling left a huge impression.
- origin_path 4y ago
  They all insisted that the world was cooling because that's what official data at the time showed. Only some insisted it was or could be a problem, but of course those were the ones that got media and political attention. The same is true today. Almost all scientists believe the world is warming. Only some extrapolate that into a crisis, but those are the ones who get media and political attention. There are lots of claims being made in this thread that aren't true, e.g. - only two papers talking about global cooling (wrong) - journalists were inverting what scientists believed (wrong) - there was no consensus on cooling (wrong; see how none of the papers discussing the cooling trend note any disagreement on its existence) and so on. For examples of media reports and scientific papers talking about global cooling see my other posts.
ben_w 4y ago
The newspapers printed those stories in the 1970s, but they didn't reflect general scientific consensus at that time. Or were you thinking of a different decade?

ahnberg 4y ago

Sadly the fact that it HAS been written about for so long just fuels the fire (no pun intended) for the sceptics. Something I often hear when trying to talk to people who refuse to believe the impact we have: "See these domsday prophets have been ranting about this for over a century and we're still here enjoying life!"

rullelito 4y ago
The same with "we only have 10 years left". After 30 years this doesn't carry much weight.
- rob_c 4y ago
  This just makes the problem worse because little remember this 30 years later and think you're a liar or idiot because you pushed exaggerated claims. In the 80s in the UK acid rain was hyped up, in the 90s it was 20 years of oil reserves in the education system. Both now have generated adults distrusting education because they're not an academic and they just remember what a fool told them at face value without nuance. One of the biggest recently being reports that we will have millions dead unless X which doesn't match reality which is just going to create more anti intellectual fear
  - random314 4y ago
    Are you aware that acid rain problem was solved by regulatory action? It didn't automatically disappear.
    - rob_c 4y ago
      Yes, Im painfully aware of this. Christ I wouldn't be making the point of I wasn't this aware of it! (My own personal anger aside here) I have a strong educational background and a head on my shoulders. However from the mainstream public perception it just "disappeared one day" and transformed into "fossil fuels will be gone" which turned into "global warming" which is now "climate change". This is obviously complete nonsense to anyone with a science background but is the result of decades of broken outreach combined with poor public education.

rob_c 4y ago

I... It's yet another discussion or "debate" or shock healine about something which won't change based on discussion... Yet another "shock" headline is just a waste of effort which polarises yet more people into bad positions on all sides even more... What's wrong in just making the planet nicer for everyone?

jokoon 4y ago

I'm already trying to imagine how society will adapt with climate change. I see mostly rich people shielding themselves from the hot climate in developed countries and feeding themselves. Meanwhile, other countries are going to be left to die or left to generalized social unrest, drought and hunger. Massive migrations with a massive security apparatus. I'm guessing human population will fall below two billion or less before 2080 or before, until we can build a green industry while protecting people from this new climate. I don't think it will be a "collapse" like it's often talked about by the collapse movement, but it will be a slow disaster, which will be much more "tolerable" and avoid dangerous, unstable crises or large conflicts. Intelligence agencies are going to carefully plan all of this. Hawks are going to say "it won't be so bad" and that "only the fittest shall survive". It won't be very civilized, but individualism will go away and be replaced by communities who focus on survival at the expense of outgroups. It will probably look like dystopian movies, minus the glory, the heroes and the adventure.

aught 4y ago

Here is a post detailing a time line of military and intelligence concerns on climate change https://climateandsecurity.org/2017/01/chronology-of-the-u-s-military-and-intelligence-communitys-concern-about-climate-change/ https://climateandsecurity.org/2017/01/chronology-of-the-u-s... Great list of references

kodyo 4y ago

If there are solutions that don't involve authoritarian communism, I'm all ears. Encouraging nuclear seems like a really good idea.

josephcsible 4y ago

I notice that a lot of past predictions took the form "if we don't hit metric X by time T1, then easily-observable bad thing Y will happen by time T2". These were concrete, falsifiable (assuming we don't actually hit the metric in question, which in practice we never did), and basically left no room for interpretation. These days, the predictions we get seem way more wishy-washy and completely unfalsifiable.

mmh0000 4y ago

For me, the XKCD chart "Earth Temperature Timeline"[0] really put things into perspective: [0] https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/