3 ms·

Pot. Kettle. Black. You should stop believing misinformation. The belief that they ever believed in global cooling is itself a result of cherrypicking. Mos

by btilly 4y ago

Pot. Kettle. Black. You should stop believing misinformation. The belief that they ever believed in global cooling is itself a result of cherrypicking. Most papers predicted warming. See https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in... for details. The short version is that aerosols in the air have a cooling effect. Papers did predict that a massive increase in aerosols could cause cooling. That increase never happened thanks to the Clean Air Act. Similarly dust from a nuclear war would have the same effect. Thankfully this theory has not been put to the test.

hammock 4y ago
>The belief that they ever believed in global cooling is itself a result of cherrypicking. Most papers predicted warming Who are "they"? If "most papers" predicted warming then some papers predicted cooling. Science and truth are independent of majority view. My point is not that one or the other of global warming or cooling is true, but that reaching into the past and surfacing research that points to warming - or cooling for that matter - is cherrypicking, and of limited value.
- btilly 4y ago
  Sorry, but you're just arguing for intellectual dishonesty at this point. There were, in fact, papers like https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.173.3992.138 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.173.3992.138 which painted a "what if" scenario about what would happen if aerosol usage increased by a factor of 4. However it didn't actually predict that aerosol usage WOULD increase by that much, and the law that successfully reduced aerosol usage was actually passed in 1970. (Though it took a few years to demonstrate its success.) And even papers like that acknowledged that CO2 was creating a long-term temperature increase, while the cooling of aerosols will stop very shortly after we stop emitting them. Conversely we can choose to emit aerosols. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... as evidence that this is being considered as a solution to climate change. (Sadly it does nothing to fix ocean acidification or the fact that plants grown in excess CO2 have lower nutritional value.) There was no equivalence where some scientists said one thing and others said another so who knows. Instead there was an ever improving understanding of a complex reality which is easy to cherrypick to rhetorical ends. Exactly as you are doing right now.

by btilly 4y ago

hammock 4y ago

>The belief that they ever believed in global cooling is itself a result of cherrypicking. Most papers predicted warming Who are "they"? If "most papers" predicted warming then some papers predicted cooling. Science and truth are independent of majority view. My point is not that one or the other of global warming or cooling is true, but that reaching into the past and surfacing research that points to warming - or cooling for that matter - is cherrypicking, and of limited value.

btilly 4y ago
Sorry, but you're just arguing for intellectual dishonesty at this point. There were, in fact, papers like https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.173.3992.138 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.173.3992.138 which painted a "what if" scenario about what would happen if aerosol usage increased by a factor of 4. However it didn't actually predict that aerosol usage WOULD increase by that much, and the law that successfully reduced aerosol usage was actually passed in 1970. (Though it took a few years to demonstrate its success.) And even papers like that acknowledged that CO2 was creating a long-term temperature increase, while the cooling of aerosols will stop very shortly after we stop emitting them. Conversely we can choose to emit aerosols. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... as evidence that this is being considered as a solution to climate change. (Sadly it does nothing to fix ocean acidification or the fact that plants grown in excess CO2 have lower nutritional value.) There was no equivalence where some scientists said one thing and others said another so who knows. Instead there was an ever improving understanding of a complex reality which is easy to cherrypick to rhetorical ends. Exactly as you are doing right now.