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1) Climate modeling is hard. There have been substantial shifts in the climate over time, including five ice ages. 2) Climate change predictions have been rep

by fwungy 4y ago

1) Climate modeling is hard. There have been substantial shifts in the climate over time, including five ice ages. 2) Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong. In the 80's they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000, for example. Maldives are still there. 3) if the models are good then things like the costs of coastal real estate should show it. Coastal real estate is still premium so either the models are wrong or the banks are ignoring the models and lend huge amounts on property thar will soon be reclaimed by the sea. 4) There are people and countries with trillions on pil reserve wealth who will be reduced to poverty in a fossil free world. Are they going to cooperate with their own impoverishment based on weak, poorly performing climate models produced by antagonistic western states? 5) There is a huge installed base of fossil fuels in the developing world. The energy density and portability of fossils is great for places with limited infrastructure. How do you convert them? 6) Nuclear is the only realistic approach to mass scale decarbonization. Why is this ignored. If you believe the climate models then we should accept the stochastic risks of nuclear over the absolute risk of climate in the near future. Is not the risk of an occasional Chernobyl better than planet wide destruction and degradation. 7) The past few years have demonstrated the danger of alarmists reacting to scary looking model data that they don't fully understand. 8) Addressing climate change directly at the source is intractable for the reasons I've listed. Mitigation approaches are going to pay much better dividends than multi moon shot green technology agendas.

CJefferson 4y ago
2) By "they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000", this seems to be one report which was the basis for for a full study of the problem by the UN. Do you agree there have been notable, significant, temperature rises over the last 100 years, which appear to be a significantly faster change than in previous ice ages?
- fwungy 4y ago
  Show me the detailed climate data for the past 20 million years. Oh, you can't. Why? Because there is no data. It's all modeled. To be clear I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change, I'm questioning the strategies employed . A hundred years of data amongst millions is insignificant. We don't know what proportion is anthropogenic and which is the larger climate trend that is beyond our control. Regardless, the logical optimization is nuclear and mitigation, not a suicidal unilateral rush into zero GHG. Under that approach if the multiple technogical breakthroughs never come we are in worse shape than if we had not done anything.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Actually there's substantial geological evidence for CO2-driven climate change. Several chapters of James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren provide a good introduction to it. I agree with you on nuclear, and if you read Hansen's book you'll see that he does as well.
    - fwungy 4y ago
      Yes. Hansen is quite convincing on his nuclear stance, which is sadly ignored. Net zero energy exclusively from renewable resources is a dangerous and delusional pathway. As for the climate backcasting, it's all theory. There's no way to even get a confidence interval on the estimates because there is no way to witness the actual events that they extrapolate from.
      - DennisP 4y ago
        Several independent lines of geologic evidence all point to a similar climate sensitivity (see Hansen). Some fairly basic physics does the same, and physicists back to 1896 predicted our current reality pretty well. The recent book The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence Krauss covers that in detail.
    - fwungy 4y ago
      It's not surprising that modelers using the same data and modeling theories come up with similar results. My point is that we have no actual way to confirm how correct these models are because we can't check them.
      - acdha 4y ago
        The part you’re missing is that it’s not “the same data” but multiple data sources showing the same trend. Ice cores, stalagmites, lake sediment, tree rings, sea shells and corals, microfossils, etc. are all measuring different things - when those show consistent results it’s increasingly unlikely that this is coincidental. Wikipedia has a good overview of the major categories which is well worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology Those cover many separate fields so it’s also unlikely that this is because they all happen to be making the same mistakes. Revealing such a flaw would be a career-making move for an academic.
acdha 4y ago
> Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong This is fossil fuel industry propaganda - whoever told you this is untrustworthy and literally banking on you not fact-checking their claims. The consensus predictions since the late 1970s have been increasingly accurate, especially since the 1980s. For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which we now have data to judge them against: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jun/25/30-years-later-deniers-are-still-lying-about-hansens-amazing-global-warming-prediction https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-climate-science-really-call-for-a-coming-ice-age/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

by fwungy 4y ago

CJefferson 4y ago

2) By "they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000", this seems to be one report which was the basis for for a full study of the problem by the UN. Do you agree there have been notable, significant, temperature rises over the last 100 years, which appear to be a significantly faster change than in previous ice ages?

fwungy 4y ago
Show me the detailed climate data for the past 20 million years. Oh, you can't. Why? Because there is no data. It's all modeled. To be clear I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change, I'm questioning the strategies employed . A hundred years of data amongst millions is insignificant. We don't know what proportion is anthropogenic and which is the larger climate trend that is beyond our control. Regardless, the logical optimization is nuclear and mitigation, not a suicidal unilateral rush into zero GHG. Under that approach if the multiple technogical breakthroughs never come we are in worse shape than if we had not done anything.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Actually there's substantial geological evidence for CO2-driven climate change. Several chapters of James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren provide a good introduction to it. I agree with you on nuclear, and if you read Hansen's book you'll see that he does as well.
  - fwungy 4y ago
    Yes. Hansen is quite convincing on his nuclear stance, which is sadly ignored. Net zero energy exclusively from renewable resources is a dangerous and delusional pathway. As for the climate backcasting, it's all theory. There's no way to even get a confidence interval on the estimates because there is no way to witness the actual events that they extrapolate from.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Several independent lines of geologic evidence all point to a similar climate sensitivity (see Hansen). Some fairly basic physics does the same, and physicists back to 1896 predicted our current reality pretty well. The recent book The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence Krauss covers that in detail.
  - fwungy 4y ago
    It's not surprising that modelers using the same data and modeling theories come up with similar results. My point is that we have no actual way to confirm how correct these models are because we can't check them.
    - acdha 4y ago
      The part you’re missing is that it’s not “the same data” but multiple data sources showing the same trend. Ice cores, stalagmites, lake sediment, tree rings, sea shells and corals, microfossils, etc. are all measuring different things - when those show consistent results it’s increasingly unlikely that this is coincidental. Wikipedia has a good overview of the major categories which is well worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology Those cover many separate fields so it’s also unlikely that this is because they all happen to be making the same mistakes. Revealing such a flaw would be a career-making move for an academic.

acdha 4y ago

> Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong This is fossil fuel industry propaganda - whoever told you this is untrustworthy and literally banking on you not fact-checking their claims. The consensus predictions since the late 1970s have been increasingly accurate, especially since the 1980s. For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which we now have data to judge them against: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jun/25/30-years-later-deniers-are-still-lying-about-hansens-amazing-global-warming-prediction https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-climate-science-really-call-for-a-coming-ice-age/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...