11 ms·

This is exactly what the "deniers" have been saying - that the mathematical model is not fleshed out enough, and the data is not present in sufficiently accurat

This is exactly what the "deniers" have been saying - that the mathematical model is not fleshed out enough, and the data is not present in sufficiently accurate quantity, for the climate models to be accurate. This research shows that the mechanism of action was misunderstood all this time. What else hasn't been researched enough and has simplistic assumptions baked into the climate models? That shockingly simplistic models and the barest of data don't actually have predictive power wouldn't surprise people in any other scientific discipline, but it will certainly be cause enough for this subject, to have this comment voted into oblivion....

ChrisClark 4y ago
Oh no, from 28x to 20x. It must mean there is no problem at all!
mstipetic 4y ago
[flagged]
- shrubble 4y ago
  Thanks for your rebuttal based on logic and rationality. Did you have anything to add in terms of, I don't know, something based on scientific or mathematical grounds?
  - mlyle 4y ago
    You've been thoroughly rebutted in this thread, but you choose to engage with the one person who called a name instead of everyone else. Meh.
kennywinker 4y ago
Except climate change is happening, and there's no doubt about that because knowing it's happening isn't relying on models, it's relying on thermometers (and to a lesser extent ice cores to confirm that it's human-driven rather than a natural change). How bad climate change will be, yeah I suppose there is a little fuzzyness there. But given how bad it COULD be (think: complete extinction of humanity, or an end of civilization) we can't really wait around not doing anything while we try to develop a perfect model.
- shrubble 4y ago
  The temperature has changed repeatedly without any evidence of human involvement over those longer time periods we can observe. And the levels of CO2 etc. have changed as well, during time periods when it could not possibly have been blamed on humans. I grew up in Canada, in an area with lots of farms... and I remember the high school trips to different geographical features such as moraines which are the residue of glaciers from long ago. What caused those mile-thick glaciers to melt, given the low levels of human population and the low levels of human technology?
  - dmbche 4y ago
    I don't think you understand what you are arguing. Yes, the average temperature of earth has chaged vastly over its history, giving different levels of habitability. At this time, we're in a really good spot for habitability, and we are seeing that we are slipping out of it. There is evidence that some of the temperature change could very well be human made, and thus easy to stop (compared to, say, the emissions of volcanoes). For some reason you argue that nothing should be done, because nothing was done in past massive climate changes, which resolved in mass extinctions. Is anything I'm saying wrong?
    - nightski 4y ago
      Easy to stop? Lol it's down right impossible and all this discussion is colossal waste of time. Humans are never going to coordinate globally to do this.
      - dmbche 4y ago
        I'm not wasting a lot of time on this, maybe a couple hours a month in looking at papers? I don't think it's a waste of time. Humans don't need to coordonate globally to slow down emissions. I'm sure you are aware of what motivated small groups of people can do. I'm not talking changing laws or protesting, but sabotage and disobedience in general are very efficient and need little coordination.
    - 4y ago
Loquebantur 4y ago
The reason your comment is bad isn't you pointing out some "truth". The reason is your comment being misleading. You pretend, the accuracy of climate models was insufficient for any relevant conclusions to be made. That is just nonsense. The interesting part is people clinging onto anything calling that impending climate catastrophe (or its human cause) into question. Individual subjective short-term benefits outweighing rationally obvious mid- to long-term consequences is usually considered the domain of teenagers. Or of people living in very uncertain (life-threatening) circumstances, devaluing any future considerations. Either way, those opinions can't carry weight in such a context, as their reasons share no common domain of validity with global long-term considerations.
- shrubble 4y ago
  You're talking about changing literally trillions of dollars worth of economic activity, per year, now and supposedly for the next 50 or 100 years, across the whole of Western civilization. The requirement for the math being absolutely "spot-on" in this case is extremely high. Is it?
  - notahacker 4y ago
    No, the model doesn't need to be "absolutely spot on" for it to be correct about the correlation between industrial activity and sustained global temperature rises. And that argument works better in reverse anyway: we're talking about a trend implying large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable for present levels of human population within a relatively short time frame (which will also have an effect on economic activity!). If contrarians really have a good faith belief that this trend is caused by some other factor and will be self correcting, perhaps they could deign to specify their own testable assumptions and make their own model...
  - Aachen 4y ago
    If the police isn't sure if someone is driving 190 or 220 miles per hour in a 45 zone, should we just not ticket the person? Or perhaps a "scientist" has spotted a suspected cancer in your brain but they can't quite pinpoint whether it's a 20x increase from normal size or a 28x increase. Based on the 28 assumption, you'll be in a wheelchair within seven years, but it might also be ten years. It's entirely preventable by doing the surgery but that costs money today plus minor lifestyle changes. Before doing a costly operation and bothering with, say, a daily pill and no alcohol, one could choose to wait while they refine their equipment over the next decades and then measure again before taking serious action. Can't trust dem scientists anyway, maybe it wasn't a problem in the first place. That's the logic I'm seeing here. A "times worse than CO2" value for one of the elements might have been off by 30% so we should just assume nothing is wrong in the first place and not change our society away from burning carbon. Maybe it's just a coincidence that ~five of the past ten summers are the hottest of all the summers whose temperature we've measured... yeah I agree: maybe. It's a possibility, no matter how remote. But I'd rather not wager with billions of lives impacted by the outcomes that are part obvious (sea level rise) and part the prediction from yet more models. We needed to act yesterday if the models are anywhere near the truth and it's going to get exponentially harder to fix the longer we wait (because reducing emissions year-on-year is a lot easier than cutting+capturing at a moment's notice). If it turns out to be a dud, we can continue to dig up the remaining oil and have a big feast, everyone happy. If not, it's a good thing we acted and we're probably still not going to be able to prevent some level of habitat damage for the species we call human, but at least it won't be as bad as when we wait for more precise information on a problem where the conclusion remains unchanged. (That's besides the healthy years of life provided by having cleaner air; I don't know how that would compare against e.g. cobalt mining.)
tzs 4y ago
From models, basic physics, and observed effects scientist make forecasts about climate change, and they adjust models based on observations. If scientist make 100 forecasts based on current models they won't all be spot on. It might turn out that say 85 of them turn out to be pretty close, 5 of them turn out to be wrong in that things actually turned out worse than the models forecast, 5 of them turned out better than the models forecast, and 5 of them didn't happen at all. The "deniers" look at those last 5 or 10 and dismiss the models and all conclusions from them as worthless, ignoring that the models got it mostly right and that the things they got wrong are nowhere near important enough to change the overall result. They at most just change the timeline a little.
altacc 4y ago
This sounds like a prelude to a simplistic "the models aren't accurate, so climate change probably isn't really a problem". However the problem with that is that the overwhelming majority of observations and models, many of which are far from simple and use large amounts of data, point to climate change being real, unusually rapid and anthropogenic. Using the argument that these models aren't accurate ignores the fact that even with a large margin of error, the lower bounds of climate change still result in significant negative effects for large numbers of people and ecosystems. Models have for a long time shown that the overall global temperature will rise and observations over the years have proved the models reflect reality. Are all models 100% correct with predictions? No, but the trend the models show is proven, even if there is a margin of error which is typically always acknowledged during modelling. Questioning the accuracy as a form of dismissal raise the question of what level of accuracy you'd want before accepting the results, and what level of accuracy any countering research should have. Research like this paper also has margins of error, are often single studies or analysis and therefore aren't proven to be accurate themselves. Science evolves all the time, a large amount of the science we experience or rely on day to day cannot be fully modelled with high accuracy but we don't discount reality because the models don't match it.
- amelius 4y ago
  It sounds like a very basic mistake, though. Now I wonder how well climate research is funded.
  - revelio 4y ago
    It's incredibly well funded, that's part of the problem. Every time they make extreme claims their funding levels go up, because rich people and governments conclude studying the climate is the most important thing that can be done with the money.
- kcplate 4y ago
  I think the problem with the attitude of “so what if the models aren’t accurate, we should still undertake giant unpopular sacrifices because I, the expert, says so…”.is that it makes people more and more distrustful of future models that may be more accurate. We just watched with front row seats what happens when once trusted scientific authorities rely on poor data, poor communications, and poor models. The general populace starts to distrust and reject them. This is the danger of every apocalyptic climate prediction that fails to come to pass. The desire to scare people into action only tends to push people into distrust and indifference.
robertoandred 4y ago
You heard it here, folks! Climate change is a hoax.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
The deniers are mostly denying that the impact of human activities on climate is real. They are just attacking the models as a convenient scapegoat which is weird because everyone know the models can be criticised but there is undeniable evidence for human emitted CO2 having an impact so it’s mostly a waste of time. If you really want to criticise the models, demographic hypotheses are far more questionable than anything having to do with methane by the way. Population growth was widely overestimated in the 90s for example and might still be. Plus the impact of an aging population and immigration becoming the main factor of population growth in the USA, Europe and China isn’t really well studied. This is partially voluntary by the way as it quickly leads to unsavoury questions.
- revelio 4y ago
  World population has grown at exactly the same rate for the last 70 years: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth If modellers were caught by surprise by this then they are clueless. But they weren't because population doesn't factor into models. They go straight from projections of CO2 levels, which have also grown at a constant rate: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ So it's not clear why you bring up population growth. It's not relevant. >> there is undeniable evidence for human emitted CO2 having an impact What is it and how is this impact measured in an undeniable way. It can't be temperatures because they don't track CO2 levels.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    > World population has grown at exactly the same rate for the last 70 years Did you actually look at what you linked? The main graph is only China and India and already shows a net inflection for China in the past few years. It will keep slowing. Read about population-lag effect. The second graph nicely confirms that contrary to what you pretend population growth has started slowing globally. There is no consensus about how much it will slow and when the peak will be reached. IPCCC had to adjust their hypotheses in the past because the lowest credible estimation where falling outside the lowest considered by the first climate model and some specialist argue we should look at even lower prediction. People in developing nations have stopped having large families faster than we thought. > So it's not clear why you bring up population growth. It's not relevant. If you don’t see how population size affects consumption, production and in fine pollution, I can’t do much for you. > What is it and how is this impact measured in an undeniable way. It can't be temperatures because they don't track CO2 levels. You are clearly arguing in bad faith or are clueless about the research surrounding climate change. In both case, I think it would be a waste of my time arguing further.
csours 4y ago
There's not one monolithic group of "deniers".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jarenmf 4y ago
> . What else hasn't been researched enough and has simplistic assumptions baked into the climate models? Simplistic assumptions does not necessarily have favorable outcomes, on the contrary, it's more likely that climate change is worse than what we think it is because of our assumptions. Also climate models are insanely complex, usually contain thousands of equations that sum up the research efforts over the last hundred years, it's not some simple model that one guy can implement in an evening as you are basically trying to simulate the whole earth from the scale of plant stomata and molecular diffusion to the entire boundary layer plus the interactions and feedbacks between the different parts of the earth system.
kagakuninja 4y ago
The fossil fuel industry has also grossly underestimated the amount of methane leaking from wells and fracking sites. Researchers got some things right, other things wrong. What we have seen historically is that the pessimistic estimates of scientists have matched reality better than the optimistic estimates. Scientists have actually under estimated the effects of climate change.
- revelio 4y ago
  Scientists overestimated climate change and frequently still do by their own telling. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2 Climate simulations: recognize the ‘hot model’ problem Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’ and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence. In recent studies, the “hot models” have even been shown to be ineffective at reproducing past temperatures, a common method used to test their reliability and accuracy. This has cast further doubt on the model democracy approach, whereby all models are given equal weighting when establishing future warming parameters. (unpaywalled copy here https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-soft-criticism-from-the-mainstream/ https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-...)
  - Aachen 4y ago
    The second link is not an unpaywalled copy, it's "climate change isn't real" content that you're portraying as having been posted to Nature. This is not a constructive way to talk about the topic at hand (methane being the equivalent of 20x CO2 instead of 28x, at least if the submission isn't in error).
    - revelio 4y ago
      Here's a public versions of their nature comment written by the same authors. I should have linked to that instead of the original paywalled version but all these versions are making the same argument, presumably with sightly different wording for copyright reasons: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-climate-scientists-should-handle-hot-models/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-climate-scientist... If you're claiming this material is "climate change isn't real" then look into who the authors are. The topic at hand is climatologists changing their minds about basic variables despite decades of making predictions with 100% confidence. The fact that their latest models are totally unrealistic, by their own assessment, is further evidence that the science here is seriously flawed and subject to major revision, still.
bufio 4y ago
They're anything but simplistic.
titzer 4y ago
> This is exactly what the "deniers" have been saying Deniers gonna deny. They'll use whatever argument it as hand, including completely nonsensical and contradictory ones, to tarnish, downplay, distort, misrepresent, and fundamentally reject the underlying thing they want to deny.
tuatoru 4y ago
> That shockingly simplistic models and the barest of data don't actually have predictive power wouldn't surprise people in any other scientific discipline This is dead wrong. It's a source of wonder in most scientific disciplines that heavily simplified models can have amazingly good predictive power.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
acdha 4y ago
If you want to talk about predictive power, let’s look at the first IPCC report from 1990. That had estimates which we now have data to judge them against, and have held up well: 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... This research shows that one variable might be 30-40% smaller but the impact of that is clearly still within the margins on reports from 3 or 4 decades ago, so perhaps consider that the fossil fuel-funded sources telling you that the models are “shockingly simplistic” are not being entirely honest about their motives.
- revelio 4y ago
  As the Ars article makes it clear, the predicted range of temperature change was extremely wide, 0.35 to 0.7 degrees by now even if you allow for the re-scaling to a shorter time period, yet actual change was at the very lowest point of that uncertainty interval. That by itself doesn't tell us that they understand the climate though. Remember that previously they were extrapolating a cooling trend into an ice age. Anyone can extrapolate a linear trend forward on a graph into a disaster zone territory, but that doesn't imply real understanding.
  - acdha 4y ago
    It’s not news that scientific consensus becomes more precise over time. The point was simply that scientists have a good track record of making accurate predictions decades out, which is quite the contrast of how deniers have flitted from wrong prediction to wrong prediction. Don’t feel bad for them, however — they get paid a lot better than climate scientists do and are probably old enough to miss out on the worst of it.
    - 4y ago

ChrisClark 4y ago

Oh no, from 28x to 20x. It must mean there is no problem at all!

mstipetic 4y ago

[flagged]

shrubble 4y ago
Thanks for your rebuttal based on logic and rationality. Did you have anything to add in terms of, I don't know, something based on scientific or mathematical grounds?
- mlyle 4y ago
  You've been thoroughly rebutted in this thread, but you choose to engage with the one person who called a name instead of everyone else. Meh.

kennywinker 4y ago

Except climate change is happening, and there's no doubt about that because knowing it's happening isn't relying on models, it's relying on thermometers (and to a lesser extent ice cores to confirm that it's human-driven rather than a natural change). How bad climate change will be, yeah I suppose there is a little fuzzyness there. But given how bad it COULD be (think: complete extinction of humanity, or an end of civilization) we can't really wait around not doing anything while we try to develop a perfect model.

shrubble 4y ago
The temperature has changed repeatedly without any evidence of human involvement over those longer time periods we can observe. And the levels of CO2 etc. have changed as well, during time periods when it could not possibly have been blamed on humans. I grew up in Canada, in an area with lots of farms... and I remember the high school trips to different geographical features such as moraines which are the residue of glaciers from long ago. What caused those mile-thick glaciers to melt, given the low levels of human population and the low levels of human technology?
- dmbche 4y ago
  I don't think you understand what you are arguing. Yes, the average temperature of earth has chaged vastly over its history, giving different levels of habitability. At this time, we're in a really good spot for habitability, and we are seeing that we are slipping out of it. There is evidence that some of the temperature change could very well be human made, and thus easy to stop (compared to, say, the emissions of volcanoes). For some reason you argue that nothing should be done, because nothing was done in past massive climate changes, which resolved in mass extinctions. Is anything I'm saying wrong?
  - nightski 4y ago
    Easy to stop? Lol it's down right impossible and all this discussion is colossal waste of time. Humans are never going to coordinate globally to do this.
    - dmbche 4y ago
      I'm not wasting a lot of time on this, maybe a couple hours a month in looking at papers? I don't think it's a waste of time. Humans don't need to coordonate globally to slow down emissions. I'm sure you are aware of what motivated small groups of people can do. I'm not talking changing laws or protesting, but sabotage and disobedience in general are very efficient and need little coordination.
  - 4y ago

Loquebantur 4y ago

The reason your comment is bad isn't you pointing out some "truth". The reason is your comment being misleading. You pretend, the accuracy of climate models was insufficient for any relevant conclusions to be made. That is just nonsense. The interesting part is people clinging onto anything calling that impending climate catastrophe (or its human cause) into question. Individual subjective short-term benefits outweighing rationally obvious mid- to long-term consequences is usually considered the domain of teenagers. Or of people living in very uncertain (life-threatening) circumstances, devaluing any future considerations. Either way, those opinions can't carry weight in such a context, as their reasons share no common domain of validity with global long-term considerations.

shrubble 4y ago
You're talking about changing literally trillions of dollars worth of economic activity, per year, now and supposedly for the next 50 or 100 years, across the whole of Western civilization. The requirement for the math being absolutely "spot-on" in this case is extremely high. Is it?
- notahacker 4y ago
  No, the model doesn't need to be "absolutely spot on" for it to be correct about the correlation between industrial activity and sustained global temperature rises. And that argument works better in reverse anyway: we're talking about a trend implying large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable for present levels of human population within a relatively short time frame (which will also have an effect on economic activity!). If contrarians really have a good faith belief that this trend is caused by some other factor and will be self correcting, perhaps they could deign to specify their own testable assumptions and make their own model...
- Aachen 4y ago
  If the police isn't sure if someone is driving 190 or 220 miles per hour in a 45 zone, should we just not ticket the person? Or perhaps a "scientist" has spotted a suspected cancer in your brain but they can't quite pinpoint whether it's a 20x increase from normal size or a 28x increase. Based on the 28 assumption, you'll be in a wheelchair within seven years, but it might also be ten years. It's entirely preventable by doing the surgery but that costs money today plus minor lifestyle changes. Before doing a costly operation and bothering with, say, a daily pill and no alcohol, one could choose to wait while they refine their equipment over the next decades and then measure again before taking serious action. Can't trust dem scientists anyway, maybe it wasn't a problem in the first place. That's the logic I'm seeing here. A "times worse than CO2" value for one of the elements might have been off by 30% so we should just assume nothing is wrong in the first place and not change our society away from burning carbon. Maybe it's just a coincidence that ~five of the past ten summers are the hottest of all the summers whose temperature we've measured... yeah I agree: maybe. It's a possibility, no matter how remote. But I'd rather not wager with billions of lives impacted by the outcomes that are part obvious (sea level rise) and part the prediction from yet more models. We needed to act yesterday if the models are anywhere near the truth and it's going to get exponentially harder to fix the longer we wait (because reducing emissions year-on-year is a lot easier than cutting+capturing at a moment's notice). If it turns out to be a dud, we can continue to dig up the remaining oil and have a big feast, everyone happy. If not, it's a good thing we acted and we're probably still not going to be able to prevent some level of habitat damage for the species we call human, but at least it won't be as bad as when we wait for more precise information on a problem where the conclusion remains unchanged. (That's besides the healthy years of life provided by having cleaner air; I don't know how that would compare against e.g. cobalt mining.)

tzs 4y ago

From models, basic physics, and observed effects scientist make forecasts about climate change, and they adjust models based on observations. If scientist make 100 forecasts based on current models they won't all be spot on. It might turn out that say 85 of them turn out to be pretty close, 5 of them turn out to be wrong in that things actually turned out worse than the models forecast, 5 of them turned out better than the models forecast, and 5 of them didn't happen at all. The "deniers" look at those last 5 or 10 and dismiss the models and all conclusions from them as worthless, ignoring that the models got it mostly right and that the things they got wrong are nowhere near important enough to change the overall result. They at most just change the timeline a little.

altacc 4y ago

This sounds like a prelude to a simplistic "the models aren't accurate, so climate change probably isn't really a problem". However the problem with that is that the overwhelming majority of observations and models, many of which are far from simple and use large amounts of data, point to climate change being real, unusually rapid and anthropogenic. Using the argument that these models aren't accurate ignores the fact that even with a large margin of error, the lower bounds of climate change still result in significant negative effects for large numbers of people and ecosystems. Models have for a long time shown that the overall global temperature will rise and observations over the years have proved the models reflect reality. Are all models 100% correct with predictions? No, but the trend the models show is proven, even if there is a margin of error which is typically always acknowledged during modelling. Questioning the accuracy as a form of dismissal raise the question of what level of accuracy you'd want before accepting the results, and what level of accuracy any countering research should have. Research like this paper also has margins of error, are often single studies or analysis and therefore aren't proven to be accurate themselves. Science evolves all the time, a large amount of the science we experience or rely on day to day cannot be fully modelled with high accuracy but we don't discount reality because the models don't match it.

amelius 4y ago
It sounds like a very basic mistake, though. Now I wonder how well climate research is funded.
- revelio 4y ago
  It's incredibly well funded, that's part of the problem. Every time they make extreme claims their funding levels go up, because rich people and governments conclude studying the climate is the most important thing that can be done with the money.
kcplate 4y ago
I think the problem with the attitude of “so what if the models aren’t accurate, we should still undertake giant unpopular sacrifices because I, the expert, says so…”.is that it makes people more and more distrustful of future models that may be more accurate. We just watched with front row seats what happens when once trusted scientific authorities rely on poor data, poor communications, and poor models. The general populace starts to distrust and reject them. This is the danger of every apocalyptic climate prediction that fails to come to pass. The desire to scare people into action only tends to push people into distrust and indifference.

robertoandred 4y ago

You heard it here, folks! Climate change is a hoax.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

The deniers are mostly denying that the impact of human activities on climate is real. They are just attacking the models as a convenient scapegoat which is weird because everyone know the models can be criticised but there is undeniable evidence for human emitted CO2 having an impact so it’s mostly a waste of time. If you really want to criticise the models, demographic hypotheses are far more questionable than anything having to do with methane by the way. Population growth was widely overestimated in the 90s for example and might still be. Plus the impact of an aging population and immigration becoming the main factor of population growth in the USA, Europe and China isn’t really well studied. This is partially voluntary by the way as it quickly leads to unsavoury questions.

revelio 4y ago
World population has grown at exactly the same rate for the last 70 years: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth If modellers were caught by surprise by this then they are clueless. But they weren't because population doesn't factor into models. They go straight from projections of CO2 levels, which have also grown at a constant rate: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ So it's not clear why you bring up population growth. It's not relevant. >> there is undeniable evidence for human emitted CO2 having an impact What is it and how is this impact measured in an undeniable way. It can't be temperatures because they don't track CO2 levels.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > World population has grown at exactly the same rate for the last 70 years Did you actually look at what you linked? The main graph is only China and India and already shows a net inflection for China in the past few years. It will keep slowing. Read about population-lag effect. The second graph nicely confirms that contrary to what you pretend population growth has started slowing globally. There is no consensus about how much it will slow and when the peak will be reached. IPCCC had to adjust their hypotheses in the past because the lowest credible estimation where falling outside the lowest considered by the first climate model and some specialist argue we should look at even lower prediction. People in developing nations have stopped having large families faster than we thought. > So it's not clear why you bring up population growth. It's not relevant. If you don’t see how population size affects consumption, production and in fine pollution, I can’t do much for you. > What is it and how is this impact measured in an undeniable way. It can't be temperatures because they don't track CO2 levels. You are clearly arguing in bad faith or are clueless about the research surrounding climate change. In both case, I think it would be a waste of my time arguing further.

csours 4y ago

There's not one monolithic group of "deniers".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jarenmf 4y ago

> . What else hasn't been researched enough and has simplistic assumptions baked into the climate models? Simplistic assumptions does not necessarily have favorable outcomes, on the contrary, it's more likely that climate change is worse than what we think it is because of our assumptions. Also climate models are insanely complex, usually contain thousands of equations that sum up the research efforts over the last hundred years, it's not some simple model that one guy can implement in an evening as you are basically trying to simulate the whole earth from the scale of plant stomata and molecular diffusion to the entire boundary layer plus the interactions and feedbacks between the different parts of the earth system.

kagakuninja 4y ago

The fossil fuel industry has also grossly underestimated the amount of methane leaking from wells and fracking sites. Researchers got some things right, other things wrong. What we have seen historically is that the pessimistic estimates of scientists have matched reality better than the optimistic estimates. Scientists have actually under estimated the effects of climate change.

revelio 4y ago
Scientists overestimated climate change and frequently still do by their own telling. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01192-2 Climate simulations: recognize the ‘hot model’ problem Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’ and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence. In recent studies, the “hot models” have even been shown to be ineffective at reproducing past temperatures, a common method used to test their reliability and accuracy. This has cast further doubt on the model democracy approach, whereby all models are given equal weighting when establishing future warming parameters. (unpaywalled copy here https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-soft-criticism-from-the-mainstream/ https://www.masterresource.org/uncategorized/climate-models-...)
- Aachen 4y ago
  The second link is not an unpaywalled copy, it's "climate change isn't real" content that you're portraying as having been posted to Nature. This is not a constructive way to talk about the topic at hand (methane being the equivalent of 20x CO2 instead of 28x, at least if the submission isn't in error).
  - revelio 4y ago
    Here's a public versions of their nature comment written by the same authors. I should have linked to that instead of the original paywalled version but all these versions are making the same argument, presumably with sightly different wording for copyright reasons: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-climate-scientists-should-handle-hot-models/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-climate-scientist... If you're claiming this material is "climate change isn't real" then look into who the authors are. The topic at hand is climatologists changing their minds about basic variables despite decades of making predictions with 100% confidence. The fact that their latest models are totally unrealistic, by their own assessment, is further evidence that the science here is seriously flawed and subject to major revision, still.

bufio 4y ago

They're anything but simplistic.

titzer 4y ago

> This is exactly what the "deniers" have been saying Deniers gonna deny. They'll use whatever argument it as hand, including completely nonsensical and contradictory ones, to tarnish, downplay, distort, misrepresent, and fundamentally reject the underlying thing they want to deny.

tuatoru 4y ago

> That shockingly simplistic models and the barest of data don't actually have predictive power wouldn't surprise people in any other scientific discipline This is dead wrong. It's a source of wonder in most scientific disciplines that heavily simplified models can have amazingly good predictive power.

deleted 4y ago

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acdha 4y ago

If you want to talk about predictive power, let’s look at the first IPCC report from 1990. That had estimates which we now have data to judge them against, and have held up well: 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... This research shows that one variable might be 30-40% smaller but the impact of that is clearly still within the margins on reports from 3 or 4 decades ago, so perhaps consider that the fossil fuel-funded sources telling you that the models are “shockingly simplistic” are not being entirely honest about their motives.

revelio 4y ago
As the Ars article makes it clear, the predicted range of temperature change was extremely wide, 0.35 to 0.7 degrees by now even if you allow for the re-scaling to a shorter time period, yet actual change was at the very lowest point of that uncertainty interval. That by itself doesn't tell us that they understand the climate though. Remember that previously they were extrapolating a cooling trend into an ice age. Anyone can extrapolate a linear trend forward on a graph into a disaster zone territory, but that doesn't imply real understanding.
- acdha 4y ago
  It’s not news that scientific consensus becomes more precise over time. The point was simply that scientists have a good track record of making accurate predictions decades out, which is quite the contrast of how deniers have flitted from wrong prediction to wrong prediction. Don’t feel bad for them, however — they get paid a lot better than climate scientists do and are probably old enough to miss out on the worst of it.
  - 4y ago