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All my life I've felt like I'm taking crazy pills talking to these people. The basics of the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect are almost trivial science - first

All my life I've felt like I'm taking crazy pills talking to these people. The basics of the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect are almost trivial science - first written about (as far as is now known) by an American woman citizen scientist before the Civil War. To say that humans can dump an unlimited amount of that gas into the atmosphere (and it's a terribly awesome accomplishment that the very air we breathe now contains one third more carbon than it did when my parents were children) with zero consequence always struck me as bonkers.

jiggawatts 3y ago
To play the devil’s advocate: I have an otherwise intelligent friend who doesn’t believe in global warming because in his mind the cause-and-effect hasn’t been clearly articulated. So I started to explain to him in more rigorous, scientific terms that he’ll understand and accept. I found that it was much, much harder than I had anticipated. I did my own research, and it turns out that the “real story” can’t really be explained without resorting to nonlinear differential equations and high-resolution spectra of exotic chemicals. For example it turns out that it matters a lot that near the poles the upper atmosphere has a higher concentration of various rare isotopes, which shifts the fine structure of absorption spectra just so as to absorb heat from the lower layers. To be perfectly honest, despite a physics degree and a background in chemistry, I didn’t quite follow the full argument and couldn’t relay it to my friend. However when I saw a NASA page about the precision spectra of truly obscure specie such as doubly-ionised isotopically non-standard excited radicals as key inputs into supercomputer climate simulations I was reassured that smart people have sunk an awful lot of effort into the problem.
- bookaway 3y ago
  A very underrated comment. I think a lot of people, including some people in this thread, willfully avoid this reality. There is a danger in losing one's self in the romanticism of being a "Cassandra", instead of addressing the prerequisite to the required action -- belief. As with any war, correct messaging is vital to retain the public will in the fight. But as with any propaganda, dumbing the truth down might result in a lie. And once such a lie is uncovered and attacked, trust may never again recover (see Covid) and the fight will be forsaken. I think the only way out, the only way to convince the general public without them needing to understand the complexity of "why" is to pour immense resources into improving our prediction of near-term events. Only by demonstrably predicting earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, detailed weather patterns across the globe 6 months-a year in advance within a day/hour level of accuracy can we hope to convince the public that the models will be as relatively accurate when predicting earth's general characteristics decades into the future. After all, the grudging leeway the public gives doctors and practitioners of mainstream medicine does not seem to be a result of them being swayed by the medical arguments presented to them, but because they have witnessed their powers of healing first hand.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Indeed, while the greenhouse gas effect is almost trivially simple science, it is acting on a global climate system that is complex in ways far beyond human understanding (though as you say, collectively we have put some impressive work into comprehending it). Given that our lives and civilizations depend on said complex system, I would consider it wise not to fuck with it.
- jfengel 3y ago
  You don't need to take it to the molecular level to demonstrate climate change. The fact that ordinary CO2 is opaque to infrared is readily demonstrable by experiment in a classroom. The cause-and-effect from burning hydrocarbons to energy absorption to a warmer environment was explained well over a century ago. The details of the atmosphere's interaction with the land are more complicated, to be sure. But that's not necessary in order to understand that the theory explains the the observations we've been making of a warming atmosphere. That's not sincere argument; that's goalpost shifting.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    This is where the oversimplified argument gets in trouble: if it’s already opaque, adding more won’t make a difference, right? The science is something like: CO2 is so opaque to IR that the determining factor for warming is the part of the spectrum where it isn’t so opaque. However the thermal transport still goes through several bounces as it goes up through the layers of the atmosphere. At the higher layers the frequencies shift down and the absorption spectrum changes in complicated ways. This all interacts nonlinearly with water at the lower layers and ionised gases in the higher layers. Actually simulating something that won’t just give you gibberish answers is decidedly nontrivial. It’s not a question of precision — I’m not talking about +2C instead of +1.5C! An overly simplistic model will predict -50C or +100C!

jiggawatts 3y ago

To play the devil’s advocate: I have an otherwise intelligent friend who doesn’t believe in global warming because in his mind the cause-and-effect hasn’t been clearly articulated. So I started to explain to him in more rigorous, scientific terms that he’ll understand and accept. I found that it was much, much harder than I had anticipated. I did my own research, and it turns out that the “real story” can’t really be explained without resorting to nonlinear differential equations and high-resolution spectra of exotic chemicals. For example it turns out that it matters a lot that near the poles the upper atmosphere has a higher concentration of various rare isotopes, which shifts the fine structure of absorption spectra just so as to absorb heat from the lower layers. To be perfectly honest, despite a physics degree and a background in chemistry, I didn’t quite follow the full argument and couldn’t relay it to my friend. However when I saw a NASA page about the precision spectra of truly obscure specie such as doubly-ionised isotopically non-standard excited radicals as key inputs into supercomputer climate simulations I was reassured that smart people have sunk an awful lot of effort into the problem.

bookaway 3y ago
A very underrated comment. I think a lot of people, including some people in this thread, willfully avoid this reality. There is a danger in losing one's self in the romanticism of being a "Cassandra", instead of addressing the prerequisite to the required action -- belief. As with any war, correct messaging is vital to retain the public will in the fight. But as with any propaganda, dumbing the truth down might result in a lie. And once such a lie is uncovered and attacked, trust may never again recover (see Covid) and the fight will be forsaken. I think the only way out, the only way to convince the general public without them needing to understand the complexity of "why" is to pour immense resources into improving our prediction of near-term events. Only by demonstrably predicting earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, detailed weather patterns across the globe 6 months-a year in advance within a day/hour level of accuracy can we hope to convince the public that the models will be as relatively accurate when predicting earth's general characteristics decades into the future. After all, the grudging leeway the public gives doctors and practitioners of mainstream medicine does not seem to be a result of them being swayed by the medical arguments presented to them, but because they have witnessed their powers of healing first hand.
hotpotamus 3y ago
Indeed, while the greenhouse gas effect is almost trivially simple science, it is acting on a global climate system that is complex in ways far beyond human understanding (though as you say, collectively we have put some impressive work into comprehending it). Given that our lives and civilizations depend on said complex system, I would consider it wise not to fuck with it.
jfengel 3y ago
You don't need to take it to the molecular level to demonstrate climate change. The fact that ordinary CO2 is opaque to infrared is readily demonstrable by experiment in a classroom. The cause-and-effect from burning hydrocarbons to energy absorption to a warmer environment was explained well over a century ago. The details of the atmosphere's interaction with the land are more complicated, to be sure. But that's not necessary in order to understand that the theory explains the the observations we've been making of a warming atmosphere. That's not sincere argument; that's goalpost shifting.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  This is where the oversimplified argument gets in trouble: if it’s already opaque, adding more won’t make a difference, right? The science is something like: CO2 is so opaque to IR that the determining factor for warming is the part of the spectrum where it isn’t so opaque. However the thermal transport still goes through several bounces as it goes up through the layers of the atmosphere. At the higher layers the frequencies shift down and the absorption spectrum changes in complicated ways. This all interacts nonlinearly with water at the lower layers and ionised gases in the higher layers. Actually simulating something that won’t just give you gibberish answers is decidedly nontrivial. It’s not a question of precision — I’m not talking about +2C instead of +1.5C! An overly simplistic model will predict -50C or +100C!