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heartbroken that John Clauser seems to have joined climate change denial.
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tom66:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on August 01, 2023, 12:22:48 pm ---And it's also a reasonable position to think that the climate is changing but that we can't really do much about it, and it's a better option to adapt to the changes than try and destroy everyones lives to meet some arbitrary "net zero" or other goal. or at least to discuss this stuff reasonably without being labelled like you seem to be doing here.

--- End quote ---

The problem with this is there is not a great outcome from 3C+ warming which is what we are heading for.

It is a bit like saying the guy with lung cancer should cut down on his cigarettes to 10 a day if he wants to live longer...  The reason the scientists are sounding panicked is because this looks really, really bad.   Humans are, in general, very bad at conceiving some future badness which requires compromise now to avoid:  this is, in part, why people smoke, despite all of the evidence suggesting a 10yr+ reduction in lifespan for instance.  And it's also why the majority of people are ignoring climate change now (imo).  "That's a problem for future me!"

If you look at the models, yes they are just models and yes they can be wrong but so far they have proven reasonably accurate when back tested and tested on data as it arrives, we are heading for some pretty bad times.  Massive crop failure, higher sea levels, hotter summer temperatures leading to greater risk of forest fires etc.   You can already see some of that happening to the Greek islands now.  And it will get worse in Australia.  India regularly experiences 40C summers, record high of 45C.  Those are just about survivable.   How about 50C summer?  Is that survivable?  What about 55C? 

Will humans survive?  Yes, undoubtedly, we are a hardy species, we will move around to areas with better food, we will build flood defences, we will cut down forests to reduce the risk of fire.   But a lot of these interventions would not be necessary if we managed to act now, and a lot fewer people need die as a result of the consequences.  It's ironic when the economic arguments are made towards the cost of fighting climate change: no - the cost of not fighting it is far greater.

Side note:  It is amazing that so many people have not actually read the research that they claim to disagree with, because if they did so many of their questions would be answered.  The IPCC reports are extremely detailed, well researched and cited.  You can replicate many of the simpler parts of the papers to calculate things like CO2 forcing.  It is true, there is a wide error margin on some outcomes, but in most cases even the first standard deviation of outcomes is "bad". 
Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: tom66 on August 01, 2023, 04:21:47 pm ---Massive crop failure, higher sea levels, hotter summer temperatures leading to greater risk of forest fires etc.
--- End quote ---

Bravo, you produced the classic list but none of these assumptions hold under critical thinking, there's very little scientific proof to support any of them.

Your mistake is this: you have seen how the climate models fit within the predictions of 1.5degC average temperature rise as happened so far, and extrapolate that the 3degC increase predicted by the same models is true. Fair enough, this is likely close. Then you go on and read that this causes massive crop failures. Yet in reality, you are not seeing any proof for this claim. While the climate models are relatively well tested, the crop models are not, and unlike climate where the 1-1.5degC rise can be verified from old data, there is no such a thing for crop failures. If there is, it assumes non-adoption of farming land, while in reality the drought is a bigger problem in areas that are poor for farming already, while increasing temperatures enable farming in new areas.

If significant crop failures were to occur after what, 2degC? 3degC?, we should be seeing clear signs of this already. I checked: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/the-dark-side-of-cobalt/msg4962169/#msg4962169 . Now wheat crops continuing to increase is not proof of the opposite, there are other crops than wheat and so on, and maybe there is some sudden steep decline after 2.5degC average rise or something, but this data sure is a red flag and reminds us about the burden of proof.

Higher sea levels is nearly irrelevant, it does not matter, the change is meaninglessly small and slow. All examples I have seen used to show sea level rise being relevant have been not about sea level rise, but local land sinking.

Hotter summer temperatures indeed increase the risk and seriousness of wildfires, but the key question is not what are the contributing factors, but what are the root causes for these fires. Again using common sense, I question why 41degC summer temperature does not "cause" forest fires but 43degC suddenly does? You don't have to dig very deep and not even into "alternative media" to find out these forest fires are almost exclusively started by human action and in alarmingly large number of cases, on purpose i.e. arson. While pyromania is well documented over the whole human history*, only in 2020's people who think pyromaniacs exists and are dangerous are called conspiracy theorists, even when they can point out credible sources describing these incidents.

*) specifically, pyromaniacs have recorded tendency to stay close to the fires they start, assist in putting them out, so seeing arsonists among firefighter should not surprise anyone

While mitigating the contributing factors is generally a great idea, I think much better results against forest fires could be had by attacking the root causes and direct factors, through education ("throwing out cigarettes is dangerous") and sanctions / fear of sanctions. This is how we deal with most other types of crime, too.

While at it, I have nothing against reducing CO2 as much as we can, through effective measures.


--- Quote ---You can already see some of that happening to the Greek islands now.  And it will get worse in Australia.
--- End quote ---

Yep, ecoterrorism. In Australia specifically, see e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51125898 . Note that police has been able to prove over 10% as arsons, and that is obviously only the tip of the iceberg because police has to state their reports based on undeniable facts. And this is a really serious issue: even if we could stop fossil fuel use completely, the climate stays roughly what it is now. The same temperatures and summer drought continues. If we do nothing to the actual root cause of the fires, they are not magically going to stop, because we are only attacking the secondary, contributing factors, significance of which is probably overestimated by orders of magnitude.

If this steep relationship from 1.5degC temperature shift into significant increase of wildfires were true, then it surely should mean there were very little to no wildfires in the past. Again, I checked: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-wildfires . Just some random statistic from the US of A but it's something. Number of wildfires has stayed relatively constant, even decreased a bit.

I would guess even in 1980's, arson was a thing. Then they would have not been called ecoterrorists, though. We always have anti-society forces and will always have them, and it is important for a human being to be on the "right side of history". Road to hell is paved with good intentions and thus, if you want to destroy societies from the inside, you need some excuses for those useful idiots to drive your destructive agenda. Fighting against bad capitalists was cool at some point, now it's fighting against those who "destroy the nature".

Feeding this from mainstream media as a colossally bad idea. We can already see how Greta's "climate movement" basically formed around boycotting school and education. Climate activism is pretty much all about war against science. In real world, science and engineering, and people in STEM is exactly what we need to solve the CO2 problem. And I won't call it a "climate crisis" because I don't want to. It's an important problem to solve nevertheless as excessive use of fossil fuels mostly do harm, not only to climate but to political stability as well (it's enough to say, look at which parts of Ukraine the gas and oil fields happen to be.)
tom66:
Side-side note.  I think this is why climate science seems alarmist, but it actually isn't (it's realistic and depressing).

Dig into the IPCC archive and extract their scenarios from 2007 for where we would be in 2020.

IPCC report 2007
IPCC report 2023

The relevant page is 54 for the 2007 report and 48 for the 2023 report.

If you look at all scenarios indicated, by 2020, IPCC expected we would see warming of around +0.5C over 1950 norm, under all emissions scenarios.  Instead, we have seen warming of about +1.1C over 1950 norm.  They were not expecting this warming until 2040.   What this indicates is they have been pessimistic in the past and shown to be wrong, the outcome was worse than expected. 
tom66:

--- Quote from: Siwastaja on August 01, 2023, 05:05:52 pm ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on August 01, 2023, 04:21:47 pm ---Massive crop failure, higher sea levels, hotter summer temperatures leading to greater risk of forest fires etc.
--- End quote ---

Bravo, you produced the classic list but none of these assumptions hold under critical thinking, there's very little scientific proof to support any of them.

Your mistake is this: you have seen how the climate models fit within the predictions of 1.5degC average temperature rise as happened so far, and extrapolate that the 3degC increase predicted by the same models is true. Fair enough, this is likely close. Then you go on and read that this causes massive crop failures. Yet in reality, you are not seeing any proof for this claim. While the climate models are relatively well tested, the crop models are not, and unlike climate where the 1-1.5degC rise can be verified from old data, there is no such a thing for crop failures. 

If significant crop failures were to occur after what, 2degC? 3degC?, we should be seeing clear signs of this already. I checked: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/the-dark-side-of-cobalt/msg4962169/#msg4962169 . Now wheat crops continuing to increase is not proof of the opposite, there are other crops as wheat and so on, and maybe there is some sudden steep decline after 2.5degC average rise or something, but this data sure is a red flag and reminds us about the burden of proof.
--- End quote ---

Disagree.  Agronomics is widely studied.  It's the reason we're able to feed so many people with so few people actually growing food.  (IIRC less than 1% of the world's population is involved in agriculture.  100 years ago, it was 15%.)  With the data we have on how certain crops perform in given climates, we can calculate yield.  So we then say, what happens if average weather temperatures go up by 5C?   

We haven't actually seen much impacts beyond occasionally hot summers.  One or two hot summers will not kill vast numbers of crops and farmers are planting hardier species.  The problems come when the crops don't survive any more because of drought and persistently hot summers.  Continued failed crops leads to dead ground and no amount of crop rotation saves you.

It is worth noting that the IPCC predict yield will mildly increase for the most northernly parts of the the western hemisphere, as temperatures rise to make more crops viable there.  However, the overall expectation is that net yields will fall.  Agreed that this is a hard thing to predict for sure, but we do already know that very high temperatures are generally bad for crop growth, so even a small increase in summer peak temperatures risks food security.

There has been some effort expended on making crops hardier towards higher temperatures.  I'm not sure what the state of the art is on this.  It would require a big political shift around GM crops which have been historically quite opposed by political parties across the spectrum, often for completely bullshit reasons.  (There are legitimate reasons to be concerned, but they can be mitigated.)


--- Quote from: Siwastaja on August 01, 2023, 05:05:52 pm ---Hotter summer temperatures indeed increase the risk and seriousness of wildfires, but the key question is not what are the contributing factors, but what are the root causes for these fires. Again using common sense, I question why 41degC summer temperature does not "cause" forest fires but 43degC suddenly does? You don't have to dig very deep and not even into "alternative media" to find out these forest fires are almost exclusively started by human action and in alarmingly large number of cases, on purpose i.e. arson. While pyromania is well documented over the whole human history*, only in 2020's people who think pyromaniacs exists and are dangerous are called conspiracy theorists, even when they can point out credible sources describing these incidents.
--- End quote ---

Even if these fires are started by pyromaniacs, is it not worth still being concerned that they will be more frequent and dangerous?  Sure, let's try to prosecute the people who do these evil acts, but if the conditions for such arson didn't exist (very long periods with little moisture, high temperatures), then there would be fewer forest fires.  Seems like a good thing to me.

By the way, it is not 41C -> 43C (that is probably roughly where we were about 10 years ago) but more like 41C -> 48~50C (if 2C average warming occurs) because the variance of weather tends to be stronger than the direct warming impact.  For these events to occur, the holes in the swiss cheese need to line up, but the likelihood is increased the warmer the climate. 


--- Quote from: Siwastaja on August 01, 2023, 05:05:52 pm ---While mitigating the contributing factors is generally a great idea, I think much better results against forest fires could be had by attacking the root causes and direct factors, through education ("throwing out cigarettes is dangerous") and sanctions / fear of sanctions. This is how we deal with most other types of crime, too.
--- End quote ---

Broadly agreed, I wonder if the fire fighting groups have considered using thermal drones to scan for people leaving BBQs etc burning.


--- Quote from: Siwastaja on August 01, 2023, 05:05:52 pm ---
--- Quote ---You can already see some of that happening to the Greek islands now.  And it will get worse in Australia.
--- End quote ---

Yep, ecoterrorism. In Australia specifically, see e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51125898 . Note that police has been able to prove over 10% as arsons, and that is obviously only the tip of the iceberg because police has to state their reports based on undeniable facts. And this is a really serious issue: even if we could stop fossil fuel use completely, the climate stays roughly what it is now. The same temperatures and summer drought continues. If we do nothing to the actual root cause of the fires, they are not magically going to stop, because we are only attacking the secondary, contributing factors, significance of which is probably overestimated by orders of magnitude.
--- End quote ---

This is a silly argument though:  the current situation is not great, but preventing it from getting worse is almost certainly better than doing nothing.  But you are arguing that letting it get worse is not bad, because the situation is not great?  It is very circular.


--- Quote from: Siwastaja on August 01, 2023, 05:05:52 pm ---If this steep relationship from 1.5degC temperature shift into significant increase of wildfires were true, then it surely should mean there were very little to no wildfires in the past. Again, I checked: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-wildfires . Just some random statistic from the US of A but it's something. Number of wildfires has stayed relatively constant, even decreased a bit.
--- End quote ---

I would need to do some more research, but a counterpoint to this is this snippet of data from UCS.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/infographic-wildfires-and-climate-change

this is also citing US data, so it's curious there is a disagreement.
RAPo:
This group is very reasonable just like John Clauser.
Each member explained her/his thinking in a peaceful way.

You don't have the right to say the posters are unreasonable, just because they have different views on things.

The real problem here at stake is not climate, but silencing unwelcomed views.

Since you have nothing more to say, imho it is better to close this topic.


--- Quote from: snarkysparky on August 01, 2023, 11:59:50 am --- I thought this group was more reasonable.

--- End quote ---
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