Those people exist, but to think they're the driving force behind the science of global warming is nonsense. The scientists' motivation is they're trying to save us and the planet, they're not involved in some bizarre plot to create a world government based on carbon credits.
As I said with shifting goalposts there's not much point in aiming for 350 ppm when we're already past 400 ppm. But that doesn't change that any cutoff is somewhat arbitrary, we have probability X of getting effect Y, if you change X or Y you get a completely different cutoff.
Assume they have a perfect model and they're all aiming for the same 450 ppm which was a hard cutoff
See, this is the sort of stuff you do. Did you pull that number out of your ass? Why do you make stuff up instead of going out and finding out what the hard cut off actually is? Your failure to do research is why you say stupid things.
For all your talk about past predictions I'm surprised you didn't recognize a proposed stabilization level from the Kyoto protocol. I can't remember if it was part of the initial treaty or a later meeting but the 450 ppm figure has been very well publicized.
Actually right in my initial response to you I did directly address the discussion about predictions and tipping points. I was incorrect in thinking you were discussing the wrong topic, but I still engaged you on the right topic.
And as I pointed out you've been oversimplifying the nature of the predictions. Assume they have a perfect model and they're all aiming for the same 450 ppm which was a hard cutoff, you'll still see predictions of the nature you posted! Why?
Because if you cut CO2 by X% annually starting in 2000 you can dodge it, but if you wait till 2005 you need to do X+Y%, and so on. At each benchmark the chance of society actually following through gets less and less, so in 2000 it was too late to act because X% wasn't politically feasible, and in 2005 it was even more too late to act.
The only scenario in which an 'act by X' date is relevant is if the act is just flipping some binary switch. The problem is you're applying a standard of prediction that even under the most favourable circumstances the scientists couldn't fulfill.
You seem to enjoy that patronizing tone. I get the feeling that your AGW denialism is based more on desire to look smarter than everyone else than it is on an impartial examination of the data.
It's mainly an awareness that we can't have an interesting conversation on the topic until you improve your knowledge. Any conversation until then will be me teaching, with you arguing all the way. That's not very fun for me, so instead I'll try to motive you to learn on your own.
When you're done, we can have an enjoyable conversation, and probably both learn.
On what basis do you think you're more knowledgeable? There were two issues, one I forget the exact issue which was just a dumb mistake on my part, but before that Amiga3D's initial statement had a flawed premise which I overlooked which led me to make an inaccurate statement (and led to my subsequent confusion).
Amiga said "I remember climate experts shouting back in the last millennium that if we didn't do radical change by 2000 it'd be too late to make a difference. Why does that target date keep moving?"
The flaw is that 2000 was probably the date to avoid significant AGW entirely, it's not too late to make a difference, it's just too late to miss it entirely. We can no longer avoid it so we have new rough deadlines we can try to hit to avoid some of the probable future consequences.
You can't give an exact date or number because both the action we take (how much we reduce CO2 and methane) and the results we get (heat, storms, droughts), even if they could be perfectly predicted are on a sliding scale. It looks like moving the goalposts because that's what we're doing, 200x is past, xxx PPM is past, we're going to get some global warming, so lets choose a new goal and try to accomplish that instead.
That's all the old 200x quotes really show.
You can use that standard it you want to but it's kinda useless in practice. Say it turns out that low levels of background radiation are good for us, does that mean radiation is no longer pollution?
Actually yes.
There are background levels of radiation. In amounts around as high as that, radiation is not really pollution.
The same goes for CO2. The amounts we are emitting are not nearly enough to be pollution, the ONLY concern was the RUNAWAY greenhouse effect, which is not happening.
So if AGW was a real threat would you consider CO2 pollution?
Forget about decades of research and thousands of peer reviewed papers.
You are forgetting about the same decades having many papers showing there is no runaway warming.
I don't know if you're being cute with the term 'runaway warming', referring to the short investigation into cooling, or are talking about denialist cargo-cult journals. If you're going to claim there's no scientific consensus around AGW then we're no longer discussing the same reality and I'll just claim 1998 was an outlier because of the emergence of Sauron.
There's also the worry that the changing climate will lead to larger storm surges
The "more XTREME Weather" line is the equivalent of "we took away all your privacy and freedom because of the CHILDREN".
Ahh, now I understand your model of the climate science community:
Step 1) Create a fake global warming scare
Step 2) ?
Step 3) PROFIT
Because all the science indicates that it almost certainly IS happening.
Science should look up the overall levels of Earth temperatures because there is no runaway warming, and hardly any warming of any sort at the moment.
But in reality of course, many real scientists would not agree with your statement.
Ahh yes, countless scientists studying the climate simply forgot to check the thermometers, it's a common mistake.
And I'm going to assume your 'many real scientists' doesn't include many climate scientists. I can show you a list of creationist scientists as well, I guess Kan Ham was right!
Just because CO2 does not directly cause adverse changes the way Chernobyl or Bhopal did does not mean that CO2 is not pollution.
The fact that the entire plant kingdom relies on CO2 rules it out as pollution for me. The Earth's whole ecosystem is devoted to processing CO2. It's probably the most benign thing we could possibly be emitting.
You can use that standard it you want to but it's kinda useless in practice. Say it turns out that low levels of background radiation are good for us, does that mean radiation is no longer pollution? We use sound to talk, I guess I can open a night club next to your house because there's no such thing as noise pollution.
A much better standard is pollution is anything that's harmful when emitted in excess or the wrong circumstance, CO2 emissions are harming the planet right now, thus they're pollution.
A rapid increase in temperatures basically undermine all that investment we have made.
As I said it's clear that will not happen. CO2 levels have risen heavily, temperatures is flat. It's clear that the levels of XO2 we are producing are not enough to cause a runaway effect.
Forget about decades of research and thousands of peer reviewed papers. They apparently were just doing a grade 3 science fair experiment with glass jar, you've pointed that out and now none of us have to worry and can go back to seeing what happens if we drop nails in Coke.
Many of our largest population and industrial centers are in areas directly threatened by rising sea water.
NOTHING is threatened by sea level rise of around a foot over 100 years. That is LOTS of time to adapt and shift. We also can tell now the absurd predictions of 20 feet sea level rise are not going to happen either. Even the IPCC admits that now.
There's also the worry that the changing climate will lead to larger storm surges which combined with the sea levels could cause a lot more damage. Though I'd agree that the other consequences from global warming are a lot more serious.
We should do our best to mitigate that and slow down the increase in the greenhouse effect
Why should we expend any effort to stop something that is not happening, when all that effort can go to fight real issues?
That's the thing that tans my hide. People are expending so much effort to fight CO2 that real problems are utterly ignored. The planet is being fucked for sure but it's not by CO2, and all action taken against CO2 is to me the same as action against the planet.
Because all the science indicates that it almost certainly IS happening. You are apparently not convinced, I don't know why, but the fact that you do not agree with the science does not jeopardize my belief in the science at all because nearly all the very smart and honest people who study the topic agree that it is happening and it's a serious problem.
Per capita you're mostly only beat by the middle east whom I agree is a problem but a smaller one than the US.
Emissions per GPD don't work well since I wouldn't expect them to scale linearly. Only with advanced economies with similar per capita would I even begin to bother looking at it.
The US has 4.5% of the world's population and is supplying 18% of the CO2 emissions, and way you look at it it's utterly indefensible. If there's any country who's a major part of the problem it's the US and they really need to fix it.
You seem to enjoy that patronizing tone. I get the feeling that your AGW denialism is based more on desire to look smarter than everyone else than it is on an impartial examination of the data.
Sometimes the naysayers are right, but generally the scientists who study it for a living are right, and the "research" you've been doing is nothing more than cargo cult science. You claim the scientists should be able to offer some simple test or benchmark because that's how you declare science is done, and when they can't do that because that's not how the problem works you declare that's not science!
I'm sorry for being harsh but I find the arrogance that underlies your position to be maddening. You're not some brilliant impartial arbitrator of truth, you're just some guy who read some convincing articles or blog posts, decided they were gospel, and you think you're some freethinking defending Galileo against the church of big science.
Now we just need to convince the Arctic ice, Antarctic ice, and Greenland ice sheet to stop their damn melting. Please do tell them about the fraudulent data they're using.
The further north you go the more liberal you get, the US north is more liberal than the US south, Canada is far more liberal than the US north, and Northern Europe is notoriously liberal.
The Arctic ice and Greenland ice sheet are so liberal they're gay married and are probably melting just to collect welfare and refreeze later with the free health care. The damn commies are further left than Sean Penn's dry cleaned underwear.
I think the hippie perception might be a problem since our belief systems are driven by status.
You don't see many anti-vaxxers in the tech community because we associate it with people like Jenny McCarthy and duncy models are people we generally mock rather than emulate.
AGW denialism on the other hand plays into geek status. Claiming to be a denialist signals not only that you're really curious about science, but that you have such a natural aptitude that you can step back and point out these massive errors that the whole climate science community has been making.
You can also point out all the celebrities (including duncy model types) who are concerned about AGW and imply opponents are just being memorized by the pretty celebrities and fancy degrees and not looking at the actual science. It's even better if you can point out that the records don't quite line up with the models so you can make some claims about shifting goalposts and failed hypothesis.
Ironically this tendency is why denialists piss off people (including me) so much. To go into someone else's domain of expertise, poke around a bit, then declare that person and their entire field is completely wrong and the actual truth is X, it just strikes me as extraordinary combination of ignorance and arrogance.
I think that's the way to combat AGW denialism, they're trying to associate AGW with a duncy art stereotype and incompetent groupthinking scientists. We need to fight back and point out the root of denialism is the asshole no-nothing who claims to be the smartest guy in the room. (But don't worry, they're in good company with the bible-thumping fundies as well)
The list is bogus.I would love to see what happens to a journalist that says politically incorrect stuff, like racist or anti-gay rants, in the top countries of this list. He would "only" be foired and sued if he was lucky, and arrested in the worse case scenario.
Freedom to say only what people consider nice and acceptable is no freedom at all. Any country that has "hate speech" laws has no grounds to criticize US lack of free speech.
I'm not a fan of hate speech laws (though I don't know who on that list besides Canada has them) but I think going after whistleblowers is worse. Hate speech laws target tone, silencing whistleblowers targets content.
I'm not sure what you would expect to see as evidence,
Yes, I know.
Seriously, for me the evidence would be the scientific consensus to agree we hit the tipping point. But you already disregard the scientific consensus, and if the science doesn't predict a great big sign at some point you're just giving yourself an excuse to always disagree.
As for the 90's predictions I can't remember what was in the media, much less the actual science,
Yes, I am not surprised. You like to talk more than you like to learn.
You like to insult more than you like to discuss. Here's a link about the first IPCC report from all the way back in 1990 (the 2nd report in '95 didn't change much).
Based on current models, we predict: under [BAU] increase of global mean temperature during the [21st] century of about 0.3 oC per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 oC per decade); this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years; under other
So where's this crazy prediction you're talking about?
Bah, I was thinking of another discussion and misremembered what Amiga3D was talking about..
No prob. You still should learn to read.
I read fine, we ended up talking about different things (I thought you meant predictions of major catastrophes now).
I'm still not sure you have a strong argument though. Think of it like we're driving a car at a brick wall, the longer we wait before hitting the brakes the harder we're going to hit. By the early 2000's we knew we'd get at least a minor collision, by now it's going to be significant, if we wait until the 2020's or longer it's just going to keep getting more severe. AGW isn't a binary thing, the more you get the worse it is, the fact we're going to deal with some unavoidable consequences doesn't mean we shouldn't stop what we can.
I mean, that's your hypothesis, right? But you haven't read to see if your hypothesis matches the data. The reality is, that there's no particular evidence that we have passed any sort of irreversible tipping point, especially not a kind of tipping point talked about by those like Hansen, where civilization itself is at risk.
I don't know if you followed AGW through the 90s, but the expectation was that the temperature would begin to rise almost exponentially, based on computer models. In 1998 it looked like it was happening, but the trend just didn't continue.
Another fun one, if you look for it, was the prediction that the north pole would be free from summer ice by 2015. Do a search, you'll find that prediction. We'll have to wait until next year to see if that prediction holds.
I'm not sure what you would expect to see as evidence, I'd fully expect us to be in store for severe unavoidable consequences well in excess of those consequences occurring. The lack of arctic sea might be one such piece of evidence as arctic ocean albedo is probably one of the feedbacks (and thawing of the permafrost a major one). The 2015-16 prediction is a valid one though I'm not sure how much it means on its own (it's really warm now, whether it remains warm enough over the next couple years to melt the summer ice doesn't say much about about the models of the future).
As for the 90's predictions I can't remember what was in the media, much less the actual science, but the 2-4 C by the end of the century figure has been around a while, that doesn't really jive with them projection a massive exponential increase starting in '98.
I was relying on the headlines/summaries you wrote in the post.
And this is why you are ignorant.
I've done plenty of reading and I don't recall prominent climate scientists making alarmist predictions about the current time frame.
No, we've just discussed that you don't actually read. You're one of those people who'd like to think that they've read, when actually you're just a talking ignoramus. Educate yourself or go away.
Bah, I was thinking of another discussion and misremembered what Amiga3D was talking about..
I'm still not sure you have a strong argument though. Think of it like we're driving a car at a brick wall, the longer we wait before hitting the brakes the harder we're going to hit. By the early 2000's we knew we'd get at least a minor collision, by now it's going to be significant, if we wait until the 2020's or longer it's just going to keep getting more severe. AGW isn't a binary thing, the more you get the worse it is, the fact we're going to deal with some unavoidable consequences doesn't mean we shouldn't stop what we can.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.
