Your article seems to suggest climate scientists have gotten it wrong by underestimating the severity of the consequences climate change would bring about. Not so much. Many scientists, myself included, viewed the dire predictions generated by computer models and empirical data with great concern over the last three decades. The news got worse with each iteration of the climatic models, painting a picture no one wanted to see and suggested remedies no one wanted employ. The dire consequences of climate change is is not fringe alarmist ranting; it is reality. The notion that if scientists had only given adequate warning, action would have been taken does not reflect reality. Scientist are concerned with assembling and interpreting facts, not motivated by a perceived need for consensus. Failure to address the problem is the result of bureaucratic caution and politics based on short-term economic gains for the wealthy few.
3144
@Donald Criss
I think it was the NY Times that reported on the climatologist, Mr. Hansen??, who issued a warning back in the 1970's and early 80's, and maybe it was under Bush sr. (or earlier under Reagan) during his presidency when it appeared the White House was going to push for climate change legislation; but then at the last second, John Sununu from New Hampshire, who was in the cabinet, I think, put the kabosh on the whole idea. Sununu was the voice of the industrialists, the fossil fuel companies, the Chamber of Commerce, et al.
We were very close to discussing honestly and sanely ways to mitigate climate change, but the discussion was shut down.
Put blame where blame is due.
306
@Donald Criss I totally agree with you Donald, but I think that was actually the point of the article. I think they call it "spin" or "irony".
29
@Chuck
Yep. Again and again the discussion was shunted to a siding. Now we are gingerly backing onto the main line just as the headlight of the Climate Crisis Express shows. The ONLY way humans seem to learn is to be smacked flat by events.
106
Please. The problem is not that scientists got something wrong. The problem is that climate change denialists went to work soon after scientists started urgent warnings. They are still at work today at Fox and other right wing propaganda sites. If you want change, work to undo that propaganda. Don’t falsely claim that dedicated scientists got something wrong. The reality is that the worst is yet to come. We need to tackle the real problems- the propaganda and climate change denialists.
2414
@CitizenJ when you cite the right wing propagandists, please always include the white evangelical churches in that mix. It’s as much a church problem as it is a a Fox problem. Check out sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund’s 2015 study — Perceptions: Science and Religious Communities. She found that 43 percent of evangelicals believe that God created the universe, at minimum, ten millennia ago. This is compared to 22 percent of the general population. Additionally, 42 percent of evangelicals do not want evolution taught in the science curriculum compared to 18 percent of the general population.
Where do evangelicals live? Red states. We will not see any real action on climate change until we have a blue Congress and a new president.
194
@CitizenJ when you cite the right wing propagandists, please always include the white evangelical churches in that mix. It’s as much a church problem as it is a Fox problem. Check out sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund’s 2015 study — Perceptions: Science and Religious Communities. She found that 43 percent of evangelicals believe that God created the universe *maximum* ten millennia ago. This is compared to 22 percent of the general population. Additionally, 42 percent of evangelicals do not want evolution taught in the science curriculum compared to 18 percent of the general population.
Where do evangelicals live? Red states. We will not see any real action on climate change until we have a blue Congress and a new president.
21
@CitizenJ
Major news papers bury articles like this one way back in some obscure section of the publication. You know, right next to the advertisement for a giant luxury automobile or an exotic vacation to some place real far away. How can we take on outright lies and propaganda when even respectable publishers won't even bring light to the situation?
73
Capitalism is an amoral economic system that rewards the amoral few at the expense the many.
It is also the system that will destroy society. And it only took about 300 years.
Capitalism is based on infinite growth and expansion. Infinite growth in a Petri dish always leads to eventual collapse in every biologic system. We are no different. It brushes aside balance, cooperation and collective decisions. We have to stop rewarding individuals in society who have no empathy or ability to see outside of themselves (think Trump).
However, I feel that it may be too late since capitalist ownership of information (Fox News, Facebook etc) will sew the seeds of denial of the "Inconvenient Truth".
1790
@John
While your Petri dish analysis is correct, it may be too abstract for many to absorb. In my own clumsy attempts at educating others, I equate Capitalism to the greatest Ponzi scam ever perpetrated.
116
@John
"Capitalism is an amoral economic system that rewards the amoral few at the expense the many."
You are a man after my own heart!
Capitalism is vicious and evil... a necessary evil, perhaps, but it must be HEAVILY controlled, regulated and balanced with socialist programs to protect the environment and us poor humans, both of which capitalism sees as an obstruction along its path to ever-increasing profits!
Wishing we were living in Canada, too. We're not far away, yet we're worlds apart. Canada is a much more sane and less capitalist country with more solid socialist programs! And what sane, decent person wouldn't prefer Justin Trudeau to Trump?! But then almost any Western leader is orders-of-magnitude better than Trump and almost any Western country is more sane and less capitalist than the US is these days.
157
@John Capitalism is a political/economic system in which the means of production and accumulation of wealth is held in private or corporate hands.
Capitalism has done more to raise the living standards of humanity more than any other system in human history.
Your comments about it are typical of those who do not actually know what it is, and typical of those who confuse it with greed, which is a human emotion and the root of the evils you and other commenters blame on capitalism.
80
How do you alarmists explain the geological record? The Earth has been in a warming trend for about 2.5 million years according to geologists. This was the last glacial era (of three) and within that era there have been drastic changes and reversals in temperature over decades, but the overall trend has been warming and the resultant disappearance of the glaciers that covered most of the Northern Hemisphere.
So how exactly do you doomsayers figure that the "warming" over the past two hundred years in anything different? There is no reliable "global mean" temperature data older than 50 years for comparison and even current data is suspect.
Anthropomorphic climate change is an unproven theory belied by the geological record and common sense.
19
It will come to pass Antarctica and Greenland glaciers do melt. Sea rise 225 ft or 23 floors will put all of humanity on move for higher ground.
In USA put Red States and Blue States under water. Huracan produced storm surges have people on move long time.
3
Humans have invented and produced amazing civilizations with superb art and science. It saddens me so immensely that the misuse of our brains for egotistical goals now threatens all that which is my life.
Add to that the misuse of religion and female suppression for endless procreation - and you have the perfect storm of an invasive species destroying itself.
Still, I am carrying my metal water bottle, clinging to hope.
21
Except of course that the Antarctic has gained ice in record numbers. Oh well.
12
Don't blame the scientists. Blame the politicians and the multinational corporations for which they stand who enabled the suppression of this appalling reality. Because it would interfere with money-making.
22
Capitalism is a cancer demanding constant growth that will kill the body in which it lives. Demand for constant growth is making our only planet uninhabitable. The planet will survive, but not as a place for us to live. We and a majority of species will die out because our capitalism demands constant growth.
The Paris agreement was a weak and inadequate joke in the face of the eco-crisis, yet our capitalist political system can't allow the implementation even of that joke.
We know that the leaders of capitalism, exemplified by Wall Street bankers but pulling in NY Times opinion writers, are not capable of resisting the demand for profit. Mr. Linden mentions the wonders of our smart phones as an example of the good side of capitalism, but the demand for exotic metals to build these phones is disastrous in destroying forests and cultures in Africa, contributing greatly to the eco-collapse we are witnessing.
Nothing can save our progeny as long our system is built of the suicidal greed for profit over all else. The billionaires cry foul at the idea of paying an extra 2% in taxes for a green deal. What hope is there so long as they run the show? And we allow them to do so.
Look in a mirror to see why we continue to live this way. Electric cars will not save us. The energy demand for all that additional electricity will push the problem around like the hands on a Ouija Board and giving illusory answers.
Our demand for profit doesn't allow serious thought or speech.
19
Why on Earth do otherwise intelligent people refuse to listen to career climate scientists and rely instead on the words of a proven compulsive, pathological liar (Trump)? Yet another urgent reason to have him removed, a.s.a.p.
25
Who is the No. 1 villain in this calamity? Donald Trump. His reactionary decisions on climate change should be the first article of impeachment. It’s time for pitchforks and tiki torches in front of the Whitehouse.
20
I have a feeling that the next tactic by dirty energy companies and the despicable politicians who support them will be to openly blame scientists and society.
13
To be fair it is a combination of several factors but mostly it is government interference with the science.
Scientists know that in order for them to tell their employers (the government) what they have found, they have to word it in a way that the government will accept. If they don't then they stand a very good chance of being fired.
So job security is a huge factor. You look at the scientists that tell it as it is and they are either unemployed, retired or hiding behind a bogus name. Some just happen to have good employers that want the truth to be told.
Governments will often step in and censor scientists as well. They don't want the public to panic at whatever news the scientists have to tell.
Peter Wadhams who has been sounding th alarm about the IPCC, is an expert in Arctic research. He was not invited to be part of the IPCC probably because he feared the government was out to end him sooner than he wanted. Fired with extreme prejudice, you might say.
“It’s just a very odd coincidence that something like that should happen in such a brief period of time.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cambridge-professor-claims-three-leading-climate-scientists-may-have-been-assassinated-10419159.html?fbclid=IwAR1LjeCBedZOyYDp4ozGkGdeP44PYNh_b0mjpILg4JfSnwx2b6Nq_1xjbAU
2
NYT headline is infuriating, as it distracts from the point.
For those who want to know about sea level rise, here's an excellent resource. I've used a link that opens on Manhattan but you can move and zoom in to somebody you know in a coastal region:
https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#12/40.7298/-74.0070?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=5&unit=feet&pois=hide
8
You have a problem with global warming (the climate always changes, so I call it global warming)? Start exerting your influence with China, Russia and other third world countries before you start picking my pocket and turning the rest of the country into a state like the failing state of California.
11
This article is absurd. The warnings were clear, no one responded. The science is not to blame.
17
It makes me wonder if scientists are downplaying the predicted effects of climate change for political reasons. They are regularly accused of being a part of some worldwide conspiracy to do.....something, not sure what the climate change deniers are currently using to defend their moronic positions. Hard to keep up and hard to care.
We know that government employed scientists are being forced by the worst president in history to hide data.
4
Perhaps what scientists got wrong was not the speed with which climate change will occur. Perhaps they were influenced by political correctness to avoid discussing the cause.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin published a watershed article in Science called "Tragedy of the Commons." This was followed by Paul Ehrlich's book, "the Population Bomb" in 1969 and a book, "the Limits to Growth," by several authors in 1972.
The majority in the US is often wrong. We fought in Vietnam to avoid it falling like a domino to communism. Bush invaded Iraq under the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
And we ignored these early warning of the impact of population growth. China took the warnings to heart. Deng Xiaoping introduced a one-child policy in 1979. Forty years later, economists cannot explain how China's GDP grows at 6% a year while the US GDP struggles to exceed 2%. Population growth provides one possible reason.
World population has doubled since 1972, That makes global warming twice as bad as it might have been had we heeded the warnings of these early writers.
Scientists are afraid to mention population growth as the cause of global warming, because they will be branded as racists by liberals.
Indeed, Garrett Hardin was branded a "white supremacist" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. There is nothing like being labeled a racist to make a scientist more circumspect and hesitant to offend.
Meanwhile, homo sapiens is ever closer to extinction.
7
No one blames Fox News
But without that propaganda, we could have rational discussions
The solution is not so hard. Just cancel the liars.
12
Putin runs a kleptocratic petrostate.
Oil sales far into the future are essential for the Russian economy, such as it is.
Global warming might actually improve the weather and growing seasons in much of Russia.
Global warming also opens up the Arctic Ocean and access to arctic resources.
Trump works for Putin and relishes his support, both support that is on the books and also support that is off the books.
I predict no change in administration climate policy as long as Trump or his acolytes are in power.
9
Some political conservatives have persuaded themselves and others to doubt the good faith of scientists and politicians championing drastic changes in technology and behavior in response to scientific predictions of climate catastrophe, seeing this as a threat to their idea of personal liberty, much realer to them than the prospect of continuing rises in temperature and sea level, predictions of mass extinctions and disastrous events, and of threats to survival, civilization, and all humanity. These conservatives come to dismiss the science itself. This attitude is a dangerous kind of ideologically-based blindness and obscurantism. In the Declaration of Independence, the first unalienable human Right is Life, before Liberty. That's what's at stake.
1
The earth will warm; humans will die back, if not die out altogether. Without human industry, perhaps the earth will rebalance for long enough stretches for Humanity 2.0 to emerge. Until the sun enlarges in its death throes, the earth will likely remain, short of an unforeseen cataclysm. Human history illustrates that self-consciousness and intelligence are Life's real challenges. There is something lacking in homo sapiens. It is a fatal flaw. Fortunately for the individual human being, the pain and fear and savagery are strictly limited, and relief from all suffering is guaranteed. We are all granted an end.
8
@Gary Pippenger
The problem isn't all homo sapiens. Indigenous peoples have lived in harmony with their environments for millennia.
7
You know what is the problem. The problem is not that nobody pay attention to or nobody knows about the climate change is not happening. The problem is that the cause of the problem is nature itself. Man carbon emissions are so small compare to the total amount of CO2 released by nature itself, that nobody (nothing) can stop climate change. Climate change is cyclical and that is how nature renew itself. The sun is one of the biggest driver to this change, surely not the humans. Everybody should know by now that temperature increases and then, just then, the CO2 level increases. The oceans will reclaim all the land, men took away from them. That is a fact. Stop worrying about the temperature and sea levels increase and focus on moving out of the way of what sims to be inevitable.
7
Mr. Linden, climate scientists didn't "get it wrong". You weren't listening. Now you are misrepresenting the scientific process which - thank God! - was able to become more & more accurately focussed over the last 50 years on the mind-bogglingly complex question of climate change. In effect you are shooting the messengers. I am only an older layperson who for the last 50 years has read the studies and thought about what they were saying, but even I have seen our current state predicted with increasing clarity and certainty the entire time. I say again, YOU WEREN'T LISTENING.
10
If we're still arguing about whether climate change is occurring we are still arguing about the laws of physics being correct.
Climate models are trying to make predictions and forecasts about the rate of change.
It would not take much change in the behaviour of the jet streams and ocean currents to wreak havoc quickly with climate norms.
We treat CO2 emissions etc as a near linear process and forget the weather/climate is a non-linear system.
9
How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong...
Which scientists? What do you know about the science the deals with the issues of climate change? How wrong were specific scientists, exactly? How many scientists do you know who had the resources to get the "message" out anyhow? How many corporations and corporate-serving politicians are there that tried to mute the message over and over? Why not just generalize about everything because specifics are "too difficult."
2
One the one hand things are happening faster than expected.
On the other actual consequences are a long way from being material. A billion dollars of environmental damage, or 100 billion, is a rounding error compared to annual US GDP of 21 trillion. Whatever people may say, and however much the media may go on about it, in their hearts people don't really care about the environment. Because it doesn't have a material effect on their lives.
The conventional view is that we must become serious about climate change to avoid a catastrophe. The reality is that the catastrophe needs to arrive first. Only then will people get serious.
7
It's worth pointing out that the hiatus data people often point to suggest that modelers somehow got it wrong is easily explained by a number of things modelers can't model given the pithy investment we made in the science. We then make the lame argument that climate scientists are just trying to get funding.
Moreover, it's also worth mentioning that when you warm up a bucket of ice, at first the temperature rises at a fixed rate per unit of heat until it hits 32F. Then it just sits at 32F until the ice is melted--a hiatus in warming. Once the ice has melted, the temperature rise per unit of heat doubles. If one assumes that a similar, albeit more complex process is underway, then the hiatus is now over, and we are in for a nasty surprise now as the rate of temperature rise increases significantly compared to before the hiatus.
2
It's kind of interesting that the top article which comes up when I google "climate change miami real estate values" is from - not a FL or even a US newspaper - but one about a year old from the Guardian. To paraphrase a comment from it: A culture of systemic, fraudulent, nondisclosure persists in high flood risk areas but more and more buyers are asking about elevations above sea level when considering properties. Miami could be one bad storm away from a rush for the exits. However, suspension of belief is a normal human condition.
3
Is it possible to punish the President for crimes against the environment? Or crimes against protecting the health of Americans? Or aiding and abetting same? Please respond if you know.
2
I have been closely following the published reports of environmental destruction in the New York Times for decades.
Every single article that this paper has written about the the state of global environmental destruction has reported that it is happening faster than was thought before. Sometimes it is just one sentence in the article, sometimes it is a paragraph but that foreboding message is consistently reported.
7
There is more to climate change than carbon dioxide produced by industrial activity. The release of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere cannot by themselves bring catastrophic change to the planet. We must consider water management including pollution of the lakes, rivers, streams and estuaries that flow to the oceans. In view of that we must acknowledge how damming and diverting of fresh water resources impact silt and sand that form boundaries and wetlands such as at the mouth of the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Colorado, Nile, Hudson, James, or the Rio Grande. Oceans need replenishment. The great marshes at the mouths of many rivers have been destroyed allowing hurricanes to do excessive damage inland as tidal surges rush inland. New Orleans suffered catastrophic damage because wet land and marshes that once provided protection from surges have been systematically destroyed.
Also, deforestation and encroachment by humans in desert areas, where humans are not supposed to live, has also disrupted climate, landscapes and water sources such as aquifers, lakes and streams. There were once streams in Manhattan that are now covered by concrete and no longer flow freely.
We must also consider how cities and slums create giant heat sinks that retain energy and no longer reflect the suns energy, but store excessive heat. Human occupation, building and farming cause as much damage as industrialization and carbon. Deforesting of the Amazon is another cause of rising heat.
And more!
7
I think we need to stop telling people what's going to happen in 2100. First off we always get it wrong, it's always worse than we thought. Second we're trying to convince that 50 or 60% of the population that still doesn't get it that they need to take this seriously. And they're not the type of people who will take something seriously that's going to happen after they're dead. They don't even care if it's going to affect their children, if it's not happening in the next few decades they think it doesn't matter.
We have to stop trying to pretend that these people are smart enough or forward-thinking enough to understand something like this. We have to give them numbers that matter now. instead of predicting and talking about things that are going to happen in the year 2100 we need to talk about things that are going to happen in the year 2040. That is close enough that some of the more moderate Republicans will start to realize they have to do something about it.
3
"Science is a process of discovery." Yes it is. BUT much of the projections are based on models which are largely based on past data and assumptions of relationships. Relationships are all too often correlations rather than causations. Consensus forecast suppress the 'black swan' outcomes. I recall in doing industry forecasts many years ago - individual forecasts might call for rise or fall of 20-30% while the consensus never went a point or two off the trend line. It was often off by 10-20% as late as 6s 6 months in to the years.
But I hear the weather predictions in Russia due to global warming are quite nice. Maybe Trump has a deal with Putin to leverage all that oil that will be uncovered by that melting ice, and for a nice new Trump tower in the newly tropic Russia. Its all business. The wealthy believe they will survive climate change just fine. They may be very wrong.
4
Amazing that the fossil fuel folks, aware for decades, of the dire consequences of its use, failed to use their capital, infrastructure, and expertise to jump into renewables. It's not exactly as if they have, or know shame.
6
How did scientists get climate change so wrong? You mean, besides the continued lack of funding to decently research the subject, researchers being pilloried in public for decades to the point where some of them were even hit with (or threatened with) legal processes, a government and energy companies that repeatedly silenced their own scientific advisors, or the poor translation of good scientific papers into breathless popular press stories which played up the emotion but downplayed the actual data, leading to increased entrenchment of all of the above? Yep, that sure is a puzzler.
12
I've been wondering how Republicans, when they are finally forced to acknowledge the awful reality of climate change, will justify their about-face. This will be their answer: it is the fault of scientists for not warning us. Of course, that is completely counter to the facts and reality, but hey, facts and reality won't deter Repulbicans any more than they did Mr. Linden.
5
"Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels..." they would have been dismissed as alarmists, much as some have said today. People don't want to know about the bad things, caused by their bad actions. At least not until it is too late to do something about them.
5
Scientists and the media needs to share the blame for all this with educators. For too long we have tolerated the notion that science is too hard for some and beyond the reach of those who have not been properly educated. Our "schools of ed" are overrun by those who teach cultural and social "theories" without understanding the meaning of the word "theory". Too many educators teach from the premise that there is not such thing as absolute truth, that facts are just part of belief systems, that theories are weaker than beliefs. Moreover, too many schools require STEM students to take serious liberal arts courses, but refuse to require liberal arts students to take serious STEM classes. Our educational system must treat innumeracy and "inphysicy" with the disdain and shame it treats illiteracy. Until then we will be unable to overcome the divide between the scientific haves and have nots, unable to demand that our leaders be at once literate, numerate, and scientifically knowledgeable, and our body politic, media, and society will be unable to respond to the demands of the day.
8
They under-estimated it because, they are soooo cautious.
Scientist really hate to be shown wrong, even though they would also be the first to admit it.
The scientific method is: "Don't believe everything you think." That notion has profoundly changed human society but, not society's thinking. People still don't want to believe any inconvenient truths.
2
Every gallon of petroleum consumed should require 18 pounds of CO2 offset to be carbon neutral. At a price of $15/ton of CO2, this works out to $.12/gallon. Would you pay $.12 per gallon to have carbon neutral gasoline? The per capita average for the USA is 15 tons per year (excluding the military). Visit www.goldstandard.org .
1
I am appalled that so many people erroneously think that the free market (or capitalism) is the problem. Yes, all human activity has been the problem since all human activity was based on fossil fuels. Now, however, all human activity will be based on solar, wind and nuclear, hydro and even geothermal. However, I believe solar and batteries alone will be the primary source in just 15 years, unless
Trump people purposely sabotage its rapid growth out of despite over the lame attempts (by minimalist agenda promoters) to woo the masses into thinking that any socio-political structure is science, and thus, an actual solution.
No, it is not because only real science is the solution and it seems that most of the solutions offered by the media is NOT based on science, rather politics.
Furthermore, these (minimalist agenda minded) people must know (by now) that pushing social-political "solutions", AKA calling the free market amoral, advocate attacks on the free market, and other negativity upon society as a whole, that in itself, WILL cause social unrest, as the division and polarization are already showing, today.
How dare they not discern that!
ONLY science is the solution to global warming. Its definition is GHG induced radiative forcing. Thus, the solution is to make humanity better again. How do we do that? ALL CLEAN ENERGY FOR TWICE THE PEOPLE AT 4X TODAY'S AVERAGE LIVING STANDARDS via primary solar, wind and batteries.
Solar growth is growing at an exponential rate!
Dude, the free market IS amoral. It’s a market, not a person. And that’s among the reasons that Adam Smith insisted that capitalism must be regulated to work properly.
4
A family member was part of the US negotiating team at the Paris climate summit in 2015. She has decided not to bring children into this world, which if not doomed certainly faces a dystopian future.
12
Canada's seminal scientist and environmentalist, David Suzuki, predicted this climate crisis long ago. In fact, a decade ago he warned we were doomed. As others have mentioned, scientists were warning the people, but many refused to heed their warnings.
8
Does the term climate change mean that the global temperatures will change, meaning that it will go both up and down. That some years we will have record highs and lows? Is this some fifth Law’s of Thermodynamics that I missed in engineering school - like a world wide Carnot Cycle. Or is it simply a scheme to transfer wealth from industrial nations? A green new deal? Not so many years ago we were told we were in a period of global cooling, then came global warming. Now we are exposed to a term that includes both. Come on guys, make up your minds.
4
It means that we’re changing the climactic patterns on which we’ve built this civilization in fairly-serious ways, with consequences we don’t fully understand and are not doing nearly enough to prepare for.
Anything else I can help with? Tallahassee’s anticipated problems with sea level rise, perhaps?
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article236215368.html
5
In the discussions on Global Climate Change, there has always been policy and solution discussions about mitigation - actions for lessening the causes of carbon emissions, and also adaptation - the changes are occurring, and it is important for communities to build greater resilience and develop planning for adapting to the coming changes.
This is an ongoing tragedy that will require Deep Adaptation to its effects. Individuals, communities, regions, and nation states should plan accordingly. https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
1
As a retired climate scientist, it feels like this article’s coming down hard on those of us who actually *were* working on the problem and absolutely, positively understood the potential catastrophic harm climate change *might* produce. We (scientists) deal in “uncertainties”—that is, a number, by itself, has no meaning—NONE—without some uncertainty statement attached to it, which tells you the *likelihood* that something will occur—like drawing a full house in a game of poker on any given deal.
Numerous models have predicted the temperature/sea level rise/hurricane severity would be just as we’ve experienced. What percentage of those predictions? I’m a scientist, mathematician, statistician...so I understand the technical side very well. But to the average person, the short answer is, “Who cares!?” For example, if I told you that you that your next plane flight from SFO to JFK had a 1% chance of crashing and everyone on the plane dying, would you still board the flight? That’s essentially the same scenario as the climate-science predictions: The more dire scenarios are more like in the 5-10% probability range. I’d call that pretty good, actually—and actionable.
Climate scientists aren’t the problem, and never have been. Politicians—and all the money and influence—behind them are, and always have been, the issue.
33
As posed, this article will be used to show there is no reason to believe scientists who always get everything wrong.
Science is by definition conservative, because scientists report what they quantitatively know. They don't report suppositions as fact. There were warnings early on, but by definition with fewer details than are now known. That's the reason the IPCC has existed as long as it has.
As many people have pointed out, the problem with the public perception of climate science has little to do with science and everything to do with fossil fuel interests who have worked systematically to protect themselves at everyone else's expense. The Times had a long article detailing the history of the Koch organization's efforts (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change.html). Public attitudes were actually better 10 years ago, before the disinformation people made this such a partisan issue.
There are a couple of real stories here:
1. Things are generally going to be even worse than the predictions, because you can never foresee everything that could go wrong.
2. Even more important--climate change requires an commitment now, because of the lead time to affect it. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just adds up. Regardless of how badly we want to stop it, things are going to continue to get worse until we stop burning coal, oil, and gas completely.
10
The corporate controlled U.S. Government will continue to protect the interests (profits) of their benefactors. Don't expect them to do what's right for the people or the planet any time soon.
8
Now it's reported that world’s thickest glacier is melting 80 years ahead of schedule as determined by even most aggressive prediction. More frustrating part is - only 17 percent of Americans believe that almost all of scientific community agree on man made climate change. That lack of awareness about science among a huge percentage of American voters is taking its toll in terms of political abuse of this ignorance by electing politicians, who are still desperately denying even the basic truth of man made climate change, forget about its rate. And that ignorance is not limited to just climate change but extended to many other issues that need some basic understanding of science. Many of such issues- like minority/LGBT rights, abortion, GMO, education policy, racism etc.- are also been made politically polarizing by such politicians. And the core of it arises from infusion of religion in public education, politics/policy, and increasingly in judiciary too. It mainly started with Reagan and exploded after Trump.
10
@Bonku
Who determined what is the right schedule for glaciers to melt?
3
In 1978 my Geology professor at UConn told us all this would be occurring by the time I was ready to retire. He predicted the droughts, fires, warming oceans, rising water and everything else that we now see occurring. An entire semester of teaching us about what was going to happen. The idea that this is a surprise, is ridiculous. Scientists knew and understood. Disinformation from industry, politicians and the media over the decades, obfuscated truths and distracted us from peril. Money bought ads, politicians and votes. Tales of recycling, clean coal and fracking natural gas were the myths. Now, here we are, in a predictable mess. Claiming shock and blaming the scientists? Shame on everyone. The truth has been in front of us for 40 years.
30
Yup, shoot the messengers that way you aren't responsible for the causes and consequences of the message delivered but not heeded.
11
I need to reiterate what others have said...PLEASE DO NOT use such a title for your article ! Com’n NYT, give me a break, you should know better! We live in an anti-science, alternate-fact universe. Continuing to perpetuate the views of ‘here-we-go-again-mad scientists-are-so-dysfunctional’ does not help. You need to educate and re-educate over and over for the health of our democracy and our planet ! So repeat after me..NO MORE ‘cute, eye-catching’ article titles that defame scientists. -signed by a slightly biased person, a scientist
17
@LMauro
Especially a piece written by a person with no science background.
3
Nearly twenty years ago Glacier National Park was well on its way to having no glaciers in it. That was the wake-up call few could deny but Republicans seemed to universally ignore. A decade ago the Swiss Alps, Himalayan mountains, Antarctica and Greenland all joined the mix with unprecedented and catastrophic levels of melting. At the same time methane and CO2 emissions from thawing permafrost joined the calls for alarm. Which in turn ramped up the climate deniers. Yes, earth orbit and axial tilt may have been involved in a natural cycle that runs over several hundreds of thousands of years but this is happening over a matter of decades at the same time human population, especially in Africa, India and Asia is exploding.
10
The climate deniers don't deny the climate is warming, just that it isn't something man made. The earth has warmed without our help before but what happened then should make us want not to push it closer to what happened back then. Once when it warmed by 2-3 C, sea levels rose by 6-9 meters. It took 13,000 years to recover from that. The other time, 55 million years ago, the temperature rose by 5-6C, all ice at both poles melted and antarctica grew trees. It took over 100,000 years to recover. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/what-happens-after-global-warming-25887608/
4
I guess we're lucky that Trump hasn't yet defunded and criminalized climate science.
I would think that, in the face of the most recent scientific conclusions, planning is well on its way for a "survival of the wealthy" strategy. The country can't afford to protect the population at large, but protecting the top few percentage points on the wealth scale is doable.
Good application for AI and AE (Artificial Empathy).
4
@sherm
I think a good part of the lack of action on climate change is that the wealthy (they're the ones with political power) do believe that they can buy themselves out the climate change, just like they've bought themselves out of every other problem they've ever had.
Perhaps they're right, in the short term.
1
I was in Greenland in August during the height of hysteria about melting and everything I saw attests to this. However as I read "The End of Ice" I see that there has been evidence of, and knowledge of, abrupt changes in climate leading to rapid melting for many many years. Good that it's finally being shouted, bad that it took so long. The deniers will all be dead when coastal cities are affected so what do they care, but their grandkids?
4
@Robert
Obama just betted 15 million that coastal cities won't be affected. (Martha's Vineyard)
5
@Mike Clarke
Sea level rise is likely to be 3-7 feet by the end of the century. That will not affect a property on a rise in Martha's Vineyard.
For projections, check this (reported by NYT, but this was the original work, published in Climate Communications and reported here)
https://climatecentral.org/news/report-flooded-future-global-vulnerability-to-sea-level-rise-worse-than-previously-understood
3
Mike, Martha’s Vineyard is an island, not a coastal city. And your claim comes from TMZ, which is different from the NYT: doesn’t seem a done deal yet.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obamas-mansion-marthas-vineyard/
I mention this because it’s the sort of sloppiness about facts we’ve all come to expect from the Denier Brigade.
4
If the US and Europe were to completely stop fossil fuel use, developing countries increasing usage would still be there. Solutions must be considered on a worldwide basis. Cognitive dissonance comes to mind when political candidates propose green energy, green jobs and using this issue as vehicle for leftist political goals.
Nothing short of a Manhattan type project to develop reactors large and small that can replace the heat source of existing generation plants around the World has a chance of working. Wishing or legislating elimination of fossil fuels without a viable replacement is impossible.
Anti nuclear power activists are as wrong if not more so than climate change deniers.
8
I’m entirely pessimistic about human beings turning this around. Greed is just too great, even without the lies and propaganda from the American Right. We’re toast. We’ll learn to adapt, but life as we know it will never be the same. But then again, we may go extinct if we kill everything, like bees, that we rely on for food.
Climate change is by far the major factor in my choice not to have children.
As a society, we always refer to the discoveries and accomplishments of science as something “we’ve” done, when actually it’s just a small group of people with expertise (and sometimes genius) in a particular field, and always has been. The rest of us just benefit. (As smart as I am, without scientists, I wouldn’t even know the world is round)
Our climate crisis is too far gone for even those noble souls of science to solve. We are indeed toast.
9
Another factor driving global warming, that is entirely absent from the scientific studies, is the continued explosion of the human population on the planet and what that means for transformation of the land and consumption of resources.
Regardless of progress with wind and solar energy, we are going to burn or consume every last molecule of fossil fuel we can get our drills at. The CO2 level of 270ppm at the birth of many of us is now over 400ppm and is going to reach 1,000 ppm. That's assuming we don't create nucler armageddon first. Have a nice day!
9
So we're now blaming the scientists for not warning us of climate change? Would this be the same scientists being shouted down & ridiculed by Koch-led business interests? The ones being muzzled by state legislatures? The ones being erased and exiled by the Trump administration? Bearing bad news is no fun: you'll regret it either way.
9
We are capitalists. We push for the maximum attainable profit today. We look no further than our noses. The rest of the world who look ahead are "socialists" ! Dread the word! They consider their children and even other people's children. They remain in the Paris Climate Accord. In their collective self-interest they would be justified in putting blanket sanctions on all things American, say 100% tariffs. That might be a two-by-four upside the head for climate deniers.
8
According to Scientific American, a study done recently on the cost of shading the planet, Potsdam study, calcualted that it would cost about $50B to setup and $13B per year without severe environmental impact. This is much more affordable and reliable than the foolhardy pipe dream of reducing emmissions. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-best-way-to-shade-earth/
1
One thing can be assured...this will not end here...the silliness will continue.
The people that reject AGW will be wrong--forever....trillions of years from now, they will be wrong.
Small comfort when the problems due to AGW will be so vast.
I agree with other commenters here. Do not blame the "canary in the coal mine"; blame the coal miners who ignored the warnings. It's obvious now the fossil fuel industry threw all it's finances into sowing doubt about any research into climates change. Greed, once again, triumphs.
It's a shame Homo Sapiens run will end so quickly. I wonder how far the cockroaches will get next?
4
Great article. It's all Trump's fault. Now I'm gonna get in my brand new full size four wheel drive Chevy truck and go get a couple of chicken sandwiches and Popeyes, get some early Christmas shopping done at the mall, pick up some beer on the way home, watch some football and grill some steaks.
5
We know this is happening and we all have the nagging feeling that "We ain't seen nuthin' yet..."
We're just getting started with water shortages, desertification and global migration.
People just don't realize how destructive constant growth is. The constant growth religion we worship will bring us down. Soon, the only thing left on our burning planet will be the cockroaches.
2
Trump and the GOP (Grand Oleagark Party) need to be Impeached or voted out now or we are all doomed, maybe anyway.
Here is a telling piece from a few years ago on what scientists know and how they deal with it.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists-0815/
1
A decade ago I worked with an organization committed to educating the public on climate change. When I trained activists I always made two points 1) to the deniers agree with them. Tell them “Yes. The scientists do have it wrong.” Then wait for their relief that you agree with them then follow by, “The scientists have grossly underestimated the impact.” 2) we never used “by 2100.” We always said, “in the lifetime of a child born today.” The public can’t see themselves in 2100. But they see their children and grandchildren.
324
@Jennifer
And also, time does not stop at 2100...a few short decades after the turn of the next century, Miami will be a water park and Wall Street will be WaterWall Street.
12
@Jennifer Your replies to deniers sound effective and polite.
Perhaps another way to meet with a Climate Change denier, is to suggest that they put their focus, on another environmental issue instead.
Remind them, that there is no shortage of other reasons to be paying full attention to the fragile ecosystem of this Planet. So, they can choose for themselves, what to address, from any number of other formidable threats, which are putting the Earth's health in peril.
Whether it is: Global deforestation. Ever-expanding human development. The decimation of animal habitat everywhere. The complete loss, or questionable future, of flora and flauna in every country, right down to the Honey Bee. Toxic pollution and unbreatheable air. Lack of clean water. Fossil fuels extracted and burning worldwide. Overpopulation. Plastics in the Oceans.
Instead of being cut off by a Climate Change denier, one can just shift the attention to the multitude of other major worries about our Planet from which a denier can pick from, to confront the fact that the Earth is irrefutably, in a dire, precarious condition.
13
@Jennifer Like everything in America, it's just a matter of marketing. Great messaging, I will use from now on.
6
It seems to me that the financial beneficiaries of fossil fuel extraction look at global warming merely as collatoral damage to their business interests. The wealthiest among us all have their escape plans made possible by their wealth.
4
I am an earth scientist. We did not get it so wrong. We knew 40 years ago that climate change would destabilize habitat, food production systems, economic systems, and human civilization. Many of us said so. But very few were willing to heed our warnings.
There were many powerful deniers - Regan, Koch, Bush and Trump families, oil and chemical companies, forestry companies, and banks. They spent billions undermining science.
So, here we are.
28
Telling the public climate change is here and is bad has been tougher than telling the public that cigarettes cause cancer. The stakes are higher.
Its amazing we know about climate change at all.
I'm sure if Mr. Putin has his way all climate change discussions will be shelved indefinitely. Luckily for Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump is beavering away & squashing efforts to deal with climate change.
Immediate economic benefits of oil based economies are fabulous. So weight gets thrown about, freely smashing climate change discussions and awareness.
I toured a park focusing on illustrating how climate had changed over the last 2000 years and how native inhabitants of the area adapted to it. There was hardly a mention of current climate change. Listening to the professor it was obvious funding was tenuous so risks of talking about current climate change were high.
I had lunch with a professor at another university who explained the university toned down one of the introductory environmental classes under pressure from big donors.
Look at the presidential candidates. They do not talk about climate change. They talk about health care. There is no greater threat to good health than climate change -
2
@Hopeful
Sanders and Warren both talk about climate chamgs supporting a Green New Deal. The corporate "centrist" join the GOP in wailing "how much it would cost. As Ocasio-Cortez said in another un-reported gathering on climate about her rejection of the perennial question "How are we going to pay for it?" regarding the Green New Deal and explained how her answer lies within frontline communities across the country. Americans across the country, she argued, have spent years paying for the inaction of a government beholden to the climate-warming fossil fuel industry.
"As though the Midwest wasn't underwater this year, as though 3,000 Americans didn't die in Puerto Rico in Hurricane Maria, as though Hurricane Katrina didn't happen," she said. "As though sea levels aren't rising, as though California isn't on fire. How do we pay for that? The way that we pay for this is through a people-powered movement, we're going to come together."
The UK gets the tail ends of the hurricane and tropical storms that beset the Atlantic coast of the US. This has not been a significant problem in the past but that has altered in recent years. Severe storms and flooding are now much more common. Even as I speak large areas of Yorkshire are flooded.
At the age of 83 I am unlikely to experience the full horror of climate change but I have grandchildren born in the 2000s who could well live to the end of this century. And the Trump administration is oblivious to all this.
4
A big hurdle here is avoiding the sense that this is beyond our control. We must resist the cynicism that causes inertia and avoid the quagmire of blaming others for this disaster. We are all at fault simply because we exist.
Each one of us needs to take immediate action by changing our daily behavior now instead of waiting for some organized entity to tell us what to do.
We must try to change the individual behaviors that have led us here.
We must all be less selfish, we must all embrace inconvenience, and we must all now think and act beyond our momentary needs and desires. We must be a little less human and a lot more humane.
A primer:
REFUSE plastic - yes, REFUSE plastic.
DON’T ACCEPT plastic water bottles, plastic take out containers, plastic coffee lids, plastic utensils.
STOP buying and eating the meat and meat by-products from industrially raised livestock.
TURN OFF your unused lights, USE LESS air conditioning, USE MORE public transportation, drive less, walk and bike more.
CUT down, way down on airplane travel.
CONSIDER the environmental consequence of every purchase.
BOYCOTT COMPANIES THAT DO NO HAVE A SUSTAINABILITY ACTION PLAN.
VOTE for candidates who make the environment a priority.
We must, at least, try.
11
Articles like this one makes being over 70 more tolerable. Those younger than I face a very bleak future.
5
What I wish in my wildest dreams. For the damage done by the ever more fierce hurricanes, blame the oil, gas, and coal companies. Then bill them for repair costs.
2
This is an amazing article. The press blaming the scientists for not being clear enough for them to understand what was going on. The science has been clear for a very long time. The scientists have been saying over and over again if we don't decease carbon dioxide and methane that were going to have a catastrophe. It was the press abetted by a corrupt political system and the capitalist system which puts profit over public good which prevented the information from being acted upon.
I have to hope it's not too late for my grandchildren. Let's get together and do something about it.
Look up makeitfair.us. Look up the American anticorruption act. Get involved. If we don't get money out of politics. If we don't stop the petroleum industry from being able to give "campaign contributions" to politicians we don't have a chance.
You need to get money out of politics so that the scientists have a chance of affecting public policy. Watching Trump take money from bankrupt coal companies and oil companies while stopping progression in automobile technology and not promoting the sun and solar energy gives away the story. If we don't fix the system we don't have a chance.
9
As long as the focus is assigning blame, nothing will happen. Reading the comments shows that most people are more interested in advancing their political agenda, both left and right. The science shows that rapid change in climate has occurred in the past, predating human intervention. Look at the data.
That human actions have contributed is likely true, but the fact remains that not all climate change is human related.
At this point the rapidity of change is such that even drastic change in human behavior is unlikely to stop climactic change.
We should do our best to mitigate what we can, but the focus should be on adapting to the coming change. Not seeking blame and "arguing points" to reassure out own political and social bias.
6
Thank you for this comment. The article is clearly written and backed up by extensive research articles by eminent scientists and groups of scientists. To grasp their research, please read through the links. The data show that Earth has a long history of rapid warming (and cooling) on the timescale of a human life. We may be looking at the onset of one of those periods. Whether or not this one is triggered by human activity, it may be worsened by it. As residents of Earth, we have a responsibility to minimize our impact, but even zero emissions may not stop the temperature spikes. Still, when we face Goliath, we must still throw our stones.
1
I see how it’s going down. This article is going to give a pass to the climate deniers by saying, ‘well, if only the scientists had REALLY warned us we would have done something earlier’.
No. I say we need zero tolerance for (political) climate deniers.
5
What's clear - then and now - is the scientists have no idea what they pontificate about. This opinion piece takes all the hysteria and thinks it's all new. In the '30s, ships were sailing thru the Arctic because there was massive ice melt (with contemporaneous NYT articles about it). At the same time, we had the huge drought across the great plains leading to mass migration. Glaciers that Captain Cook saw in his voyages thru the Alaska panhandle had receded tens of miles in a few hundred years before anyone cared. Centuries ago, Greenland was warm enough to grow crops. And then it got very cold for centuries and people left - only recently has it warmed enough to attempt to plant crops again. So let's stop blathering about scientists getting it wrong. Reality is most people always knew the climate was changing - it just wasn't fashionable to constantly wring your hands (of course, for all-too-many it's 'good business' to spew as much alarmism as possible).
Reality is that the climate has seen dramatic changes in recent human history (just the last thousand years), and yet somehow only recent changes are 'man-made'. Give us a break.
190
@fed up
The current RATE of climate change is completely unparalleled in world history as far as anybody has been able to show.
The rate of change is what prevents evolutionary forces from making adequate adjustments, and thereby insuring the survival of many plant and animal species.
There is an extremely alarming process underway, so extreme that even untrained, OBJECTIVE people can easily see it. It's undeniable at this point.
Scientists have been MOSTLY correct about climate change -- though perhaps they underestimated the shockingly high rate of the changes.
660
@fed up You are right that only this climate change is due to our human activity. Therefore, we can do something about it. The big question is will we.
160
@fed up
Guess you have to give back those teflon pans and antibiotics and statins and even your gas or electric car, 'cause they all adhere to chemical properties which those pontificating scientists have discovered AND USED TO MAKE YOUR LIFE VASTLY DIFFERENT FROM OTHERWISE!
It is all the same science, and has science continues to investigate, the clearer the science becomes.
The planet will go through variations, but probably not at the current rate if we decide to do something. Your argument is like someone saying "well, I am going to die someday, so why not take this handful of pills and swill a bottle of booze even though I am only 25 years old."
Can you guess how much it will cost to shift, in only a decade, all the wheat and corn agriculture from Kansas, where it might not grow anymore, to Montana? Any idea where that money will come from?
122
It seems no one gives much credence to mankind's ability to adapt. That said, the real problem is overpopulation in the third world.
4
Don,
Really? Over population in the third world is to blame? The same third world inhabitants that own the least in the world? The inhabitants without SUVs, air conditioning or electrical goods? Not say, the country that has been the largest contributor to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Or the largest predicted contributors of future contributions? The wealthiest country in the world that is also. the only country in the world to not be in the Paris Agreement? The country that travels the most air miles per person in the world? Whose individual inhabitants produce the most CO2 in the world? That only one fifth of it’s inhabitants understand the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists? The country that is in the process of rolling back over 200 regulations meant to protect the environment? The only first world country who’s leader managed to get elected despite claiming that climate heating is a “Chinese hoax”?
No, you are right. It must be people living in countries that have barely begun their own industrial revolutions that have pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere over the last century that we only have 8 & 1/2 years left of current emissions before hitting The Tipping Point. Whilst climate equity and justice will have an effect on the future emissions of “third world countries”, our current situation can be rested upon the shoulders of the First World and US admin policies that are actively racing us to The Tipping Point.
2
The third world generates relatively few greenhouse emissions. It’s the first and second worlds who are to blame.
3
Actually, since we use 30 to 50 times the resources and produce 50 times the carbon, the real problem is the first world nations
5
Comments reveal many posters have misread the article. It says “large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records.” Paleoclimatology is the study of climates prevalent in the geological past. The planet been abruptly cooling or abruptly warming for millions of years. Abrupt climate change not man-made. It is a natural phenomenon.
We need to focus on adapting to climate change, not stopping it. Areas now cover by permafrost might become the world's "breadbasket." However, humans will probably adopt they way they always have, through famine, pestilence, and war.
7
@William Case What was true in the past is not necessarily true for all time! Sure, before 8 billion humans lived on Earth at the same time, and invented technology to pump fossil fuels out from deep underground, and mass produced combustion engines, global climate change was free from human interference. But now the atmosphere is overloaded with carbon dioxide, and that is only "natural" if everything the human animal does is natural.
3
@William Case
Your argument does not support your conclusion. Just because past abrupt climate changes had non-human causes, obviously, doesn't mean this one must. The very prevalence of abrupt changes means the global ecosystem is sensitive, and small changes can spiral into huge effects. Fossil fuel-based industry's emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere correlates satisfactorily with global warming and other climate effects as observed), according to current science. (The science was basically right even if climate models were imprecise and data incomplete.) In other words, human industry is easily powerful enough to have triggered this "abrupt climate change," and all real evidence says that's what happened.
I suspect your unwillingness to recognize human activity's crucial role is not scientific, however. Some conservatives doubt the good faith of scientists and politicians championing drastic changes in technology and behavior, seeing this as a threat to their idea of personal liberty, much realer than the prospect of eventual rises in temperature and sea level, predictions of mass extinctions and catastrophic events, and of threats to survival, civilization, and all humanity. And so some of these conservatives come to doubt the science itself. In my view this attitude is a kind of ideologically-based blindness or obscurantism. In the Declaration of Independence, the first unalienable human Right is Life, before Liberty. That's what's at stake.
6
And your comment reveals that you do not grasp that "abrupt" as understood by paleoclimatologists is still nothing comparable to the present change rate.
That of course is a key difference which should suffice to discredit your line of reasoning, but I want also to mention that the logic behind the "we will adapt, wars and famine will take care of the rest" is profoundly amoral : we, as in "we developped nations" are the main contributors to the atmospheric composition changes, the USA being responsible of most of this cumulative change by a large margin; and not only do you reject that proven responsability but you also well know that the ones which are going to pay the dearest price, are the most exposed and have the least means of mitigating the coming changes are the poorest, most fragile, most exploited and least responsible nations.
Words fail to describe how low this attitude rates on the human moral compass.
5
There are two bodies of thought as to the cause of the Younger Dryas. Either an asteroid, smaller than the dino killer, but big enough to change climate or the vast inland sea that covered much of North America on the glaciers as they were melting broke an ice dam and poured out fresh water into the North Atlantic, turning off the thermohaline conveyor current. The second is still the more popular thesis, although they *may* have found in impact crater that would be large enough to cause it, if the time was right. It could also have been both, the asteroid triggering the glacial dam collapse.
Neither one has anything to do with the gaseous composition of the atmosphere.
1
@Diane Merriam
I respectfully disagree with your conclusion. The point is that modest events, such as a not-all-that-large asteroid hit can trigger major changes in the climate system.
Given that, imagine what an especially industrious and highly populous species that has perfected the art of mining earth's numerous sequestered sources of carbon and converting them to heat, CO2 and plastic can trigger.
3
We are in an ice age, which is now 500,000 years old. There have been about 5 "interglacials", each at most 10,000 years long. The current interglacial is now 10,000 years old. Before EACH and EVERY interglacial's end, the CO2 level has risen sharply. Yes, much MORE sharply now, because of US, but, even so... The current events, I expect, are the brief abrupt warming before ... the ice sheets again, as they really have over and over, cover all of present-day Canada.
4
@Richard Conn Henry: Please provide references of scientific research supporting your statements.
8
@Richard Conn Henry, please read this summary of the IPCC's 2018 report. We are not moving toward an interglacial that will disappear in 10,000 years (unless the human species is extinct).
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2018/10/special-climate-report-1-5oc-is-possible-but-requires-unprecedented-and-urgent-action/
2
@Anna Here it is, Anna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#/media/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
I started reading Scientific American in the 60's,even though I didn't become a scientist. Now I read Science Daily. It seems pretty clear to me that scientists were warning us, in no uncertain terms, that we had a serious problem facing us. I tried to tell my friends, but Al Gore was right, it was an inconvenient truth. Now, as a senior, all the retired people I know, conservative and liberal, love traveling, burning up tons of fossil fields to get to far flung places, while their bucket lists get longer. And, not being content with a stationary hotel room, they now need a cruise ship to propel their rooms around the globe, tripling their carbon footprint. Oh well, things will get a lot worse before humans realize that we need to change.
3
There has been a recent surge in warming that has caught everyone by surprise. It's only 10 years, so may not be statistically significant, but if it's a real acceleration it's very worrying.
Global temperature anomaly, ref period 1951-80
2010 +0.72 C
2011 +0.61 C
2012 +0.64 C
2013 +0.68 C
2014 +0.74 C
Average +0.68 C
2015 +0.90 C
2016 +1.01 C
2017 +0.92 C
2018 +0.85 C
2019 +0.97 C (10 months)
Average +0.93 C
2
The same tired and very wrong red herrings keep getting posted by the science rejectors.
The planet emerged from the ice age warming at about 0.05C per 100 years over a 10000 year period until the Holocene started about 11000 years ago. The Holocene thermal max hit about 8000 years ago, with the planet starting to cool about 6000 years ago. The cooling stopped around 150 years ago with the industrial age and heat engines. Essentially, 6000 years of cooling were reversed in 150 years. (15 to 20 times faster than coming out of the last ice age…think about that)
Ocean levels were stable for about 6000 years and were dropping from the medieval warm period down to the depths of the Little ice age. Glaciers hit their maximum levels in the 1800s. Again, that has all reversed since the industrial revolution and are at the higher end of IPCC projections. That is bad news…for the next generations.
The only change during that reversal has been humans and heat engines. There is no natural forcing that could cause the changes the planet is seeing. (don’t forget, the sun has been on a cooling trend for the last four decades.)
“Rule-of-thumb” If the ocean levels are rising, the planet is warming because land ice is melting and thermal expansion of the water.
Citing the real data:
http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%207004/Marcott_Global%20Temperature%20Reconstructed.pdf
5
Yes, climate change is worse than even the scientists predicted and yet the GOP denies it's very existence. This issue must be front and center in the forthcoming election.
3
This is not science. Science has to be testable. Period. That’s why it is rife with errors. Add to that the bias and political agendas these scientists have, and it’s a miracle that they get anything right.
I stopped listening a long time ago. These climate change issues are totally partisan and tendentious. Check out the Paris Accords- if you Google it, you will learn that the Accords won’t stop the climate catastrophes the scientists warn about. Its a total sham. Pure virtue signaling.
Zero credibility.
3
@Ari Weitzner
"This is not science. Science has to be testable. Period."
Based on this statement, you have never done any science.
Science is also empirical and climate science is applied science. It uses inductive methods....measure stuff...get feedback...improve models. Works in industry---that's why wind tunnels are used for aviation....or medicine....testing efficacy of drugs...etc.
5
This headline is extremely misleading. Scientists have been shown to be right on climate change, not wrong. While the article itself is excellent, I’m almost positive that climate change denialists will take this headline out of context and use it to smear scientists...
8
Once beavers have gnawed their way through the edible vegetation surrounding their pond, they move on to another place. Where is humanity going after we foul up the earth? Mars? It looks like we were there all ready.
2
So far humans are incapable of reading the tea leaves. It is just too inconvenient to worry about something that IS happening when it is far down the road. The only ones who possibly are paying attention at this point are the ones who have actually succumbed to the ravages climate change is causing. The partying continues on the Titanic and we all know what happened in the end......misery for so many.
2
Wow. I have to say, as an old newspaper hack, that that is one bad hed. Most scientists, for decades, have had it pretty much right. It was broader society, including politicians, deniers - and journalists - who got it wrong, by failing to heed what has been a pretty clear message for at least three decades.
5
How the press got scientists and climate change so wrong!
Scientists are conservative by nature. That's because they deal with data and facts, and they don't go out on a limb until they are sure. The IPCC is even more conservative, because it requires consensus among actors who are beholden to power and wealth and their country's influencers, often in hock to short-term interests and profits.
Uncertainty is not your friend.
Industry and the fake skeptic industry (scientists are the real skeptics) started out right away using the time-tested playbook of deception to mislead the public. Then they went to town attacking the character, employment, and even the families of climate scientists who were trying to get the word out.
Here's a truly nasty story from the early days: **A Note About Roger Revelle, Justin Lancaster and Fred Singer** http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-note-about-roger-revelle-julian.html "Fred Singer started his "Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)" in the early 1990s"
The above is a cautionary tale about the lengths these liars were willing to go on every level to deceive the public about what was what. Every time you read about Al Gore, an army of intentional and duped commenters goes to town about his few errors, attacking his character and anything else they can find.
These tactics are still in progress. And if anyone thinks Luntz and Rove invented them, Schopenhauer in "How to Win an Argument" explains:
It's all about the lies.
5
I've been a climate activist for around twenty years, and I think it's worth noting that at least some climate scientists have known for a long time how bad it was. But they were constrained from saying it in public for political reasons, if not personal reasons in the sense that few people have wanted to acknowledge the perils because they are so terrifying.
I've been to numerous presentations by climate scientists over the years and spoken to them afterwards. As far as I can remember going back to the turn of the millennium, all of them speaking to me privately expressed extreme alarm, but felt they couldn't say it in public. This happened as recently as two months ago at a forum at Harvard. Afterwards, I had a conversation with one climate scientist who privately exclaimed, "You have NO IDEA how bad it's going to be in the next years!" His onstage presentation was tame by comparison.
I actually do have such an idea, and Linden would have been more correct in his assessment if he had critiqued climate science, being firmly based in the physical sciences, for ignoring the power of biology as a *driver* of climate. Even relatively mainstream literature is beginning to confront this as an eleventh-hour insight. But it's not too late for us to intelligently rally biology on behalf of the biosphere, which is what a growing number of land managers - and people around the world - are urgently trying to do.
4
The article seems to suggest that climate change has happened before, happened very rapidly, and with dire results (a rise of global temperature of 16 degrees). Less attention is paid to the anthropogenic causes of climate change. This gap in connecting our current problem to human activity has been taken up by climate change deniers very effectively. When writing about this topic journalists need to make clear that the current problem is not a natural cycle, has been coming on as a result of centuries of increasing carbon emission, and is amenable to human intervention.
Perhaps we should visit the proposition that Donald Trump could be charged with crimes against humanity. Every action he has taken regarding the environment will have the effect of accelerating events that will lead to mass migrations and millions of deaths in the decades to come. What better definition could there be?
2
Scientists, attempting to understand a highly complex planetary system, did an extraordinary job of identifying the factors that cause global warming and ocean acidification and the consequences they will have to earth and its inhabitants. And they sounded the alarm. Not wishing to lose credibility by possibly overstating their concerns, they put forth conservative, consensus-driven forecasts. As they learned more about the way these factors affect our planet, they adjusted their computer and theoretical models, revised their forecasts and sounded the alarm. Scientists have served us well.
But most folks ignore the inconvenient warnings of our scientists because they interfere with our need to exercise our God-given right to buy a gas guzzling pickup truck or SUV. We believe that we have a right employment in a particular “job” even if that job harms the environment and even though good paying jobs can be created building alternative sources of energy. And we are not well served by government officials who are either stupid, or ignorant, or financially tied to the fossil fuel and chemical industries through legal bribery [campaign contributions and gifts] or promises of future employment for their friends and family, or for themselves in the great revolving door. We fiddle while the planet burns.
Why does it feel like we are living in a science fiction novel?
6
@Charles Hmmmm I’ve got a 2019 Lincoln Navigator and average 24 MPG on the highway and 18 in the city...I’ve refitted my Regulator offshore fishing boat with the newest and most efficient Yamaha engines and realize we all must do better. However let me know when India and China fully get onboard.....we cannot wreck our economy while they flourish in the future.
1
I agree with this, but am worried that the emphasis on earlier periods of rapid climate change (from "natural sources") provides some ammunition for those in the Drumpf administration today who might concede that the earth is warming but still deny it is caused by human activity. They point and say "these fluctuations are normal and there's nothing we can do about it" and therefore oppose climate regulations and carbon taxes.
3
I have cognitive dissonance in much of the discussion around GW, its consequences, and actions we should take.
1. Many feel global warming will have existential consequences. And soon.
2. Most activists are advocating elimination or minimization of the use of fossil fuels - to be replaced with non-polluting wind and solar generators "that are under development and coming in the future."
3. Most are against a "Manhattan Project" to develop modern nuclear plants to replace fossil fuel usage.
So... "we are all gonna die," but we will place all our chips for human survival on immature technologies, and likely devastate our economies.
But we refuse to consider nuclear energy, a proven and existing technology which works when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine, because it's too dangerous?
Please. Let's at least be serious.
5
In 1988 I took a graduate level course in Biological Oceanography at Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
Then, the scientists in the department would show collected numbers they had going back to the late 19th century in the Pacific, numbers that clearly showed big numerical changes in all types of atmospheric gases, especially carbon.
Anyone who has spent time around science will know the inherent conservatism a good scientist has to keep with them at all times. At the Institute the instructors were suggesting climate change. Nobody to my recollection was suggesting it at the rate we are experiencing now.
Climate change science is new and not perfect But the United States has this "ideology" that seems to be a kamikaze trip regarding environmental issues at large.
Those were the Reagan years where we had a non-science, immature president at the helm. We lost eight years right then.
4
There is little I disagree with in this piece except the title: How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong. Trump and those who "think" like him will not look past that headline and will repeat it in triumph: "Look, even the failing NY Times agrees that climate science is all wrong!"
7
Only a fool builds a city of a million or more on a swamp and is amazed that there is catastrophic flooding with every rain. They blame CO2 caused climate change. But it is ignorant, arrogant people caused. Same goes for California.
The last 50-75 years has been unusually calm and stable as far as weather goes. Some say abnormally stable when checked against historic records and scientific evidence.
Historical climate records and scientific evidence are like the Bible, believers pick and chose the pieces that support their belief du jour. They gleefully ignore the parts that invalidate that belief.
We do need to do what we can to restore the historical land cover and live sustainably. We also need to know that when we build in a swamp or forests that frequently burn we are going to suffer. A hundred years ago and more people understood this.
2
Dear Americans:
Stop worrying. Do something for a change! In the end it's not your Donald who's blasting all that CO2 in the air. It's YOU, who chose to live in cheaply constructed housing with insulation standards that wouldn't even have mustered Northern Europe's 1970ies building codes. Your AC units are inefficent and often still hang out of windows like in the 1950ies. You drive shoddy gas guzzling SUVs made in Detroit. You NEVER bother to take a bag when going to Trader Joe's, insisting on triple paper bagging your groceries (thinking wrongly that paper is better than plastic). You dump your trash on landfills. Your sewage treatment plants are under-dimensioned and decades behind in technology. Etc...
The sheer ignorance in this country keeps amazing me!
6
Not everyone got it wrong. Jim Hanson got it right ... Wally Broeker got it right, and they were considered kooks. Who said, how strange it is that we'd develop the science to make these kind of predictions, then stand around and wait for them to come true? Jesus wept!! All these politicians who dismissed the science out of hand, who didn't "believe" in it, who promoted the views of corporate interests to deny it should be turned out of Government, and people of thoughtful, sober common sense should take their place.
2
This should be known as the legacy of the Koch brothers, who as Jayne Mayer has written about in her book, Dark Money, almost single handily deserve credit for forcing all the political will away from science and action, to confusion and ignorance. Like the phrase, “climate change” instead of “global warming” was seemingly a Koch byproduct? But it’s no wonder it’s really only their libertarian/republican party that believes its all a hoax or misunderstood. Koch’s, et al, deserve all the credit, right down to the ignorant people who block Tesla Super chargers with their gas hogs, and as seen on YouTube: a Tesla Model X hooked up a tow cable to an off road type gas hog that was twice its size and intentionally blocking its Supercharger, the Model X drug it off and then charged. We need that kind of event to be a metaphor and fight for change!
2
I have utterly NO IDEA who Eugene Linden is, but based on the content of this screed, his opinion is apparently in lock step with The Times Editorial Board.
As I write my comment, the temperature in my area is projected to drop to ca. 20 degrees Fahrenheit later this week. Since we are in the first half of November, I would ask Mr. Linden how he would explain this apparently premature cold snap?
My suspicion is that Mr. Linden has little or no formal scientific training and that he is NOT a student of history. Were he something more than someone writing sensational prose for his patrons (who wait with anticipation his next musing), then he would likely be otherwise employed.
On Hurricane Sandy, as I had previously commented in spaces like this, it was a Great Storm that every ca. 200 years strikes the Big Apple (there were devastating storms in 1635 and 1821 bearing this out).
Likewise, Hurricane Harvey sat over southeast Texas for the better part of one (1) week since there was high pressure system that effectively stopped the usual west to east movement of weather patterns at the latitudes where the USA is located.
Mr. Linden HAS SIMPLY FAILED to support any of his contentions with facts/scientific data. The use of descriptive adjectives may please his patrons on The Times Editorial Board, but from my perspective, THE NEEDLE HAS NOT MOVED.
Man's impact on the Climate is minor. The arrogance to state otherwise directly impacts Mr. Linden's credibility; he has none.
5
It is absurd to blame scientists for any of the predicament we are in. Try the lobby groups ties to big oil and the GOP that gladly worked with them to attack scientists for being too alarmist. What a joke to say that the scientists 'got it wrong'.
2
The article has apparently mis-stated the Asian city to be affected by sea level rise -- much of Hong Kong is relatively high-level ground. Shanghai is much more low-lying. The author may have meant to include Shanghai instead of Hong Kong for his example in Asia. (It was also recently featured in the new modelling for sea level rise in the recent NYT graphic.) Many know that Hong Kong island itself is a high island formed by a now extinct volcano. The Kowloon side is low-lying but rises up the peninsula to Lion Rock. Shanghai, whose surrounding area economy is historically wet rice agriculture, is practically lying in water by comparison.
2
The headline misleadingly encourages more disregard of scientists. Climate change is happening in some ways not predicted by scientists, but the scientists did not claim these changes would not happen, so they are not “wrong”.
5
People think that scientists are the Great Hope for "fixing" climate change. What hooey! It was scientists and their "time saving" inventions that caused it. They gave us the polluting society we have had for over a century. Scientists gave us the smoke stacks, the cars, the plastics, the pesticides, the fuels that did this. And suddenly they know how to undo the horrific damage to the environment that they themselves caused? Good luck with that mythology.
People prize convenience over survival. Society will never roll back the world of technology the scientists so proudly gave us.
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
1
@Rev. E. M. Camarena, PhD
I think you mean engineers. Engineers use scientific principles in their creation of conveniences. Scientists describe the underlying natural world. Conveniences are obviously not part of that.
Turning the emissions ship is going to require both scientists and engineers. Engineers, like other humans, can be greedy, so there will always be engineers willing to work for a new car maker that wants to sell a coal powered car that consumes 1/2 ton of coal per mile. It's up to the government to block avenues of convenience like that.
2
"...even today, 17 years later, a substantial portion of the American public remains unaware or unconvinced ..."
The U.N. needs to address this global, existential issue with the utmost urgency.
Convincing Americans of drastic climate change is not nearly enough. I realize it's difficult to reason with many of these anti-science, lo-info types, but it has to be done.
Preaching to Europeans, esp Germany and other Scandinavian countries, is like preaching to the choir.
The U.N. needs to start a 24x7 365-days dialog with countries like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. We need to sit down and talk them into acknowledging the democles-sword of climate crisis.
Meanwhile Jakarta is almost under water now while the Amazon forests burn, New York subways flood and wildfire scorch California.
Trump? Forget about him, he is pointless, waste of oxygen.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia/jakarta-sinking-climate.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/world/asia/indonesia-fires-photos.html
At this point it's here and there really is nothing we can do about it. Only hope is to adapt. Try not to drown, freeze of burn.
1
in Manhattan The Playwrights Sanctuary will present Playwright Dr. Larry Myers' new stage work "horizon hiccups/hemisphere hemorrhage." The theater foundation encourages new & younger dramatists & poets to pen works about important issues. from rallies, protests, demonstrations to objective research ideas & concepts are acted out & expressed via art.
1
All I can think of is the movie Water World, and it did not look like a happy place!
2
The current denial of the impact of climate change is not unique. It fits the general pattern, an inability to effectively foresee or plan for the future, as illustrated by the parable of the ant and the grasshopper.
So we have massive failures of public and private pensions, deferred power line maintenance leading to catastrophic fires, the willful ignorance of the ambitions of the Nazis, massive disasters caused by building in known floodplains, failure to plan for emergency evacuation routes, failure to plan for infrastructure replacement like water systems, bridges and pipelines, the list is endless.
Lacking consensus, we default to crisis management when the Dust Bowl moments arrive. Hundreds of billions are spent to rebuild structures vulnerable to the next disaster. Laws are passed to reduce future risks and then repealed when the government changes to GOP control.
The acceleration of climate change could ultimately lead to decentralization of power from the Federal to state governments and regional alliances, so that good money isn't thrown after bad to pay for short sighted decisions.
You don't have to be a Ph. D. from CalTech to know what 33 degrees Fahrenheit will do to an ice cube. Try reading, "The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells. We are headed there, no doubt in my mind.
1
How about why journalists still get it wrong? Ergo: how media, like the NYT, quit running idiotic pieces that suggest the policies of Elizabeth Warren or Sanders are too extreme and costly toe be practicable. When to do anything less than what they advocate is bloody suicidal. Who are the REAL conservatives--those who will act in ways that try to meet the actual conditions or those who advocate policies that won't work to mitigate the catastrophe at hand? I suppose it depends upon what your conserving, white male privilege, or the planet and the cultural means of living with it in a healthy way.
It is time that everyone WAKE UP. We are living in an unprecedented era, more dire than the Great Depression by far. It is not just that many people are distressed, the planet (and human culture with it) is under palpable threat of mass extermination. The cost to human civilization will be far greater than feared. Only the best thought out and most ambitious policies have the remotest chance of saving our children from the scourge that we are ushering in.
Meanwhile we keep advocating that see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil run the republic.
1
How many more articles do we need to read about the coming “apocalypse”? I wish the New York Times and climate scientists would publish two or three articles each week listing, enumerating, and elucidating what each of us can do to stem the coming “apocalypse” instead of the alarmist articles. My grandmother used to say, “talk is cheap!” As a radical environmentalist myself since 1985 there are so many good things the New York Times can be publishing each day or each week to give people specific things to do to help!
1
We must vote Republicans out of office now! Their policy of climate change denial is going to make humans extinct. This is an existential political crisis.
1
Trump: So what? Let it happen.
How can anyone vote for him? And yet . . .
I am so thankful that I do not have grandchildren.
3
Climate-denying politicians, their wealthy influencers and their captive "scientist" con artists should be tried as earth criminals.
Que Sera, Sera
Bad news, oceans rising, concerning of course
Losing direction, now changing course;
No air-condition, no coal fired steamers
Plying the ocean; all, addle-brained dreamers;
Best go up country re oceans rising
Over our beachfronts, not unsurprising;
Ding dong, we kick back, throw back a cold one,
Sell sea level beachfronts before we’re undone:
Whatever the outcome, not ours to see,
Que sera, sera, it’s a slow rising sea.
We are ignoring this at our children’s peril!
1
When the bees go, we will go...mass starvation of the poor. People are still reproducing like there is no tomorrow. And everyone thought it was so awful when China instituted the one child policy. Think again, folks.
1
The title of this article is a climate denier's dream. There is no doubt that the current rapid change in climate is due to human activity. Why does the Times persevere in pretending to give a "both sides" view of this topic? There is no "other side" to argue. Either human life as we know it will continue to exist on Earth or the future will consist of ever more horrific scenarios until there is little or nothing left of the human project.
The focus now must be on creating sustainable systems. There is no time to waste on determining with precision whose fault it was, or to giving a voice to people who are in denial.
2
The reality is that climate scientists got it right about what was happening. Their crystal balls weren't as good as we would have liked about timing. But before we decry scientists for not being perfect, let's spend some effort on what we do about the buffoons in Congress and elsewhere who are still arguing that it's all a hoax. Maybe we can get them to spend their energies on the Flat Earth Society.
3
So now the ‘science’ is settled?
Stop calling it climate change. It’s GLOBAL WARMING and the Republicans want you to sanitize the words.
3
The obscenity of the studied ignorance of James Inhofe and his magic snowball pales in comparison with the policies of the criminal Trump administration.
Continuing to flirt with insane GOP leadership is humanity's way towards mass suicide. But hey, think of the economic growth!
I also post on other websites and am constantly confronted by global climate change deniers. Their denials on the surface are intriguing but regardless, even if climate change is a hoax I am sick and tired of: 1) living in a toxic soup of smog and pollution that the industrial revolution created; worse yet we went decades breathing fumes from leaded gasoline and the fossil fuel industry has never been held to account; 2) consuming the equivalent of a credit card worth of plastic each week because we have plasticized our atmosphere, lakes, rivers, waterways and oceans and are killing our oceans and coral reefs; 3) dumping natural resources that could be recycled into land fills that in turn leak toxins into underground water and rivers. Again, even if climate change is a hoax, and this is doubtful in itself, we need to clean up our act and stop polluting our natural environment. Even animals know not to defecate where they sleep and raise their young. Mother Nature will out and I suspect she has very serious consequences in store for us if we do not change our self-destructive ways.
2
I would hope that people who 40 years and younger and who support True and his idiotic attitude to climate will read article like these and wake up for their own and their children sake and demand that the Trump and Republicans to rejoin Paris Agreement or not against any climate change denier. It is about time that climate change and anticipate catastrophic consequences become and important issue for the 2020 election.
Hmmm so In the 1970’s it was all about Global Cooling and now our very inexact scientist just know what’s happening even though they previously been wrong. Within the last 1,000 years grapes were produced in Northern England due to a much warmer climate and the Little Ice Age in the late 1700’s caused crop failures galore in the Mid and Northern Latitudes. Is the climate warming? Of course. Has mankind had something to do with it? Yes. But remember the genius Al Gore who famously said in a conference In Germany that the Polar Ice Caps would all be gone by 2015. Facts matter.
We're more destructive to this sacred planet than we thought we were; much like our inequality is more destructive to community and humanity than we thought it would be. Our bad.
Great changes must happen. It's okay; we can do this. But, don't act the fool, don't deny, don't vote for Republicans.
This article is another big mistake. Serious people have known for years that some likely scenarios of the coming climate crisis were too alarming for the ordinary people to incorporate into their lives. If you want people to act do not paralyze them with fear, give them hope and something to do. There is hope in technology and I believe we have fifty years to find the way, but we must bring people along and not call people of goodwill deniers or stupid or OK, Boomer!
I think everyone understands there is a problem, so what do you do?
Almost all people decide on the basis of how it will effect me. So far, it has not affected enough people. It starts small - the scallop dragger, the lobster fisherman, the citrus grower, the pacific salmon fisherman, etc, etc - incremental impacts slowly building.
Using a compounding progression of impacts, the change point or inflection of the curve comes very quickly - usually too late for any action to have an effect. It does not become apocalyptic until the very end.
Not sure of when that point in time will come but until environmental impacts hit you personally, most people will decide do nothing because most of our society thinks only in economic terms.
That is the primary problem impacting the solution, along with the disinformation and denial.
@john2104 OK John—go down to a local truck stop and explain to truckers that filing their tanks with diesel will make their children and grandchildren lives very hard. Of course the enlightened truckers will abandon their rigs and walk back home—making their children and grandchildren’s lives very hard in the here and now
1
I have a controversial theory. I believe that ice ages were caused by the sequestration of carbon in the lithosphere, in the form of oil and coal. The lithosphere is the rocky part of the Earth where the oil is. After awhile there wasn't enough carbon left in the biosphere to warm the Earth, and the Earth endured a succession of ice ages with brief interglacial warming periods.
In the most recent interglacial, some clever hominids discovered that they could dig this stuff up and burn it, returning the carbon to the biosphere and atmosphere as C02, and in so doing, prevented the next ice age.
They could have stopped (for example) in 1954. But they didn't. The same drive that caused us to start this process is going to cause us to finish the process, unless we adapt quickly. And the thing that we need to adapt the most is how we select leaders and winners. Because now, the people who do this the fastest are in charge. Unless we can find a way to cause more moderate users to maintain control, we can expect that behavior to continue.
We're talking about it, but we haven't done it yet.
We also have to figure out how to have comfortable lives with a much smaller footprint, but that's a technical and management problem, and we already know how to do that. It's the leadership and control of resource problem that will cause us to crash and burn if we don't figure out something better in a hurry.
A cataclysmic event may be necessary to waken the populace to the mad race we are making to annihilation. Endless wars in the Middle East have done nothing to the immediate need to abandon hydrocarbons. In fact the oil industry is integrated into the banking industry and the defense industry and our government. The wealth and power of these industries are aligned to steer us into global collapse.
Money is printable and, within reason, natural resources are there for the taking IF we do it sustainably. The resource Bernie and Elizabeth are talking about spending is human labor, and that is there in abundance. Let's spend it wisely by reorganizing our economy to run sustainably. By doing that we may be able to mitigate some of the worst aspects of climate change. We can certainly stop emitting greenhouse gases and curtail plastics and other pollution within a decade without meaningful sacrifice. We have to get onto a path where society and civilization doesn't crumble under the weight of environmental collapse. The only way to do that is to lessen the impact of the collapse, and the only way to do that is an all-out push forward toward sustainability. The Green New Deal is a good start, but mark the words of all of us who have been arguing for it, it is only a start, a first step.
1
"An Inconvenient Truth" was released 12 years ago. In recent times it has been derided as a predicting a dire turn in climatic events that didn't happen quite so immediately as the film suggested. Now that the tides are turning more visibly the accusations are that scientists haven't spoken up soon enough? Tell that to the politicians who made speeches whilst holding a snowball to prove that global "warming" was a myth and tell that to the climate hoax pundits and tell that to the current President, all of whom have done nothing than perpetuate an apathy to the profound danger threatening all of us, everywhere. As with most everything else when it comes to humans facing inconvenient truths that might oblige us to modify our actions, we only react when the consequences of inaction literally hit us in the face and our homes are lost to floods or fire.
3
@StuartM
For example, there was one typo in 1000 pages. 2350 was written as 2035. More people have promoted contempt for 2035 than know that it was only a typo.
Meanwhile, thousands follow the Drudge Report (thanks Don Jr. for claiming it's the best) and swarm everywhere Gore is mentioned to trash his reputation and hard work.
3
I want to defend climate scientists. Niels Bohr once said: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." When scientists publish scientific papers, they are required to have data to back up their statements. If they make a prediction in a scientific paper, it isn't good enough to just extrapolate the data for the past two years (or 10 years, or 1000 years). Even shady financial advisors warn that "past performance is no guarantee of future results." The best way to do predictions is to use the data from many studies to build and validate a complex "climate model" -- and each model has its own built-in uncertainties. Our models are limited: there is no way that any model can accurately predict the temperature or water level in Miami for the Orange Bowl in 2050.
Note that climate scientists are doing their patriotic best to collect and process more and more data, even at a time when some treasonous politicians are shouting about Fake News!
3
Agree...and I (mildly) take issue with the headline of this article, which seems to pin the blame on the Scientific community. To blame the scientists for "missing" the signs is to wholly ignore the actions of the G.W. Bush administration to suppress and-- for the first time in our nation's history!-- actively cast doubt on "The Science." The present-day GOP trope of "Climate Warnings are a HOAX" got its genesis in those early-'90s GW Bush years, and once taken up by the fossil-fuel lobby (and hence the GOP Politicians that that industry OWNS #ExxonMobil), "the Science" has been weakened, caveated, and discounted in the minds of Republican voters...to the peril of Us All. Very Sad and a national disgrace, but the lack of action was NOT Science's fault! It was NAKED GREED and self-serving politicians who deserve the "credit" for our anemic response as a nation. Future generations will NEVER forgive us!
4
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/Fullreport-1.pdf
As you can see in the IPCC report on page 4, graph D: Agricultural production, grain yields have increased by over 200% since 1960, worldwide. So for the same surface we now get three times more grains.
Not only that, but the crop yield growth continues steadily, with no sign of slowing down.
Famine underweight has decreased by 40% since 1980.
This is the measured reality.
As you would expect, Linden, the IPCC itself, and 11,000 of self declared scientists view this as pointing to an unmitigated disaster. For the last 50 years that disaster was declared to be imminent. In fact, Linden asks why the doom predictions weren't even more apocalyptic.
See, if temps rise by 3C, crops drop catastrophically. And if temps rise by 30C, human life would be extinguished. Such is the amazing predictive power of climatology.
As a physicist, I tend to be data driven. And I believe in freedom of belief and freedom of expression.
So if a politician asks for a million dollars per household to fight climate change, the climate change which causes famine, that is OK with me. Let voters decide.
But if he or she does not also mention the fact that under current emissions crop yields tripled, and that they now rise steadily, faster than population growth,
then that politician is a crook.
PS I contributed to the blistering report on the IPCC, which made them use real data.
Predictions of future disasters remained, though.
1
@novoad
Still don't believe you are a physicist. Anecdotes are not data.
The per capita crop output world wide has been dropping since the 80s....anyone with STEM knowledge would realize such. (the growth was mainly due to fertilizers)
Actual data.
"The annual growth rate of world demand for cereals has declined from 2.5 percent a year in the 1970s and 1.9 percent a year in the 1980s to only 1 percent a year in the 1990s. Annual cereal use per person (including animal feeds) peaked in the mid-1980s at 334 kg and has since fallen to 317 kg."
http://www.fao.org/3/y3557e/y3557e03.htm
3
@novoad
Great self promotion. I hope nobody is deceived by your false summary and will look at the real information.
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-affecting-crop-yields-and-reducing-global-food-supplies-118897
Not all physicists are equal. Your "crook" comment is typical of those who turn the meanings of words on their heads.
People should look all around them and check the majority of science, not the outliers.
"Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed" https://qz.com/1069298/the-3-of-scientific-papers-that-deny-climate-change-are-all-flawed/
3
@glennmr What I presented are crop yields worldwide, so can be an anecdote only in one's apocalyptic mind. For everyone else, it's reality.
What you write on grain demand in no way contradicts the IPCC data that grain growth is spectacular and continues unabated. And that famine has decline spectacularly as well.
All I ask for is honesty from our politicians.
Why not have every politician say, simply, that crops are growing spectacularly under climate change, and famine declines, which makes it our urgent duty to stop it all at any cost payed by you.
Honest politicians get elected.
As a scientist following the emergence of climate science since the 80s, it was frustrating to see the monster computer models from the time and yet still knowing their limitations rooted in lack of detail and measurements. Even today, science, highly dependent on government funding can only move as well as it gets support, and that support is lacking. Yet, the fact that the predictions are underestimating the consequences of human effects is part political climate, part lack of data, part iterative research. Still the writing was on the wall for those that can read. As it is about smoking and diet.
1
Looks like geo-engineering will be the only answer. Changing the albeido (reflectivity) of the earth for several hundred years while we get our petroleum indulgence under control is likely the only answer. It's also fairly inexpensive to do. Don't be surprised if a few island nations get together to save their lands from rising oceans by funding such a change. Spreading reflective particles in the stratosphere is fairly easy to do.
The Earth is in Danger. It is a Fact. There is no denying it.
If you meet a Climate Change denier, or someone who just wants to continue to argue over the exact number of degrees that the Earth is warming, just suggest to that person, that they put their focus elsewhere.
Remind them, that there is no shortage of other reasons, to be paying attention to the fragile Environment of this Planet. So they can pick for themselves, their issue, from any number of other formidable threats, which are putting the Earth's health in peril.
There are: Deforestation in The Amazon, Indonesian Forests, and many others, being torched, for starters. - There is too much human development. - The complete loss, or questionable future of Species everywhere, right down to the Honey Bee. - Toxic Pollution making air unbreatheable. - Lack of clean water. - Fossil fuels extracted and burning worldwide. - Plastics in the Oceans. - Overpopulation.
Instead of being frustrated or stymied by a Climate Change denier, just shift the attention to the multitude of other major worries about our Planet from which they can choose from, to realize that the Earth is irrefutably, in a dire, precarious condition.
4
The fact is that the climate system is full of feedback loops and thus unpredictable. Some of the feedback loops were unknown just a decade or so ago, there are likely more. Some of the feedback loops were known but deemed "negligible" wrt to the larger forcing agents (like CO2) but then suddenly became important (under ice sheet and glacier melt). The best climate scientists can do is be as comprehensive as possible with model upgrades based on empirical field research. This takes time.
So don't expect a miracle from these hardworking, sincere folks. Take the extremes they predict now and apply serious risk analysis to them and upgrade those studies as new facts and probabilistic outlooks appear.
This is a quantification of the cautionary principle: focus on extreme situations, determine the risk, and decide whether or not to invest to mitigate or adapt to the situation. Upgrade as the improved outlooks come in.
It is the rapid variability of the system (heat waves, megacyclones, megafloods, megafires) that will seriously impact human existence on the planet, not the low variability (sea level rise).
This is not a USA problem but a species wide problem. Unless we as a species address it, a serious pruning of the species is likely with an extreme of extinction.
Humans have dealt with rapid climate change before but there were far fewer of them and far more in touch with Nature and with great adaptability.
Can we do as well?
the complete annotated version- with references to relevant studies-
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html
my family in lithuania also felt ' it will go away' -- it happens 'every now and then'-- 'nothing to panic about'...
1
There is no such thing as Climate Change. Just ask Trump and his band of "Scientists" at the EPA, and Betsy Devos, head of the Department of "Education".
1
One of the first things you learn upon initiation into the scientific community is you limit your public comments to what you can prove (to the satisfaction of a reviewer/editor). If you want to find out what these researchers actually believe, corner them after hours (preferably with a cold beer in hand). This reality makes the underestimates described in the article inevitable. Also, what you are seeing in the press now is absolutely still a "best case".
Uh oh.
1
To the commenters blaming capitalism for climate change: I, for one, cannot wait to see the end of American capitalism and the dawn of American socialism. I want to see how quickly we take socialism and muck it up the way we mucked up capitalism.
Anyone who thinks of any economic system as a panacea lives in a dream world. But go ahead. Give it a shot.
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
2
If major influencers like the New York Times had done their job properly, we would not be in this mess. Proof: even today, only 17% of Americans “understand that almost all climate scientists think global warming is happening.” "Think" it is happening?
And you blame the scientists!
1
I suppose Trump will save us from global warming by.. denying it. Once again how could you elect this guy President ?...
2
This is so irresponsible on the part of the New York Times. It is beyond me why you would deliberately write a headline that is meant to feed into climate change denialism. "If they didn't know how fast things would change, then obviously, anything climate scientists say is suspect." THAT is the interpretation on social media of this headline and this article.
3
Earth will destroy mankind way before mankind will destroy Earth.
I’ve heard and seen in Bayer ads a conversion of the word “science” from a noun to a verb. For example; “We science really well”. This sort of grammatical foolishness by ad makers is their tiny brained contribution to bleaching the reefs and enormous storms.
Blaming “scientists” or science is disgustingly comparable to blaming “the media” for America’s slide into the authoritarian lawless government.
Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, et.al. are just two writers that speak truth to those that want to destroy our life planet.
1
The headline for this article does a great disservice to the scientists and the public. The scientists didn't get it wrong. All their prediction gave ranges and what is happening now is within the predicted ranges. The headline, as it reads, feeds into the ignorant masses that choose to hide their head in the sand while the world burns. I expect better from the New York Times.
5
thats exponential change for you, things change slowly & then all of a sudden.
"Faster than Expected" has become a commonplace term to describe CC news lately & this is just 2019 just wait a decade more when we get past 450ppm & you'll see.
..But so much money left in ground!!
when climate science is as profitable as oil we’ll solve global warming.
1
@cse
When possible solutions come too late.
The Kyoto Agreement was signed in 1997 because scientists correctly told us that climate change was a big problem.
The humanity doubled down on climate change denialist propaganda and fossil fuel use.
Decisions have consequences, especially stupid ones.
Let us now do the right thing with absolute urgency.
2
Who remembers this one?
"You can't hug your children with nuclear arms"
Our children and grandchildren will hate us for our selfishness and ignorance.
2
We are the Dinosimians, the
Terrible Apes --
Upright we stride
our females big in hip and breast
our males manes like lions
We are the wielders of fire
our vision limited
to our wants
We rearrange the elements, alter the
soil and air without foresight
driven by hungers and
in our arrogance
enslave, murder and destroy
everyone and everything
blind to our place in the intricate intricate knot
of life
We are the Terrible Apes,
believing ourselves invincible
above -- separate from --
laying waste to
our world
We are the Terrible Apes --
look upon us
and despair
Al Markowitz
1
Look, it is obvious that scientists were trying to give conservative estimates. Even these conservative estimates were alarming, except to America's neanderthal class of evangelical or plutocratic Republicans. But you could have had hard evidence that it is going to happen full on tomorrow and these cretins wouldn't budge.
it is America or conservatives. You can't have it both ways.
1
Where are they gonna stick their heads when 5 feet of sea water washes away the beach?
1
@Mr. B "Where are they gonna stick their heads when 5 feet of sea water "
The current rate of sea rise, which rate did not change for a few centuries, and is about 10in/century,.
So those 5 feet will be 600 years from now and who knows where their heads will be by then?
Unless as usual temps change direction from the current warming to cooling. Which would make it take much longer...
Instead of blaming scientists, please eliminate your travel section. That will do more to help the climate.
2
Blame humans for not moving fast enough...
1
Man is super angry because he can not control the earth's climate.
1
So, the scientists got it wrong not Republicans. Thanks for that insight.
1
@Chicago Guy
And also blame Democrats, like Pelosi, who thinks the Green New Deal is nonsense.
There are those who deny climate change and those who deny the need for any discussion of human overpopulation.
Both deniers are wrong
4
How in the world is the world ever going to get on the same page of urgency over climate change with two different scales measuring it? Likewise sea level rise. Talking to me in millimeters and centigrade is like no comprendo repitan por favor. I don’t even want to ask what Celsius and Kelvins are. Baby it’s hot out there is unmistakable, however politically incorrect.
Education suggestion for NYT, influenced by several comments. Just as the NYT has provided a digital 'insert' with impeachment facts and updates, how about a daily (or _at least_ weekly) Global Warming section, with a similar insert, recapping previous articles and The Main Facts?
It would also be useful to include a table above the headlines, or in a sidebar, or similar, posting the day's highest & lowest temperatures--as well as the world population count every single day.
Might be an energizing jolt.
Why not give it a try?
What are you guys writing about? I think you, the editorial board, must have been reading pieces by other reporters that only read summary pieces by non-scientists. Have you not read or listened to James Hansen and others like him? You did not want to hear what was being said.
2
A very smart economist once said, "Climate Change represents the Tragedy of the Commons, the Prisoner's Dilemna, and the Free Rider problem all wrapped into one. We're screwed."
1
So why is this not the top headline article?! Bah, it’s just the future of humanity!
2
I don’t think it was the scientists that underestimated the effects of climate change, I’m pretty sure it was repugnant politician’s and their industry lobbyists. What a ridiculous headline.
5
NYT - who writes your headlines?
Since the 1970s, scientists have gotten climate change almost entirely right. It’s only now that people, maybe even a few in government, are finally listening.
6
If the author is correct, think about the goofiness of the Democratic candidates. Spend resources on “free” stuff for everyone. Mention environmental concerns, so you can check that box. But, none of them will say that this is issue number1 and this is where we need to spend resources first.
1
Blaming scientists for political inertia is unjustified when their dire predictions are so often dismissed as alarmist. This article sows distrust in scientists, which is the real cause of slow and nonexistent policy change. This article is not helpful for society's urgent need to pay attention to scientific recommendations on vaccines, agriculture, and climate.
1
It is bizarre that the so-called "leadership" of this country can get away with maintaining a public stance that is completely opposite to that of most of the rest of the world, and counter to its own scientists as seen on NASA's website's climate change pages.
It is but an offshoot of the gaslighting Trump has used to deceive the suckers who support him, often motivated by nothing more than the petty act of "sticking it" to those of us who have the sense to care.
Trump's record of lying and deception should have a prominent position among the Articles of Impeachment.
My first job out of college was to work with a group of consulting engineers and scientists doing climate and energy modeling. That gave me a face-full of the reality that climate prediction is perhaps the most complex and messy branch of science anywhere. The dynamics are staggering.
To those who find some sad, juvenile comfort in denying all predictions and disqualifying science because some have not proven accurate I can only shake my head. I’ve encountered people like this for decades. They’re just arrogantly stupid and secretly scared. Worse, they represent barriers to any progress.
In my opinion we’ve vastly underestimated the planet’s energy flywheel and there’s no stopping it now, with or without the deniers.
6
When will the fossil fuel CEOs and their boards of directors be hauled off to the Haige to be tried for crimes against humanity?
@gene
By the time climate change's consequences have make it unignorably obvious that those CEOs should be hauled off to the International Criminal Court, one of those consequences will the collapse of much of civilization, including the International Criminal Court.
The super wealthy will continue their existent in their climate controlled dwellings, maybe in New Zealand.
President Trump, Paula White, and the millions of Evangelicals could care less...their only mission in life if bringing on Armageddon.
President Trump is simply pushing the gas pedal to the floor.
Their misguided and selfish depravity is one of the greatest threats to all life on this planet.
The complete antithesis of the teaching in the Bible.
"could measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch" LOLOL. Did they estimate the measurement or measure the estimation???
1
We get these continuous comments "climate has changed before, just get over it" citing the farming in Greenland. A more careful study reminds us that the end of that period was accompanied by famine, plague and warfare. The horsemen of the apocalypse.
That is where we are now (see Syria) and its going to get worse. If these naysayers say "famine, plague and warfare just get over it" then how do we deal with such obstinate stupidity?
We have engineers, we can fix things, but how do we fix stupid?
NY Times,
I am a scientist, in 1968, in advanced electricity and magnetism class when our MIT Professor heard from a college at MIT about climate change. We then had to calculate when the tipping point would be_ Answer 2008 with the China data of 1968!
I get so very upset with the NY Times more than any other issue. You always write about 2100,
So very upsetting. Why do you do this, because no one will be alive to say that you were wrong.
Please explain predictions for 2025. 2030, 2035 and 2040. Cities having only 2 feet of water, then 3 feet etc.
The taxpayers are going to pay for this, yes but this is so wrong.
Taxpayers must know about these short term huge financial losses.
Point, this information will explain why in many coast areas people must start moving now. Homes near the Mississippi!
Please get real with no more 2100.
Explain 2005 to 2030 to your readers.
Thank you.
William
4
Policies, regulations, and actions are determined by society’s leadership.
Unfortunately, we have legislators who bow down to corporate overloads and we have a Neanderthal in the White House. God help us and our planet.
3
I guess the silver lining to all this, is that Mar-A-Lago will be underwater soon.
1
And in this same week Trump announces the US is leaving the Paris Accord and relaxing rules for coal companies to dump their waste into rivers and streams.
Houston uses gov $$ to rebuild in the exact same locations that have repeatedly flooded.
AZ has uncontrolled home building even though the water source is completely over drafted.
In India, massive fires are burning for crop rotation versus a fleet of tractors.
Millions of America listen to a lying huckster and read the bible for guidance versus science and scientists.
Humans are an ignorant species.
3
This is just the beginning. No one knows anything about climate change since we have never seen it before. Hang on to your hat.
This article title will be a rallying cry for our illegitimate President Trump . He will say to his Rambo rallies this is fake and make more climate change deniers. He needs to be charged with in this impeachment crimes against humanity for siding with coal and fossil fuel producers to worsen everything. Pope Francis said recently at an oil mans meeting you harm the environment you harm humanity.
2
Drastically limit population expansion, and you limit the pace of life threatening climate change, the pollution of the air and the oceans.
Ignorant humans are the real threat to life on earth.
1
There is a report in the 1 November 2019 issue of Science about a new way of preventing dendrite growth on metallic battery electrodes, using epitaxy onto graphene substrates. This could lead immediately to a quantum jump in battery capacity and a significant cost reduction by opening up the use of cheap materials like zinc.
What a pity the president of this infantile land is an abject fool.
I think history will decide that the planet would have been better off if America and its rapacious capitalist mind-set had never been born.
1
So it's like .... my doctor tells me I have heart disease and suggests a coupla things I should do and I say, "Oh please, doc. Stop being an alarmist."
Given the dimensions of the galloping climate crisis I think it's fair to ask, "At what point is proclaimed ignorance allowable as a defense for criminal negligence?"
Indeed, can you legitimately claim negligence at all? "Following orders" was disallowed as a defense for the Nuremberg defendants. Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl still swung from the hangman's noose.
Adolph Eichmann was no John "Ivan the Terrible" Demjanjuk. He never bashed any child's brains out or sliced off women's breasts. He was worse. He made sure that the trains to the death camps ran on time.
At what point (I think it's now long past) will society agree that the climate deniers in positions of power be branded as war criminals? After New York, London, Hong Kong, and the country of Bangladesh are under water? After one million, a hundred million, or a billion people have died due to crop failures?
No, ignorance is no longer a bona fide defense. Let the trials begin as we simultaneously launch a supremely aggressive effort to forestall the sixth mass extinction.
We humans are as irrational on the global scale as we are at the level of individuals. Just as present day smokers chuff away, knowing full well the litany of horrific pathology their actions foster, so too whole nations chuff away on coal, oil, and gas, fully aware of the horrific meteorology coming their way.
"Irrational" in polite circles, but just plain stupid to the rest of us.
1
Koch Bros, Exxon Mobil, GOP et al. ad nauseam all complicit in the ruination of the world as we know it.
Congratulations folks. Your grandchildren will curse you and you will be immortalized in infamy in human history.
And yet, Trump pulls out of the Paris climate accord and Congress does nothing…
1
Right, Scientists are clearly the ones at fault. smh
1
When I was kid in the late 1940s a common drawing in comic strips was a man walking down a street with poster boards front and back hanging from his shoulders with the words "Prepare -the End is Near". The comic strip was called"Nancy" with her pal Sluggo. It has taken a while but "the End is Near" now.
1
Our Dear Leader says that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese. Since he knows everything about everything, he knows more about defeating iSIS than the generals and he knows more about the atmosphere than PhDs in atmospheric physics, the vast majority of climate scinetists are dead wrong
This a good web site for state level effects of rising sea level. NJ is in double trouble - sinking land and rising sea level..yikes
https://sealevelrise.org/states/new-jersey/
Nice. Another "think piece" bashing science and scientists from a novelist and "essayist". Looking at the comments, you certainly encourage the "scientists know nothing and are making it up" crowd. Let me propose you actually speak to a scientist and (I know, this is awful) listen to what she says.
3
Human beings think they can solve any problem...until they can't!
1
Scientists are typically conservative and rigorous about their work. Current Republicans are corrupt and dishonest. Denial and lack of leadership.
Perfect storm.
1
Do your 'scientists' include Lovelock?
For non American readers like myself, the use of Imperial units is annoying, especially in a science article. Perhaps editorial standards could require both units, especially given the Times movement to court subscribers outside the States.
Scientists did not get it wrong. Exxon's own archived e-mails revealed that Exxon decided not to exploit natural gas fields with a high CO2 content as far back as 1981 because Exxon's own research confirmed that CO2 emissions were going to create a climate crisis. Exxon spent millions sowing climate change doubt in public despite their own knowledge of the coming crisis. Can't let a looming crisis get in the way of making billions today.
Denial reached it Use Before Date when Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson admitted, recorded on Video, that Climate Change / Global warming and Sea Level Rise are real, measured and confirmed facts, and that we are headed toward a Climate Crisis. Tillerson told us not to worry though. "Just an Engineering Problem" and "in the moment of Crisis we will find a solution" or "we'll adapt".
Millionaire oil execs say the darndest things when they try to spin up Climate Crisis Apathy, or when they finally get fed up with dealing with a Moron in the White House and tell him exactly what they think of him.
Just web search it
rex tillerson "we'll adapt"
2
Shades of "The Day After Tomorrow" movie from 2004
The failure, at least to date, of Democratic candidates to separate themselves, from each other, but most obviously from President Trump, on the issue of climate change, is telling in and of itself.
Other than the longstanding threat of escalation in the use of weapons of mass destruction, there is only one other issue that is "existential".
"Democracy inaction" is evident. The pun acknowledges that positive change on these existential threats has happened, and continues today. Yet, in all the "advanced nations", the political and economic power to substantially lower them is highly problematic.
“Were the ice sheets in Greenland & Antarctica to melt completely”. There is absolution no evidence this could or would every occur. Predictions about sea level rise of 6 feet by 2100 also show no error analysis because the error is likely far greater than the prediction. Sea levels are rising at 1/6 of an inch/year. To attain six feet by 2100, we would need a 7X increase in the current rate. Show me the data and the error analysis!
Your math is linear. Natural change happens exponentially. In other words the rate of change increases with time. So it doesn’t have to be 7X per year, but at the end you will be able to calculate a mathematical average annual increase. But that’s not what took place.
1
Billions of years of earth's history reveal global warming and cooling, meteors and volcanic eruptions, that have killed off and changed life on the planet, including the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the rise of the mammals and humans. Human history is a very small part of this great universe. We are not handling our moment well.
1
I think that the majority agree that climate change is real and the house is on fire. The problem is that too many insist on trying to put the fire out with a hand-held fire extinguisher (i.e. wind and solar) when they should be calling the fire department (nuclear power).
Nuclear power is being shunted aside due to our fear of the unknown - similar to the fear a child has when encouraged to enter a dark room - no amount of reasoning, threatening, or cajoling can get him to cross the threshold. Couple this with the need for "consensus" and you end up with paralysis.
Politicians don't help and the public follows random pied-pipers who lead nowhere. Hopefully, we will come to our senses before the house is reduced to ashes.
Nuclear power is the only foreseeable means of providing enough carbon free energy to sustain the world's 9 million people. Please, let's start and maintain this transition.
3
I realize climate & weather ain’t the same thing, but it seems worth noting that winters here in VT seem to be getting longer. Last year’s was remarkably so and there’s already snow on the ground right now, a week in which I read that hundreds of record lows are expected in the Midwest & Eastern Seaboard.
I have to tell you, after reading this other Times article. . .
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-child-sex-abuse.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
I'm starting to wish that nature would just hurry up and put us out of our misery. We are a failed experiment, an abortion of nature, gone so terribly wrong, that we NEED to be rendered extinct before we can do any more harm.
Your attention-catching heading “How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong” is misleading, given the article’s substance, and exactly what the deniers - many of whom don’t bother to read further - want.
I can see the FB meme now: “Even the NYTimes say scientists were wrong about climate change!”
3
Romans 1:25 New Living Translation (NLT)
25 "They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise! Amen." Since scientists 'god' is the Earth what do you expect them to worship but the Earth?
OH!!!! But the DOW's up. The economy is strong. Record unemployment. You ask about climate change? That's fake news.....no quid pro quo. Strongest military in the world. Strongest economy in the history of the world. Be happy.
4
Do you think it's possible if they underestimated (according to this article) that they might have also overestimated? You do know of course that the global temp record is composed primarily of extrapolations, estimates and adjustments. In short, it's so full of holes, if you wore it outside you'd be arrested for either indecent exposure or malpractice.
Really? Scientist have got it wrong when they have been raising the alarm for DECADES whilst being attacjed by the conservative media, fossil fuel lobbist and ignorant and corrupt politicians?? And now it is the scientist fault? What is wrong with you? Just because you opend your eyes at 11 doesn't mean taht the sun just raised and that none has been telling you to wake up earlier!
4
The NYT is taking flack, as it should, for a less-than-wise choice of wording for the title of this article. A better choice might have been: Why Were the Warnings of Climate Scientists so “Conservative?” And then it could have been a better article by digging further into the socio-political pressures which have pushed the natural reticence of scientists to the extreme.
3
I took two things out of this, the most important being that if everything that is written here is true, then it is already too late to do anything about it except adjust to coming conditions and plan accordingly, as it would appear the problem is so huge that any man-made 'corrections' will already come far too late to do any of us much good. The second thing is that I was not disappointed when the article ended with a slam Trump paragraph or two, this being the New York Times, which would have no other reason to print such a negative article except to include an anti-Trump message. No RussiaGate scandal, the Times's plans to label him racist ala "1619"have hit a bit snag, so we can now start the process of blaming The End of the World on Donald Trump. Dean Baquet must be so happy!
1
Scientists did NOT get it wrong. They intentionally erred on the side of ultra-conservative estimates for two reasons. The first was that the conservative estimates were almost certain to be reached or exceeded, so they would not be proved wrong. The second, and more important, was that they didn't want to be accused of fear-mongering, especially if there was a chance (which there always is) that things wouldn't turn out so bad.
Now we know that being conservative was a bad strategy. For one thing, it did nothing - not a single thing - to appease climate science deniers. But worse, it allowed everyone to think that things weren't as bad as they were. Now we are in big trouble.
It's time to declare a global state of emergency and get to work. The first step might be to muzzle the deniers - even make is a criminal offense, like espousing nazi positions is in Germany today. Cut them off the platforms on which they spew hate and lies. Like the NYTimes.
2
Climate deniers love a headline like this, no need to read the article.
3
Maybe we should pay attention the the mysterious Sam Carana.
2
17% … correctly understand that almost all climate scientists think global warming is happening.
The American public is just as ignorant as the guy who sits in the Oval office. Pathetic and out of control.
1
Mr. Trump and his enablers are immoral. Not conservative. IMMORAL. Not Christian or truly God-fearing. IMMORAL. And Mitt Romney stops at being ‘concerned’. Pathetic, and soon to be tragic unless every Democrat turns out to vote regardless of the nominee.
Earth has a problem and had had problems.
1- 270 MYA it was Siberian traps Volcanic activity
2- 65 MYA it was a 8 km size asteroid
3- Today Homo Sapiens
Mother Earth will survive, no worries.
Ok by this article I'm convinced.
So glad I didn't have children.
The Climate Change Train left the station decades ago. The planet has to save itself from the most deadly invader it’s ever faced. It tries to flood the invader's homes, burn them out, bring on virulent diseases, suffocation, rid them of their food supplies with heat, drought, cold and extinction, radiation. If necessary, the planet will commit suicide just to rid itself from the infestation.
1
Well, when Government and Corporate America (redundant, I know) kill off most of the messengers, what does one expect?
Imagine if the first person Paul Revere ran into thought "oh, balderdash!", yanked him from his horse, and beat him to death.
It'd be teatime about now, wouldn't it, mate?
66 million years ago an Asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.
They were around for 200 million years.
We have been around for a few hundred thousand years.
Civilization for about 6000 years.
Best to get money out of politics. or.........
How long until greed and stupidity wipe us out ?
Scientists are people and I'm almost certain that their underestimations are a result of the EXTREME DISBELIEF in CO2 as a warming gas and the magnitude of the impact among regular people who would vastly include the MAGA types. scientists do not want to be wrong OR wolf criers even as they know what the data says. SCIENCE is not a belief system like RELIGION but MAGA types think so which explains their resistance. Our feet, arms, and butts are important to use but we should allow our head (science brains,) to make decisions. We should not let body parts guild the whole of the organism (society.)
Trump and his hordes haven't the intellectual curiosity to deal with this issue. The H.L. Mencken quote from 1920 is so fitting:
"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of this land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron."
2
Whitt wrote that our grandchildren will suffer for Trump's stupidity. I really wish that was true.
The people alive today are the only ones who are going to suffer. We are the last generation.
1
“ If the Trump administration has its way, even the revised worst-case scenarios may turn out to be too rosy.”
Readers can move to Toronto and escape both sea level rise and the person the NYT says is primarily responsible for it.
1
When are the editors at large gonna get a clue, and stop with these stupid Headlines? Headlines like this - "How did science get (insert topic) so wrong!?" - do more damage then they do good. Namely because people read more headlines then they do the articles. In this case, the science deniers love to use these headlines to their advantage and with their audiences.
There was no need to title this opinion piece this way. There had to be any number of better titles that the allegedly intelligent staff at the NYT's could have or did pitch!
But it appears that the "How'd they get X so wrong?" format is now the default with this topic. Why?
Something along the lines of; "New, better and more in-depth research is telling a much better, although scarier story..." needs to be considered going forward.
At the core the science wasn't wrong, just not as expressive and expansive as it is now, as it all advances, and collects more drilled down data. Across the diverse scientific disciplines now involved.
Do better NYT.
1
Totally misleading headline. Idiotic and the opposite the thrust of the text . All we'll see in the Twitter-verse is "NYT: How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong."
Taken out of context, this is fodder for conspiracy theorists and useful for attacking climate science. "Few Climate Scientists Thought Warming Would Arrive So Quickly," or similar would have been accurate and a useful characterization of the article to follow.
2
Don't worry. Energy deregulation and free markets will take care of everything.
11:45 EDT, 11/09
1
Gee, I thought that climate change was linear in nature. Turns out, it's exponential instead. If you don't understand what that first sentence meant, you're the problem. Enjoy watching the slow painful death of humanity...
This article doesn't belong in the Opinion section. This is front-page news. Stop collaborating with propagandists and acting like scientific facts are scientific opinions.
1
Good Lord, don't believe the scientists in the first place and now blame them, as if over optimism had anything to do with where we are now?
3
The warning really no longer matters. The last presidential debate did not have one question relating to climate change. The next one will be about Medicare for all and wealth taxes. I will be surprised if there is any discussion about climate change. The DNC is afraid about climate change because the public does not want to hear their lives will be impacted and not in a positive way. Health insurance and taxing the rich give a story that people’s lives will be better. So climate change will remain in the drawer and not be a significant policy points.
1
Sorry but it is simply too late to stop catastrophic climate change. The physics is against us. Even in the unlikely event that we stop CO2 emissions in the next 10 years it will be too late because the heat trapped in the oceans will continue to melt the Artic and Antarctic ice sheets as well as the permafrost. In a decade we will resort to radical methods like seeding the upper atmosphere with reflective particles in a desperate measure to save civilization in some places. The only sure thing about our future is that prominent climate deniers and their enablers like the Koch brothers, Trump and McConnell to name just a few will be remembered as worse that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao for the level of human suffering their actions will cause.
7
Settled science
The same people who Obama described as clinging to their guns and bibles will cling to their SUVs and McMansions.
3
What is the contribution of overpopulation to this warming?
2
Yah blame the scientists and not the media....
3
The US President can't even accept when his golf ball goes off course and cheats on his score. This guy isn't going to admit he got it wrong on climate change.
2
What were you doing to not contribute to global warming?
1
Please, someone, force Donald Trump to read this.
1
@micivih3
You can give a Don a book but you can’t make him read.
It’s the people who vote for him that are misinformed.
@micivih3 He won't read past the headline. "How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong." That's all he needs; and to be fair to him, all he has the intellectual capacity to understand.
1
Why is it that Americans, specifically, seem to ignore science?
Instead they believe these uneducated talking heads on tv that say the scientists are wrong, backed by absolutely nothing.
Truly a deluded country led by a deranged clown.
3
More hysteria from the Left. You ran out of credibility a long time ago. Does heterosexual AIDS, ALAR, DDT, bird flu, pig flu, silicone implants, Y2K sound familiar? I could go on and on and on.
1
@Thor I only get 1500 words so I don't have the space to take on all your examples. (I don't have the patience either.) But Y2K: the fear, for those who were not sentient 25 years ago, was that computer systems based on ancient programs (remember - storage and memory were around a billion times more expensive than they now are - Moore's Law) would fail because the two ASCII slots reserved for a year - 99 instead of 1999 - would implode at the turn of the millennium. Computers all over the world on which we depended to run the power stations and water treatment and Wall Street and nuclear arsenals would scratch their collective heads and run amok. We were warned and we believed those computer scientists AND WE DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Yes I'm shouting at you. Y2K wasn't a false alarm: it was a real alarm and we reacted accordingly.
1
What's clear now is that man made climate change is real and will be far more harmful than scientists realized. What's even clearer is that Republicans and Big Business will fight against this reality tooth and nail because of power and PROFIT. Only in America.
3
This article does an excellent job of explaining the evolution of thinking in the area of climate science. This is important because first impressions are hard to reverse! For a person in the general public it’s helpful to understand how they, and a lot of other people, got a wrong impression.
The author ends the article with unnecessary political statements. Hating on Donald Trump. To the author - what are you trying to achieve? Does more divisiveness help? I suggest that a call for more people to learn about the climate change issue themselves and make tangible adjustments to their own personal economic and political decisions would have been a far superior close.
The scientists did not get it wrong! They misjudged some timelines due to incomplete data!
Because of the numbers of contributors the predictions were always the concensus position and the innate conservatism of science meant that was close to the median. Climate researchers have always understood the possibility of "tipping points", where small changes could produce very large or very different outcomes. Without a (near) perfect understanding of the system, tipping points are very hard to predict.
The changes that we are seeing very closely conform to model predictions from decades ago; they are simply happening at an unexpected rate. Events like rapidly melting permafrost have been observed and measured for years but the concensus is only now factoring them into revised predictions.
It is not surprising that the concensus shifted slowly; forty-five years ago geologists still talked about the next ice-age occurring within a millennium or two. A decade later they were modelling temperature increases and glacial retreat.
It is known that in the past there have been significant shifts in climate and there is about a 0.05 probability that this is what we are seeing. However there are now nearly ten times as many people as there were during the last such shifts. Even a natural shift lasting fifty years could have a devastating global impact. And another ice-age could kill about six billion people.
2
Two major facts left out of this article;
Accelerated population growth is decreasing the number of trees and increasing the combustion of carbon, the single greatest factor in greenhouse emissions.
Solution? Implement a new Hemp for Victory campaign and go to war with climate change by creating carbon trapping building materials, prevent erosion and plant more trees.
The second fact missed is discussed at length in Graham Hancock’s recent book “America Before”:
The Younger-Dryas was an event created by the impacts of fragments of a comet, 11,800 years ago during a time when human civilization was thriving, and if we study how the Amazon, coastal cities and the Sahara faired after impact we could learn a great deal about our ocean currents, levels and survival as a species. One of the largest fragments hit Greenland as revealed by ice cores that show a dark layer... common all around impact zones... full of iridium and nanodiamonds characteristic of a comet impact. The resulting floods and changing climate began the extinction of megafauna like mammoths and giant sloths. Other impacts occurred in southeast asia and the Mediterranean. The Amazon, where much of our surviving crops originate today was spared. But the ice and water from Greenland fell so rapidly into the Atlantic the cold water stopped the Gulf Stream, plunging the planet into a 1000 year deep freeze, followed by a warming that raised ocean levels.
Solution; we can intercept comets. But can we intercept us?
2
As a scientist I am very disturbed by the message in this article... that we are in this climate predicament because scientists failed to raise sufficient alarm. Alarms were raised clearly as early as the 1970’s and this is one of the reasons I embarked on my career as a climate scientist. In hindsight, should we have shouted louder; no doubt. But the failure is not in the message, that was clear, the failure has been in the response as society continues to fail to anticipate and adapt while pouring tons of carbon into the atmosphere. At this point we can not stop global warming and we need to face the reality that millions will flee the coast due to sea level rise and the enhanced reach of tropical storms and storm surges. Entire counties will disappear beneath the waves in our lifetime. So stop complaining, get your buts in gear, and start planning for the inevitable societal impacts that are facing us. We can not prevent disaster but we can control where we are standing when it happens. We know what will happen; no one needs to be unprepared.
16
The earth is several billion years old and has been subject to any number of climatic changes, some of which are only now being discovered and understood.
Scientific research and observation of these changes has only been around for, say, two hundred years. We have information from only a small swath of time from which to predict that future. No wonder the timetable keeps quickening.
Mankind has, indeed, influenced the pace of change, but by no means can we be blamed for all of it.
1
@Bill You are right in saying that we humans can't be blamed for all it (climate change) but we can certainly be blamed for denying science, hiding data, and refusing to act. Republicans in Congress, I'm looking at you.
3
One thing often missing from public discussions of climate science and climate modeling is sensitivity analysis. Many results have varying sensitivity to the assumptions we must make. The media does a terrible job explaining to the public why some results are well-understood long before others because they are relatively insensitive to our assumptions. For insensitive results, early and strong action is clearly warranted. For more sensitive results, collecting more data can be vital to decisions about the response strategy. Climate Deniers seem to understand this well enough to divide their agenda to address both of these separately, obstructing action on what we do know clearly, and obstructing learning about what we don’t know clearly.
It is the media that got climate change wrong. I have been reading the more dire predictions for decades. The media buries the most severe warnings deep in the article and headline the more mild guesses. But they were all guesses, as is the nature of simulations. Tweak a few parameters and predicted consequences are more and more disastrous.
But it does not matter, as the USA will keep voting GOP and more use of fossil fuels because Americans just do not want to know. Money now is much more important than anything.
10
It’s very simple.
We are digging up vast quantities buried carbon and throwing it up into the air.
This is not natural.
This is bad.
11
The cited Scientific American article attributes scientists' underestimation of the impact of climate change partly to "the perceived need for consensus," which, you explain, "has had severe consequences, diluting what should have been a sense of urgency...."
But it's probably an overstatement to say that the wait for consensus had severe consequences. We've seen that as a consensus emerged, it was met with a mounting campaign of denial. Now the consensus is overwhelming, and yet we have Donald Trump and the Republicans pushing hard in the opposite direction, actually reversing steps that had been taken to address climate change.
Even politicians who paid attention to the scientists early on failed to take the steps that were considered necessary to meet even the underestimated threats. They would start out with moderately ambitious plans and then proceed to water them down in international negotiation.
The world is now facing severe consequences, certainly; but it doesn't seem that they're traceable to scientists' consensus-building.
4
To be fair there has been a systematic bias. Scientists have tried to avoid overstating the case such that they could not be accused of raising the alarm in an irresponsibly exaggerated manner. And where specific matters were not fully understood, the default position has been not to assume what can't be proven, And it has also been written that some scientists were pressured not to be too grim. Over 10 years ago Gwyne Dyer, an excellent journalist, wrote "Climate Wars" based on research into political situations and consultations with climate scientists. He wrote that in the worst scenarios we'd see ocean level increases along the lines of what has been noted in this article. He further wrote about Canfield Oceans possibly being created making our atmosphere poisonous to life. And he got this from scientists. So catastrophic notions have long been around but have never been certain because in part they depend on the worst kind of response on our part. One tiny example of reasons for uncertainty is that the ability to model the way that the jet stream's behaviour has been modified by climate change is not an ability we have had for decades. Multiply this example a hundred times and you see why the pace of change is hard to predict even as the underlying problem has long been clear and well understood. "Climate Wars" is still a pretty interesting read not least for its insights into the problems between nuclear powers India and Pakistan.
2
If only scientists could have predicted how politicians would manipulate their findings to garner votes. I wish our politicians would offer us realistic policies to address climate change.
5
You know who got climate change right? Oil companies. That's why they for decades they have hired lobbyists, create think tanks, bought ads and generally obstructed the public realisation of climate change.
10
I am a Physicist, worked on carbon sequestration to achieve clean energy from carbon and gas plants.
Scientist did understand that climate change was happening years ago. The first book that predicted that the undesirable 2% increase in temperature would happen was written 50 years ago. Posting that most scientists do not "get it" is ridiculous and ludicrous. We did get it years ago and today at least 90% of real scientists do understand and accept climate change It is the political system that blocked acceptance of reality then and now. It is the wealthy and their politicians worrying about the cost of climate change that postponed starting to address it 15 years ago when it was still addressable. Today, are we still argue that scientist do not understand when what you do not understand is that it is almost to late to address it…..
10
"'As to whether or not it's man-made and whether or not the effects that you're talking about are there, I don't see it,' said Trump. Instead, he cited his own intelligence in explaining why he's skeptical. 'People like myself -- we have very high levels of intelligence, but we're not believers.' Later in the interview, he said he won't believe in climate change unless he can see it."
And we may be about to re-elect this man who -- on every subject, from climate to the Middle East, to how to fight forest fires -- knows more than the experts.
9
There is a big difference between those who accept climate science but were mistaken about the sensitivity of our planet and the rapidity of change, which seems to be accelerating--- and between those like our president and many of his enablers who call climate science a "hoax". To predict when is much harder than to predict what ---I do not know when the present Administration will no longer have power but I can assure you with full certainty that a time will come when they will no longer be on this world.
2
Indeed, few scientists thought that climate change, will arrive so soon. But the article misrepresents the process and role for climate science.
Climate models are incredibly complex, with many uncertain factors. Twenty years ago, it was simply impossible to be certain about the trajectory the climate would take. For example, will increased growth of algae at higher temperatures absorb carbon to reduce climate change? Or will the release of methane from the thawing tundra accelerate climate change? These models have improved over the last decades, constrained by better measurements and powered by more powerful computers. All such models produce a variety of predictions which are associated with varying likelihoods. What is happening is that the incoming data is consistent with the most extreme predictions: almost certainly catastrophic climate changes in many parts of the world.
What can be done now?
Decarbonize the power and transportation sector (btw: will require a lot more nuclear power, at least without revolutionary new technologies)
Eliminate red meat, and ideally, most animal products, from our diet.
Plant trees and other carbon trapping plants on a massive scale (the only economically plausible carbon capture technology right now).
All of the above would happen quickly if we figured out how to put a fair price on carbon pollution (i.e. a carbon tax of at least $100 per ton of CO2).
6
Does the time table for our planet's demise really matter? Now we know that it will happen sooner rather than later. How many of us react to that knowledge by inconveniencing ourselves for the sake of slowing climate change. Don't blame the scientists. At least they are trying.
6
In 1992, a small a young activist, I remember going to an environmental conference called "Threshold."
Everyone there understood we were on the edge of disaster. I'm not sure why it's taken 25 years for so few people to understand.
6
I have been calling it “our climate emergency” for over a year. I am not hysterical. But I am amazed, gob-smacked, agog that the folks who set policy in these United States not only deny the need to take action, but publicly lie about the science. The Trump administration’s EPA has removed the words “Climate Change” from all of its documents — as if that will erase the debate (which in some level it will). The science has become more accurate, more overwhelming, more persuasive. What is needed to address this emergency is leadership, vision, and the ability to look at the reality that a vast and complex cultural change is needed NOW. It ain’t pretty. And I am not holding my breath.
7
Do you know or care that the Paris Accord won’t do a thing?? It’s pure virtue signaling. A total farce. We are wasting time on this nonsense. No one takes it seriously. No one. Not even those signed the accords and won’t shut up about global warming. Let’s stop pretending we can abolish fossil fuels and try something else. Actually, never mind. Let’s sign the accord and feel better about trashing trump.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/10/paris-agreement-climate-change-usa-nicaragua-policy-environment/
They got it wrong because of corporate resistance to the very idea of climate change and disinformation campaigns by energy companies like Exxon-Mobil. Government pressures from Republican administrations also helped. It's tough being a scientist in a country where the Know Nothings of a major political party deny science, censor web sites and scientific journals and accuse you of being "unpatriotic" if you say otherwise.
5
The problem is that the climate is a very complicated system with both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial components. The models being used are, realistically, just a sketch. Not a week goes by without some new science post about a newly discovered factor. In comparison, the world economic system is trivial and transparent -- but how accurate are any honest predictions for the price of Ford or Exxon for a specific date and time? Seriously. But instead of being indicators for future problems these climate inaccuracies are being taken as indications that the models are wrong -- and same old, same old is still the order of the day. And no one need to do anything as a result save double down on coal and oil investments.
IMHO, it is unlikely that anything people can throw up in a few years, regardless of cost, will have any real effect. It took centuries to get to this state and even if we ceased to exist will take at least as long to move the other way -- if it does at all for reasons that may still remain to be discovered.
So in the here and now, adaptation to the changes and assisting people being harmed now is the only short term strategy. For a variety of reasons decarburization of out civilization(s) is a good idea but it took centuries to get here and changing will not be easy. Meanwhile there is the problem of millions of displaced people -- up against newly tightened borders. A good outcome seems most unlikely.
3
This article is guilty of the common conflation of weather extreme weather in this case) and climate. While surely good-intentioned, it muddies the understanding of climate science and adds to the general confusion of the topic. Early climate models were in fact surprisingly accurate at predicting the climate, that is average temperature and to lesser degree precipitation, we are now experiencing, and climate models are continually improving in their accuracy.
The article is correct - many of the extreme weather events in recent years have been a catastrophic surprise. However, predicting weather events, even a week or two out, is in many ways much more difficult than predicting the climate a few decades in the future. We know with certainty that future decades will be considerably warmer than today and (although with admittedly less certainty) that warmer temperatures translate to more frequent and intense weather events.
While planning for the future under a warming world is challenging, it's becoming increasingly clear that we need to place more trust in what climate science is telling us and prepare ourselves and our infrastructure for what very well could be the worst-case scenario.
4
At this point, climate change denial is not even a real thing. Just a cynical batch of invented lies created by the greedy oil, gas, and chemical barons in order to justify their short term billions in profits.
Because it is short term. The question of the future is how long before we all rise up and say enough fires, extreme heat, extinctions, floods, and megastorms?
1
Sadly, I think the answer to your question will be, "Not until it was too late." It may be already too late.
The answer is simple: they don't actually go outside into the natural world. If more people did, more people would see what's going on. It's the same answer for the Donald Trumps of the world: if they observed or cared about the earth they would see it happening before their eyes.
3
I’m sorry, but there is evidence that refutes this belief that extended contact with the outdoor world is all one needs to see the truth of climate change. Do a Google search for “I’m not a climate change guy but...” and you will find a short documentary that aired on CNBC in July of this year. The quote (above) comes from a farmer who, despite near daily contact with a clearly changing weather reality, cannot see beyond the political blinders he has placed on himself. Dogma, it turns out, can make you disbelieve your own eyes.
The Orwellian effort of making the phrase ‘climate change’ equivalent to ‘socialist hoax’ has been spectacularly successful. What began as a scientific debate has been re-cast as purely economic, and therefore my conclusion is that the only remedy is that people like the climate change denying farmer must be economically ruined before they (and their unfortunate descendants) fully realize that the scientists were never particularly interested in the politics. To steal a quote, America is not a country; it’s a business. There won’t be any meaningful change until the costs become untenable.
The crisis we are facing is not due only to the global heating science being wrong before 2002 as Eugene Linden claims, but also the wrong political science theory that views government as the solution of negative externalities.
Currently people are dying as a consequence of global heating. We can study the political science to see what factors led to this crisis since climate scientists revised their predictions in 2002 suggesting dire prospects.
The evidence against the political science was overwhelming well before the global heating crisis emerged. For instance, the myriad ways government imposes negative externalities, especially on the politically weak, as well as its inability to prevent tragic cases such as the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India.
Another factor in this crisis is that those dying from global heating are disproportionately poor and powerless. Yet, the rulers who tend to be part of the top half of the income and wealth distribution, serving the rich the powerful, are inclined to impose the negative externalities on the poor and powerless.
5
The world’s not a cartoon, you know.
Scientists draw conclusions based on the data available at the time. Data from 30 to 40 years yielded valid conclusions that are different from what we have today with today’s rapidly growing data store. Consider that in 1957 Revelle and Seuss said, “Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. It therefore becomes of prime importance to attempt to determine the way in which carbon dioxide is partitioned between the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere and the lithosphere.” That is what scientists from many disciplines have been doing and many have offered serious warnings. e. g., James Hansen. Thank you to CitizenJ and others for pointing the finger in the right direction.
5
And yet only one nation, based on the decision of one person who received 3 million fewer votes than the top vote-getter in the last presidential election, chooses not to participate in helping to resolve this.
12
@Paul in NJ Just imagine if the vote counting in Florida had been allowed to continue in the 2000 election and Al Gore had been president. The state of global warming might be very different today. Strange if th e ultimate rate of humanity rested on the Electoral College.
2
The trouble with climate change articles like this one is that they present such a doomsday outcome that people are befuddled as to what to do. Also, often the press carries stories that offer quirky and unrealistic proposals such as canceling Thanksgiving or stopping meat production or never flying. What we need is a less alarmist and psychologically debilitating approach. Each of us needs to choose a single manageable project and get fully behind it. For example,two major polluters in this country are cars and planes. The solution is passenger rail which is MUCH less a source of emissions , occupies less space, carries more passengers per mile and is cheaper. We can contact our sens and reps and demand vastly more funding for AMTRAK and local urban rail. Join the Rail Passengers Association and work with them. Counter stupid propaganda from Heritage and Cato(rail is a 19th century technology, no one rides Amtrak, etc). Press home the idea that interstates are horribly expensive to build and maintain. Never stop pointing out that they are built and maintained 70% from the General Fund and only 30% from the gas tax which is what makes driving so artificially cheap. There is a vast amount of work to do here.Pick a project and get to work!
4
The case for anthropomorphic global warming is impeccable because of three elements: empirical data on global temperature change, including the oceans; a clear physical mechanism (greenhouse gases in the troposphere raise the temperature of the surface relative to that of the layer that radiates to space, which is fixed by energy balance with the Sun); detailed and extensive research showing there is no other plausible explanation for temperature increase.
Once we come to individual events such as Hurricane Sandy, the connection with global climate change becomes much less clear. Was this event simply a hundred-year fluctuation?
Was the high cost due to in part overbuilding, lack of planning and adequate drainage? It's not clear if the author cites the recent storms as evidence of rapid climate change, or as emblems of what's to come.
The geological fact of rapid climate change is an important realization and shows that drastic changes *could* happen in the coming years. A benchmark of climate sensitivity is the short-term global temperature increase due to doubling the concentration of CO2. Current estimates stand at 1.5-4.5 Celsius. The huge uncertainty reflects our lack of quantitative understanding of climate feedbacks, both positive and negative. It is such feedbacks that could trigger rapid climate change.
5
I wonder if climate deniers like Fed Up will put their money where there mouths are. If one disbelieves the overwhelming evidence of rapid climate change and sea level rise, this would be a great time to take advantage of declining property values for coastal property.
3
I think we tail-end boomers will be the first group to say to our doctors: let's just skip the tests and the surgery. I'll take my chances, and (eventually) the pain meds, on one last long trip to Venice.
5
I truly feel sorry for future generations. At my age, luckily I will probably never see the worst of climate change but it’s coming. There is only one Earth and we cannot afford to get this wrong. Wouldn’t it make sense with so much at stake to err on the side of caution? For if we don’t, the consequences are unthinkable.
9
Oh please, scientists have been predicting global catastrophe for decades. First it was an impending ice age, then it was "global warming". Now it is climate change. At least they've finally assigned an accurate term to the phenomenon. What they fail to make clear is that climate change is as old as earth itself. Warming and cooling cycles, however long their duration are part of its history and predate mankind's influence. Even if we ignore the unpredictability of such episodic changes, why should we accept climate change "solutions" from the very people who got it "so wrong"?
1
I’m guessing you’re too young to have experienced actual ‘climate change.’ I’m 53 years old and I can tell you without a doubt that climate change is real. And I don’t need scientists to prove it - this is from my own experience and that of others my age.
11
I echo Mike L's observation -- I'm 54 and I too live in a much different climate than that of my childhood even though I live in the same place. Yes, the Earth's climate has always changed. What is different is that "natural" climate change occurs over geological time scales. The climate change we are experiencing now is occurring over a human time scale.
@RC
The modern form of humans is about 200,000 years old. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in the earnest only in the 1800s.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old and as my post makes clear climate change has been with us from day one. During that time the climate has experienced much greater extremes than any human being has ever witnessed. In that regard, 53 years hardly gives one perspective. More importantly, putting forth the proposition that mankind has influenced it in any significant way or can alter it to his liking is sheer arrogance.
All the scientists have been busy, in one form or another, informing us as to what the earth, and all the historical data they have been collecting about it, is capable of doing. Everyone with a 'Net connection and/or not living under a rock at this point has the ability to see what they have gathered for themselves.
The Earth is a terrarium. For us it is one vast, vibrant and dynamic, living whole. It gave us birth. To date it has nurtured us as one of its many species. It has done this via a whole series of interactive, intertwined, systems. Systems that adhere to one, and only one, dictate from Mother Nature.
Balance.
In our ignorance we have been merrily pushing on all those systems by willfully dumping massive amounts of energy into them. And so those systems, those implacable non-human forces of Nature, are now beginning to turn. At first slowly but with every quickening speed as the inertia builds up. Balance is the goal. And balance is what they will achieve.
My fear is the new norm being targeted will not be one that nurtures us. If not outright hostile it will be far removed from this. In effect Mother Nature is setting up to expel us in reaction to all that we are doing.
Unless we alter our ways and habits.
And since I do not see this happening there's only one thing to do in preparation for expelling. Move to higher ground is the first step in a radical change in lifestyle; not just for myself but for us all.
John~
American Net'Zen
3
Nothing short of a project similar to the Manhattan Project undertaken during the Second World War led by the brightest scientific minds in the world is what is needed here. But with Donald Trump in the White House that will never happen. Human beings do not understand what they cannot see and climate change is an example of that. Though I do not understand with the 24-hour cable news cycle how anyone could deny this is happening to the Earth. The climate change apocalypse is upon us. Humanity will abuse and disrespect the natural world even as those left draw their last breath. We are doomed.
6
According to the column, only 17 % of Americans are aware of the fact that nearly all scientists believe climate change is real and dangerous. Is this the fault of scientists? Hardly. The media needs to take a good long look in the mirror. Climate change is not sexy. More people are interested in how naked the Kardashians are willing to get in public, than in the fate of the planet. I blame a media obsessed with "clicks" and ad dollars. It is very possible that the human race is doomed (or nearly so), and all people want to look at are box scores and half-dressed women with surreally large body parts. Blame the media--not for being dishonest--but for being cynical and indifferent.
13
The scientists didn't get it wrong, but nobody listens to scientists. Scientists don't make money for political organizations, they don't make fortunes in real estate, or money laundering, or throwing orange balls in hoops.
Usually, the theoretical scientist has to dumb-down to the lowest common denominator ( such as the ignorant letter below.)
In climate change, because it is SO complicated with So Many variables, and a world wide phenomenon , we have multiple problems of politics, money, the actual engineering and practical problem solving to be done.
Unlike Climate Change Deniers and their ilk, the scientists have been unable to pull world authorities by the lapels and make them listen. The letter below is known as anecdotal, or stories...it is not Science.
You cannot fly to a different planet on Bezos' Dollars, you cannot leave it for someone else to fix. It is going to take a global effort to fix IF we CAN even fix it. All this at a time when Russia, China, N.Korea, the Middle East, and the USA are virtually at war with each other, and the Damocles Sword of Nuclear destruction is hanging over us. I doubt this incredibly complicated problem is going to be solved.
Reality, weather, and probably war will overcome commonsense policy making and Science. I take no satisfaction in this. Nor. as a biologist, do I see human beings as inviolable. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 165 million years approximately. Mankind, has ruined it in less than 200,000! Understand Now?
6
Carbon emissions or not. Nature could reverse the current trends with solar flares, a shift in magnetic poles, a meteor collision, a freak change in lunar orbit or the earth's tilt. It's not all about something man made.
1
As I remember it, the activists were telling us twenty years ago that we would certainly all be doomed already by now.
2
This article is a gross triumph of dogma over facts and evidence. First, science "didn't get it wrong." Climate sciencists and the UNIPCC and NOAA produce probabilistic models of a range of values of what might occur in the future. They do not and cannot make pinpoint predictions. The UNIPCC and NOAA don't "lowball" or "highball" as if this is Vegas odds making, and to claim they do is simply false. Second, the author makes the simplistic and fallacious argument that weather is equal to climate. It is not. We cannot attribute specific extreme weather event to climate change and there is politically incredibly foolish to do so. For every Hurricane Sandy "proving" the veracity of climate change, there is a "snowball on the Senate floor," or worse, prolonged periods of "plain old normal weather" that denialists use to prove that climate change is a hoax. Continuing to point to extreme weather as "proof positive" of climate change simply plays into the hands of denialism by making this a battle over whose cherry-picked weather events proves what, when they all prove nothing. The only weather data that has scientific meaning is long term and global, not short term and local. And the long term, global data DO tell us that climate change is a real, serious, human-caused phenomena. We have enough trouble with malicious denialists challenging science. We don't need climate change activists doing so for equal and opposite but equally false and dogmatic reasons.
4
Pretty sure they knew all along. Why do you think billionaires are buying up bug out property?
On the good side if you can call it that we will all shortly have not option to accept that anthropomorphic climate change is real.
1
Crooked politicians, misinformation agents working for polluting industries, and the management of the polluting industries, are about 95% of the problem. Scientists have been warning us since the 1960s. The EPA was created under Richard Nixon. But the fossil fuel interests bribe the GOP to undermine government science programs and to obfuscate the facts.
2
Climate change deniers are a threat to the planet and to current and future generations of all living things. They should be dealt with as such. There is no time left.
I have to admit my surprise and disappointment that Al Gore was not mentioned in this article. He heroically attempted to warn and motivate the world and was derided by the 'dark ages' mentality and greed of big oil, big coal, and the deplorable 'hanging chad' election that derailed Gore's ability to lead the world in remediating our path.
2
The author Eugene LInden is disingenuous on who to blame for inaction lies. Yale, Princeton and other universities have vast curricula in the field of atmospheric and other disciplines in climate science.
Charles Keeling developed the Keeling Curve based on his research that then Vice President Al Gore spoke about. Will Steger, Roger Revelle, Svante Arrhenius all conducted research on climate change.
These above men were climate change pioneers who rang the bell loud and clear. Greedy corporations and politicians just like the Republican regime in this administration undermined them, just like the cigarette companies muddied the science that proved that cigarettes kill.
Corporate bought denial scientists like Richard Lindzen an Atmospheric physicist and former professor at MIT and all the charlatans like the Heritage Foundation and all the others have be successful in confusing the public and are shaping Republican politics along with the fear of the cost of climate action has stalled progress.
Fact based reading:
The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States
https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10305
Scientist
3
The scientists working for the fossil fuel corporations knew a long time ago the their products were a threat to the environment. And they relayed this information to their corporate executives.
Fossil fuel corporations did everything they could to bury this information and to assert that the opposite is true -- that fossil fuel consumption is no threat to the environment. Then they used the legalized bribery (campaign "contributions" and other means) to get "our" politicians to keep the status quo. Which means keep the money coming in for the fossil fuel industry. It's corrupt cronyism.
Who is going to go to prison for that immoral and greedy policy? As usual, nobody. Because these are wealthy, White people. People who don't go to jail in America no matter how heinous their crimes. (See Donald Trump.) And it really doesn't get more serious than the current utterly UNNECESSARY destruction of the planet.
We have the technology to get ourselves off of fossil fuels, but our corrupt capitalist greed (and cronyism) is preventing it from happening. It's utterly immoral.
6
Equally as shocking as how fast the climate can change, and directly related to that is how fast society can change: the greatest defender of democracy, freedom and the future of the world, your USA, in 3 short years has become the greatest threat to freedom and the future of the world.
5
We've still got several very slow witted politicians in the Republican Party including Donald J. Trump who still have not caught on to the blatant evidence of just how fast MAN-MADE climate change is affecting the entire planet, including the one they live on. Still the Trump administration pulls out of the Paris accord, rolls back emissions controls and promotes fossil fuels. How can anyone who is not suicidal and cares about his children and their children consider voting for continuation of a Trump administration and Republican Congress???
3
OMG. We are blaming scientists for not predicting climate change accurately enough? The one group that’s been sounding the alarm for decades...to have their warnings ridiculed and fall upon our complacent deafness? It staggers the mind...
8
Climate scientists manifestly did NOT get predictions wrong - instead, they were coerced and threatened to produce low ball estimates that were politically favorable to their governments. Just look at the travesty in the United States for a sordid example!
3
This will be hard to stop now. We can take action to limit the long term peak damage, but the time lag relative to our actions will mean trouble anyway.
Trump and his populist know-nothings are determined to make everything worse. It is their calling card. This is the Jonestown administration, except they don’t want to die alone.
1
It is interesting reading some of the comments claiming the climate is naturally changing. No matter how many times you point to the broken records or data there is sometimes just no convincing some that their view flys in the face of millions of hours of work by thousands of scientists. Prepare for the worst because we are going to burn just about every drop of oil we can regardless of the consequence. With half the world incapable or unable to comprehend what’s happening the war is already lost. Carbon emissions won’t be curbed, earths population will grow and undeveloped countries will become developed and produce a carbon footprint of magnitude to do that. Plan accordingly. What’s my plan you may ask? Have just one child and pool my resources in the hope she becomes one of the few who can afford the new world in 30 years where many will go without. Like cancer, climate change in 30 years won’t be about “can you survive it” it will be “can you afford it”. Sad
Some geo-scientists were told by big oil not to share their knowledge during the sixties, even instructed to deny their own science. What gives...
What the heck? Where does this come from? The climate scientists have mostly been on target, except for some minor missteps in the 1970s. Since technological changes move with asymptotic rapidity, the 1970s are ancient history.
The only criticism is that scientists under-estimated the speed of onset of serious problems. But even that is within the range of models that have been out there for decades. The biggest factor has been the unremitting lies and propaganda from industries with trillions of dollars of profits threatened by action to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. The efforts dwarfed even the tobacco fiasco, which itself delayed upgraded tobacco policy for about 40 years.
This article should be titled "How Climate Change deniers got Climate Change so Wrong." Anything else is false equivalency and a disgrace. At stake is only human civilization.
5
It's likely due to the perceived blow-back of heightening fears of "fringe scenarios" that scientists erred on the side of optimism. Look what they've had to deal with having soothed the public with optimistic timelines. The folks who've been dogging scientists "fringe scenario" claims (i.e., dimwit conservatives) need proof of global warming to hit them personally before they'd recognize what their neighbors have been dealing with for years.
2
I = P*A*T IMPACT (on the environment) can be roughly calculated as POPULATION (more of us using, consuming, doing whatever) times AFFLUENCE (which results in increased consumption, energy use, etc. for each of us) times TECHNOLOGY (higher levels of technology require more material and energy inputs and produce more emissions, waste, etc.).
More of us, consuming more and more, at ever higher levels of technology constitute an unsustainable burden on our little planet, which is effectively a closed system.
Capitalism, which depends for it's "success" upon endless growth of all of the above, is incompatible with sustainable civilization.
Simple. And it may well be too late to do much about it.
1
This argument is absurd. The science was right in front of our face decades ago, and we failed to act. Don't place blame where it isn't deserved...
4
Terrible headline that will be misconstrued and abused by climate deniers.
It should have been: " How scientists underestimate climate change"
3
In a nutshell, climate change is logarithmic, not linear. Probably Californians understand that because the Richter Scale for earthquakes is logarithmic. The rest of the country needs to be physically shaken and woken up.
2
I know that this is hopelessly pessimistic but I am glad I will not be alive when the real Hunger Games arrive.
2
Even the big oil companies came to the conclusion that climate change is happening and so did NASA but a republican politician from Oklahoma who brought a snowball into the Senate chambers ...convinced the deniers ! The denier’s IPhones, IPads, cars, even their surgeries and their healthcare...all science based but when scientists inform us about our alarming climate change and it’s impact ... they selectively deny. Our children’s future depends on addressing the reality of climate change.
2
Truth: Oil companies and the Pentagon have known about anthropogenic climate change since the 1950s. The Pentagon quietly began to adjust its military planning, including the emergence of shipping lanes in the Arctic, and destabilization caused by worldwide refugee crises. The oil companies realized their offshore platform designs would need to include stronger, more frequent hurricanes, and protected their assets.
Truth: The oil companies, while more recently acknowledging the threat of anthropogenic climate change on their own websites, have spent many millions of dollars getting others to promote "doubt" and "uncertainty." It's not their liability if they can get others to convince the public to do nothing?
Truth: 40 percent of Americans still think the thieving LIAR in the White House is somehow heaven-sent. That if they can stack the Supreme Court and shove their "morality" down everyone else's throat, nothing else matters. They've been the biggest brake on climate change action ever since Reagan took office and ripped Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the White House.
Truth: We're in big trouble.
5
Keep in mind the same people who don’t believe the unambiguous consensus of climate scientists believe Donald Trump. That should tell you something.
1
Mr. Trump can be impeached and convicted of treason. What "treason" ever has, or ever will have a worse effect on humanity than global warming than his betrayal of trust, his deliberate and overt attempt to overturn the government of the United States.
3
A very dangerous headline. Conservative media may pick it up and report that scientists were wrong about climate change...perversely to be interpreted as climate change is not happening.
3
Scientists still get many things wrong. For one, their behavior does not cultivate confidence, when viewed from an outside perspective (something scientists can't seem to do). Scientists can't even talk to one another to report their findings, or convey their importance straightforwardly to the public, without turning it into a huge mess. Scientists communicate direct findings via expensive journals, feeding a highly profitable publishing industry that rakes in tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year. The journals either charge outrageous fees upfront to authors to make their work public, or else they lock the science behind pay walls. Scientists do this even though they do the science, they write the papers, they review the papers, they edit the papers, and they are the largest readership of these papers. Sounds pretty stupid, right? These publishing companies have come up with schemes to rank scientists using bogus metrics, and pit them against one another in a rat-race competition for who publishes the most papers (and not coincidentally, generates the most content to underpin publishers' profit margins). Scientists are busy fighting other scientists, trying to one-up their colleagues, creating a culture of self-glorification (seeking prestige, awards, pedigree, and other rotten incentives), and putting themselves and their overblown egos above the science...how could anyone trust people who behave like this?
1
With a headline like that the deniers will be cheering.The headline should have been Man made climate change even worse than expected.
4
This is rich. Jimmy Carter knew we had to use renewable energy and move away from oil. Reagan removed them. Scientists and a lot of smart and concerned citizens have been sounding the alarm for decades. Politicians, lobbyists, the oil industry all chose to ignore every study and paper published. Gosh, the oil industry ignored their own scientists. It was - and is - more important to make money.
Don’t blame the scientists. Blame the willfully blind and ignorant. Blame the greedy for their disregard for our own survival. Blame the corrupt politicians who have greater allegiance to their fat cat donors than to the people who voted them into their offices. And go jump in a lake.
3
Mr. Linden, what do you believe? The appalling lies of the right wing noise machine, or James Hanson, PhD?
Climate scientists got it right. Politicians and denialists whined and lied to mitigate their studies. Myron Ebell was selected by Trump's toadies to pick science advisors. Read Ebell, if you can. This is the same as picking the Pope to run a clinic for women's health.
This columnist thinks he has news for us. Here's news for you: intelligent scientists saw this avalanche 40 years ago. If you think otherwise, I'll send you a reading list.
4
The Catholic Church took until the 1970's to apologize to Gallileo for suggesting the earth revolved around the sun. So why would we expect our government to move any faster on climate change? Humans are locusts who will lay waste to everything and then die. It is just ironic that we are supposedly the sentient species, and we are the ones hastening this disaster.
5
Anyone who has been paying attention to the science - that does not include the author - knows that scientists have alway made predictions in the form of a _range_, whether that is a range of degrees of increase, centimeters of ocean rise, numbers of storms, and so on. This is the worst form of journalism, where the "journalist" fabricates a problem (e.g. the scientists have got it wrong), then proves his "brilliance" by "disproving" their own fabrication.
The issue here is not the scientists, who have always been spot on, and who have been pointing out this crisis for decades, literally. The issue is people who ignore science.
4
Where have you been? Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the WHite House in the 1970s (before Reagan took them off). I moved to a tipi in the 1970s after college, moving back to the land, because we wanted to have less impact on the earth. Did you never read Mother Earth News? Scientists knew about this 40 years ago!
3
From Para(2):
"...a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch..."
Which is it: measurable or estimated?
"Bake the Arctic"? "Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin"? Update: the Arctic is still unbaked and the Sahara has recently experienced Paris- and Berlin-like temperatures. Alarmist? Yep--that part is correct.
We've been bludgeoned by the science press to believe that climate science was settled and the scientific "consensus" has been deemed unassailable. Now this piece tells us the "Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong"? Maybe the piece should be renamed "How Journalists Got Climate Change So Wrong".
1
A massive sun screen in space that is also a solar panel. The energy can be used for a space station and the majority can be turned into a laser beam aimed at a collection point on earth . Turn it back to electricity to feed the carbon collector's.
I don't want my grandchildren growing up in a hellscape so you smart people better stop crying and wringing your hands. Think!
2
There have always been "outliers" in the scientific community and sometimes they're proven right and sometimes not. But it's not helpful to decry scientists generally over this. It doesn't help people understand the scientific process, which, lord knows, more people should understand and which researchers have been trying to follow to understand this. But science generally works on observed data, not on making long-term predictions without any data. This stuff is hard and to account for an entire globe's worth of data is incredibly hard. Not mentioned in the article is how scientific research is funded--by private corporations that, generally, have been ignoring all the signs and trying to profit off other things, and by the government, which we all know has not had consistent policies on this. Nevertheless, the truth has become painfully apparent: Our time is limited (not unlimited). And there's likely not anything we can do about it. It's only our hubris, thinking we can control this, that keeps people from even paying attention.
5
At my age I doubt that I shall be around to mark the truly egregious consequences of global warming/climate change. I submit, though, this thought: that the amelioration of said consequences rests not with climatologists, nor even with those governments that have come to recognize the reality of this existential threat to human civilization. I believe the solution to slowing the runaway train of global change lies within the purview of mental health professionals. By not dealing, on a transcendent level, with the rapidly approaching catastrophe, we are proving ourselves to be a species determined to commit suicide. No economic system is worth the drowning of the world, and yet we behave as though the opposite were true. Global warming naysayers may look at melting icecaps, raging wildfires, warming oceans and superstorms and still deny the threat, even as they cuddle their grandchildren and whisper 'nothing to worry about'. Scientific communities may sound the alarm, and enlightened world authorities may know for whom the bell tolls. Yet they cannot act because to do so means to enact changes on a level unprecedented in human history. Changes that realize economic and political realities are not more important than survival. And yet, we can't get there. Won't go there. Even if we believe the threat, see the onrushing train we seem unable to stop it. I submit it is not a weatherman we need. It's a shrink.
5
Even a lot of scientists do not understand amplifying feedback that accelerates change. For example, more heat leads to more use of air conditioning that leads to more fossil fuel burning that leads to more heat. This article talks about the acceleration but doesn't mention why. For more examples, see:://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/WCAS-D-18-0128.1
It is almost more astonishing than depressing that there are still educated people who do not want real action on climate change.
Sure, a small percentage of people are cynically trying to prevent meaningful action. History will shame them, but that doesn't help us much now.
What amazes is the many millions of people who surely know the truth, who are not crazy enough to really believe that there is a conspiracy involving 97% of scientists, who are literate, and yet who just ignore the evidence and the warnings, because they are "inconvenient", albeit true.
I can see one source of hope: children need to confront their parents. Your parents say they love you, if they truly loved you, they would not destroy your future. Talk to them about it. Make them promise to vote for candidates who will promote real action on climate-change.
And Democrats, try for once not to antagonise swing-voters with extremist positions on other matters. The Green New Deal is great because it is about a strategy to fight climate change - but we don't need to mix it with extreme positions on gun-control or abortion or immigration. Yes these are all important, but right now we have a climate crisis.
If Trump gets re-elected, future generations will never forgive YOU. Of course Trump will be reviled, but ultimately it is the people who knowingly vote for him (or even who don't vote against him when they have the chance), who will be held accountable by future generations.
Do not let them down.
4
The basic cause of the rapid increase in the increase of the world’s temperature is the exponential rise in human population.
Each additional person needs and uses additional energy in multiple forms, which due to the laws of thermodynamics and energy conversion inefficiencies, can only increase the earth’s overall temperature.
Given human religious beliefs, tribalism, greed, and delusions, the future will only get worse - following the same exponential increase as the population increase.
3
If those apocalyptic scenarios are somewhat accurate, then there is no much we can do about it, we just have to adapt to new environments and climates. UN climate experts have mentioned several times that it is already too late to stop temperature increase, even if our countries turn carbon neutral today.
Furthermore no politicians speak about global trade, the huge implication that it has on global CO2 emission; only the international freight transport accounts today for 7% of CO2 global emission, projected to be between 15-20% in the next decades. Cargo ships, airplanes cannot run on solar energy or other renewable sources. Total China's CO2 emission today are US and EU combined, projected to peak CO2 emission in 2030 (20-30% more?). We import products from China with more than 5 times CO2 emission per $ than for the same product produced in US (just because it is cheaper); our companies outsource their production in country like China by increasing CO2 emission than if produced locally, that's also a reason why western countries have lowered their CO2 emission and embellish their environment by also sending garbage abroad...
Let's not talk about climate change unless we talk about global trade, encourage localism as much as possible, lean economy, and see comparative advantage in terms of CO2 emissions. Let's make it difficult for our companies to move abroad for financial reasons while not taking in consideration environmental impact
4
So there is flooding; that will create a boom in infrastructure repair and housing. Every disaster leads to an economic boom (think WW 2 and 9-11). The gloomy focus on the costs but that is only half of the equation. I’m not saying it is right that economic boom results from human misery, I’m saying it is reality.
While scientists were underestimating the rapidity of climate change, a host of Republicans - from Inhofe to Trump - continue to call it a hoax to this day. Let's hope history gives them their due!
5
We are here in large part to the Koch-fueled climate denialist movement. Under fire publicly from those who insisted they were wrong, scientists learned to be cautious lest their findings be even more ridiculed. I think many of us felt in our bones that things were going to change faster than anyone would say, but kept quiet as well - we were considered "nuts."
And so we have come to this pass.
Now we start hearing the denialists and Republications -- sometimes the same people, sometimes only closely aligned -- even in these very comments, pointing the finger at scientists and those who put credence in them, for not warning us of how awful it was really going to be, for downplaying the horrors. Of course they blame the scientists, not themselves, for now costing capitalism billions because, well, this is now going to cost capitalists money. That's the problem, you see: Not the destruction of the environment and all natural life we might hold dear: the problem is that it is going to cost capitalists money. One can always find a scapegoat if one looks around.
4
Climate warming will hasten the next ICE AGE.
Although it seems counterintuitive to many that global warming could set off the next ice age, it is a fact that the melting of the polar ice caps will desalinate the oceans once again, and that has the potential to slow the ocean current conveyors which run on the difference in water density.
The currents that move tropical temperatures to colder latitudes are the source of today's moderate earth climate in the places that are the world's bread basket.
It has happened many times in the earth's history. and that was the case during the last ice age only 50,000 years ago.
Of course the GOP ideologues don't care, their Christian fundamentalist followers believe the earth is only 6,000 years old and runs on magic, and their financial backers like the Kochs, pay them well to deny real science .
They are dangerous in more ways than America realizes.
5
Massive carbon collector's stationed from mexico to Canada on top of the rocky mountains. Make use of the mountains elevation where the air is pushed up into a thin layer. This needs to be funded by a massive wealth annexation from the worlds wealthy. Estimates of one hundred trillion dollars is being hidden in off shore tax havens. Its time to break the piggy bank open .
People better start thinking outside of the box or we will be dooming humanity to massive suffering.
1
When Al Gore "lost" the election, I decided to live my life as if the world was coming to an end (that is, the world I knew and loved). Best decision I ever made.
I quit my job in 2003 (which frankly, I hated). I spent beautiful time with my mother, which we did not know at the time would be her last 10 months.
I have been so, so lucky to be able to live in quiet freedom, doing what I could to help others and do things which might bring joy into the world. I live as sensibly as I can under the circumstances--I have only bought two cars in my life, both subcompacts. I still have my 2000 Honda Insight, the first hybrid bought in Pasadena, and the 1997 Ford Escort wagon that was my mother's last car, used on the very rare occasions when a larger car is needed. We designed the house not to need air conditioning, and for all but a handful of days a year, it's comfortable (still!).
Even as I found a lot of joy and new experiences in my life, of course it feels more and more like the eye of a hurricane. For some unfortunate souls, the hurricane has already struck, literally and figuratively. The rest of us are trying not to think about the moment when it is our turn.
4
The only presidential candidate that will address this issue with the urgency needed is Bernie Sanders.
Its to bad the main stream media will never allow his message out.
They want their taxes low even if it renders the planet uninhabitable.
3
@gene I haven't heard Bernie say anything substantive on climate chang What's his plan?
2
@Bridey
Sanders has emphatically endorsed the Green New Deal which came from AOC and Senator Markey.
Unfortunately (As shown by many comments below) climate change deniers with just look at the Headline of "How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong" and (without reading the article) take it as proof that Climate Change is a Hoax. I'm 67 years old and in that time I've seen dramatic changes in our climate. We used to see Major Weather Events 6-12 times a year. Now Every Week there is at least 1 and sometimes as many as 3 Major Weather Events. I'd call that proof of Climate Change. The denier will point out that throughout history Our weather has constantly changed. This is essentially true but what used to happen over the course of thousands of years is now happening in decades. What has changed? Technology.
3
A distressing feature of the climate change "debate" is that we apparently doomed to resolve scientific questions by making is pass through the democratic process.
The is only sensible if the people by and large respect science, or even understand how it works. But that is not where we are at. The democratic process under these conditions cannot be part of, and in fact is destructive to, the scientific method.
2
Most of the anthropogenic global warming due to man made greenhouse gases is not caused by the direct reradiation of infrared radiation from the surface by those gases. It is caused by positive feedback effects which, collectively, are greater than the negative feedback effects which also occur.
While it's true that scientists are inherently conservative in their predictions for psychological and sociological reasons, it's also true that they simply don't know what the magnitude of various positive and negative feedbacks will be, and some are much more problematic and contentious than others.
The result is that their inclusion in computer models may not be much better than conservative 'guesstimates', and the more speculative ones will be omitted altogether. This inevitably leads to over conservative predictions.
A large majority of the putative feedbacks appear to be positive, and novel and potentially large ones which are not included in the models are regularly suggested by researchers. Recent examples include a very significant surge in warming by cirrus cloud formation, after a certain global temperature threshold has been reached, the outgassing of CO2 and oxygen from warmer oceans, ocean surface stratification, resulting in much less heat being transported to the depths, resulting in greater atmospheric warming etc. None of these are included in the models, and it likely that there will prove to be other significant feedback effects that are currently unknown.
3
If rapid climate change is the rule rather than the exception, then we can expect an equally rapid cooling period after the present rapid warming period.
Scientists are human and those who need funding for their research understand well the political landscape they need to operate in. One has to understand how to write a grant or proposal that will appeal to a narrowly focused, often scientifically illiterate congressperson or corporate foundation. Often foundations and government funding have short term horizons; imagine applying for limited year funding to assess longterm effects of climate shifts. What sorts of objectives do you prepare for studying climate emergencies when the funding cycle is for a 2-year or even 5-year grant? Scientists are temperamentally conservative in how they understand their sources of funding. It is a political landscape, for sure. We are all - scientists, law makers, citizens - getting climate change wrong. Look at the California wildfires due to deeper droughts and dry winds with the recourse for safety being the turning off of electricity across a major American region. The health effects, the economic impact, the social disruption was a major event in itself and but a hint of what is to come for the rest of us as we neglect even these imperfect scientists and the danger of ignorant political leadership.
3
Scientists on climate change?
Scientists have a big problem when it comes to studying what many of us, not to mention scientists themselves, often take for granted they do comprehend, cause and effect, and this problem and their incompetence is obvious when it comes to determining human made cause and effect on natural and social environment.
Take any number of actions which are occurring today: An invention is being made; a book is being written; a law is being proposed; a fad is starting. Cause and effect here is largely unknown, but humans have no problem rotating in a narrow circle where they stamp this or that action as good while condemning others as bad; in fact we apply a narrow and limited moral sense, confusing it with thought, to everything from whether our 16 year old daughter should go on a date to whether plastics should be put on the market and it's difficult to tell whether a decision we praise today will have dire consequences or whether tomorrow's scapegoat will prove not nearly as harmful as today's decision.
We simply are not as smart and honest and decisive and moral as we like to believe. And the more we invent and diffuse things which readily take on the human environment, things some call memes and whether a religion or the automobile or said plastics or the computer or the gun or medicine, the more widespread apparently the effect, like a radiating glow, and the more difficult to eliminate should things prove bad or if we just want to move on.
1
Several critical points were left out of this article.
- The ocean is not a "bathtub". Sea rise occurs deferentially which is why for example the northeast U.S. is seeing sea rise but other areas less so.
- We have lived through a relatively stable extended climate period creating observational doubt in rapid change resisted by the general public and perhaps, unconsciously, scientists.
- Maps seem permanent. Look up Doggerland, the vast submerged landmass under that once connected the U.K. to Europe. Humans lived on that landmass and witnessed it being submerged. Archaeology has plenty of data on now submerged human activity. It is projected bo have happened quickly, visible daily, at three feet of land loss a day.
1
I remember back in 1991, the talk on climate change, as I had just bought my first home, on reclaimed land by the tidal estuary. I remember the talk then, about rising water. I remember the threat that land would be swallowed up to the height of up to 10ft from rising waters by 15 years. I thought to myself that would flood my lovely new home. Well I have since moved out in 2000 and now, 19 years later (28 years altogether), still not a sign of any land mass being swallowed. Not one foot closer to my old home. Memory is a wonderful asset if you want to remind me of what was actually said back then.
For 28 years, nothing has altered the level of the ocean. Just the usual king tides and stormy weather. In fact, I believe some of the Pacific Islands, the islands such as Tuvalu, now have more land than they had back then.
So sir, let me suggest that you are fearmongering and causing more paranoia to a world that has become so gullible to misinformation but in almost two generations I still can't see any change, except the younger generation who are now having it drummed into their heads that there is going to be some sort of cataclysmic drought that will kill our world off. Good grief: we still have at least double the number of people dying from cold than heat exhaustion!
4
it took me all of 2 minutes to find a scientific article with facts about sea level rise and why your house is still just as far from the coast as it was years ago.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/
1
Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon testified just days ago that the company was well aware of the legitimacy of climate change.
“We knew, we knew it was a real issue,” said Tillerson, 67. “We knew it was a serious issue and we knew it was one that’s going to be with us now, forevermore, and it’s not something that was just suddenly going to disappear off of our concern list because it is going to be with us for certainly well beyond my lifetime.”
and
“If the economies are going to continue to not just perform, but grow, if people are going to continue to want to improve their quality of life, sustain their quality of life, they’re going to have to have energy, a lot of it, and the demand is going to keep growing,”
.
.
.
“So there’s this natural tension” between that desire for growth and fixing climate change, “and that’s really the challenge that policymakers and legislators are confronted with,”
So... it's this natural tension between that desire for growth and fixing climate change, eh? More correctly he should have said something like...
So... it's this natural tension between that desire for growth and the continued existence of human life on earth.
I can't believe that he would be able look his children and grandchildren in the eye and say these things. We need to demand leadership of the top tier of our corporations and governments. If not, there will be no market to sell to and no civil societies to govern in the not to distant future.
5
It is utterly unscientific to connect any single metereologic event to climate change. Just like it is absurd for the president to tweet that global warming is a farce when the mid Atlantic experiences a cold front, there is absolutely no way to confidently blame climate change for Hurricane Sandy or Europe's summer heat wave or any other similar catastrophe. Climate change is confirmed by changes in global weather patterns, not by individual events. I am completely in support of the concept of man made climate change and its ability to describe global trends in weather, but we're doing ourselves a disservice, and contributing to the arguments of our detractors, when we make these kinds of unfounded conclusions.
2
Clearly we must declare war on greenhouse gasses. All out no holds barred war.
This means that fossil fuel production must be drastically reduced. We must start decommissioning refineries, tankers, and pipelines. No more importing and exporting oil or natural gas. We must use every diplomatic, economic and military tool available against any country that does not follow suit.
If we wish to maintain our standard of living, we will conserve energy and build cleaner power sources. The business opportunities for doing so are tremendous.
We do not have a choice, so start now. Every year we delay makes it more difficult if we are to avoid catastrophe.
The most readily definable and changeable factor is population growth, yet no one even speaks of it. I'll believe people are serious when limiting human growth and expansion becomes a daily issue.
4
Energy has advanced the quality of life, but not proportionally. So now we got too much CO2, and over half the world isn’t developed, and haven’t enjoyed the luxuries the advanced countries have. Should Africa, India, and China keep building and burning coal in plants, or build nuclear power plants? Hundreds of new Nuclear reactors should be built as quickly as possible, with wind turbines, geothermal technology, hydro, and solar where possible. Electric cars should be phased in immediately charged by zero emission electricity over the next15 years. If we are really in a race for our lives, all countries needs must be addressed. America’s CO2 output has gone up less than 2% since 1980, far less than our population growth. If other countries don’t improve, its like America bailing out a sinking ship with a Dixie cup. CO2 is a world problem. The Paris deal permitted the worst polluters to raise their pollution for years before leveling off and reducing pollution. Unacceptable if we have so few years left.
It’s either worldwide now, or we lower our standard of living dramatically, and demand the other countries do the same, if you believe the word is really ending in the next 15 to 50 years, there is no other choice.
1
Supposedly climate science is "settled". We should all accept that scientists tell us. This article worries that it is not settled and that the warming may be worse than forecast. What the article fails to say is that the thing about "unsettled science" is that it can be wrong both in degree and in direction. We'd do a lot better to say what we can see and measure. Those are facts. We can only guess what the measurements will be in years to come.be honest about that.
2
Mr. Linden may have "written widely about climate change", but what's that got to do with his premise, or the headline some Times opinion editor chose?
I prefer seeing what the scientists discover and put out for the world to see and review, and prefer to see how the discoveries and predictions hold up to scrutiny and the ongoing accumulation of evidence.
For example, Dr. James Hansen presented important testimony to US Congress in 1988, about what we could expect over the next few decades, based on which of different emissions trajectories came to pass. His projections were pretty much in line with the actual path of greenhouse emissions (especially when factoring in the reduction in CFCs the Montreal Protocol accomplished)
Here is a review of a scientist's outline of where things were going, as reviewed by practicing scientists.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/06/30-years-after-hansens-testimony/
1
"Civilization exists by geological consent--subject to change without notice." - Will Durant
2
The problem has been that scientists are paid by governments which are manipulated by plutocrats, most of them part of the establishment... And the establishment is fossil fuel plutocracy dependent (say, Wall Street, as an example).
So scientists didn't want to bite the hand that feed them. And this is still true.
The real truth is that the giant masses of ice of Antarctica will melt with a warming of just a few more degrees. I have explained the exact mechanism in essays on my site, in great details, for more than a decade. The reason is that half Antarctica is under water... And the densest water is at 4 degrees Centigrade (roughly 40 Fahrenheit)... Thus a hyper catastrophic melting is entirely possible... Millennia before what the old, baseless, "scientific" analyses pretended. Also a serious diminution of the oxygen content of the atmosphere, ridiculed by well-fed scientists, is actually entirely possible under very plausible (yet complex) scenarios. And so on.
The plutocracy which rules over us is mostly fossil-fuel based. Any plutocracy knows that it needs to control the minds. Nowadays this means controlling the scientists. The gross attack, "climate denier" style, are there only to confuse us.
The real danger is the subtle disinformation that the situation is not dire, that we have time, it's a question of the grandchildren. I have lived in smoke for weeks on end in the tech metropolis of the San Francisco: the burning climate catastrophe is upon us now.
5
@Patrice Ayme
One can worry you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater when proclaiming all research is manipulated....
If all is manipulated.... following your though.... so are the ideas your views are based on.
To me, unlike many others who commented here, the author did not criticizes scientists. The author, by pointing how much underreported the climate change was in the past, made me aware that maybe the present reporting may also be low in estimates. And it may mean a catastrophe for the life as we know it. Science is an ongoing investigation.
The other thought: the reporting on Changing Estimates of Sea Level Rise by 2100 from the graph show the lowest projections shown roughly around recession time. This should be another warning for us in the future when we have a recession- "the recession bias" - a reporting skewed for future being represented as more optimistic.
3
One problem, from the sociology of knowledge, is the changing position of the natural sciences. In the early days, the idea the earth rotated around the sun was blasphemous - religion held sway. But discoveries continued to be made so that even one branch of social science, economics, started to have 'physics envy'. Economics mainly clings to still-fictitious 'laws' while the natural sciences became more self-conscious; unfortunately they also turned to funding requiring commercial usefulness. So, it's been a hard ask, when confronted with global warming, to discover commercially unwanted evidence and publish that. I congratulate them for their work. The nay-sayers are like the religious bodies that burned those early scientists. Now we'll all burn from these powerful groups, and their side-kicks. They also rule in Australia where our native flora and fauna are dying by the hour, at present. California likewise.
6
"Hurricane" Sandy was not a hurricane. Winds never reached the required speed.
Superstorm Sandy was a fluke storm. Because of a very unusual weather pattern that was not caused by "climate change" it curved to the west. And it happened to arrive at high tide during a full moon. It was a million to one shot. Had it arrived at low tide, it would not have been a big deal.
As for the Houston storm, it was blocked by a high pressure system to the west. The high pressure system was not caused by "climate change."
And you wonder why there are so many skeptics.
1
@Erik. Both the westward steering pattern that steered Sandy, and the high pressure that blocked Hurricane Harvey are phenomenon associated with climate change.
"you wonder why there are so many skeptics" I just think there are a lot of people out there who have been given license by the fossil fuel corporations to loudly vocalize opinions that are uninformed.
13
@Erik
Ignore at the risk of the planet. As this article says, climate change is coming faster than predicted. The head in the sand approach will hurt us.
@Erik So, to resume your reasoning, all these catastrophic events coming together a few years apart are just due to bad luck? When such a string defies statistics, it may be wise looking past “just bad luck”, don’t you think so?
1
I have understood about the warming climate since the early 1960's in chemistry classes where I learned about the properties of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gasses. For my entire life I have tried to live conservatively with all the usual recycling, more efficient cars, appliances and light bulbs, lower thermostats, or higher with air conditioning. All for naught. Preventing further degradation of the planet is not a solo sport. It requires massive intervention by large social entities, i.e. government. Don't blame the scientists. That's the trouble with science, you don't have to believe it for it to be true. Our profligate misuse of our earth's resources is going to kill us all sooner or later. I always thought it would be a supernova, and in a way , it seems it will be.
16
The number 1 priority for the Democratic presidential candidates ought to be to have a Green New Deal. It doesn't have to be as radical as they said. But the name ought to be there. Unlike Medicare for All, there will be greater public support for it. Whatever that achieved, should be adopted.
6
@A.G. I'm not so sure why you consider free medical care so bad. Is it because the word socialized characterizes who pays for it? It's good enough for western Europe and Canada.No one lives in fear of losing their entire life savings. Social Security in the USA is a socialized service. It's a true safety net for the downtrodden...yet both take a fair distribution of taxes....taken from the rich and poor according to their ability.
Scientists have got it wrong more times than they've got it right. Coffee, red meat and salt could kill us..It seems they've changed their collective minds. Fat made us fat..Sugar was great....hmmmmmm????
1
This article says that climate scientist Wallace Broecker offered a theory that changes in ocean circulation could bring about sudden climate shifts like the Younger Dryas – a few decades of a fast cool down after a long warming trend and 1300 years later a few decades of a fast warming (if I understood correctly). Maybe it will be our fate that as ocean currents change from all the freshwater melting into the oceans our current warming will be stopped by a sudden cooling. Whatever, fossil fuels, being the cause of our warming, need to go.
What exactly are Mr. Linden’s scientific credentials with regard to Earth sciences in general and climatology in particular? As a geological scientist myself who conducts research in related fields and teaches university courses that include the subject of climate change I am surprised that I have never read or even seen a technical paper authored by him on this subject. A search of google scholar turns up only a few articles having to do with sociology and the development of language. He had hardly “written widely about climate change”.
3
@JMG
He is telling you what the scientists who study it are saying, that ignoring climate change is going to hurt us. And so far the evidence shows that the experts are way on the conservative side and they are wrong on that since climate change is happening faster.
2
You’re point is exactly correct Mr. Linden, and we’ll documented here. I also addressed the issue almost seven years ago in “Climate Disruption: Are We Beyond the Worst Case Scenario?” (Global Policy Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013, London School of Economics and Political Science, doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2012.00193.x). Although it got some attention, it’s mostly been crickets. While there are structural problems that have limited scientists, such as the conservative approaches needed in order to get a manuscript accepted, there are also more particular large problems. For example, the limitations of using ensembles of climate models when projecting biotic responses to future climates. This was articulated in the paper “Climate change and ecosystem composition across large landscapes.” (Landscape Ecology, 2017, Vol. 32:195–207, DOI 10.1007 s10980-016-0435). Legitimate as this issue is, it has been eclipsed by the powerful and successful efforts of industry to persuade our political leaders and their followers that climate change is not a valid problem, that scientists are only making it up to generate more grant money, etc. Thank you for your article.
8
There is no catastrophic man made warming as this opinion piece tries to scare its readers. We're only at around 400 parts per million carbon well within the norm despite all the fear mongering coming from the pseudo scientists and so called "experts". Plants need CO2 to thrive, more of it means more plant growth and more people can be fed worldwide.
An extreme example of too much carbon in the atmosphere would be Planet Venus, where CO2 comprises 96% compared to the Earth's paltry 0.04%.
Most of the media-driven hysteria and climate-science research on temperature has focused on the recent record: just 250 years for thermometers and the past 50 years for satellites. And, as with CO2 reporting, a focus only on these relatively short time spans tends to provide skewed interpretation of the data.
For example, if you were to look at the data going back from decades to hundreds of millions of years you would see that the Earth has gone through periods of much higher CO2 concentrations with ZERO man made CO2 emitted. Around 600 million years ago there was no man made industry emitting carbon, yet the CO2 concentration was way higher at around 8000 ppm! This shows that natural processes such as Sun spot activity and the movement of the solar system through the galactic plane determines temperature, not humans.
2
@JE - yes, in the past, when humans weren't emitting the CO2 - when we couldn't be blamed - increases in greenhouse gases warmed the planet and changed climate patterns. The hottest times in the past (and the sun was dimmer in the past) were during times of higher greenhouse gas concentrations. That's because greenhouse gases slow the escape of heat back out to space - trivially easy to show in any science class.
Decreases in greenhouse gas concentrations, again, when we weren't around, led to cooling, with resulting dryer air, reduced precipitation and reduced plant growth, and more ice on the surface.
So thanks for the reminder that even when it isn't us emitting the CO2, CO2 has powerful effects on climate.
Humans don't determine temperature. The warming we're experiencing now, the sea-level rise, the acidification of lakes and oceans, the shifts in weather patterns, all would be happening just the same if the CO2 was from some source other than our fossil fuel use.
So nature's being nature. It's just humans who might feel responsibility just because this time all that new greenhouse gas IS FROM US.
10
@b fagan Yes, but the amount of carbon that humans are emitting is minuscule compared to the much higher concentrations of carbon around 2000 to 8000 ppm of the past. In fact we could use more carbon in the atmosphere, as plants and vegetation love it, at around 400 ppm today we're only were well below a half full gas tank.
@JE Actually it is not minuscule at all considering that at present levels the temps were higher than today, but they are catching up.
If plants loved CO2 as much as you say, there would be no gain inCO2 levels, the plants would absorb it. However, that is not happening. The plants are not using the excess CO2. Which blows that false theory to bits.
4
The fact that climate change was predicted over 40 years ago, based on by CO2 emissions, provides evidence that the science is correct. If the cause was "natural variation", then those predictions could not have been made as we have no means of measuring natural variation, let alone predicting it. Everything has a cause and most scientists' best efforts have determined that the primary cause of climate change is man-made emissions.
Many science doubters once disbelieved that there was any such a thing as climate change. We are now seeing them start to realise that it is true, although they still apportion the blame to "natural variation". I think this will change over time as they become more uncomfortable with denying the obvious.
The science doubters seem to believe we should just accept our fate and do nothing. If a large meteor were on a collision course with earth, I'm sure they would want scientists to identify ways to avoid the collision. So, it mystifies me why an intelligent person would want to ignore such a climate related threat to our wellbeing regardless of the cause. We have used our best efforts to identify the cause, let's follow through with prevention.
9
The gist of this article is that scientists made predictions about the global climate, 25 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago--which turned out to be "so wrong." In any other scientific field, this would spell disaster for a theory.
And what grounds are there for the layman to believe that the scientists have it right now? Isn't this article just fuel for the climate change doubters among us?
We should note for the record that Linden is _not_ a scientist, and may not have a good understanding of how science works. And I suspect that climate scientists are not exactly happy about his sensationalism, and his (possibly unintentional) sowing of doubt about their science.
5
@Robert
Scientists tend to be conservative in what they announce. The fact is that their conservatism has been too low, and they are realizing their conservative predictions are wrong, which is why they are warning us that things are worse than they thought.
Blaming the reporter for their low ball estimates, means that people like you can't accept the truth.
3
@Robert
Why believe them? Because they developed more data, more data collection sources, and new tools to collect data resulting in a modification of projections. So they are being honest and forthright about what they are finding and alerting us all to something that impacts our welfare.
2
Nope.
The point is that the science, as best understood, lowballed the consequences of what we’ve been doing for the last two centuries.
My own addendum would be that the state of scientific literacy isnot everything one might wish it to be, by which I mean to say that at beat, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Let me put this plainly: we’re in a heap of trouble, more than we thought. And having elected a greedy fool, we haven’t helped matters one little bit.
I really like your history of scientific thought. My colleague, the late Dr. James Powell and I have been have been writing about global warming for decades and have not achieved the clarity that you have with this piece. you have effectively defined the challenge.
Considering the economic, social, political, and scientific, challenge James Powell and I concluded that must MOBILIZE the international science and engineering community and the capital of the World ( a large portion in the assets of U.S. citizens) to do a few things on a global SCALE to enable the survival of humanity and it to enjoy the trajectory of our standard of living and life expectancy that we achieved with the creative use of fossil fuels.
For humanity to survive we need 3 "arks" , which are within our technological grasp but yet to be developed and implemented at global SCALE.
(1) Technologies that can capture and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, large industrial installations and smaller HVAC systems that control the climate in our homes and businesses. There are several alternatives that can be competed.
(2) Very cheap electricity that can be achieved with beamed space solar power launched by very cheap Maglev launched payload.
Cheap electricity will displace the global market for fossil fuels for electricity and transportation. (We probably will make jet fuel from air and water).
(3) Ocean thermal energy to desalinate billions of gallons of water for populations and farms.
3
@james jordan
China is working on space solar and recently I saw an announcement that the Air Force has awarded a contract for developing a beam transmitting solar satellite to Northrop Grumman. Powell describes this system in his books "Spaceship Earth, How Long Before We Crash?" and in "Silent Earth, Will Humans Give Up Fossil Fuels?"
I am working on a paper to describe how the enormous number of people who will be dislocated by the shift away from fossil fuels. It is not an easy problem to solve but I am confident that very, very cheap electricity, about 2 cents per kilowatthour, will make the problem of total electrification of the World economy much easier.
President Trump has a following from members of the fossil fuel economy. Lots of families are anxious about their future, BUT he has made a huge mistake in not recognizing the potential economic benefits of electric transport and more versatile and more efficient photoelectric materials for production of energy that could create a whole new generation of competitive jobs based on a post fossil fuel global economy.
E.G., studies on the logistics of the United States and the World show that goods and passengers delivered at 300 mph, all weather, zero-emissions, efficient electricity powered on James Powell and Gordon Danby's superconducting Maglev transport technology can complement our existing highway and rail systems by adapting them to the rights-of-way of our existing systems. Japan has proven the system.
1
@james jordan
300 kilometers an hour. Not miles. I took the maglev in China and it was impressive, but not as fast as you think.
Still, even at 185 mph, it’s got a lot else beat for trips of less than 1,000 miles.
1
@David Weber
Thanks for reading my comment.
David, the Superconducting Maglev in Japan holds the World record for 371 mph. This system was invented by the late James Powell and Gordon Danby. Our government almost developed this system which carries both passengers and fully-loaded trucks, see www.magneticglide.com for the concept but it was resisted by the transport industry led by the airlines. It was a huge mistake. We wrote a book about the whole sad story, The Fight for Maglev. SC Maglev can go any speed in a vacuum because it is riding an Alternating Current wave and the frequency can be increased easily. This capability is the basis for the spaceship launch system which transports the spacecraft in a tube to release from a high mountain top where the air is less dense. This kind of launch is less than 1% of conventional rocket launch.
3
It is pretty clear now that human population will decline precipitously in the next century or two. Arable land will continue to shrink even as human population increases. Extreme weather variability will reduce crop yields even from land that remains productive. Crop failures, and the famines that follow them, will be annual events, much quicker than steady relentless warming.
6
@Charles Tiege
It’s the water that will cause the worst upheavals. When water cycles are interrupted or even disrupted in heavily populated areas there will be massive displacement of those populations.
4
The blame game makes no sense in this context. Scientists are right in the underlying postulate that humans are contributing to the present climate change. The speed of the change is something that would be impossible to predict with the number of variable involved. Even if they had been closer, would that have made any difference to the deniers?
No.
Fires around the globe destroying carbon dioxide scrubbing forests and releasing more carbon dioxide into the air. Methane releases from thawing permafrost and melting methane solids in the deep arctic. Mass migrations related to war and drought are starting.
The earth is starting to cull the humans from its surface so life can continue on the planet.
How will we respond? The troglodyte republicans continue to deny and burn fossil fuels. China, India, russia are all increasing fossil fuel consumption.
Perhaps the few remaining humans will be able to put together a sustainable culture. We will not.
10
@kirk How is the "earth starting to cull humans"? The human population keeps increasing. 7.5 billion at last count. Deaths attributed to extreme weather are minuscule. Humans are like rats--resilient and very hard to kill.
This article discusses the consequences of global warming. It predicts a rise in global temperatures of 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
Before that happens much of the equatorial region of the earth will become uninhabitable for large periods each year. There may be hundreds of millions of deaths.
The reason for global warming? Scientists are afraid to say it, but it's population growth. In 1798, when Malthus published his warnings about population growth, the earth's population was less than one billion. That's probably not enough to cause global warming, if we took sensible precautions to limit pollution.
Since the book "the Limits to Growth" appeared in 1972 world population has doubled again to 7.7 billion. Our puny efforts to shift to solar energy are now swamped by population growth---population growth drives world usage of oil up every year!
Trump is in denial about global warming. But many Democrats are in denial about population growth.
Thus they argue for open borders. But the population of Guatemala has quadrupled since 1960. And the population of Africa is projected to DOUBLE AGAIN by 2050.
There is NO SOLUTION to global warming without achieving zero population growth. In Guatemala and in Africa.
China introduced a one-child policy in 1979. Joe Biden visited China as Vice President and lectured the Chinese on how repugnant this one-child policy was.
This illustrates how out of touch Biden is with what needs to be done for survival of humans.
8
@Jake Wagner
I note a number of comments deriding Democrats for not addressing population growth effectively but as a lifelong Democrat I have supported Planned Parenthood with time money and advocacy since it first got to Venice in the 1970’s.
6
@Blank - the population blamers like Jake have a curious myopia when it comes to dealing with the actual problems human actions cause, particularly problems here that we have jurisdiction to address.
Individuals in developing nations emit far less greenhouse gases than Americans do. And America's outsized contribution (third most populous nation and high individual carbon footprint), means we have an outsize need to fix our own contributions.
Blaming of Democrats is typical, too. I never see them point out that it's the far right that is cutting off US aid to developing nations for the family planning and birth control access that Democrats support. I never see them mention actual UN programs for family planning that are making a difference (especially when the conservative right doesn't block aid to such programs).
I never see them mention the fact that the US can actually pass laws to deal with our outsized per-capita emissions, and never see them discuss the simple fact that there's no world government that can tell anyone "stop having children"
They prefer mentioning something that we can't actually address here, and leave the rest to others.
1
Scientists didn't get the basic ideas wrong, but the details were not seen clearly at first.
For thousands of years, new technology has seemed to be the answer to all problems. At a given level of technology, population growth leads to hunger, famine, disease. But new technology, such as indoor plumbing, electricity, use of oil, made higher standards possible for a while, leading to yet further growth.
Wars were a temporary means of dealing with excess births. Peaceful periods of stability were often followed by more violent "dark ages." One started in 1077 BC when Egypt was invaded by the "sea peoples." Another came after the fall of Rome. This story kept repeating. After periods of privation, new technology would allow yet further growth.
World War II cost between 70 and 85 million lives. So we tried to outlaw war, our earlier means of dealing with too many births.
At this point we should have turned to birth control. But religious zealots said contraception is sinful and abortion is murder.
In 1972, the book "Limits to Growth" appeared. It explained that if it was difficult to predict HOW population growth would end, it was nevertheless certain that it MUST end. That there would likely be a period of "overshoot and collapse" in which population exceeded carrying capacity for a while.
We have refused to even discuss policies which limit family size.
So now we face the alternative: a die-off driven by global warming.
4
It is not possible for one person, even a scientist, to fully understand everything needed to fully deal with this issue, so people in science work together as teams. We non-scientists have to decide who and what we want to believe, although with enough time and effort we can understand much.
People have different frameworks of thinking. Some religious people seem to believe they can contain God in their imagination so well that they can foresee what God will do or allow to happen. Folly. Other religious people have learned to accept that religious traditions can teach important things about being human, but that a scientific approach is needed to understand the working of the material world. Fossil fuel and financial interests and politicians that benefit from ignorance are all to willing to spread falsehoods (this has happened much) to enable continued benefits for themselves. Likely many of us find it hard to face the severity of the problem and the necessity to give up much of the lifestyle we know. But if what the scientists are telling us is true, the human race has a very difficult time coming. We should all follow their advice to reduce the damage the environment (our entire ecosystem-world) as quickly as possible. This should be done as quickly as possible. Fast action should be our priority. We can no longer continue to imagine the world will be like we remember from our childhood.
3
I find it especially ironic that Jane Fonda of all people is now an SJW for climate change.
She was an SJW in the 1980s against nuclear power, the one technology that could have replaced coal.
10
@David Weber
Nuclear power is as dirty as coal. We don't have the safe areas to deal with nuclear waste. Instead it piles up in unsafe containment areas.
Who wants radioactive material in their backyard for thousands of years?
I don't understand why this article is blaming scientists. What is the message being conveyed? According to this writer, scientists are somehow solely to blame for the predicament we are in today. Really?
What about the polluters? The climate deniers? The greedy oligarchs of the capitalist system? Do they not share some blame for the impending climate upheavals?
An unhelpful and divisive contribution in the search for solutions to the climate crisis.
5
The frantic and manic promotion of global warming is being done in parallel with the push of globalism. Powerful companies and elitists want to rule the world with the UN as the governing body. The so called climate change is not about saving the planet but about absolute control over the serfs. No more cows? Carbon neutral in 10 years means walking and dying. Just how in the heck do these so called experts declare themselves our rulers?
2
@Jon Galt -- Oh, boy! "Jon Galt" and claiming to be from Texas, too. Thanks for the laugh.
Three consecutive 500-year floods in Houston between 2015 and 2017 and you think it's a global conspiracy. Are you a developer, or invested in petroleum?
Texas now gets about 16% of its electricity from wind. Expect that to keep increasing each year. Oklahoma gets over 31% of their power from wind. Kansas gets over 35%. Iowa gets over 30%. How many UN mind-control troops came in to do that?
Or maybe the power purchase agreements for wind and solar are now cheaper than coal and threatening long-term costs of combined cycle gas plants?
"Powerful companies" is the funniest part. ExxonMobil (more revenue in 2018 than any US company besides WalMart) was told by their own researchers decades ago that fossil fuel use would result in significant warming and changes to global climate.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
Their management and the rest of the American Petroleum Institute decide to respond. By funding disinformation.
The addiction to fossil fuel is coming to an end, "Jon". The world will be better off when Iran and Saudi Arabia don't have so much cash to use for mischief, and when Russia (and parts of the US, Canada and Australia) have to figure out how they will make money based on what's in their brains rather than what we need to leave underground.
5
Scientists aren't so much to blame...I know one high school science teacher who started moaning about climate change, global warming, in the early 1970s, and she says she was far from first nor the only one.
The last five or ten years I have been observing to people what happens in a simple acceleration curve, was for me in 1970 8th grade math.
4
The "“perceived need for consensus?” Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in 1962, said:
“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.”
In the case of climate change these scientists either did not know what the world was like or were scared of politicians who most definitely did not know what the world looked like. Well, no worry about that shortcoming fellas. That world is now crashing at your door. Or maybe it's fake news. Fake hurricanes, fake tornados, fake monsoons, fake sea level measurements. So here's the question you have to ask yourself (hats off to Dirty Harry Callahan): "Do you feel lucky?"
3
Thanks to cripes somebody besides me noticed Kuhn. And I say this as a student of Dr. Sayvetz.
3
The world's superpower had a president who refuses to take any steps to obviate Climate Change because he's invested in the fossil fuel industry whose support he needs.
Neil De Grasse Tyson recently said that there's no more room on the planet for any more children because the planet can't feed more than now exist. While that's likely true people aren't going to stop having children.
Wars over food will occur in the near future as millions starve in 3rd World Countries first, particularly India where weather is causing enormous problems for farming, but then to other countries as well.
Humans are destroying the planet and the world continues to ignore the obvious.
The greed associated with allowing the planet to die by doing nothing to make more money is particularly egregious and if unabated will kill us all.
3
We somehow have to convince people who are too willing to believe special interest group propaganda over scientific fact. That may be hard when millions of people believe humans co existed with dinosaurs and watch Fox News, particularly at night.
6
'Dr. Jonathan Foley
@GlobalEcoGuy
I appreciate the author is trying to bring more attention to the issue of climate change, but he got most of it wrong.
No, scientists have not gotten it “so wrong”. In fact, the planet is warming as predicted — even by models built in the 1980s and 90s.'
https://twitter.com/GlobalEcoGuy/status/1193246472675811328?s=20
8
How this Opinion piece got it all so wrong. Mr. Linden and his fellow climate alarmists cherry pick data and rely on fraudulent computer models to get the outcome they desire: A public in fear of a climate apocalypse, who will do anything to "save the environment" including supporting massive (in the billions) population reduction, aka eco genocide, lower standards of living, ie. lower more primitive forms of "green" energy such as wind mills, solar, etc., expensive, less energy dense and less efficient unaffordable "green" energy. Just look at Denmark and Sweden, 2 European countries that rely heavily on "green" energy, their populations pay some of the highest electricity rates in the world. Just so a few special interests can benefit, such as the speculators on Wall Street and other elites who hate humanity and want to see it reduced so it's easier to manage.
Mr. Linden and company won't even support nuclear energy which generates zero carbon and is far superior in terms of efficiency and energy flux density. So, now we're left with taking civilization back to the stone age, but it's all for a good cause based on their population reduction agenda, oops er, their so called "science".
And no, I don't work for the fossil fuel industry.
1
@JE, I'm glad you included that last paragraph.
Solar and wind are both cheaper than nuclear energy, which is why these renewable sources are growing more quickly. These aren't "primitive" sources--they're efficient, affordable, and reliable.
What is a "climate alarmist?" Is that the same thing as a climate scientist? Climate scientists never cherry=pick data because they wouldn't publish or retain their positions. Those climate models are quite good at predicting long-term trends.
I haven't heard anyone supporting eco-genocide, so I'm pretty sure that's a red herring. You do sound pretty fearful; there's nothing to fear in new technology. Our way of life isn't impacted by using fuel-efficient cars or renewable energy.
There is a climate crisis, however, and it will impact your way of life unless we address it.
12
@JE - golly, JE, you need to look at current data. You also have to document for us some supposed idea that Mr. Linden "and company" don't support nuclear energy.
Dr. James Hansen, after making some pretty accurate predictions in the 1980s about where temperatures would be heading, has become annoyingly supportive of nuclear - to the point where an organization he's part of is fighting as much against cheaper, faster-to-deploy wind and solar as against fossil fuels.
So you tell us where the polling data is that shows people who are interested in fighting against climate change are uniformly anti-nuclear.
I think we need to promote non-fossil energy, efficiency, demand management and more to reduce use of fossil fuels - and I include a desire to see all well-run nuclear plants currently in operation to stay in operation as long as it's safe to run them. By safe, I mean no leaking radioactive fluids, I mean reactors running with a steady supply of cooling water that's still cool. That second requirement is increasingly problematic for some nuclear (and coal) plants as warming continues.
But new nuclear is far slower to deploy than inexpensive wind and increasingly affordable solar. Wind is now pretty much the cheapest source of new power in much of the US, and solar and storage is also dropping in costs. Nuclear - even the promised next generation small reactors - have to prove themselves as effective AND affordable compared to wind and sunlight.
5
@b fagan Wind and solar require a ton of precious metals to mine to manufacture their components thus destroying the "fragile" planet and environment. They also require a lot more land compared to an advanced nuclear plants. The windmills kills tons of birds. Also, wind and solar are more expensive and inefficient because the wind doesn't always blow nor the sun always shine.
1
I didn’t know there was so many climate scientists.
When I was in college taking science courses I had never heard of one. Have they proliferated since the 1980s? I have still yet to meet a climate scientist, either personally or professionally—despite traveling in circles with other kinds of scientists.
Just saying.
I don’t discount your writer’s warning.
BTW The USA emits about the same amount of greenhouse gas as it did 20 years ago—even though its production has roughly doubled since then.
You need to look to China and India for the major source of the problem.
2
@David Weber, the U.S. is the major source of greenhouse gases. In recent years China has surpassed the U.S. in annual output of greenhouse gases, but China is aggressively addressing the problem. India's contribution is negligible.
We need to address our own problem in cooperation with the rest of the world. That's why Obama's climate agreement with China was so important, and why the Paris Climate Accord is essential.
7
As a (non-climate) scientist, I have a few bones to pick with this article. Yes, climate change is real, and will have profound effects over the coming centuries. But this article does a disservice by too frequently conflate weather and climate - doing this sort of things just gives the denialists more straw men to pick at.
Harvey and Sandy were epic distasters because of the way they moved(or in Harvey's case, didn't move) more than global warming.
Increased severity of droughts and floods *will* occur going forward as the planet warms - that's pretty straightforward physics(higher termperatures = increased moisture turnover). Coming with the shift in global temperatures will be a shift in agricultural viability - some areas will become less productive because they're hotter/drier. If we're lucky, others may become more productive with a longer growing season.
Still, all this talk of global warling-induced natural disasters misses the forest for the trees. While rising sea levels and hurricanes will be a threat to coastal cities, the real threat to humanity is agricultural disruption limiting our ability to feed a still-growing world population, as well as dwindling water supplies in drier parts of the world.
If you think the current state of global affairs is bad, just wait and see what happens when a progressively larger slice of the world doesn't have access to stable water supplies.
5
@John
No one mentions that when civilizations collapse it happens quickly. And it has happened before usually due to multiple factors but no fresh water really ramps up the speed of collapse. Dispersal and hunting and gathering is the fall back btw. Dust off your bow hunting skills.
1
Mostly nonsense. Look at the temperature record---the climate has been warming, somewhat irregularly, for more than a century. It's not a crisis.
Writers like this one don't appreciate how variable is weather, both in time and space. There is always a record-breaking drought, or flood, or heat wave somewhere. It doesn't mean that climate is suddenly changing rapidly.
Floods comparable to Sandy's occurred in New York in 1802 and 1820. Of course, there were no subways to flood, and the records aren't precise so it's hard to make the comparison quantitative. Sea level is rising about 1 foot per century, or 0.12 inches per year. So when we learn that a single heat wave raised sea level by 0.02 inches that doesn't change the picture. How many heat waves does it take to make a summer?
Calm down everybody! Hysteria sells papers and clicks, but should not be taken seriously. And remember that, with or without climate change, only a fool builds at low elevation on a hurricane coast (that includes New York). It's easy to ignore risks until reality bites, but they have been there all along.
4
@Jonathan Katz, I wish that climate deniers could come up with some original material. It's always the same old, same old-- state the obvious (climate has always been changing), toss in a few dubious anecdotes about past disasters, then pat everyone on the head and tell them to calm down and be good boys and girls.
Instead of frequenting denier sites, I urge you to read the summary of the latest IPCC report. Another good source is NOAA. Your children and grandchildren will appreciate your efforts.
14
The fact is that during Ice Ages the climate is very much more unstable than it is during Inter-glacial periods. Maybe 90% of the time the earth has been in the ice age part of the cycle. . The calm period we experience during the interglacial periods is the way things are only 10% of the time. It seems obvious then that normal means much more unstable weather. The sudden addition of so much CO2 to the atmosphere has to upset the delicate balance that has existed for calm interglacial periods. We can therefor expect to have the climate to be knocked out of the precarious calm paradigm of our interglacial period and become much more erratic. There used to be only 10 or 15 of what are considered to be extreme weather events a year. Now there are easily over a hundred and sometimes over 200.
People may think that ice ages only made life precarious because of cold weather but that only part of the truth. Even the equatorial regions had such unstable weather so as to make life tough for pre civilization people. It appears that at one point the cradle of life in Africa had such extreme long drought that the only survivors of our ancestors managed to live along the shore of South Africa. There seem to have been only a few thousand of them.
Modern technology may save us from that extremity but not without some real problems.
1
After reading the article, and then reading the comments, I had to read it again. I don’t see any fault in what the scientists have done and their actions, in fact it’s exemplary. I remember taking first year physics in the late 70’s and the professors reviewing what were recent papers regarding greenhouse warming. The professors reviewed the basic physics and how radiant heat transfer from the earth was affected by carbon dioxide. Obviously it generated a lot of discussion, but at the time, while warming was a certainty, no one knew what the impact on climate would be. Would cloud cover increase to mitigate the heating, would snowfall increase or decrease and increase/decrease the amount of polar ice, were there feedback mechanisms. At the time there was uncertainty as to how long fossil fuels would last - no one seriously thought in 1977 - that oil production would be higher 40 yrs in the future. In the last forty years, scientists have reduced these uncertainties, yet the fundamental physics has not changed, increase atmospheric CO2 and the world gets warmer. The climate deniers dismiss the science because they have not precisely predicted the effects. It is like saying that because if at 18 I could not predict exactly who I would be at 60, that I would not be older.
9
Nobody can be sure exactly how fast climate change will occur. But whether it turns out to be faster or slower than current predictions we can be certain that it is extremely risky to keep burning fossil fuels for energy. That has been true at least for the last 25 years or so when scientists were able to conclude that negative feedback mechanisms involving clouds, increased vegetation from higher CO2 levels, etc, will not save us. There is nothing built into nature that can rescue humans from climate change caused from burning fossil fuels for energy.
3
"... we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit."
Not to quibble, but without a time frame this figure is nigh-meaningless.
2
@polymath "over the next 80 years," the piece says.
One is not a polymath because of saying one am a polymath. Also, learn to use dashes.
TO MR EUGENE LINDEN
And after all your research about climate change, Mr. Linden, would you not agree with the late Dr. Stephen Hawking, that it's too late in the game to expect environmental remediation, worldwide.
@Dusty Chaps, do you have a reliable source for your claim?
No, obviously it's not too late to address climate change. That seems to be the last refuge for deniers.
Right now, Denver had severe freeze and snow on October 1. Leaves were frozen on trees and vegetables not harvested were lost. Two snow storms since then. This is early and wet for Colorado. Ski Resorts are opening the earliest in memory and the drought to over in some sections of the state. This does not mean there is no climate warmning. I don't know what it means, if anything. However, I believe it is time for scientists to become regular commentators on TV weather news. For examle, warming in the Arctic may have influenced the jet stream and allowed for really cold weather in the lower 48. I don't know. But, every unusual weather event should be explained, as best as possible, by scientists to the general public. Those of us without advanced degrees cannot be expected to evaluate what is happening. The public needs to be educated.
6
I happen to possess more-advanced degrees than you, and also happen to be more acquainted with Colorado earlier.
Brieflyput, stop with the squid ink.
I think you are being pretty unfair to climate scientists. Science is about assembling evidence and facts, and that is a careful process. Yes, it can take awhile to change or modify a consensus viewpoint. Yes, scientists tend to be cautious and require extraordinary evidence to be convinced of extraordinary claims. Yes, the IPCC generally limits itself to saying what it can firmly back up with evidence. That’s how science works. But even so, there has been extraordinary agreement amongst climate scientists that global warming is a serious threat to humanity and they have been bringing that fact to the attention of all of us for the last 25+ years. Climate inaction isn’t due to climate scientists — it is due to all of the big oil and gas companies that wanted to keeping making the big bucks, and all of the politicians they bought off. It’s due to first world lifestyles that depend on endless extraction. It’s due to a system that puts endless economic growth over the well being of the planet. Put the blame where it really belongs, not on these hard-working professionals.
9
Many years ago, the UAH darlings of the denial sphere first interpreted the signals of the NOAA MSUs as showing that the atmosphere was cooling. Their peer-reviewed paper was ground-breaking in the use of these satellite data but contained errors that caused them to get the sign of the effect wrong. Prior to the discovery of the errors, the IPCC honored the scientific process by hedging its statement on warming because of UAH's peer reviewed conclusions. IPCC said that the 'preponderance of the evidence' showed warming because this erroneous data set showed cooling. After the UAH methods were corrected, the IPCC reported that warming was 'unequivocal' because all data sets showed it. IPCC followed the rules.
Recently Resplandy et al. made an error in their ground breaking study and the paper has been withdrawn. The fundamental finding, that geochemical signals indicate ocean warming, supports the temperature measurements made over the years. The math error that lead to the eventual retraction will be corrected and science will advance.
Linden used the uncorrected version of Resplandy et al to criticize 'scientists' for being too timid. He also cites Broeker's analysis from years ago to explain the extraordinary warm events of the last year. Linden probably confuses impacts on ocean currents with impacts on the jet stream. These are unfortunate errors and the criticism of 'scientists' and the IPCC is misplaced. He should criticize the liars in the GOP not the scientists.
Will deniers, and the evil corporations and think tanks who misled them, quietly slink away when blame looks for a home? When will we hold the deniers and the vile people who lied and profited from fueling denial accountable?
3
Too cold to grow a meaningful amount of oranges in Lake County Florida anymore.
Articles like this are doing more damage to humanity than climate change itself. Roger Pielke’s latest work completely severs the connection between climate change and extreme weather. In one graph he shows the global losses from weather as a percent of global GDP have actually decreased since 1970. Yes climate change is real, but it is not existential. Alarmist articles like this don’t bring clarity only confusion. We are listening to the wrong Swede. We should be listening to Bjorn Lomborg not Greta Thunberg.
5
@SJW51, why would you read a non-scientist in preference to a scientist about a scientific issue?
Please read what the climate scientists say. Read a summary of the latest IPCC report, or go to the NOAA web site. We need to start relying on the experts, not the dilettantes.
3
Worst headline ever. Science has progressed as technology and techniques have allowed them to. What's wrong is how this story has been buried and slimed by every interest group intent on extracting as much cash as possible from the earth before everyone else realizes they've been robbed. And their children have been robbed. And their grandchildren...
The only important issue in the upcoming election is: who is willing to tell the truth about global climate, largely caused by greedy human activity, and that ignoring this looming disaster is a crime against future humanity.
4
This kind of article begins to resemble the after-articles from people who sought to pretend that no one had ever spoken out against the Iraq War before it started.
As recently as five years ago, when I would talk to climate scientists about tipping points and catastrophes, they would say there are no critical points in climate. Many of us thought otherwise, but the reporters and decision makers would listen only to those with "Climate Scientist" as an official title, those of us who worked in related systems were not the right bona fides.
Now here we are, proving that if your discipline is, say, tipping points, maybe you know more than a climate scientist about what can happen when they tip.
I'm sorry, but, "we didn't know, and nobody saw this coming," was not correct for the Iraq War ("Everybody thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction") and it isn't true now for climate ("Everyone thought climate was a science of gradual change").
Maybe the movers, shakers, and watchers should be less worried about seeing a credential or a posh university position, and look to whether what people are saying makes sense.
The biggest thing to know about a tipping point is that in general, the probability of returning to status quo ante after tipping is negligible at best.
We never were only facing a couple of feet of sea level rise and a couple of degrees Celsius of warming. It just fit a narrative in which the human race survives and we can fix anything at a profit.
7
The author has a confused expectation of good science, and good scientists. As an example, the Greenland Ice record is a local, not hemispheric, signal. It is a blip on the global average, with little effect outside the North Atlantic region. Same thing goes for heat waves in one area, which are balaned out largely by cooler conditions elsewhere.
The "gold standard" in science is to limit your predictions to those your data supports at 95% confidence. Internally, some subdisciplines of climate-change science largely failed to adhere to that gold standard, up until the IPCC was convened. The IPCC recognized that the gold standard had to be applied equally to all data, regardless of subdiscipline tradition, to create the best global model forecasts. As a result of this process, many subdiscipline scientists cross-pollenated ideas and methods, markedly improving the quality of work they all are doing.
Many misconstue that a forcasted 1 degree of global warming will cause the area where they live to experience a 1 degree rise in temperature. As the Editorial chronicles, that's wrong. Your area's temperature may rise less, or far more. Climate scientists do not know yet how the Earth will look once a new steady-state of climate is achieved, and what temperatures at any one location will be. What we do know is that a steady state will take hundreds of years to achieve, even if humans ceased all carbon emissions today.
4
Climate scientists have been scientific. They have said what they cannot falsify . And they have correctly given best and worse scenarios. All of what some of us have been saying for years is simply no longer able to be ignored .
Negative population growth, 100 percent renewables. Immigration control (to not socialize the population consequences).
3
Climate scientists have been getting it RIGHT. Intergovernmental reports (IPCC) are conservative by definition: they are consensus judgments. And it's not like IPCC has suggested we put up our collective feet! Unbelievable that, after all these years, we're starting to see *these* headlines.
6
Most scientists and virtually all climate scientists are acutely aware of tipping points and extreme events. I am not a climate scientist, but I knew very well the CO2 and the corresponding temperature curves tracking each other 30 years ago. We all knew it was happening and when certain things happen, like the melting of the ice, it is autocatalytic, i.e., the underlying rock soaks up the heat from the sun and if/when it snows it just melts. It may take a million years for some other extreme event, such as a giant volcanic eruption, before the snow and ice returns. I find it incredible that you blame the scientists, when they have been telling you that this is going to happen for 30 years, and of course we knew it could be very sudden. If you want to lay blame, why not look at yourself or at all of the fossil fuel enthusiast who want to make their money before the catastrophic tipping point is here. Please put the blame where it belongs.
5
The under estimation of the scientists projections is of major concern. When your worst case scenario becomes an alarmingly increasing occurrence, its obvious we need to act now.
3
It is indeed grim but I predict it won't be solved to any significant degree in a timely manner. We are far too tribal and suspicious of each other to all join hands and make the sort of sacrifices that would be necessary. We want to blame the oil companies but really they are just meeting the demand of all of us for more fuel, and that demand is increasing every day. China and India are building new coal fired plants, developing countries don't want to make sacrifices to bail out the rich countries who mostly created this problem, and most Americans do not seem ready to give up their gas guzzling cars. Our biggest obstacle to solving AGW is our own human nature.
2
Time to start paying people to capture and sequester carbon. Fortunately, mother nature figured out how to do it. Its called photosynthesis. Properly farming and grazing can sequester several tons of CO2 per acre per year. With almost 900 million acres of farmland in the US the potential is around 2 billion tons of CO2,
Were we to pay farmers and ranchers to do so, cost plus a modest profit, farmers would support the program even more than they do ethanol production. Further, Regenerative Ag, actually works.
3
Grim. Focus on the graphic what people know for a minute. 45% are ignorant of climate change; 17% get it right; and 36% are aware but don't know the science. What needs to happen is that the 36% need to be taught the science immediately in order that the urgency of addressing climate change NOW be known to them. In this process the 45% will also learn, and hopefully learn the urgency at the same time.
Don't depend on our politicians to do this. As you know they are mainly concerned with the polls and zeroing in on messaging to just 5 States. The urgency calls for changing Senators in ALL States that are represented by climate change deniers--those that are owned by the fossil fuel industry, including Senators from States that produce no oil.
Who's going to do this? You are, if it's going to happen. You've been very good at explaining why Trump and those around him are crooks. Now tell your readers about the science of climate change. Politicians won't run on this, unless there is public outcry--demand. You've seen how effective healthcare is as an issue. Climate change is an even more important issue.
The projected statistics: by 2100, 5.5' to 8.2' of sea level rise. But when the W. Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks off is an unknown. Potential 4-6' of sea level rise from this event. The geologic past shows the Laurentian ice melt went into the Atlantic all at once. This could also happen with the WAIS. Prudence is to act now towards an achievable zero emissions.
5
Even if something as dramatic and catastrophic as a state or city on either coast were to disappear into the ocean because of continual rising tides and water, there would still be individuals out there, clamoring that tragedy was not due to global warming, but merely Mother Nature readjusting and rearranging her global backyard.
7
There is nothing wrong with scientists moving forward cautiously and with near consensus.
BUT, the rest of us need to realize that the range of outcomes have always had an uncertainty that goes both ways. The most stupid (or cowardly) thing politicians have said is that they can't justify imposing costs for something that "might happen". But planning for public risks SHOULD be a major function of government. Even a very low probability of some of these outcomes should have led to more action.
And it is government action that's needed: more R&D, carbon taxes, and major investments in nuclear power while continuing growth in solar and wind. People worrying about their individual "carbon footprint" may actually be delaying action on real solutions.
2
You know, if we're going to talk about the wrongs committed by a group, we have to concentrate on the wrongs of the global warming deniers. Not scientists' mistakes but the deniers' willful ignorance has brought us to our present state. And not the deniers but the scientists will save us, if we care to listen to them. So a whole article dedicated to explaining how the climate change was underestimated by scientists seems grossly misguided. Are we running out things to write about?
7
Clearly I am late to this discussion and this comment will lkely disappear into the morass, but as a climate scientist I need to point out that 1) the author of this op-ed is not a scientist, and 2) much of what's here is either flat wrong or overstated in a hysterical tone. Scientists do not write like this for a good reason, and the NYT should not publish this kind of stuff.
Climate change is unfolding more or less exactly (depressingly) in accordance with projections. There have been no big surprises. We may get some eventually, especially in connection with clouds and precipitation, but to date nothing has been particularly remarkable.
Also, scientists are not responsible for the fact that economics projections are frequently wrong; economics is not a science. But even given that caveat I doubt there is strong enough evidence at present for anyone to make definitive statements about the economic impacts of climate change.
A core principle of science is to not make claims that are unsupported by evidence. People writing ABOUT science should follow the same principles.
14
Just because humans are dominant now... it remains to be seen if we are intelligent enough to remain that way.
3
Overpopulation must also be addressed.
Nature always wins.
4
So what? These consequences are not here, smacking us in the face and our leaders and society is still basically complacent. The corporate media and democratic "mainstream" electorate are still debating whether the next democratic nominee should be bold or willing to compromise with republicans. trump is willing to shut down government, throw caution to the wind, disregard any and all knowledge and expertise on any issue - all with nearly universal republican support - to tilt at windmills and pursue his personal enrichment. and Pelosi and Schumer still schlep up to the white house to "negotiate" with this tyrant (buffoon, narcissist, . . . who knows what the actual diagnosis is) and then pout when he pulls yet another of his tantrums. yes, democrats with control of the purse strings through control of the House should be willing to shut down the government to save the planet. if we're not willing to do that now that the we are actually experiencing the beginning of the end, who cares whether scientists should have been more bold in making predictions in the past? how could that have made a difference within our oligarchical political system??? compromise is not going to save the planet; an unremitting willingness and even desire to compromise just enables republicans to believe that the threat isn't that severe; after all why would the dems be so willing to compromise if the threat were really that severe when their mindset is don't compromise over the most trivial?
1
Humanity does appear to be in a lot of trouble, but when was it not? Human history is one story after another of people creating peril where there is none through idiotic, unnecessary behavior so full of cruelty that it sets the stage for the next disaster. It has only been in the last century that we’ve gotten technologically proficient enough to create havoc on a global scale. We haven’t changed and probably won’t because it isn’t profitable. I’d argue for a return to an old style recognition of the seven deadly sins they got us to this dreary place, but nobody paid any attention to them anyway. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “so it goes.”
1
People carry on about climate change, but they absolutely refuse to confront and take responsibility for the root cause.
What has the biggest environmental impact? Overpopulation.
THE PEOPLE COULD DO MORE to care for the planet than any government ever could, but they refuse to take responsibility, or even recognize simple mathematics.
If you are the biological parent of more than two children, you are, personally, contributing to population increase.
The world population has increased from about 3 billion in 1960 to almost 8 billion today (a doubling time of a little over 40 years, assuming exponential growth). US population has increased over the same time frame from about 179 million to almost 330 million (a doubling time of just over 60 years). Both India and China are getting close to 1.4 billion inhabitants, right now.
IMAGINE OUR CHILDREN LIVING IN A WORLD WITH 16 BILLION PEOPLE, and a U.S. with almost 700 million, and the devastation that infestation would cause to our planet.
God told his people to be fruitful and multiply. He didn't say infest the Earth to the point that no other of his creations could survive.
We must not only control our growth, but REDUCE our numbers.
9
Everyone is speaking here about the dire consequences of climate change, which are there for anyone to see if they truly care.
What could be more important for humanity than food? And what could be more devastated by climate change than food production? There is little new land to be farmed, so the crop yields are what matter.
What better source than the latest IPCC report.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/Fullreport-1.pdf
As you can see in the IPCC report on page 4, graph D: Agricultural production, the grain yields have increased by over 200% since 1960, worldwide. So for the same surface we now get three times more grains.
Not only that, but the crop yield growth continues steadily, with no sign of slowing down.
The crop yield growth is much faster than population growth, which is why in E, the prevalence of underweight has decreased by 40% since 1980.
The countries most affected by climate change are in Africa. Remember the endless famines in Ethiopia? Ethiopia has bumper crops and is now a net EXPORTER of grain.
Do you think that making a tripling and steady growth of crop yields and reduction in hunger,
do you think that making this look like a disaster of giant proportions, much worse that the worst predicted,
do you think that that is easy?
Or that making every US family willing to pay $200,000 ($500,000 for NYT readers) totaling $30 trillions, to stop this, is easy?
That is why we should all bow down to the immense talents of Mr. Linden.
2
@novoad
Nicely played.
But not exactly the point.
You say that crop yield growth continues "with no sign of slowing down"
You missed Section A2. "... Climate change, including increases in frequency and intensity of extremes, has adversely impacted food security and terrestrial ecosystems as well as contributed to desertification and land degradation in many regions (high confidence)..."
You missed Section 2 A .2 and A6.4 "...For food security, the transition from moderate to high risk occurs for global warming between 2.5°C and 3.5°C in SSP1 (medium confidence) and between 1.3°C and 1.7°C in SSP3 (medium confidence). The transition from high to very high risk occurs between 2°C and 2.7°C for SSP3 (medium confidence)..."
Warming will require the reinvention of agriculture since the strains that are showing increasing yields now do not do well at the warmer temperatures certain in the future due to continued emissions of GHGs (due to climate denial). Agriculture has been reinvented in the past. It may be harder to reinvent it in the warming world. Our children and grandchildren will see.
2
@James Wilson
Thank you for making my point. With a huge increase in emissions, according to the IPCC, crop yields are bigger than ever and growing. That is the measured reality. Previous places in famine have now bumper crops.
What you mention are PROJECTIONS. Of course that they point towards a disaster. The IPCC always points towards a disaster. Otherwise we wouldn't need an IPCC.
You, the IPCC, Linden and 11,000 self declared scientists view the tripling and continuous, steady growth of crop yields as a disaster.
What could be worse than famished people getting more food? This is a disaster which has to be stopped at any price by the US. That price means wrecking the US economy.
Why do these articles never mention the primary driver of climate change and the first thing that should be addressed: Overpopulation. There are simply too many people on the planet. The earth will provide a series of corrections until the population is under control again. It will be ugly, but the Earth and humanity will survive.
5
What's more embarrassing are all those college-educated voters out there denying the science in the first place. I'd say that Republicans should be ashamed of themselves, but they'll have much larger concerns than guilt in short order.
Just make sure they don't get to claim the high ground (morally or physically).
3
How is it possible to write an article on this topic without calling out the Koch brothers who have spent millions of dollars buying politicians and scientists and funding pr campaigns to deny climate change? Speaking of, can we chisel the Koch name from the fountains in front of the Metropolitan Museum already?
7
They got it wrong alright; that's why they gave up talking about "global warming". Of course, the climate is always changing so it becomes harder to sell their snake oil to people.
2
I remember a 1980 Walter Cronkite editorial on climate change:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9s0XyEctI
Scientists didn't get a wrong. They have been raising the alarm for 40 years. But big business and governments didn't want to make the hard choices - and money and power dictate the fate of our planet.
Now all we can do is rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic. I grieve for the fate of my son and the generations following him.
5
They didn’t “get it wrong.” They were pushed to be ultra conservative in what they claimed—and even then, when predicting even the most gradual changes, they were dismissed as alarmist.
6
The United States could have hardly picked a worse time in Earth’s history to elect a climate-change denier as president.
7
A plethora of misjudgments by the present occupant of the White House climate policy may be the one with calamitous long term effects. Of course the ignorant abdication from the Iran nuclear agreement and the lack of responsible policy with North Korea may produce near term disasters.
1
It is astounding that economists would have anything credible at all to say about the pace and costs of climate change. Economics deals in the arithmetic of scarcity, and has no actuarial capabilities.
Insurance companies, and especially re-insurance companies were well aware of the import of these studies, even though they were watered down as much as possible by IPCC members carrying water for the fossil fuel industry.
2
Due to the ever-changing path of the earth's orbit around the sun, the earth has been cycling through Ice Ages and Warm Ages for millions of years. I don't think humans are much of a factor, if any, in the next-coming Warm Age.
2
So scientists were incorrect about the speed of climate change, but they are honest and use scientific method. Far worse are corrupt politicians and big businesses. They won’t look beyond the next election or the next quarterly report. Had they heeded what scientists were telling them 20 years ago, we would have done better at slowing it. But hey, economic growth!
10
This is an excellent, informative article. I just wish it had been given a different headline.
3
"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
Our current hyper capitalism gone global will give us more severe climate change, which may well lead to the end of the world's civilizations. Watching the process, we'll all sit bewildered about why we so embraced capitalism that we were ready to perish for it.
3
My question to the naysayers is why? What is the motivation to offhandedly dismiss serious scientific concern about the consequences of climate variability exacerbated by human activity?
Aren't we already seeing serious anomalous weather phenomena that have caused deadly expensive events? I would point to flooding in Houston, the flooded NY subways, Hurricane Michael (that seemingly popped up out of nowhere,) and the never-ending fires in California.
Trump and his cult can not see beyond the edge of their noses, or more accurately the temporary thrill of short term gain.
The mascot for such people is the ostrich.
3
Sooner or later regular folks have to be taught how science works, so that they can come at all data sets with the same caution and excitement as those of us that have been trained a bit more than average. The world was in for a heap of change a long time ago, The IPCC was hedging their bets, hoping to get people to listen, but having a hard time getting people to think about Today not in the future.
This is the result of having heads of state, tell you nothing to worry about, as they see shorter time lines, where as Climate changes today, and tomorrow and piles up the results faster than the working papers at the UN.
We will lose a lot of coastlines, Learn to live on boats all you coastal folks, Land isn't stable. Never was.
Amother urgent reason to remove Trump and all the Republican climate change deniers from office.
Without an Intelligent and informed President and Congress, there will never be the political will to undertake those actions necessary to save the planet for our children and grandchildren.
IMPEACH AND VOTE DEMOCRATIC!
4
We really need a persistent cheerleader in the White House. Denial and inertia are so much easier than taking action, which will require making sacrifices and modifying our lifestyles. We need strong leaders to push us to do this.
2
That is precisely how non-linear phenomena works...slow at first, then it grows exponentially...it seems climat chnge is following that dangerous trend
I just watched a video on YouTube about rogue ocean waves. Scientists before free floating oil platforms and wave measuring ocean buoys predicted 80+ foot waves in the hundreds of years span. Then they found out that waves 100 feet and higher happen hundreds of times each year in every ocean. Scientists need to admit sometimes they just don't know.
1
The atmosphere and oceans have made a fine CO2 and heat sink for the last 250 years. They are highly saturated and will cause massive stores of frozen methane gas to be released soon enough. It's pretty clear that climate change and warming are with us for thousands of years. By the time it is really uncomfortable, only a few decades from now, it will be every individual, group, tribe, or nation for themselves.
Climate denial is a billion dollar a year industry in America. No points for knowing who is funding it. The scientists were plenty alarmed and communicated such, but were met by carefully planted 'what me worry?' bravado of the sort still displayed by our current President. By now, after decades of propaganda has born its vile fruit, laughing in the face of climate change is a politically popular position to take. Other than the obvious fossil profit motive, Americans need to take stock of the way climate catastrophe may play into the dark futurology of our friends and neighbors: the one in five households in America with a basement full of assault rifles.
"the Trump administration has made its posture toward climate change abundantly clear: Bring it on!" Yes. Decades of fossil-fueled propaganda has led to this: a substantial fraction of America sees our dark fate coming, and welcomes it as an assist in its 'final solution' to multiculturalism.
4
The error was the trap of linear presuppositions, not understanding complex systems.
1
It is truly amazing that about 20 years after the main arguments about climate change were settled in the scientific literature these arguments still rage in the public sphere. The genesis of keeping these arguments going seems to be the fossil fuel industry which way back in the 1960s realized that burning their product could be disastrous because when fossil fuels are burned carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas is released.
4
We are truly a pitiful species. If only we could underwrite an insurance policy, or print some worthless bonds, or do BOTH & sell the tinker's cart to an unsuspecting rube, then capitalism would prevail. It is the luminary THINKING that affords our society mandatory automobile insurance, unfettered firearms, yet decries healthcare as 'socialism.' As Ye sow, so shall Ye reap.
1
Scientists got it wrong and that's the problem? Suppose we just had the voices of the fossil fuels industry, the "alternative facts" crowd, and their loudest politicians.
2
Mr. Linden is a respected author and advocate for climate science and writes about the disastrous effects of climate change. He underestimated the ignorance of American readers. It appears to me readers don’t read and understand but read and react.
I often read people saying such things as they don’t “Believe” in climate change. Scientific investigation is not a belief system, rather it is a systematic approach to understanding the world we live in. Those of you who aren’t scientists or engineers are not expected by scientific authors to believe what they or other scientists write.
Scientists hope that readers will apply logic when reading. Please dear readers consider thoughtful comments or responses. Scientists present hypotheses or concepts to explain the natural world based on the best data (evidence) available. Mistakes are made and scientists do not universally agree on everything. That said the evidence of climate change and calamitous effects is well founded.
19
The still delusional under current of warnings about the dire consequences of climate change is the belief that if we could only get our governments to take action that climate change can be reversed. It is much too late for such hopes or such activities. We are ultimately dealing with a primal instinctual proclivity that uses such things as technology to control the environment and to make the planet support a continually growing human population. What we are seeing are the effects of man made decisions but those decisions are far beyond the capacity of governments or even human will to change. What we are waking up to is that what is coming is coming and there is nothing we can do about it. And the effects will be a quickly accelerating chaos that will cause states to fail and populations to starve. There will ultimately be wars as populations are forced to fight for land and resources that are above water. Its possible that some of the worst that is ahead could have been avoided in a world that respected science and logic and self preservation. But we do not live in that world.
A last ditch approach might be to mount a global terraforming initiative and develop industrial ways to scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while we still have the industrial strength and economies to do so. But we won't cooperate on that for all the old reasons. We need this generation to write down what the old world looked like so that the next world will be warned.
3
@Bobotheclown, the IPCC respectfully disagrees. We can't reverse global warming, but we can mitigate its worst effects.
I suspect that fatalism will be the final response of deniers (I know you aren't one). They'll go from saying it's a hoax to saying that it's real but not man-made to saying that it's too late to do anything.
3
Lemme quote one of my college profs: “The whole point of being a human being is that you’re not a slave to your own biology.” Freud was a pessimist, not a no-hoper.
I might add that we none of us are nearly as biologically superior to the sheeple as we sometimes like to think.
Without a radical change in our Government and Economy it is over; and that's it.
And that radical change is not the "no hope and change Biden" moderate approach. The radical change Bernie Sanders may scoff at.
So buckle up cuz we're locked in for some doomsday stuff.
7
30 years ago, climate scientists predicted that some coastal cities would be under water by now. Since, the author tells us, they were too conservative, a lot of coastal cities must be under waters now.
Why not concentrate on these new versions of Atlantis. Interview the millions who escaped about the hundreds of millions who drowned. Show us the former streets, houses, theaters filmed by submersibles.
The key is to stay in touch with reality, not talk about scary scenarios only...
2
@novoad
"30 years ago, climate scientists predicted that some coastal cities would be under water by now"
No they didn't. The IPCC report clearly states that sea levels would rise between 30 cm and one meter.
Sea level on rises on a warming planet. After dropping during the little ice age, the sea levels started rising shortly after the industrial revolution took hold. The only significant change on the planet were heat engines with their CO2 releases.
8
@glennmr
The IPCC report clearly states that sea levels would rise between 30 cm and one meter by the end of this century...
typo correction.
6
Translation: the IPCC was, and is, right. It’s just that deniers can’t stand to admit even their more-obvious errors.
1
Until and unless the peoples of the Earth decide that changes in the global environment affect us all, nothing serious will happen. It would not matter if even all climate scientists were to agree that we colletively stand on the edge of a precipice. A change in direction of the necessary magnitude to even stabilize climate would require that every human being make adjustments, beginning with "first world" countries. There's no political will, and no understanding in the general populace, to do so. Any awakening will likely occur only after it's far too late. It is a very good time to be in one's 80's. Especially if you have no grandchildren.
3
Anyone over the age of 40 in the Midwest knows the climate is rapidly changing. Every year there is a new record. Where I live, we have had 2 big floods since 1993. Last year was a new record amount of snow and next week record cold is predicted. We must do everything we can to protect what’s left.
9
Ahem. Just about all of it was predicted to a reasonable level of accuracy. Wild weather, droughts, etc. A lot could have been done about it. Not much has.
For those who don't get basic high schooe chemistry - Change the mix of gases, and you change the thermal mix of gases. About 16 billion tons of CO2 goes into the atmosphere every year. It doesn't "blow away". It absorbs heat.
What happened in the past century has no bearing at all on the future. The sheer scale of change means all bets are off. Pollution is poison. Massive pollution means not only the atmosphere is getting denser, but also more toxic. The effect on basics like food and water availability so far looks pretty grim.
On the other side of the spectrum, the melt was hard to predict because it was so complex. Siberia is becoming a maze of methane potholes. Enough of this "climate always changes" excuse. It's now changing very dangerously, and it's no longer an academic issue if it ever was.
Also note - In the supposedly safe past, for most of its history, Earth wouldn't have been a safe place for humans. This period of relative stability was the exception, not the rule. Learn, listen, and don't be complacent.
10
Climate change is like Donald Trump. I don't have to be swayed by the media to understand he's a first class buffoon and leading member of the illiterati. I have only to observe the man himself: his bullying tweets and his general incoherence and obvious lack of education when speaking. Donald Trump himself makes the best case for a failed presidency: Trump, and Trump alone.
Likewise, I don't need to read scientific articles/treatises on climate change to know it's happening. Bees are disappearing from the garden; fewer butterflies are passing through on their migrations, and the often chill, foggy weather of beachy Central California has been replaced by clear days and high temperatures. Forty years ago I wore down jackets and knit caps on my November rambles. Today I'm wearing a t-shirt.
This is not a good moment for America, or planet Earth.
10
The problem here is not that the climate is changing, that the change is rapid and accelerating, and not that it is caused by human activity.
The problem IS what those who publicly promote those truths want to DO about it. If those who are trying so hard to get mankind to wake up to the dangers advocated for employing every bit of technology, ingenuity, and resourcefulness available to control the situation, they would have every human being on Earth at their side.
By demanding (correctly) that they are right and simultaneously demanding (incorrectly) that they have 'all of the right answers' they are causing the whole machinery of progress to slowly grind itself to pieces.
This is precisely The Elizabeth Warren Problem that is well established and widely recognized. If you don't leave room for everyone's input, you get zip, squat, nada. The Elizabeth Warren Problem is tolerable in national political debates, but it is intolerable when dealing with global existential threats.
Leave room for other people to offer solutions, and don't shout down those whose support you need (whether you realize it or not).
1
The time is long past for consensus we will probably never get. But it is enough if governments and others begin to understand what they can do and start to act. To do nothing is defeatism. Trump is a wrench in the works, an obstructionist. He needs to get out of the way.
Interestingly, the article fails to mention the contributions of India and China to the equation of global change. It appears to be a liberal conspiracy to allow the greatest contributors to go on unmentioned and unaccountable.
I would relish an article that lists each country with the amount of pollution it produces, the amount of coal burning factories, the percentage of renewable resources and their plan to reduce omissions.
1
What difference does it make? Every person has to manage their own carbon footprint and hold their representatives accountable for positive legislation. At this point I don’t care what other nations are doing, I want my country to do something.
2
@Martha
If the United States went totally renewable overnight it would have no effect on climate change.
It might make you feel better knowing that you are reducing your minute carbon footprint but it is nothing compared with what 2 billion people are doing on the other side of the world.
1
@D. Arnold, why is that interesting? This information is readily available. It's not included in the article because it isn't the topic of the article.
I'm tired of the finger-pointing, as if identifying the correct culprit would cure the problem. The U.S. is responsible for twice as much carbon emissions per capita as China or Japan, and many, many times more than per capita emissions than India.
Historically the U.S. is responsible for most CO2 in the atmosphere, although annually we're only number 2 at this point.
So it's mostly our fault. That's not a liberal conspiracy--it's just fact.
2
As of at least ten years ago anyone who gave climate science a careful reading realized we were already in serious, unavoidable trouble.
One thing climate scientists are 100% correct on--and have been for the past 100+ years--is the cause and solution to global warming. To whine late in the game that they didn't scare us enough is childish and brings nothing to the table.
9
Savante Arrhenius predicted fossil fuel burning would lead to rising surface temperatures in 1896. He thought it was a good thing - longer growing season, milder climate (he was a Swede, who can blame him?).
That prediction is based some pretty simple and fundamental physics. Trying to figure out just how climate will change and how fast turns out to be a lot more complicated.
It's hard to see how scientists are at fault here. Had we made more accurate predictions sooner, would it have made a difference? Would more dire warnings get more attention?
Unlikely. Too many heads buried deeply in the sand.
6
"How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong", sounds like scapegoating. The problem is, and always has been, us the consumer. Not the climate scientists (most of whom have been warning us for decades), and not even the industry pandering politicians. We drive when we could bike. We buy SUVs and gas guzzling trucks, instead of finding more modest vehicles that meet our needs. We eat lots of beef, even though it is an energy and resource intensive food. We do not discourage uncontrolled human breeding.
7
When I was growing up, science taught us that humans cannot control the weather. But now we do?
2
Weather and climate are not the same. Please learn the distinction; it is important.
4
I’m a professional scientist, pretty old, and I was never taught that. In what university were you taught that?
5
Sadly, there is no evidence that climate change deniers will ever accept.
For them, money is all life - even more important than life itself.
2
Once again, my advice is to concentrate our efforts where we get the most "bang for the buck". That is not by spending domestically, except to immediately prohibit the flaring of unburned methane as is done at some fracking sites and to stop the burning of coal and semi-refined oil ( bunker oil and at cement plants), but to invest in limiting or eliminating such and similar practices in Asia and Africa. Let's start with India and China. Support China's nuclear power plant program, entice our Japanese friends to restart their nuclear plants. Let's build and operate efficient solar, wind and nuclear plants in India. Let's then tackle the needs in Nigeria, Egypt and elsewhere in Africa. Those efforts will yield much greater results than subsidizing electric cars, solar panels and wind mills in the US.
At the same time let's address the " in your face" extravagant use of "business jets". Such conspicuous consumption of oil and destruction of the ozone layer belong to a bygone era.
1
Mr. Linden has his worldview upside down.
Science is our cynosure. It avoids both extremes, of overestimating knowledge or underestimating time scale.
Climate is a highly complicated process with as yet untold parameters. Imagine the difficulties in predicting local weather forecasts, and scale that by orders of magnitude to difficulties in predicting global climate patterns.
Scientists have been modeling Earth's climate for decades. During this time they have advised governments regarding the urgent need for action. Why hasn't Mr. Linden been listening?
Small minds in control of our planet's resources are inconvenienced by such gloomy predictions. It is in this realm that the philosophy of "don't need to fix the roof if it's not raining" holds sway.
Be assured, when the stuff hits the fan in their back yards, they will turn on science in a heartbeat, blaming it for not protecting them from themselves. Perhaps we see a little of that here, even in our great NYT opinion section.
Real climate change happens over millennia. A sudden heat wave here, or cold snap there, causes small minds to cry wolf. Science plots them on their models and looks to increased understanding.
The cost of ignoring science now will escalate to unimaginable hardship for living things and costs for entire populations. Our descendants in a millennia or two will rightly throw shade on our generations for having thrown them u der the climate bus, just to maintain our own cozy spaces.
6
For the past half century, the power and influence of climate change deniers are too great in the GOP for any thing to happen. As long as money rules our politics this power also corrupts many democrats. The sooner we get money out of politics the quicker we can solve many of our problems.
2
The human body evolved to live in climate conditions that were Mediterranean. In contrast, look where humans are found. Most humans are living in environments where they need environmental support which they get from energy released by oxidizing Carbon fuels. These fuels were Nature's way of storing Carbon over geologic time. The widespread burning of these fuels causes damage to the biosphere that cannot be undone in the short time needed to save humans and many other life forms. It is too late to turn the clock back. More and more you can expect to hear the call "Every man for himself!" The governments of humans can't solve this problem.
2
The scientists did NOT get it wrong. The politicians and the media got it wrong. Science is by nature conservative in presenting findings and predictions. The media did not know -- and still does. ot know -- how to report on science. The politicians -- funded by corporate intersts! -- put pressure on the scientists to be extremely conservative. And the corporations, corporate media, and politicians tried their best to squelch both research and the findings from the research that was getting done despite the best efforts to squelch it.
The NYT shares blame.
13
NY Times - are you part of the problem? I thank you for this report! Now, are you willing to reject advertising dollars from organizations who have supported Climate Denial campaigns systematically for the past 30 years? I listen and subscribe to the daily. It's often sponsored by Exxon (now boasting some PR investment on algae ). What would it take for corporations to take a principled stand on this and categorically reject doing business with any other entity that has bet on the short-term vs. the long-term? What if you led the Clean Media movement where you choose to only take advertising dollars from organizations who have not invested in clear misinformation (defined as organized campaigns that go against scientific consensus)?
8
Americans are largely responsible.
The USA consume twice the amount of energy of Europeans for about the same quality of life.
The carbon foot print of the USA, per capita also, is 3 or 4 times heavier than Europeans.
6
The hole in the author's thesis is that there has been no agreed-upon prediction for what would happen in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years. And no predictive model that accurately told us what would happen during an observable period of time.
So telling us now that the predictions were wrong is making that data problem worse. The climate problem is real ... the jeremiahs have diminished climate science's credibility.
1
Could there be anything more alarmist today than the inconvenient truth of climate change, climate-warming appearing far sooner than expected on Earth? William Butler Yeats predicted the existential armageddon of humankind in his 1920 poem, 'The Second Coming'.. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...surely some revelation is at hand".
The world today is in pre-apocalyptic mode with Arctic melt and climate-warming bringing record snow and single digit cold to our central and eastern states, and catastrophic fire-birthing heat to our western states. We all need to wake up to the reality of extinction of mankind on earth. How could we have gotten climate change so wrong?
If only the climate scientist hadn’t got it wrong on the speed of climate change we would have taken
Them seriously and done more to save the planet.
This is a joke, right? Climate scientists have been vilified as alarmists by the deniers for years. Once even the deniers realize it’s too late to live on earth as we have they can always blame the scientists for
Not sufficiently warning them.
8
Take it from the GOP, survival "isn't economically viable".
9
Come on, Linden. Didn't have anything exciting to write about today so why not try to implicate *Scientists* for underestimating our folly in predicting the effects and evolution of climate change. I've been listening to the scientific community sounding the alarm for forty plus years. It's only recently that the effects have become so obvious that even the mass polluters (read big coal and the distributors of internal combustion engines among others) have had to look up from counting their gold. If anyone has underestimated the effects, it is those among the power brokers who, to some extent, still remain willfully ignorant of the catastrophic consequences. It's really easy you know: We have one Earth with one atmosphere, And the whole thing spins around like a top mixing up the atmosphere like a bit of cream mixing in a cup of coffee. Now, where on Earth does anyone think all these gasses are going to go? Is it not time for us to stop acting like children and clean up our room?
3
Bureaucratic inertia and politics is a very interesting way to describe greed. Pure unmitigated greed. We are lucky that the young don’t kill us while we sleep.
1
Propaganda has misled the public since the oil industry's scientists recognized the danger of CO2 to the climate in 1968. Eventually, the effects on the climate grew to the point it became observable to the public. At this point, Oil embarked on a Tobacco scale misinformation campaign. Oil needed protection to continue the burning of their product, a massively profitable product with little costs for them. Oil's waste product costs are displaced in the atmosphere and deposited on the public. This practice rewards Oil's bottom line.
Eventually, the ability to control the dialog was being overcome by costs and suffering from climatic events. The final option to prolong profit production and protect leaders of countries dependent on oil production was to control means of public information.
Fake News is the outcome. President Trump was placed in the White House to forestall the inevitable consequences for Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Oil Industry.
Connect the dots, why is Putin, MBS, Kochs, and Tillerson associated with Trump's presidency?
4
Trump was right to try and buy Greenland. It means Green-land. In 40 years it will be green. Palm oil, soy, endless about the Trump Hotel Thule. Golf courses north.
And that is after we extract all the platinum, gold, americium.
2
Should the free speech be politically correct?
If we cannot blame the clergy for the religious hatred, animosity, bias, sectarianism and civil wars, then we shouldn’t blame the stewards of the capitalism for the global warming.
If we all participate in it, then all of us are equally responsible…
4
They were wrong - and it arrived to quickly.... but Donald Trump says it still isn't happening. He is the President, so the American people have chosen to believe in nonsense rather than truth.
1
“As we now know, all of those predictions turned out to be completely wrong. Which makes you wonder whether the projected risks of further warming, dire as they are, might still be understated. How bad will things get?”
The predictions were not completely wrong, the timeline was, because scientists (believe it or not) tend to be a little conservative with their predictions. Add in a political body like the IPCC, and you’ll get a report that tries to convey the urgency and breadth of action which needs to be taken as non-panic inducing and non-controversially as possible.
Can it get worse? Yes, start reading up on societal collapse. U
The general public does not believe in climate change for an obvious reason: most Democratic politicians resort to the phrase "existential threat" if they discuss the issue at all. And, of course, most Republicans follow the lead of our ignorant president in considering climate change a "hoax." Now if Democrats want the issue to have any effect, they will replace "existential" with "actual" and then demonstrate the reality of global warming in every congressional district--especially in red states (farmlands under water in Nebraska and Arkansas, flooding from hurricanes in eastern Texas and North Carolina, rising waters on the Florida Atantic coast, etc.) But compared to the GOP, Democrats are weak at delivering messages. So they will concentrate on free college education, on Medicare for All, and other issues that will melt away in an earth that is heating up even as you read this article.
1
"If we knew... " Scientists DID know.
This history of milestones in the discovery of global warming shows, at least by 1990, from the first IPCC report, the world has been warming and future warming seems likely.
https://history.aip.org/climate/timeline.htm
MORE:
https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm
Why did this info not get out sooner? There was an article "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" (October, 1976; Amory Loviins)
The article describes a 'soft path' -- one that addresses long- term goals. Worth a read. Is it possible to extract a useful path from it today, 43 years later?
http://rmi.org/insight/energy-strategy-the-road-not-taken/
2
We need to try our best to protect the planet that we are a part of. We are not separate, we are part of the life on this planet that is threatened.It will only take one crucial link to collapse to kill us all.
The planet temperature crisis can kill massive amounts of life on the planet and after eons, and eventual stabilization, support life again. We unfortunately do not have the luxury of time. Trumps idea is to support growth and deregulation at any cost. They say he can only think of one thing at a time.
If we are to solve anything at all we need a president who can think of more than one thing at a time. It will take worldwide consent to try to manage carbon dioxide release. Perhaps an event that is extremely devastating will galvanize the world population. But we better do what we can now and not wait. This will not happen with Trump in office.
3
Just so’s you know, this article doesn’t “blame scientists.” It says—and it’s a point Thomas Kuhn correctly made fifty years ago—that it is the nature of scientists to build and to work within interpretative communities that operate off definable paradigms, and that these paradigms tend to remain pretty stable until data and theories change enough that they snap and reorganize radically.
It’s pretty simple, okay? The argument is that the science was saying global warming was occuring, but that its pace was fairly slow and constant. It is that only a few “outliers,” were arguing that we might very well see abrupt, large changes...which apprears to be what is actually now happening.
It’s a fallacy to think that science is some sort of computer program, where you stuff data in one end, and get Truth out the other. It’s a human enterprisecarried out by human beings, and if you look at today’s Deniers, you get a pretty good idea of just how dippy THOSE guys can be. It’s also a fallacy to explain everything with some fantasy that Mr. Burns is in a room atop a steel tower, cackling, rubbing his hands, and destroying the Secret Designs for a car that runs on water.
In fact, what we ought to attend to is that the sharp turn in what the science is saying is nicely matched by the sharp turn in the planet’s climate. That’s what’s sposed to happen, okay?
The science isn’t there to say what you want it to say. Neither is Nature.
6
Perhaps it is time to invest in Antarctic real estate.
1
sulphur hexafluoride climate change
Search for it.
Sometimes in our haste to remedy something we humans actually make things worse. Do the search and decide for yourself.
Scientists and environmentalists got it right - the anti-science business types got it wrong!
During the First Earth Day celebrations in 1970 - 49 years ago - climate change due to greenhouse gas was a MAJOR subject of discussion.
Business-employed "scientists" aka: flacks, spin-doctors, lobbyists, professional liars told us all the hippie-Commie-environmentalist-radicals had it All Wrong.
So the world ignored a problem that dates to the early 14th Century and the deforestation of Europe.
Even the pre-scientific world thought something was wrong - all that singing about rebuilding an English Jerusalem in place of those "Satanic mills" went nowhere either.
So do not blame the people who wrote the real data, or read and taught the real data. We knew it was coming then.
It was the commercial interests of the world/Communist quick-grow economy to catch the West interests of the world - economic interests of the world, who worked to silence discussion of what a few realized was saw happening.
Go back and check the scientific journals of the time, and you'll begin to get a handle on how scared we were of this, way beck when something could easily have been done inexpensively.
Now, solutions appear to look like design of huge orbiting reflectors, possibly solar-powered CO2 destroyers, either solar-electric Above or Surface - using something called chlorophyll, population reduction, fossil fuel reduction, putting a big windmill on every "high tension" tower.
2
Could there be anything more alarming today than the inconvenient truth of climate change, climate-warming appearing far sooner than expected on Earth? William Butler Yeats predicted the existential armageddon of humankind in his 1920 poem, 'The Second Coming'.. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...surely some revelation is at hand".
The world today is in pre-apocalyptic mode with Arctic melt and climate-warming bringing record snow and single digit cold to our central and eastern states, and catastrophic fire-birthing heat to our western states. We all need to wake up to the reality of extinction of mankind on earth. How could we have gotten climate change so wrong?
1
you people have lost it, all of you ,and it is not funny. Look at Trump. You really want to be like him?
Things are not going your way. temperatures are not rising. nothing is flooding. Ice is not melting. So, just like Trump, you just say the opposite a little louder. And then a lot louder.
Do you understand what the consequences will be of destroying what little public trust there is left in science and her institutions.
Cease and desist. Now.
1
The most profound way in which us grown-ups don’t wanna be like Trump is that we don’t wanna find ourselves jumping up and down and screeching at reality, and anybody who notices reality.
2
What I do believe, is that we're putting out a lot of poisonous emissions, body gases, etc., that are polluting the air we breathe and very likely are seeping into our bodies otherwise, causing harm.
That these emissions are the cause of climate change is a theory; a scientific theory. It is not a law, such as Newton's or Boyle's Laws. Those are irrefutable. Weather has always waxed and waned....sometimes up and sometimes down. We know for sure there have been ice ages and extremely hot ages, cyclically.
similarly the stock market goes up and down...if we could predict the cycle, we'd all be zillionaires.
I'm not a denier....just agnostic...
Ecology scientists report rising of the oceans, melting of the ice...we're all going to die....the seas are rising and we have to move to higher ground, if we're lucky...Experiments that don't back up their theories sometimes go unreported..After all, their incomes and grants, as well as their livelihoods depend on keeping their theories going.
If i'm suspicious, please excuse me.
1
@Saul RP scientists reported salt was bad, red meat, coffee, dairy...all bad..sugar good and required, all written in peer review articles in top journals..while they smoked cigarettes.......topsy becomes turvy and turvy topsy...
Is the author implicitly suggesting that more dire predictions from scientists would have resulted in a more adequate response from governments? That assertion is dubious at best.
3
If the climate scientists have been getting it so right, why do they have so many different conclusions. Don't get me wrong here, climate modelling is still very imprecise and they are doing the best they can, but when there is so little mention, say, of water vapour, the largest (90%) greenhouse gas, I start to wonder. As for the climate changing - it has always done so. Man wasn't responsible for the start or end of the ice ages for instance.
2
@Gary Re- The climate has always been changing. It's a matter of the rate of change. If I leave a glass full of ice cubes on the counter, leave the house for several hours, and discover the ice has melted when I return, I'm not surprised. If I leave a glass full of ice cubes on the counter, walk the dog around the block, and discover that the entire glass has melted in 20 minutes, I am astonished. Something out of the ordinary has happened.
The rate at which the climate is warming is astonishing. Not the fact that it's changing, but the rate at which it's changing.
6
With every catastrophic event, it takes a confluence of circumstances to coalesce. With a thoughtful human presence on earth, you'd think the humans would do everything humanly possible to mitigate their contribution to the acceleration of climate change. We know what our contributions to climate change are and how to lessen them. There are as many financial drivers to keep the status quo as there are answers to combating climate change. The latter is just a little harder. And humans always take the easy way out. Especially when there's a lot of money stacked up on the side of the status quo. The United States can't even elect an honorable and thoughtful president, how in the world could we actually combat climate change?
2
Since they have been so wrong in the past, should we believe them that humans really have a lot of control over climate change without bringing vast economic calamity?
Healthy skepticism is always how to view science given its tendencies to human error and biases.
1
@Dan, there's nothing healthy about denial, especially if that denial has consequences for the health of your loved ones.
Deniers aren't skeptics. In fact they tend to believe the most fantastical stories on the internet. They're enormously credulous.
Climate scientists have been accurate in their predictions about long-term trends. The author's point isn't to fault them but to point out that science, by its nature, is conservative.
2
Lots of things get missed in the climate debate.
.
Few things are worse for the environment than economic collapse. This is true at the individual level: a person struggling to make ends meet won’t necessarily worry if his car leaks oil. It’s true for businesses: a bankrupt company has to satisfy creditors before it can clean up environmental hazards. It’s true for governments: when the economy is bad, they like to relax environmental regulations in the name of growth.
.
The people called on to drastically change their ways of life in the name of the environment, aren’t necessarily the ones who are threatened by climate change. People in coal country who relied on the mines; people in the Rust Belt who relied on factories. They were never going to be flooded in a hurricane or forced out of their homes by a forest fire. But they’ve been asked to give up their well-paid jobs and strong local economies in the name of preventing these things.
.
Climate change is Global. If the Americas and Western Europe were to drastically change their economies and environmental laws, it wouldn’t necessarily stem climate change. Not if Africa, the Middle East, and Asia failed to follow suit. Our local environments would be better: but it wouldn’t solve the global problem.
.
Third: there’s the hypocrisy of the One Percent: us little people about the environment while having multiple homes and flying around the world in private jets.
5
@ZAW, what does the loss of factory jobs have to do with climate change? That's a non-sequitur.
Also, coal is losing to out to natural gas. Market forces are entirely responsible.
I'm not sure why you think green energy involves economic hardship. Most people think of emerging technology as economic opportunity generating more jobs.
Finally, if you're concerned about economic disruption, you should be concerned about climate change. The worst effects would mean an end to our way of life.
2
If you have a likelihood of having an accident on an icy road you put your seat belt on. If you think it will be cold and snow, you try to make sure you have fuel or electricity in the house. If global warming is likely to precipitate floods, you move if you can. But if the same warming trend is going to heighten weather uncertainty everywhere, it is to huge and too vague for people to see a way out of the situation. We need government authority to enforce changes to our lifestyle that may help enough over time. If you think Trump will be any good at all with this problem, think again. He is busy reversing everything that might help.It is like a death wish. Maybe he can't process complicated information and just does what he can understand, which is very influenced by who he knows. At any rate we are doomed with Trump in charge. That is clear. Four more years of ignoring crises and we may significantly reduce the population in certain places of the country.,
2
The naive are frequently confounded by scientists getting things wrong. They don't realize that science works by getting things wrong; the correct answer is arrived at by means of many wrong answers. It makes some people cynical when the answers keep changing: Is it OK to eat fat or not?!! I, on the other hand, am reassured that scientists keep getting things wrong. It means that knowledge continues to be refined and sharpened. Climate science is now dealing with events unique in human history, and uniquely complex events. Though science may often get the particulars wrong, it is rarely wrong about the broad outlines.
8
As I sit in my house 100 miles north of Toronto, I am advised by a government weather agency that I will enjoy nighttime temperatures over the next three days of: 10-5-5 degrees Fahrenheit. I am old, yet these temperatures seem extreme for this location, and this time of year. They are well below the norm for November. I have experienced many winters, yet all signs point to this being one of the coldest in my time. What is wrong here? Is some other part of the globe going to have an extraordinarily warm winter? Does weather "even out"? Are we truly doomed, like the mastadons of a mere 10000 years ago? Can we prevent it? Do we, in some retributive way, deserve the heralds of our own demise? Do we believe in a "god"? Is he upon us? Does the universe, in its immensity, and our own relative insignificance care? And why should it.
4
@Stephen Bowyer You tell me. I'm in Fairbanks, Alaska, right now. It was a mixture of drizzle and snow for about 36 hours earlier this week. Normal high temperatures for this time of year are around +10 deg F, so roughly 20 agrees above normal. It's colder today, but the forecast for the region is for a warmish and wet winter.
For the record, during the last 10 years or so, there have been periods of time when it rained in Fairbanks in late November and late December. This is astonishing. (The town is practically paralyzed when this happens, because steady drizzle over hours sto days results in a layer of water on top of snow-packed and ice-packed roads, turning it into a surface so slippery that few vehicles can travel about. Schools are shuttered, not because of cold, but because it's too dangerous to drive.)
5
There is a difference between belief and scientific truth. Both are falsifiable but the latter requires massive data to be accepted by the scientific community. As long as the public doesn't understand the difference between the two, those who resist change for whatever reason will exploit the falsifiable nature of scientific truth. This is precisely how the right have been trying to demote theory of evolution to the level of creationism; ignoring all the evidence and nature of a coherent theory, they argue, after all evolution is just a falsifiable theory, just like creationism. Similarly, that's have they've prevented the American public from getting the facts of the matter about global climate change. With the support of many corporations, they've successfully presented it as two equal and competing sides and the jury is still out there and characterized those who keep warming about the urgency of the situation as those trying to stifle free debate. How ironic. This is the same problem we encounter in many areas and I think one of the biggest problems here is reducing education to acquiring skills demanded by the market. At its core lies the lack of a decent philosophical education which provides students with the necessary skills for analytical and critical thinking and the habit of questioning. In the absence of these we have a public that could be easily manipulated about global warming, budget deficit, immigrants, and so on.
4
I hate to be a pessimist but nothing will happen until we have some significant, and I mean significant, catastrophe caused by climate change- i.e. 60% of Manhattan under water,LA burned to the ground, Miami leveled by a hurricane or under 5 feet of water, Chicago hit with 15 below freezing for 2 months, cities in the rest of world totally destroyed etc., Then maybe then we would start to do something and then probably too late. What we have now is the drip, drip,drip of the evidence of climate change. So long as we have our elected officials unwilling to really do something about the situation-we are doomed.
8
Science is tentative and rarely engages in absolute certainty. Politicians just try to get re-elected. I worry that our systems are incapable of dealing with climate change. Politicians want to deliver good news. People don’t vote for blood, sweat, and tears. People will not willingly give up internal combustion engines, jet travel, and factories. When Democrats talk about climate change, Republicans just talk about jobs.
6