[canoebuilder]

The relentless doom saying gives the impression that there are some studies or research or science out there that can accurately make predictions of the sort you are interested in, but as far as I know that’s not the case. I’m not aware of any system with a track record of predicting climates that far out.

A volcano could erupt tomorrow and create much cooler climates around the world.

Al Gore’s movie from the early 2000s said Florida would be underwater by now. What’s the actual sea level rise in the intervening period been? A cm or 2, if that?

[ithkuil]

> Al Gore’s movie from the early 2000s said Florida would be underwater by now.

Would our could?

If a volcano could erupt then perhaps the sea also could rise?

It's sad that it's so hard to talk about which of these are more likely without bringing up one's whole political identity into the discussion.

[premium-lizard]

> Would our could?

I doubt the movie expressed absolute certainty, but it was indisputably meant to be alarming.

> the sea also could rise

It wouldn't be surprising, since they've been rising for 20,000 years. The strange thing about sea rise is that the tens of meters of rise from before the industrial revolution were good and natural, whereas the centimeters since are evil, and definitely due to CO2 emissions.

[Juliate]

> I doubt the movie expressed absolute certainty, but it was indisputably meant to be alarming.

Well, seasoned reasonable discourse from the scientific community started in the 70s (as well as knowledge of the issue among oil companies).

So, you'd expect a 2000-dated discourse to be slightly more alarming, yes.

[premium-lizard]

> as well as knowledge of the issue among oil companies

Oil companies don't have any special ability to predict the future state of a complex system.

> So, you'd expect a 2000-dated discourse to be slightly more alarming, yes.

Actually, the UN said in 1989 that whole nations might be wiped off the map if we didn't reverse global warming by 2000, so I might expect a 2000-dated discourse to have some humility, considering that the doom prophecy totally failed to materialize.

But anyway, how did Gore's predictions fare?

[ithkuil]

It's a PR problem.

Scaremongering is a double-edged sword. I'm not a fan either. It can cause some people to pay attention and care about the problem. But it also causes other people to dismiss the worry as exaggerated (because by definition putting too much emphasis on the extreme range of the probability range is by definition exaggerating).

But it's a mistake to confound the scaremongers with the underlying science that provided the inputs for the worry.

The uncertainty bracket is large. You can't really know if we're going to experience problems at the scales that most people would recognize as "doom" by 2020, 2040 or 2140. But that doesn't mean the underlying model is wrong, it just means that the uncertainty bracket is large.

If the practical every day problem starts at 2040 or 2080, is this any better? Because you'd be dead and it will be somebody else's problem?

Or because when the problem will become manifest we'll just fix the problem then?

The inertia of the system goes both ways. The observable parameters have long changed and the system has been slow to move towards the predicted target. This also suggests that corrections to the parameters will take a very long time to fix.

[premium-lizard]

> The uncertainty bracket is large.

I completely agree. It's so large that it's expected that any near-term predictions will be false, and that's what we see. By now there's a huge graveyard of false climate doomsday predictions that are swept under the rug by the media, seemingly because it's so useful for them to have something scary to talk about.

We know that the atmosphere's temperature goes up and down, and does not require human activity to do that. It has ranged from about 10C to 25C over the past 2B years (obviously with no human intervention). Earth has been about as cold as it ever gets recently, so even if there were no emissions by humans, it wouldn't be surprising to see the earth heating up. That's what it's done many times in the past.

We're being told that it's definitely due to CO2 emissions, when we lack the computational ability to prove such a thing. Because of this insistence on the CO2 hypothesis, all talk is about ceasing emissions. If we thought the earth was heating up of its own accord, all talk would be about configuring society to have huge amounts of reliable clean energy, which pretty much means nuclear, rather than solar and wind.

Note the same anti-human pattern as in the case of sea-level rise: it's fine for nature to add e.g. 2000 ppm CO2, but it's evil, wrong, and potentially disastrous for humans to add 100.

[Juliate]

> Oil companies don't have any special ability to predict the future state of a complex system.

No, but they definitely have the scientific knowledge to understand the scale at which they pump CO2 into the atmosphere and the first-order consequences this has.

> But anyway, how did Gore's predictions fare?

It's like when you fly a plane, never trust the instruments: "yeah, sure, the altimeter is going down, but you know, we're still in the air. Besides, the altimeter has a margin of error, so... we're good."

We have a song for that in France: "Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien...".

[premium-lizard]

> No, but they definitely have the scientific knowledge to understand the scale at which they pump CO2 into the atmosphere and the first-order consequences this has.

Check your hypothesis. There have been times in the past when CO2 went from, say, 3000 to 4000. Did the global average temperature do what you think it should?

> It's like when you fly a plane

I'm not seeing a number of correct predictions out of total predictions. What do we usually think when somebody has a hypothesis, and based on that hypothesis they make some testable predictions, and the predictions don't come true?

[premium-lizard]

> I’m not aware of any system with a track record of predicting climates that far out.

This is right. Nor is there going to be any such system. The climate is a complex system, meaning it's fundamentally not amenable to simulation. All the models are toys compared to the reality. None of them even attempt to actually simulate what's going on. Not only is it impossible because we don't even know what the phenomena are, it's extra impossible because there's not enough computational power. I doubt humanity is capable of accurately simulating the sugar in a stirred cup of coffee, much less figuring out what's going to be happening with the atmosphere tomorrow, much less 30 years from now.

The models are (unavoidably, necessarily) just toys. They don't predict the future. Anyone who tells you that they are predicting the future with them is malicious or extremely naive. The models just masquerade as science to support political goals.

[piva00]

> The models are (unavoidably, necessarily) just toys. They don't predict the future. Anyone who tells you that they are predicting the future with them is malicious or extremely naive. The models just masquerade as science to support political goals.

What political goals? Source would be appreciated as well.

[Juliate]

Yes, not screwing up the biome on which we all depend to live (and countless other species) is definitely a political motive.

Is there a problem with that? Don't think so.