[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.

[polotics]

You wrote that we lack the computational ability to show that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which causes climate drift with lower temperatures in the higher atmosphere, and higher temperatures in the lower atmosphere? Are you serious? This was demonstrated by Fourier more than 250 years ago! He did not lack computational ability at all, was able to produce good estimates. May I suggest you study a bit more?

[ithkuil]

I don't care who caused things. I just don't want things to change. Call be "environmental conservative" if you wish; I want my grand-children to bathe in the beach I grew up, under the shadow of pines and olive trees. I don't care if nature or humans destroy that, I just don't want this to be destroyed. Arguing that in the past nature caused wider temperature swings than what humans could do doesn't make me feel any better. Life on earth was much different back then, dinosaurs and Pangea and whatnot.

I think this whataboutsim about nature is missing the point about how we actually want to live.

Socially conservative people should probably care more about conserving our way of life as in having children running on meadows instead of being trapped under domes or underground. Instead they're focusing on preserving their relatively recent life-style of reckless burning fossil fuel.

We may be wrong and maybe it will turn out that all this caution was not necessary. But it's not that we're saying we should all curl up in a corner and die.

There are alternative ways to deal with resources that can give jobs to people and let humanity thrive in other ways. What are you people really afraid of exactly? What kind of fearmongering have you been exposed to? That all the last decent people will disappear when coal mines will close? What is it, really? Even if all we end up doing wasn't really necessary to "save the planet" but just to have better air quality in our cities, would that be that bad?

[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?

[scrollaway]

You're not seeing correct predictions because you're choosing to look at the worst ones and you're not looking at the more average ones.

I've seen dozens of instances of fairly scary predictions from 2000ish which were originally for 2050 and are coming true the last five years.

Weather maps predicting scorching heat in France which i remember thinking "there's no way this will ever be that bad", and what do you know, it is that bad.

Warnings about floods, glaciers entirely disappearing, heat domes.

Warnings about the possibility of methane reservoirs releasing into the atmosphere as permafrost melts.

These aren't warnings anymore, they're news stories from the past couple years.

Do you somehow believe it's just a coincidence? That it'll get better, we don't need to do anything?

Everything about what you're saying is a choice you are making. You are choosing to dismiss evidence. Choosing to adopt an attitude which lets you ignore reality. Choosing to put your fingers in your ears. Choosing to compare events that happen over millennia to events that happen over decades.

Make better choices.