[upsidesinclude]

>prevent additional deaths caused from global warming

How would one even begin to make such an assessment? Natural disaster is less likely than ever to cause death with a higher than ever population. Damage dollar cost increases from weather have increased as a result of development, not increasingly severe events.

>the impossible situation all of humanity is in now

Compared to the current resurgence in desire for nuclear war, war and diminishing diplomacy? We are not in an impossible situation because of weather. This is alarmist and completely predicated on climate models being accurate, despite that they have always proven to be inaccurate.

"Whelp, no issue there, those were the old models. We've got new, accurate models now!!"

[mort96]

Climate models are generally inaccurate in the opposite direction of what we want though. Things are progressing faster than predicted.

But I assume nothing will change your politically motivated opinion that climate change is no big deal.

[yodon]

>But I assume nothing will change your politically motivated opinion that climate change is no big deal.

The fact that you disagree with someone does not make the other person's analysis a "politically motivated opinion" any more than your disagreeing with them makes your analysis a "politically motivated opinion."

Either party in a disagreement can always choose to stoop to insults and ad hominem attacks. That doesn't mean stooping to insults and ad hominem attacks is the path to the best or desired outcomes.

[mort96]

Come on. They're conflating climate and weather, downplaying the effects, and calling people who are concerned about the ongoing mass extinction alarmists. This is good old climate change denialism, there is nothing here that's worth taking seriously.

[upsidesinclude]

Feel free to engage any of the points I brought up.

Or don't. You are hyperbolic and provided nothing of value to the conversation thus far.

I don't deny climate change. I question the appropriate response and the motivations of those that intend to place themselves in positions of authority unsubstantiated. You fall into the latter category if not the former.

[mort96]

I'm 100% for challenging how the powers that be react to climate change! But you're saying we should be taking it less seriously than we already do. That's completely bonkers and the complete wrong conclusion. You're not challenging authority, you're supporting their destructive profit seeking behaviour by downplaying the negative effects.

[yodon]

Speaking as someone who is unequivocally of the view that climate change is the greatest threat to human survival, I will say that the manner in which you are attacking your opponent is far less effective rhetorically, logically, and substantively than you believe it to be, because you are bringing so many pre-conceptions about "the other side" that you are hearing the other party say all sorts of things that they aren't actually saying and framing your argument with them around things you believe they believe but that they didn't actually say.

By pulling your own emotions into check and responding to the actual concrete points the other party has made you make your own points far more effective because your words speak directly to what the other party is saying, not to a mental straw man you've built in your mind of what you think the "other side" says and believes.

The ad hominem attacks and attacks on things the other party didn't say (but that you believe they believe) don't strengthen the effectiveness of your words, they weaken it. I'm not disagreeing with you as to the importance of climate change, I'm saying you have the capacity to be far more effective in how you chose to make your points, and given the importance you attach to this topic I'll advocate you owe it to yourself and to the world to bring your A-game to debates and actions on a subject you feel is this important.

[origin_path]

No, they are not. Models vs observations:

https://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-mod...

Even the modellers themselves admit this. When they felt a need to re-declare victory a few years ago in response to graphs like that one, even then, their argument was "if we re-calculate the original models with better data then they aren't so inaccurate anymore". It wasn't that the original predictions were correct.

Now look at a graph of temperatures as measured by satellites:

https://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

Notice that it has long periods where it moves sideways, despite continuing emissions. Models don't predict these apparently arbitrary pauses.

"But I assume nothing will change your politically motivated opinion that climate change is no big deal."

This is a thought terminating cliché. The default non-political position in any discussion of what should government or society do is always "do nothing". It has to be - think about it. It's always the people agitating for change who are engaged in the process of politics, because it's via the process of politics that change on the level of government policy is enacted.

What's happening here is the opposite; the people saying "default to nothing, we think the need is unproven" are the people taking the default non-political position. It's the people demanding massive enforced changes to people's lives that are engaging in politics. And unfortunately, history teaches that people who insist on totally upending society for long term abstract goals must always be treated with suspicion because that is power, power corrupts, and the ground is full of the skeletons of people who died due to the dreams of despots. What they advertised as concern over some abstract ideal (justice, equality, nation, etc) rapidly became a mere tool to enter and stay in power.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer

> Dr. Roy Spencer, Ph.D.[3] is a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a crank with a major persecution complex. His favored form of pseudoscience is global warming denial, though he has also become known as a proponent of Intelligent Design.

[origin_path]

Is that meant to be a rebuttal? You realize that I'm citing data, not even personal opinions?

It's hilarious that the website is called "rational wiki" by the way. Replies like yours are why we must not geo-engineer the earth. The sort of people who insist it's necessary can't handle data and fall back to ad-hominem, so should not be listened to.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Yep, it is a rebuttal. Climate cranks and their misuse of questionable data should not be taken seriously. Relying on them in your arguments, quoting and defending them is likewise an instant credibility fail.

[origin_path]

Rational wiki are well known cranks therefore you should not cite them for anything. There, done, you have no possible answer to that. Do you now wish to address the actual data?

[upsidesinclude]

Thanks for that reasoned reply

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Is that sarcasm? That's a 100% oblivious reply.

[hotpotamus]

Why are you linking to one guy's wordpress blog? I think this is the kind of research that might take more than one person. And is his data only coming from satellites? Wouldn't it make more sense to get a variety of sensor data?

[origin_path]

Because that's where I happened to find the graphs? Go right ahead and find the papers if you like. The research in question is simply plotting old model projections on a graph along with satellite temperatures.

"Wouldn't it make more sense to get a variety of sensor data?"

By all means, try it. You'll find that satellites and weather balloons disagree with surface level temperature history. The reason is, climatologists keep editing surface temperature databases to create new 'versions' that create warming trends where none were previously visible. This is not scientific, of course. You're meant to fit your theory to the data, not data to the theory. The satellite data presented there is much less tampered with.

[hotpotamus]

How do I know the satellite data wasn't tampered with?

[origin_path]

Good question! In fact some satellite datasets are tampered with. There's a good example documented here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOHrYY3yAGE

The RSS dataset showed no warming for nearly twenty years - a problem, it's not meant to show that. Once the data was released, people with experience with how climatology operates (like Dr Spencer) predicted the data would soon be revised to show warming, somehow. That's exactly what happened. The original data used confidence intervals that widened over time, to reflect degrading instruments and orbits. In the new data the CIs were gone and the new trend line was simply the uppermost value allowed within the CI for each point. Because the CIs were widening, this trick created an appearance of warming where previously there hadn't been any.

Generally, the only way to be sure something isn't being messed with is to review the methodologies. The tampering is public, it's not a secret and they don't hide the fact that they do it, they just don't mention it to the general public and rely on the media to not report what they're doing. It works: awareness of this problem is incredibly low. Still, you can compare the different 'versions' they release over time to see the enormous magnitude of the changes, or you can read the occasional reports that surface in outlets like Nature when really massive revisions occur, and then you can remember that scientists aren't meant to do that. They're meant to add error bars if they have doubts about their data and propagate that uncertainty through to their final graphs and predictions. Climatologists don't do this. Instead they argue that they know temperatures should be going up, so if it isn't, there must be something wrong with the data. Nothing a quick model can't fix.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

"An apparent pause in global warming might have been a temporary mirage, according to recent analysis. Global average temperatures have continued to rise throughout the first part of the twenty-first century, researchers report on 5 June in Science. That finding, which contradicts the 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is based on an update of the global temperature records maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The previous version of the NOAA data set had showed less warming during the first decade of the millennium."

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Why are you linking to one guy's wordpress blog?

One particular guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(meteorologist)

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer

See particularly Wikipedia:

> "Spencer holds contrarian views on climate change and intelligent design. These views are rejected by the scientific community."

Which, if you translate back from the dry language that Wikipedia uses, says "this guy's a nut".

[upsidesinclude]

This statement is just false.

As of yet, the outcomes have been on the lower end of modeling, i.e. less severe, until the models are revised to be more conservative in their estimates. Convenient because then the models can come back with elevated outcomes by comparison to the predicted average. Ah! See scientism at work?

It's the persistent, politically motivated science that causes the hesitancy and disbelief