It's interesting that we're not allowed to debate the existence of the crisis in the first place... it's just accepted as an a priori fact and anyone who provides even the slightest push-back is ridiculed and silenced.
They get ridiculed because they argue in bad faith with bad or even made up references and data.
Their predictions are basically useless. Decades ago these "debators" were arguing in favor of global cooling because solar activity is going down yet what we got is record temperatures after record temperatures practically every single year.
Even with correct data they intentionally misinterpret it or omit crucial factors. For example a graph where solar insolation, co2 levels and global temperatures are listed they remove the solar insolation data and then argue that there is no correlation between CO2 and global temperatures or state that past CO2 levels have been higher while ignoring that over the time of millions of years solar insolation has increased by a few percentage points and it takes less CO2 today to cause the same level of warming Vs millions of years ago.
Let's assume there was a "debate", why is one side acting in such a way? You would have to put on a tinfoil hat and explain this by saying something ridiculous like "the green lobby routinely funds junk science to discredit climate skeptics".
I haven't seen any new credible evidence in years that doesn't hyperfocus on one data point or weather event or just try to generally throw up a "well we don't really know do we it could be this other thing" to try to prove their claim. It's tiring and the data is overwhelming that we're warming the Earth.
Maybe because there's a scientific consensus at least on the fact that there's a global warming at the source of a ever growing climate instability and that the only people pushing against it are crazy people who don't know what they are talking about and crazy politicians willing to say that out loud in order to get elected, and coal/oil/gas lobbies paying for sham science (and aforementioned politicians) to say the contrary.
Funny by the way how the discourse about climate change has changed over the years from "It's not happening" to "It's not that bad". Altough in typical conspiracist style, some have always held both at the same time.
Is Freeman Dyson also a crazy person who doesn't know what he's talking about?
The appearance of consensus is manufactured by the media. They label each dissenter as an individual crazy person and somehow the mainstream narrative is the consensus.
And again, this labelling is done by the media. There's no high authority of science.
Freeman Dyson is not a climate scientist.
How can you expect me to take it seriously when I read that:
"""
Dyson replied that "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."
"""
The consensus being withheld by the all the media that speak the voice of the elite is that you should go to work and not interfere with the money making machine. Realizing that climate change is an issue for humanity and doing something about it does interfere with the money making machine and only with threats of impending doom, does the machine slowly allow to modify its ways. But profit remains the sacred law.
I don't watch "the media" and I do my own labelling. I have read and seen enough conspiracist bs to tell the difference by myself.
Because the disaster we're heading into is backed by laws of physics that have been proven again and again over centuries. It's not possible to come up with arguments to "push back" against it. If you think it is, you simply lack the level of required scientific education to understand what is going on.
The problem with this is there do seem to be quite legitimate physicists who disagree with the "sky is falling" conclusion that all popular discussion is premised on. I recently heard an interview with Dr. Richard Lindzen that, for instance, provides what sounds like a very reasonable counter to the prevailing attitude.
Anyone who says "the science is settled, the laws of physics cannot be violated" fails to realize what physics is even about. The vast majority of victories that physics has had since Isaac Newton are based on incredibly simplified models that strip out all of the complexity from a system. Basically everything interesting is treated as linear (as in f(x) ~ x) and a lot of the other stuff is just thrown into constants. After a few decades of working with that, both in theory and with experiments, you might get comfortable enough to add some small corrections to your theories. In this way you step closer and closer to "truth" but we are still very far off, even with our best physics, from fully understanding anything of even moderate complexity. This is not to say that we don't get incredibly useful results from physics (just look at our technology!), but it does mean that we need to constrain statements about how much we really understand and where our "laws" really are applicable. Take for instance the equation for kinetic energy, k=.5 * mv^2. Hugely useful, but dead wrong if you try to apply it to things moving at relativistic speeds.
The problem of climate science, from my perspective, is that we can't strip it down like we do for simple systems like a ball moving in space. Climate is inherently very complex; if you try to ignore how oceans interact with vegetation, how vegetation interacts with clouds, how clouds and rain are connected, etc, then your models can be interesting and might reveal something, but they can't be used to predict what will happen with any degree of confidence because they are too far removed from the real thing. And if you don't strip something out of the system when doing your modeling, well then good luck: you'll never understand anything at all because the thing is too complex to be used to calculate anything of interest.
Sorry, this is typical denial discourse up there. "Oh but we are not perfect, we can't be sure".
The fact that there a greater margin of impredictability should make us even more wary of potential disastrous consequences.
Plus, scientists working on the question do acknowledge that there is a big room of impredicatability. Which is why they make best-case and worst case scenarii that vary wildly.
There's however a consensus on the fact that it's going to be bad. What don't know is how bad. Which is IMHO frightening enough
I'm sorry but you are wrong. I am describing how physics works and it is at odds with many of the claims made regarding our understanding of what is a very, _very_, complex system. You can't just claim there is "consensus that it's going to be bad" without having the sort of scientific discussion I am trying to have. Let's discuss what we know, what the limits are of that knowledge, etc, before we declare that the sky is falling.
I do think you make a great point, which is that the risks and rewards need to be considered. The problem is that analyzing the cost is also a pretty complex problem and there are very real arguments to be made that going green could end up being very costly.
FWIW, I actually came into the climate science debate on your side and have been won over by paying attention to a broader set of sources. One of the things I really can't stand about the climate change disaster is that even if you accept all the claims from the IPCC, it pales in comparison, in my opinion, to other issues that seem a bit simpler to me. The collapsing insect populations, for instance, can have a pretty direct impact on human health and happiness. The climate discussion seems takes all the attention even though no one has made a credible argument as to why it is more dangerous than other problems we face.
edit: I'll add that scientific modelling is _very_ difficult in general, even for much simpler systems than what we are talking about here. These models have tons of simplifying assumptions baked into them and they can be made to spit out just about anything, depending on what values for certain parameters are chosen. The tools aren't particularly trustworthy.
edit: I'll add a bit more. I do think climate change is happening and I do think that humans might have a big part in why it is happening. What I don't find compelling is why this is necessarily an end-of-the-world scenario. The typical argument is: "there has already been warming and there will be further warming. Then there will be runaway effects, then the warming will become extreme and life will become very difficult for most people in most places." Well I do agree with the first part, but it is _really_ hard to predict what happens afterwards, i.e. are there going to be runaway effects. There are reasonable arguments that there won't be. The arguments that there will be tend to focus on a few scientific facts and ignore the complexity of the system at large (i.e. they ignore negative feedback mechanisms and focus only on positive feedback).
Well don't you think that climate change plays a part in a collapsing insect population. I know pesticides are killing them but I have a hard seeing how unpredictable weather patterns, extreme climate events and resulting ecosystem perturbations in their environment may not contribute to that collapse.
The mere fact that an end-of-the-world scenario is possible should mobilize us all. End of the world is not something you gamble on. And, of course, it won't an end of the world, it will a slow and painful life on an unlivable planet.
Can you give me any positive feedback from the release of carbon ?
We've seen this line of reasoning in the COVID crisis. I won't be fooled twice. Everyone is systematically overstating their confidence. I'd rather deal with the problem as it arises than do unnecessary damage.
And I definitely think that relying on the weather a.k.a. "renewable energy" when you have solid prediction that its going to be unreliable, while your prediction of the possibility of averting the crisis is unknown, is beyond dumb. It's suicidal.
We're choosing the worst possible strategy right now. We have the highest probability of the worst case scenario: chaotic climate and weather while relying on said climate for energy generation. Planning for worst case is planning for the crisis happening regardless of your actions, because your confidence about the impact of your actions is pretty low.
There is no metric by which the current suicidal strategy makes sense. We're not minimizing the damage in the worst case. We're not adapting to the situation as it comes. The only scenario in which the current strategy has a better outcome is if we somehow were right about everything, not only about the impact of CO2, but about the geopolitical actions taken by China and India.
The probability that we're on the best possible strategy is practically zero.
That the planet is warming is backed by very good science but the magnitude of the ecological impact to humans is unknowable and thus not science at all.
Aside from borderline impossible claims of a runaway greenhouse effect, there is absolutely no world where human extinction is on the table and frankly I would argue that mass death is unlikely as historical evidence is by far in the favor of human adaptability.
> I would argue that mass death is unlikely as historical evidence is by far in the favor of human adaptability.
I would argue that mass death happening somewhere else is almost an inevitability by historical arguments; it just doesn't look like it's climate related. Is a refugee from desertified Africa who drowns in the Mediterranean a "climate death"?
Mass death won't look like the Al Gore movie. It'll look like COVID: a line going up on a chart which people can ignore.
The difference with the Galileo situation is that the consensus before Galileo was not based on scientific work but on "It's written in the very old book of Truth, duh"
Your argument doesn't work, if it ever did. People have already decided where they fall. You'll never beat them into submission; you'll only make their positions more entrenched.
There are two arguments, and they like to confuse people that they must be related.
There is all the data of what is actually going on in the world. Temperature readings, satellite images, etc. This can be called science and it is evidence, but it doesn't come with anything saying what is causing it. The equivalent of a primitive man meticulously measuring the rain.
Then there is the conjecture that this is all because of CO2 and its all our fault. This is purely religious argument, not at all different than the good old "Gods are punishing us" argument from a primitive man. The only evidence for this argument are some trash computer models which are running far beyond their predictive capability.
It's also inevitable that if we have "global warming god" and "global cooling god", one would emerge victorious.
It isn't science, it's just masquerading as science. The data analysis of real world data is science. The trash computer models attributing all of this to CO2 aren't science.
These are similar to the computer models in the COVID crisis which have overshoot reality by orders of magnitude.
Their predictions are basically useless. Decades ago these "debators" were arguing in favor of global cooling because solar activity is going down yet what we got is record temperatures after record temperatures practically every single year.
Even with correct data they intentionally misinterpret it or omit crucial factors. For example a graph where solar insolation, co2 levels and global temperatures are listed they remove the solar insolation data and then argue that there is no correlation between CO2 and global temperatures or state that past CO2 levels have been higher while ignoring that over the time of millions of years solar insolation has increased by a few percentage points and it takes less CO2 today to cause the same level of warming Vs millions of years ago.
Let's assume there was a "debate", why is one side acting in such a way? You would have to put on a tinfoil hat and explain this by saying something ridiculous like "the green lobby routinely funds junk science to discredit climate skeptics".