I wonder how Much of it is global warming vs other effects! Would be nice to see a even longer historical overlay of the changes. Or even have the values corrected for anomalies that are not an effect of human involvement.
Sure, there is some uncertainty. But in reality, we have a pretty complete model of physics, chemistry, geology and biology. Generally, the predictions we made 10 or 20 years ago match with what we're seeing.
So of course "science does not deal in certainties" but most of the questions are really at the second or third decimal point.
There is an excellent video by David Louapre (of Science Etonnante fame) that explains for example how our greenhouse model works. It's in French, but subtitles should do the tricks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewc8FBtEKPs
You have been downvoted, but it is a good question. Hopefully it was asked in good faith ;)
Since around the 1970s, the North Sea became a few degrees warmer. Fisherman more regularly find fish and other creatures that used to be only down in France or even more south. As far as I know, we don't really know what caused this trend of the gulf stream going more up north. For all we know, it might switch back and we get the climate of Canada; winter from September until April.
Now we find out that same gulf stream is slowing down. We did not predict that and don't really know why it happens and what the consequences will be.
By the way, inside the country, water coming in from more central Europe is coming in faster in winter, causing problems, while in summer not much is coming in, causing more draught. Germany and Belgium are not prepared for this. A few years ago many people died when rivers overflowed.
There do exist people (even on the internet) who ask similar questions about climate change, who prefer to attribute it to all kind of other causes, and deviate or deny that human activities create climate change. I do know that wasn't part of the question, so I can only guess and hope.
The only reason "values corrected for anomalies that are not an effect of human involvement" would be interesting is to find out whether the effect of human involvement is significant or not. It is a valid question, but we already know the answer, so asking OP to essentially re-do a huge amount of climate science comes off as disingenuous.
Sure yeah, or we could accept the settled science and move on to fixing the problem before the ice caps are gone and frozen methane hydrates vent from the ocean and kill much of the globe.
recent science graphics shown among experts predict 4-5 degree celsius rise in annual mean temperatures in far north Europe. From previous discussion, these numbers will change quite a lot of daily life all year.
What? Of course we should! It is of course partially caused by humanity. But it’s a common debate among researchers exactly how much the trends are affecting the changes.
It's a legitimate question, but I can't tell if you're wondering whether we have significant influence on it at all, or if you are just wondering what fraction the solar cycle being at its maximum ~now (iirc) and other such effects are (which I imagine is no more than a few percent, since previous ones are not immediately apparent in the visualization of the previous 10k-odd years (https://xkcd.com/1732/); or even if we're only a tiny fraction on top of nature's mechanisms, that's apparently 'that much' too much greenhouse gases)
The Solar Cycle is approximately has a period of ~11 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle). The heating clearly shown in these visualizations does not appear to be related to the solar cycle.
Correct words, but blatantly misleading as a concept.
As an example: sure, Einstein found in the 1900s that Newton's theory of gravity from the 1600s was wrong, but it's wrong to such a degree that it doesn't matter for everyday applications and we still use and teach Newton's law of universal gravitation because it's a very good approximation with a very simple formula. If we had based the mechanism of climate change on the "faulty" formula and adjusted our emissions based on that, then found out that it's incorrect to the same degree, we'd have been so close to the truth that it would have worked out perfectly (to well within the error margins of global measurements).
The point of science is that it's about testable predictions. You can say "if I drop a mass from 1m height at sea level in a vacuum chamber, it will impact the surface after 0.10204 seconds" and then go and measure that and you can find that it's right to within your measurement's error margins. We've been doing the same for climate mechanisms and a whole host of other things. If the scientific method didn't work, we couldn't have reliable vehicles, let alone airplanes or useful GPS results.
Don't let yourself be mislead by attention-grabbing headlines of "scientists found out they were wrong all along" which we see all too often. Read the article if it's from an otherwise good source, or click through to the source if it's not, and make up your own mind
I disagree that it's "blatantly misleading as a concept". Just as it is, as a concept, it's essential to being able to argue any conclusion. Which, in turn, is essential to science. There can't be fences. Even if your notes on practical process hold true most of the time.
Though it's a shame to use the climate science example, given the immense anti-science pressure that looks to bury dissenting theories and data instead of engaging them as a means of continuously proving itself in the context of the divisive politics. Which are inevitable given that this particular science seeks to make world altering prescriptions. The failed hope is to make such prescriptions in an environment of no allowable argument. The result is widely percieved corruption of science for political ends. That was never supposed to be an outcome of science, should its principles be followed in spirit and otherwise.
Conclusions have to defend themselves, forever. Ridiculous theories can be marginalized due to lack of evidence, but nothing should be silenced as a matter of working principle. In turn, we can operate based on consensus conclusions but these conclusions have to be able to defend themselves, forever, only on merit.
> - is also known as hydroxyl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
> - contributes to the "greenhouse effect".
> - contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
> - has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
[etc.]
> Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used: as an industrial solvent and coolant [...] [and] as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.
You can convince virtually anyone that water is dangerous and should be outlawed by saying only true things.
> In 2001, a staffer in New Zealand Green Party [...] office responded to a request for support for a campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide by saying she was "absolutely supportive of the campaign to ban this toxic substance". This was criticized in a press release by the National Party, one of whose MPs fell for the very same joke six years later.
More related to this thread, the difference between "just asking questions" and "just sowing doubt" is in the effect on the casual reader rather than in the legitimacy of the question, unfortunately :(. There are things that are harmful to randomly call into question without being specific enough (such that it may sound like you're doubting all of climate change) and/or doing your own research first (many things needn't be carefully asked if you just type it into duckduckgo instead), I believe.
Not saying anyone was sowing doubt here, I'm just responding to your point that there cannot be questions that are off-limits in science. (Also noting that this is a comment thread for the general public on the topic of some graphs, not precisely scientific discourse itself.)
Translation: I have never looked for an explanation.
"""Time series of global average temperature anomalies show excellent agreement between observations and model simulations (Figure 1b)."""
Randel, W. J., Polvani, L., Wu, F., Kinnison, D. E., Zou, C.-Z., & Mears, C. (2017). Troposphere-stratosphere temperature trends derived from satellite data compared with ensemble simulations from WACCM. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 122, 9651–9667, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JD027158
Among many, many others in the literature. Climate models going clear back to 1960 have been right on the money, with the primary source of error being predictions about how much stupid shit humans would do.
Nice snide comment to start with. I have looked. What I have found does not match what the models need. Most things aimed at the general public are simplistic. I assume the real answers require access to journals.
Are global average temperatures enough to provide data for all the temperature variables in models? Surely only sufficient for a model that predicted only global average temperatures.
Some models may have been right, but some were badly wrong Here is an example of one that got media attntion that is clearly badly wrong.
Answering that to the detail that I feel it requires to prove beyond doubt, would likely take about as much time as doing a meta-analysis on the topic. Here's some starting points:
> We know this warming is largely caused by human activities because the key role that carbon dioxide plays in maintaining Earth’s natural greenhouse effect has been understood since the mid-1800s. Unless it is offset by some equally large cooling influence, more atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to warmer surface temperatures. Since 1800, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 parts per million to 410 ppm in 2019. We know from both its rapid increase and its isotopic “fingerprint” that the source of this new carbon dioxide is fossil fuels, and not natural sources like forest fires, volcanoes, or outgassing from the ocean. [...] no other known climate influences have changed enough to account for the observed warming trend
If you're wondering how to establish causality in the first place, when we can't do experiments (we could hardly add and remove a significant amount of emissions at will to see what effect it has), this article provides two methods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7081045/ The problem is not unique to climate science. Quoting the "background" section:
> In clinical medical research, causality is demonstrated by randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Often, however, an RCT cannot be conducted for ethical reasons, and sometimes for practical reasons as well. In such cases, knowledge can be derived from an observational study instead. In this article, we present two methods that have not been widely used in medical research to date.
Beyond global warming, much easier to study is the effect that air pollution has on humans. Stopping coal power plants and combustion engine vehicles in cities would also extend millions of people's healthy years of life every year. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution
> Outdoor air pollution attributable to fossil fuel use alone causes ~3.61 million deaths annually, making it one of the top contributors to human death
The solutions we have today (using wind, water, sun, and fission) that reduce warming and improve health are not perfect, but my understanding is that they are better
I am not disputing that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will net cause warming. I am asking for the methodology used to test climate models. The same with the fact that pollution is bad: nothing to do with the testing of climate models.
The analogy with medicines where controlled trails are not possible is flawed. You can observe large numbers of people. We can only observe one planet.
From the replies and the down votes, its seems people read even asking questions about climate models as a claim that climate change is not happening, or human beings are not a major cause, or something similar.
That's a rather huge document just to respond to a single sentence (with someone's highlights, not sure if those are yours or whether to otherwise heed them). Feels a bit asymmetrical in the amount of effort one has to put in to understand your comment/point.
From reading the first page, I would say that this could be a summary / an answer to the statement of the person above you:
> when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
(The document seems to assume that you know the earth is an oblate spheroid or something: rather close to spherical, but off enough that it's noticeable under certain circumstances such as spaceflight.)
If that is indeed what you meant to say, I would recommend citing that part and adding the link for reference. That probably helps more people than just posting the document link by itself
Thanks i like that! Likewise, the relativity of wrong reactions to our situation needs to be considered I think. There seemsnto be consensus now that it is too late to address the problem only in the right way. We should still do all of those things. But to avoid mass suffering, it is well past time we considered planet scale climate engineering as a valid approach. It is risky, but risky is, like wrongness, relative. And the wrongness and riskiness of acting without knowing all the effects is relatively less, not just than continuing on the current path, but even than adopting all the right behaviors at this late hour with no other steps.
That seems to be an uncharacteristically poorly thought out argument from Asimov, who I have immense respect for otherwise. He's engaging in a simple strawman! The issue is him (Asimov) being critiqued for thinking we have finally gotten everything, more or less, correct - finally. The critic alleges to Asimov that he's falling for what I call 'the arrogance of the present.' For great minds in past centuries also certainly thought they had finally, more or less, worked everything out, and were invariably proven wrong. So what makes now different, beyond the fact that 'now' is the time we live in?
Asimov's argument is that modern ideas are 'less wrong' than those of times past. He then goes on to talk about flat Earth and geocentric views of times past, going so far as to literally suggest his critic, refusing to accept any certainty, might believe the Earth could be determined to be a cube next year. That's just deeply disingenuous by Asimov, and I suspect the issue flustered him.
The critic was obviously not suggesting that next year we might decide the Earth is cubical, but referencing modern theories like the luminiferous aether [1]. Asimov would have certainly been aware of such, but as I suspect you might not - it's an extremely interesting tale. The aether was had a tremendous amount of science and support around it. And it was also completely and absolutely wrong. Not incomplete, not even less wrong, just plain wrong. It was only proven to be wrong in the famous (and quite elaborate, by the standard of the times) Michelson-Morley experiment. [2] Yet so strongly supported was the aether, that Michelson actually assumed he made an experimental mistake when he failed to detect the aether. He rejected his own discovery! He has a very famous quote:
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"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
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That quote was made in 1894, 7 years after proving the aether (and ultimately centuries of established science prior) wrong! He was still under the belief that he simply had yet to achieve the precision necessary to measure the aether! In fact so compelling was it, that it was really finally only put to rest by relativity, which showed the absurd nature of our reality - that the speed of light is a constant from all frames of reference. That only kicked off in 1905. And indeed there's every reason to expect that some, if not much, of what we think today may simply end up being seen as the aether of our times - well supported, logical, wrong.
> going so far as to literally suggest his critic, refusing to accept any certainty, might believe the Earth could be determined to be a cube next year.
He absolutely did no such thing.
What you seem to have missed is that the entire thing is a thought exercise to demonstrate a point.
Quoting the paper, "In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after."
I’m pretty sure the only anomalies that have ever produced geographic temperature changes as drastic as the ones visualized are things like city-sized asteroid collisions or volcanic eruptions that blot out the sun. If you haven’t noticed any of those, then it’s probably safe to assume that approximately 100% of the effect is down to human activity.
I don't understand what part of that link is supposed to prove the person wrong. Could you cite that part, or at least point out what part of the above statement is supposedly wrong in the first place?
So of course "science does not deal in certainties" but most of the questions are really at the second or third decimal point.
There is an excellent video by David Louapre (of Science Etonnante fame) that explains for example how our greenhouse model works. It's in French, but subtitles should do the tricks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewc8FBtEKPs