To save HN users further time, it's a link to a five month old Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel video titled I wasn't worried about climate change. Now I am.
It's not a day late and a dollar short. It's 30 years late and tens of trillions of dollars short.
Actual climate scientists were warning about the dangers at 1.5C, and had been since the 80s. Now 1.5C is actually here.
So I feel like this needs more than just a "whoops, changed my mind". This needs a "Hey, turns out that maybe physicists don't know everything, and maybe when in doubt we should defer to the people who actually study the field".
Hossenfelder is very smart and (at least within her field) very well qualified. But she seems to like perceiving herself as a gadfly, choosing contrarian positions, usually without being in a position to be proven wrong. In this case she was very wrong, and everybody who actually knew the domain told her that.
I don't need a mea culpa about it. It's not like she was a really important force in climate denial. But changing her mind now isn't really helpful -- and it seems like she rarely has any desire to make an actual contribution.
As a general summary 2023 average ocean surface temperatures jumped by a bit more than one degree Celsius over the course of a few months. One degree doesn't seem much, but in the climate crisis people are discussing about two or three degrees of warming potentially fatal for human civilization. And also scientists were thrown for a loop because climate models predicted this change not happen so quickly.
Luckily (for some interpretations of luckily) it seems that 2024 ocean surface temperaturs are not rising as quickly as in 2023, but they are still rising. It still seems that we crashed with high speed through several tipping points and continue.
Especially that SST as of July 1st 2024 is same as July 1st 2023, in other words, we had a jump of slightly more than a degree Celsius and a year later we are at the same place.
It's not a day late and a dollar short. It's 30 years late and tens of trillions of dollars short.
Actual climate scientists were warning about the dangers at 1.5C, and had been since the 80s. Now 1.5C is actually here.
So I feel like this needs more than just a "whoops, changed my mind". This needs a "Hey, turns out that maybe physicists don't know everything, and maybe when in doubt we should defer to the people who actually study the field".
Hossenfelder is very smart and (at least within her field) very well qualified. But she seems to like perceiving herself as a gadfly, choosing contrarian positions, usually without being in a position to be proven wrong. In this case she was very wrong, and everybody who actually knew the domain told her that.
I don't need a mea culpa about it. It's not like she was a really important force in climate denial. But changing her mind now isn't really helpful -- and it seems like she rarely has any desire to make an actual contribution.