[eykanal]

For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra...

Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.

[notarobot123]

Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists

[jihadjihad]

Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax, and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.

[4er_transform]

Actually I think a lot of climate change denialism has more to do with the “…and so we have to do X to solve it” part of climate change. It’s “climate change activism” that turns people off.

Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.

There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.

[autoexec]

> Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth.

I've never seen "halting economic growth" as a suggestion for dealing with climate change that was being taken seriously. There might be some crackpots out there insisting that we need to being the economy to a halt and move into caves or something, but I think the vast majority understands that it isn't going to happen. That said, there are things that could be done which would hurt the profits of the ~50 companies who are responsible for most of the global CO2 emissions and/or trillions in climate related damages without causing the entire global economy to grind to a stop or collapse (as much as they'd love for us to believe otherwise).

The greatest societal behavior that needs to be changed is the way we allow a very small number of people get away with making insane amounts of money by causing insane levels of harm. Until that changes, the harmful systems that those people have created for themselves to profit under won't change either.

[moritzwarhier]

Have you considered that there might be political decisions that are necessary, but not associated with a short-term gain for the majority of people?

[4er_transform]

Yes of course. Unfortunately many of those decisions get distorted and captured by bad actors, creating a reasonable skepticism.

If you care about solving climate change: instead of yelling at climate change denialist you should direct more effort into advocating for policy and messaging that acknowledges and mitigates the harms while keeping you expect people to endure

[moritzwarhier]

I'm not yelling at anyone.

But if you want me to, I could, sure.

It doesn't sound to me like you contribute any valuable argument that would improve the "PR" for the goal of protecting environmental living conditions for humans though.

[DrScientist]

So to paraphrase, some people don't like some of the proposed solutions to climate change to choose to pretend it isn't happening rather than confront the problem?

> it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it,

Sure there are fanatics spouting end-of-the-world-is-nigh stuff but fundamentally I think the problem here is it's unknown - both in terms of the physical changes [1], and perhaps more importantly second order effects due to mass migration. It might become a real problem a lot sooner than you think - we simply don't know - but I think it's certainly wrong to view the effects as a gradual rise - that average hides a lot of local/temporal variation.

[1]in terms of potential for positive feedback loops like methane release, or compensating stabilising effects like cloud cover. [2] For a region to become uninhabitable, you don't need it to be uninhabitable every day of the year - just one or two days a year may be enough - enough to kill people or crops. What's important is the occurrence of extremes during the year, not the average gradual rise.

[logicchains]

The scientific method is making testable predictions. You can look back 10, 20, 30, 40 years at the predictions of sea level rise made by climate scientists, and the sea level today is nowhere near where they predicted it would rise to. If someone's continuously making incorrect predictions it's not reasonable to assume their predictions will suddenly become accurate, especially when there's no feedback loop to weed out people making bad predictions (unlike e.g. in finance where people whose models have little predictive power eventually go bankrupt). No climate scientist has lost their job for making incorrect predictions of sea level rise twenty years ago.

[uecker]

"We were quite amazed how good those early projections were, especially when you think about how crude the models were back then, compared to what is available now,” https://news.tulane.edu/pr/study-finds-sea-level-projections...

[imtringued]

Yeah you have to literally stick your head in the sand to deny what's happening. The models are shit. They suck, and yet the degree to which they are more accurate than not should be enough to convince you.

The CO2 hypothesis was made in the 50s, long before there was conclusive evidence, and yet we are right on the predicted trajectory.

[uecker]

That CO2 emissions will cause warming was predicted first by Arrhenius Svante in 1896. While accurate modelling of all effects may be difficult, the basic effect follows from fundamental physics. There is really no excuse for doubting this.

[pastage]

That sounds like a perfect match for a meta study do you have any? I am very dubious about your conclusion. I am basing this on work I did in high school on this so I really have no sources for my claim.

EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.

[vel0city]

In fact I remember reading the opposite recently, that IPCC sea level rise predictions from the 90s were actually pretty accurate given the limitations of the models at the time. And that a good bit of the error was underestimations of rise, not overestimations.

> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025ef00...

[Zetaphor]

People wouldn't just lie on the internet!

[gosub100]

The far left is all in on climate change so they suppress anything that contradicts the narrative. You think Nature is going to publish "oops we were wrong about" stories wrt climate change? Each side has dug their heels in.

I believe people have influenced the climate, but the far left is using it as a political football to get Their Guy elected, not to actually stop it. The idea of a rising sea is a perfect disaster they can sell you the solution for. If they actually cared, 1) the Democrats would be fighting AI tooth and nail, unless it was 100% powered by renewables (not nuclear, remember their version of science denialism is no nukes.). 2) they would be worshipping Elon for bringing us EVs. Instead they take all that silicon valley AI money and tell us to save the ocean. No way San Jose!

[JoeAltmaier]

That argument seems to be applicable to either party.

And I'm not sure we want to put our heads in the sand and say La-La-La, against the real possibility that everything is actually going to shit.

[xnyan]

What is nature not publishing? On what has the climate change "side" (such as it is) dug their heels on?

[alsetmusic]

> The far left

> the Democrats

You have shown that you don't understand what Leftist politics means. Democrats are center-right. The USA hasn't had a meaningful Leftist party since the first half of the last century.

[digdugdirk]

Systems are complicated. Given there are numerous predicted outcomes (it's not just about the actual measured sea-level rise, after all) and many of those predictions are coming to pass far earlier than hoped, it might be worth having an open mind to the fact that sometimes people who devote their lives to studying something might be worth listening to.

[pnt12]

It's much harder to predict exactly than to dismiss anything slightly off.

But the tendency is showing: in my country, we're getting records in extreme temperatures, forrest fires and storms.

But a study 1% can be dismissed, some random in a basement 99% off can be believed. This just says: many people are just looking for a confirmation of their beliefs, not evidence. And many companies play this game (supporting the right politicians, spreading disinformation aka lies, etc), because there are billions at stake.

[blell]

You can apply that too to the “man-made climate change is real” argument.

[jrajav]

Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.

[exhumet]

my wife is an actuary, and we always joke that you know climate change has real cause and effect because the actuaries are specifically monitoring and modeling for it lol

[Forgeties79]

Hell the US military takes it into account

[virgildotcodes]

Can you apply that too to the "earth is round" argument?

The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?

I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!

[funkyfiddler369]

that's cute but you can't blame people for holding opinions based on phenomenal observations before they learn the language and can perform experiments. the fact that so many can't is the sole reason you might be considered somewhat superior or competent. more people with scientific skills and a personal way to explain and adhere to the scientific method would mean that your competence would be no more than average, if at all. how would that make you feel?

more importantly though, is the fact that there are enough "critics" that consider Global Warming a cycle that "man" merely accelerated by a few decades. most of these "skeptics" are also perfectly capable of discerning between the amount of energy "wasted" in office buildings and lit up skyscrapers as well as anything at the end of luxury supply chains and markets and what the rest of the world "wastes" or expends. to them, the hoax is the "man-made" part ...

it should be "some-man-made climate change"

[anigbrowl]

My phenomenal observations are that it's been getting warmer during my lifetime, but as soon as I mention this in an online conversation I get slapped down with 'the climate is always changing' and 'n=1'.

Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.

[seec]

Well, it's my observation as well, but the point is that it's not the first time this happened.

In fact, we have records from not that long ago that at some point climate became colder after it had been warmer for a bit.

It's obvious human civilization has an impact, but the real question is more, can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life? Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.

Climate activist make it look like it's a settled issue, but the problem isn't the science; the problem is trying to use the science to enforce decision that are highly political in nature and are not to be left only to the designated god scientist, no matter how hard they cry...

[imtringued]

>Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.

Uh? Ultimate loser? When I read comments like this I'm basically confronted with the following implication "Human civilization isn't worth preserving. If you disagree, then the problem is with you, namely because you believe humanity to be redeemable".

The ultimate loser is the person who thinks that a small or almost nonexistent reduction in quality of life is a small price to pay in comparison to a large and permanent reduction in quality of life.

The ultimate winner is the person who will see his quality of life decline before his eyes.

Crazy.

[Ma8ee]

> can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life

Yes, no doubt! And actually doing something about it will impact our lives much less than trying to continue as usual. If we would have started 30 years ago, the transitions would have been smooth, but now it is going to be harsher. The problem is that doing something about it will affect the profits of some very big and influential corporations, and they are doing everything they can to sow FUD.

[Forgeties79]

>that’s cute

Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.

[breakyerself]

What are the cycles called? How do they function? A lot of people use the world cycle like other people use the word magic. A mystery pretending to be an explanation.

The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.

[ai-x]

There are various levels of perspectives

- Climate Warming is a hoax

- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles

- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.

- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way

- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.

For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans

[yongjik]

Things must be bleak for climate deniers if they have to make an itemized list of strawman arguments to feel good about it.

[ai-x]

The only group that cries and creates hysteria is the last group. So, not sure why you think the other groups consider it as bleak. From all the other groups perspective, they are winning, because nobody is buying the stupid de-growth, ban fossils agenda.

Yes, if hysteria and de-growth propaganda wins, it is bleak for the other groups

[Forgeties79]

I think you should take a step back, try to ignore your priors a bit, and take a look at this subject with an open mind/willingness to be incorrect. Because I’m telling you man, the science is against you.

Even the US military is planning around climate change because they sure as hell believe it’s real: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/375340...

[ai-x]

It perfectly falls under - "Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way"

[imtringued]

You forgot to list like a dozen variants in-between the last two groups. The abrupt end and extremely biased framing is almost comical.

>Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way

Green growth aka energy efficiency doesn't work, so one more category.

Carbon capture doesn't work without government subsidies. Hence you need a group of people who would be willing to pay tax money to solve climate change. One more category.

Human adaptation can mean many things. People accept climate change even if it means mass immigration. One more category.

People accept climate change even if it means armed border conflicts where immigrants get shot (see Poland) due to closed border policies. One more category.

People resign and accept the negative consequences of climate change as the new normal, similar to people living in polluted cities, except globally. One more category.

[JackMorgan]

You're missing: "Climate is warming, but this is a good thing because it means Jesus will come back sooner and I'll live in endless bliss and not have to go to work anymore, so I'm going to do my part by driving a huge truck and pretend like it's fake."

[jandrese]

More commonly these days is the message that CO2 is plant food, and climate change is a nefarious plot to kill off the plants by starving them in order to reduce the Earth's population. I can dig up several tweets this week pushing that message.

It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now. Elon doesn't even care, more outrage == more engagement and that's what feeds the system. It's a feedback loop of crap.

[Nevermark]

> It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now.

Not "basically" owned. Manipulation is the explicitly optimized and financed purpose.

The feed is a two-directional manipulation competition, with both directions enhancing each other, with a conflict of interest afterburner, for all parties to maximally control users. Neutrality doesn't exist.

(1) An auction for ads/influence to get your manipulative content in front of the most likely vulnerable users.

(2) A never ending competition to create addictive content, funded in direct proportion to successful impact on users.

(3) And the value in both directions is magnified by the "personalized" leverage manufactured through pervasive logging, beyond service surveillance, dossier collation, psychology hacking and real time feed manipulation.

(4) None of this is impeded by any "standards", neutrality, or a concern about external damage.

Admittedly great things for users and society, except for the four on that list that are not.

[virgildotcodes]

It's not even that Elon doesn't care as in he is ambivalent about it, it directly feeds into reinforcing his political preferences.

Try to create a brand new twitter account, you'll find that 80+% of the accounts that get suggested to you are right wing propaganda with climate denial being one of their greatest hits.

[truculent]

Hypothetically speaking, if people in the last group were right, and that is the logical conclusion to be reached from careful evaluation of the evidence, wouldn’t the other positions indeed be ones of wilful denial of the state of the climate?

[ai-x]

At the end of the day, we are talking about humanity/civilization and not planet earth itself.

We have easy measures of that

- Real GDP.

- Global Life Expectancy

- Global Child Mortality

- Global Poverty

- Global Food Production

If you are really into science and evidence, you should be tracking that for humanity extinction/survival trends (and the effect technology is having in tackling climate change), which is what my position is

[Ma8ee]

I would be in the second to last group if we actually did something when there still was time, and more was done to actually do something now. Yes, there's a lot of energy efficiency measures that could be done, and much more clean energy could be build, and we will be forced to adopt whether we want to or not. (Carbon capture from the atmosphere is a fucking joke though, which should be to everyone when you know that CO2 in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million!)

But we didn't start when we had to, and we are still doing only a fraction of what must be done. So, we are screwing ourselves over majorly. And this is not some fringe hysteria, this is the scientific consensus and has been for a long time. You can almost hear screams of frustration and desperation through the lines if you pick ut the latest IPCC report.

[Biologist123]

Maybe add climate change is real but there’s little we can do to stop it/change the systems which result in it.

[Toutouxc]

> humans adapt along the way

These people are about to be really surprised when the bees die.

[michaelsbradley]

- Climate Warming in the last ~200 and current years is Man Made, but given Man’s relative shortsightedness and propensity for becoming preoccupied, his ongoing impact on climate change will run its course to one end or another, probably redefining coastlines in the process and including other effects on agriculture, diversity of species, and so on. Much, much later the Earth will more than likely enter another Ice Age and most of the planet will be frozen over. Between the Man induced (relatively) extreme warm period and the next Ice Age, Man will find his way one way or another. Or Not.

[mmooss]

> de-growth

Associating action to prevent with 'de-growth' is disinformation from the deniers. Climate change itself is massively de-growth. The question is how to best prevent it.

[ai-x]

By your own brilliant logic, since Growth is accelerating everywhere, Climate Change is not happening?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...

[mmooss]

If you respect and consider ideas that conflict with your own, that's how you can learn new things.

Many factors influence economics; climate change is one part of the equation. There are many examples of climate change's direct impact so far - floods, fires, sea-level rise (requiring investment in massive public works), droughts, etc. I don't think it's debatable that these things have negative economic impact.

Climate change is expected to greatly increase its impact in many ways. Let's not wait until it overcomes all other factors in economic growth and makes our economies shrink.

[ai-x]

once again show my the data of your choice (related to humans).

The planet went through much worse climate change cycles

[cbility]

https://images.meme-arsenal.com/c59dc2bac9a54c97d5d1302822aa...

[ai-x]

put your money where your mouth is. Any idiot can generate hysteria in 2026. Make your prediction about any HDI metric -- Real GDP, Child Mortality, Life Expectancy, Poverty, Malnutrition (hunger) and give me your prediction for 2030 (or any year < 2035). If your doom prediction doesn't come true, Announce to the world, "I'm pretty much clueless about how the universe works and will stop posting hysteria on Social media"

[yfw]

Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help

[Forgeties79]

It also doesn’t help that anyone with few scruples and a desire to make a buck can quickly monetize screaming about how up is down on YouTube

[mmooss]

> Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help

These are scientists, not the government, and the US government, at least, has long opposed or been ambivalent toward climate research.

I'm not sure how rich donor influence is involved. Rich donors generally have acted to oppose climate research.

[scottLobster]

Also scientists generally suck at messaging and persuasion. They think if they just dial up the stakes and consequences a little more, it'll be compelling! Maybe if we make one more documentary with bad CGI disaster movie scenes, that'll do it! Same with the stupid "Doomsday clock" that is somehow always "the closest we've ever been to nuclear war!" whenever it gets trotted out. You'd think people who know what stochastic noise is would realize when they're producing it.

They would have made a lot more headway talking about clean air, clean water, jobs, and a bright prosperous future where we manufacture wind turbines, batteries and solar panels in deep red Missouri. A minority tried that, but most stuck with the catastrophizing for decades and now that they've ruined their social credit no one will listen to the message they should have opened with.

You need people emotionally invested, and it's a lot easier to get them invested in their lives than in the abstract consequences of computer models that are at least 100 years out if they're even accurate. And most people are not independent enough to direct their own lives. If they make the right decisions on abstract concepts, it was more because the incentives/disincentives in their environment were set up correctly than they actually understood the decision they were making. Message accordingly.

[virgildotcodes]

Every approach you've suggested above, and others besides, has been tried by scientists, NGOs and government agencies for the last few decades, and largely failed.

The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.

Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).

None of it works.

1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.

The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.

2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.

Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!

And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.

[Nevermark]

> The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.

Except downplaying consequences downplays the upside, i.e. opportunity.

The dire warnings should be dire, but paired with a call to opportunity opportunity opportunity. Instead of focusing on enemies or little inconvenient things we could all do, if only we could all be uniformly focused and high minded enough as uncoordinated individuals.

That fact that virtually every way we can reduce climate damage involves new capabilities and resources with additional economic and health benefits (not to mention political disentanglements) makes positive self-interested calls to profitable action much more sensible.

And political leaders shouldn't be afraid to work with the CFO's of fossil fuel companies to create incentives they want. It might be costly, but CFO's get flexible when there is a clear path to making more money. Any costs of smoothing that path (let's be clear, in a way that would be pure corruption if the size of the problem didn't make that a value creator) are nothing compared to the costs of climate change.

China gets it. (Not uniformly of course, but more, and its paying off for them.)

[thrance]

Except the same people disbelieving in climate change hold a blind faith in Trump's administration, that is extremely corrupt and influenced by rich donors. This isn't skepticism, these people have just been completely ideologically captured by the oligarchy's propaganda.

[designerarvid]

There’s actually research to support the claim you’re making here (Elaboration Likelihood Model).

When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.

[rootusrootus]

It's a culture thing, nobody on the right would ever be convinced by science, they will shop around until they find what they need to hear. My sister in law sent me a video and told me that she thought it was a really good explainer and had a lot of good facts and figures to support it. To humor her, I took a brief glance at it, and saw that it was produced by Dr. Shiva. I was thinking "no way, it can't be that Shiva, could it, email guy?" Yes, yes it was.

We are doomed.

[madaxe_again]

Tell her that you have a greenfield synergistic solution to upscale her big tent.

[BoingBoomTschak]

Because "the left" would be willing to listen to scientific arguments attacking their pet issues, right? It's really not a left/right thing.

[rootusrootus]

What is a left wing equivalent?

[amelius]

It depends if they can agree with what they are saying.

[timr]

Setting aside the names of the authors, this is a very bad paper. They take temperature data sets, "adjust" [1] them by attempting to remove the biggest recent factors (volcanism, solar and el nino cycles) affecting temperatures, then do a piece-wise regression analysis to look at trends in 10-year chunks. This is just bad methodology, akin to what a junior graduate student with a failing thesis might do to find signal in a dataset that isn't being cooperative to their hypothesis.

Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:

> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.

They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.

I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.

[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:

> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.

[bjourne]

Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors. The resulting time series fits a super-linear curve -> accelerating global warming.

[timr]

> Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors.

No, it isn’t. You’re just rephrasing what I said with more words: they attempted to adjust for three of the biggest factors that affect temperature, then did a piecewise regression to estimate a 10-year window.

You can’t do it in a statistically valid way. Full stop. The authors admit this, but want you to ignore it.

[cbility]

> You can't do it in a statistically valid way.

They use an established methodology (https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-95 9326/6/4/044022 - the methodology retains the average warming rate over the period since 1970 while smoothing fluctuations) to remove predictable temperature variations so they can isolate the effect they are trying to measure.

Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.

Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".

Add another year or two and it's likely we won't even need to smooth the curve to show accelerated warming at 95% confidence.

[timr]

They used a published methodology. That doesn't mean the methodology is uncontroversial, and it certainly doesn't mean that they used it in a way that makes sense in the current context. One can commit an almost infinite number of horrible abuses via bog-standard linear regression.

Even setting aside the dubious nature of the adjustments, doing a regression on a 10-year window of a system that we know has multi-decade cycles -- or longer -- is just blatantly trying to dress up bad point extrapolations as science. Then, when they don't get the results they want to see from that abuse, they start subtracting the annoying little details in the data that are getting in their way.

> Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.

You can't go back in time, invent counterfactual histories by subtracting primary signals, and declare the net result to be "significant". This isn't even statistics -- it's just massaging data via statistical tools.

> Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".

https://xkcd.com/882/

> Add another year or two and it's likely we won't even need to smooth the curve to show accelerated warming at 95% confidence.

I guess we'll find out.

[cbility]

If you were trying to determine if the quantity of daylight increased over a week in spring, would you account for the differences caused by day and night? What about cloud cover? Or is that just massaging the data?

p.s. the cited methodology has >300 citations in peer reviewed publications, ref Web of Science

[bjourne]

Actually, I used fewer words. I don't think you understand what the authors are doing. They are modeling temperature T per year as a sum of four terms: T = E + S + V + R---(E)l Nino, (S)solar irradiance, (V)olcanic activity, and (R)emaining factors. Then they subtract E, S, and V. Then they show that R fits a super-linear curve. Why there would be no "statistically valid way" to do this is beyond me, the authors, and the article's peer reviewers. If this is "bad methodology", lodge your complaints on https://pubpeer.com/.

[timr]

1) Their model is inherently dumb. The system is much more complicated and inseparable.

2) They openly admit that “subtracting E, S and V”, as you say, cannot actually be done.

3) They’re arbitrarily removing sources of variation so that they can claim “significance” in a narrow window. The entire exercise is designed to achieve a predetermined outcome, and statistical significance cannot be calculated in those circumstances.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

They also don't seem to account for the reduction of sulfur emissions from ships, which is surprising given how widely this was reported even in mainstream media.

Is this an oversight (or "oversight") or something that is reasonable for some reason that would be so obvious to experts in the field that it's not worth mentioning?

[cbility]

Doesn't that fall outside the scope of "natural variability factors" which they are trying to account for?

[timr]

I mean...they're just cherry-picking the sources of "noise" that prevent their preferred window from showing "significance". It's not like they did a thorough analysis of every uncontrolled factor and carefully tried to control them all. Even that would be crap, but at least it would be good-faith crap.

[refurb]

This has always been the big issue I have with the conclusions draw in climate publications. I encourage anyone with strong opinion on climate change to do a deep dive on the temperature analysis.

The best example I can think of is the "global warming hiatus" that was discussed in depth in the top climate journals in the mid-2010s. Nature Climate Change even devoted an entire month to it.[1]

5 years later publications were saying "there was no hiatus at all".[2]

And as you said, when you dive into the paper, you realize that temperature measures are not objective at all. And I would ask - If everyone was in agreement that temperature increases paused, then 5 years later everyone agrees they didn't, how much confidence do we really have in the measures themselves.*

As someone who conudcted scientific research, this has a ton of inherent problems. It doesn't matter what I'm measuring, if the data collection is not objective, and there is no consensus (or at least trong evidence for adjustments), then the data itself is very unreliable.

If I tried to publish a chemical paper in a top journal and manually went in and adjusted data (even with a scientific rationale) the paper would be immediately rejected.

[1] https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/global-warming-pause-cli...

[timr]

> And as you said, when you dive into the paper, you realize that temperature measures are not objective at all.

I don't know if I'd go that far. The measurements are as objective as they can be given the limits of technology and time, but what we do with the datasets afterward is usually filled with subjective decisions. In the worst cases, you get motivated actors doing statistically invalid analysis to reach a preferred conclusion.

This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.

[refurb]

I think research ranges from this paper to ones more rigorous, but the problem of "adjustments" is consistent.

And the issue is not so much the research is being done, but rather how it's reported on. Scientists know the limits of rigor in climate science, but the public doesn't. So catastrophic predictions are viewed by the public as a sure thing, versus one particular prediction with wide error bares.

> This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.

Indeed. Nobody plays fast and lose with papers on the structure of some random enzyme for political purposes.

[tarr11]

It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."

I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.

[epistasis]

For non-specialists, I think the most important view on papers is to not view them as nuggets of truth, but communications of a group of people who are trying to establish truth. No single paper is definitive!

Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.

Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)

Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Sometimes reviewers also look for whether the paper cites enough of their own papers, who is publishing it (regardless of whether the review is supposed to be anonymous or not), whether it clashes with a paper they're about to publish... science is just as full of politics and corruption (if not more) as any other field.

[epistasis]

I almost added "place the research into the context of other relevant research" as another way of saying "cite enough of the peer reviewer's papers" but fair enough.

I'm not sure if science has as much corruption as other fields, but it definitely has politics. PIs get to their position without the typical selection process for leadership that happens in most larger orgs, so there's more fragile and explosive personalities than I find in other management/leadership positions.

[jfengel]

I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.

The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.

If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.

If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.

Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."

[sleet_spotter]

Peer review is still very relevant in climate science. But given it is from well-respected authors, I am more inclined to trust the results at this stage.

[Nevermark]

There is no need for "trust".

There is no benefit in non-expert readers inserting their own subjectivity into an already complex topic. Even for themselves.

What we know: It is an interesting paper. It is going to get attention.

Good to be aware. It is also good to reserve judgement while the community evaluates the results.

[juujian]

It is already published at Geophysical Research Letters, a highly (if not the most) reputable source in the area. But that journal is behind a paywall: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

[FabHK]

Oh, that contains an ELI5:

> Plain Language Summary The rise in global temperature has been widely considered to be quite steady for several decades since the 1970s. Recently, however, scientists have started to debate whether global warming has accelerated since then. It is difficult to be sure of that because of natural fluctuations in the warming rate, and so far no statistical significance (meaning 95% certainty) of an acceleration (increase in warming rate) has been demonstrated. In this study we subtract the estimated influence of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data, which makes the global temperature curve less variable, and it then shows a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about the year 2015. Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been.

[jaredklewis]

A paper being peer reviewed is a good sign, but I feel like the signal is usually over interpreted.

Peer reviewed does not mean the findings of the paper are established fact or scientific consensus. It does not mean that the findings have been replicated by other scientists. It does not mean that the paper relied on a robust methodology, is free of basic statistical errors, or even free of logical fallacies.

Some of these limitations are due to the limitations of peer review itself. Others are just side effects of the way science works (for example, some ideas start as small, unimpressive experiments that are reported on in papers, and the strength of the findings is gradually developed over time). Obviously sometimes the prestige (or lack thereof) of the journal the paper is in decreases (or increases) some of these issues.

Anyway, peer review is a very noisy channel (IMHO).

[tialaramex]

For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.

In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.

If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:

Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.

Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.

And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.

† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.

[bjourne]

Pre-prints exists because it can take up to 18 months to get a paper published in a journal or reputable conference. Since lots of people can publish pre-prints[1] what you should think depends on the authors. If they have a record of publishing good research you should think highly of the paper.

[1] - Actually, there are hoops on pre-print repositories, such as arXiv, so not everyone can post there. I guesstimate that 99% of the public has no means of posting on arXiv.

[mold_aid]

Are you? How many preprints are posted here every day?