[moubarak]

i read an article a while back on the economist which suggested that if you look at a longer span (much longer than 1880) you will find that this is a natural cycle that the Earth/Sun go through. We just happen to be at that point in the cycle. i really doubt we humans can affect climate changes in any way. An interactive colourful plot doesn't convince me.

[mikeash]

There is no known natural cycle in which the rate of change in global temperature matches what's been happening in the past few decades. Current and even projected temperatures are well within the range of what happens naturally, but it's happening much faster than it ever has before. This has worrying implications for the ability of ecosystems to adapt, and more importantly for us humans, for the ability of civilization to adapt. Civilizations have collapsed due to slower, smaller changes than this.

You say "I really doubt we humans can affect climate changes in any way." This is a common sentiment. I see a lot of people saying things like this. "The Earth is just too big." "Humans are insignificant." And so forth. What causes you to say this? Have you actually run the numbers? I've not found anyone expressing that sentiment who actually has anything like a quantitative basis for it.

[moubarak]

I'm a non-secular person that's why. I certainly don't have the numbers, i read them here and there. But i base it on knowledge coming from scriptures. Scientists are hardworking people, but i don't take their numbers as faith.

[mikeash]

OK, so you think humans can't possibly affect the climate because the all-powerful creator of the universe said it couldn't happen?

Why are you even trying to put a factual basis on your doubt, then? Why talk about natural cycles and all that, if your actual source for doubt is divine?

[moubarak]

My doubt is based on divine scriptures, and there are experiments (as per the article i mentioned) that agree with it. What's wrong with that? You can still experiment and prove divine wisdom, it doesn't have to be forced knowledge.

[mikeash]

The main thing that bugs me is that it seems extremely dishonest to converse in this way, where you bring up vague references to articles to support your position, when the real reason you believe in it is because of your religion.

You say you can still experiment and prove divine wisdom. Can you experiment and disprove divine wisdom? In your eyes, is it possible even in theory that it could somehow be proven that human activity is in fact affecting the climate? Because if you've already decided on the outcome and are just casting around for support, what you're doing is not experiment, it's just an exercise in cognitive bias.

[matthewmacleod]

There is little to no evidence that current climate change is a natural event.

as per the article i mentioned

You didn't link to this article, so it's content is not useful, and it's likely it didn't say what you imply.

You can still experiment and prove divine wisdom

No you can't.

[athenot]

I'm intrigued as to how you arrive to this conclusion.

Faith explains the "why", science explains the "how". And there certainly is support in Scripture to take good care of the Earth, following a more generic pattern of being good stewards of what God has entrusted us with.

This is why Laudato Si is nudging the faithful into action.

[mikeash]

Faith explains both why and how. The Bible is full of "how." Almost all of the "how" has been discovered to be wrong, but it's there. Religion has responded to this by retreating from the realm of the "how," and so your statement that faith is just about the "why" is becoming a pretty common view.

However, a lot of people are still around who don't agree with that approach, and still stick with the "how" as described in their holy texts. Exhibit A, above.

[cholantesh]

Which scriptures? And why are human-authored documents so trustworthy in that one scenario?

[tunesmith]

There's a difference between religion and willful ignorance. If you want to believe or disbelieve something unprovable, fine - that can be defined as religion, or conjecture in science-speak. But to believe or disbelieve something in the face of observation, clear evidence, and fact - that is not religion.

[mikeash]

Why is that not religion? Certainly there are religions that fit themselves entirely within the "believe something unprovable" niche, but there are a lot of religions that go much farther than that.

[rimunroe]

Fortunately, it turns out that climate scientists have actually thought about the history the system they study. They've probably even collectively thought about it more than a person writing an article for the Economist!

[moubarak]

Scientists make mistakes as often as Economist writers do. I don't revere scientists i'm sorry.

[yequalsx]

You don't need to revere them. However, you should expect that an expert in a given field has almost certainly considered and answered any question a non-expert can think up within 10 minutes of contemplation on the said field. If you can come up with a question that starts with, "Have they considered the possibility that .....?" the answer is almost certainly going to be yes. This is more so when talking about a large collection of experts. For instance, with the collections of all experts in climate science.

[mikeash]

Nobody is asking you to revere scientists, merely not to revere Economist writers.

[hackuser]

The Economist, which I read, unfortunately pushes propaganda about climate change (as they do about some other issues too).

For example, many years ago they published an article[1] saying that a recent conference led by John Bolton[2] came to the same climate-denying conclusion as an earlier conference led by Bjorn Lomborg.[3] The Economist claimed that Bolton's results were independent corroboration for Lomborg's, saying the "conclusions were strikingly similar".

The Economist omitted a few things that made the similarity less striking: 1) The Economist co-sponsored Lomborg's conference; 2) Lomborg co-chaired Bolton's conference; 3) Bolton's conference was in fact marketed as the sequal to Lomborg's (Lomborg's was "Copenhagen Consensus 2004", Bolton's was "Copenhagen Consensus 2006", and a third was planned); 4) Former Economist writer Clive Crook co-chaired Bolton's conference.

I pulled those details from an email I sent to The Economist at the time. The article author responded professionally, but dismissed my concerns.

[1] "How to save the world: Bolton v Gore", June 22nd 2006 http://www.economist.com/node/7086861

[2] Bolton is a prominent US diplomat, whose career included being Ambassador to the United Nations, and a very outspoken neo-conservative.

[3] Lomborg is a leading climate denier, trotted out as a academic expert. His PhD is in political science and, at least at one point, he taught statistics at a business school. (My anecdotal observation is that few climate deniers have expertise in climate science.)

[Pinatubo]

Lomborg has openly stated multiple times that he believes in anthropogenic climate change. How is he a "climate denier"?

This post looks like a cut-and-paste from a political blog.

[asgard1024]

More correct would be to say, at the time (2006), Lomborg was a denier. He only recently turned around (although first by saying that climate change is not a serious problem), which is to his credit. Still in retrospect, people shouldn't have listened to him, he was wrong.

[Pinatubo]

This is false. The introduction to the section on climate change in The Skeptical Environmentalist (published in 2001) states "This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming" (p259).

[ljd]

No one is convinced by an "interactive colourful plot" it's the underlining data that it represents.

If data doesn't educate your actions you may find tech to be a hard industry to navigate.

[batou]

Indeed.

Didn't Feynman say that the real measure of science is experiment?

Show me the experiments otherwise we have merely observations and conjecture.

They might be right, but at the moment we've established hypothesis and nothing more.

[yequalsx]

We humans are right now conducting the experiment. Despite empirical evidence, data, modeling, and application of our knowledge the effects of green house gases we continue to pump them into the atmosphere on a massive scale. In another 30 - 40 years the experiment will yield conclusive results. Then I suppose global warming deniers like Rush Limbaugh will shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, we now have our experimental evidence."

[batou]

I look forward to the results however I'm not sure they stand as an unbiased controlled experiment and are as factually devoid as the methodology.

Many things are observable but the difference between correlation and causation are somewhat more subtle.

Please note, I'm no denier and think that we should reduce our emissions as they have secondary benefits, fully acknowledge that there is a slight raise in global temperature but to assign a cause is a little premature.

Add to that the incidental political involvement, funding and the 'facts' (of incidentally we have none, nor many viable theories) leads to a logical conclusion that "mu" (neither yes or no) is a better stance to take.

[mikeash]

The experiment isn't controlled, but it's being performed. The experiment is, "Let's dump gigatons of excess CO2 into the atmosphere and see what happens!" So far, what happens is that global temperatures go up noticeably.

What are you proposing we should do? Should we just ignore the whole thing until it's proven?

[batou]

Not at all. I'm saying that we should reduce emissions. What could possibly be bad about that?

Its what I'm not saying that is important. I don't proclaim an answer nor an idealism, merely cautious scientific thought that suggests the methodology needs to be considered. In any other field the lack of rigorous proofs would be laughed off the table.

[mikeash]

So you agree with the conclusion that we should cut emissions, but you object to... what? The wording?

[harshreality]

We don't know what other explanations there might be. Trotting out a limited number of counter-explanations like solar activity or volcanoes, and showing they don't explain the phenomenon, and therefore your pet explanation is true because it matches the data more closely, is logically specious.

We don't know the dynamics of the system. All we know is that for the data we have so far, the models work pretty well. We have no idea whether, in 200 years, these trends would lead to a 20 degree average temperature increase, a 0 degree increase or a 20 degree decrease by activating some unanticipated alternate environmental dynamic that plunges us into an ice age.

CO2 emissions as the cause of the recent temperature trend is plausible, and the results could be catastrophic, so I'm all for reducing emissions and taking every other practical measure we can to avoid the risk[1]. That's not the same as, "Anthropogenic global warming is settled science, deniers are morons, and if we don't do something now Earth in 100 years will be hell."

[1] I think the problem is, we can't agree as a society, or globally, how much we should do to mitigate it. We could spend lots of money directly, on solar power, nuclear power, electric car subsidies, etc. We could impose tremendous costs on CO2 emitting industries through regulation. But we can only speculate, based on a simplified economic model and assuming long-term accuracy of some environmental model, what the ultimate cost/benefit would be.

[mikeash]

The science is settled, in the sense that the vast majority of people working in the field think this is probably what's happening. I think people who object to "settled" want it to mean "absolute certainty" but that's just a quibble over wording.

Deniers are morons. That's not the same as saying that there's no room for debate. There's always room for debate. But it's also a fact that the loud public face of the deniers is a bunch of politically motivated faith-based science illiterates peddling terrible rationalizations. Now, the fact that one side is full of idiots doesn't make the other side correct. But neither does the lack of complete definitive proof for one side mean that the other side isn't full of idiots.

And I've never seen anyone say that the Earth will be hell in 100 years. I have seen a lot of deniers say that this is said, in order to discredit climate change. What's actually said is that there will be a lot of disruption and chaos from changes, but of course there will always be lots of nice places to live, climate-wise. They just may not be where they are today.

[batou]

I agree to the conclusion but not for the same reasons.

[ChuckMcM]

Well there is historical evidence of glacial periods (ice ages) which the planet moves through cyclically. And of course if you took 1880 to the present (135 years) and plotted the climate changes variation compared to the geologic record, it would not be discernible, so that is either really scary or reassuring depending on your interpretation.

[flavor8]

> i really doubt we humans can affect climate changes in any way

On what basis, exactly? Would you be convinced if climate scientists critiqued your unit testing approach?

[moubarak]

as i answered before, merely on a non-secular basis. Not all knowledge comes from science and experiments. There is so much knowledge in religious scriptures.

[fixermark]

I'm really not familiar with any specific scripture that indicates humans cannot affect climate change, in any faith I've heard of.

Indeed, the scripture I'm familiar with from a Christian heritage seems to imply the opposite.

Genesis 1:26 (ESV): Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Isaiah 24:5 (ESV): The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.

Jeremiah 2:7 (ESV): And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination.

It would seem that even if one reasons from religious scriptures, "Man can defile that which God creates" is a pretty clear theme.

[mullen]

> There is so much knowledge in religious scriptures.

No, there is not. Some guy writing a book 800 years ago, who was not a scientist and who was not even writing on any scientific subject be more accurate that a modern scientist writing on the subject they have spent years studying. It just boggles the mind that an adult in modern times would believe any of that scripture nonsense.

[PKop]

Is it because you believe these scriptures to be divinely influenced?

If the scripture was inspired / written / influenced etc. by divine entity, or if it was made up completely by humans, how would you tell the difference?

Science is written by man, and scripture was written by man. What is the basis for your faith in the latter's validity?

[jcranmer]

The anthropogenic component (this includes both industrial processes like Haber-Bosch and changes brought about by high-intensity farming) to most legs of the nitrogen cycle equals or exceeds that of the natural component. To argue that humanity is incapable of screwing with climate in any significant way when we are clearly overriding natural ecological cycles is pure inanity.

[ocschwar]

When talking about the "significance," we forget that we're talking about differences of 5K in an ambient temperature of 300K.

We're not "significantly" screwing with the climate. That's not the issue. The issue is just how sensitive our civilization is to such a small temperature change.