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Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change


donsutherland1
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Climate change is real, and there are certainly risks that come along with it.

That being said, fear-mongering and politicization of climate change is also very real. Both things can be true - and don't trust anyone from either "side" who speaks in certainties.

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10 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

As much of the scientific community sees it, the speech openly mocked the First Law of Thermodynamics, the quantum mechanics of molecular absorption, and the established concepts of radiative forcing and planetary energy balance. Trump dismissed these fundamental laws of physics, and the principles derived from them, as a “scam,” a “hoax,” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

History will record this repudiation of evidence as among humanity's worst policy excesses. They will mark this speech as an iconic moment where comfort in falsehood outweighed the responsibility to truth and raw ignorance uprooted scientific understanding. They will see this moment as a vivid symptom of a Great Denial: a period when humanity still had real power to avert a return to mid-Pliocene or worse conditions yet chose  to perpetuate the profitability of industries responsible and policy paralysis instead. They will place such rhetoric alongside the campaigns that once denied the link between tobacco and lung cancer or between CFCs and ozone depletion, citing it as evidence that many, including those in positions of authority, preferred tribal loyalty and ideology over science, evidence, and truth.

Future generations condemned to endure the realities of a mid-Pliocene climate will condemn those who consigned them to an unmanageable world. No political gimmick will change the physics. There are no instant, magical methods to draw down the accumulated greenhouse gases, reverse the radiative forcing, or reglaciate the ice sheets that have already disappeared, much less the much greater damage that will occur in decades and centuries ahead. 

He could have just been honest and said we know climate change is real but we will adjust.

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3 hours ago, tacoman25 said:

Climate change is real, and there are certainly risks that come along with it.

That being said, fear-mongering and politicization of climate change is also very real. Both things can be true - and don't trust anyone from either "side" who speaks in certainties.

humanity will adjust to it, we need to cut down the human population anyway

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6 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

By “unmanageable,” I mean a future marked by significant disruption (economic dislocation,  migration, and irreversible environmental/biodiversity loss). These changes will not unfold overnight, but they are already being set in motion. Even a one-meter rise in global sea level, plausible by 2100 and very likely to continue beyond, would reclaim entire neighborhoods of many major coastal cities. Even at one-meter, tens of millions of people would be displaced from major coastal cities.

See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8208600/

We don’t have to rely solely on climate models to understand where things are headed under current policy. Paleoclimate evidence is unambiguous. During the mid-Pliocene, when atmospheric CO2 concentrations hovered around 350–450 ppm (levels we have already reached) global temperatures were roughly 3 °C (5.4 °F) warmer than today, and sea level stood at least 10 meters higher than at present. 

See: https://sciences.ucf.edu/biology/d4lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2018/08/Science-2015-Dutton-.pdf

The climate system responds slowly but inexorably to sustained forcing. Ice sheets have not yet equilibrated to today’s CO2 levels, but over centuries to millennia continued melt is inevitable. Research indicates potential hysteresis once a critical threshold is crossed. Under hysteresis, cooling back to current temperatures will not fully restore lost ice. Some modeling places the Greenland Ice Sheet’s critical threshold at roughly 1.7 °C–2.3 °C above pre-industrial temperatures, a range that will likely be surpassed later this century.

Warming also amplifies extremes rather than simply shifting the average. Climate change does not “cause” every drought, heatwave, or flood, but it makes them more frequent and more severe, a conclusion supported by a rapidly expanding body of attribution science.

See: https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/

Being honest about these well-documented risks is not scaremongering. Communicating evidence-based threats, whether to coastal cities, food and water security, or human health, is a fundamental responsibility of scientists, leaders, and citizens. Describing dangers that the data clearly support is not “spreading fear.” It is providing the information societies need to plan and adapt.

That some shrink from the task e.g., as one witnessed at the UN General Assembly, is not an act of courageous leadership. It is an abdication of leadership responsibility and a demonstration of leadership failure. It is a profound display of disregard for the wellbeing of future generations who will have to live with the consequences of bad choices made by those who will evade those very consequences by their having departed the scene well before the tragic returns on their bad policy investments are realized.

Given this evidence, the burden of proof no longer lies with scientists who have documented human-induced climate change and its risks. It lies with those who advocate inaction, who must explain how a 3 °C or warmer world relative to pre-industrial temperatures, which is likely by 2100 on the current path, could remain “manageable” despite escalating threats to food and water systems, ongoing ocean acidification, intensifying extreme weather, and one-meter sea-level rise (with more to come beyond 2100). It is their burden to prove at a high confidence level that the laws of physics somehow don't apply in the case of greenhouse gases.

Finally, claims that models are unreliable are belied by their track record. Climate models have consistently captured the long-term warming trend with striking accuracy despite the climate system’s complexity.

See: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378

But we can also say that the current standard of living and consumerism that plagues humanity is also unsustainable and sooner or later that was going to come to an end.

Climate change is a huge problem but there are multiple aspects of human society that are unsustainable, starting with having 8+ billion people on the planet, the usage of chemical pesticides (something the UN also mentions as an existential threat), etc.

 

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10 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

As much of the scientific community sees it, the speech openly mocked the First Law of Thermodynamics, the quantum mechanics of molecular absorption, and the established concepts of radiative forcing and planetary energy balance. Trump dismissed these fundamental laws of physics, and the principles derived from them, as a “scam,” a “hoax,” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

History will record this repudiation of evidence as among humanity's worst policy excesses. They will mark this speech as an iconic moment where comfort in falsehood outweighed the responsibility to truth and raw ignorance uprooted scientific understanding. They will see this moment as a vivid symptom of a Great Denial: a period when humanity still had real power to avert a return to mid-Pliocene or worse conditions yet chose  to perpetuate the profitability of industries responsible and policy paralysis instead. They will place such rhetoric alongside the campaigns that once denied the link between tobacco and lung cancer or between CFCs and ozone depletion, citing it as evidence that many, including those in positions of authority, preferred tribal loyalty and ideology over science, evidence, and truth.

Future generations condemned to endure the realities of a mid-Pliocene climate will condemn those who consigned them to an unmanageable world. No political gimmick will change the physics. There are no instant, magical methods to draw down the accumulated greenhouse gases, reverse the radiative forcing, or reglaciate the ice sheets that have already disappeared, much less the much greater damage that will occur in decades and centuries ahead. 

what was a mid Pliocene climate like and what kind of flora and fauna were around back then Don?

is there any 3D simulation we can run to see what the Earth looked like in different eras and what kind of species were on the planet back then?

I'm wondering if the Pliocene was the era of giant mammals like Baluchitherium, giant terror birds (Dinorthus), giant sloths, etc.

 

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