Easily the best science article I've come across at Persuasion.
If we view the historic increase in SO2 and particulate emissions as "experiments" in climate modification that worked, and did not cause any disaster, could that be used as an argument that we should not shy away from the much, much smaller deliberate experiments being proposed to find out if we could counter global warming, given our failures with UN climate agreements?
Fascinating article. There still much to learn about climate change. Perhaps someone will research why the Canadian polar bear population is increasing, all due respect to the BBC.
I don’t get the point of these articles that make climate change sound less bad in a publication like persuasion. The interesting. And complicated effects of Aerosols are well reported on from my experience in mainstream news articles (Canada). Further, greenhouse gas driving temperatures does increase storm frequency and magnitude. However, just because changes in aerosols may be moderating the effects in this situation, does not mean that temperatures don’t also. Some of these things are complicated, yeah. But pretty much all modern science does multivariate analyses and looks at moderators. And yeah, climate change will lead to greater storms. So it’s weird to criticise “climate activists” (who does that entail?) when the big picture is accurate. Guess what, there are a lot of ways that climate change/ecological collapse is worse than is generally reported on, including by “activists”. I’d like to see the nuanced criticism of that. I mean, I love nuance in science, as with al things. But I am concerned because I keep seeing these types of claims and statistics in this platform, as they appear to find nuance in one direction and not the other. Maybe it would be better to get actual scientifically trained expert rather than “political scientists” to highlight the nuance in these areas in the editorial team. It’s one thing if our values and decisions (including liberal) don’t match to specific ecological systems, it’s another to politicise the science. It’s the famous providing equal journalistic space to “both sides” mistake about scientific fact.
"But if you listen to mainstream climate journalism it’s easy to get the sense that the greenhouse effect is the alpha and the omega of our influence on the climate. This bears little relationship to the discussion among actual scientists, who are much more comfortable with the idea that human activity affects the climate through many channels at once."
Isn't that last line the basis for justification of climate crisis denial? And it isn't just the human activity criteria... there are natural events that also screw with the data models. For example, the massive Hunga Tonga eruption that put trillions of gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere. There is seasonal solar activity that we don't understand well enough.
The problem is the absolutism pushed by these climate crisis believers... and it resulting in actual policies that cause reciprocal harm... including the harm of not doing the right things like changing the zoning and construction rules for building in hurricane zones because everyone is made to believe that banning fossil fuels is the solution.
I watched a debate about climate change hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance last week. Kerry Emmanuel was one of the four debate participants. Contrary to the dead-certain-and-beyond-question absolutism of the climate fanatics, Dr. Emmanuel emphasized not how much we know about climate effects, but how very LITTLE we actually know. That doesn’t mean climate change should be dismissed as a concern (he definitely does not), but it does mean that when allocating scarce resources among competing important priorities, climate-related spending should be informed by how much (little) we actually understand, and the commensurate risk that some of what we think we understand currently could turn out to be wrong.
I have studied chaotic systems in biology and also recall an atmospheric chemistry course I took at CalTech as an undergrad there. Carbon dioxide has a huge influence on the heat flows in the atmosphere as well as the chemistry of aquatic systems. With carbon dioxide levels being higher than they have been in the past few hundred thousand years that is certainly going to drive a change in climate. BUT the climate system is a dynamical system that includes a lot of feedback loops and therefore likely to display chaotic (mathematically chaotic) behavior. This means that long term changes are unpredictable even if we knew all the variables involved. So all we know is that climate is going to change in some way but attributing any particular change to "global warming" is nonsense.
I think that the conclusion we as a species should be drawing from the climate data is that global weather patterns are going to change unpredictably and possibly widely. This is going to make food production less predictable as well as cause changes in the habitats of many insect pests and disease vectors. We should be focusing on working together to help each other mitigate the negative effects of those changes instead of fighting amongst ourselves.
Easily the best science article I've come across at Persuasion.
If we view the historic increase in SO2 and particulate emissions as "experiments" in climate modification that worked, and did not cause any disaster, could that be used as an argument that we should not shy away from the much, much smaller deliberate experiments being proposed to find out if we could counter global warming, given our failures with UN climate agreements?
Fascinating article. There still much to learn about climate change. Perhaps someone will research why the Canadian polar bear population is increasing, all due respect to the BBC.
Maybe a growing food supply of climate crisis researchers.
Persuasion et al, please stop writing headlines using the template "You're Thinking About [x] All Wrong." You don't know how the reader is thinking.
I don’t get the point of these articles that make climate change sound less bad in a publication like persuasion. The interesting. And complicated effects of Aerosols are well reported on from my experience in mainstream news articles (Canada). Further, greenhouse gas driving temperatures does increase storm frequency and magnitude. However, just because changes in aerosols may be moderating the effects in this situation, does not mean that temperatures don’t also. Some of these things are complicated, yeah. But pretty much all modern science does multivariate analyses and looks at moderators. And yeah, climate change will lead to greater storms. So it’s weird to criticise “climate activists” (who does that entail?) when the big picture is accurate. Guess what, there are a lot of ways that climate change/ecological collapse is worse than is generally reported on, including by “activists”. I’d like to see the nuanced criticism of that. I mean, I love nuance in science, as with al things. But I am concerned because I keep seeing these types of claims and statistics in this platform, as they appear to find nuance in one direction and not the other. Maybe it would be better to get actual scientifically trained expert rather than “political scientists” to highlight the nuance in these areas in the editorial team. It’s one thing if our values and decisions (including liberal) don’t match to specific ecological systems, it’s another to politicise the science. It’s the famous providing equal journalistic space to “both sides” mistake about scientific fact.
Thank you for this. Well done and objective.
"But if you listen to mainstream climate journalism it’s easy to get the sense that the greenhouse effect is the alpha and the omega of our influence on the climate. This bears little relationship to the discussion among actual scientists, who are much more comfortable with the idea that human activity affects the climate through many channels at once."
Isn't that last line the basis for justification of climate crisis denial? And it isn't just the human activity criteria... there are natural events that also screw with the data models. For example, the massive Hunga Tonga eruption that put trillions of gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere. There is seasonal solar activity that we don't understand well enough.
The problem is the absolutism pushed by these climate crisis believers... and it resulting in actual policies that cause reciprocal harm... including the harm of not doing the right things like changing the zoning and construction rules for building in hurricane zones because everyone is made to believe that banning fossil fuels is the solution.
Excellent post, thank you.
I watched a debate about climate change hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance last week. Kerry Emmanuel was one of the four debate participants. Contrary to the dead-certain-and-beyond-question absolutism of the climate fanatics, Dr. Emmanuel emphasized not how much we know about climate effects, but how very LITTLE we actually know. That doesn’t mean climate change should be dismissed as a concern (he definitely does not), but it does mean that when allocating scarce resources among competing important priorities, climate-related spending should be informed by how much (little) we actually understand, and the commensurate risk that some of what we think we understand currently could turn out to be wrong.
I have studied chaotic systems in biology and also recall an atmospheric chemistry course I took at CalTech as an undergrad there. Carbon dioxide has a huge influence on the heat flows in the atmosphere as well as the chemistry of aquatic systems. With carbon dioxide levels being higher than they have been in the past few hundred thousand years that is certainly going to drive a change in climate. BUT the climate system is a dynamical system that includes a lot of feedback loops and therefore likely to display chaotic (mathematically chaotic) behavior. This means that long term changes are unpredictable even if we knew all the variables involved. So all we know is that climate is going to change in some way but attributing any particular change to "global warming" is nonsense.
I think that the conclusion we as a species should be drawing from the climate data is that global weather patterns are going to change unpredictably and possibly widely. This is going to make food production less predictable as well as cause changes in the habitats of many insect pests and disease vectors. We should be focusing on working together to help each other mitigate the negative effects of those changes instead of fighting amongst ourselves.
Fascinating article! This is the kind of new information and curious perspective I that I love about Persuasion.
Tim Harford also did a similarly fascinating episode of his wonder "Cautionary Tales" podcast regarding hurricanes and weather modification. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-man-who-played-with-hurricanes