So the history of climate change goes something like: confusion about overall sign in the 1960's, mounting evidence for warming due to CO_2 in 1970's, consensus about overall warming caused by human CO_2 emission in the eighties, and then clarifying in the details since then.
The fact that there still isn't mainstream discussion about how society must change, but rather eternal growth society is still the default target across the globe is depressing and gives confidence that we are going to see substantial civilisation collapse in the future.
I think you are missing out on all the discussion that is occurring... Particularly in the energy sector, which is experiencing a dramatic shift towards low carbon energy sources (and a more dramatic shift away from environmentally horrid coal). I am very confused if you think that solar, wind, nuclear, and coal energy are not mainstream discussions.
As far as the "eternal growth society", I have to completely agree. But I would say there continues to be discussion around the (de)merits of capitalism. As a counter point, there are still about a BILLION people without access to electricity (something that rarely in the mainstream discussion). Advancements in electricity access (~70% in 1990; ~87% now) is a place we can probably all agree that growth is warranted.
I think that alarmism has hurt climate science ever since the 1960s. Past mistakes matter because people generally won't trust the naysayers when they've been proven wrong so obviously that grade school children won't trust them.
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Can you give me a citation for your first quote (from George Ward). Although it seems to show up on a lot of self-described "climate skeptic" pages, I can't seem to find any legitimate source for it. It shows up in wikipedia as well, but the citation there just leads to the same tangled mess of "climate skeptic" pages that all seem to cite each other.
I'm really curious if George Wald said this at all, and if he did, what specifically he was talking about. Nuclear proliferation was another of his areas of activism, for example.
A large number of those are of the form "If X continues, bad thing Y will happen", and they are being called wrong predictions because bad thing Y did not happen. But Y did not happen because X did not continue, either because we purposefully stopped X from continuing partly to avoid Y, or something replaced X for other reasons unrelated to Y and the new X did not have the properties that could lead to Y.
If X was not happening, then why even say Y will happen?
Consider this prediction: if Hillary Clinton (X) gets elected president in 2016, then 10% of the population in Libya will be killed by US bombing campaigns in 2017 (Y).
Obviously X did not happen, so Y never occurred as a predicted result, but was Y ever a valid prediction? Y might be considered a valid prediction because Hillary Clinton intervened in Libya in the past, resulting in the toppling of Qaddafi and scores of civilians being killed in civil unrest, but it is a wild prediction that is extremely unlikely for many reasons.
So, is there any evidence that the World adopted specific remedies in the 1970s which averted catastrophic Y predicted?
Suppose someone is swimming nude in a cold lake. I predict that if they stay in the lake for 20 more minutes (that's X), they will get hypothermia (Y).
They get out of the lake two minutes later, so X ends up not happening. Are you going to argue that my prediction was not correct? Or that it is a wild prediction?
In the case of several of the ones you cited, they were based on an assumption that pollution levels would continue their rapid rise unabated. But we actually did put in a significant effort to get pollution under control, which was fairly successful. (High levels of pollution have significant health, agricultural, and climate consequences, which is why they were a key part of the base of many of those predictions).
"I think that alarmism has hurt climate science ever since the 1960s."
Only one person in the above quotes is talking about climate (10, 18). And you could certainly find 10 climate "skeptics" who have been horribly wrong in the 90s.
I don't understand who is exactly being hurt by alarmism. Most people choose to ignore it anyway. Maybe you could provide some example where overzealous application of ecological policies have hurt society.
If you've been keeping up with such things, then you know that there is currently a move to shut down many coal and nuclear plants, much of which is due to the economics of natural gas, but also due to environmental concerns. However, in parts of the U.S. there is also a movement to prevent the building of natural gas plants and the pipelines that feed them, again due to environmental concerns. If this path continues, then parts of U.S. may soon find themselves unable to provide adequate heat and power during the cold of winter, which will no doubt lead to many deaths. The Trump administration is currently working to prevent something like this from happening, yet is taking significant heat for that.
I would suggest that anyone here who trashes the fossil fuel industry read "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" before they continue such trashing. They don't necessarily have to agree with it, but they should at least read it.
I've read it, and do you know why? Because I saw an article somewhere which was just vehemently hating on the book (or more specifically its author, IIRC), and since I'd never heard of it before - and since much of that hate didn't seem to be terribly coherent to me - I went ahead and read the book for myself. I'm weird that way.
Nice cop out - now you don't have to actually read the book, I guess? After all, it might challenge some of your pre-conceived notions ...
I will reiterate that I read the book myself because someone was trashing it so badly. And a lot of what I read there actually made sense, in spite of what the trashing claimed!
A lesson we all should have learned from "The Wizard of Oz" - when someone insists that we "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!", it's probably a good idea to go have a chat with that man behind the curtain!
I think the problems the fossil fuel industry are having, such as they are, have little to do with climate change and more to do with either economics being against them, in the case of coal, or fraking in the case of natural gas. The "environment concerns" around fraking include increased earthquakes and contamination of groundwater and are a pretty big deal. The tradeoff is that by allowing fraking, the US is no longer dependent on the middle east for oil and doesn't need to worry about having to import natural gas for the foreseeable future, so it's not as clear cut as it would otherwise be.
I don't think anything that the Trump administration has done has changed any of the core issues. All of the changes they have made have been pretty blatent givaways to their donors, which also happen to be alot of fossil fuel companies, but they're still rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as far as actual effects on coal. As far as Oil and Natural Gas, there's still the problem of regulatory uncertainty and the dropping cost of alternative energy, which means companies are still more likely to keep fraking going on existing wells until they're dry rather than try to actually drill in the new areas that have been opened up. They still want the option to drill later on if conditions change, but they're moving very slowly in most cases.
Not biased, so much; more like balanced. (Dare I say "fair and balanced"?) After going through my daily news feeds and perusing so many stories (so freakin' many!) about how climate change (or whatever) is going to kill us all soon enough, I also now routinely head over to WUWT to see what their take on the matter is. Some of what shows up there I think is crap, of course, but much of it is quite thoughtful and remarkably clear-headed.
And if you're the type to just automatically dismiss such a site out of hand as being too "biased" without actually reading what they have to say with an open mind, then perhaps the problem lies with you and not with them.
It's like the clearest description of confirmation bias: things that you agree with are thoughtful and remarkably clear-headed, others can just be ignored and don't reflect on the quality of the source. Avoiding confirmation bias would require one to give up on this attitude.
No, it's more like much of what shows up there (from either side) should rightly be questioned. And sometimes those questions are answered and the answers are reasonable, and sometimes not so much.
If you bothered to actually read the site, then you'd know that the articles there come from many authors and many sources - some of them even from the so-called "alarmist" side of things, though the site itself is usually tagged as "denialist". (Hence my balanced comment - they do generally cover stuff from both sides.) Comments from the site's owner and from readers about all of these articles can get quite interesting and heated, though.
As an example of crap, a couple of articles were recently posted there about the current Judge Alsup proceedings - articles that were quite clearly incorrect to those of us actually following the proceedings; the reader comments called out this error. I don't know if the authors of those articles ever actually went back and corrected them, but I'm thinking not - which is bad! Also, I have on occasion seen things quoted there which weren't actual quotes, but rather paraphrases (to put it nicely) - which is also bad! For the record, these days the "legitimate" press is sometimes very bad at doing this kind of thing, too, but it seems that they are rarely called out for it.
I have read the site, and its contents border on ridiculous. The viewpoints are obviously biased toward a desired conclusion.
But more importantly, the articles will typically take one plot, image, or paragraph out of context and then build a story around it. The comments are just a bunch of back-slapping.
I've been reading the site myself on-and-off for several years now, and while it certainly has a particular spin much of the time, an awful lot of what shows up there as critique is just basic common sense. If you can't see that then perhaps you lack common sense yourself - because it seems that "common sense" isn't really so common after all.
And certainly not all of the comments "are just a bunch of back-slapping" - in fact things can get quite heated at times. Which you would know if you'd actually read the site in depth and to any great extent.
There may have been valid complaints in the past that the site was sloppy and too one-sided. But the tone has changed quite a bit over recent years, in that they now try to keep everything more balanced and in context. For example, they may print large parts of an article while highlighting and commenting on certain portions of it, rather than just presenting a few sentences from it that they think are relevant, with little or no context. They will also try and make sure to point back to original sources whenever they can, and so on. They still get it wrong sometimes, though.
Well, it's actually more of "Don't put quote marks around things which aren't actually quotes, but rather paraphrases" situation - so not necessarily an inaccurate assessment of what was being said, but not an actual quote either. Which is not a good thing at all, but at least they don't just make things up out of whole cloth, as I've seen some other "news" places do.
Along those lines, I once saw a place which laid out an imaginary conversation with someone in the public eye (we'll say John Doe) where they "asked questions" and John Doe "gave answers". Then they actually had the gall to lay out a headline with one of the those imaginary answers - in quotes, no less. And then that headline made it into my supposedly legitimate newsfeed.
Another time they interviewed someone who was speaking about John Doe, and they said something like (and I'm just making this up because I don't remember the actual context) "Deep down inside John Doe probably thinks that all illegal immigrants should be shot on sight!" And then the headline was 'John Doe: "All illegal immigrants should be shot on sight!"' And once again that headline made it into my newsfeed. Crap like that makes me wonder if there actually any truly legitimate news organizations left around these days.
Noticeably, all 18 of these are quotes from an individual scientist or author (not sure exactly what kind of scientist Paul Ehrlich was). None of them reflect an almost universal scientific consensus, like what now exists on global warming.
Were some people wrong about the limits of resources? Yes. Are resources therefore limitless? No.
Did some theorists dramatically underestimate the complexity of the world and rely too much on simple models in the 70s? Yes. Did scientists learn their lesson? Yes. Nobody's been doing that shit for decades.
Even so, in your "alarmism" list:
> “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
10.000 deaths a year are attributable to air pollution in London alone. That is despite the widespread introduction of environmental measures that reduced the pollution this quote is warning about:
Coal combustion in China’s power plants causes an estimated 250,000 deaths per year. according to the IEA (which is _far_ from an activist/alarmist organization. On the contrary it's been hilariously underestimating renewables: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/931869221386104832).
> “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Item number 6 above states that 4 billion people were expected to die, which obviously didn't happen. Governor Jerry Brown just stated (presumably relying on data from "experts") that billions of people might be expected to die soon enough from climate-related issues (heat plus disease). So apparently not much has changed after all!
As to London and the UK, the problems lately appear to be related to the cold and secondary issues caused by that. (See example article below.) So maybe air pollution shouldn't necessarily be their biggest concern at the moment.
No, he said that 3 billion people will be subject to heat events that can be lethal. He's not saying 3 billion people will die. That's not controversial, he worded it more dramatically than the scientists would, but the core is absolutely correct.
Your second point, that cold deaths are also an issue, isn't in any way relevant to the discussion of pollution.
You can go on denying the science, and/or being upset that people care too much about these issues. But you wont be right, or savy, or pragmatic for it. You'll just be part of the problem instead of the solution.
I was careful not to claim that he said billions WOULD die - rather "that billions of people MIGHT BE EXPECTED TO DIE." He's the one throwing out the words "billions" and "lethal" here as a scare tactic; I'm not exactly putting any words into his mouth. I even nicely provided a link so you could see exactly what he said for yourself.
And I didn't make a connection between pollution and cold, either; rather I said that their priorities here might need to shift - less concern about pollution, more concern about people staying out of the cold. And "staying out of the cold" implies maybe burning more fossil fuels, which would generate more CO2, which everyone knows isn't itself pollution anyway.
As far as "problem" vs. "solution", my main goal is trying to get people to NOT buy into all of the doomsday environmental scenarios that are constantly being thrown about now. History has shown that such prognostications are almost always nonsense. (Plain old common sense should tell you that, too, but it seems a lot of people lack common sense these days.) I mean, we don't want people going off on a tangent and doing what this guy did (see below)! Amirite?
You're not a crusader for common sense, you're an apologist for smug inaction in the face of a well documented grave crisis. And your argument seems to be no better than: "well they shout to much".
But sure, the real problem is a governor getting the wording of deadly heatwave slightly wrong. Were you even aware of the solid research he is alluding to, or are you above googling some facts for a few seconds because the statement rubbed you the wrong way? Is the fact that it's likely that thousands will die in heat waves somehow less concerning to you than the governors choice of words?
And no, history has not shown "such prognostications are almost always nonsense". There is simply no historical precedent here. We don't have a precedent of solid scientific consensus, backed by massive amounts of data, vast careful impact studies, etc ever even being performed in any field. But typically science done much less carefully has turned out to be overwhelmingly right.
I'm going to cut you some slack here and assume that your reading comprehension skills are pretty low right now, as is your ability to think clearly. I'll just go ahead and blame that on allergy meds, since it's that time of year.
The list given earlier (which has now disappeared from this thread, apparently) showed at least a dozen or so dire Earth Day predictions which obviously didn't come true. There's no particular reason to believe that at least the more dire of climate change predictions will come true, either, especially given that many predictions haven't come anywhere close to being true even though we were told to expect serious consequences by now. By that I mean things like "major ice loss at the poles", "polar bear population collapse", "the end of snow", "the new normal" (in various contexts), "major agricultural decline", and so on. Though it's certainly easy enough for some folks to play the "Well, maybe it didn't happen as early as originally predicted, but it will definitely happen by the year 2050 or 2100" game, isn't it?
BTW, I don't necessarily consider it a coincidence that item number 6 from that list mentioned 4 billion people, and Gov. Brown also mentioned 4 billion people in total. That's a big, scary number, but it apparently was taken at least somewhat seriously in the past, so why not just recycle it for the future?
And yes, I'm quite aware of various forecasts concerning heat and such. However, historically cold has generally been far more deadly than heat; see the following, for example.
Well, gee, folks, if cold-related deaths are historically up to 20 times higher than heat-related deaths, then common sense suggests that the above claim is just pretty much total bullshit on the face of it, since we're being told to expect cold waves to decrease while heat waves increase.
As to your "We don't have a precedent ..." statement, common sense should tell you that we probably still don't have any such situation! I've actually looked at some of that data directly myself and found it wanting. I'm somewhat hesitant to use the word "fraudulent" here (but I think that applies to at least some of it), so I will just use the words "sloppy" and “highly suspect” instead.
A funny thing about your “vast” statement: The latest numbers that I recall seeing (I’m not sure where) claimed that there are currently something like 70,000 climate scientists out there who have by now published hundreds of thousands of climate-related papers, or some such. Which is funny because just a few years ago the numbers that I recall seeing weren’t anywhere close to this; we’re talking at least an order of magnitude difference here, IIRC. So, taking these claims at face value, then you probably would have to have had a truly remarkable increase recently in the number of climate scientists (maybe they just breed like rabbits?), with an equally remarkable burst of publishing productivity on their part (maybe they’re just working really, really hard trying to save the planet?). All of this, of course, in the face of painful restrictions on research funding and competition for journal space in general. I’m just not buying said claims personally, so methinks that maybe you’re being a bit too gullible here.
It's fine to roll your eyes at more outrageous statements, but keep some perspective. You're not better at science than many many scientists out there. This science was developed in an exceptionally hostile atmosphere, where any results to the contrary (climate change isn't happening/isn't human made/is benign) would have been vastly helpful to a scientists career, so there is no misaligned incentive structure here. So the idea that there is a massive misrepresentation of results, skewed towards the extreme, driven by sloppy science, is just a conspiracy theory.
Again, the IPCC report I linked above explicitly compares the expected increase in mortality in summer and the expected decrease in winter and finds the former outweighs the latter.
And yes, research into climate change, and specifically climate change impact has vastly expanded in recent years. It's still a tiny fraction of the overall research budget, so this is simply a shift in emphasize.
Of course there is sloppy science out there, not every of the 70.000 you quote (I don't know where that number comes from) is a beacon of integrity. I've refereed enough papers in my life to know that first hand. That's why IPCC reports were such an important exercise. They document consensus, not just publications.
"You're not better at science than many many scientists out there."
As an unbiased, outside observer who's been a huge science nerd almost since birth, yeah I kind of am - in at least some very important respects. While I have no particular skin in this game (it's not my bread and butter, so to speak), I'm generally quite good at seeing the big picture on things (the forest vs. the trees). Plus I've rubbed elbows with enough PhD-types in my life, both inside academia and out in industry, to know that they very often don't really have a good grasp of reality. They can be pretty freaking clueless, in other words.
As a computer nerd myself, I have no fear of downloading large datasets and analyzing them - and finding them wanting, perhaps. Nor do I have any particular faith in various computer models which are being relied on so heavily these days in fields like climate science. "Garbage in, garbage out", as the old saying goes.
As a referee, how much of that kind of thing do you actually do yourself? Download the data sets and analyze them? (This amounted to thousands of files in my particular case.) Review the algorithms and the supposed logic behind them? Maybe even run the modeling software itself to see what the results look like, perhaps as you tweak various settings? Or do you just take whatever is given to you in those papers at face value? There are quite a few people out there now who have actually gone through these analysis steps - spending hours, days, maybe even weeks or whatever doing so- and they often have't been particularly impressed with what they've found.
"there is no misaligned incentive structure here."
Yeah there is, in that apparently there are quite a few researchers and others out there who will quietly tell you that they themselves may have real doubts about an issue (whatever it is), but are afraid to speak up too loudly out of fear of being beaten down professionally because of it. And then there's the whole "gravy train" problem, where folks will just jump on whatever bandwagon they think will get them funding and get their papers published and so on. This even though they themselves may not necessarily particularly qualified to speak in that area. In that I’m including things like saying “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now!”, which may not get them much traction. But change that to say “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now because of climate change!”, and then they may get lots of traction. There’s also the issue where negative results and results which go too much against the grain may rarely get published - because those peer-reviewed journals that everyone if supposedly so enamored of are first and foremost a business, after all, and they need to move product, so they will pick and choose whichever papers they think will help them do that. They also don’t want to go around ticking off their best customers (especially the ones who control the subscriptions), if publishing said research papers might make those customers look bad.
The fact that there still isn't mainstream discussion about how society must change, but rather eternal growth society is still the default target across the globe is depressing and gives confidence that we are going to see substantial civilisation collapse in the future.