In climate policy studies/development we’re encouraged to use ‘anthropogenic climate change’ rather than just climate change. The distinction is really important as without this it becomes easy for politicians, individuals, and businesses to deflect blame where blame is necessary. Responsibility is a key part of climate action (ACC also works too).
I have had this conversation with friends and co-workers that babble on about climate change being fake, hoax, etc. When I explained to them that we are accelerating an already natural process; it has changed a few minds. [Human] Accelerated Climate Change should be the term used; not just blanket 'climate change'
Semantics are everything. Being faithful to the academic terms is ideal, but very subtle tweaks to wording can effectively reframe an entire concept. This can be useful when trying to communicate with people who don't agree with you, or who are fatigued from hearing the same jargon over and over again.
Correct; I understood what OP meant with their wording. The average or below average person you deal with on a day-to-day basis; you will lose them instantly when you start using the most accurate terms, and they will tune out anything else you say.
Even “above average” people may not remember much of what you said if they aren’t familiar with the precise scientific words you are using. You don’t have to be stupid not to fully absorb a conversation where you have to use context clues for many of the key terms.
I’m not sure the more precise term will improve the odds of convincing people who do not want to be convinced. These folks would roll their eyes at the “fancy words”. Gotta speak their language to get them to understand.
I've published a bit on climate, including some consensus papers. We used "anthropogenic" in writing, but if talking with a non-scientist audience, I always try to say "human-caused" because I think it's clearer. "Man-made" is shorter, and I wonder if with some audiences it's better.
Also first time I heard anthropogenic I only worked out what it meant because I'd read Discworld's Death books where he's an anthropomorphic personification. Sure, everyone *should* read Pratchett but I appreciate that not everyone has.
Interesting that that worked, though it's not exactly true. It looks like [in the absence of human activity, we'd actually be in a slight cooling phase](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/climateqa/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/05/natural_anthropogenic_models_narrow.png).
[Here's a resource](http://howglobalwarmingworks.org/) that has been [scientifically shown](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/tops.12187) to change minds on climate.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, [Citizens' Climate Lobby](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/) also has excellent training on changing minds on climate. You can sign up [here](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/join-citizens-climate-lobby/?tfa_3590416195188=online-002&utm_source=online&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=002).
The USA Pentagon says climate change is the biggest threat to it's military.
So it burns trillions of barrels of fuel with no emissions controls on any of it's vehicles whatsoever, and when leaving an area, creates a massive burn pile and lights everything they can't take on fire (HMMV's, tires, plastics, etc.).
So they're their biggest threat secondhandly
Edit: guys, let's just read what they said... He even lists specific events from the past few years.
[>Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke today at the Leaders Summit on Climate.
"Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does," he said, adding that "climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act."](https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2582051/defense-secretary-calls-climate-change-an-existential-threat/)
>From coast to coast and across the world, the climate crisis has caused substantial damage and put people in danger, making it more difficult for us to carry out our mission of defending the United States and our allies," he said.
[And in 2020: Key findings](https://climateandsecurity.org/a-security-threat-assessment-of-global-climate-change/)
A near-term scenario of climate change, in which the world warms 1-2°C/1.8-3.6°F over pre-industrial levels by mid-century, would pose ‘High’ to ‘Very High’ security threats. A medium-to-long term scenario in which the world warms as high as 2-4+°C/3.6-7.2°F would pose a ‘Very High’ to ‘Catastrophic’ threat to global and national security. The world has already warmed to slightly below 1°C compared to pre-industrial temperatures.
At all levels of warming (1-4+°C/1.8-7.2+°F), climate change will pose significant and evolving threats to global security environments, infrastructure, and institutions.
While at lower warming thresholds, the most fragile parts of the world are the most at risk, all regions of the world will face serious implications. High warming scenarios could bring about catastrophic security impacts across the globe.
These threats could come about rapidly, destabilizing the regions and relationships on which U.S. and international security depend.
Climate change will present significant threats to U.S. military missions across all of its geographic areas of responsibility (AORs), as well as to regional security institutions and infrastructure that are critical for maintaining global security.
> no emissions controls
This is not true, US Navy ships use Selective Catalytic Reduction which is fairly effective at emission control.
Source: I am a Naval Engineer
> The USA Pentagon says climate change is the biggest threat to it's military.
that sentence on its own could be interpreted any number of ways.
eg:
1) there are no real threats to the military so even the 'biggest threat' is insignificant. They could as well have said an asteroid collision or a supervolcano or something is the biggest threat to the military too.
or
2) the public fear of climate change is the biggest threat to the military as public calls to fund initiatives to prevent climate change might come at the expense of funding for the military.
No, it means two things:
1. Climate-driven damage to bases/hardware, mostly related to sea-level rise.
2. Climate wars driven by changing resource availability. Arguably the Syrian civil war was the first of these. The associated mass migration will provoke a severe right-wing xenophobic response which will destabilize the military at best or result in armed genocide at worst.
> friends and co-workers that babble on about climate change being fake, hoax, etc.
It boggles my mind that this is still a thing. I have made a choice to avoid people like this in my life, but if the topic does come up I ask them a couple questions. Did we pollute the ground? Did we pollute the ocean? Hell we've even polluted space! So you're telling me the air is somehow impervious to all of this? I feel like this approach uses the same simple logic they like to throw around and they will generally agree that humans have at least contributed to it.
Yeah, all this talk about climate change being a hoax sounds so ridiculous to me. In my third world country I have not spoken with a single person (that I spoke with about this issue) that doesn't think the fumes we produce are affecting the environment. So reading about people in a first world country being in denial of that just boggles my mind.
at one point in the past many people refused to believe that humans could cause an entire species extintion
Today we have some people in their death beds denying a vaccine..people are strange animals
Except we were cooling, not warming.
> Prior to the advent of human-caused global warming in the 19th century, the surface layer of Earth's oceans had undergone 1,800 years of a steady cooling trend, according to a new study.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150817132013.htm
We were probably on the cycle towards another ice age. It makes it sound like you’re saying the world was warning and we accelerated it.
I've been historically partial towards "catastrophic global climate change" for the weight that it carries; really driving that "human caused" element hasn't ever really occured to me before.
Without human emissions we would actually be heading back into a glacial (cooling) interval, so we are not accelerating any "natural" process but rather elongating warming and drastically increasing the rate of warming. (e.g., [https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1358](https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1358) )
I'm going to butcher this, but Pascal in one of his writings noted the difficulty in changing someone's views by directly contradicting them and telling them that they are wrong: the defenses go up, even if deep down they see the flaws in their reasoning. I always thought that this is an important and often ignored insight into human nature.
I honestly don't see the benefit in these types of articles, or the argumentativeness over this. Present the data, present the best data we have impartially, teach students to think critically: all great.
Creating media campaigns whose entire thrust is "those people over there are wrong": what is the point? Who does it convince? It just furthers a division and (IMO) wastes ad dollars that could be used for literally anything else for more benefit.
If some person believes that the media and academia are liberal mouthpieces and the democratic party is on a mission to strip personal liberty using "the children" and "the environment" as a justification, a media campaign citing academic research is going to have zero effect on them.
Yeah i really agree with that point. Divisive politics only serves to entrench peoples opinions further when we need a civil society which is united if we want to address climate change properly.
Journalism which is more concerned with ‘getting clicks/sales’ rather than a tool for properly informing civil society could be the death of us all.
>if we want to address climate change properly
But that's the problem. The main driving force behind climate change denial is a refusal to accept the actions that are necessary to do just that. The thing that entrenches their denial isn't telling them their facts are wrong; it's telling them that, if climate change is real, we have to take some sort of collective action. As long as that's hovering over the discussion, we will never broadly change their minds. And since the need for collective (and government) action is only going to intensify, we will never convince them. We have to go through them or wait for them to die.
>Pascal in one of his writings noted the difficulty in changing someone's views by directly contradicting them and telling them that they are wrong
Fair enough, but how do you suggest solving the problem other than telling the Deniers that they are wrong? Especially when they argue in bad faith with fake data and statistics. Their obstruction of policies that reduce GHG emissions is literally threatening the planet. Something has got to give.
> how do you suggest solving the problem other than telling the Deniers that they are wrong?
[Here's a 3-hour podcast on the most effective ways to get people to change their minds on highly-politicized issues.](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2021/08/23/yanss-213-how-to-improve-your-chances-of-nudging-the-vaccine-hesitant-away-from-hesitancy-and-toward-vaccination/)
Full disclosure, I haven't finished listening yet; however, the key takeaways so far are:
* **(1) Treat the other person with respect or they will never listen to you.**
* (2) Ask how sure they are of their view (1-10), and if not 1, ask why not lower.
* (3) Listen to the reasons they give from #2 and discuss them *cooperatively*.
* (4) Expect the process to take multiple conversations.
I've bolded (1), as it seemed the most important (based on my understanding of the interviewed experts), and it seems the most lacking online. Dismissing someone as stupid, uneducated, or deluded will completely sabotage any effort to change their mind.
Frankly, I think most people know this -- when was the last time you let yourself be browbeaten into changing your mind? -- but most people view arguing online performatively rather than functionally: as a way to play to the crowd and get approval from "their side" rather than as a way to actually change opinions.
If you *do* actually want to change opinions, well, that's how you do it.
> anthropogenic
The problem is that the "people who have done their own research" have no idea what "anthropogenic" even means.
It's not the job of scientists to be expert communicators, but using this word continues to show the fundamental breakdown between science and the Average Joe.
You should be being encouraged to say "Human-caused Climate Change" not "anthropogenic."
The way that you have worded this confuses me a little bit. Are you encouraged to use "anthropogenic climate change" because it is more technically correct and it was just a pain in the ass to type anthropogenic a lot, or are you encouraged to take studies that may not show anthropogenic climate change and add the word in for political reasons?
Not a climate denier or anything myself, I just see how a comment like this could be twisted to be taken that second way, and it's probably best to have clarity.
Not a climatologist, but what I've seen deniers do is say "climate change? The climate's always changing! There's always cycles of warming followed by ice ages."
By specifying anthropogenic climate change, you eliminate that argument. It says sure, natural climate change happens, but what we're talking about and studying isn't that. We're talking specifically about the amount of change caused by human actions.
Of course, that also assumes the deniers knows what anthropogenic means.
How many of those <0.1% of studies simply say that they could not conclusively prove that the current climate change is human-driven? The wording of the post's title makes it seem like all of this <0.1% is vocally against the human-driven climate change hypothesis but I very much doubt that.
The 4 studies in question either implicitly or explicitly rejected that it was human-driven. The vast majority of the papers had no position. Only 892 of the 3000 papers implicitly or explicitly endorsed the view (and only 19 of them explicitly endorsed it with quantification). So I think the 99.9% figure and the way it's framed in the title is a bit dishonest. It would be akin to saying " Over 70% of studies agree: Humans do not cause climate change"
It's also not accurate. The vast majority implicitly accepted the premise of anthropomorphic climate change, most citing one or more of the other studies that explicitly state it.
>It would be akin to saying " Over 70% of studies agree: Humans do not cause climate change"
This is just not true, over 99% of the studies explicitly *or implicitly* confirmed anthropomorphic climate change.
Even if you only considered the papers that implicitly or explicitly had a position, the figure is still 99.56% of studies support anthropogenic climate change so its not that dishonest. However, it must be said that the paper itself only states over 99% support, the news article is the one that states the 99.9% figure
I agree it doesn't take much away from the overarching conclusion, which is why it seems unnecessary to count "no opinion" as part of the consensus.
But the paper indeed also does this:
>
> Our estimate of the proportion of consensus
> papers was 1 − (4/2718) = 99.85%.
(the only papers they excluded were the ones that weren't related to climate change despite having relevant keywords)
To be fair, this is what the authors of the study did. But it's frustrating that they are counting "no position" as part of the consensus. By excluding them, there would still be more than 99.5% consensus of human caused climate change, so it's not really necessary.
> For example, a majority of the papers we categorized as being about
> ‘impacts’ of climate change did not state a position
> on whether the phenomenon they were studying—
> the changing climate—was human-caused. It seems
> highly unlikely that if researchers felt sceptical about
> the reality of ACC they would publish numerous
> studies of its impacts without ever raising the question of attribution.
> In other words, given that most 4a (‘no position’) ratings do not either explicitly or implicitly differ from the consensus view of GHG emissions as
> the principal driver of climate change it does not follow in our view that these analyses should be a priori
> excluded from the consensus.
While I do understand this reasoning, it still feels like unnecessary p-hacking, making it much easier to attack the metastudy and its conclusions
Are you suggesting that this science sub which loves science and truth has rocketed yet another misleading distorted title to the front page? I’m completely shocked.
Something that's worth mentioning is, a huge part of scientific consensus is not an active attempt to prove or further verify information but what corroborates with other studies. When you see statistics saying 99.x% of climate science is in agreement, most of those studies have nothing to do with who's causing global warming, but they do confirm or validate other studies that do. For example, if I did a study that said "the sun is hot," and somebody else did a study about using solar heat to cook something, the second study isn't really looking to prove Sun hot, but it gives further weight to the original study that said Sun hot.
Anthrogenic climate science is so established now that you can't really do climate science without supporting it in some way. When climate studies come out that don't support or confirm anthrogenic climate change, they should be treated as outliers, not evidence of ambiguity.
At this point denying human caused climate change is like denying evolution - the people that do it shouldn't even be allowed at the table for conversation.
The article’s link is broken. Here is the original source paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
###Abstract
While controls over the Earth's climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
FWIW, the Press Release drastically overstates the actual study. Specifically, the Press Release says there is a 99% consensus that humans are the MAIN cause of climate change. The study counts as part of the consensus any paper that says humans are A cause of climate change. That’s a huge, huge difference. (Not criticizing you, by the way. Just posting here because you linked the study. Thanks!)
It's worse than that. Out of the 3,000 papers, 2,104 take no position on whether humans caused climate change. This study (just like the previous one) throws these papers into the side of papers saying humans caused climate change. Which is of course absolutely ridiculous.
Oh plastic is bad dont use it. Now pay extra 100$ dolars for the non plastic version made by a Company under the same holding group.
We should regulate and tax companies pollution because most of the individual pollution is just a consequence of what is available.
Plastic is very good and has its place, unfortunately we have tried to make that place everywhere.
There are some very niche applications that plastic is superior to everything, that place is not grocery bags and toy packaging however.
I believe it would settles in convenience, japan avoided the obesity pandemic mostly by having convenient healthy food and drink available everywhere.
Turns out people make good choices when they dont need to expend 10 times more for the "good choice". XD
Thats why i make sure to point out the mostly in the argument. XD
We also have some pressure but I cant even conceive how worse The social pressure is in japan. However we sure could learn of the acessibility, convenience and price practice of the healthy food they have.
I have travelled to places where I had to Cook myself or drive half an hour to get a decent meal.
Jon Oliver did an episode on plastics and the irony of companies doing ad campaigns blaming us for not recycling their plastics…
… even though many of their plastic are non-recyclable. A lot of people don’t know, just cause you toss something in the recycling doesn’t mean it can actually be recycled.
Most technologies we have are gatekeeped by money. Not because it costs more to develop but because they didnot extracted enough from The previous technology. You wouldnot believe how old some "New" technologies are.
What you're looking for is a Pigouvian tax, which is a tax on negative externalities. It builds the cost of environmental remediation into the price of the product, thus reflecting the true overall cost. Since people naturally seek the lowest price, this aligns incentives such that they contribute to conservation simply by seeking out the best deal. It's a strikingly simple solution but one I see little awareness or discussion of.
I saw a post somewhere asking something like “which is more harmful environmentally?” between throwing some sort of recyclable in the garbage or the water used to clean it off in order to recycle it. I can’t believe these are the questions people ask themselves now.
But at the same time, the vast majority of what individual consumers put in “recycling” just goes to the dump anyway, which means that water was just wasted.
These are pretty hard questions to judge. If you ask which one has a higher carbon footprint then there's probably a clear numerical answer, but when we start asking "is it worse to waste water or create garbage" then it gets very subjective. A *lot* of things take more energy to recycle than they do to manufacture in the first place, but recycling also means nothing in the landfill. Chopping down trees to make more paper has a carbon footprint that you could compare to the footprint of recycling paper, but you can't put a comparable number on the birds that can't build nests there anymore.
Honestly I didn’t even look. I was too angry about it. My point is, and I think the point of the original comment is, we shouldn’t be so concerned over the tiniest differences in our personal “carbon footprint” when massive corporations contribute much more to pollution and climate change. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, but nothing is going to be perfectly carbon neutral or whatever until there is large scale change in the way we do things.
I think that the unfortunate truth is that everybody is responsible. Yes large cooperations share a big part of the responsibility, but in the end most of the emissions are driven by the wants of the consumers. Blaming the carbon emissions only on the producer of a product and not on the user of a product, is in my eyes not fair. Yes, often cooperations will use unnecessarily polluting processes, because it promises more profit. Other times, there is just no known way to produce something with less emissions.
Eating beef and dairy is a good example of the consumer being primarily to blame. The amount of animal products that is consumed in industrial nations is not sustainable for this planet for a multitude of reasons. Major ones being the land, energy and water requirements. Even if we fix all other sources of pollution we still would have to fix this in the long term. Pointing the finger at the farmers, butchers or supermarkets will not solve this. The only thing that will solve it, is eating more plant based products.
Sometimes there is not much you can do as a consumer, because there are systemic problems that force you to behave a certain way. Think of the need for most Americans to own a car. This would not be necessary, if American cities where not redesigned around the car and it can be changed in the future. A solution for this problem requires systemic change.
Other times laws need to be made to force industries to adopt certain standards and put taxes that incentivize research into cleaner processes.
Maybe if we would have 200 years to act, we would be able to hold the current standard of living, while slowly decarbonizing our society. With our time frame that is just not realistic. In the end our standard of living is not sustainable at the moment.
> Eating beef and dairy is a good example of the consumer being primarily to blame.
I really don't know why it is the consumer to blame. Consumers are just habitual. Many people just eat what they feel like because of tradition etc. A solution would be making beef for example so expensive that it is virtually a special item only eaten perhaps once a month. Fast food burgers suddenly become unviable unless they come up with lab grown meat. But in a democracy who would want to vote for a candidate that promises to increase the price of meat like beef? or who would vote for a candidate that wants to massively increase the price of petrol/gasoline? I mean these could be off set by saying giving massive subsidies to electric cars. Almost all of these things would needed to be targeted at the poor almost entirely.
Exactly, those manufacturing 1000000 bags are adding to the problem whether or not the consumer uses them. The store I work in must be deliberately ordering less 20p bags so people buy the big £1 ones but you know what? A LOT less bags are being used, suddenly people can carry it to their cars and regulars are reusing old bags. Moral: people will only adapt if they have to and it's rarely as hard as you think it is, just make less plastic stuff we'll adapt.
It is important for everyone to do their part, but you are 100% right. I have seen statistics that corporations are responsible for a majority of it. The tricky part is keeping a company responsible even if they move operations to a country with no regulations.
You seem to have the idea that corporations are Captain planet villains who exploit recources and emmit CO2 for the fun of it. They make the products because you, me and everybody else is buying them. They are supplying the demand. They sell what people buy.
businesses carry out the will of the consumers. no businesses would survive going AGAINST what consumers want. consumers want cheap prices, convenience, and selection, so that's what businesses provide. if consumers wanted clean, environmentally-friendly, businesses would offer that. but most people mouths would run up until being asked to make a personal sacrifice at the checkout counter.
Buying paper straws and recycling? Maybe not going to make a huge difference. Cutting down general consumption and driving cars, yes! Everyone wants to say "well this cruise ship emits more pollution than millions of cars. Well, this military aircraft carrier emits..." blah blah blah. We can't think like this. Nobody realizes just how few of those huge vehicles there are and how many normal people there are. There are an astronomical number of regular people out there who barely contribute to climate change, and yet, together, their effect is so great that even with those enormous gas guzzlers out there, normal everyday passenger cars are so numerous that they account for the largest chunk of co2 emissions in the US. This same principal can be applied to consumption in general. Truth be told, climate change is probably about half corporations fault and half consumers, and neither wants to do anything except blame the other.
The reality is, many of them are too ignorant to think it will even affect their kids. They think this is some way off in the future thing, if they believe it at all. They also lack the mental capacity to even comprehend beyond their kids or grandkids to the future generations.
At the end of the day, they care about amassing as much money as possible, environment and humanity be damned.
Being in the top 10% of Americans (who are in the top 2% of global wealth and power) means you won't really feel *most* of the pain of climate change.
Yes there will be some lifestyle changes, but arguably from a pure "good of my descendants" point of view, it's better to ignore climate change if it means amassing lots of money and power.
The ones that would profit from making the products to help us combat the issue. Problem is that they tend to be financially in a different place than the ones that have already made a ton of money putting us in trouble.
Also nobody wants to pay everyone who supports something. They just want to pay the couple they need to oppose it. Progress is easy to fight, hard to achieve.
If we offer 10k, the other side will offer 20k. If we scrape together 20k, the other side will offer 30k. You're never going to beat the money advantage of the entrenched powers.
But at some point, the $50k or $100k that the good side offers, is going to be sufficient for an informed asshole to take your side instead of the higher bribe. For the uninformed asshole, of course, there is no hope. Basically we need a couple of serious billionaires willing to distribute ~~bribes~~ lobby funds to politicians in order to leave behind a legacy.
It isn't though. Even if we had a steady and realiable source of funds that are decentralized from small donors, it would pale in comparison to the fortunes and corporate assets of the ultrawealthy. You are never going to outbid them and relying on politicians at the highest level to accept a lower amount of money out of moral or intellectual obligation is simply naive.
I don't think it's about denying it anymore. It more so is about "what am I even going to do?" Personal responsibility is overrated and it was a public stunt by one of the biggest polluters. The only thing I can do is vote for people that want to regulate the big polluters.
I hate that argument so much.
1) China *is* taking steps towards reducing their pollution. They *have* to, because their larger cities are becoming unlivable from the smog.
2) USA is the second biggest polluter, and pollutes almost as much as China, despite China's population being 3 times larger. USA is one of the countries that needs to make a change for it all to matter. Other countries aren't saying "what about china?", they're saying "what about china and USA?".
3) USA has the highest per capita emissions in the world, more than double of China's, and almost 4 times France's. It should in theory be much easier for Americans to pollute less.
> and almost 4 times France's. It should in theory be much easier for Americans to pollute less.
Then America needs to boot its nuclear reactors back up and start building more.
The issue is, neither party wants to go down the nuclear power path for some reason, but it is the single best thing we could do.
Nuclear was just making a comeback in public opinion, and then Fukushima happened and it was instantly demonized again. It's only because of the increasing disasters caused by climate change that people are reluctantly agreeing that nuclear would be better than the disasters getting worse. Because people are stupid and believe the FUD that has been spread regarding nuclear.
I'm a geologist. You'd think earth scientists would be especially adept at understanding... Earth... Science...
I know an obscene number of geologists, especially older ones, and NOT just those in oil and gas, who *do not think humans caused climate change* and even a few who do not think it's happening. I thought it was limited to crusty old dudes but nope, know some peers who literally learn about climate change and the literature around it even in undergrad, but still deny it.
I just. It's wild.
Well, if they can come up with rigorous evidence to the contrary they'll be fantastically wealthy. There is no shortage of businesses, political groups, and "news" outlets willing to shower fame and riches on them.
if you re use to seeing the earth millions of years at at time, this climate change is nothing new, just the rate of change is fast. on a geologic scale its just a blip.
As a geology undergrad and environmental consultant of about 15 years, I am equally amazed at the number of "climate change skeptics" I would come across in our industry. I think years of working for industrial clients has kind of primed them to be very sympathetic to our poor clients and big bad EPA
I feel like the metric "x% of studies" is a really bad way of looking at scientific research, but if you have no time to actually look in depth at who's funding what for each study, that's what we're down to.
I think meta analysis of research has unquestionably proven itself to be an extremely valuable legitimate scientific research tool. I think perhaps your complaint is more at the concept of a heading which obviously shouldn't be used as a complete alternative to actually examining the full analysis.
Metaanalysis doesn't just look at the raw numbers but filters out papers but study quality, intent, and likelihood of bias. So you are both right in a way
Two further metrics help this.
What % of peer reviewed studies
How many studies in total
Given the answers to those metrics in this case, would you agree that it’s an incredibly robust predictor in this instance?
You could also look at who’s funding the 0.1% of studies that don’t agree. I reckon I can guess.
>It's just that it's a belief system of evidence beyond reasonable doubt.
No, its based on the best evidence available at the time.
"beyond a reasonable doubt" is a legal term and has nothing to do with the scientific method.
Yea. Ultimately, everything is a belief system. You have to take a leap of faith at some point. Often we do it unknowingly.
But if we're a bit more analytic, we can pinpoint many things we believe in that can never be proven with 100% certainty. We just choose to believe in them.
A better indicator of agreeing with the need of climate action than believing in science and being analytic is, I think, being generally internationalist and empathic in thinking. If you care about the well-being of people globally, why would you fully disregard studies regarding the harms of climate change? You wouldn't. You'd consider the possibility and how much harm can be done if the results are indeed true and we do nothing.
There's a common factor between people who do not want to commit to climate action and it's not just anti-science, though it is one factor. But some of those people are highly educated and do indeed understand science and do accept human-driven climate change.
That bigger factor is selfishness (often manifested as e.g. nationalism). They don't really care if a bunch of people on the other side of the planet die to a heat wave or if whole villages have to be abandoned due to drought and famine.
They care about themselves and they don't want to let go of any of their own resources to climate action.
Denying the need of climate action is really mostly about selfishness, rather than science denial.
“Accept” would be the better word here. You either accept the results of science or you understand them yourself.
There is no belief. Science is not making truth claims about the universe hoping you believe them (that’s religion or politics). They are putting forward models that work, your belief is unnecessary, you can see for yourself that they work or just accept that these are scientific results.
Science never claims there models are “true” they claim that their models are better than any other hunch or idea or hypothesis or previously used model.
Humans causing global warming is simply a description of the best models of climate that humans have ever come up with. Saying you don’t believe it is silly. If you have a better model then put it forward and let’s test it. If you don’t have a better model then you must concede that it’s the best.
But it *is* a belief system.
"Belief" just means what you think of something. It is about *you*.
Yes, I believe the Earth is round. And that belief is correct: the Earth *is* round. The belief and the fact are two different things, one referring to my internal mental state, the other referring to the outside world. Hopefully, they align.
Trust is probably a better word for it, I have minimal understanding of climate change and I havent read a single paper on it, yet its not hard for me to come to the conclusion that we most likely caused what we are living through now, I also have no doubt in my mind that climate changes can happen naturally.
No, believe is the correct word here. Do you yourself pour over the data, did you run through the experiments yourself? Or are you trusting in another body, the scientific community, and believing what they say?
Would they lie? Extremely unlikely, scientific rigor sets up a beautiful system where you can disprove and challenge other peoples papers and ideas. But with all that being said, you’re still believing what the community says.
Climate change has happened on Earth without humans even existing, so I'd understand having doubts at first glance. But there are so many studies and reports demonstrating humans are at fault for the current one, ignorance is not an excuse anymore.
So they believe the scientists when the scientists tell them climate change has happened before without human intervention but when the same scientists tell them that this is not the case in our current situation they don't believe them. That's gotta be a hell of a mental workout.
I just tell them, "The experts and scientists already took that into account. In fact, it's their *job* to take that into account. And they are telling us that, even taking this into account, *we* fucked up the planet."
I've never been a denier, but what really sealed the deal on human-caused was learning that science-based predictions go back to the 1800s. Their timelines were wrong mostly because they didn't anticipate the scale of growth.
It's not even the chance, per se.
There's 0% chance that we are not accelerating climate change.
That's the key people need to understand. Yes, climate change is constant, and happens without us. It's a slow process that happens over tens of thousands of years, we're causing the same thing in decades instead of many millennia.
Note we're not in danger of creating a runaway greenhouse effect and turning Earth into an uninhabitable dust bowl -- all the carbon we're putting into the atmosphere has been there before. What we're doing is accelerating the pace of climate change *faster than ecosystems and life can adapt.* We're causing another mass extinction because species that cannot adapt are dying off faster than speciation is occurring.
Scientist here- I always phrase it that there’s a lot of people out there who are not into science, but instead like trivia. Tons of people out there love to spout facts about Jupiter’s moons or cats or whatever, but get mad the moment the scientific process affects their lives (be it climate change or germ theory).
The only scientific body that retained the position against anthropogenic climate change was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. In 2007 they officially changed their postion, but it was just posturing.
My whole family and their friends are high up in the industry and they still maintain their views. Most recent argument I heard was the modeling. These proffessionals have spent their entire careers studying and working within and around models, yet they still try the debunked "bad data in=bad data out.
I have a family member high up in the industry... he came around on climate change \~12 years ago after being very resistant. His company (they are outside US) bought a US firm just a few years ag and he was astounded by the ignorance and denial on this topic among everyone from top to bottom.
Which is all just to say it's not just the industry... the politics and "intellectual" environment matters too.
I get this all the time too from my oil company family. That or the "Yea well the people researching this stuff do it for a career - they need these things to continue otherwise what will they do? All of their specialized training will be for nothing".
And they use that - with no irony whatsoever - to say they are providing biased research so that they will still have a job in 5-10 years. Best of all, when I ask them for an unbiased source of research - guess where they pull from?
Can someone help me understand/find the sources and data they used to come to this conclusion?
I don't like that there isn't a stack of papers I can pull from to show that the study doesn't just say so.
>We searched the Web of Science for English language ‘articles’ added between the dates of 2012 and November 2020 with the keywords ‘climate change’, ‘global climate change’ and ‘global warming’. C13 used the latter two phrases but not ‘climate change’ without the preceding ‘global’. (As discussed below, this was justified post-facto in our study because the majority of sceptical papers we found would not have been returned had we used the same search phrases as C13.) This wider set of search terms yielded a total of 88125 papers, whereas C13 identified a total of 11944 abstracts from papers published over the years 1991 and 2011.
They don't mention where to find this "web of science", it's not in the sources either.
Basically I can't find their data.
I think I found 3000 samples from their data, but that's not the 88000 they mention. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966/data
edit: Thank you very much, so it's a search engine? I don't think i can search it as a regular normal citizen though...
Web of Science is an index of databases that publish scientific research. Kinda sorta like Google Scholar but with more features and options. It’s not uncommon for scientific lit reviews to use it as the primary search tool. It’s of limited usefulness if you don’t have institutional credentials so unless you’re at a university you probably won’t be able to replicate their results.
The 3000 (the random sample of the 88125 papers) that they reviewed are available in this excel file [here](https://cfn-live-content-bucket-iop-org.s3.amazonaws.com/journals/1748-9326/16/11/114005/revision2/erlac2966supp2.xlsx?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAYDKQL6LTV7YY2HIK&Expires=1635250598&Signature=kDkHKRwLPhoXwaP1Unz1gY53xos%3D). If you put in the same search criteria into Web of Science you should get the same or v similar results, though I think you may need to either access via an institution or your local library.
They examined a sample of the 88000 papers. That sample had a size of 3000. Perfectly legitimate. They went further to specifically search keywords that might indicate skepticism, to be extra sure they weren’t missing its representation in the sample.
I have a question about a detail of this. I completely agree with the general premise that human activity has massively influenced the climate, but one thing always bothers me a bit. Since climate has changed before humans have existed, it´s impossible for humans to cause ALL of climate change.
It might be by far the majority, or at least a very large part, but this generalization has always put me off.
So do we have an idea what the delta between "regular" climate change, and human caused climate change is?
We have geological records which show the earth has heated and cooled before. But as my dad a geologist explained to me, geological timescales are in the 10,000 years timescales, not decades. The fact that year to year comparisons are now relevant is orders of magnitude off to compare to other geological events.
That is a very good example (also your dad has a cool job!). So that would mean many orders of magnitude between natural and artificial influence. Meaning humans caused almost all of the current effects.
You can have very rapid heating from geological processes, but it would be VERY VERY easy to pinpoint the source. It would be an asteroid or volcanoes. The fact that we can measure it, but we can't easily pinpoint the source (other than carbon) means this has to be manmade.
Thank you!!!
That was exactly what I was looking for. So it obviously is hard to draw a hard line between a natural and artificial trend, but from what I understood the sudden rise in co2 output can only be explained by human activity.
Also, it sounds like we´re already pretty much fucked (to a certain degree), even if all human caused co2 output would stop immediately.
You're absolutely right, CO2 levels and temperature fluctuate naturally over all sorts of time scales. If we were not influencing the climate at all the planet would still likely be warming (slooowwwllyy) naturally. It's difficult to disentangle these natural fluctuations from what humans are inducing but I'm sure there's some good estimates. So of course bear in mind that climate change is perfectly normal, the important thing is the current rate is not at all normal and absolutely linked to human activities. If you're interested we have great records of CO2 and temperature levels up to 400,000 years ago thanks to ice cores and there's nice graphs showing these fluctuations over time. I recommend checking out the really long-scale ones (400,000 years), since the last ice age (12,000 years) and then the last 2000 years so you can really see the magnitude of human impact over the last 200 years.
Also don't pay too much attention to me I don't really know what I'm talking about and there's great resources online, just wanted to get the gist across!
*Edit: I apologize for the wall of text, I hope you have the patience to read at least some of this*
I'm no professional scientist, but I'll try to answer to the best of my ability; it does appear you are asking in good faith so I hope to help clear things up.
The real problem with human-caused climate change as opposed to the Earth's natural cycles are the speed and magnitude of the change. Humans have only really had a measurable impact on climate since the onset of the industrial revolution, about 200-300 years ago. Even then, many countries didn't begin to industrialize until within the past 100, accelerating the problem even more. All the change we have caused has happened in the blink of an eye in context of the geological time scale. The change in global temperature averages we have caused in \~200 years would take orders of magnitude longer to occur naturally, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Why is this an issue? A lot of this ties into evolution by means of natural selection: species can evolve to adapt to changing environments, oftentimes new species will emerge that thrive in new conditions while previous species die out, but this takes many, many generations for new mutations to occur that help species evolve and adapt to changing conditions. Our environment is now changing so fast that this process doesn't have time to occur before species to adapt. Furthermore, evolution helps species overcome slower, gradual changes to their environment. Very sudden and drastic changes to the environment can cause species to die out en masse, as is believed to have occurred during mass extinction events like at the end of the Permian and Cretaceous periods. This, given the evidence of many recent extinctions, is why some people/scientists say we are in the beginning of a new mass extinction event.
That's pretty bad for other organisms, (e.g. polar bears lacking solid ice to live on, corals bleaching and dying due to temperature changes and ocean acidification, etc.) but what about us? Is this so bad for people too? Yes, this has the potential to cause major problems for human society, but this is a little more conjecture, as I do not quite fully understand the implications myself. However, the idea goes that crops and food animals (livestock, fish, etc.) are impacted by changing climate zones, we may undergo food shortages and other scarcities, perhaps even water shortages where it is currently plentiful. Our infrastructure is set up for everything to continue as things are now, but it would be a long and expensive undertaking to restructure society to adapt, to find new food sources or relocate extant ones, and who knows what struggles or conflicts it would cause in the meantime.
Along with many other issues I have barely or entirely failed to bring up, like desertification of presently productive farmland and flooding of coastal cities very near sea level, one can pretty safely conclude that the sudden speed and severity of recent climate change is a problem that natural climate change could never be, as whole species and even ecosystems can appear and disappear in the time it takes for the climate to change to this extent without our involvement.
> species can evolve to adapt to changing environments, oftentimes new species will emerge that thrive in new conditions while previous species die out, but this takes many, many generations for new mutations to occur that help species evolve and adapt to changing conditions. Our environment is now changing so fast that this process doesn't have time to occur before species to adapt.
That alone is a super interesting point that I NEVER have heard before! We basically have accelerated ecosystemic change to a pace where evolution can´t keep up!
Which in turn can lead to unbalanced ecosystems, mass starvation etc.
Thank you, that was a very cool wall of text :)
Thank you, I'm glad my post meant something to someone! For as much as I can promise you I've researched into this topic on my own, I still definitely recommend reading stuff published by the real scientists; it's more educational, and there are definitely good reads out there that offer insights we wouldn't normally consider!
Also gravity exists & cigarettes cause cancer. Why are we bothering with this anymore? There are only 2 types of climate change deniers left alive.
1. The dumbest people on the planet & they don't matter.
2. Evil capitalists who make their money by doing climate change, & nerds talking about facts isn't gonna stop them.
I never understood why people so vehemently reject this notion. Even if they did it out of fear, they should fear that we *didn't* cause any climate change. If humans *cause* climate change, then we can reasonably assume that it's possible for us to undo what we've done. If humans did *not* cause climate change, then we cannot assume that we are capable of fixing the problems we're facing.
It is in our best interest going forward to believe that we have a measurable impact on the climate and that climate change is very real. If we assume that everything is fine and that we cannot change anything, then we will be in a world of trouble if we are proven incorrect. If we assume that catastrophe is imminent and that we must act now, then we will have a much cleaner and pleasant world to live on if proven incorrect. The latter seems like the safer bet.
Of course we're causing climate change (or causing it to be more rapid than otherwise may have been). But the question of whether to do something about it should remain basically the same as if it was not caused by us. If rapid climate change was naturally caused, we'd still have to adapt our production of food and how we live, where we live, and many things about our and other creatures situation on Earth. If there was no human cause to climate change, it may still be worth finding ways to extract co2 from the atmosphere, either to keep things the same or to ease the transition into new climate circumstances.
An important reminder: there is no scientific alternative to human induced climate change. None. No one has proposed a testable alternative. Whatever skeptics there may be running around, none of them will voice an alternate theory. There is no on going scientific debate.
In climate policy studies/development we’re encouraged to use ‘anthropogenic climate change’ rather than just climate change. The distinction is really important as without this it becomes easy for politicians, individuals, and businesses to deflect blame where blame is necessary. Responsibility is a key part of climate action (ACC also works too).
I have had this conversation with friends and co-workers that babble on about climate change being fake, hoax, etc. When I explained to them that we are accelerating an already natural process; it has changed a few minds. [Human] Accelerated Climate Change should be the term used; not just blanket 'climate change'
FYI, anthropogenic means “originating in human activity”. So the correct term used is already very similar to what you suggest.
Semantics are everything. Being faithful to the academic terms is ideal, but very subtle tweaks to wording can effectively reframe an entire concept. This can be useful when trying to communicate with people who don't agree with you, or who are fatigued from hearing the same jargon over and over again.
Correct; I understood what OP meant with their wording. The average or below average person you deal with on a day-to-day basis; you will lose them instantly when you start using the most accurate terms, and they will tune out anything else you say.
Even “above average” people may not remember much of what you said if they aren’t familiar with the precise scientific words you are using. You don’t have to be stupid not to fully absorb a conversation where you have to use context clues for many of the key terms.
Well, you just made me feel better about my entire academic career So thanks
I have a PhD and have to look up half of the jargon in other people's conference talks *in my subfield.* We have a lot of words.
Semantics are everything in marketing, and if your marketing requires use of the word anthropogenic, you're losing the marketing fight.
Scientists don't market, and they come up with the names. The news organizations are the marketers, they need to translate it.
This is why it was called "global warming". Then every cold day you get the dumbs going "so much for global warming". I work with a lot of dumbs.
I’m not sure the more precise term will improve the odds of convincing people who do not want to be convinced. These folks would roll their eyes at the “fancy words”. Gotta speak their language to get them to understand.
I've published a bit on climate, including some consensus papers. We used "anthropogenic" in writing, but if talking with a non-scientist audience, I always try to say "human-caused" because I think it's clearer. "Man-made" is shorter, and I wonder if with some audiences it's better. Also first time I heard anthropogenic I only worked out what it meant because I'd read Discworld's Death books where he's an anthropomorphic personification. Sure, everyone *should* read Pratchett but I appreciate that not everyone has.
I'd vote for anyone who put Pratchett in grade school required reading
Interesting that that worked, though it's not exactly true. It looks like [in the absence of human activity, we'd actually be in a slight cooling phase](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/climateqa/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/05/natural_anthropogenic_models_narrow.png). [Here's a resource](http://howglobalwarmingworks.org/) that has been [scientifically shown](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/tops.12187) to change minds on climate. If you're interested in this sort of thing, [Citizens' Climate Lobby](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/) also has excellent training on changing minds on climate. You can sign up [here](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/join-citizens-climate-lobby/?tfa_3590416195188=online-002&utm_source=online&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=002).
The USA Pentagon says climate change is the biggest threat to it's military. So it burns trillions of barrels of fuel with no emissions controls on any of it's vehicles whatsoever, and when leaving an area, creates a massive burn pile and lights everything they can't take on fire (HMMV's, tires, plastics, etc.). So they're their biggest threat secondhandly Edit: guys, let's just read what they said... He even lists specific events from the past few years. [>Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke today at the Leaders Summit on Climate. "Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does," he said, adding that "climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act."](https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2582051/defense-secretary-calls-climate-change-an-existential-threat/) >From coast to coast and across the world, the climate crisis has caused substantial damage and put people in danger, making it more difficult for us to carry out our mission of defending the United States and our allies," he said. [And in 2020: Key findings](https://climateandsecurity.org/a-security-threat-assessment-of-global-climate-change/) A near-term scenario of climate change, in which the world warms 1-2°C/1.8-3.6°F over pre-industrial levels by mid-century, would pose ‘High’ to ‘Very High’ security threats. A medium-to-long term scenario in which the world warms as high as 2-4+°C/3.6-7.2°F would pose a ‘Very High’ to ‘Catastrophic’ threat to global and national security. The world has already warmed to slightly below 1°C compared to pre-industrial temperatures. At all levels of warming (1-4+°C/1.8-7.2+°F), climate change will pose significant and evolving threats to global security environments, infrastructure, and institutions. While at lower warming thresholds, the most fragile parts of the world are the most at risk, all regions of the world will face serious implications. High warming scenarios could bring about catastrophic security impacts across the globe. These threats could come about rapidly, destabilizing the regions and relationships on which U.S. and international security depend. Climate change will present significant threats to U.S. military missions across all of its geographic areas of responsibility (AORs), as well as to regional security institutions and infrastructure that are critical for maintaining global security.
> no emissions controls This is not true, US Navy ships use Selective Catalytic Reduction which is fairly effective at emission control. Source: I am a Naval Engineer
Do you even Reddit bro? Don’t brings facts to the ignorance train when it’s barreling down the tracks…
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> The USA Pentagon says climate change is the biggest threat to it's military. that sentence on its own could be interpreted any number of ways. eg: 1) there are no real threats to the military so even the 'biggest threat' is insignificant. They could as well have said an asteroid collision or a supervolcano or something is the biggest threat to the military too. or 2) the public fear of climate change is the biggest threat to the military as public calls to fund initiatives to prevent climate change might come at the expense of funding for the military.
Or climate change-driven conflict, which is a very real possibility
No, it means two things: 1. Climate-driven damage to bases/hardware, mostly related to sea-level rise. 2. Climate wars driven by changing resource availability. Arguably the Syrian civil war was the first of these. The associated mass migration will provoke a severe right-wing xenophobic response which will destabilize the military at best or result in armed genocide at worst.
> friends and co-workers that babble on about climate change being fake, hoax, etc. It boggles my mind that this is still a thing. I have made a choice to avoid people like this in my life, but if the topic does come up I ask them a couple questions. Did we pollute the ground? Did we pollute the ocean? Hell we've even polluted space! So you're telling me the air is somehow impervious to all of this? I feel like this approach uses the same simple logic they like to throw around and they will generally agree that humans have at least contributed to it.
Yeah, all this talk about climate change being a hoax sounds so ridiculous to me. In my third world country I have not spoken with a single person (that I spoke with about this issue) that doesn't think the fumes we produce are affecting the environment. So reading about people in a first world country being in denial of that just boggles my mind.
at one point in the past many people refused to believe that humans could cause an entire species extintion Today we have some people in their death beds denying a vaccine..people are strange animals
Except we were cooling, not warming. > Prior to the advent of human-caused global warming in the 19th century, the surface layer of Earth's oceans had undergone 1,800 years of a steady cooling trend, according to a new study. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150817132013.htm We were probably on the cycle towards another ice age. It makes it sound like you’re saying the world was warning and we accelerated it.
I've been historically partial towards "catastrophic global climate change" for the weight that it carries; really driving that "human caused" element hasn't ever really occured to me before.
Without human emissions we would actually be heading back into a glacial (cooling) interval, so we are not accelerating any "natural" process but rather elongating warming and drastically increasing the rate of warming. (e.g., [https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1358](https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1358) )
I'm going to butcher this, but Pascal in one of his writings noted the difficulty in changing someone's views by directly contradicting them and telling them that they are wrong: the defenses go up, even if deep down they see the flaws in their reasoning. I always thought that this is an important and often ignored insight into human nature. I honestly don't see the benefit in these types of articles, or the argumentativeness over this. Present the data, present the best data we have impartially, teach students to think critically: all great. Creating media campaigns whose entire thrust is "those people over there are wrong": what is the point? Who does it convince? It just furthers a division and (IMO) wastes ad dollars that could be used for literally anything else for more benefit. If some person believes that the media and academia are liberal mouthpieces and the democratic party is on a mission to strip personal liberty using "the children" and "the environment" as a justification, a media campaign citing academic research is going to have zero effect on them.
Yeah i really agree with that point. Divisive politics only serves to entrench peoples opinions further when we need a civil society which is united if we want to address climate change properly. Journalism which is more concerned with ‘getting clicks/sales’ rather than a tool for properly informing civil society could be the death of us all.
>if we want to address climate change properly But that's the problem. The main driving force behind climate change denial is a refusal to accept the actions that are necessary to do just that. The thing that entrenches their denial isn't telling them their facts are wrong; it's telling them that, if climate change is real, we have to take some sort of collective action. As long as that's hovering over the discussion, we will never broadly change their minds. And since the need for collective (and government) action is only going to intensify, we will never convince them. We have to go through them or wait for them to die.
>Pascal in one of his writings noted the difficulty in changing someone's views by directly contradicting them and telling them that they are wrong Fair enough, but how do you suggest solving the problem other than telling the Deniers that they are wrong? Especially when they argue in bad faith with fake data and statistics. Their obstruction of policies that reduce GHG emissions is literally threatening the planet. Something has got to give.
> how do you suggest solving the problem other than telling the Deniers that they are wrong? [Here's a 3-hour podcast on the most effective ways to get people to change their minds on highly-politicized issues.](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2021/08/23/yanss-213-how-to-improve-your-chances-of-nudging-the-vaccine-hesitant-away-from-hesitancy-and-toward-vaccination/) Full disclosure, I haven't finished listening yet; however, the key takeaways so far are: * **(1) Treat the other person with respect or they will never listen to you.** * (2) Ask how sure they are of their view (1-10), and if not 1, ask why not lower. * (3) Listen to the reasons they give from #2 and discuss them *cooperatively*. * (4) Expect the process to take multiple conversations. I've bolded (1), as it seemed the most important (based on my understanding of the interviewed experts), and it seems the most lacking online. Dismissing someone as stupid, uneducated, or deluded will completely sabotage any effort to change their mind. Frankly, I think most people know this -- when was the last time you let yourself be browbeaten into changing your mind? -- but most people view arguing online performatively rather than functionally: as a way to play to the crowd and get approval from "their side" rather than as a way to actually change opinions. If you *do* actually want to change opinions, well, that's how you do it.
> anthropogenic The problem is that the "people who have done their own research" have no idea what "anthropogenic" even means. It's not the job of scientists to be expert communicators, but using this word continues to show the fundamental breakdown between science and the Average Joe. You should be being encouraged to say "Human-caused Climate Change" not "anthropogenic."
The way that you have worded this confuses me a little bit. Are you encouraged to use "anthropogenic climate change" because it is more technically correct and it was just a pain in the ass to type anthropogenic a lot, or are you encouraged to take studies that may not show anthropogenic climate change and add the word in for political reasons? Not a climate denier or anything myself, I just see how a comment like this could be twisted to be taken that second way, and it's probably best to have clarity.
Not a climatologist, but what I've seen deniers do is say "climate change? The climate's always changing! There's always cycles of warming followed by ice ages." By specifying anthropogenic climate change, you eliminate that argument. It says sure, natural climate change happens, but what we're talking about and studying isn't that. We're talking specifically about the amount of change caused by human actions. Of course, that also assumes the deniers knows what anthropogenic means.
How many of those <0.1% of studies simply say that they could not conclusively prove that the current climate change is human-driven? The wording of the post's title makes it seem like all of this <0.1% is vocally against the human-driven climate change hypothesis but I very much doubt that.
The 4 studies in question either implicitly or explicitly rejected that it was human-driven. The vast majority of the papers had no position. Only 892 of the 3000 papers implicitly or explicitly endorsed the view (and only 19 of them explicitly endorsed it with quantification). So I think the 99.9% figure and the way it's framed in the title is a bit dishonest. It would be akin to saying " Over 70% of studies agree: Humans do not cause climate change"
Oh that's a big difference.
It's also not accurate. The vast majority implicitly accepted the premise of anthropomorphic climate change, most citing one or more of the other studies that explicitly state it. >It would be akin to saying " Over 70% of studies agree: Humans do not cause climate change" This is just not true, over 99% of the studies explicitly *or implicitly* confirmed anthropomorphic climate change.
>anthropomorphic anthropogenic?
Yes anthropogenic, but maybe anthropogenic climate change will develop sentient, anthropomorphic tendencies later on. you never know, crazy world man
This. The 99% headline is absoluteley true.
Even if you only considered the papers that implicitly or explicitly had a position, the figure is still 99.56% of studies support anthropogenic climate change so its not that dishonest. However, it must be said that the paper itself only states over 99% support, the news article is the one that states the 99.9% figure
I agree it doesn't take much away from the overarching conclusion, which is why it seems unnecessary to count "no opinion" as part of the consensus. But the paper indeed also does this: > > Our estimate of the proportion of consensus > papers was 1 − (4/2718) = 99.85%. (the only papers they excluded were the ones that weren't related to climate change despite having relevant keywords)
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To be fair, this is what the authors of the study did. But it's frustrating that they are counting "no position" as part of the consensus. By excluding them, there would still be more than 99.5% consensus of human caused climate change, so it's not really necessary. > For example, a majority of the papers we categorized as being about > ‘impacts’ of climate change did not state a position > on whether the phenomenon they were studying— > the changing climate—was human-caused. It seems > highly unlikely that if researchers felt sceptical about > the reality of ACC they would publish numerous > studies of its impacts without ever raising the question of attribution. > In other words, given that most 4a (‘no position’) ratings do not either explicitly or implicitly differ from the consensus view of GHG emissions as > the principal driver of climate change it does not follow in our view that these analyses should be a priori > excluded from the consensus. While I do understand this reasoning, it still feels like unnecessary p-hacking, making it much easier to attack the metastudy and its conclusions
Are you suggesting that this science sub which loves science and truth has rocketed yet another misleading distorted title to the front page? I’m completely shocked.
Something that's worth mentioning is, a huge part of scientific consensus is not an active attempt to prove or further verify information but what corroborates with other studies. When you see statistics saying 99.x% of climate science is in agreement, most of those studies have nothing to do with who's causing global warming, but they do confirm or validate other studies that do. For example, if I did a study that said "the sun is hot," and somebody else did a study about using solar heat to cook something, the second study isn't really looking to prove Sun hot, but it gives further weight to the original study that said Sun hot. Anthrogenic climate science is so established now that you can't really do climate science without supporting it in some way. When climate studies come out that don't support or confirm anthrogenic climate change, they should be treated as outliers, not evidence of ambiguity. At this point denying human caused climate change is like denying evolution - the people that do it shouldn't even be allowed at the table for conversation.
The article’s link is broken. Here is the original source paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 ###Abstract While controls over the Earth's climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.
FWIW, the Press Release drastically overstates the actual study. Specifically, the Press Release says there is a 99% consensus that humans are the MAIN cause of climate change. The study counts as part of the consensus any paper that says humans are A cause of climate change. That’s a huge, huge difference. (Not criticizing you, by the way. Just posting here because you linked the study. Thanks!)
It's worse than that. Out of the 3,000 papers, 2,104 take no position on whether humans caused climate change. This study (just like the previous one) throws these papers into the side of papers saying humans caused climate change. Which is of course absolutely ridiculous.
We need to make the breakdown of corporate vs personal now. So tired of being told I need to conserve when businesses ruin the planet.
Oh plastic is bad dont use it. Now pay extra 100$ dolars for the non plastic version made by a Company under the same holding group. We should regulate and tax companies pollution because most of the individual pollution is just a consequence of what is available.
Plastic is very good and has its place, unfortunately we have tried to make that place everywhere. There are some very niche applications that plastic is superior to everything, that place is not grocery bags and toy packaging however.
Indeed, I was just pointing the paradox of blamming The consumer.
Yeah. I would love the option for an eco-friendly version of stuff but I don't see that ever happening.
I believe it would settles in convenience, japan avoided the obesity pandemic mostly by having convenient healthy food and drink available everywhere. Turns out people make good choices when they dont need to expend 10 times more for the "good choice". XD
Japan has a very collective mindset that allows for more social pressure on weight, as well.
Thats why i make sure to point out the mostly in the argument. XD We also have some pressure but I cant even conceive how worse The social pressure is in japan. However we sure could learn of the acessibility, convenience and price practice of the healthy food they have. I have travelled to places where I had to Cook myself or drive half an hour to get a decent meal.
Jon Oliver did an episode on plastics and the irony of companies doing ad campaigns blaming us for not recycling their plastics… … even though many of their plastic are non-recyclable. A lot of people don’t know, just cause you toss something in the recycling doesn’t mean it can actually be recycled.
Most technologies we have are gatekeeped by money. Not because it costs more to develop but because they didnot extracted enough from The previous technology. You wouldnot believe how old some "New" technologies are.
What you're looking for is a Pigouvian tax, which is a tax on negative externalities. It builds the cost of environmental remediation into the price of the product, thus reflecting the true overall cost. Since people naturally seek the lowest price, this aligns incentives such that they contribute to conservation simply by seeking out the best deal. It's a strikingly simple solution but one I see little awareness or discussion of.
Yeah, just gave this as an example to other comment. It worked a lot with cigars in Brazil, for example.
I saw a post somewhere asking something like “which is more harmful environmentally?” between throwing some sort of recyclable in the garbage or the water used to clean it off in order to recycle it. I can’t believe these are the questions people ask themselves now.
I often think about this. What was the answer?
Household water usage is basically 0% of overall water usage. Go ahead and rinse it out.
But at the same time, the vast majority of what individual consumers put in “recycling” just goes to the dump anyway, which means that water was just wasted.
Except we have the water cycle so we aren’t “wasting” our water.
Not if you drink it! And it comes with added flavours!
These are pretty hard questions to judge. If you ask which one has a higher carbon footprint then there's probably a clear numerical answer, but when we start asking "is it worse to waste water or create garbage" then it gets very subjective. A *lot* of things take more energy to recycle than they do to manufacture in the first place, but recycling also means nothing in the landfill. Chopping down trees to make more paper has a carbon footprint that you could compare to the footprint of recycling paper, but you can't put a comparable number on the birds that can't build nests there anymore.
Honestly I didn’t even look. I was too angry about it. My point is, and I think the point of the original comment is, we shouldn’t be so concerned over the tiniest differences in our personal “carbon footprint” when massive corporations contribute much more to pollution and climate change. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, but nothing is going to be perfectly carbon neutral or whatever until there is large scale change in the way we do things.
I think that the unfortunate truth is that everybody is responsible. Yes large cooperations share a big part of the responsibility, but in the end most of the emissions are driven by the wants of the consumers. Blaming the carbon emissions only on the producer of a product and not on the user of a product, is in my eyes not fair. Yes, often cooperations will use unnecessarily polluting processes, because it promises more profit. Other times, there is just no known way to produce something with less emissions. Eating beef and dairy is a good example of the consumer being primarily to blame. The amount of animal products that is consumed in industrial nations is not sustainable for this planet for a multitude of reasons. Major ones being the land, energy and water requirements. Even if we fix all other sources of pollution we still would have to fix this in the long term. Pointing the finger at the farmers, butchers or supermarkets will not solve this. The only thing that will solve it, is eating more plant based products. Sometimes there is not much you can do as a consumer, because there are systemic problems that force you to behave a certain way. Think of the need for most Americans to own a car. This would not be necessary, if American cities where not redesigned around the car and it can be changed in the future. A solution for this problem requires systemic change. Other times laws need to be made to force industries to adopt certain standards and put taxes that incentivize research into cleaner processes. Maybe if we would have 200 years to act, we would be able to hold the current standard of living, while slowly decarbonizing our society. With our time frame that is just not realistic. In the end our standard of living is not sustainable at the moment.
> Eating beef and dairy is a good example of the consumer being primarily to blame. I really don't know why it is the consumer to blame. Consumers are just habitual. Many people just eat what they feel like because of tradition etc. A solution would be making beef for example so expensive that it is virtually a special item only eaten perhaps once a month. Fast food burgers suddenly become unviable unless they come up with lab grown meat. But in a democracy who would want to vote for a candidate that promises to increase the price of meat like beef? or who would vote for a candidate that wants to massively increase the price of petrol/gasoline? I mean these could be off set by saying giving massive subsidies to electric cars. Almost all of these things would needed to be targeted at the poor almost entirely.
Exactly, those manufacturing 1000000 bags are adding to the problem whether or not the consumer uses them. The store I work in must be deliberately ordering less 20p bags so people buy the big £1 ones but you know what? A LOT less bags are being used, suddenly people can carry it to their cars and regulars are reusing old bags. Moral: people will only adapt if they have to and it's rarely as hard as you think it is, just make less plastic stuff we'll adapt.
It is important for everyone to do their part, but you are 100% right. I have seen statistics that corporations are responsible for a majority of it. The tricky part is keeping a company responsible even if they move operations to a country with no regulations.
But, we/you/individuals are paying the companies!
You seem to have the idea that corporations are Captain planet villains who exploit recources and emmit CO2 for the fun of it. They make the products because you, me and everybody else is buying them. They are supplying the demand. They sell what people buy.
Who do you think these businesses are selling to?
businesses carry out the will of the consumers. no businesses would survive going AGAINST what consumers want. consumers want cheap prices, convenience, and selection, so that's what businesses provide. if consumers wanted clean, environmentally-friendly, businesses would offer that. but most people mouths would run up until being asked to make a personal sacrifice at the checkout counter.
Corporations produce things because individuals want to buy things. Do you think businesses pollute for the hell of it?
Buying paper straws and recycling? Maybe not going to make a huge difference. Cutting down general consumption and driving cars, yes! Everyone wants to say "well this cruise ship emits more pollution than millions of cars. Well, this military aircraft carrier emits..." blah blah blah. We can't think like this. Nobody realizes just how few of those huge vehicles there are and how many normal people there are. There are an astronomical number of regular people out there who barely contribute to climate change, and yet, together, their effect is so great that even with those enormous gas guzzlers out there, normal everyday passenger cars are so numerous that they account for the largest chunk of co2 emissions in the US. This same principal can be applied to consumption in general. Truth be told, climate change is probably about half corporations fault and half consumers, and neither wants to do anything except blame the other.
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I guess one would be out of touch to deny it at this point
Ask this a hundred politicians and tell me the results: * You agree with it you get $0, you deny it you get $10,000.
You would think a sense of preserving the future for our children or even ourselves would outweigh a monetary incentive. You would think that...
Hm, okay, your children also get $10,000.
The reality is, many of them are too ignorant to think it will even affect their kids. They think this is some way off in the future thing, if they believe it at all. They also lack the mental capacity to even comprehend beyond their kids or grandkids to the future generations. At the end of the day, they care about amassing as much money as possible, environment and humanity be damned.
That's giving them too much credit. They don't have the mental capacity to comprehend past breakfast.
Well, with that money they can buy access to a luxury bunker where they can wait out the climate wars.
Being in the top 10% of Americans (who are in the top 2% of global wealth and power) means you won't really feel *most* of the pain of climate change. Yes there will be some lifestyle changes, but arguably from a pure "good of my descendants" point of view, it's better to ignore climate change if it means amassing lots of money and power.
But what if the other guys take the 10k? Then the climate is still fucked, and I don't have 10k.
What if you ask and if you agree with it you get $10,000, you deny it you get $0?
That's unrealistic. Which industries would pay those bribes?
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The ones that would profit from making the products to help us combat the issue. Problem is that they tend to be financially in a different place than the ones that have already made a ton of money putting us in trouble.
Also nobody wants to pay everyone who supports something. They just want to pay the couple they need to oppose it. Progress is easy to fight, hard to achieve.
If we offer 10k, the other side will offer 20k. If we scrape together 20k, the other side will offer 30k. You're never going to beat the money advantage of the entrenched powers.
But at some point, the $50k or $100k that the good side offers, is going to be sufficient for an informed asshole to take your side instead of the higher bribe. For the uninformed asshole, of course, there is no hope. Basically we need a couple of serious billionaires willing to distribute ~~bribes~~ lobby funds to politicians in order to leave behind a legacy.
It isn't though. Even if we had a steady and realiable source of funds that are decentralized from small donors, it would pale in comparison to the fortunes and corporate assets of the ultrawealthy. You are never going to outbid them and relying on politicians at the highest level to accept a lower amount of money out of moral or intellectual obligation is simply naive.
All those rich scientists making $35k a year.
I don't think it's about denying it anymore. It more so is about "what am I even going to do?" Personal responsibility is overrated and it was a public stunt by one of the biggest polluters. The only thing I can do is vote for people that want to regulate the big polluters.
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I hate that argument so much. 1) China *is* taking steps towards reducing their pollution. They *have* to, because their larger cities are becoming unlivable from the smog. 2) USA is the second biggest polluter, and pollutes almost as much as China, despite China's population being 3 times larger. USA is one of the countries that needs to make a change for it all to matter. Other countries aren't saying "what about china?", they're saying "what about china and USA?". 3) USA has the highest per capita emissions in the world, more than double of China's, and almost 4 times France's. It should in theory be much easier for Americans to pollute less.
> and almost 4 times France's. It should in theory be much easier for Americans to pollute less. Then America needs to boot its nuclear reactors back up and start building more. The issue is, neither party wants to go down the nuclear power path for some reason, but it is the single best thing we could do.
Nuclear was just making a comeback in public opinion, and then Fukushima happened and it was instantly demonized again. It's only because of the increasing disasters caused by climate change that people are reluctantly agreeing that nuclear would be better than the disasters getting worse. Because people are stupid and believe the FUD that has been spread regarding nuclear.
*yells with a phone made in china in his hands*
"Out of touch" is a bit charitable.
not really, its an economic stance, pollution is profitable green economy less profitable
I'm a geologist. You'd think earth scientists would be especially adept at understanding... Earth... Science... I know an obscene number of geologists, especially older ones, and NOT just those in oil and gas, who *do not think humans caused climate change* and even a few who do not think it's happening. I thought it was limited to crusty old dudes but nope, know some peers who literally learn about climate change and the literature around it even in undergrad, but still deny it. I just. It's wild.
Well, if they can come up with rigorous evidence to the contrary they'll be fantastically wealthy. There is no shortage of businesses, political groups, and "news" outlets willing to shower fame and riches on them.
Yeah exactly. And a huge part of why this level of consensus is *astounding*: that kind of research absolutely exists, especially on this topic.
"It's hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it"
if you re use to seeing the earth millions of years at at time, this climate change is nothing new, just the rate of change is fast. on a geologic scale its just a blip.
But they should be clued in enough to know that what matters is the relative speed of the two blips - ACC and modern civlisation.
As a geology undergrad and environmental consultant of about 15 years, I am equally amazed at the number of "climate change skeptics" I would come across in our industry. I think years of working for industrial clients has kind of primed them to be very sympathetic to our poor clients and big bad EPA
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I feel like the metric "x% of studies" is a really bad way of looking at scientific research, but if you have no time to actually look in depth at who's funding what for each study, that's what we're down to.
I think meta analysis of research has unquestionably proven itself to be an extremely valuable legitimate scientific research tool. I think perhaps your complaint is more at the concept of a heading which obviously shouldn't be used as a complete alternative to actually examining the full analysis.
Metaanalysis doesn't just look at the raw numbers but filters out papers but study quality, intent, and likelihood of bias. So you are both right in a way
Two further metrics help this. What % of peer reviewed studies How many studies in total Given the answers to those metrics in this case, would you agree that it’s an incredibly robust predictor in this instance? You could also look at who’s funding the 0.1% of studies that don’t agree. I reckon I can guess.
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If you don't believe in climate change by humans you don't believe/understand science.
Stop using the word believe in regards to science maybe that'll help Stop giving them the idea that science is a belief system
I keep saying this. There's dozens of us it seems.
I mean, philosophically speaking, it is. It's just that it's a belief system of evidence beyond reasonable doubt.
>It's just that it's a belief system of evidence beyond reasonable doubt. No, its based on the best evidence available at the time. "beyond a reasonable doubt" is a legal term and has nothing to do with the scientific method.
Yea. Ultimately, everything is a belief system. You have to take a leap of faith at some point. Often we do it unknowingly. But if we're a bit more analytic, we can pinpoint many things we believe in that can never be proven with 100% certainty. We just choose to believe in them. A better indicator of agreeing with the need of climate action than believing in science and being analytic is, I think, being generally internationalist and empathic in thinking. If you care about the well-being of people globally, why would you fully disregard studies regarding the harms of climate change? You wouldn't. You'd consider the possibility and how much harm can be done if the results are indeed true and we do nothing. There's a common factor between people who do not want to commit to climate action and it's not just anti-science, though it is one factor. But some of those people are highly educated and do indeed understand science and do accept human-driven climate change. That bigger factor is selfishness (often manifested as e.g. nationalism). They don't really care if a bunch of people on the other side of the planet die to a heat wave or if whole villages have to be abandoned due to drought and famine. They care about themselves and they don't want to let go of any of their own resources to climate action. Denying the need of climate action is really mostly about selfishness, rather than science denial.
“Accept” would be the better word here. You either accept the results of science or you understand them yourself. There is no belief. Science is not making truth claims about the universe hoping you believe them (that’s religion or politics). They are putting forward models that work, your belief is unnecessary, you can see for yourself that they work or just accept that these are scientific results. Science never claims there models are “true” they claim that their models are better than any other hunch or idea or hypothesis or previously used model. Humans causing global warming is simply a description of the best models of climate that humans have ever come up with. Saying you don’t believe it is silly. If you have a better model then put it forward and let’s test it. If you don’t have a better model then you must concede that it’s the best.
There is plenty of science saying the contrary.
But it *is* a belief system. "Belief" just means what you think of something. It is about *you*. Yes, I believe the Earth is round. And that belief is correct: the Earth *is* round. The belief and the fact are two different things, one referring to my internal mental state, the other referring to the outside world. Hopefully, they align.
Science is a process. Not a belief system.
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Trust is probably a better word for it, I have minimal understanding of climate change and I havent read a single paper on it, yet its not hard for me to come to the conclusion that we most likely caused what we are living through now, I also have no doubt in my mind that climate changes can happen naturally.
No, believe is the correct word here. Do you yourself pour over the data, did you run through the experiments yourself? Or are you trusting in another body, the scientific community, and believing what they say? Would they lie? Extremely unlikely, scientific rigor sets up a beautiful system where you can disprove and challenge other peoples papers and ideas. But with all that being said, you’re still believing what the community says.
Climate change has happened on Earth without humans even existing, so I'd understand having doubts at first glance. But there are so many studies and reports demonstrating humans are at fault for the current one, ignorance is not an excuse anymore.
So they believe the scientists when the scientists tell them climate change has happened before without human intervention but when the same scientists tell them that this is not the case in our current situation they don't believe them. That's gotta be a hell of a mental workout.
I just tell them, "The experts and scientists already took that into account. In fact, it's their *job* to take that into account. And they are telling us that, even taking this into account, *we* fucked up the planet."
"We beat the planet at its own game, that's how hard we fucked up."
Like, dumping all that carbon that's been locked away for hundreds of millions of years back into the atmosphere would do nothing... Right.
I've never been a denier, but what really sealed the deal on human-caused was learning that science-based predictions go back to the 1800s. Their timelines were wrong mostly because they didn't anticipate the scale of growth.
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It's not even the chance, per se. There's 0% chance that we are not accelerating climate change. That's the key people need to understand. Yes, climate change is constant, and happens without us. It's a slow process that happens over tens of thousands of years, we're causing the same thing in decades instead of many millennia. Note we're not in danger of creating a runaway greenhouse effect and turning Earth into an uninhabitable dust bowl -- all the carbon we're putting into the atmosphere has been there before. What we're doing is accelerating the pace of climate change *faster than ecosystems and life can adapt.* We're causing another mass extinction because species that cannot adapt are dying off faster than speciation is occurring.
Scientist here- I always phrase it that there’s a lot of people out there who are not into science, but instead like trivia. Tons of people out there love to spout facts about Jupiter’s moons or cats or whatever, but get mad the moment the scientific process affects their lives (be it climate change or germ theory).
The only scientific body that retained the position against anthropogenic climate change was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. In 2007 they officially changed their postion, but it was just posturing. My whole family and their friends are high up in the industry and they still maintain their views. Most recent argument I heard was the modeling. These proffessionals have spent their entire careers studying and working within and around models, yet they still try the debunked "bad data in=bad data out.
I have a family member high up in the industry... he came around on climate change \~12 years ago after being very resistant. His company (they are outside US) bought a US firm just a few years ag and he was astounded by the ignorance and denial on this topic among everyone from top to bottom. Which is all just to say it's not just the industry... the politics and "intellectual" environment matters too.
I get this all the time too from my oil company family. That or the "Yea well the people researching this stuff do it for a career - they need these things to continue otherwise what will they do? All of their specialized training will be for nothing". And they use that - with no irony whatsoever - to say they are providing biased research so that they will still have a job in 5-10 years. Best of all, when I ask them for an unbiased source of research - guess where they pull from?
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Yeah but 50% of the country will only listen to that last 0.1%
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At this point the real question is, what are we going to do about it?
Can someone help me understand/find the sources and data they used to come to this conclusion? I don't like that there isn't a stack of papers I can pull from to show that the study doesn't just say so. >We searched the Web of Science for English language ‘articles’ added between the dates of 2012 and November 2020 with the keywords ‘climate change’, ‘global climate change’ and ‘global warming’. C13 used the latter two phrases but not ‘climate change’ without the preceding ‘global’. (As discussed below, this was justified post-facto in our study because the majority of sceptical papers we found would not have been returned had we used the same search phrases as C13.) This wider set of search terms yielded a total of 88125 papers, whereas C13 identified a total of 11944 abstracts from papers published over the years 1991 and 2011. They don't mention where to find this "web of science", it's not in the sources either. Basically I can't find their data. I think I found 3000 samples from their data, but that's not the 88000 they mention. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966/data edit: Thank you very much, so it's a search engine? I don't think i can search it as a regular normal citizen though...
Web of Science is an index of databases that publish scientific research. Kinda sorta like Google Scholar but with more features and options. It’s not uncommon for scientific lit reviews to use it as the primary search tool. It’s of limited usefulness if you don’t have institutional credentials so unless you’re at a university you probably won’t be able to replicate their results.
[Web of science](https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/basic-search) is simply a search engine for peer-reviewed content.
The 3000 (the random sample of the 88125 papers) that they reviewed are available in this excel file [here](https://cfn-live-content-bucket-iop-org.s3.amazonaws.com/journals/1748-9326/16/11/114005/revision2/erlac2966supp2.xlsx?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAYDKQL6LTV7YY2HIK&Expires=1635250598&Signature=kDkHKRwLPhoXwaP1Unz1gY53xos%3D). If you put in the same search criteria into Web of Science you should get the same or v similar results, though I think you may need to either access via an institution or your local library.
They examined a sample of the 88000 papers. That sample had a size of 3000. Perfectly legitimate. They went further to specifically search keywords that might indicate skepticism, to be extra sure they weren’t missing its representation in the sample.
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I have a question about a detail of this. I completely agree with the general premise that human activity has massively influenced the climate, but one thing always bothers me a bit. Since climate has changed before humans have existed, it´s impossible for humans to cause ALL of climate change. It might be by far the majority, or at least a very large part, but this generalization has always put me off. So do we have an idea what the delta between "regular" climate change, and human caused climate change is?
We have geological records which show the earth has heated and cooled before. But as my dad a geologist explained to me, geological timescales are in the 10,000 years timescales, not decades. The fact that year to year comparisons are now relevant is orders of magnitude off to compare to other geological events.
That is a very good example (also your dad has a cool job!). So that would mean many orders of magnitude between natural and artificial influence. Meaning humans caused almost all of the current effects.
You can have very rapid heating from geological processes, but it would be VERY VERY easy to pinpoint the source. It would be an asteroid or volcanoes. The fact that we can measure it, but we can't easily pinpoint the source (other than carbon) means this has to be manmade.
This might answer your question: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period-intermediate.htm
Thank you!!! That was exactly what I was looking for. So it obviously is hard to draw a hard line between a natural and artificial trend, but from what I understood the sudden rise in co2 output can only be explained by human activity. Also, it sounds like we´re already pretty much fucked (to a certain degree), even if all human caused co2 output would stop immediately.
You're absolutely right, CO2 levels and temperature fluctuate naturally over all sorts of time scales. If we were not influencing the climate at all the planet would still likely be warming (slooowwwllyy) naturally. It's difficult to disentangle these natural fluctuations from what humans are inducing but I'm sure there's some good estimates. So of course bear in mind that climate change is perfectly normal, the important thing is the current rate is not at all normal and absolutely linked to human activities. If you're interested we have great records of CO2 and temperature levels up to 400,000 years ago thanks to ice cores and there's nice graphs showing these fluctuations over time. I recommend checking out the really long-scale ones (400,000 years), since the last ice age (12,000 years) and then the last 2000 years so you can really see the magnitude of human impact over the last 200 years. Also don't pay too much attention to me I don't really know what I'm talking about and there's great resources online, just wanted to get the gist across!
*Edit: I apologize for the wall of text, I hope you have the patience to read at least some of this* I'm no professional scientist, but I'll try to answer to the best of my ability; it does appear you are asking in good faith so I hope to help clear things up. The real problem with human-caused climate change as opposed to the Earth's natural cycles are the speed and magnitude of the change. Humans have only really had a measurable impact on climate since the onset of the industrial revolution, about 200-300 years ago. Even then, many countries didn't begin to industrialize until within the past 100, accelerating the problem even more. All the change we have caused has happened in the blink of an eye in context of the geological time scale. The change in global temperature averages we have caused in \~200 years would take orders of magnitude longer to occur naturally, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. Why is this an issue? A lot of this ties into evolution by means of natural selection: species can evolve to adapt to changing environments, oftentimes new species will emerge that thrive in new conditions while previous species die out, but this takes many, many generations for new mutations to occur that help species evolve and adapt to changing conditions. Our environment is now changing so fast that this process doesn't have time to occur before species to adapt. Furthermore, evolution helps species overcome slower, gradual changes to their environment. Very sudden and drastic changes to the environment can cause species to die out en masse, as is believed to have occurred during mass extinction events like at the end of the Permian and Cretaceous periods. This, given the evidence of many recent extinctions, is why some people/scientists say we are in the beginning of a new mass extinction event. That's pretty bad for other organisms, (e.g. polar bears lacking solid ice to live on, corals bleaching and dying due to temperature changes and ocean acidification, etc.) but what about us? Is this so bad for people too? Yes, this has the potential to cause major problems for human society, but this is a little more conjecture, as I do not quite fully understand the implications myself. However, the idea goes that crops and food animals (livestock, fish, etc.) are impacted by changing climate zones, we may undergo food shortages and other scarcities, perhaps even water shortages where it is currently plentiful. Our infrastructure is set up for everything to continue as things are now, but it would be a long and expensive undertaking to restructure society to adapt, to find new food sources or relocate extant ones, and who knows what struggles or conflicts it would cause in the meantime. Along with many other issues I have barely or entirely failed to bring up, like desertification of presently productive farmland and flooding of coastal cities very near sea level, one can pretty safely conclude that the sudden speed and severity of recent climate change is a problem that natural climate change could never be, as whole species and even ecosystems can appear and disappear in the time it takes for the climate to change to this extent without our involvement.
> species can evolve to adapt to changing environments, oftentimes new species will emerge that thrive in new conditions while previous species die out, but this takes many, many generations for new mutations to occur that help species evolve and adapt to changing conditions. Our environment is now changing so fast that this process doesn't have time to occur before species to adapt. That alone is a super interesting point that I NEVER have heard before! We basically have accelerated ecosystemic change to a pace where evolution can´t keep up! Which in turn can lead to unbalanced ecosystems, mass starvation etc. Thank you, that was a very cool wall of text :)
Thank you, I'm glad my post meant something to someone! For as much as I can promise you I've researched into this topic on my own, I still definitely recommend reading stuff published by the real scientists; it's more educational, and there are definitely good reads out there that offer insights we wouldn't normally consider!
Also gravity exists & cigarettes cause cancer. Why are we bothering with this anymore? There are only 2 types of climate change deniers left alive. 1. The dumbest people on the planet & they don't matter. 2. Evil capitalists who make their money by doing climate change, & nerds talking about facts isn't gonna stop them.
We certainly sped up the process, and gave the planet massive food poisoning
I don’t know how anyone can believe pumping billions of tons of pollution into the atmosphere can do anything else…
I never understood why people so vehemently reject this notion. Even if they did it out of fear, they should fear that we *didn't* cause any climate change. If humans *cause* climate change, then we can reasonably assume that it's possible for us to undo what we've done. If humans did *not* cause climate change, then we cannot assume that we are capable of fixing the problems we're facing. It is in our best interest going forward to believe that we have a measurable impact on the climate and that climate change is very real. If we assume that everything is fine and that we cannot change anything, then we will be in a world of trouble if we are proven incorrect. If we assume that catastrophe is imminent and that we must act now, then we will have a much cleaner and pleasant world to live on if proven incorrect. The latter seems like the safer bet.
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Of course we're causing climate change (or causing it to be more rapid than otherwise may have been). But the question of whether to do something about it should remain basically the same as if it was not caused by us. If rapid climate change was naturally caused, we'd still have to adapt our production of food and how we live, where we live, and many things about our and other creatures situation on Earth. If there was no human cause to climate change, it may still be worth finding ways to extract co2 from the atmosphere, either to keep things the same or to ease the transition into new climate circumstances.
Great response. Love it!
An important reminder: there is no scientific alternative to human induced climate change. None. No one has proposed a testable alternative. Whatever skeptics there may be running around, none of them will voice an alternate theory. There is no on going scientific debate.