Climate change protest done right

[SaturnVee]

http://climatenamechange.org/#/petition?c=upworthy

Sign this petition and names for hurricanes could actually be relevant .

On side note, what evidence is there that climate change isn't caused by human industrialisation?

[Omicron314]

No evidence to the contrary, or else climate scientists would not be in complete agreement. The only reason this is difficult is because there are a lot of stupid people in the country.

Anyway, signed. We need to get a famous person to support this. Does anyone here know any famous people? Actually, scratch that. Someone tell Bill Nye about this!

[lajoswinkler]

http://climatenamechange.org/#/petition?c=upworthy

Sign this petition and names for hurricanes could actually be relevant .

On side note, what evidence is there that climate change isn't caused by human industrialisation?

You can't prove a negative (proving that A caused it doesn't mean B wasn't involved, too).

You can only prove a positive statement, and there's plenty of evidence we started this problem.

I think this is a great idea. If people in US can't use science to shove the mouths of ignorant politicians, they can at least mock them. That's all they're left with.

I find it devastating that almost 40% of the people that decided to rate the video actually disliked it. It's the revenge of the failed school systems.

Edited August 29, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[Wesreidau]

I fail to see how ad hominem furthers the pursuit of reason.

[K^2]

You can't prove a negative (proving that A caused it doesn't mean B wasn't involved, too).

You can only prove a positive statement, and there's plenty of evidence we started this problem.

Oh? Such as?

[Kimberly]

Calling out those who are unreasonable furthers the pursuit of reason, Wesreidau. The idea is not to call those who disagree names, the idea is to remind the world that an overwhelming scientific consensus exists and that people who irrationally deny climate change should not be making policy for the United States.

Edit: though on reading the site, they seem a bit lax in their selection. Joe Heck is called a denier because he voted to allow offshore oil drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf...whether you like the idea or not, that's not exactly climate change denial.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Kimberly

[Guest]

Hurricane names are one thing. U.S. policy is something entirely different. If you shut down coal fired plants, there had better be a plan B. If my neighbors air conditioner goes out, no big deal, he just gets hot and pissed off. If he runs out of food and gets hungry, that's something to worry about. People get desperate when they are hungry. Bad **** happens.

[Wesreidau]

Reason furthers wisdom, and petty sophistries further petty minds. Naming hurricanes after climate change deniers is simply personal attacks to insult one point of view. One man's stance about a climate science theory does not make him responsible for a weather pattern any more than one man's stance on germ theory makes him responsible for an epidemic. His individual actions might leave him responsible for some tiny fraction of the incident, but you cannot blame one person not covering his mouth when he sneezes for an outbreak of influenza on another continent. Would you have blizzards named after AGW backers? Their efforts to reduce CO2 emissions cause automobile accidents on icy roads, hypothermia, and frost on Florida orange trees. Those claims are just as nonsensical as AGW deniers being blamed for hurricanes.

It is far better for everyone if unreasonable people are defeated with reason, rather than both sides becoming unreasonable.

[Diche Bach]

Despite whatever consensus exists, I remain skeptical that anthropogenic forces are the sole and sufficient explanation for recently observed changes in climate. Explaining recent patterns of climate change may necessitate inclusion of anthropogenic factors, but that is not the same as those factors sufficing to explain the changes.

Earth's climate has changed more or less forever, and in particular during the past ~1.3 million years of the Quaternary period, tremendous evidence indicates a pattern of more rapid and extreme oscillations in climate than the much more gradual pattern of cooling during the preceding two eras of the Cenozoic.

So in sum, dramatic and possibly quite rapid variation in climatic patterns has been the rule, not the exception for the past 1.2 or so million years, and this pattern over the last 1.2 million years is a clear departure from a generally slower and more gradually fluctuating climate during the preceding 65 million years.

None of this in any way 'disproves' the signs that Earth's climate has been warming, that greenhouse gases have increased, that sea level is rising, and that weather patterns have become more erratic, and extreme. Those observations appear superficially to be sound and valid, and to the extent that the aforementioned "consensus" is specific to those observations, then it seems fitting.

The problem I have with the standard rhetoric of climate changes 'science' going all the way back to the IPCC findings (which incidentally get quoted by everyone still to this day) was that there has been virtually noconcern with developing models that would address how anthropogenic forces were interacting with the pre-existing patterns of fluctuation and change that the geological record (and historical records) show quite incontrovertible to have 'been there' when the industrial revolution ensued. Since then I have yet to see any advocate of climate change science, and the handy moral/ideological/political compass it tends to be presented alongside even bother to acknowledge that something might be gained from including geological climate change into "global warming" anthropogenic change models, much less serious efforts to integrate insights about natural climatic variation into such anthropogenic models.

This combined with the moralistic and politicized tone and agenda have made me rather cynical about the whole thing.

As I've said in other threads, I believe that reducing our ecological footprint is a good thing, nah an essential thing. But focusing on one supposed culprit, even specifically for warming trends, is a risky venture at best. I fear that the cult like focus on carbon emissions may well have distracted our attention from other equally important environmental problems.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Diche Bach

[Wesreidau]

Ave, Horatius. Hold the bridge well.

[K^2]

Calling out those who are unreasonable furthers the pursuit of reason, Wesreidau. The idea is not to call those who disagree names, the idea is to remind the world that an overwhelming scientific consensus exists and that people who irrationally deny climate change should not be making policy for the United States.

There is no consensus on anthropogenic climate change. There isn't even a consensus on which way the climate is changing. Basically, the fact that it's changing is pretty much the only thing everyone in the scientific community agrees with. But since it has always been changing, and none of the models in place are sufficiently good to even agree with the pre-industrial record, claiming that we know how humans are affecting it all is just silly.

Now, I agree that it's better to be safe than sorry, and we know of ways in which we can reduce our impact on the environment, even if we don't completely understand what that impact is. And it's a good idea to try and scale back on emissions, try to stop deforestation, and so on. This is true regardless of whether these things impact global climate in a significant way.

But it bugs me when people try and claim that we understand anything about how we impact global climate, that it's certainly for the worse, and that this is something that everyone in the field has agreed upon. This just isn't so. We don't know what we are dealing with, and there is no consensus. There is no need to misinform the public further to try and convince them to do the "right thing". Being responsible to local environment shouldn't be something you have to scare people into using a made up global crisis.

[Nibb31]

I don't think climate change requires protesting, especially not with ad hominen attacks. It requires awareness and the removal of corporate sponsorship in US political campaigns.

There are several facts that *everybody* agrees on:

- The Earth's climate is measurably changing.

- The Earth's climate has varied a lot over millions of years in the past, but never this rapidly.

- Extreme climate change will have negative effects on human activity.

- Burning stuff emits CO2, which is a greenhouse gas.

- We have only be massively burning stuff for the last century or two.

- There is a finite amount of stuff to burn.

- Big corporations don't want to stop burning stuff.

- Environmentalists want us to stop burning stuff.

And there is the stuff that we do not agree on:

- Whether climate change was caused by human activity.

- Whether we need to stop burning stuff.

- Whether we can actually fix it.

Now, there are at least 2 events going on at the same time that are unprecedented in the millions of years of historical data that we have:

- An unprecedented rapid change of climate.

- An unprecedented industrial and demographical explosion of one species.

Correlation doesn't imply causality, but it would be foolish to not consider it. We can't necessarily confirm the causality (although mechanisms are suggested), and we can't deny it either. Science is never about certainty, but about establishing predictable models. Climate and weather are chaotic in nature (the butterfly effect...), which makes them hard to model and predict. Our models are currently imprecise and need refining, but ultimately, does it matter what triggered the changes in the climate? The question is, what do we do about it? When your house is on fire, whatever the cause, do you keep on throwing wood into the fireplace?

We have two options:

- Stop making things worse by burning more stuff.

- Ignore the fire alarms and keep on with business as usual.

The main force that is driving the "let's ignore climate change" current is big corporations who want business as usual. They don't want to invest in the future because their main focus is on next year's earnings and they can't project themselves over a decade or two. Incidentally, they also have the money to influence politicians and the public opinion, especially in the US which is the only democratic country where political campaigns are paid for by corporations.

When people complain about the political influence of environmentalists, I think that the political influence of corporations is much more dangerous.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Nibb31

[Jackissimus]

Voice of reason, K^2 and DicheBach.

I can't believe how far we have gotten with this climate change thing. When it was just starting out, there was still some open discussion, now there's just name-calling and popularity contests. I can tell you that the 97% metric, so often cited by the alarmists, is completely bogus. I work with scientists every day, they are our customers. None of them simply says "yes" or "no", the discussion there is ambivalent in the same way it is ambivalent in the general public. The data is unreliable or the models are wrong. Heck, the whole idea is based on turbulence, one of the last unsolved problems of classical physics.

What I dislike is when people call CO2 a pollutant. That to me is just evil tactics. If anything, it's an elixir of life, you and I wouldn't live without CO2. Plants build 90% of their body mass from CO2 through photosynthesis. We eat plants. CO2 levels used to be much much higher historically and they've been so low in the past couple million years that plants are actually suffocating - they had to evolve a more efficient method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (C4 photosynthesis). CO2 have been so low because all the carbon has been deposited underground and there is not enough to go around in the biosphere. There used to be rain forests in Antarctica. Barring anthropocentric arguments, rising CO2 levels is actually good for nature. If you double the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, plant size doubles as well.

By the way, the Earth has been actually getting colder in the past 10 years. I am not an antienvironmentalist, I think the environment is important. But I think science has been taken hostage by political forces trying to hold people down in this matter.

[K^2]

There are several facts that *everybody* agrees on:

- The Earth's climate has varied a lot over millions of years in the past, but never this rapidly.

- Burning stuff emits CO2, which is a greenhouse gas.

I think these two require clarification. We don't have evidence of climate changing this rapidly in the past, but the further back we go, the harder it is to detect rapid changes. Its very difficult to say just how rapid some of the past climate shifts have been. And some of them have been rapid enough to cause serious ecological problems. It's possible that these are also related to some mass emissions, like volcanic eruptions, meteorite strikes, etc. But we just don't know. There are some problems with data as well. There is major bias in where we have been taking measurements and what we are comparing them to.

As for CO₂ being the greenhouse gas, the main problem is with what we mean by the greenhouse gases. The greenhouse model of environment heating is simply wrong. An actual glass greenhouse placed in vacuum would have the same equilibrium temperature as a bare rock. The reason greenhouses work down here is because they are placed in an environment. The way the atmosphere heats up the planet is way more complicated and has to do with convective cycles and radiation equilibria at different altitudes. The atmosphere, in this case, works as a heat pump, not a greenhouse. If the atmosphere was perfectly stable, with no convective flows, CO₂ in upper atmosphere would actually result in cooling, due to reduction in IR albedo. Despite that, many estimates on impact of CO₂ are done based on the faulty greenhouse model. In fact, I have not seen a good workup on how CO₂ actually affects global temperatures that takes weather into account. I wonder if that might be because "everyone knows that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas."

Nothing about climate is that clear cut. We need to be talking about it. We need to be doing more research. Convincing people that we have reached consensus is actually extremely counterproductive.

[Nibb31]

What I dislike is when people call CO2 a pollutant. That to me is just evil tactics. If anything, it's an elixir of life, you and I wouldn't live without CO2. Plants build 90% of their body mass from CO2 through photosynthesis. We eat plants. CO2 levels used to be much much higher historically and they've been so low in the past couple million years that plants are actually suffocating - they had to evolve a more efficient method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (C4 photosynthesis). CO2 have been so low because all the carbon has been deposited underground and there is not enough to go around in the biosphere. There used to be rain forests in Antarctica. Barring anthropocentric arguments, rising CO2 levels is actually good for nature. If you double the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, plant size doubles as well.

I don't think anybody said that CO2 wasn't good for plants, but that doesn't mean that it can't have a negative impact elsewhere. Water is also good for life on Earth, but flooding and tsunamis can kill us. It's all a question of balance.

Anyway, life on Earth has nothing to worry about; it will survive with or without us. Species disappear or evolve, others emerge; that's no big deal in the grand scheme of things. What we should worry about are the consequences of climate change on human activity: if some areas become unhospitable or uninhabitable, it could lead to famine, mass migration, war... A new balance will have to emerge. As a species, I have no doubt that we will survive, but not without massive suffering and political instability.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Nibb31

[Seret]

People get very focussed on CO₂, but the fact is that most of our energy-producing equipment that has a high-CO₂ output is also a nightmare for other pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur and particulates. Replacing all our coal-burning power plants would be a good idea even if you ignore carbon.

[Jackissimus]

I don't think anybody said that CO2 wasn't good for plants, but that doesn't mean that it can't have a negative impact elsewhere. Water is also good for life on Earth, but flooding and tsunamis can kill us. It's all a question of balance.

Anyway, life on Earth has nothing to worry about; it will survive with or without us. Species disappear or evolve, others emerge; that's no big deal in the grand scheme of things. What we should worry about are the consequences of climate change on human activity: if some areas become unhospitable or uninhabitable, it could lead to famine, mass migration, war... A new balance will have to emerge. As a species, I have no doubt that we will survive, but not without massive suffering and political instability.

Possible, possible. But the counter measures as suggested now are so expensive that they will also cause major political upheaval and massive suffering.

[K^2]

I don't think anybody said that CO2 wasn't good for plants, but that doesn't mean that it can't have a negative impact elsewhere. Water is also good for life on Earth, but flooding and tsunamis can kill us. It's all a question of balance.

Not to mention H₂O being a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂ and present in much higher concentrations in upper atmosphere. But yeah, yeah, I know about non-overlapping spectra.

[Diche Bach]

I think Jackissimus raises an excellent point, open discussion has been made heretical and that is not a good context in which learning and knowledge are generated. It is really quite deplorable.

Good theories are transformed into scientific law, not by browbeating and ostracizing those with questions, but by allowing anyone with questions to "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks." I fear that in 20 years when the current generation of 'leaders,' lobbyists, and activists are past their prime and the evidence that the story is far more complicated than the rhetoric conveys simply cannot be ignored any longer, that suddenly there will be a sad denouement and a couple generations of well-meaning environmentalist young people (now middle aged) will realize that, all that passion they felt for that single silly model, may well have blinded them to the 1000 other issues that had all along been contributing to climatic changes and/or other forms of environmental degradation: nitrogenous wastes, heavy metals waste, wasted precious metals in electronic, continued expansion of invasive species and pathogen, extinction of species that we could've saved (gray and little brown bats, African wild dogs to name only acouple that are likely goners within the next 20 years) . . .

[KOCOUR]

Hmm, climate is changing. Thats true, Ve contribute to those changes. thats also true. How much we contribute, is qestionable.

Anyway, we as humans should minimize our impact to nature to prevent unvanted damage that could bite us in the ass. Thats logic.

But the form, the form.

This kind of pettitions is one of the stupidest form of figting. Seriously pointing out on people that opose us, saying: "look a bad person"? Naming bad things after people we dont like? Thats childisch, so childish.

Its still better than tiing yourself to the tracks in front of the train (thats really stupid), but still stupid.

This kind of behaviour undermines all our effort. Because it more or less makes us look as mindless childish radicals and people who see this will never take us seriously.

Edited August 29, 2013 by KOCOUR

[palker]

Climate is changing ok. The question is: Why should i care? Most likely by the time some real cereal stuff happens i will be dead or to old to notice.

Edited August 29, 2013 by palker

[Jackissimus]

Not to mention H₂O being a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂ and present in much higher concentrations in upper atmosphere.

I was saving that point for counter-arguments

I guess what peeves me is when I have to listen to 15-year old girls on the bus talking about CO2 being "toxic" and that the evil factories want to poison us all by releasing more of it in the atmosphere. It's starting to resemble propaganda more than science. If it was real science, those girls wouldn't care, lol.

I understand that the above example is a bit extreme, but I had a long discussion with a truck driver recently (yeah I meet a lot of different people) and he was saying that burning things is just evil, we should stop burning things. But burning is just a natural process, it's part of the carbon cycle just as well as decomposition is. Some forests cannot even grow without first burning down. Storing all carbon in underground fossil deposits might be even more dangerous to life. Why should all human activity be automatically evil? I for one am very proud of human achievements and nature might even be very grateful to us for spreading life to other planets one day.

[K^2]

Well, there are real reasons why CO₂ can have significant impact despite the fact that absorption is already saturated at these wavelengths and that it's a minor fraction of total absorption when compared to how much water vapor contributes. Basically, altitude at which IR equilibrium is achieved is more sensitive to CO₂ levels than H₂O levels. The problem is that we still don't know at what point that actually becomes a problem, because modeling this stuff is insanely difficult, and experimenting with it directly is not practically possible.

[bsalis]

Like others have said, ad hominem attacks are no way to push a point of view.

Furthermore, there has always been extreme weather, regardless of climatic conditions at the time.

In any case, i'm surprised the whole AGW thing is still kicking on. The beginning of the end started with Climategate. Leadership of developed nations have been backing away from it since then. Big money behind carbon credits have pulled out. Developing nations were never onboard, since it's always been a secular western thing.

Some gems from Climategate...

Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we've done anything wrong. – Phil Jones

We also have a Data Protection Act, which I will hide behind. – Phil Jones

It would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "Medieval Warm Period". – Michael Mann

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. – Kevin Trenberth

What kind of science where they doing exactly?!

[Omicron314]

Let's see, a new name is added once every 5.7 seconds on average as far as I can tell, and with about 8040 names to go, this will take about 26 and a half more minutes. That seems too fast, but math, I suppose.