> A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
...
> The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
Since that article was published, atmospheric CO2 has gone from 355ppm to 410ppm (a 15% increase). Global surface temperature has risen 0.6°C since 1989 (1.1°F). Sea level has risen by 8 centimeters.
I realize the UN official wasn't a scientist or an expert, but neither are many of the people quoted in articles about climate change today. Global warming is a bad thing, but it's not as bad as a lot of media & activists are portraying it. It's not an existential risk.
This sounds like it refers to various island nations in the Pacific, which are, indeed, under existential thread from global warming and the associated sea level rise.
I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist. It reads:
"So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually."
> Who cares what journalists say? IPCC and nasa reports are publicly available and use plain language anyone can read.
Investigating geological or ecological truth is one thing, investigating causes and consequences for widespread ignorance and bad policy decisions is another. You and I are approaching this from different angles. Unfortunately, journalists have power to shape our society. I would argue that as a group, they have more power than scientists.
> Sadly journalists seem even more in the pocket of big biz than scientists.
I think you may be suggesting that there have been journalists who push climate denialism at the behest of the oil industry? My apologies if I misunderstood, but I would agree emphatically.
There are also other jouranlists who push climate alarmism because alarmism sells.
> I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist.
That's a nice "No True Scotsman" right there. Unless, of course, you can give me a non-arbitrary reason why Dr. David Barber of the University of Manitoba speaking in 2008 is a "pre-modern" climate scientist, whereas Dr. James Hansen of NASA writing in 2009 is a "modern" climate scientist.
Then you do the job of googling for them. Retrieve a few relevant sources.
And they proceed to shoot them down, even moving goalposts if necessary. They might come back with their own confirmation biased sources.
This instance is even more egregious. There is a growing mountain of evidence for climate change. Multiple books, across multiple disciplines, can and have been written. Numerous peer reviewed papers.
What's more infuriating is that you don't need climate scientists to corroborate climate change. Because it's not a prediction anymore, climate has been changing already. Disciplines as diverse as geology and biology can detect the effects. If you want to do projections, sure, biologists may not be able to help. But if you want to see the effects today, they certainly can.
With such an enormous pile of data, I can't believe this is a legitimate discussion.
Sure, David Barber was off by a bit in that particular sentence, but arctic sea ice minima are now half of their historical values, and dropping. It is true, that in complex dynamic systems, predictions have to have wide error bars, but he was way less wrong than the charlatans who claim this isn't a problem or isn't a trend.
I have every confidence that David Barber is an honest scientist doing his best to apply rigorous science to an inherently complicated system.
The objection here is that we live in a media environment which continually emphasizes one end of that error bar. So long as we live in that sort of environment claims of catastrophic consequences are going to be taken with a degree of skepticism.
Why would your beliefs about the "media environment" influence your view of the reports from scientific bodies? The claims of catastrophic consequences are coming straight from the literature. You can't explain those away by waving your hands and saying "the media."
> Why would your beliefs about the "media environment" influence your view of the reports from scientific bodies?
If the media present bold predictions intended to reflect the views of scientific bodies, and those predictions fail to come to pass, then we have reason to doubt at least one node in the flow of information. It could be that the media incorrectly portrayed scientific results, or it could be that the scientific model upon which the prediction was based was flawed.
For instance, when the NYT says in 1978:
> An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.
Clearly the statement has been proven false. But why was this false statement made? Is the problem with the NYT, or the international team of specialists?
That's the problem with the media environment, because it's not always clear (certainly not to the lay person) when the media is representing their sources faithfully.
> The claims of catastrophic consequences are coming straight from the literature.
There are a few things one needs to sort out:
1. What are the actual expected range of consequences stated in the literature?
2. What is the confidence with which the literature expects these consequences?
3. What are the necessary interventions to prevent these consequences (if they can be prevented)?
4. How do the costs of the interventions compare with the consequences?
It's actually quite hard for a lay-person to sort out. The IPCC reports are a good place to start, but still very dense for most people. Also, every seemingly erudite critic of those reports is viciously attacked as a bad faith actor.
That's a good point. The conversation is about a history of irresponsible public statements, but the evidence for this history is dismissed with:
>actual modern climate scientist
With this rhetorical technique, it could be impossible to provide evidence. Who gets to decide what makes a climate scientist 'modern'? Disregarding alleged 'non-modern' climate scientists is the last thing we should do when discussing prior decades of alarmism.
