Earth's energy imbalance removes almost all doubt from human-made climate change

https://news.yahoo.com/earths-energy-imbalance-removes-almost-083014356.html

by CarCooler • 5 years ago

34 76 5 years ago

news.yahoo.com

didibus3• 5 years ago

It's fun to be able to know if the cause is man made, or just bad luck (happening naturally), but what is more important either way is what can we do to reverse or mitigate the negative impact of the changes to the climate?

Now I don't think there's many left who deny that the climate is changing at all. But I think there are still some who aren't sure the changes to the climate will have a negative impact on humanity. I think this aspect I don't often hear discussed, after all, the climate changing could be good, or it could be bad, or it could be a mix of those in different places or different use cases.

And once we start to agree that some of the changes will be bad, it also becomes important to discuss what could be done to mitigate the negative effects?

The actual cause being man-made isn't that important, except possibly as a way to understand how to remediate the change. Like if we stopped all CO2 emissions would it really help?

Off course, this is where things will get political, because any policy to attempt to mitigate the negative effects (current or predicted) will inevitably affect someone's bottom line (their money). So expect a lot of push back from the people who'd lose money, and a lot of promotion from the people who would make money. That political dance will make it really hard to figure out which are the actually good solutions and which aren't.

Edit: It's true, beyond just financials, policies could also have an impact on people's lifestyles and life affordances and conveniences, that will also play a lot in the political dance.

Retric4• 5 years ago

You can’t “solve” climate change via mitigation as the simple act of building infrastructure has an associated cost. The only thing you can do is minimize cost. Canadians buying air conditioners for example would reduce the numbers of dead in coming heat waves, but they’re not free.

It’s not even just about economic impact. Mandating all roofs be painted white for example has a tiny mitigating effect, but while the economic cost is low enough to justify people don’t want to be forced to paint their roofs white.

didibus3• 5 years ago

I didn't use the word "solve" anywhere in my comment, can you clarify what you're referring too?

empressplay• 5 years ago

Many houses in British Columbia still burn fuel oil so in that particular case if they all switched to reverse-cycle air conditioners it would be a net improvement

haskaalo• 5 years ago

Like if we stopped all CO2 emissions would it really help?

I assume yes. Right now CO2 emissions outnumbers the rate plants transform CO2 to O2.

_y5hn8• 5 years ago

No, it would take a hundred year for CO2 concentrations in the troposphere to start going down significantly. Cutting all emissions today won't help us enough as thresholds are being triggered that will release more and more greenhouse gases, reduce earth's albedo and acidify the oceans.

asaddhamani• 5 years ago

And yet the climate change deniers will find a way. I don’t see why this has to be made into such a political issue when we have hard numbers and objective facts to back up the claim that we are causing global warming, it’s clearly observable. The situation gets worse every passing year and we’re still trying to appease the “doubters”. Concrete and drastic measures need to be taken, it is high time.

OrvalWintermute9• 5 years ago

a political issue climate change deniers appease the “doubters”

I'm not sure if you're going to convince people about the correctness of a position if you utilize name-calling with negative connontations.

That kind of approach is frankly unproductive.

celeritascelery• 5 years ago

In my experience, the reason climate change doubters are so opposed is because of the “concrete and drastic measures” proposed. It has very little to do with “hard numbers and objective facts”. People are reluctant to give up their lifestyle or lose a job for the sake of “global warming”, so they focus on the possibility of it not being real instead.

sprafa5• 5 years ago

69% of Americans believe climate change is real. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans... That's an overwhelming majority. The 'doubt' is media-created FUD being replicated to pretend to be an issue.

mekoka2• 5 years ago

Identifying a phenomenon and its causes doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to address it. It's a common fallacy. Questioning prognostical conclusions and recommendations made based on not a single data point (we don't know of another planet that went through something similar) is a valid stance. Scientists have been wrong before. I remember Allan Savory confessing his regrets to the killings of thousands of elephants in an effort to prevent desertification, only for things to get worse. Later they realized that the ancillary effects of their grazing activities were actually contributing to slowing down and even reversing desertification.

sprafa5• 5 years ago

69% of Americans believe climate change is real. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/americans...

That's an overwhelming majority. The 'doubt' is media-created FUD being replicated to pretend to be an issue. The issue is not the population, who overwhelmingly agree this is a problem. The problem is the ruling class does not want anything sudden to be done that would endanger their investments, and rapid change away from fossil fuels and other climate-change causing investments is a danger to their interests.

A huge amount of issues in the world are manipulated to look like issues by the media. Don't fall for it!

runlevel12• 5 years ago

But only 55% of Americans believe it to be human-caused. From the actual report [^1]:

A majority of Americans (55%) understand that global warming is mostly human-caused. By contrast, only about one in three (32%) think it is due mostly to natural changes in the environment.

The remaining 13% presumably answered "don't know" -- so there's at least some hope of reaching up to 68%.

However, even if that 13% is won over, there's still another big barrier to meaningful legislation: Anthropogenic skepticism is over-represented in congress.[^2] Every state gets 2 senators regardless of population, and the more populous states tend to already have senators that believe it is caused by humans.

[1] https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/201... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/22/us-senat...

OrvalWintermute9• 5 years ago

Before there was Climate Change, there was Global Warming.

Why was there a name change, a rebranding if you will? In some cases, there is conflation, but they mean very different things.

When it comes to Climate, scientists say that climate is in 30 year intervals. Day to day that is just weather.

The problem is the ruling class

I would be much more inclined to believe that there was an actual problem if the ruling class was not gallivanting around on private jets to nonstop events to preach to us plebes about the evils of our fairly tame lifestyles in comparison.

Strangely, COVID has been great for driving down wanton energy use

that would endanger their investments, and rapid change away from fossil fuels and other climate-change causing investments is a danger to their interests.

That sounds like one of the prevailing narratives in the media.

However, I think the truth may be complex than that. After all, it is Exxon that did invent the ubiquitous Lithium-ion battery.

https://energyfactor.exxonmobil.com/energy-innovation/rd/the...

If we are going to replace our oil-based economy I have little doubt that the innovation behind it will come from either Academia or BigEnergy, and market reasons will drive this change.

vixen99• 5 years ago

So what about China and other Asian countries who demonstrate by their actions that they've 'found a way'? They say one thing but do another, using many means to encourage the West to adopt policies that will increase energy costs while continuing to build coal-fired power plants themselves. Now why would they do that? In 2020, China brought 38 gigawatts of new coal-fired power into operation, more than three times what was brought on line everywhere else.

Seems they're not quite on board with the idea that 'concrete and drastic measures need to be taken'. Clearly they don't think there is an existential threat. And they can hardly be accused of being ignorant of the science.

lumost2• 5 years ago

Many economies that were considered developing during the Kyoto accords are now large economies but still pretending that they need to be excluded from such climate provisions.

KONAir• 5 years ago

Why is this being burried? Is there even any doubt about China's edge had been and still is ignoring envorimental sanctions and outright denying workers rights?

mekoka2• 5 years ago

I think climate change and the human factor are very easy to accept. Although, some years ago after listening to Freeman Dyson on the topic, I became aware that acknowledging the phenomenon doesn't imply that we necessarily also know where it will lead and what to do about it. Yet, many of the proponents are acting exactly as such, pushing their own agenda. Hence all the ensuing politics.

gadjo95• 5 years ago

The Princeton University researchers behind the paper found that there's a less than 1 percent probability that the changes occurred naturally.

"So you're telling me there is still a chance" - Dumb & Dumber

nickthemagicman2• 5 years ago

I'm going to get down voted for not sensationalizing climate change like the doomers want... even though I do believe it is happening..

But what's interesting is that the average temperature right now is estimated to be among the coolest the Earth has ever been.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

Just because something is happening doesn't automatically make it a scary big deal.

runlevel12• 5 years ago

The linked page discusses it on the scale of millions of years.

Humans have only been around for about 300k years and have only had permanent settlements for about the last 10k of them.

it_citizen• 5 years ago

The hottest/coldest day matters but the timescale matters too. Ecosystems (and probably humans) can adapt when those changes happen slowly. But human-made climate change happens way too fast.

Here's a great way to visualize things: https://xkcd.com/1732/

nickthemagicman2• 5 years ago

This is a great point and gets down to the fundamental truth of it all.

Its 'save the humans' not 'save the planet'.

It's a sensational catchphrase.

The planets going to be just fine.

It's the humans that are screwed.

Depending on ones level of misanthropy this may or may not be a big deal to you.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

There wasn't any doubt for decades. Normal thinking people understand cause and effect. Understand basic science of greenhouse effect. Understand if energy is not reflected to space it is stored and that you can't do that forever with impunity.

tommiegannert• 5 years ago

I mostly agree, but I think this falls under the Black and White fallacy. Just because we understand the mechanism doesn't mean that the magnitude is large enough to matter. It could be that clouds or normal volcano erruptions have such a large impact on trapping energy that greenhouse gases don't matter. What you also have to show is that the basic cause is actually sufficient to explain the effect, and that's difficult when it's on a (planet) scale most people never think about.

Many times I see experts spend lots of time explaining the simple casue and effect relationship, only to gloss over the large amount of work they've done to convince themselves that it actually is significant. University PR departments and ads-driven media aren't helping.

biasedbrain7• 5 years ago

One group of scientists, who can't imagine that their self invented model could be wrong, can't imagine any other reasons than man made changes for the results of their model simulation.

How you get from that to "removes almost all doubt" is beyond me. Such hyperbole does more damage than good.

I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions, so I am sorry, but for me it doesn't remove "almost all doubt".

jt2190• 5 years ago

It’s unfortunate when we glom onto the headline and start arguing from there, because (assuming that NBC follows the traditional newsroom workflow) the scientists didn’t write the headline, and the journalist didn’t write the headline, the news editor did, and the news editor wrote the most attention-grabbing (a.k.a. “clickbait”) thing they could.

Now maybe if we dig into the article and the paper we’ll see that the headline is really an honest reflection of the content, but I’ll bet it’s not.

Edit: The words “remove all doubt” do not occur in the article, just the headline.

em500• 5 years ago

I don't disagree with you, but but at the same time I think that if the editor used "Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance" as the headline, probably nobody would have clicked, let alone read it. Heck, it probably wouldn't have made HN either.

alecst• 5 years ago

I don't know anything about those scientists, I don't know anything about their model and their assumptions

So you didn't read the paper, you don't know who wrote it, and you're commenting on a paraphrase in the headline. What exactly are you contributing to the discussion?

biasedbrain7• 5 years ago

Announcing the paper with such hyperbole makes me less likely to want to read it. It just makes it very unlikely to live up to the hype.

I wonder if you have read the paper, btw?

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

This is how deniers argue - latch onto trivial language in the title, and spew doubt. Instead of trying to understand, which would probably scare the pants off of them. So they put blinders on instead.

torstenvl3• 5 years ago

This is how extremists argue - spew the most outrageous ideas they can get away with, and when they cross the line into obvious lies, they attack the other side for "latching onto trivial language."

The editorialization is patently false. You are wasting political capital by defending it.

biasedbrain7• 5 years ago

No, headlines like that is how "believers" argue. Just cut out the hyperbole and present reasonable, verifiable arguments, not appeals to authority.

8jef2• 5 years ago

Groups and people who oppose climate change apparently do so because their livelihood depends on fossil fuel being produced and sold without much restriction.

Then, there's too much money to be made from the effects of climate change. It's already a booming business. Supplying water and air purifying systems, sheltering, organizing future population movements, securing the affluent from the needy masses, etc.

While the naïve worry about saving the planet, most people just think about saving their own arses. And for the moment, they are winning.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Chaos is a ladder? Ok, Baelish.

8jef2• 5 years ago

Exactly. Real life Baelish being: ...

Earth's energy imbalance removes almost all doubt from human-made climate change

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