Crediting someone in 1938 with "discovering" anthropogenic global warming might be misattributing a bit?
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1]
It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2].
The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4].
More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade before the last founding father of the United States died.
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
Excerpt from your second citation Nature (1882) paper:
From this we may conclude that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate of the world.
The mountainous regions will be colder, the Arctic regions will be colder, the tropics will be warmer, and throughout the world the nights will be colder, and the days warmer.
In the Temperate Zone winter will be colder, and generally differences will be greater, winds, storms, rainfall greater.
Both global warming and cooling happen, just at different timescales. In the early Industrial Revolution when coal use was exploding exponentially due to cheaper mining and transportation the sort term net effect was cooling due to particulate emissions having a larger short term impact than CO2. However, the exponential growth slowed down as people didn’t need unlimited heating for their homes so the cooling leveled off as CO2 accumulated.
Thus people in 1900 saw net heating from the exact same coal burned in 1800 that produced cooling back then.
The same thing happened again with the explosion of automobile use globally before that growth curve slowed down. And it’s even part of climate models where if you stop all fossil fuel emissions you get a few years of additional warming before things stabilize.
For that passage the authors were talking about hydrogen, marsh gas, and ethylene. They state "those have the property of a very high degree of absorbing and radiating heat, and so much so that a very small proportion, of only one thousandth part, had very great effect."
Whether CO2 is referred to as "pollution" or not depends on the context. In this case they were talking about other industrial greenhouse gases.
It is impossible to have an opinion on this topic without being personally scorched (as opposed to being 'globally warmed').
I appreciated the research you and the OP did. I pointed out the ideas that co2 was fingered as the cause was not supported by the quote you posted. I also pointed out that a totally opposed position was also possible from the same info - that the the idea of climate alarmism. Ie you could say 'climate alarmism' has been around for a long time in order to raise fear to get the masses to move in a particular way, and that the historical facts are re-interpreted for the present day - ie that 'pollution' is the same as 'co2'.
I hadn't seen the Fourier paper before, nice. He doesn't really go into CO2 but focuses more on general atmosphere heating. I really appreciate the translator's notes.
Eunice Foot (1856) and John Tyndall (1859) independently characterized how CO2 absorbs radiant heat, and both postulated on the potential climate impacts. Tyndall is often given the credit as the founder of climate science but Foot was first.
Thank you for pointing that out. It was nice to have a reason to read the translation much more carefully. It's clear that Fourier understood there existed some greenhouse effects from the atmosphere, but didn't have a strong grasp on details of those effects. And as you say, it doesn't talk about CO2.
In the 1800s the lakes in New Jersey would freeze solid to the point that there were companies who would cut ice in New Jersey and store it to be sold in New York in the summer. Nowadays the mid atlantic is lucky to get a few inches of snow at a time, and I doubt a single lake in New Jersey has frozen enough to walk on in 30 years. Even places like Upstate New York, famous for their snowfall and long winters, have long stretches of winter with above freezing temperatures where all of the snow melts. The effects are extremely pronounced and the climate is nothing like it was in the 1800s now.
This isn't just climate change though, that period was significantly colder than previous periods (google 'little ice age'). Not disputing man made climate change at all, but the earth naturally goes through warming and cooling phases and we shouldn't expect New York to be as cold as 1800 today even without climate change.
Of course this kind of natural change is what gives ammunition to climate deniers!
It’s important to remember that it’s really tough to separate this stuff out and properly attribute changes.
There could be natural causes for the little ice age starting/ending but there’s also evidence pointing that decreased human activity resulted in cooling and increased activity resulted in heating. Aside from CO2 emissions, there’s deforestation, controlled burns, and other terraforming projects on a massive scale around that time period that could easily have contributed in a major way.
Agreed. It might have been any of those things, or something else entirely.
For example, in 1883, Krakatoa erupted, one of the most powerful volcano events in recorded history.
The eruption of Krakatoa had a significant impact on global climate, with summer temperatures in 1883 falling by as much as 1.2°C (2.2°F) below normal in parts of the Northern Hemisphere. It changed the skies to various colors like blue, gold, green, and purple, "... more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets... the glow is intense; that is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire."
And that was just a single volcanic eruption, in the southeastern hemisphere, massively affecting temperatures on the opposite side of the planet. There have been other natural events, like a massive simultaneous triple-eruption, possibly in 536, that plunged the planet into a short ice age.
Other interesting natural phenomena are things like solar storms that can cause a global increase in both wildfires and electrical storms (or the cooling effect during less active cycles) as well as the significant dust clouds that occur when a large meteor strikes the earth.
An interesting one that didn't seem to cause any climate changes was the Tunguska event. In 1908 in Siberia, it was thought to have been a meteor, except for the total lack of an impact crater, and is now believed by leading scientists to have been a meteor air burst. (Of course scientific consensus always is, until it isn't.) This didn't seem to cause a significant dust cloud or changes in weather patterns, but there are many other documented cases of meteors and volcanoes massively changing the weather. It'd be very interesting to map the climate curves (such as they may be known) against various known natural phenomena over the centuries.
This is a fascinating hypothesis, but the timelines don't really add up. Global temperatures started decreasing around 1100 AD, and by 1300 AD the decline was very much apparent [1]. The Little Ice Age temperature low does correspond with the period from roughly 1420-1820, but by 1492 average temperatures were already close to their lows and a full ~0.3C lower than the High Middle Ages. If it were caused by the colonization of the Americas, you'd expect the temperature decline to not start until first contact with the Native Americans.
I think it's more likely that the Little Ice Age was caused by a drop of solar output, and that all of the turmoil in Europe (Black Death, Hundred Years War, War of the Roses, Wars of Religion) that led to the eventual colonization of the Americas was a consequence of resource scarcity in Europe.
It's not my paper, and I'm not a climate scientist, just found it interesting myself. This except was striking:
"According to the study, a spike in plant life was responsible for up to 67 per cent of a significant drop in carbon dioxide levels between 1520 and 1610. Carbon had been transferred from the atmosphere to the land surface through photosynthesis.
Previously cored Antarctic ice samples were investigated. Researchers observed that 7.4 petagrams — or 7-billion metric tonnes — of carbon had suddenly disappeared at that point in time."
The Norse colonization doesn't line up well with the Native American disease die-off, though. The Norse colonization didn't seem to have a major impact on major agricultural populations in North America, perhaps because they landed in remote regions of Greenland and Canada with low population densities. The Aztec empire didn't get started until 1372, for example, and peaked entirely during this time of dropping temperatures. Smallpox wasn't introduced until 1519.
I found some independent validation of the drop in CO2 that you cite [1], but the authors have no idea what the root cause was. Possibly the Native American hypothesis could fit as cause for a secondary climate trend from 1600-1800, but it seems like a stretch. Also should not discount the possibility of plant growth feedback loops: it's known that higher CO2 concentrations cause rapid plant growth, and possible that lower solar irradiation might encourage plants to grow more rapidly to capture more of the available solar energy, and both of those lead to the observed drops in CO2 and increased vegetation. Perhaps the causality was that lower solar output -> increased plant growth -> CO2 drop as well as lower solar output -> it's cold and CO2 drop -> it's cold.
>> The Norse colonization didn't seem to have a major impact on major agricultural populations in North America, perhaps because they landed in remote regions of Greenland and Canada with low population densities
The Norse didn't travel to North America directly from Europe. For them to spread smallpox, someone from Europe would have had to travel to Greenland shortly before they left for North America. Then they would have had to come into close contact with Indians before the disease ran its course among the crew, which, given the close contact on a small sailing vessel, probably wouldn't take long.
"There is evidence of Norse trade with the natives (called the Skrælingjar by the Norse). The Norse would have encountered both Native Americans (the Beothuk, related to the Algonquin) and the Thule, the ancestors of the Inuit. The Dorset had withdrawn from Greenland before the Norse settlement of the island. Items such as comb fragments, pieces of iron cooking utensils and chisels, chess pieces, ship rivets, carpenter's planes, and oaken ship fragments used in Inuit boats have been found far beyond the traditional range of Norse colonization. A small ivory statue that appears to represent a European has also been found among the ruins of an Inuit community house.[13]"
The Norse had no major impact on North America, certainly nothing even remotely close to causing major worldwide temperature changes. They had like a few seasonal outposts, plus Greenland.
a third of a degree Celsius different in 1492, 3 centuries years before Celsius developed that scale, 2 centuries before "a temperature reading device" was even plausible.
~70 years ago, schoolchildren were chastised for commenting that the continents looked like they ought fit together. These children are the ones you're trying to convince, after changing your collective minds at least twice, that there is climate change. Shortly after they were vindicated about the patterns in coastlines they observed, "science" said there was a risk from global cooling. Spock even did an hour long TV show about global cooling and the risks (70s.) Then in the 90s, global warming was heating up, we're all going to die! Now it's neither cooling nor warming (right?), it's just "climate change" and no matter what, we can say "climate change did that". Crazy storms - climate change. Droughts - climate change. Hot summer - climate change. below average winter - climate change.
Now you got "solar eclipse - climate change"; "earthquake in NY - climate change". These are the people you need to convince.
I don't see the point in arguing. My power is hydroelectric, i don't buy disposable stuff if i can avoid it. I have no control over the petrochemical industry - not in the US, not in China. What i do see the point in is calling out silliness like "0.3C in 14XX" and the lies by omission of things like storms that are affected by the el nino/la nina ocean patterns, as well as certain dust events.
I used to link some articles published by NASA/NOAA when these sort of discussions would appear in my peer group. People would refute by linking other NASA/NOAA articles. None of them saw my point, which i think is funny. By the way, you can do the same thing with pubmed articles, if you're ever feeling frisky.
I think we often forget that most of the indigenous people who died from disease never came in contact with Europeans directly and disease burned through the population moving from tribe to tribe. I’d love to learn more about the pre-Columbian population of North America and what that time looked like.
About a week ago there was a freak heatwave in West Africa that caused almost 100 excess deaths. These events are going to get more common near the equator, and this will drive climate refugees.
Out of curiosity: how much of desertification in Africa and elsewhere is due to bad land management and how much is just due to changing weather as the climate changes?
> I doubt a single lake in New Jersey has frozen enough to walk on in 30 years
Not disputing the spirit of your comment but from Jan 2013 I have photos of myself walking on Budd Lake. It was the first time I had ever been on a frozen lake. So it does still happen inside that timeframe, but yes it's uncommon now.
This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change.
I fully understand that climate models are mind boggingly complex, and that it's incredibly difficult to predict how all the different intertwined factors will play out in real time. But at a very fundamental level, we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history (not to mention many of the other major greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide). Literally no sane person disputes that fact. How could we think that making this major change to Earth's climate system wouldn't have huge effects?
This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change.
Ignoring the debate over how much the CO2 impacts the temperature, which other comments address, there are likely a few things at play. First, "BigBusiness" has a vested interest in playing down any risk, so they sink considerable money into campaigning against climate change (political, media, etc). Second, people are conditioned to absorb quick soundbite factoids, not complex models, so "nuh-uh, fake science" hits home better than {complex model}. Plus, change is scary - either doomsday temperature increases OR give up cars and airplanes and cheap hamburgers? Yikes!
This is all that matters at the end of the day. Most people are not self-aware enough, and/or willing enough to experience their own emotions, to handle ugly truths. It's more emotionally comfortable to find reasons to deny them.
Just to nitpick, while commonly accepted, the idea that CO2 increase is anthropogenic is routinely disputed by climate skeptics [1].
The argument generally is that warming temperatures cause rising CO2. This in turn is a fact not disputed by climate scientists, only that it is not sufficient to explain the current rise in CO2.
Ya know, I saw this a year ago, and was curious if it actually held up. After all, the amount of CO2 released by humans is only about 4% of all CO2 released, on an annual basis (730 gigatons all sources, ~30 gigatons by humans).
But it's a pretty simple equation. We know the approximate mass of the atmosphere, and the number of molecules per weight. We know how many molecules are in a unit mass of CO2.
Thus we should be able to calculate out "how many gigatons of CO2 are necessary to increase atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm", and then given measurements of actual CO2 increases, how much CO2 is necessary to increase atmospheric levels by the amounts seen.
If the amount of CO2 required to yield the observed increase is greater than annual human emissions, then that's a strong signal that CO2 increase is NOT anthropogenic and something else is going on. If it's less, then that is a strong signal that humans are the primary culprit.
Anyway, I did out all the math and it takes about 8.8 gigatons to increase atmospheric levels by 1ppm, and we're netting an increase of about 17gt into the atmosphere per year, for an increase of ~2ppm annually. So it's pretty clear that this is anthropogenic.
If anyone wants to check my math I wrote it all up here [0]. Numbers are a couple years old at this point but the conclusion still stands.
That's not the same argument. Some people claim that CO2 increase does not cause temperature increase and therefore temperature increase is not anthropogenic (which is what your link is debunking), but nobody claims that the CO2 increase itself is not anthropogenic.
I’ve heard people (seemingly educated and intelligent) making arguments like volcanoes emit more (I wasn’t sure when they said it at the time but I looked it up and it’s nowhere near the amount - humans win by an overwhelming amount in CO2 emitted each year even if you look at the biggest eruptions ever).
Yes, the usual denial arguments I hear are on the form of "the climate has always been that way", "it's variance on the solar output" and "volcanoes are the ones emitting most of those gases".
It's also quite interesting window to thoughts of other people. I find it extremely mind-boggling that we live in times of detecting gravity waves, building particle accelerators etc. and some people live in reality where we don't know how much energy we're getting from the sun or co2 from volcanoes.
We can’t predict the weather more than 14 days into the future.
It seems like the opposite to me, it’s a no-brainer that predicting what will happen to an immensely complex system, and making all these assumptions about what will occur 50-100 years from now is going to be hotly debated.
Are you intentionally trying to conflate weather and climate? Is it hard to believe that short term trends (weather) are much harder to predict than long term trends (climate) because you’re smoothing out the chaos of the short term behavior?
A poor analogy is that you can’t predict where an atom is located and its speed due to quantum, yet when you average over a bunch of atoms you some pretty useful bounds on the shape of the problem.
Also, we already have plenty of data to evaluate the models - climate models are underpredicting the consequences (ie things are hotter and more volatile than climate models predicted). This indicates the models are conservative about the predictions in the wrong direction (you want to be predicting 20% worse than reality than 20% better because of it impacts planning). The reason they’re likely wrong is that we don’t have a full accounting of the ways in which human activity causes warming.
When we throw a tennis racket with spin about one specific axis we cannot predict the tumbling motion .. that's weather.
What we can do is predict the arc of motion of the centre of gravity .. that's climate.
It's a no-brainer that anybody who confuses the two and hasn't put in the work to raise their understanding to intermediate axis instability is below the bar for admission to grown up climate modelling discussions.
Yet, if you're living anywhere north of Mexico City, it's almost certain that 12 weeks from now it will be much hotter than 12 weeks ago. In fact, it is such a basic knowledge that our ancestors with stone tools figured it out.
What's impressive is that some people are so invested in not understanding climate that they reject the notion that larger trends can be bloody obvious before anyone can predict day-to-day variances. (Again, a basic principle that our stone tools ancestors figured out.)
That's an apples to oranges comparison. Weather is not climate. Meteorology is not climatology.
Obviously, meteorology doesn't work over a 50-100 years time frame -- "What's the temperature on January 20th 2064 and 9PM" is an impossible question to answer. But climatologists are not attempting to answer the same question as meteorologists. They're studying a much easier variable to predict, which is averages of phenomena, where all the short-term complicated meteorological noise cancels itself out due to the law of large numbers.
> The argument generally is that warming temperatures cause rising CO2. This in turn is a fact not disputed by climate scientists, only that it is not sufficient to explain the current rise in CO2.
It should also be noted that the type of C in CO2 matters:
> In addition, only fossil fuels are consistent with the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon in today’s atmosphere. Different kinds of carbon-containing material have different relative amounts of “light” carbon-12, “heavy” carbon-13, and radioactive carbon-14. Plant matter is enriched in carbon-12, because its lighter weight is more readily used by plants during photosynthesis. Volcanic emissions are enriched in carbon-13. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere and the ocean are roughly the same. Since carbon-14 is radioactive, it decays predictably over time. Young organic matter has more carbon-14 than older organic matter, and fossil fuels have no measurable carbon-14 at all.
> As carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen over the past century or more, the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 has fallen, which means that the source of the extra carbon dioxide must be enriched in "light" carbon-12. Meanwhile, the relative amount of carbon-14—radioactive carbon—has declined. The record of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is complicated by nuclear bomb testing after 1950, which doubled the amount of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. After the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, the excess atmospheric carbon-14 began to decline as it dispersed into the oceans and the land biosphere.
> In this “Grand Challenges” paper, we review how the carbon isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 has changed since the Industrial Revolution due to human activities and their influence on the natural carbon cycle, and we provide new estimates of possible future changes for a range of scenarios. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and land use change reduce the ratio of 13C/12C in atmospheric CO2 (δ13CO2). This is because 12C is preferentially assimilated during photosynthesis and δ13C in plant-derived carbon in terrestrial ecosystems and fossil fuels is lower than atmospheric δ13CO2. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion also reduce the ratio of 14C/C in atmospheric CO2 (Δ14CO2) because 14C is absent in million-year-old fossil fuels, which have been stored for much longer than the radioactive decay time of 14C.
It's weird to me that there's no mention of silicate weathering in that article as the big negative CO2-temperature feedback. If anything CO2 levels are fighting against a warming/wetting Earth which weathers more rock and captures it... although maybe on a very long timescale
I think the figure I saw was that if human emissions stopped tomorrow, silicate weathering would get rid of the excess carbon in something on the order of 10k years.
It is a high school lab experiment to watch CO2 absorb infrared and heat up.
There is no universe in which you can dig vast amounts of carbon, burn it, and not have things warm up. There are lots of hard questions but the fundamental fact that the globe has to warm is an unavoidable conclusion.
Yeah but your high school experiment has no feedback mechanisms, no oceans, water vapor, volcanos, solar cycles, plants, and so on. You’re also not putting in 0.04% CO2 vs 0.0395% CO2 and measuring anything meaningful because the scope and scale of the Earth’s atmosphere is unfathomably larger.
If you’ve ever owned a Fish Tank or taken High School Chemistry, you’d realize that even in the most simple environments things don’t always add up in a way that seems intuitive.
Where can I go or what can I read written by credible people (not autodidacts and conspiracy theorists from the internet) that makes the case against anthro-caused climate change, and puts the arguments in context with the pro-ACCC people?
My denial is tactical in nature for the mere fact I don't think being eco-friendly or a climate-skeptic changes anything in the end when it comes to CO2 emission. Going the amish way certainly does, but 1°) nobody is advocating for this 2°) it wouldn't be feasible for whole societies, they would collapse. Additionally the proposed solution to the greenhouse gas problem, namely energetic transition, is compromised by the ongoing Peak Everything [1]. It's of course not an absolute wall and people working on obscure topics such as [2] are contributing a lot more than people arguing for or against the reality of anthropogenic climate change on a political level. These people should instead focus on other issues where activism would be a lot more useful, in particular the decline in insect populations (about 75% loss in 26 years for Germany, in absolute mass, not number of species) [3]. Advocacy to get rid of neonicotinoids would be a more efficient way to combat the impeding collapse of Nature.
Finally, I don't think it's a matter of political decision: we don't have the solution to the problem of greenhouse gas and the only outcome it can have is a form of self-punishment and eco-morale. I'd prefer to die of starvation in a desertic earth than suffer this kind of hypocritical tyranny that advocates both for reduction in natality and substitution immigration to offset it.
The only form of solution I could be satisfied with is some kind of AI-driven system to figure it out, not for its supposed super-cognitive abilities, but for the methods employed in ML. In this perspective, every new scientific paper, every ecological experimentation should be logged and ageggated automatically to update some global gradient, without having to face political mediatic inertia. This would allow us to deploy solutions such as Lorenzo Furlan agricultural insurance against pesticide [4]. Of course I had to use google translate for this link. This proves my point.
> This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change.
Few people ever really change their mind about anything; they just get older and die and their opinions get removed from the discourse.
I'm mostly referring, of course, to the baby boomers, which is a bit ironic because they're the ones who actually remember that the Jersey River used to freeze every winter (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion).
My own father has a degree in geology and had a career in the mining industry… his own take drifted from "this is ridiculous" to "okay it's happening but there have been plenty of similar shifts in the geological record over history." I had to actually show him graphs that illustrated that yes, the earth has shifted temperature by 2º plenty of times in history… over periods of hundreds or thousands of years, not a single century. Now his take has drifted to "there's probably nothing that can be done about it."
Anyone pushing for societal change and progress needs to get themselves out of the mindset of "changing minds," it's like swing voters, they're barely real.
They're the combustion engine generation. In their life most of the roads and highways were built and all cities became fully motorized.
Most of them in the western industrialized countries could never imagine or want another way of living because this was the promise and evidence of progress and success since they were born.
Unfortunately I wish I shared your optimism that things will change after the boomers pass. I am from and have family in Alberta, oil country, and there's... just no chance. Some of the most vicious deniers (or worse, the "don't carers") are young.
I feel like things are swinging back the other way, and quickly.
When things start to fall apart people can have two reactions to it... stick and work together to solve the problem, or scatter and hoard and everyman-for-himself and proclaim "I got mine, now get lost..."
No, "we" can all agree for a reasonable definition of "we." People who argue that warming is not an effect and isn't man-made are being purposely and obstinately wrong, and lying to themselves and often others. And there's actually very few of them, they just shout really loud.
> we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history
I think you need to learn more about Earth's history. Not to dispute the fact that it has increased, but it's totally false to say this is unseen in Earth's history.
As the sibling comment points out, the rate of increase is important.
Dynamical systems are often sensitive to the value of a parameter, its rate of change and/or its rate of rate of change.
Eg. You can warm milk to a certain temperature (the parameter) on a stove on gentle heat and it will be fine. If you warm it to the same temperature on high heat (i.e. increased rate of parameter), it will burn. That's because the convection process in this system has limited maximum speed.
If you look at when previously the Earth's atmosphere had high CO2, it took hundreds of thousands to many millions of years get there. We did it in a 100 years, so at least a thousand times faster.
The Earth has warmed and cooled even more rapidly before. And again I am not disputing the current cause of warning. I am just annoyed with the ignorance of history.
From a cursory look, any such events look like they were part of mass extinctions. I'm curious what exact data you are looking at so I may better understand your statement.
I'm just annoyed with the lack of reading comprehension. My statement was "we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history". I am aware of no other scientific evidence, or even hypotheses, where greenhouse gas concentrations changed as quickly, and that includes periods of extreme vulcanism, such as when the Siberian Traps were created.
Again, if you have any evidence or citations to the contrary, "put up or shut up".
Thank you - that was indeed my primary point. Was a good article yesterday about the "Anthropocene", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014, where if you look at graphs of things like temperature, CO2 concentrations, methane concentrations, etc., that the last hundred or so years just basically show a vertical line.
There are easier "facts" to disprove AGW that don't rely on innumeracy. I mean you don't really care, you just want to have a "gotcha" and not think past that, but AGW was considered disproved for a few decades and you could get some "stumpers" that aren't quite as silly as playing number games.
The oceans can absorb a practically infinite amount of CO2, so there's no way for it to build up in the atmosphere in the long run. Also, the atmosphere is already saturated with CO2 to the point where adding more will have no effect. Also, water vapor's absorption spectrum overlaps that of CO2 so there is no way for CO2 to have any additional effect. All of these facts were known more than a century ago, and consequently AGW was considered disproved.
"Skeptics" should not read past this point, because it turns out all of those things are misleading. The oceans don't mix fast enough to prevent CO2 buildup, and the action of CO2 is felt not in the lower atmosphere but at the radiative top-of-atmosphere, the point where outgoing infrared radiation is more likely to escape to space than strike another molecule. Adding CO2 makes the CO2-dense region greater in extent, thus the outgoing heat takes longer to leave Earth, thus raising the total atmosphere temperature and causing a nasty feedback mechanism with H2O. Because this changes which elevation energy gets radiated at, we can directly measure it. Checkmate skeptics.
To tie this back in to the main point, Callendar was one of the prime movers in rehabilitating the AGW theory (one of his papers amusingly refers to the theory's "checkered past"), but it took until Keeling's work in the late 1950s to conclusively demonstrate the year-over-year increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
And you're totally missing my point. GP came up with a backwarded way to prove your point so I stooped to that level and came up with the equivalent reasoning that's held on the other side since he was asking for it. Funnily, you're more adamant to address my comment than his because you're more attached to the resulting truth than the reasoning step that lead to it. Admit it, it's not a matter of science anymore, it's entirely politically motivated. I wish you good luck with your control system challenge, I'm sure it will be very nuanced.
His comment was accurate, yours was misleading, seemingly deliberately. AGW is not in scientific dispute; the skeptics are merely unscientific -- politically motivated, if you will.
This is like prevaricating about whether the Earth is flat. If your standards allow you to set aside direct observations then you are not being scientific, and if you don't like "skeptic" as a label for that then I don't mind getting creative.
I can't find the exact quote, but to put it in perspective: the weight of the extra C02 added in the last 100 years is more than the sum total of everything humanity has built. The actual quote might be everything from the last 2000 years, regardless, same point. If you weigh all of that CO2, it's an enormous amount.
That's still a retarded argument and way below any scientific standard. Now that climate change has become the dominant worldview we witness the bigotisation of this cause, where so called "truth" becomes the target of activism as it as it morphs into a form of belief. Not because what it points to is wrong, but because, as in any politically motivated crusade, any mean, path to reach that truth is deemed worthwhile. This noble cause has turned into a matter of adolescent rebellion that is dealt with absolutism and a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations. What if the phenomenon is overblown by the political movement that tries to fight its consequences ? What if the proposed solutions are more painful than the problem ? To hell with these considerations ! You're either with us or against us in our fight against apocalypse itself !
It's not surprising that as the hysteria grows and gains more and more minds, and as the climate skeptics crowd thins out, the figure of the "climate change denier" grows in importance. It's important for communities to have a malevolent figure against which hateful unanimity takes shapes. It allows them to endure the test of time, and survive even when the core beliefs are shaken, should the "deniers" turn into tomorrow's saints. May the crowd turn to them as it even forgets it is changing opinion so as to atone its own sins. Isn't it what this all about ? Recognizing climate urgency as a way to pay for the sins of modern life ? What was the point in abandoning religion if it was to repeat exactly the same structure then ?
Just want to point out, I was not expressing an opinion, nor a view point, nor an ideology. If you feel otherwise, could you point out specifically where? Do you believe my unsourced quote to be inaccurate? It seems this is all math, thermodynamics an chemistry at play.
Otherwise, what makes you believe the total volume of CO2 is irrelevant?
Ignoring the screed, your retort was CO2 was a low percentage. My response is it is the volume that matters, not the percentage composition
> This noble cause has turned into a matter of adolescent rebellion that is dealt with absolutism and a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations
Pot calling the kettle black?
Can you put forth evidence why percentage composition is more important than total volume? I believe chemistry and thermodynamics come into play, volumes matter when balancing thermal dynamic equations. Thus, it is those equations that imply a 50% increase in volume, while still an overall small fraction of some other total composition, would have a significant impact on Earths climate systems
>a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations
What happens if it turns out climate change's origin is not human activity ? Or it's considerably less worse than anticipated ? Or even beneficial ?
Imagine if measures are taken globally in some kind of global government to impose restrictions and its proves to be a massive fuckup for nothing in the end. It will be probably the nail in the coffin for any attempt to regulate the earth system scientifically. What's at stake is huge. Both ways.
To those who downvote: admit it, if climate justice was to be established in your terms, I would pay more for my rebellion than someone with a carbon footprint 10 times as big as mine. It's an ideological fight far removed from measurable facts (even if it pretends the opposite) where submission to the ideology overrides any other consideration.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Psalms 32:5
^ You're here. Seethe all you want, you're biggots of the kind you hate the most.
You seem to be much more invested in an ideological battle than anyone else here.
Where I’m from, the climate has changed. It is changing. You don’t need scientific instruments to notice it.
As far as I can tell, the orthodox AGW theory fits the evidence and has predicted these changes better than any alternative explanation I’ve heard so far. As far as I’m concerned, ideology doesn’t really come into it.
Not an argument for the fact it's driven by human activity. However it suggests that you paint the past climate as some harmonious system on short time ranges:
>the 8.2-kiloyear event was a sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred approximately 8,200 years before the present, or c. 6,200 BC, and which lasted for the next two to four centuries.
>[...]
>Estimates of the cooling vary and depend somewhat on the interpretation of the proxy data, but decreases of around 1 to 5 °C (1.8 to 9.0 °F) have been reported.
>Starting around 2200 BC, it probably lasted the entire 22nd century BC. It has been hypothesised to have caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, and the Liangzhu culture in the lower Yangtze River area.[4][5] The drought may also have initiated the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation, with some of its population moving southeastward to follow the movement of their desired habitat,[6] as well as the migration of Indo-European-speaking people into India.
>The African humid period (AHP; also known by other names) is a climate period in Africa during the late Pleistocene and Holocene geologic epochs, when northern Africa was wetter than today. The covering of much of the Sahara desert by grasses, trees and lakes was caused by changes in the Earth's axial tilt; changes in vegetation and dust in the Sahara which strengthened the African monsoon; and increased greenhouse gases.
>One study in 2003 showed that vegetation intrusions in the Sahara can occur within decades after strong rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide[952] but would not cover more than about 45% of the Sahara.[53] That climate study also indicated that vegetation expansion can only occur if grazing or other perturbations to vegetation growth do not hamper it.[953] On the other hand, increased irrigation and other measures to increase vegetation growth such as the Great Green Wall could enhance it.[950] A 2022 study indicated that while increased greenhouse gas concentrations by themselves are not sufficient to start an AHP if greenhouse gas-vegetation feedbacks are ignored, they lower the threshold for orbital changes to induce Sahara greening.
We've actually burned nearly enough carbon to double the atmospheric CO2 levels, but other sinks (eg, the acidifying oceans) have taken up enough that only about half stayed in the atmosphere.
It gets even worse. Around ~800 ppm you get noticeable cognitive impairment in humans. We may get there by 2100.
i.e. in the next generation, unless one's home is equipped with a fancy filtration system, breathing air will have issues on its own, anywhere in the world.
Cognitive impairment is bad, but probably the least of anyone's concerns at 800 ppm. I suspect the interest will be more in migrating to the last habitable zones near the poles and fighting off the others trying to eke out an existence there. Weird to think that a kid born today could easily live to 2100.
That's possible assuming the pace of medicinal science continues. Someone living until 2100 means they'd be 76. That only requires they don't have an accident. Most people born today will live that long.
And, rather sadly, if climate change happens as predicted it is going to make for a pretty bleak existence. It's one reason I'm fairly happy not to have had kids.
Yes, I feel fortunate to have never wanted children; it's something that's actually brought me a lot of peace as I've gotten older. It's taken me a long time to come to some acceptance of the likely future of humanity and the Earth, and I can understand why it's so hard for those with children to do so themselves.
It is interesting that you don't get to consent to being created, isn't it? If you want my thoughts on the matter, Tolstoy pretty much nailed it (and obviously wrote it far better than I could) over a century before I was born in "A Confession" - essentially saying that life is like being stuck holding onto the edge of well with a dragon at the bottom; knowing that eventually you will lose your grip and be consumed by the dragon. I do resent that I was put in that well a bit and am not looking to put anyone else in a well of their own.
If you shift a normal distribution to the right even a little bit, the frequency of tail events above a fixed threshold (in this case, wet bulb temperatures exceeding the human survivability limit of 35 degrees celcius) increases more than linearly.
This is especially an issue near the equator, which will lead to climate refugees seeking colder climates, north and south.
From yet another perspective, one human lifetime of 100 years would see as much climate change as would normally be seen in 100,000 years.*
Humans only started farming 12,000 years ago (which I still find shockingly recent), and humans used to farm all over the middle east (thinking if Iraq specifically, it used to be largely arable).
All in all, it's getting really spicy for next couple centuries.
* except, the earth climate system can't change that fast relative to an impulse difference of Co2 levels. It us akin to putting 10 blankets on your bed. It takes time for heat to build up (the system experiences a latent effect)
It looks a little bit periodic before we showed up. If it is random with some periodic tendency, I guess we don’t need a particular justification for the highest peak, right? One has to be. It isn’t massively higher than the previous peak.
I don't know, I wasn't there. How old do you think I am?!
Just kidding. I suspect that's an interglacial when you have warming and melting but before the trees have grown back to recapture the co2. But check with an expert if you want a more authoritative answer.
I think is is pretty obvious: those were previous species that tried to become industrial, but were killed by Bigfoots. Humans, with our natural tendency toward absolutely slaughtering other species of large mammals, are the first species to escape the Bigfoot trap.
This would be clearer if the title said something like, “provided 1st definitive evidence of…“, in order to distinguish it from earlier attempts to propose or prove global warming effects of CO2.
> He also implied that a non-expert could not possibly understand atmospheric processes well enough to calculate the effects of solar radiation which Callendar had asserted was being absorbed in greater quantities by increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
There's this bad thing, terrorism. Worry not! We have the solution which is warrantless mass surveillance of Americans. If you aren't with us you are a bad person.
Peer review was broken back then too. It is just too perverse and dismissive. Peer reviewers have a bias to discredit novel results that are true. I feel terribly for Callendar not being recognized.
If I was reading a fiction novel and the character making predictions for decades in the future had a last name “Callendar” I would chuckle and think the autor was unimaginative, over-literal.
Alas, reality is often more on the nose than one would expect.
See lithium batteries, a technology with many problems but probably our best bet for the energy transition, being invented by a guy named Goodenough.
Climate change due to industrial emissions of CO2 has been known and published in mainstream news articles since at least 110 years ago.[0][1]
It's been known and discussed in public by professional scientists for over 140 years[2].
The great inaugural Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius, wrote a paper on the topic in 1896[3] which cited Fourier's publication from 1827[4].
More generally, global greenhouse effect of CO2 has been known for at least 185 years[4], a decade before the last founding father of the United States died.
----------
0: The Rodney and Otamatea Times (Aug 1912) https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...
1: Popular Mechanics (Mar 1912): https://books.google.com/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&lpg=...
2: Nature (1882): https://www.nature.com/articles/027127c0
3: Journal of Science (Apr 1896) https://doi.org/10.1080/14786449608620846
4: M ́emoire sur les Temp ́eratures du Globe Terrestre et des Espaces Plan ́etaires, M ́emoires d l’Acad ́emie Royale des Sciences de l’Institute de France VII 570-604 (1827): https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/Fourier1827Trans.pd... (English Translation)
From this we may conclude that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate of the world.
The mountainous regions will be colder, the Arctic regions will be colder, the tropics will be warmer, and throughout the world the nights will be colder, and the days warmer.
In the Temperate Zone winter will be colder, and generally differences will be greater, winds, storms, rainfall greater.
We also have both claims here - global warming and global cooling.
Can't we also say, from broad claims such as the ones you hi light, that a sort of generic scientific alarmism has existed a long time?
Scientific alarmism in itself justifies the valuable work those scientists raising the alarm do, of course...
Thus people in 1900 saw net heating from the exact same coal burned in 1800 that produced cooling back then.
The same thing happened again with the explosion of automobile use globally before that growth curve slowed down. And it’s even part of climate models where if you stop all fossil fuel emissions you get a few years of additional warming before things stabilize.
Whether CO2 is referred to as "pollution" or not depends on the context. In this case they were talking about other industrial greenhouse gases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
Is it the OP who interprets pollution to be co2, or mine as you interpret me to be narrowing the scope somehow?
It’s dangerous to have an opinion on this topic on HN ;)
I appreciated the research you and the OP did. I pointed out the ideas that co2 was fingered as the cause was not supported by the quote you posted. I also pointed out that a totally opposed position was also possible from the same info - that the the idea of climate alarmism. Ie you could say 'climate alarmism' has been around for a long time in order to raise fear to get the masses to move in a particular way, and that the historical facts are re-interpreted for the present day - ie that 'pollution' is the same as 'co2'.
Eunice Foot (1856) and John Tyndall (1859) independently characterized how CO2 absorbs radiant heat, and both postulated on the potential climate impacts. Tyndall is often given the credit as the founder of climate science but Foot was first.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.006...
Of course this kind of natural change is what gives ammunition to climate deniers!
There could be natural causes for the little ice age starting/ending but there’s also evidence pointing that decreased human activity resulted in cooling and increased activity resulted in heating. Aside from CO2 emissions, there’s deforestation, controlled burns, and other terraforming projects on a massive scale around that time period that could easily have contributed in a major way.
For example, in 1883, Krakatoa erupted, one of the most powerful volcano events in recorded history.
The eruption of Krakatoa had a significant impact on global climate, with summer temperatures in 1883 falling by as much as 1.2°C (2.2°F) below normal in parts of the Northern Hemisphere. It changed the skies to various colors like blue, gold, green, and purple, "... more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets... the glow is intense; that is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire."
And that was just a single volcanic eruption, in the southeastern hemisphere, massively affecting temperatures on the opposite side of the planet. There have been other natural events, like a massive simultaneous triple-eruption, possibly in 536, that plunged the planet into a short ice age.
Other interesting natural phenomena are things like solar storms that can cause a global increase in both wildfires and electrical storms (or the cooling effect during less active cycles) as well as the significant dust clouds that occur when a large meteor strikes the earth.
An interesting one that didn't seem to cause any climate changes was the Tunguska event. In 1908 in Siberia, it was thought to have been a meteor, except for the total lack of an impact crater, and is now believed by leading scientists to have been a meteor air burst. (Of course scientific consensus always is, until it isn't.) This didn't seem to cause a significant dust cloud or changes in weather patterns, but there are many other documented cases of meteors and volcanoes massively changing the weather. It'd be very interesting to map the climate curves (such as they may be known) against various known natural phenomena over the centuries.
I think it's more likely that the Little Ice Age was caused by a drop of solar output, and that all of the turmoil in Europe (Black Death, Hundred Years War, War of the Roses, Wars of Religion) that led to the eventual colonization of the Americas was a consequence of resource scarcity in Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#/media/File:200...
It's not my paper, and I'm not a climate scientist, just found it interesting myself. This except was striking:
"According to the study, a spike in plant life was responsible for up to 67 per cent of a significant drop in carbon dioxide levels between 1520 and 1610. Carbon had been transferred from the atmosphere to the land surface through photosynthesis.
Previously cored Antarctic ice samples were investigated. Researchers observed that 7.4 petagrams — or 7-billion metric tonnes — of carbon had suddenly disappeared at that point in time."
I found some independent validation of the drop in CO2 that you cite [1], but the authors have no idea what the root cause was. Possibly the Native American hypothesis could fit as cause for a secondary climate trend from 1600-1800, but it seems like a stretch. Also should not discount the possibility of plant growth feedback loops: it's known that higher CO2 concentrations cause rapid plant growth, and possible that lower solar irradiation might encourage plants to grow more rapidly to capture more of the available solar energy, and both of those lead to the observed drops in CO2 and increased vegetation. Perhaps the causality was that lower solar output -> increased plant growth -> CO2 drop as well as lower solar output -> it's cold and CO2 drop -> it's cold.
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
The Norse didn't travel to North America directly from Europe. For them to spread smallpox, someone from Europe would have had to travel to Greenland shortly before they left for North America. Then they would have had to come into close contact with Indians before the disease ran its course among the crew, which, given the close contact on a small sailing vessel, probably wouldn't take long.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_North_Am...
~70 years ago, schoolchildren were chastised for commenting that the continents looked like they ought fit together. These children are the ones you're trying to convince, after changing your collective minds at least twice, that there is climate change. Shortly after they were vindicated about the patterns in coastlines they observed, "science" said there was a risk from global cooling. Spock even did an hour long TV show about global cooling and the risks (70s.) Then in the 90s, global warming was heating up, we're all going to die! Now it's neither cooling nor warming (right?), it's just "climate change" and no matter what, we can say "climate change did that". Crazy storms - climate change. Droughts - climate change. Hot summer - climate change. below average winter - climate change.
Now you got "solar eclipse - climate change"; "earthquake in NY - climate change". These are the people you need to convince.
I don't see the point in arguing. My power is hydroelectric, i don't buy disposable stuff if i can avoid it. I have no control over the petrochemical industry - not in the US, not in China. What i do see the point in is calling out silliness like "0.3C in 14XX" and the lies by omission of things like storms that are affected by the el nino/la nina ocean patterns, as well as certain dust events.
I used to link some articles published by NASA/NOAA when these sort of discussions would appear in my peer group. People would refute by linking other NASA/NOAA articles. None of them saw my point, which i think is funny. By the way, you can do the same thing with pubmed articles, if you're ever feeling frisky.
I think we often forget that most of the indigenous people who died from disease never came in contact with Europeans directly and disease burned through the population moving from tribe to tribe. I’d love to learn more about the pre-Columbian population of North America and what that time looked like.
Not disputing the spirit of your comment but from Jan 2013 I have photos of myself walking on Budd Lake. It was the first time I had ever been on a frozen lake. So it does still happen inside that timeframe, but yes it's uncommon now.
Wow, somehow I was unaware that we had raised atmospheric CO2 by 50% -- that's impressive in sense.
I fully understand that climate models are mind boggingly complex, and that it's incredibly difficult to predict how all the different intertwined factors will play out in real time. But at a very fundamental level, we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history (not to mention many of the other major greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide). Literally no sane person disputes that fact. How could we think that making this major change to Earth's climate system wouldn't have huge effects?
Ignoring the debate over how much the CO2 impacts the temperature, which other comments address, there are likely a few things at play. First, "BigBusiness" has a vested interest in playing down any risk, so they sink considerable money into campaigning against climate change (political, media, etc). Second, people are conditioned to absorb quick soundbite factoids, not complex models, so "nuh-uh, fake science" hits home better than {complex model}. Plus, change is scary - either doomsday temperature increases OR give up cars and airplanes and cheap hamburgers? Yikes!
This is all that matters at the end of the day. Most people are not self-aware enough, and/or willing enough to experience their own emotions, to handle ugly truths. It's more emotionally comfortable to find reasons to deny them.
The argument generally is that warming temperatures cause rising CO2. This in turn is a fact not disputed by climate scientists, only that it is not sufficient to explain the current rise in CO2.
[1] A pro-AGW debunking of the common argument https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
But it's a pretty simple equation. We know the approximate mass of the atmosphere, and the number of molecules per weight. We know how many molecules are in a unit mass of CO2.
Thus we should be able to calculate out "how many gigatons of CO2 are necessary to increase atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm", and then given measurements of actual CO2 increases, how much CO2 is necessary to increase atmospheric levels by the amounts seen.
If the amount of CO2 required to yield the observed increase is greater than annual human emissions, then that's a strong signal that CO2 increase is NOT anthropogenic and something else is going on. If it's less, then that is a strong signal that humans are the primary culprit.
Anyway, I did out all the math and it takes about 8.8 gigatons to increase atmospheric levels by 1ppm, and we're netting an increase of about 17gt into the atmosphere per year, for an increase of ~2ppm annually. So it's pretty clear that this is anthropogenic.
If anyone wants to check my math I wrote it all up here [0]. Numbers are a couple years old at this point but the conclusion still stands.
[0] https://biotinker.dev/posts/climate1.html
All are patently bullshit, of course.
It seems like the opposite to me, it’s a no-brainer that predicting what will happen to an immensely complex system, and making all these assumptions about what will occur 50-100 years from now is going to be hotly debated.
A poor analogy is that you can’t predict where an atom is located and its speed due to quantum, yet when you average over a bunch of atoms you some pretty useful bounds on the shape of the problem.
Also, we already have plenty of data to evaluate the models - climate models are underpredicting the consequences (ie things are hotter and more volatile than climate models predicted). This indicates the models are conservative about the predictions in the wrong direction (you want to be predicting 20% worse than reality than 20% better because of it impacts planning). The reason they’re likely wrong is that we don’t have a full accounting of the ways in which human activity causes warming.
What we can do is predict the arc of motion of the centre of gravity .. that's climate.
It's a no-brainer that anybody who confuses the two and hasn't put in the work to raise their understanding to intermediate axis instability is below the bar for admission to grown up climate modelling discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_racket_theorem
What's impressive is that some people are so invested in not understanding climate that they reject the notion that larger trends can be bloody obvious before anyone can predict day-to-day variances. (Again, a basic principle that our stone tools ancestors figured out.)
Obviously, meteorology doesn't work over a 50-100 years time frame -- "What's the temperature on January 20th 2064 and 9PM" is an impossible question to answer. But climatologists are not attempting to answer the same question as meteorologists. They're studying a much easier variable to predict, which is averages of phenomena, where all the short-term complicated meteorological noise cancels itself out due to the law of large numbers.
a casino can't predict the next 14 blackjack cards, but somehow it can predict the profit over the next 365 days (millions of blackjack cards)
just sayin.
It should also be noted that the type of C in CO2 matters:
> In addition, only fossil fuels are consistent with the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon in today’s atmosphere. Different kinds of carbon-containing material have different relative amounts of “light” carbon-12, “heavy” carbon-13, and radioactive carbon-14. Plant matter is enriched in carbon-12, because its lighter weight is more readily used by plants during photosynthesis. Volcanic emissions are enriched in carbon-13. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere and the ocean are roughly the same. Since carbon-14 is radioactive, it decays predictably over time. Young organic matter has more carbon-14 than older organic matter, and fossil fuels have no measurable carbon-14 at all.
> As carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen over the past century or more, the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 has fallen, which means that the source of the extra carbon dioxide must be enriched in "light" carbon-12. Meanwhile, the relative amount of carbon-14—radioactive carbon—has declined. The record of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is complicated by nuclear bomb testing after 1950, which doubled the amount of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. After the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, the excess atmospheric carbon-14 began to decline as it dispersed into the oceans and the land biosphere.
* https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-k...
> In this “Grand Challenges” paper, we review how the carbon isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 has changed since the Industrial Revolution due to human activities and their influence on the natural carbon cycle, and we provide new estimates of possible future changes for a range of scenarios. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and land use change reduce the ratio of 13C/12C in atmospheric CO2 (δ13CO2). This is because 12C is preferentially assimilated during photosynthesis and δ13C in plant-derived carbon in terrestrial ecosystems and fossil fuels is lower than atmospheric δ13CO2. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion also reduce the ratio of 14C/C in atmospheric CO2 (Δ14CO2) because 14C is absent in million-year-old fossil fuels, which have been stored for much longer than the radioactive decay time of 14C.
* https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
They're not "skeptics". They're not even deniers. They're just liars.
There is no universe in which you can dig vast amounts of carbon, burn it, and not have things warm up. There are lots of hard questions but the fundamental fact that the globe has to warm is an unavoidable conclusion.
If you’ve ever owned a Fish Tank or taken High School Chemistry, you’d realize that even in the most simple environments things don’t always add up in a way that seems intuitive.
https://www-wikiberal-org.translate.goog/wiki/Liste_de_scien...
My denial is tactical in nature for the mere fact I don't think being eco-friendly or a climate-skeptic changes anything in the end when it comes to CO2 emission. Going the amish way certainly does, but 1°) nobody is advocating for this 2°) it wouldn't be feasible for whole societies, they would collapse. Additionally the proposed solution to the greenhouse gas problem, namely energetic transition, is compromised by the ongoing Peak Everything [1]. It's of course not an absolute wall and people working on obscure topics such as [2] are contributing a lot more than people arguing for or against the reality of anthropogenic climate change on a political level. These people should instead focus on other issues where activism would be a lot more useful, in particular the decline in insect populations (about 75% loss in 26 years for Germany, in absolute mass, not number of species) [3]. Advocacy to get rid of neonicotinoids would be a more efficient way to combat the impeding collapse of Nature.
Finally, I don't think it's a matter of political decision: we don't have the solution to the problem of greenhouse gas and the only outcome it can have is a form of self-punishment and eco-morale. I'd prefer to die of starvation in a desertic earth than suffer this kind of hypocritical tyranny that advocates both for reduction in natality and substitution immigration to offset it.
The only form of solution I could be satisfied with is some kind of AI-driven system to figure it out, not for its supposed super-cognitive abilities, but for the methods employed in ML. In this perspective, every new scientific paper, every ecological experimentation should be logged and ageggated automatically to update some global gradient, without having to face political mediatic inertia. This would allow us to deploy solutions such as Lorenzo Furlan agricultural insurance against pesticide [4]. Of course I had to use google translate for this link. This proves my point.
[1] https://shorturl.at/IJMS1 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/abs/pii/S2... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations [4] https://www-pollinis-org.translate.goog/publications/lorenzo...
Few people ever really change their mind about anything; they just get older and die and their opinions get removed from the discourse.
I'm mostly referring, of course, to the baby boomers, which is a bit ironic because they're the ones who actually remember that the Jersey River used to freeze every winter (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion).
My own father has a degree in geology and had a career in the mining industry… his own take drifted from "this is ridiculous" to "okay it's happening but there have been plenty of similar shifts in the geological record over history." I had to actually show him graphs that illustrated that yes, the earth has shifted temperature by 2º plenty of times in history… over periods of hundreds or thousands of years, not a single century. Now his take has drifted to "there's probably nothing that can be done about it."
Anyone pushing for societal change and progress needs to get themselves out of the mindset of "changing minds," it's like swing voters, they're barely real.
Most of them in the western industrialized countries could never imagine or want another way of living because this was the promise and evidence of progress and success since they were born.
Unfortunately I wish I shared your optimism that things will change after the boomers pass. I am from and have family in Alberta, oil country, and there's... just no chance. Some of the most vicious deniers (or worse, the "don't carers") are young.
I feel like things are swinging back the other way, and quickly.
When things start to fall apart people can have two reactions to it... stick and work together to solve the problem, or scatter and hoard and everyman-for-himself and proclaim "I got mine, now get lost..."
There are no alternative facts.
I think you need to learn more about Earth's history. Not to dispute the fact that it has increased, but it's totally false to say this is unseen in Earth's history.
Dynamical systems are often sensitive to the value of a parameter, its rate of change and/or its rate of rate of change.
Eg. You can warm milk to a certain temperature (the parameter) on a stove on gentle heat and it will be fine. If you warm it to the same temperature on high heat (i.e. increased rate of parameter), it will burn. That's because the convection process in this system has limited maximum speed.
If you look at when previously the Earth's atmosphere had high CO2, it took hundreds of thousands to many millions of years get there. We did it in a 100 years, so at least a thousand times faster.
I'm not denying that the rate is significant in this specific conversation, but maybe that wasn't the best example?
From a cursory look, any such events look like they were part of mass extinctions. I'm curious what exact data you are looking at so I may better understand your statement.
Again, if you have any evidence or citations to the contrary, "put up or shut up".
ppm. Parts per million. 0.0421%
The oceans can absorb a practically infinite amount of CO2, so there's no way for it to build up in the atmosphere in the long run. Also, the atmosphere is already saturated with CO2 to the point where adding more will have no effect. Also, water vapor's absorption spectrum overlaps that of CO2 so there is no way for CO2 to have any additional effect. All of these facts were known more than a century ago, and consequently AGW was considered disproved.
"Skeptics" should not read past this point, because it turns out all of those things are misleading. The oceans don't mix fast enough to prevent CO2 buildup, and the action of CO2 is felt not in the lower atmosphere but at the radiative top-of-atmosphere, the point where outgoing infrared radiation is more likely to escape to space than strike another molecule. Adding CO2 makes the CO2-dense region greater in extent, thus the outgoing heat takes longer to leave Earth, thus raising the total atmosphere temperature and causing a nasty feedback mechanism with H2O. Because this changes which elevation energy gets radiated at, we can directly measure it. Checkmate skeptics.
To tie this back in to the main point, Callendar was one of the prime movers in rehabilitating the AGW theory (one of his papers amusingly refers to the theory's "checkered past"), but it took until Keeling's work in the late 1950s to conclusively demonstrate the year-over-year increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
And you're totally missing my point. GP came up with a backwarded way to prove your point so I stooped to that level and came up with the equivalent reasoning that's held on the other side since he was asking for it. Funnily, you're more adamant to address my comment than his because you're more attached to the resulting truth than the reasoning step that lead to it. Admit it, it's not a matter of science anymore, it's entirely politically motivated. I wish you good luck with your control system challenge, I'm sure it will be very nuanced.
I can't find the exact quote, but to put it in perspective: the weight of the extra C02 added in the last 100 years is more than the sum total of everything humanity has built. The actual quote might be everything from the last 2000 years, regardless, same point. If you weigh all of that CO2, it's an enormous amount.
That's still a retarded argument and way below any scientific standard. Now that climate change has become the dominant worldview we witness the bigotisation of this cause, where so called "truth" becomes the target of activism as it as it morphs into a form of belief. Not because what it points to is wrong, but because, as in any politically motivated crusade, any mean, path to reach that truth is deemed worthwhile. This noble cause has turned into a matter of adolescent rebellion that is dealt with absolutism and a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations. What if the phenomenon is overblown by the political movement that tries to fight its consequences ? What if the proposed solutions are more painful than the problem ? To hell with these considerations ! You're either with us or against us in our fight against apocalypse itself ! It's not surprising that as the hysteria grows and gains more and more minds, and as the climate skeptics crowd thins out, the figure of the "climate change denier" grows in importance. It's important for communities to have a malevolent figure against which hateful unanimity takes shapes. It allows them to endure the test of time, and survive even when the core beliefs are shaken, should the "deniers" turn into tomorrow's saints. May the crowd turn to them as it even forgets it is changing opinion so as to atone its own sins. Isn't it what this all about ? Recognizing climate urgency as a way to pay for the sins of modern life ? What was the point in abandoning religion if it was to repeat exactly the same structure then ?
Otherwise, what makes you believe the total volume of CO2 is irrelevant?
> This noble cause has turned into a matter of adolescent rebellion that is dealt with absolutism and a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations
Pot calling the kettle black?
Can you put forth evidence why percentage composition is more important than total volume? I believe chemistry and thermodynamics come into play, volumes matter when balancing thermal dynamic equations. Thus, it is those equations that imply a 50% increase in volume, while still an overall small fraction of some other total composition, would have a significant impact on Earths climate systems
>a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations
What happens if it turns out climate change's origin is not human activity ? Or it's considerably less worse than anticipated ? Or even beneficial ?
Imagine if measures are taken globally in some kind of global government to impose restrictions and its proves to be a massive fuckup for nothing in the end. It will be probably the nail in the coffin for any attempt to regulate the earth system scientifically. What's at stake is huge. Both ways.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Psalms 32:5
^ You're here. Seethe all you want, you're biggots of the kind you hate the most.
Where I’m from, the climate has changed. It is changing. You don’t need scientific instruments to notice it.
As far as I can tell, the orthodox AGW theory fits the evidence and has predicted these changes better than any alternative explanation I’ve heard so far. As far as I’m concerned, ideology doesn’t really come into it.
Not an argument for the fact it's driven by human activity. However it suggests that you paint the past climate as some harmonious system on short time ranges:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event
>the 8.2-kiloyear event was a sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred approximately 8,200 years before the present, or c. 6,200 BC, and which lasted for the next two to four centuries.
>[...]
>Estimates of the cooling vary and depend somewhat on the interpretation of the proxy data, but decreases of around 1 to 5 °C (1.8 to 9.0 °F) have been reported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2-kiloyear_event
>Starting around 2200 BC, it probably lasted the entire 22nd century BC. It has been hypothesised to have caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, and the Liangzhu culture in the lower Yangtze River area.[4][5] The drought may also have initiated the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation, with some of its population moving southeastward to follow the movement of their desired habitat,[6] as well as the migration of Indo-European-speaking people into India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
>The African humid period (AHP; also known by other names) is a climate period in Africa during the late Pleistocene and Holocene geologic epochs, when northern Africa was wetter than today. The covering of much of the Sahara desert by grasses, trees and lakes was caused by changes in the Earth's axial tilt; changes in vegetation and dust in the Sahara which strengthened the African monsoon; and increased greenhouse gases.
>One study in 2003 showed that vegetation intrusions in the Sahara can occur within decades after strong rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide[952] but would not cover more than about 45% of the Sahara.[53] That climate study also indicated that vegetation expansion can only occur if grazing or other perturbations to vegetation growth do not hamper it.[953] On the other hand, increased irrigation and other measures to increase vegetation growth such as the Great Green Wall could enhance it.[950] A 2022 study indicated that while increased greenhouse gas concentrations by themselves are not sufficient to start an AHP if greenhouse gas-vegetation feedbacks are ignored, they lower the threshold for orbital changes to induce Sahara greening.
i.e. in the next generation, unless one's home is equipped with a fancy filtration system, breathing air will have issues on its own, anywhere in the world.
Indeed! It's also quite possible that some of the humans that will live forever (or until they choose not to) may already be around us.
And, rather sadly, if climate change happens as predicted it is going to make for a pretty bleak existence. It's one reason I'm fairly happy not to have had kids.
What do you think of Emil Cioran, btw? It may pique your interest.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deadly-african-he...
If you shift a normal distribution to the right even a little bit, the frequency of tail events above a fixed threshold (in this case, wet bulb temperatures exceeding the human survivability limit of 35 degrees celcius) increases more than linearly.
This is especially an issue near the equator, which will lead to climate refugees seeking colder climates, north and south.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/extreme-co2-levels-could-trigger...
We will be at 2000 in 640 years.
Previously those rates of change were over the course of millions of years.
It is crazy how much things have changed over millions of years, perhaps crazier to see those same changes 3 orders of magnitude faster.
Humans only started farming 12,000 years ago (which I still find shockingly recent), and humans used to farm all over the middle east (thinking if Iraq specifically, it used to be largely arable).
All in all, it's getting really spicy for next couple centuries.
* except, the earth climate system can't change that fast relative to an impulse difference of Co2 levels. It us akin to putting 10 blankets on your bed. It takes time for heat to build up (the system experiences a latent effect)
In indoor urban spaces, concentrations are probably already typically 800ppm. It might explain some of our social dysfunction...
[1] https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ove...
Just popped up on my news feed, "Archaeologist braves the Joe Rogan podcast to counter Graham Hancock's nonsense":
* https://boingboing.net/2024/04/19/archaeologist-braves-the-j...
Episode in question, "Joe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint Dibble":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL1_EMIw6w
(Entire episode is 4h26m long: I don't have to interest/patience for that personally.)
You can watch 70 minutes of another youtuber reviewing the debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haKFyj-2OVw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1_u8N53utw
Just kidding. I suspect that's an interglacial when you have warming and melting but before the trees have grown back to recapture the co2. But check with an expert if you want a more authoritative answer.
Otherwise very cool link.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fac...
or the 1896 paper ""On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground"
Sounds like he posted his findings to HN.
It's certainly not causative, and I don't see the steps from A to B.
It is taking a long time for the resulting concerted disinformation campaign to fall apart though.
Alas, reality is often more on the nose than one would expect.
See lithium batteries, a technology with many problems but probably our best bet for the energy transition, being invented by a guy named Goodenough.
*Edit:* Ahh I see, capitalized not uppercased.