by disco stu » 16 Nov 2021, 1:01 pm
When I was first studying climate change, near on 20yrs ago, the predictions made by the IPCC were crazy. We should be looking at 50cm plus sea level rise by now, which we obviously aren't.
The thing with climate change, from a scientific standpoint, is that you can't say with much certainty how much it's caused by humans. We don't know all the variables that go into climate, so looking at changing one variable is hard. So anyone who says with confidence that humans are definitely changing the climate can't be trusted.
On the flip side, we can't also say that we definitely aren't changing it. So anyone who declares with confidence that humans aren't changing the climate can't be trusted.
The problem with science and climate change is that is everything needed some climate aspect to it to get approved for funding. So friends from uni who were doing research had to basically put climate into their research to get approval, so it ends up becoming more and more hyped. One friend had to change their lychen study to the effect of climate change on lychen to get it going.
There was also the issue of anyone who presented research showing doubt about climate change being caused by humans was basically boycotted, people waking out of conferences etc. Scientists want to do research, so if they wanted to keep a good reputation they had to toe the line and not do silly things like cast doubt on such well established facts like climate change (note, a scientific fact has to be able to repeatedly be tested with consistent results. You can't do this with climate).
Of the thousands of signatories to the IPCC reports, the majority weren't climate scientists, they were specialists in other areas who took the info from the climatologists and then said that x about of temp change would lead to x amount of sea level rise, y amount of coastal erosion etc.
I had one of them as a lecturer, and he struggled to think to be honest. I submitted a GIS assignment that showed a 50cm sea level rise would lead to an increase in mangrove population of a particular south coast estuary. I included all of my reasoning, data sources, analysis etc etc, and he just couldn't understand how that wouldn't lead to a reduction in mangroves. He just couldn't think beyond himself.
My father in law is a climatologist and a coastal geomorphologist who worked at a uni for his whole career, so he saw the whole thing from the inside. He doesn't have much good to say about the research or the openness of things around this. He just kept his mouth shut on most things for the sake of his career.
My personal thinking is like someone posted above-in many years time I reckon it will be like we are now about global cooling from 50odd years ago. "Hey, remember how they used to think that humans were changing the climate" type thing. But to harp back to what I said earlier, I can't say this with much certainty. My opinion, no harm in trying to reduce CO2 emissions if it isn't knee jerk reactions that are actually harmful to the environment. With statements like "the greatest threat to face humanity", people have proposed some scary solutions. Plus most people can't think, so just some because no exhaust is coming out their tailpipe then they're saving the planet, not realising that their electric car has to travel more than ~120 000km before it starts getting ahead of the emissions of a petrol car.
Anyway, I'll go back to trying to deliberately avoid this thread because it's about climate change
.
