This is what people should really be worrying about ...

[shedview]

Even if you haven't been worried (yet) by current increases in extreme weather events, this should ring alarm bells. These currents are what keep the UK and other northern European countries relatively warm compared to Greenland. : BBC News - Antarctic ocean currents heading for collapse- report
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-65120327

@Raggletagglegypsy sorry, but that isn't evidence, it's just a positioning piece as are the majority of her publications.

But if I asked you for evidence, your starting point would probably be the 'authoritative' work of the IPCC , which so often informs the overarching narrative - therefore, an assessment of the contents of IPCC evidence constitutes precisely the evidence requested to support my position that the science is not settled. There may be a degree of consensus with respect to the fundamentals of the underpinning physical processes of GHGs - but the resulting application of this knowledge, through complex computer modelling, within a complex atmospheric system, has resulted in a wide range of possible outcomes - for which the science is not settled and suggestions to the contrary are disingenuous. The same body of scientific evidence furnishes different interpretations (and positions) and needs to be understood within that context. I am not sure what other evidence of my personal position you would be looking for.

@Daftasabroom thank you for your sensible and measured posts. They’ve really helped me previously when I’ve struggled with climate anxiety/grief.

I know there’s a lot still to do and much to be anxious and fearful of, but it feels as though we’re reaching a bit of a turning point, in terms of climate action becoming much more mainstream. Renewables have also become more economically viable than new fossil fuels, and the environment/green tech are at the forefront of investment (see the IR Act in the US and Labour’s decarbonisation/renewables plan for the UK).

It’s unfortunate that it’s taken money to make environmentally-friendly measures palatable, but it’s happening and that’s a positive. Trajectories for roll-out of EVs and solar power, for example, are really impressive.

Like a PP, I’ve got a bit of hope and optimism from finding out more about this side of things. The ‘Volts’ podcast is really interesting on this stuff too, and there’s a couple of really detailed episodes on the IR Act.

This is evidence:

Annual global temperature change (thin light red) with 11 year moving average of temperature (thick dark red). Temperature from NASA GISS. Annual Total Solar Irradiance (thin light blue) with 11 year moving average of TSI (thick dark blue). TSI from 1880 to 1978 from Krivova et al. 2007. TSI from 1979 to 2015 from the World Radiation Center (see their PMOD index page for data updates). Plots of the most recent solar irradiance can be found at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics LISIRD site.

Solar warming going down, temperature going up. Conclusion: current global warming is not linked to solar activity.

@Raggletagglegypsy There may be a degree of consensus with respect to the fundamentals of the underpinning physical processes of GHGs - but the resulting application of this knowledge, through complex computer modelling, within a complex atmospheric system, has resulted in a wide range of possible outcomes - for which the science is not settled

You're standing on the edge of a cliff and 999 scientist told there was 95% chance of death, and 1 scientist told the risk was only 75% would you jump?

For the umpteenth time I am not disagreeing that global warming has and is occurring - you are setting up a strawman argument. I am saying that there is disagreement within the scientific community about the extent of the projected future warming and the degree to which suggested reductions in anthropogenic GHGs will impact on those modelled predictions.
This cannot be decided by selecting and presenting isolated pieces of evidence (as you have done in your separately posted graph) - such evidence has to be interpreted in the round, within the context of the physics of the biosphere. That is a complicated business that cannot be reduced to any single piece of evidence - it is not simplistic, causal correlation - it has multiple potential layers of both positive and negative feedback loops that are inadequately understood.
As already quoted (in a previous post) from climatologist Dr Judith Curry "there is considerable disagreement about the most consequential issues: whether the recent warming has been dominated by human causes versus natural variability, how much the planet will warm in the 21st century, whether warming is ‘dangerous’, and whether radically reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will improve the climate and human well being in the 21st century." Thus, it is not, as many seem keen to suggest, a simple narrative of settled science.

Literally have no dog in this race (beyond the risks to humanity obviously!) - what I mean is that I don't fully understand the science behind climate change.

That said, I've really enjoyed your reasoned arguments and the fact you're not resorting to childishness or slurs like many threads on MN devolve into when there's a disagreement. Bravo!

I saw this yesterday but it's too huge for me to take in and it's too terrifying to deal with. What can we do to change it, as individuals?

Write to your MP and ask what they are doing about it.

Vote with this existential threat to our survival in mind.

Do what you can as a consumer to help our country hit our environmental targets.

Reduce consumption and flights

www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/how-many-clothes-do-we-need/amp

hotorcool.org/1-5-degree-lifestyles-report/

@Blackisthecolour

Skip straight to the last line if you want a quick explanation.

Most of the energy from the Sun that reaches the Earth does so as visible light. When that light reaches the surface, the sun-bathers, the sea, the air, your house, the Artic and Antarctic, the mountains and forest (or what’s left of it), anywhere touched by light will absorb the Sun’s energy.

As the energy is absorbed, whatever it is (a body) will (usually) warm up, i.e. increase in temperature.

As the body warms it will emit energy (usually) in the form of infra-red radiation. Don’t worry this isn’t scary radiation and is quite literally how radiators work.
When you take dinner out of the oven, assuming it’s not actually on fire, much of the heat it gives off is the form of infra-red radiation. (This doesn’t apply to pop-tarts or cheese on toast, that’s conduction, or to the big wave of heat when you open the oven door, that’s convection).

So, we have a sun-bather, or a tarmac road that has been warmed by the Sun all day but by morning it’s cool (or maybe not in the case of the sun-bather), that’s because it has emitted a lot of energy back out as infra-red radiation.
As we all know the Earth’s atmosphere is made up of many different gases, stuff like clouds and particles from smoke or volcanoes.

Nitrogen (N2), Oxygen (O2) and Argon (Ar) account for 99.9% of atmospheric gases. These gases allow visible light in and infra-red out. We need them to live so it’s a good job there’s lots around.

That last 0.1% hides a whole load of troublemakers, not least greenhouse gasses.
Greenhouse gasses (GHG) allow visible light to pass through on its way to the Earth surface, but, absorb or reflect infra-red back the way it came. CO2 is the poster boy for GHGs but NOx, and the F gases are far more potent, just fortunately not so abundant. Over the last 150yrs or so we have increased the GHGs by roughly 45%.

This means energy from the Sun reaches the Earth just like it used to but it can’t escape like it used to.

I'll post some links but the best analogy I can think of is this:

If for millennia until 200 years ago our atmosphere was single glazed, it’s now double glazed.

Form communities!

I already do all those things, @verdantverdure.

I belong to environmental organisations. I haven't flown for years. I recycle and buy second hand.

But none of it seems enough.

@Daftasabroom I have no idea what you do for a job but if it's not some form of teaching, I'd be surprised because that was a brilliant explanation. Genuinely, thanks so much for that, I read it and fully understood (for once!)

Thank you @Blackisthecolour I'm not a teacher, but I do work in STEM research which involves a bit of outreach.

For anyone genuinely worried, I found this conversation between an academic atmospheric physicist and a former economic professor fascinating. It certainly helps give a different perspective and addresses issues of actual evidence. I would be interested to know what other critical thinkers make of the opinions voiced. @Blackisthecolour and @Daftasabroom might welcome this aspect. It strays off climate stuff into the world of academia and associated issues in the middle (the economist has an understandable axe to grind, and a business to push). But I suppose it is all interconnected, and it gets back onto the science and the IPCC towards the end. The physicist was once the lead author for the IPCC's chapter on physical climate processes and feedback, back in the day, but feels their reports are not scientifically rigorous in the way they are presented. He illustrates this with reference to the fact that their headline summaries for policy makers are published 6 months in advance of the actual IPCC reports, so that they have scope to go back and 'rewrite' the science if it has been misunderstood or misrepresented in the summaries! He says that very few people bother to read, or would be capable of understanding, the science of the actual report's scientific content (content that sounds pretty constrained anyway). He also goes on to point out how, in his expert opinion (and he is one of the leading experts in the field of atmospheric physics) the global warming narrative is fundamentally flawed in respect to its modelling of physical climate, in the way it uses the tropics as the main driver - or something along those lines - also bemoans the movement away from proper theoretical science to a over-dependence on models at a point when they need to be focusing on quantitatively isolating components of the climatic system - as these are not yet understood adequately enough to form the basis of a conceptual framework (I may not be representing the exact science of his views correctly, but it is the gist).

https://www.google.com/search?q=professor+lindzen&tbm=vid&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:y&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5z8uuooj-AhWCdcAKHSH0B8IQpwV6BAgKECA&biw=1745&bih=881&dpr=1.1#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:5edcd743,vid:spKTb3wMmJM

@raggety3 I had a long reply ready to go but I shut the tab by mistake.

I can kind of see where they are coming from, but professor Lindzen takes a very purest and dogmatic approach. He seems far more interested in perfecting specific elements of climate models rather than applying what we do know and recognizing and mitigating the variability in the existing models. Without saying so he seems to be dismissing empirical and analytical modelling in favor of a purely rational approach.

For instance he mentions the Navier-Stokes equations which are commonly used to model fluid dynamics, from aircraft to ships, blood flow, weather and climate. Yes we know they are not perfect and cannot be proven to work for all boundary conditions, but they are actually amazingly good.

The NS equations are based on Newtonian physics and were developed 150 to 200 years ago, the fact that they are still relevant today, as are Newton's laws is nothing short of incredible. Again we know Newton's laws are not universally applicable and that quantum physics is starting to fill the gaps. Lindzen acknowledges the limits of our understanding of real world quantum effects. The implication being that we don't know anything until we know everything.

I'll add a bit more in due course, but, if we wait another 200 years before taking action on climate change we're pretty well screwed.

Thank you for taking the time to look at it, it is a bit of a long one. You seem very knowledgeable about the science side of things. 🙂He probably was dogmatic (or war weary!), but then there seems to be dogma on both sides of the debate.

I think you are right in your assessment that he took rather a purist academic approach. That said, if he is correct in his assessment, there is a worrying lack of scientific purism and rigour in general.

Whilst I agree with your point about time potentially being of the essence, and the need to embrace the speed that powerful computer modelling can offer, it seems troubling that more resources are not available to also focus on the development of critical scientific skills and understanding alongside this, so that model algorithms can be fine-tuned in the right way.

Whatever, we live in interesting times for sure. The sooner we can get people out of their cars and onto their feet, the better, in my opinion! 😋

Sorry, I forgot to tag you into my previous post @Daftasabroom to thank you for getting back to me on that video of the academic exchange! Thank you! 😊Pity there is no edit function on this site!

@raggety3 I think what we have now in terms of models and rigour is pretty good and, as they say, perfect is the enemy of good.

Basically, GHG emissions from burning fossil fuels is causing an almost unprecedented change in the climate of our planet. When there have been changes of this significance in the past they have been associated with disruptive or mass extinction events.

We know what is causing climate change. We know if we don't do anything it could be anywhere from bad to very bad. We also know what we can do to limit the damage. We need to stop burning fossil fuels.

@Daftasabroom you make some excellent points - clearly not daft as your name suggests! 😊

The IPCC Summary for Policy makers is a kind of dummies guide to the full IPCC reports. Our UK Climate Change Committee also issue similar as do many other organizations.

The COP26 IPCC reports were each over 600 pages and SfPM was something like 180 (from memory). Lindzen makes a good point that no single person can get their head round all of the science, in my organization we tend to delegate a chapter or two to specialists who can then produce recommendations.

One of the challenges with really really big reports with multiple authors and contributors is getting agreement on the minutiae of the text. I've often sat in meetings with researchers who are umming and ahhing or squabbling over some minor detail of a report but when asked if it would change their recommendations one way or another the answer is no the recommendation is good.

So we often issue an executive summary with report to follow. Not perfect perhaps but pragmatic and allows us to move forward.

Nice!

@raggety3 Thanks for linking through to that interview, not one I had seen, although I have seen recordings of presentations that he has given - included one in an earlier post. I was impressed by Prof. Lindzen, after stumbling across his work some years ago. . He seems like a reputable, but frustrated, scientist who has raised genuine concerns about the science underpinning anthropogenic global warming.

I’m not sure there’s any point just worrying about it is there OP? I don’t think you are going to convert anyone to anything by trying to get them to worry. They either already are or have decided to ignore it.

@Daftasabroom You say, "professor Lindzen takes a very purest and dogmatic approach. He seems far more interested in perfecting specific elements of climate models rather than applying what we do know..."
Heaven forbid that we should have scientists who actually takes a purist approach to the science! Surely, the problem is that if the scientific building blocks on which models are programmed are intrinsically wrong, the range of predictions that they churn out, which inform our policy responses, will also be wrong - and this matters hugely. The "specific elements" of climate models are absolutely key. As Lindzen said, nothing has changed to make the scientific basis for anthropogenic global warming any more credible now than when it was viewed as lacking in credibility back in the 1980s - the only thing that has changed is the political agenda (for any number of possible reasons). We have now gone so far that too many have a vested interest in perpetuating the narrative - whether that interest is economic or simply misplaced passion of those who have been whipped into a frenzy of hysteria by the propaganda!