Are Scientists Downplaying the “Actual Likelihood” of Climate Change?

In My Humble Opinion
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Splintered off from the “Unsupported Science Beliefs That You Hold” topic to avoid derailing that thread:

I’ll note that @echoreply does qualify this as his “unsupported belief” so I don’t intend this to be a criticism of them, but I just don’t think that either of the bolded statements are true. I’ve spent the last dozen years delving deeply into the technical literature on various aspects of climate system modeling (including building some models of my own, albeit highly simplified, to understand the complexity and challenges of the field), and frankly what I’ve seen is an increasing undertone of alarm, dread, and horror tempered by an academic need to present measured data and model projections as objectively as possible and qualified by the large uncertainties in the progression of phenomena that are not only well outside of our experience but are not even anchored by evidence from the geological record. Because the general public doesn’t understand statistics or even basic uncertainty, what is often reported in popular science are the ‘mean’ trends or projections with just a side note made to qualifications about that the model or data does not represent, but the reality is that climate scientists writ large have hewed much further to the ‘much worse’ projections than the media generally reports upon and that most people will accept as ‘reasonable’.

There has been criticism in recent years that scientists aren’t communicating more definitive statements to the public about the increasingly dire outlook, but this is kind of like complaining that an accountant uses too many numbers, and notwithstanding the criticism from sources of climate change denial who will pick at any discrepancy or error to ‘prove’ that the entire field is just a house of cards. That said, there is an increasing trend of people working in various areas of climate science who are presenting alarming projections (and indeed, in many areas it is difficult to avoid ‘catastrophizing’) as well as the emerging field of “attribution science” which attempts to pin specific weather events and climate trends on climate change. I think if you ask almost anyone working in global climate modeling, cryosphere research, and especially marine biology if they think that the future trends are veering strongly toward an increasingly desperate and untenable future for humanity, the majority will agree and will list various ways in which this will be realized, but they’ll also have to acknowledge that there are many, many unknowns which make it impossible to make a scientifically-grounded prediction.

And of course there are the many legions of naysayers who argue that “the only constant is change”, that we can fix things tomorrow with magical technology that we don’t have today, or that we’ll just adapt by building seawalls, vertical farming, Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide, or my favorite, spraypainting the sky with aerosols to block out ‘excess’ sunlight which will fur-sure not have any deleterious side effects, and use these arguments to claim that climate scientists are “cry-babies” who are being hyperbolic to attract more funding and celebrity, to which the media gives far too much attention and credence to in order to achieve some theoretical measure of ‘balance’. This is notwithstanding all of the other planetary boundaries that are being demonstrably exceeded in the effort to sustain industrial society and expand the benefits of globalized trade to ‘new markets’. One does wonder why economists—whose job it is to look at trade and industry in a systematic, global fashion—aren’t being called out as a profession for not looking at these hypothetical efforts to decarbonize the global economy while sustaining or even accelerating growth and calling bullshit on the basis of energy and resource extraction limits, and the improbably exponential rates of industrial growth to achieve them in the foreseeable future.

I think that if you actually look the data and conclusions of at what many scientists working in climate and associated fields are actually producing, you can see the clamorous warnings and dismal outlook…again, tempered by a need to be objective in not just emphasizing the worst case projections. I think there is an argument that policy should be looking at more worst-case projections because you can only roll sevens at the craps table so many times, but there are also realistic limits on what policy can physically accomplish even if there was a broad consensus about the severity of the outlook, and in the case of climate change and the energy, agriculture, and industrial systems that produce excess carbon dioxide, there is realistically little that can be done that wouldn’t completely undermine national and the global economy upon which governing power relies.

Stranger

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This is exactly the phenomenon I was talking about. I probably overstated what I meant, and certainly didn’t say it nearly as succinctly.

To add to what you’re saying, even in the non-corporate shill media I’ve seen people say that doomsaying and catastrophizing is counter productive. The idea being if you say “we’re all doomed” then everyone will give up, ensuring we are doomed. I find that really disingenuous, because, you know, we’re all doomed.

I feel like the place we are now as far as bringing mitigations online is where we needed to be in the early 90s. Excuses about we didn’t have the technology then don’t count. It doesn’t matter, we needed to be working hard to get them.

As for economists, politicians, and corporate types, I’m really sick of their “think about the profits” mantra. Profits go to zero when the consumers are all dead, and that is the course we are speeding along.

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I just want to reinforce the point that I wasn’t really trying to pick on you, or have any general disagreement with your points other than that I don’t think scientists in general are trying to downplay the severity of observations and the consequences. In most cases I think that the focus of research is so necessarily narrow that the broader implications are not apparent to the casual reader or someone getting their information filtered through the lens of popular science media. Most scientists working on some area of climate-related are adverse to trying to tie their work to other areas in which they do not have expertise because it potentially impacts their credibility if they make even a small error, and it is easy to be seen as ‘Chicken Little-ism’ if you’re screaming about permafrost loss or collapse of shellfish populations because the public doesn’t have the knowledge base to process this in the context of the larger concern.

If there is a bias in reporting conclusions, it is in the vein of wanting to be indisputably factually correct about definitive statements, and sufficiently hedged in areas where there is any doubt. In the case of cryosphere research and modeling, the science is so far out in front of data and for which the models are so complex (involving all three physical phases of water, which turns out to be a surprisingly complex substance to characterize in its myriad of climate interactions) and have to represent very different timescales of interaction for various mechanisms, that there is just an enormous amount of uncertainty.

To @Ludovic’s statements in the original thread, I think it can be said with confidence that there is physically no way that the entire ice sheet will melt into the ocean on the timescale of a year owing to the latent heat of fusion of ice and the maximum rate at which the sheet could feasibly progress into even a rising and warming ocean, but it used to be a consensus that it would take many centuries—perhaps millennia—before it could collapse and raise the ocean level by tens of feet, and now there is far less agreement and more concern that this could pose a risk within just a few centuries or even many decades. And there is no mechanism to reverse that other than Milanković cycles, which given that we should be in the middle of a glacial period now means that the current anthropogenically created interglacial condition is likely to last for many tens of thousands of years.

I’ve been saying for decades that the time to start addressing this was at the end of the Cold War, when the resources and scientific establishment that was dedicated to that conflict could have been turned to addressing this issue (which was already known about in general environmental science circles and was introduced to lawmakers in the ‘Eighties with the testimony of James Hanson and Carl Sagan (among others). It certainly would have made a lot of sense, not just in terms of ecology but from a national security and economic stability standpoint to develop energy sources and transportation technology that are not dependent upon foreign oil and the military and political entanglements that come with it. But the problem is not fundamentally about technology; while we can develop technology to abate emissions and provide alternatives, the real shift is in the area of policy, and specifically reducing unnecessary emissions, waste, and development for the sake of economic growth rather than long term health of either nations or human populations.

Since the 1980s the developed world has been on an unregulated growth spurt—often referred to as the “Carbon Pulse” by energy pundits—fueled almost exclusively by coal, oil, and natural gas, which not only produced ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions (not just CO2 but methane, nitrous oxide, and the fluorinated gaseous compounds which are per unit mass more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat). A more reserved pattern of growth and greater efficiency in the use of energy and greenhouse gas-producing industrial and agricultural processes would have given decades more time to understand climate forcing mechanisms and develop alternatives, but the need for economic growth to fuel globalization (both to produce consumers and cheap labor bases) was pushed by the neoliberal agenda, resulting in both self-reinforcing population growth and a web of interdependencies so intricate that they cannot be dismantled without putting billions of lives at risk of famine, and causing ‘advanced’ industrial economies which are dependent upon constant expansion to collapse into inflationary/deflationary cycles.

The failure of economists, and economics in general, is the treatment of all things that do not have an immediate dollar-value cost or merit as “externalities”; they treat the world and all interactions within it as exchanges of currency or commodities that can be measured in units of economic value without regard to effects that cannot be quantified. And I think we just need to assume that corporations—which if they are to be treated as ‘people; under law should be assumed to be sociopaths—will be interested in profits over all other considerations because money is the literal lifeblood that makes large businesses work. But my argument with economists isn’t this (although it is a fundamental problem in relying on economic forecasts as virtually the sole guide for policy or assessing national health or societal value); it is that they aren’t standing up to the ‘green tech’ crowd and pointing out that we aren’t going to ‘save the world’ or ‘solve climate change’ by building electric cars, building wind farms or nuclear fission plans, or ‘greening’ building construction. Regardless of how good or bad these technologies might hypothetically be for the environment, we simply cannot deploy them at scale while retiring or remediating the products and infrastructure they replace within the time and resource constraints that exist, and in fact trying to push replacement by some unrealistically arbitrary may actually be worse than doing nothing at all. It’s another case of ignoring externalities, which in this case are actual physical limitations on what resources can be made available and the often severe ecological and human costs of doing so.

In any case, I don’t think the problem is that scientists are biased against telling the bitter truth (certainly not the ones I know and have spoken to in my efforts to become at least marginally competent at understanding various aspects of climate science and ecology), nor that there is a collective peer pressure to sugar-coat the news of impending catastrophe. There is perhaps not small amount of what could be termed “toxic positivity” in assuming that somebody will come along with brilliant technology or policy innovations to fix a system that is accelerating toward a cliff edge, but then anyone who just espouses that we’re intractably headed toward doom is not going to get any part of the rest of their message heard. Realistically, humanity should collectively be making policy decisions about how to best adapt to change for some small part of the population that might be sustainable in a not-terribly-distant future hothouse environment and retain the valuable knowledge of industrial society, but that would entail both facing the truth and agreeing that in order for some to live, many others will have to be sacrificed, and nobody ever wants to have that conversation until they are actually in the lifeboat. Nor can we put aside political differences, social pecking order, and generations-long cultural grudges (witness the current multiple fracases) to come to the table. I suspect that in industrial society humanity has hit its “Peter Principle”, and we’re not going to learn or change until the mid-latitudes become hellscapes and the coastlines have to be redrawn.

Stranger

4

Well, I mean, if you’re going to pronounce the death of global human civilization, I can see you wanting to be sure sure about it first…

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I recall reading an interview of Obama while he was president done by some famous journalist. The topic was AGW.

Obama was saying in effect “the science is unequivocal; we are utterly screwed if we don’t make massive course changes. But as a political fact, that message will not cause change, it will prevent change. We need to ensure we feed this need for change to the public at a rate they can be led. Else they’ll dig in their heels and it’s game over.”

Of course that was before the word “trump” entered the political lexicon and reset the speed limit for positive change to barely 1% of what it was under Obama.

I can’t speak knowledgeably to the idea that scientists are themselves softening their message. But even the politicians on the correct side of history agree that attempts to drag the public faster than they are able / willing will produce stasis, not progress. Or, ref trump, trigger active reactionary attacks. I can hardly wait to see the first instance of a major fossil-fueled power plant “rolling coal” just for grins and YouTube views.

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Aside: “fashion-clothing”??

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My guess is that it is auto tagged because someone mentioned the word “fashion” because I can’t find “clothing” or “fashion” in the thread. When I saw it, I thought the environmental impact of cheaply-made fashionable clothing was going to be mentioned, but nyet.

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Fixed. The auto-tagging system sometimes makes things… interesting.

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I was not talking about a scenario in which it melts into the ocean. That would indeed take many decades even given a massive and unprecedented warming, and an expanded definition of “melting” which includes some increased ice flow and erosion.

I was thinking about a scenario in which it collapses into the ocean. Some of it is thousands of feet below sea level, and if those parts are exposed, there will be a thousands of foot high wall of ice touching the ocean, the behavior of which is not well-understood.

However, I did not take the lip of the sheet into account, which would be in the middle of the ocean but only a few hundred feet deep. If the collapse takes place on a massive basis, the large chunks of ice will still have to flow over the lip.

With regards to the topic of this thread, I did read an article about a simulation, which I can’t find now, that measured the collapse of an ice wall. They found that if the broken-off chunks of ice stuck around as a sort of a shelf, it would buttress the wall somewhat from further collapse like stable shelves do. Yet if the ice immediately drifted away, the front sections of the wall started to collapse pretty quickly.

The headline was something like “simulation assuages fear of sudden ice wall collapse.” The headline could have just as easily been “simulation shows that sudden ice wall collapse is possible.”! But I agree with what others have said, that it was not the scientists creating the headline and thus downplaying the likelihood of the impact of climate change. Also, if there is some unknown mechanism (like a large upwelling current) that could take away the ice, it would both remove the buttressing effect, and carry small chunks of ice away from the lip. But the combination of all of these is less likely than I thought it was previously.

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There is a phenomenon in science that results in scientific predictions being slow to change, even in the face of new, better, and independent measurement techniques becoming available. You can see this in things like measurements of the speed of light, or Newton’s constant, over time. The first measurements of these, of course, had huge errors. But if all of the measurements were truly independent, what you would see would be a wide range of measurements at first, encompassing the true value, and then as time goes on and experiments improve, a narrowing of that wide range down to the modern, high-precision value. Instead, what you see is more like a linear progression: All of the early experiments are clustered near the ones that came before, and the whole cluster gradually moves to the true value.

This is not usually due to conscious “fudging” by the scientists. Rather, any experiment will have issues with it. But you’re more motivated to go find those issues if your results disagree a lot with the conventional wisdom than if they agree. So if you get results close to what’s come before, you go ahead and publish, but if you get results that are wildly different, you look closer, and if you find issues, you fix them and roll the dice again for a new result. Most likely, the result that “looked right” also had those issues, but they go unnoticed, because they look right.

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I didn’t post this yesterday because of the protest walkout of Washington Post staffers but this reflects the general dichotomy between actual climate scientists, geophysicists, and others working on climate change research on one hand, and the governments and energy companies trying to keep going with “business as usual” on the other with just a bit of payola out to affected developing countries with a barely restrained undertone of “Take the money and shut the fuck up!” As Peter Zeihan recently observed, there are effectively two COPs; one for the science, and the other for the business, and they happen to be in the same place but have almost no functional interactions.

The science presentations, particularly in the “Cryosphere Pavilion” are pretty stark. Like this one, “Why East Antarctica is a Sleeping Giant”:

The language is probably a bit stilted for the layperson but the underlying tone is clear; while there are still large uncertainties in models and interactions between ice sheets, the ocean, and the global climate, the more evidence we uncover and the better that the interactions are modeled, the prognosis looks progressively and dramatically worse. I don’t see any indication of scientists minimizing or downplaying concerns; as a group they are, within the context of honestly presenting the uncertainties about measurements and models, hitting the panic button over and over, and yet not seeing anything in terms of regulatory policy or international consensus, and with COP28 the hydrocarbon fuel industry and governments that are intimately linked to gas and oil literally, openly, brazenly co-oping the entire process to make deals and do some performative philanthropy of minimal value toward the people most affected by climate change and corruption.

Stranger