Just finished having a stupid debate about climate change on FB.
One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of deniers latch on to the fact that Al Gore or climatologists will claim: “By the year 2012 “X” will happen” and then when X doesn’t happen, they naysayers say: “See! I told you climate change was a hoax”.
Not sure how to deal with this, but I think a good place to start is to stop making absolute claims X will happen by a certain year.
How about “The world is going to end in 12 years.”?
Do you have links to any of these definitive predictive statements made by climatologists who were later shown to be wrong?
That’s in no way a prediction.
That’s a good question. I should have asked when I was having my debate.
That said, I’m pretty sure Al Gore has told some whoppers that turned out not to be true. (Not gonna look it up because I am about to start dinner).
Is there a future where dumping 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year endless will not do damage? its already changing the ocean’s pH and causing environmental changes.
What did you mean then by saying “one thing I’ve noticed is a lot of…climatologists will claim ‘by the year 2012 X will happen’ and then it doesn’t happen”? Where have you noticed this?
I’m not aware of climatologists or any real scientists making very many “absolute” claims. Broadly speaking, there is a hierarchy of relative certainties. Beginning with the most certain and getting progressively less certain, we have:
The amount of additional CO2 and CO2 equivalent GHGs that will accumulate by a given time – a frequently cited target time is the year 2100. The greatest uncertainty here is political and socioeconomic, not climatological, and revolves around the question of how successful mitigation policies will be relative to economic and population growth. The IPCC has laid out four baseline alternatives, from most optimistic to least optimistic, that are called RCPs – Representative Concentration Pathways – which correspond to well-defined amounts by which climate forcing and hence the earth’s thermal energy budget will increase for each one.
The increase in the earth’s global average temperature corresponding to each RCP. This is less certain because it has to take into account complex climate feedbacks, mostly positive ones that accelerate warming, but also some negative ones. Essentially it adds the uncertainty of not knowing the exact value of climate sensitivity, the critical multiplier that takes us from the forcing of #1 to the temperature change of #2. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is essentially the factor that translates a given climate forcing to a resultant global temperature change taking into account all climate feedbacks.
Predicting the impact on global phenomena like atmosphere and ocean circulation systems resulting from temperature rise, which have the potential to change either gradually or abruptly, and which have can have profound effects on regional climates, such as making them drier or wetter. The higher energy differentials resulting from temperature rise also drives more extreme weather, which is harder to predict in specific terms, although both climate models and historical records are clear about the general trends.
Finally and most difficult of all is predicting the changes that will occur in specific geographic regions. It’s really hard because it not only requires accuracy in 1, 2, and 3, but it requires climate models that are both global and also high resolution, which takes a staggering amount of computing power even if we had all the data.
Just some thoughts off the top of my head. I don’t know how helpful that is, but I think the important point is that we don’t need to have highly accurate predictions all the way down to #4 in order to confidently say that the earlier and more certain determinations tell us in a general way and with sufficient certainty to be actionable that unnaturally strong forcings driving global climate are going to cause a long list of very bad things to happen, even if we can’t necessarily say exactly when or exactly where – more extreme weather, both drier and wetter conditions in areas already experiencing droughts and flooding, threats to food crops, pest and disease migration, sea level rise, and so forth. It’s just a red herring and blatant ignorance when deniers trot out the lack of specificity as “proof” that the broad general projections aren’t valid. They are clearly already happening and have been for decades. It really is very much like setting fire to your living room couch and then going upstairs to bed: it would take a lot of data and computing power to predict exactly how the fire will develop and spread, but it’s quite certain that very bad things will happen that can be generally predicted.
The thing is, climatologists and even Al Gore rarely make absolute claims about a specific result by a particular year. Usually the scenario is framed as “If current levels of CO2 production continue,” or “If present trends continue,” such and such “could” happen in a certain time frame. Such statements are then seized on by climate-change deniers as if they were definitive.
I just did a bit of spot checking for accusations of false predictions, and most of them are of this kind.
In fact, often actual climate change to date has proved to be more severe than the “mid-range” predictions by climatologists, and tend more toward the high end of the range.
It’s usually in the form of stupid memes. The latest one being in the form that Darren Garrison alludes to. Or Al Gore saying the ice caps should have been melted by now.
I mean, it’s all stupid but it gives the deniers something to sink their teeth into.
Good stuff. Thanks for posting.
BTW contrarians are the ones that have more trouble with predicting the future:
The pause or cooling so many deniers were talking about years ago? Not there.
Al Gore is not a climatologist. He tends to simplify things (partly because he doesn’t necessarily get all the minutiae, partly because he’s not talking to climatologists), and the people who report on whatever he’s said simplify even more. From “If we keep burning everything down, we’ll end up having burned everything”, what sometimes gets to the ears or hands of the Man In The Street is “Paris is burning!”
One of the worst cases I’ve seen was the report that a doctor had discovered a new element, which he’d called Lithium, in bananas. What this doctor had actually done was discover that bananas (a food that many depressive people take more of when they’re feeling down) happens to have lithium (an element discovered in 1817 and widely used as an antidepressant) in high amounts and in an easily-absorbable form; specifically, as the central element of a porphyric group (similar to the non-proteic part of hemoglobin). Reporters kept copying and rewriting each other’s reports and not only had chopped off a lot of relevant information, but added a completely-false element (pun absolutely intended).
Here’s an article from 1989 that a friend posted on Facebook the other day:
See, the difference is that informed people will read that and think “we need to do something by XX date in order to avoid a disaster some time down the road”, and others will read the same thing and think “all of that bad stuff is going to happen on XX date.” When the latter does not come to pass, then they end up disregarding climate predictions specifically and climate science in general.
Noel Brown was not a climatologist. From here:
Fair enough, but at the time he was the director of the UN Environment program. And I doubt he was just making that stuff up, according to the article the information came from “a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study”
To be fair, if this thread is about climatologists making bad predictions about the future shouldn’t there be at least two or three examples of them doing so before we branch off onto bad predictions of those who aren’t climatologists?
I guess so. But it seems common for a leader of a climate research agency or organization or government panel or whatever wouldn’t necessarily be a climatologist. And that person summarizing a report from actual climatologists wouldn’t necessarily be “A prediction from someone who is not a climatologist”
In any event, I’m not wedded to the article or anything. But it seems like the “UN Environmental Program” would be an organization to listen to.
It still exists today, but the UN Environment Acting Executive Director is Joyce Msuya, who is not a climatologist. Should we not listen to anything she has to say regarding climate change, even if she is reporting on what her own Agency is doing?
That “prediction” has not been proved false in any way, and in fact may turn out to be correct. Read it carefully. It doesn’t say all those things will happen by 2000. It says they will happen at an unspecified future time if global warming has not been reversed. Global warming has not been reversed, so they may still be in the cards. Most climatologists say that we are already past the tipping point and that significant changes can’t be avoided no matter what we do now. All we can do is lessen the detrimental effects.