cafeamericainmag.com
There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.
I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
The deniers are just coping or contrarians.
It is very easy:
A) CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
B) Industrialization increased its percentage in the atmosphere.
Preindustrial CO2 rate was under 300 parts per million.
2000 it was 370 ppm
2024 it reached 420 ppm
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region
It is skewing to the last decades: half of the emmissions from 1750 to now were emitted in the last 30 years.
The amount of coal and oil we burned and will burn is stunningly large. A hundred times more every year than all vulcanism. HOW could that NOT have an effect?
Approved vaccines are effective, they stop infections at least in 95% of cases on average for 10 years. Covid vaccine was tested in clinical trials which showed strong efficiency preventing infections.
That means that covid vaccines should be mandated to everyone, young and old and they will help to almost eliminate covid via heard immunity, right?
What went wrong with this reasoning? Despite vaccination most people got infected with covid anyway. The protection was short lasting (3-4 months at most). It reduced severity and hospitalizations in elderly though. Other people especially children were not that much affected anyway.
Biology is more complicated than we could infer from a simple graph.
I have no strong opinion about global warming but I am against trivialization of this science. Too many unknowns for me. How believable are the models? How warmer temperatures will affect us? I can see both negative and positive aspects. How much would it cost to prevent that versus to adapt to the change?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01990-8?fromPaywallRec=false
The damage of climate change, up to 10% of global GDP, is such an enormous sum that it is always cheaper to instead invest in carbon reduction and reduce climate change.
Of course all the same arguments and attitudes from before apply here: If one doesn’t believe in the scientific consensus in climate change why should one believe the financial modeling and projected costs of extreme weather events are correct?
Regarding the comparison and how to deal with uncertainty: I think one main difference is that vaccination was not needed for the survival of civilization. But renewable energy and electrification is needed in any case, sooner or later, because fossil fuels are a limited resource. Even under most optimistic calculations we have only 100-200 years of oil reserves left.
“up to” could mean less than 10%. Could be 1% or whatever. Even if we accept 10% figure, we also expect the GDP to grow more than 10% during this period.
Many suggested measures talk about degrowth. That could have severe impact on our growth, even more than 10%.
That's why I want more detail analysis and our confidence levels about this analysis. Obviously we will need to stop using oil sooner or later but it is not about that. It's about the politics that surround all these decisions.
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The obvious answer is that 120ppm is really not very much -- CO2 is essentially a trace gas in the atmosphere. Would adding 120ppm of neon to the atmosphere have noticeable effects? Maybe it would, IDK -- but it's not obvious one way or the other.
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How can it not have an effect, indeed?
Well, the starting point would be to demonstrate that it can have an effect, in isolated, carefully-controlled lab conditions.
That CO2 absorbs IR has been definitively shown for over a century. That this absorption and re-emission of radiation back towards a heat source causes that heat source to heat up further? Never has been, as detailed in the article.
Thus there is no experimental basis for the claim.
As to the atmosphere itself warming up due to absorbing CO2 -- firstly this is not the greenhouse effect (which is that the surface warms, not the air). Secondly, the lower atmosphere is warmed far more by conduction&convection, which 100% of the atmospheric gases participate in, than radiation, which only the IR-absorbent constituents do. Thirdly, that increased CO2 level will cause net air warming after all effects taken into account, is nowhere near certain (see: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/carbion_dioxide_does_not_cause_warming.html). Fourthly, the CO2 absorption is already saturated in the troposphere; any effects of additional CO2 are said to only affect higher, cooler layers of the atmosphere. Thus any effect on the surface would not be a direct effect but rather a complex, indirect effect. One might say that this means the boundary condition of the higher-up air is warmer (see earlier points if that is true), yet this comes to fifthly: the consensus is increased CO2 levels will cause the stratosphere to cool, not to warm. Thus the boundary condition at the TOA will be a cooler TOA not a warmer one.
As to differing rates of CO2 levels somehow themselves being an evidence for warming, I refer you to the article: "Looking at longer time scales calls the general theory into question: Barral 2017 shows that CO2 levels sometimes show “inverse trends” with temperature, and Easterbrook 2016 found evidence that “global warming causes increased atmospheric CO2”, and not vice-versa."
To sum: it is nowhere near as simple or certain as you claim.
Here is the absorbtion spectrum of CO2 : https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C124389&Type=IR-SPEC&Index=1#IR-SPEC As you can see, it has low transmittance a little over 4um wavelength and between 14-16um
Compare that to the blackbody spectrum at 300K (27C, or 80F in freedom units) https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/blackbody-spectrum/latest/blackbody-spectrum_en.html
The emission of blackbody radiation starts at a little below 4um, peaks at 9.8um, then continues with significant emission to above 20um. so the absorbsion of the CO2 is within the ground emission spectrum.
The sun emits radiation at 5600K, much shorter wavelenght which are not absorbed by CO2, those radiation hit the ground, heat it, and the ground emits black body radiation at around 300K. that longer wavelength radiation leaves the ground. As that radiation goes up, the part of it that is within CO2 absorbtion spectrum can get absorbed. When a CO2 molecule absorbs a photon, one if it's electron gets bumped to a higher energy level, then one of two things can happen : A) the electron goes back to it's original energy level, emitting another photon in a random direction, or B) the CO2 molecule hits another molecule and the excited electron gives back it's energy to the other molecule as kinetic energy (I.E. heat). A is much more likely to happen in gases, while B is more likely in solids/liquids.
when A happens, it does not really heat the atmosphere, but it impedes the ground heat dissipation in the wavelenghts where there is high absorbtion. So if we are to keep the energy balance, what happens to the ground ? It has to increase temperature to dissipate more heat in the wavelengths that are not affected by CO2.
All of that stuff was figured out long ago in the 1800s, it's pretty baffling that people can deny it 200 years later. But I don't lose sleep over it, I took the doom pill over climate change long ago. We're fucked. even if we could magically convince everybody that we ought to do something about it, it would require a level of international cooperation that I think is impossible. How do you make all the world powers sit around a table and agree on a "let's all get poor until we figure out better energy sources" program when they can't agree on much smaller things.
and as for experimental measurement of CO2 radiative forcing, I found this paper : https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/nature14240
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Well, that's concerning...
On the other hand, excuse me, but how am I supposed to take anyone screaming at me about global warming seriously? All the "adults in the room" are coming up with galaxy-brained plans to limit air travel and ban internal combustion engines, when the vast majority of that trend is coming from Asia? Why are we building solar farms in clouded regions of the northern hemisphere instead of chipping in for the nuclear electrification of the developing world?
"people fail at dealing with complex things, are happy to exaggerate for rhetoric and ignore claimed implications" is nothing new
only for peasants, private flights are not going to be affected
luxury cars are exempt
Nevertheless, you have weird people going with full denial of established physics and screaming about 2nd law of thermodynamics without understanding it, and fail to interpret simple graphs.
Because apparently failing at dealing with complex things, exaggeration for rhetoric and ignoring claimed implication are easier to do. Or more interesting?
That's the thing, I don't know if it counts as a complex problem. It's a "you're picking small high-hanging fruits, when you haven't even started picking the big low-hanging ones" situation.
I think I'm radicalized enough as it is, you don't need to encourage me more.
Yeah, contrarianism is a hell of a drug, ask me how I know. But this is why I think the establishment was, and is, playing a dangerous game, burning trust to meet short-term goals. We're probably gonna keep getting more and more people questioning the most basic things around them.
"nuclear power has scary failure modes, but it is rare, does not actually kill so many people compared to failure modes of hydro and regular operation of coal burning and can be actually power our civilisation is safeteism is only of strong variety rather than extremely insane variety" apparently is a complex problem. Too many people think that ideal answer without drawbacks is achievable and anything with problems should be discarded.
Kind of "you're picking small pretty high-hanging fruits, when you haven't even started picking the big ugly low-hanging ones"
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