If this survey is real the messages these young people are receiving are completely wrong.
We need to reduce our impact on our planet but CO2 is a complete red herring. The current ECS (temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) is centred around 3°C (IPCC AR6). The 2°C will destroy civilisation is simply made up.
Peter Bernard Ladkin:
Inter-glacial warmings are known to be cyclical, usually 10000 to 15000 years, Ours is 11000 years, so we can expect cooling at any time from now. This knowledge is gained form Antarctica Ice Core samples.
Have any of those core samples shown evidence of a 3° rise in 200 years or less?
Personally No, but the facts presented by Parker 1992; CO2: Boden 2016 show that warming began 200 years before man made any significant contribution of CO2 into the atmosphere. Warming being about 1.5 degrees since 1650
climate science is far from settled.
We certainly agree on that.
Ah, yes. The people who organised the Great Barrington Declaration.
There is a parallel.
“There really isn't a problem. If you think there is, and that we as a society need to change our behaviour in some way, here are a bunch of impressively-titled people to tell you there really isn't and we really don't.”
In the case of Great Barrington, it was people claiming some kind of “herd immunity” which manifestly was present nowhere on earth. I take it that the suggestion here is that the contribution of anthropogenic CO2 to global warming is negligible? If there are arguments for that, why don't you give them?
BTW, the argument for engaging in countermeasures to global warming does not solely depend on whether or not anthropogenic CO2 is helping warm the biosphere or not.
Aivar Usk:
I would recommend to let dr. Howard Cork Hayden, professor emeritus of physics at University of Connecticut explain to you what the problem is. It would be interesting to hear if anyone could point out where he is wrong in this 54 minute presentation:
Having a nominally-impressiveacademic title does not necessarily mean much. As you yourself surely understand - it hasn't hindered you from telling me where I might be wrong. (All to the good, I might say.)
As a rhetorical measure, inviting people to watch a one-hour video and criticise it is not very persuasive. Why don't you summarise the arguments for us in, say, a five-minute read?
I was not intending any ad-hominem when suggesting that most of the activists are not knowledgeable about climate science;
If you are talking about people, and (I take it) criticising them for not being knowledgeable, then that is a prima facie case of an ad hominem argument. (It doesn't get much clearer than that.)
People don't have to be individually knowledgeable about matters of science in order to hold and support beliefs about such science. If you say to climate activist A “you don't know much climate science”, A might reply “that may be right, but I talk regularly with and listen to people who do.” And that is an appropriate response (if it is true).
For example, I don't know half as much meteorology as a professional meteorologist, but I do know some stuff about the “rain dome” that formed over the Eiffel in July 2021, which is inter alia why I'll be talking in February on that flooding catastrophe. The other reason is that the conference organisers know I'll do my best to talk to people who really do know, although I admit to having huge difficulties getting anyone to respond (there seem to be political and legal issues which inhibit communication). Weirdly enough, all the data disappeared from the meteo WWW sites within days (if anyone can find the surface and 500mb charts from July 12-17 2021 over northern-continental Europe I'd be very glad of a pointer).
When Joe Blow installs roof insulation and says it will save him 25% on his heating requirements, Joe is not saying so because he is “knowledgeable” about heating science, but because the heating consultant who calculated it is licensed and registered and conforms with a professional code of conduct, and Joe has every reason to think that what the consultant told him is very probably true.
Ms. Thunberg might be a teenager, but the people she consults with are highly knowledgeable and she is - obviously from what she says - a discerning intellect who is capable of making and presenting simple and powerful arguments which most people are not so capable of doing. That is why people listen to her. Not everyone gets to be invited to the WEF. Whatever you might think of it, the WEF is full of intellectually very impatient people whose attention you can't keep for long unless you have something worthwhile to say and can put it briefly.
Personally, I am really glad she is around. Just as I am concerning that other spectacular once-young talent Malala Yousafzai.
Peter Bernard Ladkin:
"I'm glad you agree that global warming is real and some of it is likely to be anthropogenic. What do you propose to do about it?"
Considering that the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on climate change is rather small, I would trust the recommendation of many climate scientists, among them MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: have the courage to do nothing about CO2 emissions in particular. Energy efficiency is another matter, this should be pursued everywhere.
I do not think we can solve the climate issues here; I would rather suggest listening to scientific debates on the topic, although there are only a few these days. I can recommend a debate on EconTalk in May 2021 between climate optimist John Christy (University of Alabama, Huntsville) and climate pessimist Kerry Emanuel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); they found agreement that climate science is far from settled.
I hope that in addition to Dr. Hayden's presentation I mentioned in an earlier posting, the above answered most questions. Regarding Mauna Loa CO2 data analysis: I only compared monthly changes to similar changes in previous years and found no striking differences.
Inter-glacial warmings are known to be cyclical, usually 10000 to 15000 years, Ours is 11000 years, so we can expect cooling at any time from now. This knowledge is gained form Antarctica Ice Core samples.
Have any of those core samples shown evidence of a 3° rise in 200 years or less?
Simon Barker:
Something I realised a while back is that attempting to persuade somebody that they are wrong on something that matters to them is utterly futile.
I have spent a large part of the half-century of my professional life “attempting to persuade” other professionals that they are wrong on something which matters to us. When I have been right, I have often succeeded. When I have been wrong, they often eventually succeeded. (Then there are all the other cases …. :-) ).
Thankfully, we are in a professional forum, not a social-media echo-chamber. My brief experience has been that people here largely (not exceptionlessly, but largely) think before and as they post. As indeed one would expect from the IET Rules of Conduct. I started in forums with usenet groups in the mid-1980's. Five years later, I quit, and migrated to closed professional mailing lists (one of which I still run myself).
Post Office Limited has in recent years been persuaded that the arguments it used for many years to persuade courts that subpostmasters were committing fraud were in fact facile and largely wrong. And now it has been told that by the Court of Appeal in 2021 in no uncertain terms. And accepted that judgement. It has taken a decade. Sometimes people and organisations do take that long to change their minds.
Ten years ago, I took part in a year-long international research group at the Uni Bielefeld on distasters, the social phenomena they engender, and communications. We watched a film about a group of Pacific islands whose fishing way of life had been drastically altered over the course of about a decade, forming a serious emergency. A developed-world activist told them - persuaded them - that the changes were due to anthropogenic climate change, largely caused by the behaviour of the developed world. One of the islanders turned into a UN envoy who inter alia went around the world explaining their plight and campaigning for sensitivity to the problem and countermeasures. I argued at the time that that could not be right. As far as I could tell, anthropogenic climate change was a secondary effect that would manifest over the time scale of many decades, and that short-term effects such as the loss of this island nation's fishing resources likely had another cause. Now (you will appreciate) I think I was very wrong about that.
Those are just two examples from my immediate experience.
So I think it's time I abandoned this whole thread.
For what it's worth, I don't, and would encourage you to continue.
Peter Bernard Ladkin:
but it will not change the likelihood that the Earth is probably entering one of its 10,000 year climate change cycles.
What is that likelihood? What is your reasoning?
There is a by-now measureable anthropogenic contribution to phenomena which make the biosphere warmer. Even supposing the biosphere is in a warming cycle (as I take it you suppose), which may well affect humanity in various deleterious ways, is there any argument for continuing to contribute to making it worse?
‘What is that likelihood? What is your reasoning?’
Inter-glacial warmings are known to be cyclical, usually 10000 to 15000 years, Ours is 11000 years, so we can expect cooling at any time from now. This knowledge is gained form Antarctica Ice Core samples.
An argument to stop the Green agenda, maybe that if we persist with all out Net Zero then economies will fail with unforeseen consequences for the poorest people on the planet.
Legh Richardson:
You lot can argue as much as you like,
Thank you.
but it will not change the likelihood that the Earth is probably entering one of its 10,000 year climate change cycles.
What is that likelihood? What is your reasoning?
There is a by-now measureable anthropogenic contribution to phenomena which make the biosphere warmer. Even supposing the biosphere is in a warming cycle (as I take it you suppose), which may well affect humanity in various deleterious ways, is there any argument for continuing to contribute to making it worse?
Simon Barker:
So it can't be described that simply. What's the problem?
I would recommend to let dr. Howard Cork Hayden, professor emeritus of physics at University of Connecticut explain to you what the problem is. It would be interesting to hear if anyone could point out where he is wrong in this 54 minute presentation:
I don't see an ad-hominem attack gets you anywhere. The climate has certainly warmed in the last few decades. All the predictions had huge error margins on them. Nobody predicted exact values for warming.
I was not intending any ad-hominem when suggesting that most of the activists are not knowledgeable about climate science; it has been my personal experience that certain concepts are simply parroted in media without understanding of any underlying physics. In an ideal world this would work - one should be able to trust the scientists. In case of climate science, opinions of some scientists are politically amplified while those of others are muffled.
Regarding predictions: in addition to overblown output of most climate models, there have been many literal crises predictions and almost all have been wrong:
Legh Richardson:
Then this is conjecture, a bit like the chap up in Scotland who has built his own Ark…. it won't float because he hasn't nailed any panels on it! but it has aroused the interest of his local council.
Legh
Someone should tell the Scotsman that Sea Level rise is only 1.3mm per year and in a straight line, as it has been for the past 100 years.
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