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What does it take to succesfully transition to a green energy economy?
- Thread starter Marc v E
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Please provide some references for this, from the climate classes I had in college I was taught that climate changes are slow i.e. on a scale of thousands or tens of thousands of years.
JayGilb
Major Contributor
That's the part which makes me highly uncomfortable, especially because there's no way that the adjustments can be accurately validated. I admit suffering from lab scientist syndrome.
It's not my data so I have neither means nor intention of defending it. I think the attitudes of certainty on various side of the issue are misplaced.
SIY, just make up your own model. Anything can be done with the correct model. Oh and to answer the question of the topic, A large country can't go to a green economy, they can go greener than what they are, but not a full on green economy. If they did that they will look like Venezuela........
I got into an interesting disagreement with one of our young profs (a very smart guy) who specializes in modeling and machine learning. I started off by annoying him with my standard of Von Neumann's Elephant. On the other hand, his strong feeling is that with modeling, we don't have to do experiments, or at least a whole lot fewer experiment. He was taken aback by my attitude that modeling is only as good as the experimental results behind it- it can be used to show that it's consistent with existing results, and passing that test, used to make predictions which need to be validated experimentally. It's only good until its first failure, and continually patching it up with parameter adjustment turns it into a game rather than a valid physical model.
We have an older guy (emeritus professor and former Engineering dean) here who has spent decades doing molecular dynamics, has gotten some amazing results, and he seemed to agree with me. So while I cop to lab scientist syndrome, it may be a function of age as well.
SIY, Thank you for trying to educate the young guy on models and how they should work. Constantly patching an often wrong model in itself says something. When someone tries to cling to a model that doesn't work much shows the model needs a LOT of work or a new model needs to be made. OMG! While typing this I just realized how it seems as if I was talking about snake oil!!I got into an interesting disagreement with one of our young profs (a very smart guy) who specializes in modeling and machine learning. I started off by annoying him with my standard of Von Neumann's Elephant. On the other hand, his strong feeling is that with modeling, we don't have to do experiments, or at least a whole lot fewer experiment. He was taken aback by my attitude that modeling is only as good as the experimental results behind it- it can be used to show that it's consistent with existing results, and passing that test, used to make predictions which need to be validated experimentally. It's only good until its first failure, and continually patching it up with parameter adjustment turns it into a game rather than a valid physical model.
We have an older guy (emeritus professor and former Engineering dean) here who has spent decades doing molecular dynamics, has gotten some amazing results, and he seemed to agree with me. So while I cop to lab scientist syndrome, it may be a function of age as well.
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I'm more convinced by the shrinking glaciers that at a minimum things are warmer. Plus things like record high and low temps being skewed in the direction of warmer. Maybe less so about the rather precise modeling predictions.
I wonder what model they were using for the predictions in the "An Inconvenient Truth" movie? Outside of there being over 400 ppm C02 in Hawaii I believe every prediction made in that movie is incorrect.
I'm more concerned that the data points are derived (necessarily) using different measurement methods with different error bars and different biases. When I see a chart like this (from the article linked a few posts back), I have to admit that it gets me headscratching. I'm sure one of our experts here can explain why measurements in the 1880s and measurements in 2020 can be consistently used in the same dataset.
Try a more realistic scale:
Is a "scientific consensus" of any value without scientific facts? Especially since a scientist can't get a government grant unless they tow the consensus "party line"?
I agree with you. The model for global warming has been wrong for over what 30 years now? Gore and the gang said Florida would be under water 20 years ago. We have passed the tipping point every few years yet there are no massive changes as predicted. There is climate change, but that has been going on forever. Long term cooling, long term warming and on and on. Then the plans for us to "fix" the global weather because we don't ;like where it is heading is usually not scientifically sound. Mankind just does not have the ability to do what they want to do. Maybe in 100 years things will change. Who knows?
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I think that is going too far. As for what Gore said etc. that is politics. I don't think reputable climate scientists were saying Florida is underwater in 20 years. I also don't think the scientists in the field have been claiming we have reached tipping points. Only about the fact we are moving toward them and things might be much worse if that happens.
And I don't know the models have been "wrong". They have been updated and improved and adjusted. Most do seem to be at least in the ballpark with what is happening.
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Such thinking misses the point. There is no long term here. On a long term graph, we're perched on a tiny level blip at the extreme right of the picture, more or less at zero years. We had a freak, stable 10,000 year plateau, and used it to build an entire civilization still and always based on fixed-location farming, by a sedentary population, using negotiated and/or legislated water rights.
Now we're off the end of the tiny plateau and moving upward again, accelerated by our own innocent but ignorant delights. The issue is - will our global civilization survive a few degrees rise? An average +2C would be an immense problem, and +4 would wipe it out.
No doubt roving bands of hardy souls would survive far into the future, but most of everything will be lost, like bankruptcy, at first slowly, and then fast.
I had a climatology class in college and during that time the news was all about "a new ice age" that was going to wipe out civilization. My professor said something I still remember : "As you go through your life you will hear some people saying it is getting colder and others will say it is getting warmer. While one or the other may be right no one will know until 10,000 years after you are dead". This whole "tipping point" / "hockey stick" thing has no proven science behind it that I have seen (If real science exists please point me to it). Moving toward a more a more environmentally sound economy is certainly a good idea but all the alarmist "We are doomed in 10 years" has no basis in reality and especially no basis in real science and leads to counter productive policies.
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Keith_W
Major Contributor
I work in the Medical field and read a lot of Medical journals. I know what I know, and more importantly, I also know what I don't know. If someone asks for my professional opinion on something, the response has to be measured, take into account what is known and what is not, and the limitations of what the evidence shows. I lack the expertise critically analyse papers outside my own field, so climate science journals may as well be written in a foreign language to me. So for those papers, I have to rely on the same sources that everyone else uses - the popular press, "scientific" magazines like New Scientist, Scientific American, and so on.
It surprises me that climate scientists can be so bold when it comes to making predictions. These sort of pronouncements are not the measured, careful scientific statements from professional scientists that I am familiar with. Rather, these are catastrophic predictions that will occur within our lifetimes - e.g. Australia's rainfall will dry up and there would be widespread water rationing (this lead to some state governments installing expensive desalination plants and was followed by several years of flooding), the Great Barrier Reef is already dead (it isn't), and you are all familiar with American doomsday prophets and their predictions that never came to pass.
I am not saying that climate science isn't real - it most certainly is. But it seems to be infested by a bunch of ideologically driven doomsday prophets who make wildly inaccurate predictions, and this is what concerns me. Because - for each prediction that fails to occur, the credibility of climate science is damaged. We actually empower the naysayers.
There is a similar parallel when it came to COVID and vaccine deniers. Pandemics in the past have a habit of fizzling out because of mutations. Killing your host is not a viable option for reproduction if you are a virus. We knew that COVID would eventually fizzle out, but we did not know when. In the meantime, COVID was in its aggressive phase and killing hundreds of thousands of otherwise young, healthy people. The correct response was to protect public safety and introduce widespread vaccination programs. Unfortunately, the vaccines were less effective than hoped, certainly not as effective as something like the Smallpox vaccine. And FORTUNATELY, COVID started fizzling out sooner than we anticipated. Vaccine deniers opposed the vaccination programs, and now that COVID is fizzling out, they are proclaiming that they were right all along. They argue that it is a mish-mash of expensive government over-reach, "health damaging" vaccinations and "big pharma conspiracies". I suspect (without evidence) that the COVID pandemic has empowered these vaccine deniers and anecdotally I am seeing more medical skepticism.
If anything, these two examples should be a warning to scientists to be careful about making predictions, because wrong predictions damage your credibility.
Ahhh the experimental, synthetic gene therapy was never the correct response and never could have been....
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Dr. Steven Hatfill is a specialist physician and a virologist with a military background and separate master's degrees in microbial genetics, radiation biochemistry, and experimental pathologyand the
I don't know how long ago your climate class was, but it is certainly outdated. I am an economic historian, and we collect observations. We mostly do not build complex models, but use linear regressions, and the upward bend and the subsequent upward trend are all too clear. Whether there is a critical tipping point is obviously less clear, and would depend on feedback mechanisms such as the melting of permafrost releasing methane into the atmosphere.
Previous examples of rapid climate change were all from natural causes, of course, but some are now quite well documented. The chronological resolution of our data has improved massively. Tree ring data provide climate information with an annual resolution and are now going back thousands of years. The Greenland Ice Core data go back a lot further in time, and the most recent analyses provide subannual resolution. Similar subannual resolutions are now possible from caves like the Soreq cave near Jerusalem.
The Dryas Wikepedia article linked to earlier gives some examples of rapid climate change after the last Ice Age. Ian Morris' wonderful Why the West Rules -For Now is a great synthesis by a leading archaeologist and historian with some good examples. For the more recent period The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2016) by Bruce Campbell is a stark reminder of the impact on society of pretty rapid climate deterioration.
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44 degreees (Celsius) in Seville today, and Summer has not even started. Our original plan for our holiday this year was an early (April) cycling/camping holiday in the South of Spain. We are glad that in the end our schedule did not allow us.
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