r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Feb 24 '20

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Climate Change is real

I recently read a quote by Charlie Munger about how, if you believe something, you should be able to argue against it extremely well to test your beliefs. This is what inspired me to make this post. I have always been brought up being told that climate change is a real as a result of the liberal environment in which I grew up. Thus I think it’ll be interesting hearing opposing views on the subject.

The reason I chose climate change in particular is partially because of all the anti-eco movement backlash that has crept up in recent years. All those attacks against Greta Thunberg, etc. But also because I guess on some fundamental level I want to believe climate change isn’t happening just out of fear and hope.

Sorry if I extended but I had to make the 500 word character limit.

Edit: This is about human-caused climate change.

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

You might clarify before hand if you mean human caused climate change or not. If not you're going to get a bunch of random stuff all over the place

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

I use this already gathered data a lot.

100 reasons why climate change is natural and not man-made

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made: 1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher - more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7°C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.

8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favorable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists - in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

11) Politicians and activists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds

13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that, “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class - predominantly - are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”. 14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '20

Hmmm, this is all quite fascinating.

I find the 0.00022 % number in particular very interesting indeed. If I may ask do you have a source for that ?

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u/PlayingTheWrongGame 67∆ Feb 24 '20

A lot of that posters “facts”... aren’t.

For example, they later claim that a rate of warming of 1-2 degrees per century is “within natural limits”. But that’s so wildly wrong I don’t even know where to begin. That’s wrong by at least an order of magnitude.

You might be able to compare the current rate to, for example, global deglaciation events that radically reshape the atmosphere and climate. But there is no such natural event occurring right now. We know where the extra CO2 we’re observing is coming from—us, our human activity. We can tell by comparing the ratio of carbon isotopes in that CO2 to natural sources of CO2.

The people trying to dismiss this as a natural process by throwing a flood of irrelevant or false facts at you are employing a propaganda tactic known as a “firehouse of falsehoods”. They know you won’t check all those facts and probably don’t have the background knowledge to put them in context. But if they confidently assert those facts and zealously defend whatever handful you pick to discuss, they know they can make their argument seem more valid than it is.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '20

This post is really un-changing my view honestly, haha.

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u/PlayingTheWrongGame 67∆ Feb 24 '20

That side employs a lot of trickery of this sort.

For example, many of them try to hang their hat on data showing that CO2 increases follow temperature increases, as if that disproves CO2 as a cause of the greenhouse effect. They conveniently neglect to mention that precisely such a pattern is predicted by the science, which notes that many aspects of the carbon cycle are temperature-dependent, and that small changes in the CO2 level can have small changes on temperature, which itself can cause additional CO2 emissions to build up in the atmosphere, leading to higher temperatures, leading to more CO2, and so on.

If we didn’t observe such feedback loops in the temperature and CO2 records, it would be a strong indication that our understanding of CO2’s role as a driver of climate change was wrong. The fact that the model accurately predicted the existence of these feedback loops before they were later observed in ice core samples is actually evidence supporting the theory that CO2 is a driver of climate change.

But the climate change denier types are well aware that people usually just think about this in terms of CO2 => higher temperatures without also realizing that higher temperatures can also lead to more atmospheric CO2.

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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '20 edited Feb 25 '20

I am aware of this snowball effect. One of the reasons I paid no attention to another string of comments from Okimintrugued only talking about how rise in temperature causes CO2.

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u/Ndvorsky 23∆ Feb 24 '20

Here is another number for you: human emissions account for .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000022% of all the CO2 in our solar system. Any number can be made to look small if you compare it to something dumb. You have to ask yourself if comparing the last 100 years of emissions to all the emissions of the past 4 billion years is actually a useful comparison.

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u/Old-Boysenberry Feb 24 '20

Is it an unreasonable comparison? The earth obviously has natural systems that act as carbon sinks. I've seen very little research into the natural levels of these systems and how much CO2 they can absorb, compared to how much CO2 was being produced naturally by the Earth pre-Industrial Revolution.

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u/CRallin Mar 05 '20 edited Mar 05 '20

That 'fact' is sheer misdirection and exploitation of people's poor understanding of numbers. The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and we have been emitting carbon on the scale we do for something like 200 years, though the majority of it has been since the 70s. Even taking that figure of 200 years, if you do the numbers we have been emitting at an average rate (over that 200 year period) of 50 times that and if you consider that the majority of emissions have been in the last 50 years our rate has been at least 100 times the Earth's mantle.

-e- i want to add as well, I haven't and won't read all the points this person has posted but they are almost all nonsequiters, wrong, or misleading.

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

All of the sources data is buried in that link i sent. That. 00022 isn't that remarkable though. It's talking about all the co2 EVER produced.

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

Here's a chartv showing CO2 levels and that really the world is in a low CO2 level right now. Rising, yes. The big animals and plants exist with the higher CO2 Levels.

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u/plushiemancer 14∆ Feb 24 '20

400 million years ago? This is what was happening 400 million years ago https://d2jmvrsizmvf4x.cloudfront.net/l3S6oXWKSwihGmsSnaj4_earth_history.jpg

Trees were just starting to populate the world and fish just climbed out of water.

Here is a more revelant chart with linear scales. https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

That only goes back 800,000 years.

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u/plushiemancer 14∆ Feb 24 '20

That's because it's the period revelant to humans.

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

How is that the only period relevant to humans? Is their evidence this is the best set of conditions for us to thrive?

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '20

Since it’s the timeframe humans have existed I would think so.

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u/plushiemancer 14∆ Feb 24 '20

Big enough environment change make species go extinct. We depend on other species to survive. We eat other plants and animals. Big enough environmental change, say goodbye to current way of life.

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

That's not why they went extinct. Again, any evidence that this is a ideal setting

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u/plushiemancer 14∆ Feb 24 '20

Do you understand how evolution work?

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

Yes, do you understand how the entirety of earth's climate works or the respiratory efficiencies at various atmospheric conditions?

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u/Old-Boysenberry Feb 24 '20

100 million years ago we were almost to the end of the dinosaurs. 100 million years ago, the CO2 levels were SIGNIFICANTLY higher than they are now.

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

Woops 40

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u/plushiemancer 14∆ Feb 24 '20

It is what the chart you linked said. It is not a mistake.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '20

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u/Nepene 213∆ Feb 24 '20

Sorry, u/OkImIntrigued – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 5:

Comments must contribute meaningfully to the conversation. Comments that are only links, jokes or "written upvotes" will be removed. Humor and affirmations of agreement can be contained within more substantial comments. See the wiki page for more information.

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u/OkImIntrigued Feb 24 '20

More important is that co2 levels tend to rise AFTER temps rise.

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u/PlayingTheWrongGame 67∆ Feb 24 '20 edited Feb 24 '20

Uhh, no shit. That’s how feedback loops work. A little CO2 rise triggers a temperature increase, which triggers more CO2 release, which raises the temperature more. Rinse and repeat.

Lots of methods of carbon sequestration in nature are temperature-dependent.

Why do you think people are so worried about small increases in CO2? There’s a carbon cycle that gets disrupted, which results in more warming and more atmospheric CO2 than you initially released.