The history of climate science, for a denier in my comments.

Someone apparently objects to my comment moderation policy, and seems to have that delightful conservative reflex of trying to make people they disagree with angry. I’m posting this not to put a target on the commenter, but because he serves as a useful reminder that there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know this stuff. I would say that it is partly their own fault, but not entirely. We know for a fact that the fossil fuel industry has known about this for decades, and that they responded by pouring millions of dollars into a decades-long propaganda campaign. The amount of misinformation on this issue has been staggering. In my opinion those responsible are guilty of crimes against humanity. That said, I don’t think everyday deniers are entirely blameless.

At this point, I feel that ignorance on such a big issue – and it’s big even if you’re in denial about the science – is at least partly a choice. All of this information is publicly available. Almost all of it I learned after I graduated college. Getting a bachelor’s degree in biology definitely gave me the tools to better evaluate the science for myself, but any scientist knows that that’s nowhere close to expertise in any branch of science. I’m more trained than a “layman”, but I don’t think that’s saying much.

Even without that training, the world is full of people who have explained this stuff in a myriad of different ways. For whatever reason, those explanations haven’t gotten through to this particular commenter, so I figured I’d put in my oar.

“Bigots, doomers, and trolls will have their comments edited or deleted. ”
Guess I should do my best to be considered one of those. BTW I consider YOU a ‘doomer’. It isn’t that I do not ‘believe’ in ‘climate change’. Rather I recognize no reason why it should not – unpredictably, but likely conforming to past patterns of experience in large part. It is fun to hear you refer to disbelief in anthropogenic global warming / climate change as a matter for a ‘conspiracy theory’ – although when government levies a tax it is no secret what their theft is about. Nor is it especially credible that man should be responsible for change decades hence. Such a projection is still the speculation it ever was. Not even the I.P.C.C. calls its computer emulation of the function of crystal balls factual – though if one is silly enough it can be called credible. There is no data – nor can there be. Things which have not happened remain unmeasurable..

I tend to allow a little leeway for discussion, disagreement, and so on. My problem comes when we enter the realm of advocacy, or when we start going in circles. The “doomers” in question are those who think our extinction due to climate change is inevitable and near, and therefor we shouldn’t bother doing anything about it. It’s the flip side of those who say the problem isn’t happening, so we shouldn’t do anything about it.

As to your claim that it’s “not especially credible”, I’m afraid the only two reasons why you’d say that are dishonesty or ignorance. I’ll assume – for now – that it’s ignorance, and we’ll see where that goes. To begin with, you seem to think that the field of climate science is a relatively new one.

It’s not.

We’ve known how CO2 interacts with heat in our atmosphere since 1856. When I say “known”, I mean that Eunice Foote was able to measure it then. Her work has since been confirmed countless times by countless people, and versions of it are still used as science fair projects to this day.

The first prediction that CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels would raise this planet’s temperature was in 1896, by Swedish chemist and physicist Svante Arrhenius. This wasn’t just a guess. He and many others had found evidence of past ice ages, and were studying what could cause such a thing to happen, when another scientist approached him with his evidence that carbon dioxide from burning coal was actually accumulating in the atmosphere. The prediction was made not based on random guesswork, but based on the measurable physical properties of carbon dioxide, and the measurable rate of increase in the atmosphere.

That was 126 years ago, also known as 12.6 decades.

When Arrhenius made the prediction, he calculated it would take around 3,000 years for the climate to warm enough for palm trees to grow in Sweden, and he was pretty happy about the idea. That was based on fossil fuel consumption in the 1890s, you understand. The rate of consumption has gone up a bit since then.

Already you can see that this isn’t a prediction NOW about something happening in the future, so much as a prediction from the past that we’ve checked over and over and over for over a century, and that has turned out to be accurate, no matter how many times we run the numbers.

This is what science is. It’s a method for taking information we know, and using it to make predictions, which are then tested.

The field of climate science continued after Arrhenius’ work, of course. The term “climate change” goes back to the 1930s, if memory serves, but it was in the late 1950s when things really kicked off. That’s when Charles Keeling started making some noise about what his CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa observatory were showing. This graph is known as “Keeling Curve“:

1958 is also when the first televised warning about climate change appeared on Bell Telephone Science Hour:

I want to emphasize, again, that all of this was literal decades before that warming was measurable. This is not something scientists came up with after the fact to explain warming that was being seen, it’s something scientists successfully predicted decades before it happened. In the case of Arrhenius, he predicted it and then died of old age decades before it happened. It was also – in case I need to tell you this – decades before computer models or the IPCC existed.

The creation of the IPCC was the moment when governments realized that they should at least look like they were doing something about this problem. That’s what the “I” of that acronym is – “Intergovernmental”.

That came almost a century after the first prediction of global warming caused by human activities, and it came because the evidence had already been overwhelming for years

This is no different from Eratosthenes measuring the circumference of the earth in 276 B.C.E., literally thousands of years before we were able to actually circumnavigate it whenever we wanted, or even go into space and take a look from the outside. It’s no different from our ability to predict that a dramatic increase in the number of new smokers THIS year, will lead to a measurable increase in cases of lung cancer a few decades down the line.

Every aspect of your life involves technology that came from predictions made decades or centuries before those predictions were realized. This is not the divine revelation of prophecy, it’s just a basic understanding of the material realities of our world.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: How not to talk about climate change

There are a lot of wrong ways to approach climate change, both in terms of the policies proposed, and in terms of the rhetoric used. The people in our society with the most power and the biggest platforms are pretty much universally people who have no trouble making ends meet. I think that’s part of why they’re so willing to embrace the notion that climate change is about individual choices, rather than systems, because paying a little more for something doesn’t really affect their quality of life much. Left Reckoning has a perspective on this that I think is worth lyour time:

Video: Post-Satire Capitalism

I don’t know if satire is dead, but a lot of this video gets at how I’ve been feeling for a while now. Life has a sort of surreal quality, with the cheerleaders of capitalism becoming ever more cartoonish in their praises for murderous profiteers. How is it that these people have so much power? How is this supposed to be the best the world can be?

How can this possibly last?

It can’t.

If you like this content, consider giving to Leon’s patreon.

A super sexy video from Some More News that’s totally not about any serious problems or anything.

Edit: To everyone who came here because of this post’s title, uh, sorry this wasn’t what you were looking for, but feel free to check out the blog when you have a moment!

So the language in this one is a bit more risqué than my normal content, but I think it’s a really good follow-up to the optimism video I posted the other day. Society is run by people who’re so thoroughly detached from “normal” people’s lives that I think they’ve lost the ability to think clearly about the state of the world. After all, everything’s going great for them.

And so the whole world has to stagnate and decay, so that a few people can cling to the illusion that everything’s fine. It’s possible I’m feeling somewhat irritated by all this. Here, have a video!

Video from Unlearning Economics: Steven Pinker and the Failure of New Optimism

I’m working on a couple big-ish pieces right now – one on economic sanctions, and one on a video game called The Outer Worlds, and in some ways this is relevant to both. One of the things that came out during the 2008 crash was that a great many people had seen it coming, and had been ignored or even fired for not being optimistic enough. I think there’s a very strong case to be made that a similar kind of reckless optimism is still the default among the ruling class (not surprising – things are great for them), but rather than an economic bubble, we’re facing something much bigger and much worse.

This is a long one, but I think it’s well worth your time. You can listen to it while commuting or doing chores or something, or you can just treat it like a documentary. It digs into the propaganda that’s being used to hide serious problems from those of us at or near the imperial core, and I think we’re still in the early stages of that narrative collapsing. I would expect to be hearing more “things are better than ever” propaganda going forward, and it’s useful to have an understanding of how they use “real” numbers to lie. I haven’t seen a whole lot from Unlearning Economics, but I think I’m going to change that soon.

 

 

Spirit photography and cults

Hey, didja know that this blog is part of a larger blogging network? I know! It’s true! Unfortunately, I’ve been a less-than-exemplary community member over the last couple years. International moves seem to use up a lot of my energy, so I just kinda turned into a hermit. In the name of doing better about that, I’ll be cross-posting more stuff from my fellow Freethought Bloggers, starting with this:

There is a very strong desire among some segments of the population to make contact with dead people. This desire has been exploited by charlatans, people who claim that (for a fee, of course) they can channel your loved ones. The methods used have varied over time. In the US, the rise in interest in communicating with the dead coincided with the Civil War that saw massive numbers of dead people that left their families devastated and seeking some form of comfort.

I’ve found the occult fascinating for years, both as a social and psychological phenomenon, and because I enjoy the aesthetics. I think that the phenomena behind both occult fads and cults are related, and that’s something we’d do well to consider as we continue into this century of high technology and climate chaos. At times it’s hard not to feel like the world is ending, and with the predicted rise in death and destruction, I think a lot of people are going to end up turning to strange places for help. I also think that with traditional Christianity being so closely tied to political leadership in the United States, a lot of younger people are going to prefer things that don’t remind them of the folks who seem to be screwing everything up. Reading Mano’s post made me think of this Tumblr thread Tegan came across a little while back:

 

https://ruimtetijd.tumblr.com/post/675903941497765888/my-hypothesis-is-that-in-like-10-years-gen-z-is

Check out Mano’s post (there’s a neat video there!), and maybe spread this post (or the Tumblr post) around, because I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of those aspects of history we’d do well to learn from.

 

 

Is Joe Rogan worth trying to engage with?

There’s a reflex, when you think you know about a particular topic, to engage in discussions and disagreements using that knowledge as your primary tool. Most of the time this is fine, but when it comes to debates and public arguments, it turns out that being correct and knowledgeable can count for much less than being a fast talker who’s good at engaging with an audience. When it comes to Joe Rogan, it’s generally not hard to point out where he’s factually wrong, but as with young-earth creationists and climate deniers, that’s often not enough. It’s also important to consider how he responds to disagreement, and whether it’s worth engaging with him at all.

John Stewart recently declared Rogan to be “someone you can engage with”, which prompted Rebecca Watson to take a skeptical look not at whether Rogan is right or wrong about a given issue, but specifically at what happens when he is provably wrong, and someone tries to point that out to him.

And this is perfectly encapsulated in the Josh Zepps interview: Rogan takes approximately 10 seconds to say “for young boys in particular there’s an adverse risk associated with the vaccine: there’s a 2-4 fold increase in incidences of myocarditis.”

Zepps responds “Yes, you know there’s an increase in myocarditis in that cohort from getting COVID as well which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.” That also takes him approximately 10 seconds.

Rogan responds “I don’t think that’s true.” In the next 60 seconds, Rogan reads the article that says Zepps is correct, and argues that it’s not true for children, at which point Zepps needs to dumb it down for him a little to make sure Rogan understands that it IS about the cohort he’s talking about. When it becomes indisputable that Zepps is correct, Rogan objects to the source of the article, and just starts saying complete nonsense: “That is NOT what I’ve read before, and also it’s like even when we’re reading these things where are we getting this from even from the VAERS report, the amount of people that report, the underreporting.”

So he never actually admits that he was wrong. The best he can do is say it’s “interesting” and “not what (he’s) read before.” And that, to Jon Stewart, is an example of someone who isn’t an idealogue, someone we can engage with. And this is the BEST POSSIBLE CIRCUMSTANCE: Rogan was speaking with someone who already knew the actual answer to the single piece of misinformation he happened to spout at that time; Rogan’s opponent was a white man who he respected; and the opponent did not back down when Rogan continued pushing back.

Now let’s see what happens when Rogan says a piece of misinformation and is confronted by an expert in the field on which he’s pontificating, but it’s NOT a white man who he respects. On the Opie and Anthony show, Rogan claims that researchers recently found a new chimpanzee called the Bondo ape in the Congo, a 6 foot tall 400 pound chimp that nests on the ground, walks upright, and kills lions. Then a PhD primatologist calls in. Let’s see what happens (starting at 5:40)!

I bet some of you were thinking “well it’s not because she’s a woman” right up until he yelled “I have a vagina” at the end, weren’t you? Admit it. I mean, he’s also dismissive of men who know more than him but he doesn’t usually have the guts to scream over them quite so heartily.

And again, that was just ONE false claim. It took Rogan about a minute to make it, and when a primatologist had the nerve to point out that he was wrong (which he was: the “Bondi ape” was announced in 2003 and by 2004 researchers confirmed that it was a common chimp), he spent several minutes just screaming epithets over her. In the course of a regular Joe Rogan show, he can make dozens of false and misleading claims that no one would be able to rebut.

It can be difficult to navigate the confluence of free speech and bigotry at times, but this particular instance doesn’t seem particularly hard to figure out. I’m generally of the opinion that when someone has an outsized amount of power, they also have a comparable amount of responsibility to the rest of society. That means that they also are going to have more limits on their freedom, simply because of the damage they can do. Rogan’s massive audience means that he can’t just be some guy talking to people he finds interesting. He has a massive amount of influence, and he’s paid very, very well for that. He is responsible for damage that he does in spreading misinformation, and that should make him more careful about what he says. Hell, it wouldn’t even require him to do more work – at his level of wealth, he could easily pay people to do fact-checking and analysis for him, and to hold his hand through pre-interview research.

For a man with his resources, ignorance is a choice. For a man with his influence, willful ignorance is a danger. I think it’s very respectable for Young and others to choose not to associate with Spotify and Rogan, and all this hand-wringing about freedom of speech rings more than a little hollow. Maybe Rogan will change – I’m not optimistic enough to believe he’ll go away – but in the meantime I think Watson’s right. Rogan isn’t worth engaging with directly, and there are better ways to refute someone than going on their show to debate them. I’m not going to think less of people who keep their work on Spotify because they can’t afford not to – it’s certainly no worse than selling books on Amazon – but I am glad to see that they’re taking at least a little bit of a hit from all this.