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The case for climate optimism.
Last thread I got in a discussion about global warming and I got a few responses that encouraged me to turn it into a top level post, in the hopes of brightening the day of some doomers and maybe convincing some skeptics of the reality of global warming. Now I don't expect there to be many climate skeptics here but I did get one person seemingly heavily implying it last time so lets quickly go over the basic logic of global warming.
Most people who dispute global warming typically deny the existence of greenhouse gases. Point two is just indisputable and three just follows if one and two are true. Disputing the existence of greenhouse gases is really your only avenue of attack. I'll gladly defend point one of anyone disputes it in the comments but I won't belabor the point here.
Before getting into the meat of my argument I do want to give the skeptics their due. Climate activists often make incredibly misleading arguments they think will promote climate activism but once people find out they've been mislead it just sows distrust in the entire field. Probably the most infuriating one is fossil fuel subsidies. You'll see the claim going around that governments spend 7 trillion dollars subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. But once you look into the numbers you see that the vast majority of these 'subsidies' are not from governments spending money but actually from governments failing to tax externalities. Now, I realize that economists do call these things implicit subsidies but climate activists rarely mention the implicit part and regardless this is not what anyone else uses the term subsidy to mean. Not only does this misleading stat sow distrust in climate activism but it also misdirects it. Most climate activists take it as it's face meaning and think governments are pointlessly shoveling cash into fossil fuels for no reason and all they have to do is to stop that. I hate this argument and wish it would stop being made. Sadly with even wikipedia's own article burying the lede on it I doubt I'll stop hearing it anytime soon.
Okay, so I've been waffling for a bit, what exactly is my argument? I fully believe that by 2030 global warming will be largely solved and by 2040 the issue will be essentially forgotten like the hole in the ozone layer. Now, if you haven't been keeping up with the clean energy and EV industry this might be a very surprising claim, global warming fixed in 4 years? Too good to be true! However I have what I think are good reasons for believing this. First thing to note is what most of our oil goes towards. About 85% goes towards making fuels of some kind and a good chunk of the remaining 15% goes towards things that don't get converted to CO2 like plastics and lubrication. As you might expect from the previous number, the vast majority of CO2 emissions also come from energy.
This chart I linked actually massively understates the how much global warming is caused by energy emissions because I'm fairly certain most of the agriculture and forestry slice on that pie is bullshit but I already gave the skeptics their due so I won't go into it.So, since the vast majority of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels for energy, either for transportation or electricity, then to fix global warming you'd have to get both transport and electricity off of fossil fuels. I am therefore happy to report that significant and rapid progress is being made on both fronts. For EVs last year about a quarter of all new cars sold were EVs, while the full stats for 2026 aren't in yet
for some reasonthe preliminary numbers are putting it at about a third. It looks pretty clear to me that EV adoption is a standard industry S-curve and we're hitting the nearly vertical section of it. Oh and before you ask, yes, it is mostly full EVs, not hybrids. Even if it were to end here this would already take a substantial chunk out of our CO2 emissions, since 100% of ICEVs emit CO2citation neededbut already about 40% of our electricity is clean.But speaking of electricity, how has that been going? Pretty well actually, the share of global electricity thats renewable has nearly doubled in since the great recession, even nuclear is having a renaissance, and the rate of growth only seems to be accelerating. All the increase in electricity has come from clean sources, indeed the total amount of fossil fuel electricity is now declining. Why? Mainly thanks to the growth of solar and wind which is mainly thanks to the plummeting price of wind and solar. It's gotten so cheap that developing countries are skipping coal and gas and going straight to solar and wind. Not just are the share percentages similar to EVs but they now seem to be even be growing at similar rates!
You only need to extrapolate these curves out to see that by 2030 the vast majority of cars will be electric and we'll be approaching majority clean energy. All we must do to fix global warming is to keep on the path we're going down.
So, if global warming is mostly solved then what will there be for climate activists to do? Perhaps they'll try to find some other catastrophe to panic about like @JTarrou said, maybe AI. However, notice I said only mostly solved. Transport and energy is huge but theres still going to be a few tough holdouts that'll be difficult to decarbonize. Air travel is the big one, unless solid state batteries pan out in which case it'd be easy, with concrete, steel and nitrogen fertilizer being most of the rest. The latter three are particularly vexing problems but with a ~90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions we'll have plenty of time to figure them out. Regardless of any caveats I hope you dear reader learned something from all this and perhaps even made the future seem a little less bleak for you.
This is the major problem with climate theories. They reduce a very complex system down to the simple pieces we are capable of observing, then, arrogantly, assume that this means we understand them. You can prove that greenhouse gases raise temperatures in a greenhouse, but is the Earth a greenhouse? Who is to say what proportion of warming is caused by greenhouse gases? What role is played by oceanic variation, by subterranean thermal forces, solar forces, Milankovitch cycles? We don't have a second control earth, we aren't running controlled experiments, we are simply asserting that the rise in measured global temperatures* is caused by the Greenhouse Effect, because that's the one part we seem to understand.
Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce because I didn't clean my room and I know that makes them angry.
You said that "the vast majority of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels for energy". This topic works me up a little bit, so I don't want to be too animated, but maybe I can convince you that this is a very dubious statement to be making.
It's an ontological mess. Pig's breakfast. We have no idea what we're talking about. Vineyards were maintained in Greenland for hundreds of years, Mesopotamia used to be the Fertile Crescent. We have no idea what reasonable historical averages really look like. The infamous hockey stick graph is basically a work of fiction, when you look at the methods scientists use to estimate past temperatures they don't match we can read on a thermometer. The entire field of climatology is subsidized by governments and runs into perverse status incentives. The whole field is ripe with the same conditions that feed the Replication Crisis, except that climate papers can't even fail to replicate because there's nothing to replicate. There are precious few actual experiments being done. We don't have a second earth to run controlled experiments on. We have complicated instruments and theories, sure, the scientists all get degrees and wear labcoats. I will grant that it's all done in some seriousness. But ontologically it's not the same as hard, replicable science. It's elaborated wumbology. And you have to believe in wumbo to be allowed to practice. This more closely mirrors the conditions of Roman sacerdotes performing auguries than actual science, which is maybe why climate scientists consistently fail to predict anything.
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe fossil fuel use goes down and we did it Patrick, we saved the whole town. The earth doesn't burn up, I pitched a perfect game, it must be because I wore my lucky socks. This is fairly basic to the human condition. If climate change goes out of fashion it won't be considered that maybe it didn't matter at all, it will be taken as proof that we understood everything, we solved it. That doesn't really bother me. But I do think that actually this was mostly all a waste of time.
* Let's not even get into all the problems with measuring temperature.
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If the various and sundry ecological predictions are correct, then it seems to me there is only one broad course of action: Push nuclear, nuke China and Russia and re-colonize the entire world to keep them from developing in ways that would produce carbon. Anything short of that is ineffective and unserious, according to the current state of climate science. We are already past the tipping point, the ice caps will melt within a century and if we don't start killing billions, there won't be a future for humanity. Naturally, being an American, I favor other billions.
Modestly proposed, modestly delivered.
Or maybe, just maybe, science didn't solve the entire planet's climate model in 1975 and this whole thing is overblown. Good news! Turns out we didn't need to kill all those people after all! Woops!
Anakin: "Nuclear is the solution for climate change."
Padme: "Because it provides reliable carbon-neutral energy, right?"
Anakin: "..."
Padme: "... right?"
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Considering the science (or Science(tm) if you prefer) can't account for all the emitted carbon with a basic mass/energy balance, I do have some skepticism about the overall climate models that predict doom.
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I would share your optimism if the half-life of atmospheric CO2 was a year or two. Sadly, CO2 is a very stable molecule.
Google's AI claims that 50-70% will be absorbed by oceans and plants over 50-100 years. To get rid of the rest, the carbon needs to be transported into the deep oceans or even back where we took it from and this will take even longer.
I could as well say:
CO2 is the gas of life, and the more CO2 we have in the atmosphere, the more dense with life our planet will become. We do not need to get rid of carbon. There is nothing wrong with it.
It appears that some life-forms on the motte are still bitter about the Great Oxidation Event, when the gas of life was largely replaced by unnatural toxins such as oxygen. Glad to see that someone is pushing back against the Eukaryote chauvinism so common here!
FWIW, I agree that life on Earth will be fine whatever the CO2 levels are. As the saying goes, there are no bad environmental conditions, only ill-adapted species. With regard to whiny polar bears and corals, it is really their own fault for having picked ecological niches which are going away. Still, in a few hundred million years we will probably have at least as much biodiversity as we have today. It is not Earth's first extinction event, and it will not be Earth's last either.
Even humans as a species will be fine -- as reflected in our Least Concern vulnerability rating. Sure, individual human populations might die, but realistically humans die all the time. If we started caring on that level then we would have to wet our pants every time a world war happens. Preposterous. We might as well start caring about individual humans while we are at it.
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It is hypothetically possible for the planet to support much green plant life but little or no large mammalian life. Such as plants thriving in hot CO2 but not megafauna such as humans.
The jungle tends to have more mammal biomass, not less, than the poles.
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We should make our atmosphere 100% CO2 to maximize life, what could go wrong?
Currently, though, the number is at 0.04% CO2. It does seem like there's some room to go up without drastically displacing other gases.
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You're right. The first thing that comes to my mind when talking about climate change -- and I'm surprised it's not more well known -- is the Extinction Clock website that compiles failed climate-related predictions, especially relating to catastrophe. (Unfortunately it appears to have been down for months now, so here's an archived version.)
To this day I see climate activists wondering why no one trusts them, and I must be going crazy because that website should be like a mirror to them, and if I were them I would go look in the mirror and see #1 Reason Why People Don't Trust You, Exhibit A. The one way they can have even a small hope of recovering trust in people is if they are willing to publicly admit that their predictions have been wrong and talk about the steps they are taking to ensure being wrong won't happen again. This is the only way, and there is no shortcut. Doubling down further on wrong predictions, and especially tying them to a moral failing on the part of the audience, only sows more distrust.
That's the gishiest gallop I've seen in some time. You've got stuff that's not related to climate change, like the quotes about ozone depletion or the Ehrlich quotes at the beginning or what have you. You have obvious intentional misinterpretions: if you have a quote like "2015 is only six years away, but many experts say that if the world has not reached an agreement to massively reduce greenhouse gases by then, we could pass a point of no return", it obviously doesn't mean that we're at the point of a full-scale visible apocalypse in 2015, just that it would eventually show up if there's not agreement by then without a timescale given for visible events.
You've got misquotes and missing context: the full context for "In relation to the first Earth Day event, quote: "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind"." is "Nobel-winning Harvard biochemist George Wald articulated the fears in a speech later that year at the University of Rhode Island, warning that civilization would end within 15 to 30 years unless immediate action were taken against threats facing mankind, including pollution, overpopulation, and potential nuclear war", and we did indeed take action regarding a potential nuclear war (and other stuff there) after 1970. You've got "could happen" scenarios interpreted as predictions. And so on.
It obviously DOES mean to cause distress and prompt significant actions right away.
It's not a gish gallop, it's a collection of hysterical failed doomsday predictions. Of course doomsday predictions don't come to fruition, they never do. The point is to remind everyone how long the same kind of tactics have been used, and how false every manipulative claim really is.
There's no way for you to sweep this away in that manner. Just read it:
We're there. We're in a period of climatic change. No hedges, no if-only. We're there, we're in the middle of the period of change.
Except....they go on to describe some of the problems:
Balderdash. Complete phooey. Made up out of whole cloth. No beach has lost sixty feet in the intervening thirty years.
Or this one predicting an ice free Artic well over ten years ago:
And yet, what do we actually see? Over ten years later and we're still waiting for the first ice free day.
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But taking measures against overpopulation only made things worse. How should you count the entire list when the list has an item like that?
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So far as I can see all energy sources are at all time highs in total energy output. Coal is higher than ever before, oil is higher than ever before, renewables are higher than ever before.
Anyway, all clean energy does in climate terms is lower the rate of increase in temperature. CO2 that's up there in the atmosphere stays up there unless we take it out. Electrifying cars cannot help with this.
Plus the climate changes without us. There's oil in Antarctica, it used to be jungle down there. We didn't have anything to do with that!
Fixing global warming means controlling global temperatures directly, not merely adjusting our footprint. There are many ways to do this, mirrors and aerosols and painting things white, adjusting cloud formation.
Aerosols are my preferred approach, mimicking natural cooling effects induced by volcanoes. Aerosols can achieve immediate cooling effects sufficient to halt and reverse global warming at a modest cost of a few tens of billions per year. There are some tradeoffs with the ozone layer and weather patterns that could also be addressed with more effort. But aerosols are an actual solution to global warming, whereas renewables are not.
I think climate change discourse has gone down the wrong direction, there's a certain ecological angle that seeks to reduce human activity in all respects. A more mature approach is to accept that human destiny will not and should not be an unending burden as caretakers for nature. The world is not a national park, nobody is going to pay us to keep it as it was. We are responsible not as stewards but as owners and developers. We have been developing Earth for millennia, it is silly to stop now when the job is incomplete and say 'no further changes'.
Extinction should be avoided except for pests, which should be destroyed. But we could make new species as well. Slashing and burning jungles to make cheap beef is bad - not innately as a desecration of nature but because there are potentially valuable cures and biology there.
"Stick to the devil you know" was not meant for this occasion.
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I gotta go to work very soon so I'll respond to the rest of this later but
This is incredibly misleading. The last time Antarctica was a jungle was when it was way further north, part of pangea and also when CO2 levels were way higher.
There were jungles near the South Pole 100 million years ago, 82 degrees south is pretty much where Antarctica is today: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2148-5
I don't see how it's misleading to say that the climate changes without our involvement when there was rainforest in Antarctica and where-Antarctica-is-now. Plus there was the Ice Age too in more recent history. That was a pretty big deal, nearly wiped us out.
Taking full control of the climate is an important step. CO2 can clearly exert huge environmental changes, the renewables-only approach leaves a lot to unknown chance. If we hit a 'tipping point' then who knows what might happen, we'll be flooded in our trendy electric cars.
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In somewhat related news, Ezra Klein had a climate guy on his podcast recently that also painted a fairly bright picture. Which I agree with not only because I don't think anyone has proven to me global warming is bad, but also because I always expected this trend and that we could reverse CO2 levels with ease if we just cut regulations and grew the economy.
And that is what also saddened me about Ezra's guest. Despite being optimistic, he was delusional. Saying that if only we had followed Jimmy Carter's plan in 1978 we'd already have a full EV fleet and solar powering our grid. My guy, we are talking about technologies that have been heavily subsidized for decades, and as a result were over-invested in, and still were failing. Its only when the rest of tech caught up have these things been economical. Alas this is the way of the environmentalist. Take credit for things not earned, lay blame where you caused the issue. Such is politics I suppose.
Alas, I do thing we could probably already be able to suck carbon from the air for essentially free (if needed, which I dont think is proven) if we just eliminated the EPA and most state equivalents.
Unfortunately that guy is right that we could've solved global warming decades earlier but wrong about how it would've been done. The most maddening thing about old school environmentalists is their opposition to nuclear. We could have a totally decarbonized electric grid right now but lead ladden boomers and genxers heard nuclear and thought of bombs.
Nuclear power opposition has probably aggravated the air quality problems we have from burning all that excess coal. It's the most annoying thing about environmentalists.
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Nah; we thought of imaginary three-eyed fish and fantasy barrels of glowing green radioactive goo.
IMHO the logical culprit here was the one-two punch of Three Mile Island (where, despite no detectable health effects, we proved the west was capable of screwing up more badly than should have been possible) and Chernobyl (where the Soviets proved that screwing up far more badly could contaminate a thousand square miles and probably lead to early cancer for thousands of people), but emotionally the obstacle to simply improving procedures and designs and regaining public trust was definitely the thought of Homer Simpson in charge of safety and Mr. Burns in charge of waste disposal.
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What's your definition of solved by 2030? Aren't there something like 2 billion cars on the planet. Won't it be ~10 years to end of life half of those cars? While we continue to mostly replace them with ICE cars (albeit in smaller proportion). I'm just not understanding how we get to solved by 2030. More like 2045, in this aspect, if EV growth continues through the happy scenario.
Also are renewables significantly reducing the amount of absolute energy that's being produced from fossil fuels, or is it simply supporting new energy demand? One could imagine we do a great job of making more and more of the grid renewable/green energy but still blow our carbon budget because the fossil fuel generation that got us into this situation is being supplemented rather than retired.
I look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and I don't see the line doing anything but going up and to the right.
When it goes to the left is when you need to worry, up or down.
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I would say solved being peak CO2 emissions. You're right about ICE cars but even at the levels we're at right now it's helping to slow the rate of car emissions. ICE car sales peaked in 2017 and it's been nothing but down since. I'd estimate that by 2030 over 80% of new cars sold will be EVs and the transition from mostly ICE to mostly EV will be quicker than you think. Norway is well ahead of everyone and is already at a third of cars on the road being EVs, hell even china is at one in ten and they started way later.
Well, if the amount of electricity being generated from fossil fuels is going down, and the number of cars burning fossil fuels is going down, then I don't see how it couldn't be?
https://www.marketscale.com/industries/energy/solar-hits-87-of-global-power-but-fossil-fuels-still-grew-faster-in-2025
I'm wrong in a worse way. Fossil fuel based generation is not merely being held constant while renewables provide the added demand (still a climate change bad case), but fossil fuel consumption increased as well.
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There was a third way to dispute greenhouse gases - “the planet would heat up”.
If you if you believe (1) greenhouse gases exists (2) we are pumping a lot of them….it does not guarantee (3) in a complex system. Or more importantly that (3) will be significant versus other modifications like population moving slightly north etc. Or taking other steps that mitigate problems.
The weakest part of the global warming argument was always the create a climate model that is accurate while knowing (1) and (2) are correct. We are simply not good at modeling those things. One thing that has some similarities is the human digestion system and we’ve never been able to model that correctly or entirely explain why humans are getting fatter. And throughout my life on this earth I’ve seen incredible changes on “this is the healthy food you should eat”. The current thing seems to be that I should only eat protein perhaps cooked in beef lard. Sometime in the not so distant past you were suppose to avoid eating red meat.
But 3) is the most well-attested part! It’s the whole reason Al Gore could get up on stage and point to those sawtooth curves. I don’t think I’ve seen an argument that the planet is actually cooler than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
If 3) is hard, the correct response is not to throw up our hands and let God decide. And there are some skeptics out there trying to make their own models say, yeah, it’s alarming but okay. Here’s a feedback mechanism, here’s a reversal, we’ll be alright if we bring back bunker fuels. Stuff like that.
But the mainstream version of climate skepticism is to accuse the people working on 3) of being paid degrowth shills who hate America. You can see it all over this thread. The motte is that spending money on climate research is wasteful and rewards the wreckers. The bailey is that it’s all fake and gay by default. Is that truth-seeking behavior?
I think your food analogy is wrongheaded. What you’ve seen are the fads, the contrarians, the countersignals. The people selling something by contrasting it with a mainstream. Climate science is the mainstream! That’s why so much time and effort has to go into discrediting it! The dynamics are completely different than the market for fad diets.
I honestly have no idea what part of this is sarcasm or an actual argument. I think the use of italics and exclamation marks makes it hard to tell if you are speaking clearly or using them to imply you don’t really believe that argument.
Sorry. No sarcasm was intended.
My understanding is that the warming itself is easy to measure. We have thermometer records going back to the 1800s and reasonable proxies going back further. This would make 3) well-attested.
I do not believe that 3) is controversial. I have seen people argue that 3) was correlated with, not caused by, 2). I have also seen people accept 3) and then propose 4) it won’t be that bad. Those are both consistent positions, and I respect the people who are trying to seriously find evidence for them.
It's true, but pretty uncommon to have exactly the same thermometer in exactly the same location (within the same environs) for even a few decades -- datasets like HADCRUT are heavily massaged by true believers, and the longest-term measuring locations tend to be in areas particularly vulnerable to urban heat-island and other local effects. Also the areas said (by current models) to be expected to experience the most local warming are sparsely populated (pretty polar) and have limited historical data of any kind.
I'm more "so what" than full-denier -- but I think "we don't really know with high certainty how much average global temperatures have increased since the 1800s" is a pretty viable position.
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Well, it's pretty easy to explain why humans are getting fatter, it's because we're eating too much. In fact the changing fad diets all seem to be based on the idea that you can somehow eat your way into not being fat. I suspect this idea might hold some blame as to why people are getting fatter.
Regardless one and two does indeed imply three and adapting to a warmer planet has no bearing on whether the planet is warming, on the contrary it kinda requires it.
(1) and (2) does imply (3) but it’s not always true. Natural systems can have mean reverting systems (or breakout) systems. The amount of food you eat does not strictly translate to getting fatter because most people’s metabolism increases when they eat more so there is a naturally mean reversion. Especially since the AGW story was sold on runaway temperature rises and not something that would have system in place that could cancel out a rising temperature.
You actually do need a nearly flawless model of the earths system to make prediction on more CO2 leading to runaway temperature growth and I have not see evidence that we have really good models on the earth.
I am just point out that (1) and (2) does not mean problematic climate change. That actually takes far more complicated science.
I think it'd be really difficult to fairly test, but the correlation between increasing global CO2 and BMI strikes me as a potential causation that would, if nothing else, be funny. "We're getting fat because average CO2 concentrations have increased 50%" isn't something I've seen tested, even if the linkage isn't understood. IIRC someone here once linked to a study showing that lab mice on the same controlled diets get fatter than they did decades ago.
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I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it. As far as I can see if it wasn't dug out of the ground and burned then it doesn't contribute to global warming in a meaningful way. Main reason I'm skeptical about the agriculture stuff on that pie chart I linked.
“ I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it”
Which is why I said initially (1) and (2) don’t really matter but (3) which the model. How the system interacts with itself is all that matters.
That being said for decades it seemed like the real goal of climate activists was drawing in communists/degrowthwers as an angle to attack western civilization. The actual climate models and whether we should be concerned I believe is past human IQ to figure out. So the entire debate was a capitalist-communists fight played out in climate science indirectly that no one understood.
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They don't really say anything about the magnitude of three though -- unless you have a good model of the system as a whole, which we don't.
Luckily with that you can just check vs reality to see the magnitude. CO2 levels are currently at 427 ppm over the 280 is was before the industrial revolution, and temps are at about 1.5℃ above pre-industrial. So pretty damn close to 0.01 degrees per ppm.
You... think that global temperature (whatever that even means) has a direct linear relationship with (average) atmospheric CO2?
I'm fairly sure that's an oversimplification...
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I don't mean to be glib, but intuiting a linear relationship from correlation in a complex system is famously unreasonable.
Whenever this debate comes up i'm just reminded of so called technical analysis and all the fallacies that come up in it. Just substitute temperature for the price of a stock and you got them all:
And so on and so on. People just don't seem to have the humility to accept that complex systems are hard to model. That's not to say the climate scientists are necessarily wrong, but it's tremendously difficult to actually make a valid argument either way, and such a small proportion of the debate is that.
No we can't just eyeball it, for the same reason you can't just eyeball your options strategy unless you want to donate all your money to Wall Street.
Yes linear is silly. A lot of it depends on the model which we are not good at. I think some had like Russia permafrost melting and releasing a lot of carbon buried under it which would accelerate heating. I have no idea if that is true. But you could have a model where some natural thing starts happening when temperatures rise which cancels out more carbon.
So the model which is (3) is the dominating part of the equation and without a doubt the weakest part of the science.
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I believe that global warming is essentially a hoax. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but the main thing I dispute is that warming due to mankind's emissions will be amplified by a positive feedback mechanism.
So in a sense, I don't dispute global warming. What I mean is that (1) there is little or no dispute that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising due to mankind's activities; (2) since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, one can reasonably expect measurable warming due to mankind's activities. The issue is that according to climate activists, alarmists, warmistas -- whatever you want to call them -- this baseline warming will be amplified to dangerous levels by water vapor feedback. However this claim of amplification, in my opinion, does not stand up to scrutiny. Which means we are left with modest warming as opposed to dangerous warming.
Anyway, as I said, I can't speak for anyone but myself but I suspect that you are attacking a bit of a strawman here. Are you able to identify a few prominent global warming skeptics who "deny the existence of greenhouse gases"?
I've never heard either this objection or anything about water vapor feedback being anything more than a minor contributor. Regardless this doesn't really matter for my point that global warming is nearly solved anyways so I won't focus on it.
As for the second, I remember quite clearly we had someone here that denied greenhouses gases existed, @dale-cloudman, wow it's been 2 years since this guy posted here. Anyways I don't really have any specific examples of popular skeptics explicitly denying greenhouse gases exist but pretty much all of them commonly make arguments that don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist. Mainly quibbling over solar irradiance or how the climate is constantly changing. Since they readily admit to two then the only other way they can argue anything else is causing global warming is by denying CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
I'm not sure is it's talked about in current climate circles, but it's significant in modeling. Models (at least in the 2000s when I learned about this) had a multiplicative factor on climate forcing that was based on a positive reinforcement mechanism from water vapor - in other words, the calculated increase in temperature from CO2 was doubled or tripled because of the assumption of positive reinforcement. Notably, the models did not really model cloud albedo effects, which make water vapor arguably a negative feedback mechanism that stabilizes temperature instead.
Of course, the actual problem was that the models kept all this secret. They were considered proprietary (including the input parameters e.g. 'CO2 forcing' = 3x), so all we the public got to see was the predictions of catastrophe and runaway warming, without any visibility on how those predictions were made. Now that we have a better understanding, it's clear why the predictions of these models were simply wrong, but the trust is quite reasonably lost.
I basically agree with all of this, except that I don't think the role of water vapor feedback in climate models was secret in the sense that it was completely unavailable and not discussed. Rather, I think it was a secret in the sense that it was not publicized or emphasized. And why would it be? It's embarrassing to admit that your catastrophic predictions are based on what is essentially a fudge factor.
But either way, there are a lot of people out there who think they know a lot about the global warming debate -- even on a scientific level -- who have literally never heard of water vapor feedback or the role it plays in climate models.
PS I agree that it's actually more likely that water vapor is a negative feedback mechanism than a positive feedback mechanism. Not because I am some kind of expert on climate science, but rather due to common sense about complicated systems. If a complicated system has been relatively stable for a while, the default assumption should be that it's dominated by negative feedback. By analogy, you are far more likely to find a large (loose) boulder on the floor of a valley than on the peak of a mountain.
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What? This is basic stuff. Water vapors are even as of now contributing over 50% toward heating. There are other heat trapping substances such as clouds (liquid atmospheric water) is another 25%, methane is 5% and CO2 maybe 20%. There are other important things in the models such as albedo effect stemming from disappearance ice replacing it with earth with different reflection rates. There is a thing of 4,000 gigatons of CO2 trapped in permafrost and microbes etc. in soil.
All these things are part of climate models, they act in nonlinear and unpredictable way, they have their own natural cycle often with different branches etc. Some of them provide some solution, for instance you can trap atmospheric carbon by growing woods, burning them via pyrolysis and producing biochar that can be used as fertilizer, replacement for some construction material such as asphalt or you can use lignin from wood to produce carbon fiber etc.
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Respectfully, water vapor feedback is the (or at least A) central issue in the global warming controversy.
Ok, then please give me examples of a few arguments made by a few prominent global warming skeptics which don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist.
I strongly disagree. They could admit that CO2 is a greenhouse gas but take the position that the effects of CO2 have been exaggerated.
No it isn't? This is legit the first time I've ever heard about water vapor feedback being a major issue. I assure you, in climate activist circles this is just not a thing we talk about. The main catastrophic feedback mechanisms climate activists worry about are clathrate gun, ice albedo feedback and permafrost gas releases. Not water vapor feedback.
Did you just not see the two I mentioned in the post you're replying to?
Sure they could but "global warming is happening and caused by humans, just a lot slower than believed" is not a track I ever see anyone take.
Well, are you saying that you have studied the global warming debate carefully for a good deal of time? (It seems like you are saying something like "If water vapor feedback were an important issue, I surely would have heard about it by now given that I've been following the global warming debate carefully for some time now.")
Maybe I missed it? Here's what I saw:
I'm just asking for a couple names of prominent skeptics and links to their arguments which "don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist."
Because I am genuinely skeptical of your claim that "Most people who dispute global warming typically deny the existence of greenhouse gases."
If you already provided the names and links elsewhere in the thread, would you mind just quoting yourself? TIA.
Again, are you saying that you have studied the global warming debate carefully for a good deal of time? It seems like that's what you are saying.
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Water vapor feedback is by far the largest feedback; its effect is comparable to CO2 itself, or probably larger.
@omw_68 is wrong in that the water vapor feedback mechanism is very well modeled and understood (unless he's folding cloud cover into water vapor, which does have a lot more uncertainty, including in sign).
I feel like I must exist in a very different bubble to you cause I rarely hear about water vapor feedback. The only catastrophic feedback mechanisms I hear about are the clathrate gun and permafrost gas releases. I'm skeptical of both, especially clathrate gun, but thats besides the point.
Well global warming is a culture war issue. So yeah, it sounds like you might be in the bubble created by mainstream sources which tend to follow the progressive/leftist/woke party line.
This is what I would call "motte" global warming. It's very defensible, but the problem (for climate activists) is that if you do the math, it results only in modest global warming, not the catastrophic scenarios described by climate activists. For that, you need "bailey" global warming: The idea that warming due to CO2 will be strongly amplified by means of water vapor feedback. Which gets you the scary scenarios, but isn't supported by the evidence.
Unsurprisingly, climate activists would like to blur the distinction between motte global warming and bailey global warming -- so that they can pivot back and forth depending on what's most convenient.
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I am very skeptical of this, and here's my challenge: Please identify a few instances where prominent climate models of water vapor feedback have made predictions which are (1) actual predictions (i.e. not backcasts or predictions after the fact); (2) interesting; and (3) accurate. TIA.
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