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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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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.

We have thermometer records going back to the 1800s

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.

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.

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”

  • Besides from that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play?

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.

Regardless one and two does indeed imply three

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...

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:

  • price is doing this, which means it's going to keep doing this
  • price is doing this in a short time frame, which means it is or will do this in a long time frame
  • price followed this pattern in the past, which means it's going to follow this pattern this time
  • price did a move after this event, so it's going to do the same move after the event repeats

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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