> People (well, climate science researchers) have been saying that the changes are decades ahead of us, even now, but that we need to take action now and in the past to prevent these changes.
Climate researchers have _not_ been implying that the bad effects are way out in the 21st century: they've made hundreds of testable predictions that catastrophe was at hand in the 80s, 90s, and aughts.
We were going to see the end of arctic ice, have a perpetual ozone hole necessitating sun screen when venturing outside and decimating wildlife from cataracts, see New York and other major cities drowned, etc. (Not to mention famine killing billions of people, etc.)
It is possible to think that climate research is useful and interesting even while acknowledging that they are often alarmist and full of nonsense in their predictions.
I agree that there's been a lot of over-exaggeration on both sides of the issue. If you listen only to pundits and talking heads, you're almost certainly getting the wrong information. The actual scientists, however, look at things a little differently.
For example, you cannot build a dam to handle any arbitrarily large amount of water. So what do you do? You look at the historic record and build your dam to survive a "1 in 500 year" flood. These sort of "1 in X year" events are all over climate science: "1 in 100 year hurricane", "1 in 500 year drought", "1 in 1000 year cold/warm streak". What I've seen most scientists say regarding climate change is that it will, essentially, shift X down for all of these. Of course, most of us are not going to live 100/500/1000 years, but if you look at all of these statistics in aggregate, you might notice that the globe would normally have, say, 3 "1 in 100 year" floods in any given year. If this year there are 5, and next year there are 4, that might be climate change.
Or it might not, because the aggregate statistics have their own statistics. For example, you might determine that a year with 5 "1 in 100 year" floods is, itself, a "1 in 500 years" phenomenon. Does that mean this year is that 1? Maybe...maybe not. But at some point, when you notice that all of the aggregations of aggregations of "1 in X" years events is a "1 in 1,000,000 year" phenomenon under non-climate change conditions, but a "1 in 10 year" or "1 in 50 year" phenomenon if climate change is occurring, then you might start thinking about attributing these events to climate change.
So: was the Syrian War caused by climate change? Maybe...maybe not. 3 years in a row of drought is probably a "1 in 500 year" type event. If climate change turns that into a "1 in 50 year" event, you still can't say for sure that climate change caused the drought...but you can say it's much more likely to have.
We'll know soon enough. If extreme weather events start causing more destabilization in more different parts of the world, we may find the long trend of decreasing incidence of conflict reverse itself...
Or maybe not, because maybe the decreasing trend will overpower the climate change induced increase, causing the overall trend to remain downward...just not as fast downward as it could have been. And really, that is what the problem with climate change is: the cost of doing nothing is greater than the cost of doing something. (The Stern Report lays this out in 700 pages of painstaking detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review .) Climate change probably won't wipe out the human race, but it will depress the progress and/or potential progress we might have made in its absence.
I find it the highest kind of irony that the main argument people make against doing anything about climate change (it will cost money) is actually the best argument for doing something to prevent it.
Could you substantiate your claim that climate researchers have made hundreds of testable predictions over the past several decades by citing peer-reviewed literature making the kinds of statements you describe?
Just to be clear, I am not asking for media reports of the scientific literature, but rather the original sources themselves, demonstrating that it is the climate scientists who have been making the kinds of predictions you mention.
I would also urge you to check any studies you do cite to make sure you are not misinterpreting stated uncertainties. It is disingenuous to claim that a study suggesting that extreme effects are possible but unlikely is "predicting" those extreme effects. One should either describe the uncertainty, or use standard summary statistics, such as the expected value.
Language in the article is quite similar to the language in the OP of this thread: "[L]ast year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin" vs. "NASA scientists suggest we've been underestimating..."
Climate science uses the West Antarctic as its poster child of global warming. Here's a scientific study that finds "an absence of regional warming since the late 1990s", and that instead "The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate... These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects":
Of course, we don't call it "global warming" anymore since we're not really sure that's what's happening. Now we just call it "climate change", because if there's one thing climates do, they change, and we don't even have to make specific predictions for that. If the temperature goes up, it's proof of anthropogenic climate change (global warming). If the temperature goes down, that's also proof of anthropogenic climate change (humans messing with nature makes world temperatures more unpredictible). If the temperature stays the same, it's just the calm before the storm, and nature will be back to mess us up in a big way to make up for lost time next year or next decade.
Most of our researchers are too savvy to make testable predictions based on this, at least not any closer than 50 or 100 years out. By the time it'd be time to test these, they'll be dead or retired. Meantime it's easy to excuse by saying "climate science is an inexact science." Then you can call it science and you don't even need testable predictions! But you get quicker tenure and better pay than you would with a degree in phrenology, parapsychology, or cryptozoology.
I'll close by saying priests and shaman have traditionally held similar sway over the masses to what our climate scientists do today by predicting things like solar and lunar eclipses (although, to their credit, their predictions were a bit more on-the-money than our climate scientists have mustered yet. Our moderns rely on confirmation bias and rejiggered data from NOAA instead). It's nice to know our old ways haven't left us.
That's a gross mischaracterization of "climate change". The reason we say "climate change" is because there are many things happening and not all of them are just increased temperatures. So, global warming is a part of climate change. Go back in the 1970s and the term was "inadvertent climate modification".
Global warming is very real, and still happening, and the "climate change" models predict that we will continue get global warming as we have been. You ask for testable predictions, yes, there are testable predictions but climates are notoriously difficult to model accurately, but even with disagreements over models and problems with accuracy global warming still emerges as a clear prediction.
If you want to look for confirmation bias and "rejiggered data", then what you do is you cherry-pick specific time frames and regions where you can find cooling. That's always possible. Pick a hundred regions in the world and pick a hundred spans of time for each, and then take the few combinations that show cooling and you can paint a picture that hides the truth.
I went digging for the paper that was the source for your first case, which I believe is "The Future of Arctic Sea Ice", finally published in 2012 [0].
Looking online for other media reports I found this [1], which includes the choice quote from the original paper (which you can find here [2]):
"Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3 (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover."
As expected, the paper describes a central estimate, an interval describing the uncertainty, and then provides further hedging ("nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer", and the whole second sentence). I must further emphasise that the paper, and Peter Wadhams, were saying that the Arctic ice would be melted during summer, rather than year-round - I don't feel that the phrase "Arctic sea ice may be completely melted as soon as 2015" captures that important distinction.
That serious consequences are found to be possible by some predictive model, is something worth paying attention to. Both you and tjic seem to by trying to imply that climate research has produced a range of models that are wildly inconsistent with reality, but that simply isn't the case (and certainly isn't here - yet).
If you have an interest in the subject then read the literature and understand the nuance of the claims being made. The are often large uncertainties involved, both because of difficult dynamics and poor observational coverage, and no-one in the field I have ever met has ever said otherwise.
>We were going to see the end of arctic ice, have a perpetual ozone hole necessitating sun screen when venturing outside and decimating wildlife from cataracts, see New York and other major cities drowned, etc. (Not to mention famine killing billions of people, etc.)
You should be more careful with your information sources. I'm kind of familiar with the claims of ending arctic ice, but only from straw men claims from deniers of climate science. I have not been able to find any alarmist claims from climate scientists on arctic ice, only websites that misinterpret the claims for their own propaganda purposes.
The flooding of New York and shifting of agricultural zones are not predicted to already have happened. When climate scientists talk about these things, they do not use the alarmist language that you are using.
Peter Wadham, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at University of Cambridge, has repeatedly made claims that Arctic sea ice will melt "next year". Eg in 2012 he predicted it would fully melt in sept 2016. Since that didn't happen, he now predicts it will fully melt in 2017/2018. IPCC estimates it will fully melt in the late 2030s.
Articles about him in legitimate media are [1][2]. Climate deniers get to say things like [3].
Other climate scientists think he is alarmist [4], and the 2013 IPCC report mentions his papers but is super dissmissive: See section 11.3.4 of the IPCC AR5, references to Maslwoski.
nitpick: it is actually antarctic ice we need to worry about. Arctic ice (except on Greenland) is floating and so it is already displacing its weight in water.
Melting Arctic ice also changes the surface albedo so more solar energy is absorbed, it changes the ocean salinity, and no longer cools the winds above it.
Thermal expansion of the ocean contributes almost half of total observed sea level rise. (1.1mm out of 2.8 mm total per year)
Climate researchers have _not_ been implying that the bad effects are way out in the 21st century: they've made hundreds of testable predictions that catastrophe was at hand in the 80s, 90s, and aughts.
We were going to see the end of arctic ice, have a perpetual ozone hole necessitating sun screen when venturing outside and decimating wildlife from cataracts, see New York and other major cities drowned, etc. (Not to mention famine killing billions of people, etc.)
It is possible to think that climate research is useful and interesting even while acknowledging that they are often alarmist and full of nonsense in their predictions.