I know if we want to advance and improve our lives we basically need to treat lesser species like shit but reading this story made me feel really gross. I’m assuming the synthetic version of this crab blood is a good alternative since Europe approved it, suppose we haven’t done the same here because lobbying/$$$.
I feel like as I get older my sympathy for humanity decreases and increases for wildlife/nature. I suppose that’s because of all the bad I see in humans while animals and the environment itself just seem so helpless. The planet is such an amazing thing and we’re just here sucking it dry making life awful for anything that isn’t human. I’m defintely guilty of this as well, I guess I care enough to get emotional about it at times but don’t care enough to actually drastically change my lifestyle.
Let’s not sell ourselves short. We’re making life awful for humans too!
The point I was making was not about her it was the person she quoted.
Actual climate scientists making stupid claims like this is so bad for the politics of climate change. As I said, that claim has the intellectual heft of a beauty queen asking for world peace but is in the context of the most important debate the world is having. It’s so destructive for people who know the science most to make moronic policy suggestions because it does only one thing, destroy the credibility of the science at a time when that does immeasurable harm.
It’s not even a defence to say his model suggests the timeline when it was so far outside the predictions made by all other models, including those complied in IPCC. It’s just bad science to generate a 2 standard deviation result from the mean and then act like it’s the obvious truth and then, even worse, suggest child-like delusional global policy based on it.
Greta tweeting it is a political strategy and is perfectly fine given her role in the debate. She needs to be a firebrand. The climate scientists can’t.
So, reading the Snopes and Full Fact analysis as well as the original GritPost and Forbes articles it isn’t clear to me that the climate scientist is asserting anything stupid or making any dumb claims at all. It seems much more likely that his words have been misinterpreted, misreported and sensationalised.
What he actually seems to have said in his seminar is that if floating sea ice in the arctic were to keep regressing at rates seen up to 2018 then there would be no permanent sea ice left as of 2022. Thankfully rates have slowed. He was inaccurate, but not stupid. This seems to have been something of an addendum to his wider point that 75-80% of the Arctic’s permanent sea ice had already been lost and that this already represented a tipping point from which it would be impossible to recover without drastic policy change.
This focus of his on recovery rather than mitigation then informs his remarks on policy. It seems likely that he’s talking about what it would hypothetically take to reverse climate change, not what ought to be done to mitigate it. He certainly doesn’t seem to be presenting it as a feasible policy proposal in Forbes’ documentation of his remarks. He starts by saying it’s almost impossible and concludes by saying that it is:
People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions, Anderson said in an appearance at the University of Chicago. Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth’s poles.
This has to be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years.
“Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no.”
The context is unclear, and I could very well be wrong, but I would say he’s emphasising the severity of the situation facing us by demonstrating the severe policy changes required to reverse it, rather than presenting those policies as feasible.
It’s a bummer to see everyone heart this as if it exonerated him. The issue isn’t that he was wrong in his prediction, the actual issue is he knew he was wrong before he said it. He knows the science. He said it to get headlines.
He made a very dumb statement not backed up by any of the science at the time that he knew, given his reputation, would be picked up by the media. This is scientific malpractice given the stakes and in a political climate with rampant climate denialism.
Scientist don’t get to be scientists and political firebrands. It’s not possible to be both.
The guy dunking in Greta was an idiot but a case can be made that defending scientists playing politicians is far more dangerous to the cause of climate change.
This reminds me of the Hannity defense that he’s “not a journalist” just an “opinion guy”, but he presents “the news” to a credulous audience which distorts reality.
What was the dumb statement he made that was not backed up by any of the science at the time that he knew?
Zero arctic ice by 2022. Literally no other model or scientist, including the IPCC most famous report “1.5 degrees” which had just come out were making this claim.
Your defence of his portion is really weird. It’s obviously really bad for climate scientist to make bold claims using poorly established models not widely accepted. I know you agree because I know you are not an idiot.
We are allowed to be nuanced here. We don’t have to defend the attack on Greta to point out the underlining point was really bad.
Perhaps more than any other type of scientists, climate scientists have a moral duty to be as accurate as possible at all time. There is even an entire subfiekd of the discipline about this point. I’m simply saying he knew his claim was dumb at the time and equally knew it would get massive headlines. I get the urge to be a firebrand. But that the role of the Greta”a not the people making models.
I went back and looked at the quote that started this whole thing off, and I think you’re right. It’s not good to speak in absolutes about things like climate change because it invites “gotcha” moments. If you make a statement that is an absolute, then it’s much easier to argue against (in good faith or in bad faith). Like most science, a fair representation of climate science is that there are some things we don’t know and some things we do know, and what we do know we know with absolute certainty and that knowledge screams for policy action. It’s a (typical) technocrat mistake to get drawn into a huge “debate” about what we don’t know and allow everyone to be distracted from the important things we don’t know.
That would indeed be an indefensible claim had he said it. Yet that is precisely the issue. The scientist himself is saying that that is not what he said! This is his response as per the Snopes article:
“That is a complete fabrication of what I said,” Anderson wrote, referring to the claims he said humanity would be wiped out in five years.
He said that during the seminar, he was displaying the most recent observations of Arctic sea ice volume — specifically the ice floating on the Arctic Ocean — and made the statement that [at] “the current observed rate of floating ice loss volume, there will be no floating ice remaining by 2022.”
The focus of the statement was on the floating ice volume and the observed rate of disappearance at that time, he said.
“Thus the statement was clear to those in attendance that the reference was to floating ice volume in the data shown on the slide, not arctic ice in general,” Anderson clarified…
Did Greta Thunberg Delete Tweet Claiming Climate Change Will Wipe Out Humanity by 2023? | Snopes.com
(it’s about 3/4 of the way down)
This response of his is why I’m claiming he’s likely been misinterpreted and/or misquoted. The guy wasn’t giving a speech to the press, he was conducting a seminar at a 2018 Chicago University Colloquium and presenting slides on observed Arctic sea ice fluctuations. The only media in attendance appears to have been Forbes. That his statement would so obviously conform to a 2018 understanding of Arctic sea ice loss and so obviously diverge from the known science on Arctic ice in general leads credence to his assertion that he was misreported and what he said sensationalised.
I have no idea why you think my defence of him in this context is “really weird”.
I didn’t say he said humanity would be wiped out. I said he said there would be no sea ice. That was the dumb claim he knew to be wrong. That claim was very bad science in 2018 and he knew it.
no you didn’t
dgaf about this conversation, but if you’re going to word nit it up like you tend to do, make an effort to be consistent
Fair I wasn’t exact there but didn’t say humanity would end. That was the the point.
Ok - initially you said “zero Arctic ice”. Obviously this is a vastly different claim to “zero permanent Arctic sea ice” and precisely the same error Anderson was defending himself from when Forbes misrepresented him. I know you’re not accusing him of saying Humanity will be dead in 5 years and bolded the bit of his response I thought was relevant to your criticism to reflect this.
I think the problem I’m having is that the guy is accused of so much it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. First he’s accused of saying humanity will disappear in 5 years (not what he said). Then accused of saying the Arctic will be free of ice in 5 years (also not what he said). You then come in and accuse him of demanding “child like delusional global policy” when it honestly seems like he’s saying that recovery is unrealistic precisely because of the difficulty of instituting such policy. Then you accuse him of searching for headlines but he’s delivering a seminar tediously entitled “Climate, Chemistry, Technology and Society: A University Responsibility” a small portion of which has been misinterpreted and sensationalised by the one reporter in attendance.
In any case now we get down to the one criticism that on reflection I sort of agree with: that his extrapolation was poor when he said current trends indicated a lack of sea ice by 2022. All he seems to have done is taken the PIOMAS September minimums for Sea Ice volume, apply a quadratic trend line and extrapolate 5 years into the future:
That’s a bit shit, but it is a great deal less sensational than all the other things he’s actually been accused of doing and that you very much seemed to be echoing when first I opened this thread.
Yikes
Very dumb statement
How in the fuck are we that far off a graph like that
It’s like if Mahomes was a weather anomaly.