The Science and Evidence for Climate Change

Debate Room
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Good morning all, I hope everyone is well.

Recently I have been having an ongoing conversation, and frankly stuck in the middle between several friends and acquaintances and I wanted to bring us together in a single place to discuss it. On top of that, being initially in engineering, and now having a pure business role, I am more science adjacent and I would like for some of y’all to comment who have more experience in these matters.

This boils down between two geologists I know. One thinks similarly to myself who believes climate change is man made, and the other, from what I can tell either does not, or doesn’t think we can know (I don’t want to straw man here, I’ll let him clarify his position). Both of these geologists work in the oil industry. Here are the general topics I would like to cover:

1. Is climate change happening regardless of the source?
While I think we all agree on this point here, I want to place it here to, once again, avoid straw manning.

2. Is climate change man made? Is there a way to tell?

3. What are the contributions by forest fires and volcanoes to Earth’s green house gasses? Can we tell?

I am not 100% sure if they will get on this forum, I hope they do. Either way I will use this as a way to further my knowledge (and hopefully others) at the very least.

Here is the way I currently answer these and I would like this to be a simpler starting point to the conversation with the more knowledgeable folks adding more data. While there are other gasses involved, I will primarily focus on CO₂ since it makes up about 80% of green house gasses emitted.

  1. Yes, this is something that is easily measured and we have been measuring this consistently for at least 80 years. Below is a chart with data from the Mauna Loa Observatory that shows the change of CO₂ over time along with the seasonal changes. Anybody can buy a CO₂ meter off of amazon for around $100 bucks and measure the amount over time. We were sitting at around 300 PPM (parts per million) of CO₂ in the 1950s and we are around 425 PPM now. We know our planet hasn’t had these levels for at least hundreds of thousands of years using ice core samples and tree rings. I think this is the point geologist number 2 will take issue with.

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  1. It was estimated we (humans) put around 37 billion metric tones into the atmosphere in 2023 dwarfing other sources. We know how many barrels of oil and other products like gasoline, propane, butane, natural gas, etc. are sold each year and it isn’t hard to estimate with standard conversion factors how much CO₂ this would generate. In my mind, this really leaves people who would disagree to claim other external factors like…

  2. Forest fires and volcanoes… In theory, new plants have a much higher amount of carbon 14 isotopes and volcanoes more mostly carbon 13 leaving old dead plant and animal matter (crude oil) with only fully decayed carbon 12. This is another point geologist number 2 will probably take issue with. On top of that, scientist regularly monitor CO₂ emissions from volcanoes, they only output high amounts for short bursts it still is a good bit less what is estimated from human sources. Forest fires produce an estimated 5 billion tones of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Estimation here is complicated by which type of vegetation exists in a given area but though experimentation we can at least get some upper and lower bounds on these numbers.

A few general things:

For those who are new, please don’t paste a Link (8 bit person with a green tunic) without explaining it in your own words.

Please be kind all as we do know each other in real life.

Thank you in advance!

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I think that one of the things that confuses the issue is that manmade climate change doesn’t just have to do with the carbon dioxide and methane that we put into the atmosphere.

Trees and other plants are good at absorbing and sequestering greenhouse gasses, and we create climate change when we raze large areas of forest. Haiti–for example–is the most deforested country, and Brazil is destroying the Amazon rain forest with aggressive logging.

The idiots who maintain that humans don’t contribute to climate change because we “don’t put enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere” neglect to mention that a part of global warming comes from us sabotaging Earth’s healing mechanisms when we destroy vast areas of forest.

The oceans help manage carbon dioxide, and I believe that when we disrupt the ocean’s ecosystem with things like pollution, whaling, and oil spills, we are also destroying another healing mechanism that reduces greenhouse gasses.

I also blame religion (and many other human values) for climate change, because religion suggests that God is behind everything, so we don’t have to be accountable for our actions . . . as it’s God’s will.

Lastly, I blame a lot of climate change on American greed, short-sightedness, and entitlement. We make up about 5% to 7% of the world’s population, yet we put out about 35% of the greenhouse gasses.

When we elect fucking assholes like Trump who “Put America first” . . . we are claiming that we are entitled to take resources from the rest of the world. This is similar to the way we committed genocide against the Native Americans with our philosophy of “Manifest Destiny” that took over much of North America.

I’m not a Communist or a Socialist, but Capitalism can be a toxic mechanism that creates a lot of climate change, and America’s greed may doom humanity to a slow death.

The philosopher Aaron James defines an asshole as meeting three criteria:

  1. A sense of entitlement.
  2. The entity under discussion is shielded–by either circumstances or legal policy–from the consequences of being entitled.
  3. This sense of entitlement is an ingrained characteristic that doesn’t change over time.

So . . . we are a nation of assholes, and this is reflected in global climate change.

I believe that a part of the reason why Americans are so disliked in the world is that many people intuitively understand this about my countrymen, and they see us as locusts who consume everything in our path while leaving nothing for everyone else.

I saw a stat somewhere which maintains that in order to bring every human being up to an American standard of living would require four more planets just like Earth.

We really suck, because we don’t give a shit about anyone else . . . especially about future generations who will have to clean up our mess.

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It’s even worse than that. Add the christiligious who maintain that anthropogenic climate change is impossible, as god will not allow this to happen. And if it happens, it’s because god means for it to happen (and who are we to oppose god’s will?) And further, we have those who seem to actively promote shit to happen, by doing what they can to accelerate the return of their favourite mythology Jebus by e.g. adding petrol to the fires already burning in Israel and the Middle East.

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Add to that that there are likely a substantial number who think that their rapture is coming so why would we care about the environment.

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Ah yes, the infinite selfish ones. The ones with the Real Christian Values. I get what I want, so fuck the rest. Just like Jesus would have done.

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Genesis 1:26

“26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

You may have a point…the real irony is that whilst we seem eminently capable of fucking it all up, we certainly don’t have dominion over everything, a simple virus like Covid 19 demonstrates this pretty effectively.

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Yes, I completely agree. For me, carbon dioxide is the easiest to measure and thus, make it a little more tangible. Anybody can buy a meter and measure it for themselves. Frankly I’m not surprised that they deny it is happening. Just search for the word “environment” on fox news. Outside of them talking about “left wing” environmentalists, there is almost nothing. They never hear about India, Russia and China still having acid rain and how the EPA helped us solve that problem. They don’t talk about how we are overfishing our seas or how much land is being converted to use for man. So them knowing how many hectares of forest have been destroyed and the effects it has on our environment is unlikely.

From my personal experience, this is more tied to political affiliation than religion. If they are a Christian and moderate or liberal, they tend to think it is man made, and if they are Christian and conservative, they are much more likely to deny it.

I would say at its core it has to do with epistemology. The Christians who faith (belief without proof) less. tend to be less fundamental and are more likely to be moderate or liberal. Those who faith more, like evangelical Christians, are much more likely to be conservative. I know many evangelical Christians; none of them are liberal. Most other people in different denominations I know including Catholics are much more likely to be moderate or liberal.

Talking to my conservative Christian friends, they are not cynical about trashing the earth and are generally against pointlessly polluting. From what I have seen, they think that the environmental movement surrounding climate change is like a conspiracy with people generating bad science for their cause. Many of them I knew said similar things about the Covid 19 vaccine and the 2020 election “fraud”. This is why I am interested in this topic. I want them to provide me the “evidence” for their claims.

In the end faith is really just believing something because you want to. People may conflate it with statistics, but it is complete lack of evidence, by definition, and therefore is will alone.

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That would be a major stretch–to get the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists to agree on a conspiracy to falsify data to make it look like anthropogenic climate change is occurring when it’s not.

Science doesn’t work that way. It’s very competitive and scientists will go out of their way to point out errors in other scientist’s work.

In my experience, most people in this country don’t want to accept climate change because they think steps to rectify it will hit them in their pocketbooks. They want to continue to drive their big gas-guzzling V8 SUVs without feeling guilty about it.

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You are wasting your time (imo), that is crank magnetism:

Take your average tax protester in the United States. There’s a very good chance such a person will also be one or more, or possibly all, of the following: a Christian fundamentalist, a “biblical literalist”, a white nationalist, an anti-Semite, a neo-Confederate, a sovereign citizen, a conspiracy theorist, a birther, a teabagger, a creationist, a climate change denier, a gun nut, an MRA, a Randroid, an Austrian schooler, a gold standard advocate, a homophobe, a militia nut, a COVID-19 denialist, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, a QAnoner, a targeted individual…

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Agreed, 97% of climate scientists think it is anthropogenic and a conspiracy of that size makes no sense. But neither did any of those other conspiracies. Remember some of these people also think the world is 6000 years old and that the biblical flood was real.

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Lol, fine, but isn’t that much of what we do here in the debate room? I feel like we mostly tilt at windmills in here, especially with religious people.

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It seems you are dealing with Birchers; you’d prob need to clone Tin-man a couple time to get that many conspiracy theories here.

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Very true. Once you’ve swallowed one conspiracy theory or crank idea, it’s easier to swallow the next one. I’ve seen this time and again on several discussion forums, dating back to Usenet in the 1990ies. Some people are also serial-conspiracists/serial-crankists - they live and breathe one particular crank idea, then they hop to the next available idea that comes along and catches their interest. But they do not renounce their “old” crank ideas when hopping along, they just press the pause button. Even if one particular “prophetic” crank idea turns out to be well and truly and totally disproven (because a very particular prophecy didn’t happen when it was supposed to), they do not renounce it, but instead claim the “prophet” was misled or lied to by the god-like creatures that supposedly were the source. Or some other inane excuse.

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