Note, that in writing down this post, you haven’t brought forth any objective argument to justify your skepticism. Your argument that because people have agendas, you should be skeptical could be ok if the goal is to get objective information, not form a reactionary opinions.
A strong scientific consensus over this topic is not the result of some political agenda but of the scientific method. One of the central parts of it, is that any claim must be falsifiable through experiment. When anyone comes with a claim, others will try to reproduce or falsify it. Depending on the results the claim is either rejected or used in further research. With vasts of experiments explaining the effect or verifying the effect to better explain what was previously known, a consensus is formed. Politicians are only involved when it comes to appropriating public funding for research. That doesn’t corrupt the research itself, but hinders it if research can’t be done. When industry funds it though, then it does degrade the research very often (see tobacco industry in the 1920s-1980s, the food industry until today, or oil&gas industry which have known about the effects for at least the 1970s through their own research and have not published it).
For some more factual things you can read up on:
That CO2 gets warmer when subjected to light is known since the 1850s when Eunice Foote did experiments with water vapor and CO2 and made this observation and roughly quantified it.
John Tyndall did incorporate this effect into a first, very rudimentary, climate model of the atmosphere in 1862. The global temperature projections of that model for 1950 aren’t perfect, but still astonishingly precise.
Planck in 1900 formulated the Planck Postulate as part of his work concerning black body radiation. Quantization he thought of as a mathematical quirk. Einstein a few years later proposed that the energy of light or photons to be more precise is itself quantized. Einstein got his Nobel Prize in 1923 adopting this to not only explain the Plack Postulate (radiation) but also the photoelectric effect, i.e. that a molecule such as CO2 can absorb energy from the electromagnetic radiation interacting with it.
The scientific community was not convinced of the anthropogenic nature of the warming of the climate until in 1957 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess use the C14-method to show that the ratio of C-isotopes in the atmosphere is shifting towards those of fossil fuels. Since then more measurements have been done using this method to date things and reconstruct atmospheric composition (e.g. through ice-coring).
Since then technology such as satellites have improved the overall quality of measurements. And all of them show a clear tendency. With more computational power climate models have become more powerful and the projections are very good. The differences to measurements, when they happen are usually underestimating because the models are conservatively developed. You can refer to the IPCC reports which show you the data pretty clearly. If you want, then look at data from your local weather station, if it existed over 100 years ago, but even if only 50 years and you’ll probably see a difference even locally. Do that for all stations in the world and you can see a clear trend.
These are only a fraction of topics which anybody can read up on to form an informed decision, rather than opposing something just because it is consensus.
This is so well written. Thanks for posting this, really.
I am saving this for the next time someone tries to deny climate change just to try and seem smart or be a contrarian. You explained it so much better than I could have.
Yeah, it’s called an opinion. I used to have the opinion that global warming was a serious concern. After learning more and more life experiences, my opinion has changed.
The only fact I claimed is that politicians have political agendas, and that is a fact. Some politicians promote that the earth is getting warmer, some say that it isn’t, but if it comes from a politician, it comes from an agenda.
I appreciate that you came with some scientific facts, surely. And you’re right I brought forth no objective argument, it was subjective. Maybe I should have started my comment with “IMO”. I assumed everyone would catch on to that since I was relating my own personal experience with the topic.
I aim to motivate understanding, not assign blame. So I apologize if the tone was a bit aggressive here or there.
Please understand though, that personal and local experience with something so complex and global is the analogue of using anecdotal evidence to then ignore all quantifiable and statistical evidence. E.g. Because it snows where I live, the planet can’t be warming. Because Aspirin give me nausea, it must be bad… And from that standpoint hurling the accusation of being sheep blindly following some agenda driven group (of which I’m not disputing the existence), well, it’s not very scientific to say the least. And cementing that with that you have done your due diligence with talking to climatologists, and reading articles etc. can lead one to not see this as “just an opinion” but that you add alot of weight to it.
Please help me understand, how you formed the opinion, that climate change isn’t “a serious concern”. What kind of evidence led you “to different conclusions”? And what suggests the earth be cooling?
Sidenotes:
Science in its essence is a pursuit of objective truth. Politics is not. Neither is the economy. And even if the scientific community faces its challenges, let me illustrate this over the mask issue during the last pandemic. We were faced with a new virus on which we didn’t have data, hence why there were things believed true at first, which got corrected later, when more data was available. Add to that, that mutations changed properties of what we initially had to deal with. Opposed to that are politicians. In more than one country, the health ministers lied intentionally to the people, claiming at first that masks don’t work, because they didn’t want a run on that limited resource due to their failings in preparation. The data didn’t suggest it. When availability improved, we then had mask mandates. It was not because of science, but politics which have to weigh several interests at the same time and where the agenda comes into play.
Journalists in today’s sensationalist and outrage culture also misrepresent studies to generate clicks. This is why one can get the impression, that studies contradict themselves until one goes to the original text and sees that the claim being made in a news article (probably its title) is mentioned as one, that explicitly cannot be made without further research.
Note, that in writing down this post, you haven’t brought forth any objective argument to justify your skepticism. Your argument that because people have agendas, you should be skeptical could be ok if the goal is to get objective information, not form a reactionary opinions.
A strong scientific consensus over this topic is not the result of some political agenda but of the scientific method. One of the central parts of it, is that any claim must be falsifiable through experiment. When anyone comes with a claim, others will try to reproduce or falsify it. Depending on the results the claim is either rejected or used in further research. With vasts of experiments explaining the effect or verifying the effect to better explain what was previously known, a consensus is formed. Politicians are only involved when it comes to appropriating public funding for research. That doesn’t corrupt the research itself, but hinders it if research can’t be done. When industry funds it though, then it does degrade the research very often (see tobacco industry in the 1920s-1980s, the food industry until today, or oil&gas industry which have known about the effects for at least the 1970s through their own research and have not published it).
For some more factual things you can read up on:
That CO2 gets warmer when subjected to light is known since the 1850s when Eunice Foote did experiments with water vapor and CO2 and made this observation and roughly quantified it.
John Tyndall did incorporate this effect into a first, very rudimentary, climate model of the atmosphere in 1862. The global temperature projections of that model for 1950 aren’t perfect, but still astonishingly precise.
Planck in 1900 formulated the Planck Postulate as part of his work concerning black body radiation. Quantization he thought of as a mathematical quirk. Einstein a few years later proposed that the energy of light or photons to be more precise is itself quantized. Einstein got his Nobel Prize in 1923 adopting this to not only explain the Plack Postulate (radiation) but also the photoelectric effect, i.e. that a molecule such as CO2 can absorb energy from the electromagnetic radiation interacting with it.
The scientific community was not convinced of the anthropogenic nature of the warming of the climate until in 1957 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess use the C14-method to show that the ratio of C-isotopes in the atmosphere is shifting towards those of fossil fuels. Since then more measurements have been done using this method to date things and reconstruct atmospheric composition (e.g. through ice-coring).
Since then technology such as satellites have improved the overall quality of measurements. And all of them show a clear tendency. With more computational power climate models have become more powerful and the projections are very good. The differences to measurements, when they happen are usually underestimating because the models are conservatively developed. You can refer to the IPCC reports which show you the data pretty clearly. If you want, then look at data from your local weather station, if it existed over 100 years ago, but even if only 50 years and you’ll probably see a difference even locally. Do that for all stations in the world and you can see a clear trend.
These are only a fraction of topics which anybody can read up on to form an informed decision, rather than opposing something just because it is consensus.
edit: A word.
This is so well written. Thanks for posting this, really.
I am saving this for the next time someone tries to deny climate change just to try and seem smart or be a contrarian. You explained it so much better than I could have.
Yeah, it’s called an opinion. I used to have the opinion that global warming was a serious concern. After learning more and more life experiences, my opinion has changed.
The only fact I claimed is that politicians have political agendas, and that is a fact. Some politicians promote that the earth is getting warmer, some say that it isn’t, but if it comes from a politician, it comes from an agenda.
I appreciate that you came with some scientific facts, surely. And you’re right I brought forth no objective argument, it was subjective. Maybe I should have started my comment with “IMO”. I assumed everyone would catch on to that since I was relating my own personal experience with the topic.
I aim to motivate understanding, not assign blame. So I apologize if the tone was a bit aggressive here or there.
Please understand though, that personal and local experience with something so complex and global is the analogue of using anecdotal evidence to then ignore all quantifiable and statistical evidence. E.g. Because it snows where I live, the planet can’t be warming. Because Aspirin give me nausea, it must be bad… And from that standpoint hurling the accusation of being sheep blindly following some agenda driven group (of which I’m not disputing the existence), well, it’s not very scientific to say the least. And cementing that with that you have done your due diligence with talking to climatologists, and reading articles etc. can lead one to not see this as “just an opinion” but that you add alot of weight to it.
Please help me understand, how you formed the opinion, that climate change isn’t “a serious concern”. What kind of evidence led you “to different conclusions”? And what suggests the earth be cooling?
Sidenotes: Science in its essence is a pursuit of objective truth. Politics is not. Neither is the economy. And even if the scientific community faces its challenges, let me illustrate this over the mask issue during the last pandemic. We were faced with a new virus on which we didn’t have data, hence why there were things believed true at first, which got corrected later, when more data was available. Add to that, that mutations changed properties of what we initially had to deal with. Opposed to that are politicians. In more than one country, the health ministers lied intentionally to the people, claiming at first that masks don’t work, because they didn’t want a run on that limited resource due to their failings in preparation. The data didn’t suggest it. When availability improved, we then had mask mandates. It was not because of science, but politics which have to weigh several interests at the same time and where the agenda comes into play.
Journalists in today’s sensationalist and outrage culture also misrepresent studies to generate clicks. This is why one can get the impression, that studies contradict themselves until one goes to the original text and sees that the claim being made in a news article (probably its title) is mentioned as one, that explicitly cannot be made without further research.