Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "TED" channel.

There is nothing to solve. There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis. The UN's IPCC AR6, chapter 12 "Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment", section 12.5.2, table 12.12 confirms there is a lack of evidence or no signal that the following have changed: Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions), Aridity, Avalanche (snow), Average precipitation, Average Wind Speed, Coastal Flood, Agricultural drought, Hydrological drought, Erosion of Coastlines, Fire Weather (hot and windy), Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods), Frost, Hail, Heavy Rain, Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms, Landslides, Marine Heatwaves, Ocean Acidity, Radiation at the Earth’s Surface, River/Lake Floods, Sand and Dust Storms, Sea Level, Severe Wind Storms, Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets, Tropical Cyclones. There is no objective observational evidence that we are living through a global climate crisis. None.
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@Franck R Sorry was my cherry-picking data too global for you. I know I quoted the IPCC but it's reports are novels really. This is how it works: The world's leading climate scientists are given that title by cynical politicians. They do not essentially write the final version of the IPCC report. It is reverse engineered. The Summary for Policymakers is thrashed out by a very large group of politicos at the UN. Line by line. Remember, these are not scientists, but government lackies. Then they go back to information the scientists gave them and change it. The scientific statements must conform to the political ones, not the other way around. The IPCC was set up to find man-made global warming and when you look for something you find it, and indeed they have on the face of it, but when you look deeper you find a dearth of real evidence. Take AR5, that says all observed warming (0.66°C) since 1950 is due to combined anthropogenic forcing (Fig. 10.5, IPCC core writing team, page 6). This relies upon modelling, or rather multi-modelling. In fact when you lift the curtain it relies on 15 models (Fig. 10.4, page 882). These models are all over the place. The models' results are not consistent with the assumption that there is a clear connection between GHGs and warming. GISS-EH-2 is particularly 'not well constrained' as the terminology goes. "Scaling factors" then have to be applied so things fit with the HadCRUT dataset. Some of the scaling factors are even negative! Explain why that has to be done!
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@franckr6159 Please just try to explain what I asked you to explain. Enlighten me.
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@franckr6159 It's all pure nonsense. Enjoy yourself.
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@Franck R This won't have been the first time an idea has taken hold in a society, and that idea grew beyond the bounds of what was real or justified. Take religion and the terrifying or absurd action people will take in the name of their God. Or political ideologies that sound appealing to the masses like communism but the result has been the death of 100 million people or more, and still people believe in it and are willing to try it. This environmental crusade has all the hallmarks of one of these mass manias. A dogma that cannot be questioned (all warming is due to CO2). A priestly caste that are exempt from our trials and tribulations (the politicians in their private jets). A doomsday where the wicked (that's everybody, by the way) will be punished by fire and flood. The possibility of redemption but only through penance (living in cold dark homes, existing in 15 minute cities, and subsisting on gruel and insects), which won't apply to the priestly class. I was brought up a Catholic and the whole pattern of this Climate Crisis nonsense fits to the template beautifully. People are hard wired to be religious so when they stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing they believe in anything. Demagogues will exploit this. A nice way to summarise it is the 3Gs. The reason people who matter do things is for God, Glory, or Greed. Look at the people making a fuss about the Earth getting a bit warmer and they are doing for one of those three or a combination thereof. Stay sceptical.
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@Franck R The IPCC reports are built on models that don't model reality, as I have pointed out, and for which you have no insight. Their proxy data sets of the CWP don't agree with each other and their temperature 'records' are falsifications that cool the distant past and warm the recent observations. It just won't do. As I have said the warming is just over a tenth of a degree per decade. You get marginal changes in climate patterns: northern Europe gets a bit wetter, southern Europe gets a bit drier. No real pattern in storminess. Sea-level rise of about 1 foot (30cm) by the end of the century. A third of the Netherlands is below sea-level and they're doing fine. The climate was going to change. Just plan for it. It's not the end of the world (which is an idea people have had in every age). Where I live the flowers will come out a little earlier in the spring and that's it. Nobody would notice if you didn't tell them.
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There is no climate crisis. The Earth was warmer in the recent and distant past. It also warmed faster in the past.
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@karlwheatley1244 The big problem for you doomists is peak interglacial warmth is not now but around 8,000 years ago. Proxies show a downward trend to the present day but with an interruption for the Medieval Warm Period (that doomists aren't allowed to believe in) followed by a decent into the The Little Ice Age (which doomists think also didn't exist), and a very slight recovery to the present day still below MWP though. Now I know what you're going to say about the supposed rapid warming over the last century but that's not a fair comparison. That's instrumental - which is itself unreliable (using annual instrumental measurements) - compared with proxy data whose the resolution is 200 years. If we smooth out the current data over the last two centuries you'd be lucky to see ½ degree per century. Your rapid warming disappears, and a very large number of bicentennial periods over the last 16,500 years warm at a faster rate (than 0.5°C/century). And let's not forget the Dansgaard–Oeschger events. The Dansgaard–Oeschger events were global (Dima et al, 2018). One about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet increased by around 8°C over 40 years, in three steps of five years, but a 5 °C change over 30–40 years is more common for these events. So shall we say a rate of change about 20°C per century. If that happened now you'd be foaming. But life carried on.
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@karlwheatley1244 Apart from the migration of ecosystems polewards and the foraminifera I mentioned I am unaware of a mass extinction event at the petm that you referred to. I would appreciate some referenced material to confirm your point. Otherwise I think we should assume it did not occur. If i can quote from a paper by Aze (2022) "the PETM is not classified as a mass extinction event, as significant levels of extinction are limited to just a handful of taxonomic groups, and overall extinction rates do not increase beyond background levels".
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@karlwheatley1244 Extinction rates (1500-2009) peaked around 1900 at 50 per decade. Extinction rates have declined dramatically to around 4 to per decade in the 2000s. So the extinction rate is very low: 908 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years (IUCN Red List), so from observations there are an average of slightly less than 2 species lost every year. Out of a known species total of over 2 million. That gives an annual percentage loss of less than 0.0001%. That's background extinction. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. Of course, extinction is a natural part of the evolution of life on this planet with the average lifespan of a species thought to be about 1 million years (cf 930,000). It is estimated that 99.9% of all plant and animal species that have existed have gone extinct. It should also be noted that no taxonomic families have become extinct in the last 500 years. In fact marine diversity at the taxonomic level of families is the highest it has ever been in the Earth's long history (see Sepkoski Curve). In a review of 16,009 species, most populations (85%) did not show significant trends in abundance, and those that did were balanced between winners (8%) and losers (7%) (Dornelas et al, 2019). There have been only 9 species of continental birds and mammals confirmed extinct since 1500 (Loehle, 2011). No global marine animals have become extinct in the past 50 years (McCauley et, 2015 using IUCN data).
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It was b*ll*cks then, and it's b*ll*cks now. As regards ocean acidification, it is estimated that the ocean’s global mean surface pH may have declined (i.e., become less alkaline and thus more “acidic”) by -0.07 to -0.08 in the last 200 years — from pH8.12 during pre-industrial times to 8.04 to 8.05 today (Wei et al, 2015). N.B. The decline in pH occurred before 1930. However, and very importantly when you look the data after CO2 emissions began rising precipitously in the 1930s, the oceans have become less “acidic”!!! By way of comparison, from one season to the next, or over the course of less than 6 months, pH levels naturally change by ±0.15 pH units, or twice the overall rate of the last 200 years. On a per-decade scale, the changes are even more pronounced. Oceanic pH values naturally fluctuate up and down by up to 0.6 U within a span of a decade, with an overall range between 7.66 and 8.40. This is decadal rate of pH change is larger than the overall 200-year span (0.07-0.08) by a factor of 8.
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