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Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Greening Antarctica, Flooded Sahara: 2024 - Year of Climate Change | Firstpost Earth Year Ender" video.
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As regards the belief in weather event attribution the IPCC states “Scientists cannot answer directly whether a particular event was caused by climate change, as extremes do occur naturally, and any specific weather and climate event is the result of a complex mix of human and natural factors. Instead, scientists quantify the relative importance of human and natural influences on the magnitude and/or probability of specific extreme weather events.”
It is not possible to attribute whether an individual heatwave, drought or a flood, or any climate event, extreme or otherwise is due to human factors. People are fooled into believing it is, thanks to the magic of attribution science. One cannot prove that changes in the climate are man-made, but in tactical attribution science it is presented as a fact. To provide proof of this one would need to observe another Earth-like planet to which no GHGs (greenhouse gases) are added. This is obviously impossible. It is untestable. It is unverifiable. It is not a fact. It is not Science. It's wishful thinking often expounded for legal or political purposes as WWA’s (World Weather Attribution) chief scientist, Friederike Otto, freely admits, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.”
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@astronautical1082 So there is supposed rapid warming over the last century but that's not a fair comparison with previous ages. That's instrumental - which has its own reliability issues due to it poor spatial and temporally collection (until the advent of satellites) - with annual instrumental measurements compared with proxy data with the latter's resolution intervals often at 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 people would assume the Rapture was imminent. But life carried on.
Globally satellite data shows how variable the Earth's climate is with changes up or down of more than 1°C occurring from one year to the next. However, overall the Earth's ecosystems are resilient to these fluctuations, as most species are eurytopic enough to survive these changes.
This is a scare story about things you cannot see.
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).
Take bird species: 11,195 have been counted (not estimated). All of these have been assessed by the IUCN. They catalogued 4 bird species became extinct over the course of 28 years between 1988 and 2016. That's 1.4 per decade or an annual extinction rate of 0.001%.
Also the proportion of species assessed as threatened by the IUCN has declined rapidly over time, from 65% in 2000 (11,000 out of 17,000) to 28% in 2024 (46,000 out of 166,000). This increasingly positive outcome of their species assessments is only accelerating as time passes.
Using IUCN data on assessed species- Amphibian species extinct 0.009% per decade. Mammals 0.029% per decade. Reptiles 0.006% per decade. Fish 0.006% per decade. Insects 0.009% per decade.
There is no climate crisis.
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