Nut Nut's Attempt At A Book About Politics & Society

And here we have the internet, where everyone can "do their own research" and become an expert.

What evidence is there of that ?

I smell a very strong odor of ad hominem attacks .... an attempt to pivot from the discomfort of data and facts to the more comfortable terrain of character attacks.

When it comes to math, it makes a lot of people insecure. Math is frequently intimidating.

Another thing which is uncomfortable is the reality that most people are absorbed in their personal short-term survival. There is no common selfish reason to allocate the scarce resources of one's time and energy to matters of greater concern to our species.

Quite frankly .... most people don't give a ****.

I'm weird .... I got this imprint as a Jewish child in the 60's about the Holocaust and this mantra of "never again". But what did it mean to manifest "never again" as a reality. What would we do differently in the future if threatened with a similar potential catastrophe ?

My interpretation of that was never to be silent in the face of another imminent Holocaust. My interpretation was to scream about it from the top of my lungs.

So .... that's all I am. A person whose conscience demands that I make people aware of a coming Holocaust. Just like Churchill warmed about Hitler and was cast aside politically until he was proven right.

If your interpretation of a person who wants to warn people of an impending catastrophe is that they are grandiose .... that's your prerogative.

I think you're stupid, mean spirited and intellectually lazy.

The climate crisis is a big deal. 89% of the public wants more to be done. And what can you say that you have done as a citizen to educate yourself about the topic ?

Probably nothing.

Someone comes along who has done the work to educate themselves coming along to share the knowledge shines a light on how little you have done to educate yourself.

I'm not grandiose .... just decent. What are you ?

Your analogy doesn't work.

Did FDR claim that he was a physicist based on his own idiosyncratic definition of the word "physicist"? No.

Did you claim that you were a scientist based on your own idiosyncratic definition of the word "scientist"? Yes.

I also have no idea why you think the people you listed above are being ignored by the mainstream media or anyone else. Very few scientists have greater name recognition, or were discussed more in popular media, than Carl Sagan.

Johan Rockstrom won the Tyler Prize, which I gather is the equivalent of a Nobel prize for environmental studies. His receipt of that award was widely reported on in the media. As best I can tell, he has had no problem getting numerous books published. His most recent book was turned into a documentary film that you can watch on Netflix.

Stephan Rahmstorf has been widely cited in the mainstream media as a leading climate scientist.

Rignot has a list of awards as long as my arm. He has been quoted extensively in the mainstream media. In thirty seconds, I found 7 or 8 articles in the NYT that quoted him, the most recent of which was in July of this year.

Jennifer Francis has appeared regularly in the media, especially public radio and public TV. She testified before Congress on environmental issues.

I won't bother to go through Hansen. He has been a widely discussed public figure for a very long time. It would take you ten minutes just to read the Wikipedia article about him.

Your suggestion that these people are being frozen out by the media is a complete fantasy.

I know you would like to believe that we are engaged in some sort of gladiatorial combat about the environment, but to paraphrase David Souter, you are thrusting at lions of your own imagining.

Where did I suggest that the climate was not a big deal? You can read every post that I have ever made on 2+2 -- for that matter, you could listen to every word I've said in the last thirty years -- and you wouldn't find anything that suggested that I was a skeptic about anthropogenic climate change or the severity of the consequences. I believe that it is a huge problem, but that belief doesn't require me to revere you as an apostle.

It's true that I am not planning to write a book about anthropogenic climate change, but that's mainly because I don't think I have anything to add to the work of others with more expertise.

I have done my best not to make this about a person or myself. I've tried to make it about policy and put the issues in the most stark contrast possible.

I'm letting you all know what my prognosis is.

I'm a comfortably retired Boomer who doesn't have to work anymore. I've personally benefitted from my participation in the capitalist system to the point where I can do whatever I want.

In my opinion, the science which leads to these conclusions is accessible to laypeople who are open to data driven arguments and that's a value add that the world needs .... the ability to synthesize complexity and reduce it to its simpler essence and make it digestible for the masses.

But the difficult part of this is how it intersects with people's ego's when they become aware that some people are willing to do the deep dive that they are not.

It makes people aware that some people care more than they do and that doesn't sit well with the virtuous images that everyone wants to walk around with. The emotional response to improve their social ranking is to try and pull the other person down to their level and drag them in the mud.

It's not my fault that none of you have bothered to investigate on your own or that the revelation that someone else like me who does put in the effort causes a feeling of inadequacy in you that you want to squash by attacking the messenger.

I have consistently attempted to present myself with a degree of humility. I have never claimed to be a good person or a judge of what is good and bad. I have always acknowledged that this work is a manifestation of my instinctual selfish preference that my children and my line of DNA don't get wiped out. I have no shame whatsoever in fighting for that.

You all want to make this an inquisition into personal character ? Let's start with you Rococo ..... I'm guessing you're a mod here because of the color of your name. How about we unpack your personal life here on the internet and put it under a microscope. Is that what you want ... to make this a battle of character ? I'm not interested. I find it childish.

If you follow climate science, then you know that the guy who the mainstream looks for to comment in Dr. Michael Mann who peddles the sanitized middle ground that its not too late to avoid catastrophe.

The animosity between Mann and Hansen is immense and behind the scenes.

The people who I cited and are winning awards are respected and rewarded by the science community, that is not a proxy for admiration from the mainstream media.

I haven't been a mod here in quite some time.

Here's a good video of a Rignot lecture complete with PowerPoint slides. It's packed with information.

If you want to accelerate to the conclusions, it included his best guess that we are committed to 20 feet of sea level rise at 1.5 to 2C based upon paleo climate precedent and the time frame for such an occurrence is likely by the end of the next century ....

According to Hansen the 1.5C is "dead as a doornail" and its difficult to imagine how we stay under 2C.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N35x3Sly...

If you're like me ..... I probably invested 10 hours in watching this 45 minute presentation. I stop, check the data in the slides and make sure I understand as much as possible. Then I watch it 3-4 times again.

Edit .... do you think the mainstream media has educated the public that we're committed to 20 feet of sea level rise which will inundate every coastal city on Earth ?

Where did I ask you to unpack your personal life?

Where did I make any claims that I had a superior character to you?

You said that you wanted to write a book. I have given you more practical feedback than anyone else in this thread. One of those pieces of feedback was that you should not identify yourself as a scientist if you don't have the credentials to support the claim. Although that seems like common sense advice, it sent your lawnmower into orbit. At this point, I don't think you want feedback about your ideas or prospects for writing a book. You just want to people to share your concerns (which I mostly do) and tell you that you that what you are writing is amazing (which I wouldn't do unless I believed it).

Lastly, assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is intellectually lazy is the height of intellectual laziness.

In an intelligent world which prioritizes the survival of the species, these would be the among the most well known people in the world.

You probably just learned about them from doing a google search of the people I named.

I never said that the media completely banned them from comment. But for the overall view, they go to shills like Michael Mann who tell a completely different story.

If you and everyone else in this thread are just learning about the people I named (and who I assert have the most important credentials on earth), then it's fair to say that the media has done a poor job of having their views represented.

According to your definition, Thomas Edison would also not be considered a scientist despite an obviously lifetime of evidence of conducting experiments, he did not have a certificate from a credentialed university.

You and I define the word scientist differently.

You see a piece of paper from an accredited institution as being evidence of a scientist.

I see science as a way of life. I see Edison as a scientist ..... you don't. We can agree to disagree.

For what it's worth ... I do have an academic credential from an accredited university in a field heavily immersed in biochemistry. It's a science degree and another degree as well which is related to economics. I was raised in large by a man with a physics PhD from Harvard and taught and researched at Stanford. I whipped him in chess matches when I was 9. Science and critical thinking were a part of life.

An academic degree from an accredited institution is an indicator of work ethic, basic intelligence and an ability to conform to institutional standards.

Despite his lack of institutional credential, I see Edison as a far superior scientist than the man who raised me with the PhD from Harvard.

Was that so hard?

This isn't particularly relevant. Graduate degrees were in their infancy in the United States when Edison was in his 20s. In any case, I would agree that it is perfectly appropriate to call someone who has made a significant and novel contribution to a field of science a "scientist." No one is disputing that Archimedes could be appropriately described as a "scientist."

I don't think being a scientist is intrinsically tied to a particular degree. But in common parlance, calling yourself a scientist connotes something more than believing in the scientific method and being interested in science, just as calling yourself a theologian connotes something more than an interest in religion.

It was very, very hard.

I don't subscribe to the conventions of "common parlance". I don't judge or evaluate people based upon labels for convenient sorting and categorization.

I'm more like Edison, relentless experimenting and admittedly, most of my experiments are not yielding the breakthrough that I'm hoping for.

I'm relentless trying to get people to learn about the feedback loop in which warming and greenhouse gas concentrations reinforce each other in a spiral. And to help them understand the best estimates of where that spiral is leading. I want to invite them to take a deeper dive into the world of Hansen, Rockstrom, Rignot and the rest and understand the difference between them and the scientists who are more routinely selected for mainstream media perspective like Mann and Gavin Schmidt.

I'm not the guy who drills and interprets the ice cores. I'm not the guy who measures well mixed gas concentrations at the peak of Mauna Loa several times a day. I'm not the guy or gal monitoring the satellite measurements of ice sheets or ground penetrating radar which details the topography under those ice sheets. I'm not analyzing sediment samples for isotope ratios ratios which provides clues to prehistoric temperature. I'm not the insurance company actuarial team which is informing their investor owners to hightail it out of regions where the cost of providing profitable insurance policies requires premiums so large that it's easier to pull out a market than being the bearer of the bad news to the policy holders. I'm certainly not the folks behind the decision making at the Trump Administration which are orchestrating efforts to reverse the EPA Endangerment Finding regarding greenhouse gases like CO2.

Each of those people has a niche like a band member in a high school band. One plays drums, the other a horned instrument. The totality of the work is like a symphony and is aggregated to make something we call music.

Some people have the job of synthesizing data from a variety of specialized inputs and helping to distill the essence into something that policy makers and concerned citizens can digest.

Do you need to understand the equipment and science of spectrometry which the people are using to measure GHG concentrations on top of Mauna Loa ? Do I? Or is more important to understand that the rate of increase was 0.9 ppm per year during the 60's and is now approaching an annual increase of 3 ppm per year ? Do people relate better to an increase in CO2 equivalent from 280 ppm to 600+ ppm or do they relate better to a scale of Mt Everest weight equivalent from 12.5 to 30 ?

I'm trying to teach people how to interpret all of the data and hear the music .... the essence of what the data means.

In my opinion, it leads to a very uncomfortable place. The uncomfortable realization that the people running the world are no different than most of us ..... preoccupied with their own survival and not at all responsible for managing the threats to the continuity of our species.

We look back on history like the Holocaust and find it surreal and abstract. It's difficult to imagine finding ourselves in a parallel position. We see the starvation of children in Gaza and we imagine ourselves being immune from a similar fate when in reality it's more like a signal that WW3 is getting ready to commence and expendable people are being sacrificed.

I absolutely grasp that my policy recommendations seem draconian and authoritarian ...... but I'm sincere in asking whether you would rather be dead than acquiesce to limits on your common liberty to pollute without limit.

Until such time as I encounter someone with data that disproves what the people I follow are saying, I'm sticking to my guns about my straight forward interpretation of what they are saying.

None of you is challenging the foundation upon which my opinions are based .... you're simply trying to attack my ideas the way a Chamberlain supporter who favored appeasement with Hitler would have attacked Churchill. If you had lived in that era, you would have needed until 1940 to decide that Churchill had the better assessment. You would have needed the proof.

In this case .... because of the century plus delayed fuse between stimulus and equilibrium response .... the proof comes too late to do us any good.

So .... the best I can do is to advise you all to have your affairs in order and understand that everyone's world is going to be rocked in a forthcoming era of involuntary population reduction. Unless you're truly a leveraged member of the global elite ..... you're no more important to the powers that be than a starving child in Gaza.

Talk less and listen more. You know way less than you think and other people know way more than you think.

That's how language works.

sir this is a wendy's

Yeah. If you care about how your words are perceived, then you pretty much have to concern yourself with common parlance.

I'm listening to the experts and I've named them.

Hansen, Sagan, Rockstrom, Francis, Rignot, etc....

I'm regurgitating what they are telling the world.

Who are you listening to ? What effort are you putting in to understanding the truth about where the feedback loops we have initiated are taking our species ?

If other people know "way more" and are refusing to disclose it .... how do you explain their selfishness and not openly sharing ?

It's interesting to see how people respond.

What did I write in the very first post.

I'm afraid. This is scary stuff ..... by both what is coming down and busting out of the fear of speaking about it openly and outing the powerful people who run the world as effectively incompetent.

How do people respond to someone sharing their vulnerability .? They attack him.

Why is that ? What about my authenticity strikes such an emotional nerve in people ?

Does it provide too much information about your own fear ..... the knowledge that fear is pretty much ubiquitous and we can't talk about it because we're afraid to acknowledge that we're all vulnerable ?

I'm acting as a scientist trying to engage in an experiment. I am trying to discover the root cause of why we can't talk about this problem because we can't solve it if we can't talk about it.

I want to steer the conversation to the substance of the feedback loops and you all want to steer the conversation to me.

This is a tug of war and I'm not a quitter.

The substance of the change in atmospheric and oceanic chemistry is well documented. The important question to answer is what does that mean for all of us ??

Hansen paints a picture which is incompatible with human civilization and Mann paints a picture where we have not yet exceeded apocalyptic tipping points. Who is right and what does it mean for our personal choices going forward ?

How do we discuss our preferences for navigating the future without discussing what it holds ?

Revisiting Milankovitch Cycles

The Earth has been in a constant state of flux during it's 4.5B year history.

About 2.6M years ago, the Panama Isthmus slid into place, blocking the teleconnection between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans which previously flowed between the America's and Earth's geography arrived in it its current physical configuration. This began the Pleistocene in geologic dating terms.

Since then the planet's climate in terms of temperature has embodied the regularity associated with an EKG of a healthy heart muscle. Except instead of cycles that last 1 second, the cycles last 100k years and involve regular oscillations between ice ages and interglacials. We made the most recent and routine transition out of an ice age ~ 15,000 years ago.

Why do these cycles last 100k years ?

Because the Earth's orbital relationship to the sun is not constant, it is cyclical.

The Earth's orbit is not circular, it is elliptical. It is farthest from the sun when it is directly between the Sun and Jupiter because Jupiter has a gravitational pull on the Earth.

The plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun is not the same as the plane of Earth's spin on its axis. So the angle make a difference.

There is a 3rd factor related to obliquity which I can't easily explain. You can read about Milankovitch Cycle's yourself if you wish.

Why Are Milankovitch Cycle's Important

Because they give ample evidence of the feedback loop spiral between atmospheric temperature and greenhouse gas levels.

What is Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity or ECS

ECS is an estimate of how much the average surface temperature of Earth will increase in response to a doubling in GHG forcing AFTER reaching equilibrium to that change.

In1859, UK scientist John Tyndall proved in a lab setting that GHG's like CO2 absorb heat and cause the planet to heat up.

In the 1890's, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius estimated ECS to be ~ 5C.

In the 1950's, under the guidance of scientist Charles Keeling, the US govt began daily measurements of CO2 and methane concentrations at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The CO2 graph is known as the Keeling Curve.

Scientists were able to validate a clear 800,000 record of historic CO2 levels by extracting ice cores from Antartica which captured fossilized evidence of CO2 atmospheric gas concentrations trapped in the ice.

At present, we have more than doubled the greenhouse forcing since the year 1900 and have thus far experienced ~ 1.5C of the 5C increase that Arrhenius predicted 130 years ago.

Hansen's work effectively validates Arrhenius's prediction as do other scientific methods of validating paleo climate temperatures.

So .... if we stopped emitting today and Hansen is correct, we have another 3 - 3.5C of warming in the pipeline and the rate at which we would reach equilibrium is approximately 63% per century.

But have we stopped emitting ? No. Not remotely. CO2 levels are increasing faster each year. From a 0.9 ppm average annual increase in the 60's to approaching 3 ppm per year at present.

That tells a story like the AC/DC song Highway to Hell.

If you cowards want to take a whack at me ..... take a whack at the substance of this post.

How Do These Feedback Loops Work ?

A complete explanation would be overwhelming and quite frankly, no one has the entire picture mapped out with 100% precision. I'm not going to pretend to be omniscient, I'm going to explain the basics that a 7th grader could grasp.

1) When the Earth's receives more light, it absorbs more at the surface. Absorbed sunlight radiates back out toward space at a different wavelength due to the temperature difference in the body which it emanates from. (If you want to understand the relationship between temperature and wavelength, that's stuff that Planck illuminated in the early 1900's.)

The form of radiation emitted is infrared. That is what we colloquially refer to as heat.

2) A warmer planet causes carbon to be transferred from land and ocean sinks to the atmosphere. This comes from thawing of ground and increased metabolic activity of microorganisms. It comes from wildfires which cause trees to burn. It comes from the fact that the solubility of atmospheric gases in the ocean is related to the temperature of the ocean. As the ocean warms, it holds a lower proportion of atmospheric gas.

3) A warmer planet causes ice and snow to melt ..... making the planet darker and losing albedo (degree of whiteness) ...... the darker the surface becomes, the more sunlight it absorbs.

4) The more CO2 which is in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet gets. That's the basics of Tyndall's work 166 years ago.

That's a simplistic version of a feedback loop. Any idiot who wants to understand will understand. It doesn't take a genius or a graduate degree to get this.