Former climate change deniers, what changed your mind?
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1) That climate change is happening, i.e. the world is getting warmer. 2) That it's not a natural phenomenon, i.e. driven by human behavior. 3) That it's a bad thing, i.e. not a positive thing for the world.
Fairly quickly I accepted 1) based on the evidence. Over time I accepted 2), again based on evidence, but mostly on CO2 levels which I knew were well correlated with warm periods historically and logically should be, given it's a green house gas.
Much later I started to accept 3). I still think the negatives are over-done, an ice age is far worse than global warming and we have no idea how close we are to the next one. But species extinction simply can't be fixed after the fact, so preventing it trumps all.
By delaying society's mustering of will to face it, they a) confirm their notion that we can't do anything about it (because in their minds, fixing it requires the kind of kumbaya UN cooperation they loathe) and b) cash out while there are still profits to be made in dirty industries and practices. And we're enabling them by continuing to make this a debateable matter.
It just seems fishy that the most vocal proponents of global warming are always pushing models that overestimate the amount of change. That kind of constant inaccuracy needs to be questioned.
This often trips up engineers, who associate computer modeling with the concept of a known system. But climate models are scientific, not engineering. They exist to explore uncertainty.
The theory of anthropogenic climate change does not depend on global climate models. If they did not exist at all, we would have the same concerns about climate change.
The models are based on the theory, not the other way around.
How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without studying the local effects? The world is full of positive and negative feedback loops, discussing linear effects on the earth without taking into account these loops won't get us very far.
A lot of the biggest questions about how climate change will play out can't be well-modeled yet--like cloud formation, methane deposits in deep ocean or permafrost, etc. We need to learn more, and as we do, we feed that into the models and they improve.
> How do we know that the plants won't absorb all of the excess CO2 without studying the local effects?
We know that plants aren't absorbing all the excess CO2 because we directly measure CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and they are going up.
Are we magically absorbing more heat than 200 years ago? Getting closer to the Sun? Axial tilt shift? Gremlins?
Wake up.