@petergleick

Still, you all did better than anyone else. I thank you

@petergleick

Historians and Psychologes never have been involved systematically, to predict how utterly stupid the civilization is reacting.

@petergleick

As the habitability of the planet decreases each year, remember the names of the billionaires who thwarted action.

They will cause the deaths of a billion people.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-warn-1-billion-people-on-track-to-die-from-climate-change

Bradley, Koch, Coors, Scaife, Seid, Uihlein.
https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/25/project-2025-trump-mapped-how-6-billionaire-family-fortunes-fund-climate-denial/

They will cause 1.5 billion climate refugees
https://www.vice.com/en/article/climate-change-will-create-15-billion-migrants-by-2050-and-we-have-no-idea-where-theyll-go/

The world war they are brewing will kill even more

These kleptocrats will be the biggest mass murderers ever known

https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors

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@petergleick I don't think it would've mattered. Even reasonable, obvious, predictions were (and still are) dismissed as alarmist or extreme.

"Adding more energy to a system makes it more unstable" shouldn't be a controversial statement, but apparently it is when the system is the climate.

@petergleick

The amount of frozen methane thawed from permafrost tundra & arctic ocean floors was always just an estimate.

Koch Network funded attacks on scientific research to make sure the data estimates remained fuzzy.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/21/republican-ag-climate-dark-money

@petergleick

… too cautious or too optimistic… in the end it amounts to the same thing… #ClimateChange goes faster & is more extreme than previous best estimates & best modelling. 😐

@petergleick

no-one wants to say out loud that just about all of our #climatescience projections disincluded possible feedback effects in one way or another; #conservatives lobbied hard, the refs got played with success.

just the #methane from the permafrost in the circumpolar north, for example.

@petergleick

The bias toward underestimation is striking. It is very rare to see new research showing overestimation. Why is this so?

@petergleick as scientists we work in an milieu, where truth is an aim, and we have a methodic designed how to get there as closely as possible.

Politics, corporations and media do not have that kind of methodic approach to truth. This systems have to gain economic wealth, regardless of truth.

Scientists did not expect that and tried to change people's minds via media and politics. They believed that people working there would take care of the planets well being and therefore could affect the content of media and politics. But ckimat change content was published to get ckicks in order to get advertising revenues.

We live in capitalistic hierarchies to accumulate wealth in the first place. Capital is not able to see human and planetary needs or laws of nature. It is only functioning, if it is growing. Otherwise it leads into crisis, where some groups of humanity are blamed and extinguished. Fascism is an inner capitalist reaction to the crisis of accumulation.

So scientists need to build organisations as commoners. Get in touch with CSAs, build open databases, use GPL software. I know this comes from social science, and we think different to natural sciences, but how we organise is key to solutions. And the commoning movement has gained some knowledge on that topic.

Forget Liberalism, it is an ideology only in support for capitalist exploitation and destruction.

@petergleick wrong is a big word. Scientists are not (necessarily) activists/ politicians. Their job is finding truths, or what they can say is a truth at a certain time, not focus on what the story should be to get a certain effect on people.

Do you think scientists did not communicate a (greater consensus) that their models were underestimating? Or did they not report the truth?

Also I see people mentioning that Al Gore his prediction was wrong: he is a politician, not a climate scientist.

@petergleick

I noticed that decades ago. Every time a new study came out it would be worse than the previous study predicted. Usually way worse.