Arguments
Climate Change: Years of Living Dangerously
Posted on 5 December 2013 by Rob Painting
James Cameron, the creator and director of many smash hit movies, has teamed up with producer Jerry Weintraub to make a television series on climate change for the Showtime television channel. The series, according to the promotional trailer below, seems to focus of the human story of climate change - how climate has already begun to impact the lives of people all around the world.
In the trailer, James Cameron says:
"Everybody thinks this is about melting glaciers and polar bears. I think it's a big mistake. This is one hundred per cent a people story"
I believe he's right. Even though Skeptical Science's core message is about the observational evidence underpinning the science of climate change, facts alone are unlikely to be enough to turn public opinion around. People remember human stories better than facts and figures, so examining the impacts of climate change on people around the world may leave a longer-lasting impression on viewers.
Indeed, if there's one thing that is guaranteed to shift public opinion into combating climate change, it's the warm, clammy, hand of reality intruding upon your own personal life. Whether that's in the form of more frequent and extreme heat waves, more extreme downpours, more intense drought and bushfires, or rising sea levels amplifying current flood risk many times over. Whatever form it takes, climate change is going to, at some point, intrude upon all our lives in a very detrimental way.
Sure, SkS regulars may take issue with the 99% analogy used by James Cameron, rather than the 97% which frequently appears in the scientific literature, including our study, Cook et al (2013). And with the claim by Weintraub that hurricanes are twice as bad as they ever were (they're not). Aside from these slight flaws it is encouraging to see one of the greatest filmakers of our time turn his talents toward communicating the urgency of combating climate change.
I think humanity cares...but the challenge is complex on a global scale, challenging on a scale of time leaving, in my opinion, a good chunk of humanity to peck away solutions in ways that seem reasonable. If you step back, the challenge is monumental with no concerted frame work in place for most of humanity to follow. For some, recycling news papers, cans and plastic is all they can do...I myself am not much beyond this. Humanity has to march along the same, clear, chord. That we do not agree on the science presents a pretty big hurdle, and leap into one camp or the other.
Humanity - non science folk - is keen to follow I hope. But I feel we attach to emotion better than we do raw science. and perhaps this film begins to do just that.
I think the movie would be good and I agree a personal emotiponal connection is important, as long as the movie doesnt over hype anything.
One of the other issues with climate change is the huge scale of the issue, namely moving away from fossil fuels. I suspect most people struggle with that challenge, and need to be shown a picture of a viable world without fossil fuels.
Once people can see a future, they will relax and be more accepting of change and the costs of change. Right now they are fearful and go into denial or fatalistic acceptance of climate change.
@54, I, if others do not, appreciate the irony of somebody, who, having taken the name of God, prattles on about so-called religious traits in others. I also understand and detest the arrogance of those who so name themselves. That arrogance shows in your framing of the discussion. The simple fact is that the term "green house gas" arose from historical usage. That usage is sufficiently inconsequential that there is no benefit gained to counter the confusion that would result from a concerted effort to change terminology. The use of the term no more implies acceptance of a green house model of the "greenhouse effect" than does saying you are in good humour, or find something humourous, implies you accept the greek theory of the four humours.
On a more substantive issue, that the presence of IR active molecules in the atmosphere warms the surface relative to what its temperature would have been in their absence is established beyond any reasonable doubt by direct observations. That climate models predict the approximate magnitude of that effect is also well established. If those climate models then go on to confirm the expected increase in temperature derived from simple consideration of the theory, that gives me far more reason to trust that expectation than do the comments of a person who seeks false authority by giving themselves the name of a god, and who demonstrates by their comment that they do not understand the basic science.
Please provide an example of inappropriate use of the term greenhouse gas. Your objection is extremely unclear.
re Ahuramazda. Thanks for drawing my attention to the inference which I was inviting by choosing the early Zoarastrian god as a user name. That was not the intention and certainly does not reflect my opinion on the subject of gods or superstitions generally. I have now chosen another user name, as can be seen.
Now is the Winter1 of our discontent, to misquote the Bard. You have replied to the unimportant part of Tom Curtis's post, so have clearly read and understood it. The important part is this:
What do you have to say about the science backing Tom's statement? Is your new persona more amenable to examining the evidence and following where it leads, as a true sceptic would?
‘Years of Living Dangerously’ shouts climate fire! But, data says their shouting is simply noise. The documentary uses talented celebrities who are totally ignorant of the entire climate issues. Read my debunking of the first 2 episodes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/25/years-of-living-dangerously-shouts-climate-fire-but-data-says-their-shouting-is-simply-noise/
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/14/exploiting-human-misery-and-distorting-the-science-an-environmentalists-critique-of-years-of-living-dangerously/
(Rob P) - Your post links to a paper entitled: Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity - Westerling et al (2006). And includes this graph, which you even highlight in your post, illustrating a long-term increase in wildfire activity in western US forests:
Their abstract states:
".........We compiled a comprehensive database of large wildfires in western United States forests since 1970 and compared it with hydroclimatic and land-surface data. Here, we show that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt."
This is effectively what Years of Living Dangerously seems to be getting at - the long-term increase in wildfire activity is a result of global warming.