For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited:
Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists
Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax, and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.
Actually I think a lot of climate change denialism has more to do with the “…and so we have to do X to solve it” part of climate change. It’s “climate change activism” that turns people off.
Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.
There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.
> Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth.
I've never seen "halting economic growth" as a suggestion for dealing with climate change that was being taken seriously. There might be some crackpots out there insisting that we need to being the economy to a halt and move into caves or something, but I think the vast majority understands that it isn't going to happen. That said, there are things that could be done which would hurt the profits of the ~50 companies who are responsible for most of the global CO2 emissions and/or trillions in climate related damages without causing the entire global economy to grind to a stop or collapse (as much as they'd love for us to believe otherwise).
The greatest societal behavior that needs to be changed is the way we allow a very small number of people get away with making insane amounts of money by causing insane levels of harm. Until that changes, the harmful systems that those people have created for themselves to profit under won't change either.
So to paraphrase, some people don't like some of the proposed solutions to climate change to choose to pretend it isn't happening rather than confront the problem?
> it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it,
Sure there are fanatics spouting end-of-the-world-is-nigh stuff but fundamentally I think the problem here is it's unknown - both in terms of the physical changes [1], and perhaps more importantly second order effects due to mass migration. It might become a real problem a lot sooner than you think - we simply don't know - but I think it's certainly wrong to view the effects as a gradual rise - that average hides a lot of local/temporal variation.
[1]in terms of potential for positive feedback loops like methane release, or compensating stabilising effects like cloud cover.
[2] For a region to become uninhabitable, you don't need it to be uninhabitable every day of the year - just one or two days a year may be enough - enough to kill people or crops. What's important is the occurrence of extremes during the year, not the average gradual rise.
Yes of course. Unfortunately many of those decisions get distorted and captured by bad actors, creating a reasonable skepticism.
If you care about solving climate change: instead of yelling at climate change denialist you should direct more effort into advocating for policy and messaging that acknowledges and mitigates the harms while keeping you expect people to endure
It doesn't sound to me like you contribute any valuable argument that would improve the "PR" for the goal of protecting environmental living conditions for humans though.
The scientific method is making testable predictions. You can look back 10, 20, 30, 40 years at the predictions of sea level rise made by climate scientists, and the sea level today is nowhere near where they predicted it would rise to. If someone's continuously making incorrect predictions it's not reasonable to assume their predictions will suddenly become accurate, especially when there's no feedback loop to weed out people making bad predictions (unlike e.g. in finance where people whose models have little predictive power eventually go bankrupt). No climate scientist has lost their job for making incorrect predictions of sea level rise twenty years ago.
Yeah you have to literally stick your head in the sand to deny what's happening. The models are shit. They suck, and yet the degree to which they are more accurate than not should be enough to convince you.
The CO2 hypothesis was made in the 50s, long before there was conclusive evidence, and yet we are right on the predicted trajectory.
That CO2 emissions will cause warming was predicted first by Arrhenius Svante in 1896. While accurate modelling of all effects may be difficult, the basic effect follows from fundamental physics. There is really no excuse for doubting this.
That sounds like a perfect match for a meta study do you have any? I am very dubious about your conclusion. I am basing this on work I did in high school on this so I really have no sources for my claim.
EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.
In fact I remember reading the opposite recently, that IPCC sea level rise predictions from the 90s were actually pretty accurate given the limitations of the models at the time. And that a good bit of the error was underestimations of rise, not overestimations.
> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.
The far left is all in on climate change so they suppress anything that contradicts the narrative. You think Nature is going to publish "oops we were wrong about" stories wrt climate change? Each side has dug their heels in.
I believe people have influenced the climate, but the far left is using it as a political football to get Their Guy elected, not to actually stop it. The idea of a rising sea is a perfect disaster they can sell you the solution for. If they actually cared, 1) the Democrats would be fighting AI tooth and nail, unless it was 100% powered by renewables (not nuclear, remember their version of science denialism is no nukes.). 2) they would be worshipping Elon for bringing us EVs. Instead they take all that silicon valley AI money and tell us to save the ocean. No way San Jose!
I'm not going to ride a bike to save CO2 when AI is allowed to build a whole datacenter. And yes the misinformation and dogma is used by both parties. And I am not a Trump supporter, I think he's an abhorrent human. But I think the environmental argument is propaganda. Trying to get us to sign away our rights but not doing anything that affects the rich (e.g. ban gas stoves but not private jets).
You've gone from hating the far left for trying to push their agenda via global warming to hating the Democrats for not targeting the rich to solve climate change within the span of two comments.
Perhaps you have cognitive dissonance because you've fallen for some very low quality propaganda.
I haven't "gone from" anything. I pointed out it's "regulations for thee but not for me". If the party cared about climate change, their actions would look much different. But instead they claim disasters (that have occurred for millennia) are caused by CC, then make it right by banning and regulating things as if it will prevent, say, a hurricane. That's akin to self pleasure, or religious dogma (you are "saved" if you give your life to Christ/drive an EV and recycle).
You know I agree with you, but I might be more hard line than you can stomach.
Policies are not perfect, and they will be created with input from all parties. What you highlight feels like an artifact of these policies not being hard line enough. You are of course right that it is effective to show natural disasters and explain that these will be more frequent if we do nothing, when you do that people will make the wrong conclusions how that effects their daily lives. We know that we use too much resources, and this is going to have catastrophic consequences in the future if we do not change how we use them.
It is not obvious who you are arguing against, it feels to me that you are against the people who make climate policies weak, and the very same policies.
Lets talk specific, we had a plastic bag ban here in Sweden. It was vilified as not efficient. In the end it was effective according to research after the ban was lifted and an even extreme approach would have been even better.
It's career suicide because it is antithetical to the scientific method. You can't look at the data and then arrive at the exact opposite conclusion the data is presenting.
Every single global cooling prediction has failed, so yes, if you're that incompetent you should definitely find a different career.
You have shown that you don't understand what Leftist politics means. Democrats are center-right. The USA hasn't had a meaningful Leftist party since the first half of the last century.
Which of course is obviously false. There’s no center right in the Republican Party, only extreme right. The Democrats try to preserve democracy, the Republicans are working very hard to dismantle it.
You’re right, yet at the same time you display that you are completely wrong. One party maintains the status quo (dems). The other advocates fascism (who? repups). We are not the same. You’re using a colloquium to pretend you know about politics.
I’m a Leftist and I want good things for all people. I don’t want to persecute my enemies. I don’t agree with you.
Systems are complicated. Given there are numerous predicted outcomes (it's not just about the actual measured sea-level rise, after all) and many of those predictions are coming to pass far earlier than hoped, it might be worth having an open mind to the fact that sometimes people who devote their lives to studying something might be worth listening to.
It's much harder to predict exactly than to dismiss anything slightly off.
But the tendency is showing: in my country, we're getting records in extreme temperatures, forrest fires and storms.
But a study 1% can be dismissed, some random in a basement 99% off can be believed. This just says: many people are just looking for a confirmation of their beliefs, not evidence. And many companies play this game (supporting the right politicians, spreading disinformation aka lies, etc), because there are billions at stake.
Yes, of course there are bad actors, but this is false equivalence to equate science and the scientific method with basement randos.
Most importantly, most people don't understand scientific consensus vs. individual research papers or individual scientists. A major feature of the scientific method is that when an interesting result is published, it can be independently verified by lots of other researchers, and if they come to the same conclusion, that is excellent evidence that the result accurately describes the real world.
Scientists are people, and just like people everywhere they have biases and personal motivations. But again, the scientific method is much bigger than any individual or even group of scientists. If anything, being skeptical of unexpected results is a huge pillar of the scientific method. But skepticism alone is not enough - the next step is to look for validating research, not to say "hah, science is bullshit, let's trust this YouTube rando instead." As usual, I think Jessica Knurick does a great job explaining things: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/trust-the-s...
True, and personally, I don't believe climate science is affected by bias to such a degree that the overall conclusion is wrong. But it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased, so the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination. This is the case in e.g. social science:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.
Man, if you are going to try to attack the credibility of the field of a hard science like climate science, try doing it with claims directly related to that field of science.
Substituting in social science as a proxy for your criticism takes the wind completely out of your sails.
"Physicists are super untrustworthy and biased, it's a cabal, I mean just look at astrology and these articles criticizing it!"
> if you are going to try to attack the credibility of the field of a hard science like climate science
But I'm not. In fact I said as much. If it'll stop you from fighting phantoms, I'll make it explicit: I'm quite certain anthropogenic climate change is real, and that climate science is broadly correct about it. Yet, not even physics is fully immune from such bias, according to Feynman: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...
(Though as the charts show, in physics it has a short half-life, at least for something as straightforward as the electron charge.)
What do you mean by these statements if not exactly to cast doubt on and paint the field of climate science and the consensus behind anthropogenic climate change as being the result of bias?
> affected by bias to such a degree
Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.
> the overall conclusion is wrong
What about the specifics of the conclusion, which specifics, what percentage of the assertions, 20%, 50%, 80%? This again allows the reader to fill in the blanks with their own biases which are likely far less rigorously tested than the conclusions of the field of climate science.
> it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased
This statement, on the topic of climate change and climate science, immediately following your above two statements, serves to further reinforce the idea that climate science is biased.
> the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination.
The quotes around the independent verification of researchers serves to undermine their work and cast doubt on it. You then state they are unreasonable in their skepticism of results they "dislike", implying these are emotional decisions rather than empirical measurements of reality.
Of course, extremely ironic as the reader meant to consume this is of course the one actually looking for emotional reinforcement of their preconceptions, but in this framing gets to project that onto the scientists.
And yeah, "cursory exmination" of course in no way reflects the reality of the last several decades of climate science, but is added in as another unsubstantiated slight.
> case in e.g. social science
And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.
> Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.
I would be shocked if there was zero bias - the field is staffed by humans, and has political implications. And no, I did not leave the degree of bias up to interpretation - I set an upper bound to it, that precludes global warming skepticism.
> What about the specifics of the conclusion
To date no field has been 100% correct in everything. I already told you I'm not a global warming skeptic - what do you want, for me to pretend climate science is infallible for the benefit of morons that want to twist my words?
> And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.
On two separate occasions I explicitly wrote I believe climate science. Obviously my attempt at imparting a nuanced understanding of scientific fallibility is wasted on someone that doesn't even bother to read my posts. You want a PR statement aimed at reassuring the lowest common denominator that the scientists know what they're doing, not a discussion.
If this is how much you argue with someone who agrees with you, then, I don't know what to say. Good luck in life, man.
You must understand the net content and impact of your messaging, which is far from "Hey I'm just pointing out that humanity is fallible, apropos of nothing."
It's not -
"hey, we can argue about the best way to address climate change and the details of how it's going to play out"
it's -
"this entire field is biased" (you said "it's absolutely the case that entire fields can be biased"), the "independent verification of empirical data is actually untrustworthy and primarily motivated by personal dislike", "they make their scientific conclusions with cursory examinations", and "they're as reliable as the social sciences".
I'm sorry, but it beggars belief that you are not aware of what you're doing.
It's not the communication style of an engineer just trying to be technically correct, it's filled with subtle and not-so-subtle accusations and implications all driving in a single direction which is the discreditation of the entire scientific field.
So you think, but you're wrong. What really drives distrust in science is claims of infallibility and demands for total trust, so the only ones that remain expressing doubts are oil lobbyists and those whom they've convinced, hence your misidentification of me as one of them.
Let's take a small detour. In the show Downton Abbey, there's an episode where a character may be sick. Two doctors give their diagnoses. One says she's not sick, and that he's 100% certain. The other says he thinks he knows what illness she has, but he's not totally sure - despite knowing the patient better. Still he recommends treating her for that illness. They go with the first doctor, he turns out to have been wrong, and the patient dies.
Even the humanities and English literature graduates that wrote that show understood what you do not, that the person open about their uncertainties and faults is more trustworthy than the one claiming to be perfect. Not only is more trustworthy, but is the one that people will trust, that is why they gave that characteristic to the doctor they wanted the audience to side with - the likable permanent character, not the antagonizing guest character.
This is all a straw man, of course, as I've never said or even implied that scientists are infallible.
That said, to address your comment in some detail:
> What really drives distrust in science is claims of infallibility and demands for total trust
This is one hypothesis. Here's another -
If we look at COVID and the anti-vax movement in general, it seems apparent that a much greater driver of that distrust is grifters and kooks actively and profitably pushing emotionally satisfying misinformation. Ironically enough, they do this with far greater claimed certainty about the veracity of their conclusions than the doctors, with far less data to substantiate those conclusions.
This is pushed out to an audience which is desperately looking for explanations for the unexplainable like why their child got autism. Reasoning and nuance goes out the window and they latch onto anything that will give them a sense of certainty.
A second element of this, is that these conspiracy theories are specifically intended to stir up distrust of scientists, "educated elites", and public institutions, and to exploit the pre-existing distrust of the aforementioned that has been steadily cultivated by the right over decades.
Finally, in the case of COVID especially, we had a whole bunch of selfish motivations that were at play which resulted in people finding it expedient to believe anything that would align with their desires to do whatever they like without anyone telling them what they can and can't do (especially business owners whose financial incentives all aligned with not shutting down, and being in positions of power, they leaned into boosting this messaging).
The CDC and the medical field has for decades very clearly communicated the statistical nature of their specialty, the rate and severity of side effects, the uncertainty of prognoses and outcomes of treatments, etc etc. Quite painstakingly. There was no industrywide claim of infallibility, and yet here we are.
> Downton Abbey [...] the first doctor, he turns out to have been wrong,
Love Downton Abbey!
Climate scientists constantly communicate error bars around their measurements and the outcomes of climate change. Creating a model that predicts with any certainty how all the countless systems of the Earth will interact in such a dynamic process is insanely difficult, especially as numerous feedback cycles individually look poised to accelerate the whole process.
These many, many, many measurements and models all tend to converge around certain facts though, which leads to the probability of those being the case being as close to truth as science is capable of getting.
As "true" as 9.8 m/s^2, the heliocentric nature of our solar system, the spherical nature of our planet, the speed of light in a vacuum, plate tectonics, evolution, germ theory, etc. etc.
These truths are that the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have been steadily rising since industrialization, that this is primarily driven by anthropogenic emissions, and that as the concentration of these gases increases, more energy from the sun will be trapped within our atmosphere resulting in a heating world.
This heating world is already, and will continue to, melt the ice caps, reducing the albedo of the poles as the darker water underneath is revealed and begins to absorb more of the sun's energy, accelerating the effect.
This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, melt the permafrost which stores ~1.4 GT of methane, which is ~80x as potent a GHG as CO2, and whose release would represent a ~2x increase of the concentration in our atmosphere, again further accelerating the process.
This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, lead to tropical forests like the Amazon beginning to emit more CO2 than they absorb, again further accelerating the process.
Etc. etc.
The consequences of all this are already, and will continue to, drive more and more extreme weather, with the 10 hottest years on record all happening in the last 10 years. This has negative consequences for food production, for the habitability of the equatorial regions, and will lead to mass migrations of people unless we think they will be content to just sit around and die, and thus destabilization of societies.
While we're on the topic of entertainment media another one came to my mind, it's called "Don't Look Up".
As opposed to your Downton Abbey example, the meteor turns out to be real, and it does hit the Earth, and everyone dies.
The reason humanity doesn't take this seriously and unite to address it is because there are countless predictable incentives to distrust the scientists and ignore the inconvenient truth of an incoming meteor. Financial incentives for the rich and powerful, engagement (and ultimately financial) incentives for the grifters and kooks pushing distrust of the scientists, a deep emotional desire in much of humanity to outright reject the horrors of this potential reality...
Anyway, not sure what made me think of that or how that's at all relevant here, but you should watch it if you haven't!
Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.
my wife is an actuary, and we always joke that you know climate change has real cause and effect because the actuaries are specifically monitoring and modeling for it lol
that's cute but you can't blame people for holding opinions based on phenomenal observations before they learn the language and can perform experiments. the fact that so many can't is the sole reason you might be considered somewhat superior or competent. more people with scientific skills and a personal way to explain and adhere to the scientific method would mean that your competence would be no more than average, if at all. how would that make you feel?
more importantly though, is the fact that there are enough "critics" that consider Global Warming a cycle that "man" merely accelerated by a few decades. most of these "skeptics" are also perfectly capable of discerning between the amount of energy "wasted" in office buildings and lit up skyscrapers as well as anything at the end of luxury supply chains and markets and what the rest of the world "wastes" or expends. to them, the hoax is the "man-made" part ...
My phenomenal observations are that it's been getting warmer during my lifetime, but as soon as I mention this in an online conversation I get slapped down with 'the climate is always changing' and 'n=1'.
Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.
Well, it's my observation as well, but the point is that it's not the first time this happened.
In fact, we have records from not that long ago that at some point climate became colder after it had been warmer for a bit.
It's obvious human civilization has an impact, but the real question is more, can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life? Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.
Climate activist make it look like it's a settled issue, but the problem isn't the science; the problem is trying to use the science to enforce decision that are highly political in nature and are not to be left only to the designated god scientist, no matter how hard they cry...
> can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life
Yes, no doubt! And actually doing something about it will impact our lives much less than trying to continue as usual. If we would have started 30 years ago, the transitions would have been smooth, but now it is going to be harsher. The problem is that doing something about it will affect the profits of some very big and influential corporations, and they are doing everything they can to sow FUD.
>Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.
Uh? Ultimate loser? When I read comments like this I'm basically confronted with the following implication "Human civilization isn't worth preserving. If you disagree, then the problem is with you, namely because you believe humanity to be redeemable".
The ultimate loser is the person who thinks that a small or almost nonexistent reduction in quality of life is a small price to pay in comparison to a large and permanent reduction in quality of life.
The ultimate winner is the person who will see his quality of life decline before his eyes.
Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.
What are the cycles called? How do they function? A lot of people use the world cycle like other people use the word magic. A mystery pretending to be an explanation.
The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.
- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles
- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.
- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.
For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans
The only group that cries and creates hysteria is the last group. So, not sure why you think the other groups consider it as bleak. From all the other groups perspective, they are winning, because nobody is buying the stupid de-growth, ban fossils agenda.
Yes, if hysteria and de-growth propaganda wins, it is bleak for the other groups
I think you should take a step back, try to ignore your priors a bit, and take a look at this subject with an open mind/willingness to be incorrect. Because I’m telling you man, the science is against you.
It perfectly falls under - "Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way"
“Researchers found that plants’ protein content will likely decrease significantly if carbon dioxide levels reach 540 to 960 parts per million, which we are projected to reach by 2100. (We are currently at 409 ppm.) Studies show that barley, wheat, potatoes and rice have 6 to 15 percent lower concentrations of protein when grown at those levels of CO2. The protein content of corn and sorghum, however, did not decline significantly.”
"When grown under the CO2 levels expected by 2050, reductions of protein, iron, and zinc in common produce in some parts of the world could be anywhere from 3-17 percent. And if emissions continue at the current rate, in many countries, these nutrient declines could turn dire."
“The world's top 10 crops— barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat—supply a combined 83 percent of all calories produced on cropland. Yields have long been projected to decrease in future climate conditions. Now, new research shows climate change has already affected production of these key energy sources—and some regions and countries are faring far worse than others.”
Lower available omega 3 fatty acids
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090543/
Earth
Ozone destruction
https://psmag.com/environment/the-most-climate-resilient-cou...
In other words, heat-trapping gases contribute to creating the cooling conditions in the atmosphere that lead to ozone depletion. Greenhouse gases absorb heat at relatively low altitudes and warm the surface--but they have the opposite effect in higher altitudes because they prevent heat from rising.
In a cooler stratosphere, ozone loss creates a cooling effect that results in further ozone depletion.
Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to new research.
Our calculations suggest that projected changes in suicide rates under future climate change could be as important as other well- studied societal or policy determinants of suicide rates (see Fig. 5a).
In absolute value, the effect of climate change on the suicide rate in the United States and Mexico by 2050 is roughly two to four times the estimated effect of a 1% increase in the unemployment rate in the European Union20, half as large as the immediate effect of a celebrity suicide in Japan45, and roughly one-third as large in absolute magnitude (with opposite sign) as the estimated effect of gun restriction laws in the United States46 or the effect of national suicide prevention programmes in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries47. The large magni- tude of our results adds further impetus to better understand why temperature affects suicide and to implement policies to mitigate future temperature rise.
Climate Change Will Expose Half of World’s Population to Disease-Spreading Mosquitoes By 2050
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/climate-change-will-expose-half...
Unhealthy blood CO2 concentrations causing stress on the autonomic nervous system have been measured from people in common office environments where reduced thinking ability and health symptoms have been observed at levels of CO2 above 600 ppm for relatively short-term exposures. Although humans and animals are able to deal with elevated levels of CO2 in the short-term due to various compensation mechanisms in the body, the persistent effects of these mechanisms may have severe consequences in a perpetual environment of elevated CO2. These include threats to life such as kidney failure, bone atrophy and loss of brain function. Existing research also indicates that as ambient CO2 increases in the near-future, there will be an associated increase in cancers, neurological disorders and other conditions.
No. These CO2 measurement levels are at 9,000 feet, not on the surface at sea level. The CO2 concentration at the surface is much higher, and it is becoming very common for CO2 levels to exceed 1,000 ppm at the surface, going up to 4,000 ppm in closed areas, like houses.
The measured CO2 level has seasonal peaks and lows. What is important is the Mean keeps climbing. What is also important is the rise in the mean is starting to go exponential. A decade ago, the mean was increasing about 1 ppm per year. This past year, it is increasing at 3 ppm. All the projections from the 70's have been with the assumption that the CO2 level increase would be a linear ramp up, indicating when the troposphere, the breathable atmosphere, goes into Thermal Runaway, around 2070. If the ramp up is going exponential, then the conditions for Thermal Runaway move closer, possibly around 2040. The commencement of Thermal Runaway is a mass extinction event. This is the reason for all the "sooner than expected" headlines.
You're missing: "Climate is warming, but this is a good thing because it means Jesus will come back sooner and I'll live in endless bliss and not have to go to work anymore, so I'm going to do my part by driving a huge truck and pretend like it's fake."
More commonly these days is the message that CO2 is plant food, and climate change is a nefarious plot to kill off the plants by starving them in order to reduce the Earth's population. I can dig up several tweets this week pushing that message.
It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now. Elon doesn't even care, more outrage == more engagement and that's what feeds the system. It's a feedback loop of crap.
> It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now.
Not "basically" owned. Manipulation is the explicitly optimized and financed purpose.
The feed is a two-directional manipulation competition, with both directions enhancing each other, with a conflict of interest afterburner, for all parties to maximally control users. Neutrality doesn't exist.
(1) An auction for ads/influence to get your manipulative content in front of the most likely vulnerable users.
(2) A never ending competition to create addictive content, funded in direct proportion to successful impact on users.
(3) And the value in both directions is magnified by the "personalized" leverage manufactured through pervasive logging, beyond service surveillance, dossier collation, psychology hacking and real time feed manipulation.
(4) None of this is impeded by any "standards", neutrality, or a concern about external damage.
Admittedly great things for users and society, except for the four on that list that are not.
It's not even that Elon doesn't care as in he is ambivalent about it, it directly feeds into reinforcing his political preferences.
Try to create a brand new twitter account, you'll find that 80+% of the accounts that get suggested to you are right wing propaganda with climate denial being one of their greatest hits.
You forgot to list like a dozen variants in-between the last two groups. The abrupt end and extremely biased framing is almost comical.
>Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
Green growth aka energy efficiency doesn't work, so one more category.
Carbon capture doesn't work without government subsidies. Hence you need a group of people who would be willing to pay tax money to solve climate change. One more category.
Human adaptation can mean many things. People accept climate change even if it means mass immigration. One more category.
People accept climate change even if it means armed border conflicts where immigrants get shot (see Poland) due to closed border policies. One more category.
People resign and accept the negative consequences of climate change as the new normal, similar to people living in polluted cities, except globally. One more category.
Hypothetically speaking, if people in the last group were right, and that is the logical conclusion to be reached from careful evaluation of the evidence, wouldn’t the other positions indeed be ones of wilful denial of the state of the climate?
At the end of the day, we are talking about humanity/civilization and not planet earth itself.
We have easy measures of that
- Real GDP.
- Global Life Expectancy
- Global Child Mortality
- Global Poverty
- Global Food Production
If you are really into science and evidence, you should be tracking that for humanity extinction/survival trends (and the effect technology is having in tackling climate change), which is what my position is
I would be in the second to last group if we actually did something when there still was time, and more was done to actually do something now. Yes, there's a lot of energy efficiency measures that could be done, and much more clean energy could be build, and we will be forced to adopt whether we want to or not. (Carbon capture from the atmosphere is a fucking joke though, which should be to everyone when you know that CO2 in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million!)
But we didn't start when we had to, and we are still doing only a fraction of what must be done. So, we are screwing ourselves over majorly. And this is not some fringe hysteria, this is the scientific consensus and has been for a long time. You can almost hear screams of frustration and desperation through the lines if you pick ut the latest IPCC report.
- Climate Warming in the last ~200 and current years is Man Made, but given Man’s relative shortsightedness and propensity for becoming preoccupied, his ongoing impact on climate change will run its course to one end or another, probably redefining coastlines in the process and including other effects on agriculture, diversity of species, and so on. Much, much later the Earth will more than likely enter another Ice Age and most of the planet will be frozen over. Between the Man induced (relatively) extreme warm period and the next Ice Age, Man will find his way one way or another. Or Not.
Associating action to prevent with 'de-growth' is disinformation from the deniers. Climate change itself is massively de-growth. The question is how to best prevent it.
If you respect and consider ideas that conflict with your own, that's how you can learn new things.
Many factors influence economics; climate change is one part of the equation. There are many examples of climate change's direct impact so far - floods, fires, sea-level rise (requiring investment in massive public works), droughts, etc. I don't think it's debatable that these things have negative economic impact.
Climate change is expected to greatly increase its impact in many ways. Let's not wait until it overcomes all other factors in economic growth and makes our economies shrink.
put your money where your mouth is. Any idiot can generate hysteria in 2026.
Make your prediction about any HDI metric -- Real GDP, Child Mortality, Life Expectancy, Poverty, Malnutrition (hunger) and give me your prediction for 2030 (or any year < 2035). If your doom prediction doesn't come true, Announce to the world, "I'm pretty much clueless about how the universe works and will stop posting hysteria on Social media"
Why 2030? CO2 persists in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. This doesn't end in 2030.
The goal is not to generate hysteria; but to avoid it. Hitting one or more tipping points [1] is orders of magnitude more destructive than prioritising phasing out fossil fuels, and impossible to undo.
But I do understand that some people have reasons not to care about impacts that have an outsized effect on future generations, so to your request: a recent example of a list of impact predictions is the UK Government joint intelligence committee's national security assessment [2].
Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help
> Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help
These are scientists, not the government, and the US government, at least, has long opposed or been ambivalent toward climate research.
I'm not sure how rich donor influence is involved. Rich donors generally have acted to oppose climate research.
Also scientists generally suck at messaging and persuasion. They think if they just dial up the stakes and consequences a little more, it'll be compelling! Maybe if we make one more documentary with bad CGI disaster movie scenes, that'll do it! Same with the stupid "Doomsday clock" that is somehow always "the closest we've ever been to nuclear war!" whenever it gets trotted out. You'd think people who know what stochastic noise is would realize when they're producing it.
They would have made a lot more headway talking about clean air, clean water, jobs, and a bright prosperous future where we manufacture wind turbines, batteries and solar panels in deep red Missouri. A minority tried that, but most stuck with the catastrophizing for decades and now that they've ruined their social credit no one will listen to the message they should have opened with.
You need people emotionally invested, and it's a lot easier to get them invested in their lives than in the abstract consequences of computer models that are at least 100 years out if they're even accurate. And most people are not independent enough to direct their own lives. If they make the right decisions on abstract concepts, it was more because the incentives/disincentives in their environment were set up correctly than they actually understood the decision they were making. Message accordingly.
Every approach you've suggested above, and others besides, has been tried by scientists, NGOs and government agencies for the last few decades, and largely failed.
The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.
Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).
None of it works.
1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.
The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.
2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.
Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!
And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.
> The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.
Except downplaying consequences downplays the upside, i.e. opportunity.
The dire warnings should be dire, but paired with a call to opportunity opportunity opportunity. Instead of focusing on enemies or little inconvenient things we could all do, if only we could all be uniformly focused and high minded enough as uncoordinated individuals.
That fact that virtually every way we can reduce climate damage involves new capabilities and resources with additional economic and health benefits (not to mention political disentanglements) makes positive self-interested calls to profitable action much more sensible.
And political leaders shouldn't be afraid to work with the CFO's of fossil fuel companies to create incentives they want. It might be costly, but CFO's get flexible when there is a clear path to making more money. Any costs of smoothing that path (let's be clear, in a way that would be pure corruption if the size of the problem didn't make that a value creator) are nothing compared to the costs of climate change.
China gets it. (Not uniformly of course, but more, and its paying off for them.)
Except the same people disbelieving in climate change hold a blind faith in Trump's administration, that is extremely corrupt and influenced by rich donors. This isn't skepticism, these people have just been completely ideologically captured by the oligarchy's propaganda.
Certainly doesn't help that nobody made those predictions but denialists make up or intentionally misinterpret people making predictions so as to "prove" nothing is actually happening.
The widely-cited UNEP report where people get the supposed non-occuring Maldives prediction from suggested that half of the Maldives could be inundated by 2100 in a one-meter-rise scenario.
There’s actually research to support the claim you’re making here (Elaboration Likelihood Model).
When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.
It's a culture thing, nobody on the right would ever be convinced by science, they will shop around until they find what they need to hear. My sister in law sent me a video and told me that she thought it was a really good explainer and had a lot of good facts and figures to support it. To humor her, I took a brief glance at it, and saw that it was produced by Dr. Shiva. I was thinking "no way, it can't be that Shiva, could it, email guy?" Yes, yes it was.
And, it's important to understand why they're emitting some of that CO2: Western wallets demanding foreign produced goods, because Western society collectively, and enthusiastically, pushed manufacturing to China.
It's more important to understand why they're emitting so much of that CO2 - because a lot of people in China need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Any analysis that fails to take per-capita into account is not made in good faith.
China has a large population but so does India. Don't forget that China is the world's factory and that's where a very large chunk of CO2 emissions come from.
My point is that if you pay a factory in China to make something for you, then the CO2 produced in that process would be more appropriately added to your total, rather than theirs, because it was you were the direct and only reason it was produced.
Setting aside the names of the authors, this is a very bad paper. They take temperature data sets, "adjust" [1] them by attempting to remove the biggest recent factors (volcanism, solar and el nino cycles) affecting temperatures, then do a piece-wise regression analysis to look at trends in 10-year chunks. This is just bad methodology, akin to what a junior graduate student with a failing thesis might do to find signal in a dataset that isn't being cooperative to their hypothesis.
Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:
> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.
They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.
I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.
[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:
> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.
Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors. The resulting time series fits a super-linear curve -> accelerating global warming.
> Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors.
No, it isn’t. You’re just rephrasing what I said with more words: they attempted to adjust for three of the biggest factors that affect temperature, then did a piecewise regression to estimate a 10-year window.
You can’t do it in a statistically valid way. Full stop. The authors admit this, but want you to ignore it.
They use an established methodology (https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-95
9326/6/4/044022 - the methodology retains the average warming rate over the period since 1970 while smoothing fluctuations) to remove predictable temperature variations so they can isolate the effect they are trying to measure.
Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.
Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".
Add another year or two and it's likely we won't even need to smooth the curve to show accelerated warming at 95% confidence.
They used a published methodology. That doesn't mean the methodology is uncontroversial, and it certainly doesn't mean that they used it in a way that makes sense in the current context. One can commit an almost infinite number of horrible abuses via bog-standard linear regression.
Even setting aside the dubious nature of the adjustments, doing a regression on a 10-year window of a system that we know has multi-decade cycles -- or longer -- is just blatantly trying to dress up bad point extrapolations as science. Then, when they don't get the results they want to see from that abuse, they start subtracting the annoying little details in the data that are getting in their way.
> Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.
You can't go back in time, invent counterfactual histories by subtracting primary signals, and declare the net result to be "significant". This isn't even statistics -- it's just massaging data via statistical tools.
> Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".
If you were trying to determine if the quantity of daylight increased over a week in spring, would you account for the differences caused by day and night? What about cloud cover? Or is that just massaging the data?
p.s. the cited methodology has >300 citations in peer reviewed publications, ref Web of Science
> If you were trying to determine if the quantity of daylight increased over a week in spring, would you account for the differences caused by day and night? What about cloud cover? Or is that just massaging the data?
Just to draw a better analogy to the low quality of the current work, let's say you wanted to compare average daylight last week, globally, to all of recorded history. Then you made a model that had terms for (say) astronomical daylight, longitude, latitude and, I dunno...altitude of the measurement. Then you made a regression, subtracted three terms, and claimed that the residual was still "significantly darker". Then you run around waving your arms and shouting that if we only extrapolate forward N weeks from last week, soon we'll be living in a fully dark world!
You'd be rightfully laughed out of any room you were in.
I think you are missing my point, and the point of the article: they are demonstrating that global temperature change that is not driven by volcanism, solar variation or El Niño is (in all likelihood, given the data) accelerating. They can do this because the effects of volcanism, solar variation and El Niño on global temperature can all be predicted from external measurements.
Actually, I used fewer words. I don't think you understand what the authors are doing. They are modeling temperature T per year as a sum of four terms: T = E + S + V + R---(E)l Nino, (S)solar irradiance, (V)olcanic activity, and (R)emaining factors. Then they subtract E, S, and V. Then they show that R fits a super-linear curve. Why there would be no "statistically valid way" to do this is beyond me, the authors, and the article's peer reviewers. If this is "bad methodology", lodge your complaints on https://pubpeer.com/.
1) Their model is inherently dumb. The system is much more complicated and inseparable.
2) They openly admit that “subtracting E, S and V”, as you say, cannot actually be done.
3) They’re arbitrarily removing sources of variation so that they can claim “significance” in a narrow window. The entire exercise is designed to achieve a predetermined outcome, and statistical significance cannot be calculated in those circumstances.
They also don't seem to account for the reduction of sulfur emissions from ships, which is surprising given how widely this was reported even in mainstream media.
Is this an oversight (or "oversight") or something that is reasonable for some reason that would be so obvious to experts in the field that it's not worth mentioning?
I mean...they're just cherry-picking the sources of "noise" that prevent their preferred window from showing "significance". It's not like they did a thorough analysis of every uncontrolled factor and carefully tried to control them all. Even that would be crap, but at least it would be good-faith crap.
This has always been the big issue I have with the conclusions draw in climate publications. I encourage anyone with strong opinion on climate change to do a deep dive on the temperature analysis.
The best example I can think of is the "global warming hiatus" that was discussed in depth in the top climate journals in the mid-2010s. Nature Climate Change even devoted an entire month to it.[1]
5 years later publications were saying "there was no hiatus at all".[2]
And as you said, when you dive into the paper, you realize that temperature measures are not objective at all. And I would ask - If everyone was in agreement that temperature increases paused, then 5 years later everyone agrees they didn't, how much confidence do we really have in the measures themselves.*
As someone who conudcted scientific research, this has a ton of inherent problems. It doesn't matter what I'm measuring, if the data collection is not objective, and there is no consensus (or at least trong evidence for adjustments), then the data itself is very unreliable.
If I tried to publish a chemical paper in a top journal and manually went in and adjusted data (even with a scientific rationale) the paper would be immediately rejected.
> And as you said, when you dive into the paper, you realize that temperature measures are not objective at all.
I don't know if I'd go that far. The measurements are as objective as they can be given the limits of technology and time, but what we do with the datasets afterward is usually filled with subjective decisions. In the worst cases, you get motivated actors doing statistically invalid analysis to reach a preferred conclusion.
This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.
I think research ranges from this paper to ones more rigorous, but the problem of "adjustments" is consistent.
And the issue is not so much the research is being done, but rather how it's reported on. Scientists know the limits of rigor in climate science, but the public doesn't. So catastrophic predictions are viewed by the public as a sure thing, versus one particular prediction with wide error bares.
> This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.
Indeed. Nobody plays fast and lose with papers on the structure of some random enzyme for political purposes.
It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."
I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.
For non-specialists, I think the most important view on papers is to not view them as nuggets of truth, but communications of a group of people who are trying to establish truth. No single paper is definitive!
Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.
Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)
Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.
Sometimes reviewers also look for whether the paper cites enough of their own papers, who is publishing it (regardless of whether the review is supposed to be anonymous or not), whether it clashes with a paper they're about to publish... science is just as full of politics and corruption (if not more) as any other field.
I almost added "place the research into the context of other relevant research" as another way of saying "cite enough of the peer reviewer's papers" but fair enough.
I'm not sure if science has as much corruption as other fields, but it definitely has politics. PIs get to their position without the typical selection process for leadership that happens in most larger orgs, so there's more fragile and explosive personalities than I find in other management/leadership positions.
I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.
The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.
If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.
If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.
Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."
Peer review is still very relevant in climate science. But given it is from well-respected authors, I am more inclined to trust the results at this stage.
> Plain Language Summary
The rise in global temperature has been widely considered to be quite steady for several decades since the 1970s. Recently, however, scientists have started to debate whether global warming has accelerated since then. It is difficult to be sure of that because of natural fluctuations in the warming rate, and so far no statistical significance (meaning 95% certainty) of an acceleration (increase in warming rate) has been demonstrated. In this study we subtract the estimated influence of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data, which makes the global temperature curve less variable, and it then shows a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about the year 2015. Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been.
A paper being peer reviewed is a good sign, but I feel like the signal is usually over interpreted.
Peer reviewed does not mean the findings of the paper are established fact or scientific consensus. It does not mean that the findings have been replicated by other scientists. It does not mean that the paper relied on a robust methodology, is free of basic statistical errors, or even free of logical fallacies.
Some of these limitations are due to the limitations of peer review itself. Others are just side effects of the way science works (for example, some ideas start as small, unimpressive experiments that are reported on in papers, and the strength of the findings is gradually developed over time). Obviously sometimes the prestige (or lack thereof) of the journal the paper is in decreases (or increases) some of these issues.
Anyway, peer review is a very noisy channel (IMHO).
For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.
In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.
If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:
Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.
Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.
And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.
† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.
Pre-prints exists because it can take up to 18 months to get a paper published in a journal or reputable conference. Since lots of people can publish pre-prints[1] what you should think depends on the authors. If they have a record of publishing good research you should think highly of the paper.
[1] - Actually, there are hoops on pre-print repositories, such as arXiv, so not everyone can post there. I guesstimate that 99% of the public has no means of posting on arXiv.
Their credibility and experience makes it more likely that they will have followed scientific procedures correctly, that their measuring techniques will not have obvious flaws and their findings reflect the evidence.
This is not an appeal to authority: the paper will be examined thoroughly by peer reviewers and likely by academics across the world, in part because of their credibility. That will take time. Meanwhile it should be taken seriously.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra...
Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.