Demystifying Three Climate Lies - The Road to Decarbonisation | Thomas Stocker | TEDxBern

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Published 2016-10-13
Thomas Stocker starts by debunking three of the most popular climate change myths. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of climate and regularly advises the UN. At the end of the talk, he shows the way out of climate change: decarbonisation.

Thomas Stocker graduated from ETH Zürich in 1987 and held research positions in London, Montreal and New York. Since 1993 he is Professor of Climate and Environmental Physics at the University of Bern. This research group is leading in the reconstruction of greenhouse gas concentrations from polar ice cores and the simulation of past and future climate changes. From 2008 to 2015 he co-chaired Working Group I of the IPCC, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at ted.com/tedx

All Comments (21)
  • @linzearth
    So good of you to allow comments on this video. Too many producers disable the ability to question or disagree. After all the idea of consensus on this matter is contrary to doing good science. Nothing was demystified here.
  • @Fitin10nation
    We don’t even know what has caused the past heating and cooling cycles but we know what’s causing this one? Speculation and/or correlation are not causation. The reality is we don’t know ...and I don’t understand why some scientists refuse to admit this.
  • @johnmcardle8016
    100% of the comments seem to conclude that this guy hasn't a clue.
  • @notyou1877
    3 years later and the IPCC finally relented and allowed to include the water vapor (clouds) in their next round of climate predictions models. It is not perfect, but a step in the correct direction.
  • @ralphalf5897
    When's the ice age we were warned about in the 70s going to hit?? Asking for a friend.
  • Reading this comment section makes me want to cry. I am simply baffled.
  • @joephysics5469
    As a physicist myself I understand how this guy loves to think everything can be simplified. But also as a physician who works with outrageously complicated systems of the human organism it is obvious to me that he really doesn't comprehend how complex the climate truly is. He also doesn't include how human bias is rampant when studying very complex systems. Scientists often find what they want to find in these complex systems because of their natural bias. Medical studies are notoriously false because of natural bias.
  • @pookatim
    Where did he get the numbers? I cannot find anything that says we added 330 molecules per million of CO2 in 250 years. Everything I see shows CO2 was actually higher 250 years ago. I would like to see this data.
  • Oh dear, just a researcher that has researched the view he is looking for. This is not from a scientist and is missing huge parts of the climate jigsaw. And showing graphs of skewed data, .... it just goes on.
  • @danweaver4304
    I like the discussion at 14:00 about “complex” systems. However, I would like to propose the problem of measuring the average global temperature is a little bit more complicated than a boiling pot of water. A better example is another system everyone encounters regularly: a microphone, an electrical amplifier and a speaker. This system amply demonstrates the concepts of positive & negative feedback which are critical to understanding the climate change science. Those who think they can predict future global temperatures based on flawed global climate models are like inexperienced sound engineers who aim the speaker at the microphone. Positive feedback causes the system to runaway into a high-pitched squeal! Negative feedback causes forcing to be damped, and the sound system can recover quickly from loud sounds. Negative feedback is used in many electronic circuits to create stability, and prevent extreme reaction to variable inputs. This is like the real climate system, which holds a planetary temperature within a few degrees C over hundreds of years. The “standard deviation” on mean annual global temperature has been about 0.1%. If no forcing at all existed, then we could still expect temperature anomalies to range from -0.5 to +1.2C. That’s three standard deviations on 286K, the approximate mean temperature of earth over the past 200 years.
  • Very selective choice of information and graphs used. Never heard any media give anything other than a pro climate change propergangda.
  • @markustilgner
    If you have a different opinon of climatechange you can not even be part of IPCC. This shows how scientific the IPCC really is.
  • @jouniantero
    Predicting a complex system 50 years into the future seems to me at least quite difficult, no matter what this guy says. And when it comes to climate change, I would say that as soon as some of the past predictions would be even close to what they predicted I could start to believe in this. So far they never got it right. Every time they have radically over estimated the human-effect and warming. Recently the IPCC also change their latest predictions to a less catastrophic direction. This was, of course, done in silence...
  • @bobdeverell
    Stocker presents the traditional view that 'greenhouse effect' will cause a disproportionate rise in the earth's temperature. Yet new research suggests atmospheric pressure, rather than CO2, maybe the mechanism on Venus rather than any 'run-away' greenhouse effect. More research is needed into this before coming to definite conclusions.
  • @hyotis
    Yes, of course! Predicting (and measuring) the temperature in a boiling pot of water is just like predicting the temperature for the entire planet.
  • @4Nanook
    One of the myths that is presented in this video is that absorption is linear with the amount of CO2 in the air. This is not true. You reach a point where the spectral lines CO2 absorbs is saturated, and after that you only slightly widen the absorption curve, you do not substantially increase absorption.
  • @mattyk82
    I deeply care about this issue but I just wasted nearly 20 minutes of my time. No relevant science exists here.
  • @chhu_1753
    He said from 1880 to 2000, temperature is rising, climate is changing.