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Personally, I would worry more about a meteor wiping out humanity than climate change. There isn't political or social will because those on the extreme ends o

Personally, I would worry more about a meteor wiping out humanity than climate change. There isn't political or social will because those on the extreme ends of both sides are controlling it making it impossible to meet somewhere in the middle. Which is what politics have to do to move anywhere. Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent. But even posing such an idea will get you put into the "climate denier" category in a heartbeat and stop all rational discussion. There are other ways to think about this. Here is one. Humans have historically been living at the mercy of nature, nature is rather unforgiving and quite harsh. Over the time we have adjusted to climate change and we always will have to as the climate will always be changing. I would personally rather be in our current situation and have a fighting chance to improve than being left with the chances I had as a person 200 years ago for even basic natural causes. The wicked problem isn't that there isn't political will but that we can't both secure the continued prosperity of humanity and at the same time not have an impact on the environment we live. The way out of our problems is not to stop up but to continue improving technology and energy utilization. A great start would be to get back to nuclear but I am under no illusion that there are many rationally minded people left in the environmental organizations anymore.

blindwatchmaker 8y ago
> Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent. Could you elaborate? I was under the impression that even conservative estimates by reputable climatologists showed some pretty drastic changes.
- Filligree 8y ago
  They do, and they've consistently underestimated things so far. The guy's just a denier.
  - jeffreyrogers 8y ago
    That's not true. The climate models typically show larger rises in temperature than have actually happened. I found this within 5 seconds of Googling: https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-climate-reality/ https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli... I'm not sure how good the source is, but it is consistent with what I've seen elsewhere.
    - polotics 8y ago
      Complex systems have less linearity than expected, but more hysteresis. The flat(ter) early naughties have already been well explained, mostly taking 98 as reference is where the effect comes from, we caught up since then, and ain't slowing down.
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        Yet everything is getting better, not worse because we've become better at dealing with issues. The number of people who died from drought has gone down not up according to some studies. Number of people out of extreme poverty is going up is going up not down. https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/deaths_from_extreme_weather_1900_2010.pdf https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/deaths_from_extr... https://ourworldindata.org/famines https://ourworldindata.org/famines And the world is has gotten greener: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... And so we are back to the beginning. We don't really know as much as some like to claim. So what is the goal of humanity? How do we measure human flourishing? How do we ensure we still get people to become more resourceful? We can't have our cake and eat it.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  The climate models predict larger increases in temperature than have actually occurred, and the increases in temperature appear to be slowing down. I think most (reasonable) people agree that climate change is caused by humans, but there still isn't much to do about it. Pretty much anything you do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is going to massively increase the cost of everything. Plus it puts your country at a disadvantage relative to countries that don't put in place the same policies. Hydrocarbons have made the modern world possible by providing a relatively cheap and portable energy source. None of the renewables come close. They're also the main source of greenhouse gases and thus climate change. There is no practical policy proposal to decrease fossil fuel usage in the near-to-moderate future that would maintain living standards at their current levels.
Retric 8y ago
The problem is human infrastructure is built around existing climates. Something small like 2% more rain seems meaningless, but add that on top of extreme events and overtopping levees instead of being a 100 year event it's a 10 year event. Tropical diseases / insects stop being so tropical etc etc. It's a death of 1000 cuts. On top of that clean energy is cheap, the difference between coal electricity and renewable sources is vastly less than the costs from climate change. So doing nothing has significant costs from climate changes but cutting emissions 50% is fairly cheap. PS: Electric cars might win on their own even without considering climate change. So, we can make huge difference in adoption without significant costs.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  It's just not that easy. We also have 14% more green vegetation today than 30 years ago. The climate system is one endless positive negative feedback system and we don't have enough data to say anything truly conclusive other than the climate is changing and things are getting hotter. Anyone claiming they know how this is going to turn out on either side are simply lying or are trapped in some ideological self-delusion. We have no way of knowing. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything but just that what we should do might not be ignoring the reality of a majority of this world who are not rich enough to install solar panels on their roofs. With regards to the Pascals wager argument again I am more worried about a meteor hitting us and that brings us back to the discussion again about how to ensure growth which pays for technological advancements and helps more people get out of poverty. Clean energy isn't cheap, it's subsidized heavily (yes other energy forms are too) and it's just not realistic for most of the world to use solar cells or wind as they don't have the infrastructure at all to support unreliable energy sources. My personal belief is that we should assume the climate is changing and then use that to build solutions rather than endless and meaningless debates about whether climate change is true or not which brings us nowhere and doesn't change the climate. If you believe things are going to be bad then make a company that deals with the things you believe are most problematic. If you believe the sea levels are rising the build solutions to deal with that if you believe methane is going to suffocate us then figure out how we can encapsulate it.
  - 8y ago
sirtaj 8y ago
We will adjust to climate change the way we adjusted to smallpox and the plague. As a species we will probably ride it out, but things are going to look pretty grim for those of us in the thick of it.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Yeah but you can say the same about poverty. Growth is the realistic way out of that IMO.
skummetmaelk 8y ago
>Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent. But even posing such an idea will get you put into the "climate denier" category in a heartbeat and stop all rational discussion. Because when climate change deniers could no longer deny that the climate is changing, they started saying that humans were not to blame. It's mostly the same people moving the goal posts. It is then quite natural that you get lumped into that camp when expressing that "opinion".
- jackhack 8y ago
  >>the same people moving the goal posts Perhaps, but I see this from the pro-climate-change side, too. First it was a "coming ice age" (1970s) then it was Al Gore banging the "global warming" drums (1990s), now it's simply "climate change" (either/or) -- "heads I win, tails you lose." It's intellectually dishonest. There is a very important reason to inquire as to whether mankind is the cause of global-warming, or merely an observer. If man is the cause, then perhaps there is a chance to prevent it; we might ask what action might one take. If man is merely the observer (e.g. the sun is to blame) then our odds are infinitesimally small for having any positive effect whatsoever, and quite large for having unintended consequences. It is not "denial" to ask for evidence, untainted by politics or opinion or data clouded by curve fitting and backwards adjustments to "compensate" for who-knows-what but always in a way that predicts gloom and doom and fosters continued grant money. That raises suspicion of any open-minded person and especially the cynical. Personally, the groupthink hysteria surrounding this "settled science" alarms me much more than the .5 degree C/century temperature increase observed. I have lived long enough to remember the panic about the world starving to death in the 60s, the coming ice age predicted in the 70s, and recall scientists literally laughing about the idea of bacteria being responsible for ulcers, high-fat diets being "deadly", cholesterol and salt is bad for you, etc. Trends change and science moves ahead, often not hand-in-hand. finally, you should drop the ugly "denier" label. lumping in those who ask for evidence for global temperature change with those who deny the occurrence of the holocaust is sickening and has no place in reasonable discourse. (edit:fixed typos, and formatting)
  - 8y ago
admax88q 8y ago
> we can't both secure the continued prosperity of humanity and at the same time not have an impact on the environment we live. I'm not sure I believe that. There are many aspects of modern life that are way more energy wasteful than they need to be. Ever walk down a street in Vegas? The amount of excess demonstrated there is staggering. Giant fountains in a desert. I'm not convinced we need to live to that level of excess in order to be prosperous. > The way out of our problems is not to stop up but to continue improving technology and energy utilization. I'm not sure any environmentalist would argue that we should stop improving technology. I certainly wouldn't. I think we need to invest heavily in research and technology to find better cleaner sources of energy. But I also think we need some level of regulation like a Carbon Tax/Rebate, pollution taxes, etc, in order to actually incentivize the market to be take those externalities into account.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  They wouldn't argue we should stop improving technology. It's my claim that the consequence of their politics would be to stop growth. Environmentalist are against humans making an impact on nature and consider nature sacred. That excess you see in Vegas is also paying the bills it's part of the growth. That's the point. You can't isolate them and have non-impact on nature and then at the same time growing the economy. Should we also regulate the internet? How much of our use is excess? Is this discussion excess? Are 99% of discussion on the internet excess is posting images excess? Once you start digging into it you realize that these things can't be isolated. This is why it's better to let the market play it out as it will optimize local needs. It's far from perfect to the extent that it's useless but it beats all the other ways we have at least to my understanding and I haven't heard of any other and better solution than let growth play out and produce surplus and then use some of that to be better and better.
  - polotics 8y ago
    You wrote: "This is why it's better to let the market play it out as it will optimize local needs" Do you know about the concept of externalities?
sulam 8y ago
When you write: >humans might have something to do with it you come across immediately as a climate change denier. The science of what humans are doing to the climate is well established. We _have_ something to do with it, no "might" about it. Of course other things are contributing -- in fact we may well have passed a tipping point where non-anthropogenic carbon emissions are being generated via feedback loops, similar to warming cycles in the past that aren't associated with human activity. But there is a very very broad consensus that as a species have something to do with climate change.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  So reading it in good faith taking the other things I wrote into consideration is just not something you do?
  - sulam 8y ago
    As you have pointed out, good "faith" is in short supply in this conversation because there are extreme elements that will go to great lengths to maintain the status quo, despite all the evidence that it is long-term unmaintainable. If you want to talk in good faith with me personally, there are a few things you have to accept as ground truth: 1) Human behavior has caused a change to the climate that is measurable and has real impacts to the environment. 2) Those changes are complex and driving systems in ways we do not fully understand, any more than we fully understood the systems before we started adding climate change into the equation. Despite this lack of understanding of all of its effects, this does not mean #1 is somehow disproven. You tripped over #1 -- if we don't agree about that we will have a problem having a productive discussion. Another commenter in this thread tripped over #2 -- if someone wants to litigate the minutiae of every historical prediction from climate scientists we will have a problem having a productive discussion.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      You took only the middle part of that sentence and ignored the whole sentence which is quite a different meaning than the one you tried to attach to me. Here it is in it's whole: "Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent." So yes I agree we have an impact just not sure how much and what it will mean and if you want to debate that with me personally you either prove me wrong or agree with that. Furthermore, I wrote plenty of other things that should make it obvious I am not in any specific camp but interested in a larger context than just debating climate change true/false silliness. Human flourishing, how to also get people out of poverty, the ability to control nature more than it has historically controlled us etc they are all important issues and climate change doesn't mean we should just ignore those. Yet that's exactly what people do when discussing climate. They ignore all the other things that are also important and also affecting real people right now as we speak. So I frankly don't see you doing anything but not reading me in good faith. But bygones.
vixen99 8y ago
Let that be a lesson to you not to venture wicked thoughts counter to the prevailing ethos on this forum.

blindwatchmaker 8y ago

> Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent. Could you elaborate? I was under the impression that even conservative estimates by reputable climatologists showed some pretty drastic changes.

Filligree 8y ago
They do, and they've consistently underestimated things so far. The guy's just a denier.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  That's not true. The climate models typically show larger rises in temperature than have actually happened. I found this within 5 seconds of Googling: https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-climate-reality/ https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli... I'm not sure how good the source is, but it is consistent with what I've seen elsewhere.
  - polotics 8y ago
    Complex systems have less linearity than expected, but more hysteresis. The flat(ter) early naughties have already been well explained, mostly taking 98 as reference is where the effect comes from, we caught up since then, and ain't slowing down.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      Yet everything is getting better, not worse because we've become better at dealing with issues. The number of people who died from drought has gone down not up according to some studies. Number of people out of extreme poverty is going up is going up not down. https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/deaths_from_extreme_weather_1900_2010.pdf https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/deaths_from_extr... https://ourworldindata.org/famines https://ourworldindata.org/famines And the world is has gotten greener: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... And so we are back to the beginning. We don't really know as much as some like to claim. So what is the goal of humanity? How do we measure human flourishing? How do we ensure we still get people to become more resourceful? We can't have our cake and eat it.
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
The climate models predict larger increases in temperature than have actually occurred, and the increases in temperature appear to be slowing down. I think most (reasonable) people agree that climate change is caused by humans, but there still isn't much to do about it. Pretty much anything you do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is going to massively increase the cost of everything. Plus it puts your country at a disadvantage relative to countries that don't put in place the same policies. Hydrocarbons have made the modern world possible by providing a relatively cheap and portable energy source. None of the renewables come close. They're also the main source of greenhouse gases and thus climate change. There is no practical policy proposal to decrease fossil fuel usage in the near-to-moderate future that would maintain living standards at their current levels.

Retric 8y ago

The problem is human infrastructure is built around existing climates. Something small like 2% more rain seems meaningless, but add that on top of extreme events and overtopping levees instead of being a 100 year event it's a 10 year event. Tropical diseases / insects stop being so tropical etc etc. It's a death of 1000 cuts. On top of that clean energy is cheap, the difference between coal electricity and renewable sources is vastly less than the costs from climate change. So doing nothing has significant costs from climate changes but cutting emissions 50% is fairly cheap. PS: Electric cars might win on their own even without considering climate change. So, we can make huge difference in adoption without significant costs.

ThomPete 8y ago
It's just not that easy. We also have 14% more green vegetation today than 30 years ago. The climate system is one endless positive negative feedback system and we don't have enough data to say anything truly conclusive other than the climate is changing and things are getting hotter. Anyone claiming they know how this is going to turn out on either side are simply lying or are trapped in some ideological self-delusion. We have no way of knowing. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything but just that what we should do might not be ignoring the reality of a majority of this world who are not rich enough to install solar panels on their roofs. With regards to the Pascals wager argument again I am more worried about a meteor hitting us and that brings us back to the discussion again about how to ensure growth which pays for technological advancements and helps more people get out of poverty. Clean energy isn't cheap, it's subsidized heavily (yes other energy forms are too) and it's just not realistic for most of the world to use solar cells or wind as they don't have the infrastructure at all to support unreliable energy sources. My personal belief is that we should assume the climate is changing and then use that to build solutions rather than endless and meaningless debates about whether climate change is true or not which brings us nowhere and doesn't change the climate. If you believe things are going to be bad then make a company that deals with the things you believe are most problematic. If you believe the sea levels are rising the build solutions to deal with that if you believe methane is going to suffocate us then figure out how we can encapsulate it.
- 8y ago

sirtaj 8y ago

We will adjust to climate change the way we adjusted to smallpox and the plague. As a species we will probably ride it out, but things are going to look pretty grim for those of us in the thick of it.

ThomPete 8y ago
Yeah but you can say the same about poverty. Growth is the realistic way out of that IMO.

skummetmaelk 8y ago

>Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent. But even posing such an idea will get you put into the "climate denier" category in a heartbeat and stop all rational discussion. Because when climate change deniers could no longer deny that the climate is changing, they started saying that humans were not to blame. It's mostly the same people moving the goal posts. It is then quite natural that you get lumped into that camp when expressing that "opinion".

jackhack 8y ago
>>the same people moving the goal posts Perhaps, but I see this from the pro-climate-change side, too. First it was a "coming ice age" (1970s) then it was Al Gore banging the "global warming" drums (1990s), now it's simply "climate change" (either/or) -- "heads I win, tails you lose." It's intellectually dishonest. There is a very important reason to inquire as to whether mankind is the cause of global-warming, or merely an observer. If man is the cause, then perhaps there is a chance to prevent it; we might ask what action might one take. If man is merely the observer (e.g. the sun is to blame) then our odds are infinitesimally small for having any positive effect whatsoever, and quite large for having unintended consequences. It is not "denial" to ask for evidence, untainted by politics or opinion or data clouded by curve fitting and backwards adjustments to "compensate" for who-knows-what but always in a way that predicts gloom and doom and fosters continued grant money. That raises suspicion of any open-minded person and especially the cynical. Personally, the groupthink hysteria surrounding this "settled science" alarms me much more than the .5 degree C/century temperature increase observed. I have lived long enough to remember the panic about the world starving to death in the 60s, the coming ice age predicted in the 70s, and recall scientists literally laughing about the idea of bacteria being responsible for ulcers, high-fat diets being "deadly", cholesterol and salt is bad for you, etc. Trends change and science moves ahead, often not hand-in-hand. finally, you should drop the ugly "denier" label. lumping in those who ask for evidence for global temperature change with those who deny the occurrence of the holocaust is sickening and has no place in reasonable discourse. (edit:fixed typos, and formatting)
- 8y ago

admax88q 8y ago

> we can't both secure the continued prosperity of humanity and at the same time not have an impact on the environment we live. I'm not sure I believe that. There are many aspects of modern life that are way more energy wasteful than they need to be. Ever walk down a street in Vegas? The amount of excess demonstrated there is staggering. Giant fountains in a desert. I'm not convinced we need to live to that level of excess in order to be prosperous. > The way out of our problems is not to stop up but to continue improving technology and energy utilization. I'm not sure any environmentalist would argue that we should stop improving technology. I certainly wouldn't. I think we need to invest heavily in research and technology to find better cleaner sources of energy. But I also think we need some level of regulation like a Carbon Tax/Rebate, pollution taxes, etc, in order to actually incentivize the market to be take those externalities into account.

ThomPete 8y ago
They wouldn't argue we should stop improving technology. It's my claim that the consequence of their politics would be to stop growth. Environmentalist are against humans making an impact on nature and consider nature sacred. That excess you see in Vegas is also paying the bills it's part of the growth. That's the point. You can't isolate them and have non-impact on nature and then at the same time growing the economy. Should we also regulate the internet? How much of our use is excess? Is this discussion excess? Are 99% of discussion on the internet excess is posting images excess? Once you start digging into it you realize that these things can't be isolated. This is why it's better to let the market play it out as it will optimize local needs. It's far from perfect to the extent that it's useless but it beats all the other ways we have at least to my understanding and I haven't heard of any other and better solution than let growth play out and produce surplus and then use some of that to be better and better.
- polotics 8y ago
  You wrote: "This is why it's better to let the market play it out as it will optimize local needs" Do you know about the concept of externalities?

sulam 8y ago

When you write: >humans might have something to do with it you come across immediately as a climate change denier. The science of what humans are doing to the climate is well established. We _have_ something to do with it, no "might" about it. Of course other things are contributing -- in fact we may well have passed a tipping point where non-anthropogenic carbon emissions are being generated via feedback loops, similar to warming cycles in the past that aren't associated with human activity. But there is a very very broad consensus that as a species have something to do with climate change.

ThomPete 8y ago
So reading it in good faith taking the other things I wrote into consideration is just not something you do?
- sulam 8y ago
  As you have pointed out, good "faith" is in short supply in this conversation because there are extreme elements that will go to great lengths to maintain the status quo, despite all the evidence that it is long-term unmaintainable. If you want to talk in good faith with me personally, there are a few things you have to accept as ground truth: 1) Human behavior has caused a change to the climate that is measurable and has real impacts to the environment. 2) Those changes are complex and driving systems in ways we do not fully understand, any more than we fully understood the systems before we started adding climate change into the equation. Despite this lack of understanding of all of its effects, this does not mean #1 is somehow disproven. You tripped over #1 -- if we don't agree about that we will have a problem having a productive discussion. Another commenter in this thread tripped over #2 -- if someone wants to litigate the minutiae of every historical prediction from climate scientists we will have a problem having a productive discussion.
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    You took only the middle part of that sentence and ignored the whole sentence which is quite a different meaning than the one you tried to attach to me. Here it is in it's whole: "Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent." So yes I agree we have an impact just not sure how much and what it will mean and if you want to debate that with me personally you either prove me wrong or agree with that. Furthermore, I wrote plenty of other things that should make it obvious I am not in any specific camp but interested in a larger context than just debating climate change true/false silliness. Human flourishing, how to also get people out of poverty, the ability to control nature more than it has historically controlled us etc they are all important issues and climate change doesn't mean we should just ignore those. Yet that's exactly what people do when discussing climate. They ignore all the other things that are also important and also affecting real people right now as we speak. So I frankly don't see you doing anything but not reading me in good faith. But bygones.

vixen99 8y ago

Let that be a lesson to you not to venture wicked thoughts counter to the prevailing ethos on this forum.