Have been reading the late and great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air lately (completely free on withouthotair.com) https://www.withouth

Have been reading the late and great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air lately (completely free on withouthotair.com) https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_5.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_5.shtml >The climate-change motivation is argued in three steps: one: human fossil- fuel burning causes carbon dioxide concentrations to rise; two: carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas; three: increasing the greenhouse effect in- creases average global temperatures (and has many other effects). >Fossil fuel burning increases CO2 concentrations significantly. But does it matter? “Carbon is nature!”, the oilspinners remind us, “Carbon is life!” If CO2 had no harmful effects, then indeed carbon emissions would not matter. >However, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Not the strongest greenhouse gas, but a significant one nonetheless. Put more of it in the atmosphere, and it does what greenhouse gases do: it absorbs infrared radiation (heat) heading out from the earth and reemits it in a random di- rection; the effect of this random redirection of the atmospheric heat traffic is to impede the flow of heat from the planet, just like a quilt. So carbon dioxide has a warming effect. This fact is based not on complex historical records of global temperatures but on the simple physical properties of CO2 molecules. Greenhouse gases are a quilt, and CO2 is one layer of the quilt. > One last thing about the climate-change motivation: while a range of human activities cause greenhouse-gas emissions, the biggest cause by far is energy use. Some people justify not doing anything about their energy use by excuses such as “methane from burping cows causes more warming than jet travel.” Yes, agricultural by-products contributed one eighth of greenhouse-gas emissions in the year 2000. But energy-use contributed three quarters (figure 1.9). The climate change problem is principally an energy problem. Watched Merchants of Doubt recently, point that stuck with me most is that people against global warming are motivated by libertarianism, and anti-communism. lots of the contrarian scientists worked during the cold war. Will be checking out the book version soon I don't think you even need the climate change motivation to get behind moving off fossil fuels (supply chain security is another huge one, I find climate change deniers often also in the peak oil camp). The way David MacKay presents the numbers allows people to come up with realistic plans to move off fossil fuels on their own instead of reciting someone else's dogma Teasing out cause and effect is difficult especially with something that we can't perform randomized experiments on. I'd like to read more about counterfactuals and causal analysis of climate change Judea Pearl has a great little bit about this in The Book of Why >Until recently, climate scientists have found it very difficult and awkward to answer questions like “Did global warming cause this storm [or this heat wave, or this drought]?” The conventional answer has been that individual weather events cannot be attributed to global climate change. Yet this answer seems rather evasive and may even contribute to public indifference about climate change. > Counterfactual analysis allows climate scientists to make much more precise and definite statements than before. It requires, however, a slight addition to our everyday vocabulary. It will be helpful to distinguish three different kinds of causation: necessary causation, sufficient causation, and necessary-and-sufficient causation. > Using these words, a climate scientist can say, “There is a 90 percent probability that man-made climate change was a necessary cause of this heat wave,” or “There is an 80 percent probability that climate change will be sufficient to produce a heat wave this strong at least once every 50 years.” The first sentence has to do with attribution: Who was responsible for the unusual heat? The second has to do with policy. It says that we had better prepare for such heat waves because they are likely to occur sooner or later. Either of these statements is more informative than shrugging our shoulders and saying nothing about the causes of individual weather events > Climate scientists can get counterfactuals very easily from their computer models: just enter in a new number for the carbon dioxide concentration and let the program run. and one of my favorite quotes from MacKay: > Please don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear or anti-wind. I'm just pro-arithmetic