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I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy, but what mig

by rjf72 7y ago

I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy, but what might be driving the divide otherwise? I think this failure to consider others' positions, largely because we all tend to just surround ourselves with voices that agree with "our" side, is one of the biggest causes of the increasingly sharp wedge being driven into society today. If you'd like to know the realistic reason, it's because of past experience. This [1] was published back in 1989. "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said [director of UN Environmental Program] Brown." 30 years from the date of that article's publication is 6 days from now. Temperatures have increased 0.52 [2] degrees since then. He may have meant fahrenheit since he was the director in New York and so was likely speaking with an American demographic in mind. But even then that's still only about 0.9 degrees - still under his "most conservative scientific estimate." The article was full of plenty of other alarming hyperbole which also turned out to be completely false. The problem is that that article is not an outlier. We've now had several decades of alarming climate predictions. The reason this timing is relevant is because we've now reached the point to where we go back to these predictions and see how they have played out. And in general the quality of predictions has been quite poor. Of course the response here is that 'well climate science is hard, and they're at least getting the general trend right - up.' The problem with this is that this general trend goes back long before even the industrial revolution. And so predicting heating to continue is about as meaningful as me predicting that in 30 years the stock market will be higher than it is today, which it almost certainly will be. What really matters are the specifics. So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions. People can view similar data and come to radically different conclusions. And only to preempt the typical mass-level ad-hominem that generally mentions here I'd mention individuals such as Richard Linzen [3]: MIT atmospheric physicist, member of the National Academies of Sciences, Fellow of American Geophysical Union, fellow of American Meteorological Society, lead author on the IPCC's 2001 climate report, etc. He also falls into the latter group. I would emphasize that this is not an appeal to authority (which I think is generally a very foolish idea), but rather a preempting of the exact same. [1] - https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 [2] - https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen

adrianN 7y ago
So the IPCC underestimated the amount of heat that ocean would absorb. They unfortunately also underestimated how quickly the permafrost is melting and how quickly we lose glaciers. The models we have are wrong. There is no doubt about it. But there is very little evidence that they're wrong in the direction where we can just do business as usual and still live a comfortable live in fifty years.
kerkeslager 7y ago
> I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy ALL the people with significant power are wealthy. I'm not downplaying the importance of the poor voting in elections, but that happens twice a year (primaries and general election) and the choice the poor get is which wealthy person gets the power, or in rarer cases, which policy proposed by wealthy people is enacted. The rest of the year, the wealthy people make all the decisions. Certainly which wealthy person is in power makes a difference, but they're still all wealthy people. And to be clear, no major party is immune to this. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Paul--no supposed heroes of change are poor or even middle class. > So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions. I'm not in either group. I don't believe we've overcome the mistakes of the past. I don't believe we even know what all of those mistakes are, so we can't possibly have overcome them all. What I do believe is that the only effective mechanism we have of predicting the future is science, and that science is a slow process that often gets things wrong, but slowly gets less wrong as it progresses. An alternate theory which just decides to let markets decide the truth isn't even wrong--it's a stopped clock, which is sometimes right but never useful. Science hasn't been right and it may continue to be wrong, but at least it's trying to find the truth via a proven method. Letting markets decide isn't even trying to find the truth.
- rjf72 7y ago
  I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical. For instance to what degree does society create its leaders, and to what degree do leaders create their society? To what degree did Lincoln choose to direct society to end slavery? To what degree did changes in society make inevitable the creation of a "Lincoln"? And then we'd have to try to get into the heads of those in power to determine whether their views are authentic or being driven by political or even economic interests. For example abortion is full of political flip-flopping for people to pander to various demographic bases. Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common. On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.

by rjf72 7y ago

adrianN 7y ago

So the IPCC underestimated the amount of heat that ocean would absorb. They unfortunately also underestimated how quickly the permafrost is melting and how quickly we lose glaciers. The models we have are wrong. There is no doubt about it. But there is very little evidence that they're wrong in the direction where we can just do business as usual and still live a comfortable live in fifty years.

kerkeslager 7y ago

> I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy ALL the people with significant power are wealthy. I'm not downplaying the importance of the poor voting in elections, but that happens twice a year (primaries and general election) and the choice the poor get is which wealthy person gets the power, or in rarer cases, which policy proposed by wealthy people is enacted. The rest of the year, the wealthy people make all the decisions. Certainly which wealthy person is in power makes a difference, but they're still all wealthy people. And to be clear, no major party is immune to this. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Paul--no supposed heroes of change are poor or even middle class. > So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions. I'm not in either group. I don't believe we've overcome the mistakes of the past. I don't believe we even know what all of those mistakes are, so we can't possibly have overcome them all. What I do believe is that the only effective mechanism we have of predicting the future is science, and that science is a slow process that often gets things wrong, but slowly gets less wrong as it progresses. An alternate theory which just decides to let markets decide the truth isn't even wrong--it's a stopped clock, which is sometimes right but never useful. Science hasn't been right and it may continue to be wrong, but at least it's trying to find the truth via a proven method. Letting markets decide isn't even trying to find the truth.

rjf72 7y ago
I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical. For instance to what degree does society create its leaders, and to what degree do leaders create their society? To what degree did Lincoln choose to direct society to end slavery? To what degree did changes in society make inevitable the creation of a "Lincoln"? And then we'd have to try to get into the heads of those in power to determine whether their views are authentic or being driven by political or even economic interests. For example abortion is full of political flip-flopping for people to pander to various demographic bases. Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common. On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.