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> I work in medical research Then there is a good analogy: tobacco. You believe smoking drastically increases the risk of cancer, right? Yet for years, tobacco

> I work in medical research Then there is a good analogy: tobacco. You believe smoking drastically increases the risk of cancer, right? Yet for years, tobacco companies argued that the evidence was inconclusive. After all, if a doctor can't predict which of their patients will respond well to a certain medication, how can they say that exposure to this or that substance was responsible for the cancer?

breck 7y ago
Tobacco is a great analogy. Yes, I believe smoking drastically increases the risk of cancer (1). I'm not arguing the evidence of climate change or co2 is inconclusive. I think it's very conclusive: global warming is happening and it's man made. What I am arguing is that climate change is not good or bad. It just is. I think we need better tools to understand climate change, and hopefully control it. However, I think "fighting climate change" is a partisan approach, and not scientific at all. For example, assume we are able to figure out how to reverse global warming, and in effect cool the planet. How cool should we go? By your statement "when you put more energy into a system, it becomes more volatile", we should keep going lower, and perhaps make it cooler than it was 100 years ago, which might be deadly for people living in colder northern climates or mountain towns. So any action on climate will have winners and losers. And "fighting climate change" means fighting the people who just happen to live in a different geographic region. What I'm saying is the issue is complex, the numbers are massively bigger than even the type of data Google handles, and we need much better tools to tackle this set of very complicated problems. (1) I also believe in the future we may learn that smoking is very healthy for a small fraction of people.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  Standard procedure for handling a complex system is "First, do no harm," not "Futz around and hope we come out on top." We know that climate change is disrupting biomes everywhere. Life will eventually adapt, but not before a significant loss of biodiversity.
  - breck 7y ago
    > Standard procedure for handling a complex system is "First, do no harm," Yes! Great point. But the problem is, some people are currently benefiting from climate change, so by fighting it, you are indeed doing harm to them.

breck 7y ago

Tobacco is a great analogy. Yes, I believe smoking drastically increases the risk of cancer (1). I'm not arguing the evidence of climate change or co2 is inconclusive. I think it's very conclusive: global warming is happening and it's man made. What I am arguing is that climate change is not good or bad. It just is. I think we need better tools to understand climate change, and hopefully control it. However, I think "fighting climate change" is a partisan approach, and not scientific at all. For example, assume we are able to figure out how to reverse global warming, and in effect cool the planet. How cool should we go? By your statement "when you put more energy into a system, it becomes more volatile", we should keep going lower, and perhaps make it cooler than it was 100 years ago, which might be deadly for people living in colder northern climates or mountain towns. So any action on climate will have winners and losers. And "fighting climate change" means fighting the people who just happen to live in a different geographic region. What I'm saying is the issue is complex, the numbers are massively bigger than even the type of data Google handles, and we need much better tools to tackle this set of very complicated problems. (1) I also believe in the future we may learn that smoking is very healthy for a small fraction of people.

rubinelli 7y ago
Standard procedure for handling a complex system is "First, do no harm," not "Futz around and hope we come out on top." We know that climate change is disrupting biomes everywhere. Life will eventually adapt, but not before a significant loss of biodiversity.
- breck 7y ago
  > Standard procedure for handling a complex system is "First, do no harm," Yes! Great point. But the problem is, some people are currently benefiting from climate change, so by fighting it, you are indeed doing harm to them.