28 ms·

What Kind of Problem Is Climate Change?

67 points by mitchbob 7y ago

bristleworm 7y ago
text without paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20190930123234/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/climate-change.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190930123234/https://www.nytim...
- british_india 7y ago
  Thank you!
lowken10 7y ago
It’s a made up problem that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
liaukovv 7y ago
Imagine if humanity has treated other technological problems as societal ones: >What do you mean plague vaccine? We need to stop dreaming about magic solutions and just stop living in cities >Farming? No this will never work, just stop reproducing. And collect more berries. >Fire? Why do we need fire? It's dangerous and hot food is a luxury.
- hnarn 7y ago
  1. The plague, while probably exacerbated, was not caused by urbanization. 2. With the exception of up until modern times, farming, like many other major changes in human habitation, never threatened our existence on this planet. 3. Fire is dangerous, but the benefits vastly outweighed the dangers, and also did not permanently, in the chronological perspective of human beings, threaten our ecosystem.
- ptah 7y ago
  the second one would have actually helped us to avoid current dilemma :-P
  - justsubmit 7y ago
    In which case, you probably wouldn't exist, and neither would the medium in which we're having this conversation. Better or worse?
  - noonespecial 7y ago
    So what then? A few thousand humanoids would have picked berries for a few dozen thousand years until the next ELE wiped them out and be gone? That's better how? We've got exactly one planet's worth of resources to consume in our reach for the stars. Doing nothing and doing it wrong gets us extinction on basically the same galactic time scale. What a tragedy though, to have a real shot and burn it all up trying to get each other to click on ads for plastic crap no one needed.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  "Humanity" has not treated problems collectively until a few hundred years ago. Some might argue it still doesn't, really. Also, and more importantly - it's easy to categorize problems retroactively based on how they were eventually resolved; not so easy to apply this categorization with foresight. Finally - some problems have both societal and technological aspects, and so do their solutions.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Disease was as much a social problem requiring changes to the norms of "cleanliness" as a technological problem.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  We don't need to imagine, we know how humanity reacted to plague prior to effective treatments. Very badly. With lynch mobs and singling out certain groups for persecution. Even having acne would do it...
spodek 7y ago
The article's opening sentence: > If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. However big they seemed compared to the past, they're nothing compared to the future, though everything we do affects it. We can still avoid some of the worst.
- hnarn 7y ago
  My biggest gripe with that type of argumentation is that it plays into the idea that weather and climate are pretty much the same thing, when they really aren't.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Yeah, if you get people used to that kind of argument, get ready for absolutely zero belief in global warming next time we have a cold winter preceeded by no hurricane.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    Also because correlation isn't causation. An instance of a hurricane or a warmer summer by itself doesn't prove anything. That's poor science journalism. You need trends and models to demonstrate climate change, not an instance of undesirable weather. It's not like hurricanes or warm summers never happened before.
  - cos2pi 7y ago
    Agreed, this has repeatedly been one of the biggest failings in communicating the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate change is not a single event, nor a cluster of events, that occur(s) over a summer. Strong hurricanes have occurred well before Dorian [1]. So have heat waves [2]. Extreme weather happens. The change in the frequency of (some) extreme events can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but a single event cannot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave
  - 7y ago
bryanlarsen 7y ago
> Is there any way to escape the prisoner’s dilemma facing the provision of a public good? Wrong question. We're not creating public goods, we're preventing the creation of a public bad, aka externalities. How to prevent creation of externalities is well-known: Pigouvian taxes, which are similar to but not quite the same as sin taxes. The prisoner's dilemma also exists here, but there is a solution which also won the Nobel Memorial Prize: William Nordhaus' climate clubs. https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/ https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
- reallydontask 7y ago
  Now we just need enlightened politicians to sell these taxes to the public.
  - xienze 7y ago
    Well they're certainly trying, by parading a young girl around to make emotional appeals.
    - reallydontask 7y ago
      It seems as if you disapprove (apologies if I'm reading too much into your comment). What is the alternative? Cold hard facts don't seem to move the majority of people as they are hard to relate to.
      - xienze 7y ago
        > It seems as if you disapprove I do, because trying to manipulate people's emotions is the lowest form of argumentation. Not to mention the fact that she (or rather, her handlers) only care to target western countries. I'd be more willing to trust her (handler's) sincerity if she ALSO AT THE SAME TIME called out the country that has a giant brown cloud, visible from space, hanging over it. > What is the alternative? Make a better argument for why _this time_ it's truly different. Start off by admitting that scientists aren't always correct ("the science is settled" is one of the dumbest phrases ever uttered) and admit that scientists HAVE gotten things wrong about the climate in the past (e.g., the ice age predictions of the 70s). Then proceed with arguments that detail why previous dire predictions were incorrect and why it's different this time. Finally, be logically consistent in your arguments: * People in western countries are told to "have fewer children" in order to save the earth. Well guess what, we're already below replacement levels. We've done our part. Lecture folks in the developing world to do so, they're the ones contributing to overpopulation. * At the same time, much is said about per-capita CO2 emissions in western countries. Why do we hear complete silence from climate alarmists about migration from third-world to first-world countries? I would think they'd be staunchly opposed to it, seeing as how every person imported into western countries will instantly have their carbon footprint boosted sky high. Wouldn't it be better for the earth to not have these migration patterns occur?
chooseaname 7y ago
Stronger storms, heat waves, drought, floods, erratic weather. Check. Where I live, we are on track to have the driest September on record. We have also broken or tied 7 record hot days (and looks like we might go for 8 today)[0]. How much more common does this have to be before people start acting? Edit: [0] Had someone argue with me that this just means we had record hot months before. I'm like, no, that's not how that works. Those record days were from different years. The new ones were from the same year.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Remember when people were saying that global warming wasn't happening because we were in the middle of a particularly cold winter? Treating this year's bad weather as proof of global warming is making the same error in the other direction. The climate can only be understood as a long-term average of the quite large annual variations in weather.
  - chooseaname 7y ago
    I get that. I do. I said: >How much more common does this have to be before people start acting? Because it is becoming more common. Just as predicted.
- justsubmit 7y ago
  > We have also broken or tied 7 record hot days (and looks like we might go for 8 today). On average, how many record-high days have been recorded each year, for as long as your records have been kept? How many record-low days? A number out of context is not useful for drawing a scientific conclusion.
corodra 7y ago
I agree that global warming is real. Global warming is a problem. However... > If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. That's an amazingly stupid comment. This is why global warming deniers exist, because people make these types of stupid comments. A hurricane strengthening and stalling on land is not linked to global warming. It's always happened and always will. What was hurricane Andrew then in 1992? What about Katrina 2005? How about in 2004 where 4 hurricanes hit Florida in a 6 week time span? I lived through that one. Hurricane Lorenzo, right now, is a better example due to where it's at in the Atlantic and its strength. Still not a great example, but better than Dorian. Dorian was technically a normal hurricane. Nothing that special or different. Devastating yes. But devastation is not an indicator of climate change. A higher number of hurricanes and higher than average number in Cat 4 and Cat 5. That's an indicator. And to be honest, this year has been pretty chill when it comes to hurricanes. Only one FL scare. Most years there are 3-5 scares by the end of September. We're only on L when it comes to named storms. Bad years in the past are around S by now. Hurricanes are named in order of the alphabet if you didn't know. In 2004, we went through the whole alphabet, plus some. I agree global warming is happening. But this year's hurricane season does not show it.
- tomp 7y ago
  Funny enough, worst hurricane in recorded history (according to some metrics) happened in 1935! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane
- wozniacki 7y ago
  If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. I was stunned that such a callous, dismissive & low quality statement would even pass muster at The Grey Lady. Who's proof-reading these pieces? Pair it with a striking statistic from a reputable source, at the very least if youre going to make such a naked statement. Who is the piece trying to convince? The already convinced and dyed-in-the-wool card carrying eco-enthusiasts or the unconvinced and the leery crowd?
garmaine 7y ago
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. If you think the "other side" is a climate change denier, you don't have a grasp of the issues involved and I'm really suspect that your op-ed is preaching to your crowd rather than actually trying to engage the problem. The issue has never been denying the scientific fact that CO2 reflects infrared light, causing a greenhouse effect. It's a question over the scale of the problem, the timelines in which it plays out, and the panic and alarmism exhibited by one side of political debate. Moving off fossil fuels is going to cost a lot of money, and it is going to be substitutive spending, not the growth-building kind. The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Is is worth it? Is it necessary? That depends on how alarmist you are in your global warming predictions. And that is where we disagree. I've lived through two major economic recessions, and seen the effect that has on young people and opportunities. I wouldn't want to wish that on an entire generation. Millennials think boomers gave them a bad break, but wait until their kids see what opportunities their climate change policies leave them with... We need to move off fossil fuels. But we can do it in a way that is gradual and growth-positive, while exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields and adds living space for the growing population of the world. That requires a healthy debate about trade-offs and choices, and recognition that this is a complex, multi-faceted issue that people come to with multiple opinions and that's okay.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Miner49er 7y ago
  > The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Source? The last New Deal helped get us out of the Great Depression. Seems crazy to suggest that a new similar one would cause one.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    First point, the last new deal didn't get us out of the great depression. You might recall that the great depression lasted throughout the 1930's. It was World War 2 and its aftermath that ended the depression. But anyway, the only similarity is in the name. The FDR new deal built new infrastructure. The Green new deal replaces infrastructure. Adding infrastructure where there was none before increases productivity, and therefore causes economic growth. Replacing infrastructure has net-zero change and therefore while the activity adds to GDP, it has no lasting effect on the economy. And since it substitutes for things that would have led towards growth, it actually causes stagnation or decline. In the social sciences, this is known as the "broken window fallacy." There's a lot of papers you can find with those search terms. If you want an idea of the best-case scenario of what life would be like under the Green New Deal, look to Japan with it's 20+ years of economic stagnation. Except without nationalized pensions we'd be asking a whole generation to live through work-until-you-die conditions. I'm sorry, but I don't think I want to do that to my kids unless it is a real do-or-die scenario as the alarmists claim. But the alarmists are wrong. The world is not ending tomorrow, or even the day after. We can deal with the change at a pace that doesn't result in economic suicide.
specialist 7y ago
I like the game theoretic framing. Winners and losers. Currently a zero sum game. Where we non-zero sum games, filled with win-win outcomes. Robert Wright's book Nonzero, which advocates for these kinds of reforms, deeply influenced my worldview, way back when. https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/dp/0679758941 https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/d... -- I'm a treehugger. During the 90s, I volunteered at Wetlands Conservation Network (WetNet), a short lived Audubon offshoot trying to save the Pacific salmon. During my time there, I somehow got the impression that all environmental (ecological) challenges could be fixed with better accounting and fair markets. More than just addressing externalities. With our salmon, the (economic) winners were timber companies and developers. Who reaped outsized rewards for developing habitat. (Timber companies were turning second growth forests into urban sprawl thru their subsidiaries.) Other beneficiaries were power (hydroelectric) and some farmers (irrigation). The biggest losers were the commercial & tribal fishers, anglers, and the hard to quantify "culture". But for some reason, beyond my experience and understanding, commonsense structural reforms were completely out of bounds. For instance, (I'm told) that water rights in the West are "use it or lose it", so potato farmers in Idaho continue to grow an oversupply. Whereas if they somehow rent (or transfer) those water rights in an open marketplace, that water could be put to better uses. -- Note that I've been out of the treehugger game since 2000, so I don't know what, if any progress, has been made since. Also, I continue to be surprised that Wright's Nonzero thesis apparently hasn't gotten any traction. Neither with the libertarian Freedom Markets™ cultists. Or the weirdly regressive leftists who reject markets and incentives, and continue to conflate corporatism & cronyism with capitalism. Oh well.
RobertRoberts 7y ago
When I was a child, my parents were in a dooms-day cult. When people threaten your future with vague notions of impending, and irrevocable doom, there is only one answer: Live for today. Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes? (there's a post about planting trees I haven't read yet, seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)
- rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
  >seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with So people will do something that has very little effect on the problem, feel good for their contributions. Then, people will learn than this "something" had no meaningful impact, feel betrayed ("but we agreed on this"), and give up. "Oh, come on, I already did "something". They'll wait for someone else to pickup the burden. That would be big waste of time and energy.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- reallydontask 7y ago
  Do you not worry about the world you will be leaving behind for your children? or nephews/nieces? or just the rest of humanity that will come after you? Surely, I can't be alone in this.
- avar 7y ago
  The Paris Agreement, as part of the way as that's going to get us, is by-and-large being globally implemented. Rising awareness about climate change has contributed to pushing for all sort of policies from more fuel-efficient cars, to state subsidies in dozens of countries for things like renewable energy, electric cars etc. If your view of people pushing for something being done about climate change is that of a dooms-day cult you're going to have to admit that it's a rather politically successful cult.
- lordfoom 7y ago
  >Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes? It's not irrational fear. Why do cynical eye-rollers like you always try and crab bucket people's attempts at changing things for the better?
adj83 7y ago
Global warming is obviously being exploited politically. And public communication deliberately confuses the facts. and it is being used to spread fear. I dont think philosophers jumping on the subject is going to help
jokoon 7y ago
The world of today is highly individualistic, and climate change is exactly how nature will punish humans for not being able to be more cooperative. It's as simple as that. To me inequality and global warning are siblings. They are about the same thing, and share a common cause. If you cannot solve inequality you cannot solve global warming. Unless Elon Musk or somebody else is able to finance a big breakthrough in several technologies that makes ALL greenhouse gasses machines obsolete, there is literally no way humans will avoid having their population reduced. This article is short and it's a good summary on why individualism not only makes society unfair, but also threatens humanity.
- beat 7y ago
  I'd say we are making big breakthroughs in technology that will make greenhouse gas machines obsolete, and that's where we'll get eventually. But getting there will take decades, because we have to obsolete out (and/or buy out) existing fossil-dependent infrastructure - heating in cold climates, and international shipping are two big ones that come to mind. But do what we can. That said, I'm not convinced this is going to lead to a global population reduction. In modernized economies, food isn't the boundary on population growth (all modern economies are at near-zero growth or even negative growth, and developing nations are modernizing to low birth rates at an astounding pace). Barring any huge changes, we're looking at the global population growing maybe 50% over the next century, and being completely level or shrinking after that, and most of that growth happening in the next few decades. So for the population to shrink significantly, it would require billions to die, of famine or resource wars. So what's going to shrink the food supply that much? Enough to induce famine at a global scale? Keep in mind that global warming moves more slowly than harvest cycles. Farmers and nations can make decisions on what crops to plant and adjust their farming practices based on new information and reasonable predictions. Next year's weather won't be much different than this year's was, even if it will be significantly different than the weather in 20 years. We are also on the cusp of two massive technological changes that will impact our farming abilities - IoT, and GMO. IoT allows plant-by-plant management of crops, reducing tilling and chemical use. GMO allows adaptation of crops to growing conditions more quickly than hybridizing does. It just seems to me that the concerns about feeding everyone, in the wake of a previous century that absorbed a quadrupling of the population while making more food than ever and a future of at least two key technological breakthroughs, is more doomsday than solid reasoning.
tgbugs 7y ago
One phrase that seems to be missing from the article is is larger category of problem -- a collective action problem. The public good framing has to do with a citizen/state relationship. The collective action framing reflects a state/state relationship. A number of the more technical terms throughout the article imply this, but I was surprised that the term itself was left out because including it immediately tells us that certain solution simply will not work. Further note (edit). I think it is unlikely that a single state will ever be able to mitigate alone unless all other states stop or drastically reduce CO2 release. Maybe one state could threaten to set off a bunch of nukes in the upper atmosphere to destroy electronics and power grids around the world as a threat to encourage compliance, but that seems extremely far fetched.
gmuslera 7y ago
The problem of seeing this as a cost-benefit equation is when you may risk facing infinite cost. Climate change, as a single, isolated factor, won't cause by itself human extinction or at least the end of the human civilization in a foreseeable future, but reality is complex, current civilization and most of mankind depends on a lot of connected systems. Positive feedback loops happen, in climate, economics and in cultures, and from time to time the effects catch by surprise experts. We might be betting it all, and losing the bet, forever.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  You might be right, but you can make that same argument about any change in any complex system.
  - gmuslera 7y ago
    In this case, it is the complex system at which we all live in. And we are not talking about the fly of a butterfly, the climate system is gaining an atomic bomb worth of energy each second https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/global-warming-of-oceans-equivalent-to-an-atomic-bomb-per-second https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/global-w...
programminggeek 7y ago
It's an invented problem based on a belief that we control the planet. Yet, if we DID control the planet, we could simply fix it. What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then?
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It's an invented problem based on a belief that we control the planet. Climate change is a problem whether or not it's anthropogenic (which there is massive evidence that it is). > Yet, if we DID control the planet, we could simply fix it. Us having the capacity to initiate a warming trend doesn't imply that we could simply stop it. > What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then? Then we'd have just as much interest in bringing it under control. The impacts don't change of the source is different.

67 points by mitchbob 7y ago

text without paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20190930123234/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/climate-change.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190930123234/https://www.nytim...

british_india 7y ago
Thank you!

lowken10 7y ago

It’s a made up problem that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

liaukovv 7y ago

Imagine if humanity has treated other technological problems as societal ones: >What do you mean plague vaccine? We need to stop dreaming about magic solutions and just stop living in cities >Farming? No this will never work, just stop reproducing. And collect more berries. >Fire? Why do we need fire? It's dangerous and hot food is a luxury.

hnarn 7y ago
1. The plague, while probably exacerbated, was not caused by urbanization. 2. With the exception of up until modern times, farming, like many other major changes in human habitation, never threatened our existence on this planet. 3. Fire is dangerous, but the benefits vastly outweighed the dangers, and also did not permanently, in the chronological perspective of human beings, threaten our ecosystem.
ptah 7y ago
the second one would have actually helped us to avoid current dilemma :-P
- justsubmit 7y ago
  In which case, you probably wouldn't exist, and neither would the medium in which we're having this conversation. Better or worse?
- noonespecial 7y ago
  So what then? A few thousand humanoids would have picked berries for a few dozen thousand years until the next ELE wiped them out and be gone? That's better how? We've got exactly one planet's worth of resources to consume in our reach for the stars. Doing nothing and doing it wrong gets us extinction on basically the same galactic time scale. What a tragedy though, to have a real shot and burn it all up trying to get each other to click on ads for plastic crap no one needed.
einpoklum 7y ago
"Humanity" has not treated problems collectively until a few hundred years ago. Some might argue it still doesn't, really. Also, and more importantly - it's easy to categorize problems retroactively based on how they were eventually resolved; not so easy to apply this categorization with foresight. Finally - some problems have both societal and technological aspects, and so do their solutions.
pjc50 7y ago
Disease was as much a social problem requiring changes to the norms of "cleanliness" as a technological problem.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
We don't need to imagine, we know how humanity reacted to plague prior to effective treatments. Very badly. With lynch mobs and singling out certain groups for persecution. Even having acne would do it...

spodek 7y ago

The article's opening sentence: > If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. However big they seemed compared to the past, they're nothing compared to the future, though everything we do affects it. We can still avoid some of the worst.

hnarn 7y ago
My biggest gripe with that type of argumentation is that it plays into the idea that weather and climate are pretty much the same thing, when they really aren't.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Yeah, if you get people used to that kind of argument, get ready for absolutely zero belief in global warming next time we have a cold winter preceeded by no hurricane.
- goatlover 7y ago
  Also because correlation isn't causation. An instance of a hurricane or a warmer summer by itself doesn't prove anything. That's poor science journalism. You need trends and models to demonstrate climate change, not an instance of undesirable weather. It's not like hurricanes or warm summers never happened before.
- cos2pi 7y ago
  Agreed, this has repeatedly been one of the biggest failings in communicating the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate change is not a single event, nor a cluster of events, that occur(s) over a summer. Strong hurricanes have occurred well before Dorian [1]. So have heat waves [2]. Extreme weather happens. The change in the frequency of (some) extreme events can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, but a single event cannot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave
- 7y ago

bryanlarsen 7y ago

> Is there any way to escape the prisoner’s dilemma facing the provision of a public good? Wrong question. We're not creating public goods, we're preventing the creation of a public bad, aka externalities. How to prevent creation of externalities is well-known: Pigouvian taxes, which are similar to but not quite the same as sin taxes. The prisoner's dilemma also exists here, but there is a solution which also won the Nobel Memorial Prize: William Nordhaus' climate clubs. https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/ https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/

reallydontask 7y ago
Now we just need enlightened politicians to sell these taxes to the public.
- xienze 7y ago
  Well they're certainly trying, by parading a young girl around to make emotional appeals.
  - reallydontask 7y ago
    It seems as if you disapprove (apologies if I'm reading too much into your comment). What is the alternative? Cold hard facts don't seem to move the majority of people as they are hard to relate to.
    - xienze 7y ago
      > It seems as if you disapprove I do, because trying to manipulate people's emotions is the lowest form of argumentation. Not to mention the fact that she (or rather, her handlers) only care to target western countries. I'd be more willing to trust her (handler's) sincerity if she ALSO AT THE SAME TIME called out the country that has a giant brown cloud, visible from space, hanging over it. > What is the alternative? Make a better argument for why _this time_ it's truly different. Start off by admitting that scientists aren't always correct ("the science is settled" is one of the dumbest phrases ever uttered) and admit that scientists HAVE gotten things wrong about the climate in the past (e.g., the ice age predictions of the 70s). Then proceed with arguments that detail why previous dire predictions were incorrect and why it's different this time. Finally, be logically consistent in your arguments: * People in western countries are told to "have fewer children" in order to save the earth. Well guess what, we're already below replacement levels. We've done our part. Lecture folks in the developing world to do so, they're the ones contributing to overpopulation. * At the same time, much is said about per-capita CO2 emissions in western countries. Why do we hear complete silence from climate alarmists about migration from third-world to first-world countries? I would think they'd be staunchly opposed to it, seeing as how every person imported into western countries will instantly have their carbon footprint boosted sky high. Wouldn't it be better for the earth to not have these migration patterns occur?

chooseaname 7y ago

Stronger storms, heat waves, drought, floods, erratic weather. Check. Where I live, we are on track to have the driest September on record. We have also broken or tied 7 record hot days (and looks like we might go for 8 today)[0]. How much more common does this have to be before people start acting? Edit: [0] Had someone argue with me that this just means we had record hot months before. I'm like, no, that's not how that works. Those record days were from different years. The new ones were from the same year.

whatshisface 7y ago
Remember when people were saying that global warming wasn't happening because we were in the middle of a particularly cold winter? Treating this year's bad weather as proof of global warming is making the same error in the other direction. The climate can only be understood as a long-term average of the quite large annual variations in weather.
- chooseaname 7y ago
  I get that. I do. I said: >How much more common does this have to be before people start acting? Because it is becoming more common. Just as predicted.
justsubmit 7y ago
> We have also broken or tied 7 record hot days (and looks like we might go for 8 today). On average, how many record-high days have been recorded each year, for as long as your records have been kept? How many record-low days? A number out of context is not useful for drawing a scientific conclusion.

corodra 7y ago

I agree that global warming is real. Global warming is a problem. However... > If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. That's an amazingly stupid comment. This is why global warming deniers exist, because people make these types of stupid comments. A hurricane strengthening and stalling on land is not linked to global warming. It's always happened and always will. What was hurricane Andrew then in 1992? What about Katrina 2005? How about in 2004 where 4 hurricanes hit Florida in a 6 week time span? I lived through that one. Hurricane Lorenzo, right now, is a better example due to where it's at in the Atlantic and its strength. Still not a great example, but better than Dorian. Dorian was technically a normal hurricane. Nothing that special or different. Devastating yes. But devastation is not an indicator of climate change. A higher number of hurricanes and higher than average number in Cat 4 and Cat 5. That's an indicator. And to be honest, this year has been pretty chill when it comes to hurricanes. Only one FL scare. Most years there are 3-5 scares by the end of September. We're only on L when it comes to named storms. Bad years in the past are around S by now. Hurricanes are named in order of the alphabet if you didn't know. In 2004, we went through the whole alphabet, plus some. I agree global warming is happening. But this year's hurricane season does not show it.

tomp 7y ago
Funny enough, worst hurricane in recorded history (according to some metrics) happened in 1935! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane
wozniacki 7y ago
If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. I was stunned that such a callous, dismissive & low quality statement would even pass muster at The Grey Lady. Who's proof-reading these pieces? Pair it with a striking statistic from a reputable source, at the very least if youre going to make such a naked statement. Who is the piece trying to convince? The already convinced and dyed-in-the-wool card carrying eco-enthusiasts or the unconvinced and the leery crowd?

garmaine 7y ago

> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will. If you think the "other side" is a climate change denier, you don't have a grasp of the issues involved and I'm really suspect that your op-ed is preaching to your crowd rather than actually trying to engage the problem. The issue has never been denying the scientific fact that CO2 reflects infrared light, causing a greenhouse effect. It's a question over the scale of the problem, the timelines in which it plays out, and the panic and alarmism exhibited by one side of political debate. Moving off fossil fuels is going to cost a lot of money, and it is going to be substitutive spending, not the growth-building kind. The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Is is worth it? Is it necessary? That depends on how alarmist you are in your global warming predictions. And that is where we disagree. I've lived through two major economic recessions, and seen the effect that has on young people and opportunities. I wouldn't want to wish that on an entire generation. Millennials think boomers gave them a bad break, but wait until their kids see what opportunities their climate change policies leave them with... We need to move off fossil fuels. But we can do it in a way that is gradual and growth-positive, while exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields and adds living space for the growing population of the world. That requires a healthy debate about trade-offs and choices, and recognition that this is a complex, multi-faceted issue that people come to with multiple opinions and that's okay.

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Miner49er 7y ago
> The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Source? The last New Deal helped get us out of the Great Depression. Seems crazy to suggest that a new similar one would cause one.
- garmaine 7y ago
  First point, the last new deal didn't get us out of the great depression. You might recall that the great depression lasted throughout the 1930's. It was World War 2 and its aftermath that ended the depression. But anyway, the only similarity is in the name. The FDR new deal built new infrastructure. The Green new deal replaces infrastructure. Adding infrastructure where there was none before increases productivity, and therefore causes economic growth. Replacing infrastructure has net-zero change and therefore while the activity adds to GDP, it has no lasting effect on the economy. And since it substitutes for things that would have led towards growth, it actually causes stagnation or decline. In the social sciences, this is known as the "broken window fallacy." There's a lot of papers you can find with those search terms. If you want an idea of the best-case scenario of what life would be like under the Green New Deal, look to Japan with it's 20+ years of economic stagnation. Except without nationalized pensions we'd be asking a whole generation to live through work-until-you-die conditions. I'm sorry, but I don't think I want to do that to my kids unless it is a real do-or-die scenario as the alarmists claim. But the alarmists are wrong. The world is not ending tomorrow, or even the day after. We can deal with the change at a pace that doesn't result in economic suicide.

specialist 7y ago

I like the game theoretic framing. Winners and losers. Currently a zero sum game. Where we non-zero sum games, filled with win-win outcomes. Robert Wright's book Nonzero, which advocates for these kinds of reforms, deeply influenced my worldview, way back when. https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/dp/0679758941 https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/d... -- I'm a treehugger. During the 90s, I volunteered at Wetlands Conservation Network (WetNet), a short lived Audubon offshoot trying to save the Pacific salmon. During my time there, I somehow got the impression that all environmental (ecological) challenges could be fixed with better accounting and fair markets. More than just addressing externalities. With our salmon, the (economic) winners were timber companies and developers. Who reaped outsized rewards for developing habitat. (Timber companies were turning second growth forests into urban sprawl thru their subsidiaries.) Other beneficiaries were power (hydroelectric) and some farmers (irrigation). The biggest losers were the commercial & tribal fishers, anglers, and the hard to quantify "culture". But for some reason, beyond my experience and understanding, commonsense structural reforms were completely out of bounds. For instance, (I'm told) that water rights in the West are "use it or lose it", so potato farmers in Idaho continue to grow an oversupply. Whereas if they somehow rent (or transfer) those water rights in an open marketplace, that water could be put to better uses. -- Note that I've been out of the treehugger game since 2000, so I don't know what, if any progress, has been made since. Also, I continue to be surprised that Wright's Nonzero thesis apparently hasn't gotten any traction. Neither with the libertarian Freedom Markets™ cultists. Or the weirdly regressive leftists who reject markets and incentives, and continue to conflate corporatism & cronyism with capitalism. Oh well.

RobertRoberts 7y ago

When I was a child, my parents were in a dooms-day cult. When people threaten your future with vague notions of impending, and irrevocable doom, there is only one answer: Live for today. Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes? (there's a post about planting trees I haven't read yet, seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)

rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
>seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with So people will do something that has very little effect on the problem, feel good for their contributions. Then, people will learn than this "something" had no meaningful impact, feel betrayed ("but we agreed on this"), and give up. "Oh, come on, I already did "something". They'll wait for someone else to pickup the burden. That would be big waste of time and energy.
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reallydontask 7y ago
Do you not worry about the world you will be leaving behind for your children? or nephews/nieces? or just the rest of humanity that will come after you? Surely, I can't be alone in this.
avar 7y ago
The Paris Agreement, as part of the way as that's going to get us, is by-and-large being globally implemented. Rising awareness about climate change has contributed to pushing for all sort of policies from more fuel-efficient cars, to state subsidies in dozens of countries for things like renewable energy, electric cars etc. If your view of people pushing for something being done about climate change is that of a dooms-day cult you're going to have to admit that it's a rather politically successful cult.
lordfoom 7y ago
>Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes? It's not irrational fear. Why do cynical eye-rollers like you always try and crab bucket people's attempts at changing things for the better?

adj83 7y ago

Global warming is obviously being exploited politically. And public communication deliberately confuses the facts. and it is being used to spread fear. I dont think philosophers jumping on the subject is going to help

jokoon 7y ago

The world of today is highly individualistic, and climate change is exactly how nature will punish humans for not being able to be more cooperative. It's as simple as that. To me inequality and global warning are siblings. They are about the same thing, and share a common cause. If you cannot solve inequality you cannot solve global warming. Unless Elon Musk or somebody else is able to finance a big breakthrough in several technologies that makes ALL greenhouse gasses machines obsolete, there is literally no way humans will avoid having their population reduced. This article is short and it's a good summary on why individualism not only makes society unfair, but also threatens humanity.

beat 7y ago
I'd say we are making big breakthroughs in technology that will make greenhouse gas machines obsolete, and that's where we'll get eventually. But getting there will take decades, because we have to obsolete out (and/or buy out) existing fossil-dependent infrastructure - heating in cold climates, and international shipping are two big ones that come to mind. But do what we can. That said, I'm not convinced this is going to lead to a global population reduction. In modernized economies, food isn't the boundary on population growth (all modern economies are at near-zero growth or even negative growth, and developing nations are modernizing to low birth rates at an astounding pace). Barring any huge changes, we're looking at the global population growing maybe 50% over the next century, and being completely level or shrinking after that, and most of that growth happening in the next few decades. So for the population to shrink significantly, it would require billions to die, of famine or resource wars. So what's going to shrink the food supply that much? Enough to induce famine at a global scale? Keep in mind that global warming moves more slowly than harvest cycles. Farmers and nations can make decisions on what crops to plant and adjust their farming practices based on new information and reasonable predictions. Next year's weather won't be much different than this year's was, even if it will be significantly different than the weather in 20 years. We are also on the cusp of two massive technological changes that will impact our farming abilities - IoT, and GMO. IoT allows plant-by-plant management of crops, reducing tilling and chemical use. GMO allows adaptation of crops to growing conditions more quickly than hybridizing does. It just seems to me that the concerns about feeding everyone, in the wake of a previous century that absorbed a quadrupling of the population while making more food than ever and a future of at least two key technological breakthroughs, is more doomsday than solid reasoning.

tgbugs 7y ago

One phrase that seems to be missing from the article is is larger category of problem -- a collective action problem. The public good framing has to do with a citizen/state relationship. The collective action framing reflects a state/state relationship. A number of the more technical terms throughout the article imply this, but I was surprised that the term itself was left out because including it immediately tells us that certain solution simply will not work. Further note (edit). I think it is unlikely that a single state will ever be able to mitigate alone unless all other states stop or drastically reduce CO2 release. Maybe one state could threaten to set off a bunch of nukes in the upper atmosphere to destroy electronics and power grids around the world as a threat to encourage compliance, but that seems extremely far fetched.

gmuslera 7y ago

The problem of seeing this as a cost-benefit equation is when you may risk facing infinite cost. Climate change, as a single, isolated factor, won't cause by itself human extinction or at least the end of the human civilization in a foreseeable future, but reality is complex, current civilization and most of mankind depends on a lot of connected systems. Positive feedback loops happen, in climate, economics and in cultures, and from time to time the effects catch by surprise experts. We might be betting it all, and losing the bet, forever.

amanaplanacanal 7y ago
You might be right, but you can make that same argument about any change in any complex system.
- gmuslera 7y ago
  In this case, it is the complex system at which we all live in. And we are not talking about the fly of a butterfly, the climate system is gaining an atomic bomb worth of energy each second https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/global-warming-of-oceans-equivalent-to-an-atomic-bomb-per-second https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/global-w...

programminggeek 7y ago

It's an invented problem based on a belief that we control the planet. Yet, if we DID control the planet, we could simply fix it. What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then?

dragonwriter 7y ago
> It's an invented problem based on a belief that we control the planet. Climate change is a problem whether or not it's anthropogenic (which there is massive evidence that it is). > Yet, if we DID control the planet, we could simply fix it. Us having the capacity to initiate a warming trend doesn't imply that we could simply stop it. > What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then? Then we'd have just as much interest in bringing it under control. The impacts don't change of the source is different.