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Im not sure why anyone expects these estimates to hold any water at all. From what I gather, pressure from the establishment has systematically caused scientis
by mooneater 7y ago
Im not sure why anyone expects these estimates to hold any water at all.
From what I gather, pressure from the establishment has systematically caused scientists to lowball impact estimates and ignore second (and higher) order effects. Meanwhile the complexity and far reach of impact is beyond anything we can model.
Consider how all the experts were surprised in the 2008 economic crisis. That was just an economic crisis, primarily involving things we can easily count (dollars) on a very small timescale (years).
Now we are talking about many interlocking systems we cannot model well, on a timescale we cannot fathom. How good could those estimates ever be? Maybe +/- 6 orders of magnitude.
- mooneater 7y agoDownvoters please help me understand your angle here
- tito 7y agoI upvoted, FWIW. Maybe help explain your perspective some more? It sounds like you're just kind of saying "we can't model anything so why bother?". We can model what we can. Sure, the big recession catches the world by surprise, but people are working constantly to model these systems, and it seems to be better than doing nothing. Climate models for example tell us that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas, and gives us an idea of the amount of warming we'll see at various levels. +/- 6 orders of magnitude seems like a lot. Like that seems like we don't know whether we'll have 400 ppm or 400,000,000 ppm in the future?
- mooneater 7y agoThanks! My order of magnitude range is extreme, but I was thinking of "total cost to humanity" estimate not ppms. I do think trying to put a price tag on climate change's "total cost to humanity" is truly a hopeless task, and results are bound to be meaningless, due to sheer complexity combine with subjectivity. How can we meaningfully price biodiversity, the anguish of future generations, permanently escalating geopolitical stress, and the vast flock of black swan events that will result from these changes, in a single dollar amount? I believe such efforts are pure hogwash.
- tito 7y agoGlad you responded! Lots of thoughts on this. The estimates are sure to be not exactly right. But I don't let that hold me up! I see sooooo many people get stuck because they can't figure out "Well is it 700 billion tons of carbon in the air or 900? Will the the warming 4 degrees C or 5?". "I can't do anything if I don't know exactly what it is". To me it's all just an excuse to do nothing. And I understand it, it's a relief to feel powerless sometimes, "I can't do anything about this, oh well". But we have to fight that. I know there's more carbon in the air than we know what to do with, and we have to take it out. Current capacities are so much smaller than any estimate of the order of magnitude, that my role is building, not predicting. We do need more modelers and monitors. However, there is a diminishing return to modeling and modeling and modeling. So we need 10X more modeler and 100,000X people building and taking action.
- mooneater 7y agoI think we agree, all Im saying in addition is, "total cost to humanity" is extremely hard to model, far harder than a physical climate model, so hard its near meaningless.
- mooneater 7y agoIm not saying climate models are not worth doing, I think we must do them. But I think the priors on the models are not right, we should be open to publishing radical results not taming them down for palatability.
- mooneater 7y agoYour Impossible Labs looks cool btw, glad you are doing this!