2 ms·

Things always seem fine until they aren't, and then they're real bad. Invariably, the nature of a difficult situation is that they're difficult to get out of,

Things always seem fine until they aren't, and then they're real bad. Invariably, the nature of a difficult situation is that they're difficult to get out of, so we tend to be very interested in avoiding difficult situations. This is why people are so interested in avoiding climate change, rather than waiting for more real-time data about how much climate change actually sucks so they can update their Bayesian priors and "avoid climate change when it happens again."

pksebben 5y ago
This is specifically what I'm referring to. Temperatures are already getting lethally hot and we're not really doing all that much about it. It's not resource scarcity that seems like the killer, here.
native_samples 5y ago
It's worth noting that the Limits to Growth didn't talk about climate change, just generalized 'pollution'. One now obscure reason for this is that back in the 1970s people didn't believe in global warming and the term "climate change" didn't exist as we know it today. Climatologists were worried about global cooling instead. At that point their records showed a generalized decline in temperature from the 1940s onwards and they believed it might continue indefinitely, leading to a new ice age. This was taken quite seriously, as newspaper records from the time show. These days it can be hard to understand why they thought that, because if you get a modern graph of the long term temperature record it doesn't show this cooling effect. The reason is that climatologists have repeatedly issued new versions of the historical time series, each time reducing the extent to which this cooling period can be seen. The differences between versions are the extent to which models are allowed to modify the raw data. The climatologists do this because they are very certain in their theories, but a long period of cooling in the 20th century is not compatible with them, and thus they look for reasons why the data must be wrong. When they come up with such a reason it gets merged into the model and the next version "corrects" for it. Modern graphs show basically no cooling, leading to some people concluding that the belief in global cooling was some sort of fringe belief, or even an urban legend, because obviously, how could they have thought that when no such cooling is visible. Given the long track record of educated people having near unshakeable confidence in models even in the face of failed predictions (of which World3 is a salient example), this progressive replacement of measured historical data with synthetic data is well worth pondering deeply.

pksebben 5y ago

This is specifically what I'm referring to. Temperatures are already getting lethally hot and we're not really doing all that much about it. It's not resource scarcity that seems like the killer, here.

native_samples 5y ago

It's worth noting that the Limits to Growth didn't talk about climate change, just generalized 'pollution'. One now obscure reason for this is that back in the 1970s people didn't believe in global warming and the term "climate change" didn't exist as we know it today. Climatologists were worried about global cooling instead. At that point their records showed a generalized decline in temperature from the 1940s onwards and they believed it might continue indefinitely, leading to a new ice age. This was taken quite seriously, as newspaper records from the time show. These days it can be hard to understand why they thought that, because if you get a modern graph of the long term temperature record it doesn't show this cooling effect. The reason is that climatologists have repeatedly issued new versions of the historical time series, each time reducing the extent to which this cooling period can be seen. The differences between versions are the extent to which models are allowed to modify the raw data. The climatologists do this because they are very certain in their theories, but a long period of cooling in the 20th century is not compatible with them, and thus they look for reasons why the data must be wrong. When they come up with such a reason it gets merged into the model and the next version "corrects" for it. Modern graphs show basically no cooling, leading to some people concluding that the belief in global cooling was some sort of fringe belief, or even an urban legend, because obviously, how could they have thought that when no such cooling is visible. Given the long track record of educated people having near unshakeable confidence in models even in the face of failed predictions (of which World3 is a salient example), this progressive replacement of measured historical data with synthetic data is well worth pondering deeply.