7 ms·

A deeper issue missed here is his comment: "I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to unders

A deeper issue missed here is his comment: "I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans." That's one of the core problems with his statement: the deeply wrong declaration that these are disconnected problems. Every. Single. One. of those things is made worse by climate change. From disease to poverty to the collapse of fish biomass to the flooding of New Orleans.

nucrow 2y ago
Not sure that's true. https://assets.weforum.org/editor/cXaoElD7K4eR-JTqP-ViH1LkcCsCBVagXJCfNnhoQZQ.png https://assets.weforum.org/editor/cXaoElD7K4eR-JTqP-ViH1LkcC... https://climateataglance.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/lomborg-climate-related-deaths-1920-2021.png https://climateataglance.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/lomb... (disclaimer: quickly looked these up from memory, haven't verified their accuracy)
pdfernhout 2y ago
Thanks for the reply. You make an excellent point on the systems aspect of all this. And I personally agree things like poverty, fishery depletion, and so on are important issues to address. But, I am not sure Freeman Dyson intended to imply these are disconnected problems. With his broad-ranging mind, Freeman Dyson was definitely a systems thinker -- though with a bias to quantification. Assuming what you say is true, he might ask, to what degree are those problems made worse by CO2-driven climate change? 1%? 10%? 100%? 1000%? Assuming that is a significant amount, we can choose to invest some resources to reduce emissions and/or we can choose to invest some resource to mitigate the consequences and/or we can choose to invest resources in some other way like space program, UBI, the arts, creating 1000s of free water-only-fasting and nutritional-reeducation health clinics like True North Healthcare to deal with the "diabesity" crisis overwhelming the USA and making things like respiratory viruses more deadly given comorbidities, to come up with safer plastics and safe ways to detox people of their current microplastics, and so on. "Water-only Fasting" https://www.healthpromoting.com/water-only-fasting https://www.healthpromoting.com/water-only-fasting "Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic" https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/ https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middl... "Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see." Which of those options should we do to what degree? That is the sort of question Freeman Dyson might ask. On the other hand, maybe the alarms are overblown and CO2 increase at this point is mostly a non-issue? ==== More details If you want to go one step further in considering systems effects, consider this article from 2022: "Why global warming is good for us: Climate change is creating a greener, safer planet." https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/15/why-global-warming-is-good-for-us/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/15/why-global-warming-... "Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions in the UK by 2050 is controversial enough as a policy because of the pain it is causing. But what if that pain is all to prevent something that is not doing net harm? The biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet. Forests grow more thickly, grasslands more richly and scrub more rapidly. This has been measured using satellites and on-the-ground recording of plant-growth rates. It is happening in all habitats, from tundra to rainforest. In the four decades since 1982, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, NASA data show that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains. You read that right: every year there’s more greenery on the planet to the extent of three Britains. I bet Greta Thunberg did not tell you that. The cause of this greening? Although tree planting, natural reforestation, slightly longer growing seasons and a bit more rain all contribute, the big cause is something else. All studies agree that by far the largest contributor to global greening – responsible for roughly half the effect – is the extra carbon dioxide in the air. In 40 years, the proportion of the atmosphere that is CO2 has gone from 0.034 per cent to 0.041 per cent. That may seem a small change but, with more ‘food’ in the air, plants don’t need to lose as much water through their pores (‘stomata’) to acquire a given amount of carbon. So dry areas, like the Sahel region of Africa, are seeing some of the biggest improvements in greenery. Since this is one of the poorest places on the planet, it is good news that there is more food for people, goats and wildlife." (I have a lot of issues with Bjorn Lomborg's work, but on that greening I think he is probably mostly correct.) Also from the article: "But are we not told to expect more volatile weather as a result of climate change? It is certainly assumed that we should. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest weather volatility is increasing and no good theory to suggest it will. The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little." (Continued in another comment.)
pdfernhout 2y ago
(continuing my previous comment) The fact is, the weather has always caused issues. About 100 years ago in the US North East there was massing flooding and great loss of lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(1900%E2%80%931999) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_before_1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_be... California, for another example, seems to flip-flop between big droughts and massive floods every couple hundred years based on slight changes in atmospheric conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_California "Geologic evidence indicates that "megafloods" occurred in the California region in the following years A.D.: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, and 1750. Prior to European settlement, these early floods predominantly affected the indigenous peoples of California." (And of course then there are West Coast major earthquakes...) Tens of thousand of years before all that, a mile or two of ice settled over the North East of North America among other other parts and the globe. Imagine the problems of living somewhere the snow stopped melting in summer and just piled up year after year for centuries. Our ancestors somehow made it through that. As well as later catastrophic flooding from breaking ice dams that might have raised sea levels by 10s of meters in a few days wiping out many coastal villages. Then there were failed harvests from the Little Ice Age. And there was associated social dislocation from other climate change, like the apparent "Sea Peoples" who invaded Egypt and elsewhere. Back to the present day, we've got all this tech to both reduce emissions (solar etc), and to ameliorate consequences (weather satellites, boats, railroads, 3D printed housing, insulation, LED lights, indoor agriculture, air conditioning, amazing materials, and so on). As "nucrow" pointed out in a graph they linked to, the annual number of climate-related deaths from 1920-2021 from about 500,000 to about 10,000. Why? Presumably better weather forecasting and improved infrastructure are part of it. But rather than optimism, some people are forgoing having kids because they are worried about climate change meaning there is no future for the human race. They are spiraling into dysfunctional despair. I pointed to Reddit "CollapseSupport" previously to be kind because there is a genuine community there of people helping others deal with their fears, and anyone on HN who really is in despair over this climate change topic might find some help there (among other places). But if you really want to see what ongoing doomsterism and despair looks like, "/r/collapse" is the companion to that other group: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/ I find it interesting and educational reading -- including about new things to worry about like post-Covid increased violence. There are many anecdotes there about personal despair and local despair. I have to agree many of them are things I share some concern about. The question is, in a world that has invented social media where people can see the worst stories from around the planet due to for-profit algorithms that promote engagement even if it is toxic to the user, do those selected anecdotes add up to an overwhelming trend? I saw something similar as far as a zeitgeist of worry starting in the 1970s with Peak Oil fears that grew to a crescendo in the early 2000s (e.g. Michael Ruppert, perhaps contributing to his death), and fought against that despair somewhat then in various online discussions. But who really worries about peak oil now with EVs and cheap solar? Yes, it was good to be concerned about the transition, but humanity invented and deployed solutions (in part due to the concern). The USA always had hundred of years of coal supply -- but it would have caused a lot of ecological damage to use it. In the 1800s, there was a despairing concern about Peak Whale Oil too, presumably, given declining Whale populations from all the harpooning. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Can-We-Learn-From-Peak-Whale-Oil.html https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Can-We-Learn-From... I saw another zeitgeist of fear in the 1980s with fear over nuclear war, especially coincidental with the movie "The Day After" and other previous things like the downing of Korean Airlines 007. Sadly, nuclear war is still a very realistic fear, even if such war is ironic, as I suggest in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Odd that the media and most people seem to have mostly stopped worrying about nuclear war over the decades as a day-to-day worry, even though Russia is increasingly rattling the nuclear option a lot. That is a much more likely apocalypse than climate change, especially since the lives of most US Americans are totally dependent minute-to-minute not so much on the US military's technical prowess as instead on probably-lowly-paid Russian service technicians probably using scrounged parts to maintain a 1970s-era "Dead Hand" computers (which the US tried to sabotage) so they don't launch nuclear missiles accidentally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand I would expect that is the sort of issue that Freeman Dyson too might be more concerned about than rising CO2 levels (including as he wrote a peace-exploring book about the nuclear arms race called "Weapons and Hope"). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028642.Weapons_and_Hope https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028642.Weapons_and_Hope "In this book, Professor Dyson explores how national decision-makers think about nuclear war, and how this isn't always well-considered or intelligent thought. He also applies the same criticisms to how leaders in various peace and disarmament movements think about nuclear war. The result's an unflinching assessment of how we think about actually using (or defending ourselves from) the world's still-massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons. (Vance Frickey, 2018)" Of course, there are always other fears like (more?) engineered plagues. Here is a list of my technology-and-society related fears circa 1999: :-) https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm In any case, as linked above at spiked-online, there is a plausible case that rising CO2 is a good thing. And as I previously linked to, it's quite possible that we have already passed the maximum level of atmospheric warming (although there still might be knock-on effects as systems that are reservoirs of "coolth" like the deep oceans continue to absorb heat until some equilibrium point). That means that any effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions and keep CO2 at current levels may be essentially wasted because it won't affect atmospheric warming and it also harms the greening of the planet and the blooming of deserts. So such money would be better spent on either mitigation or other socially beneficial projects (like, for example, eliminating malaria and/or easily curing it?). In general, these are the sorts of systems effects that Freeman Dyson was concerned might be missing from the models or related policy. He presumably felt some things that should be better understood before making certain broad policy investments. For example, there is an argument that plants growing faster given more CO2 might be weaker or less nutritious (mentioned in part in the article), so another issue to be explored as a system effect. Personally, I am all for replacing fossil fuels with decentralized renewables like solar and also energy efficiency including passive-solar homes (and maybe someday fusion power, perhaps even via local-scale "Back to the Future" "Mr. Fusion" household systems). Such innovations produce less local air pollution and water pollution than fossil fuels burning does which otherwise harms and even kills a lot of people via health issues (potentially costing in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually plus many lives as an externality of fossil fuel use). Smog and oil slicks are unpleasant to be around and cause a lot of environmental damage to other creatures (including mercury pollution from burning coal which makes many fish unfit to eat much of). Decentralized electrical power sources help shift political power in a more decentralized way too, which can potentially help shift the overly-hierarchical wealth-concentrated society we live in towards a better balance of meshwork/hierarchy (using Manuel De Landa's terms). Such decentralized power systems also tend to be more resilient, with longer time-scales of stand-alone operation, which makes them better to have around in times of most disasters or war. So, we should move away from fossil fuels for those sorts of reasons, not because of potentially-flawed-or-incomplete doomster academic models. (A supervolcano eruption would definitely be bad for solar though, and we'd be better off with nukes or geothermal or fusion in such circumstances, or even desperately going back to burning fossil fuels for a few years until the air cleared.)

nucrow 2y ago

Not sure that's true. https://assets.weforum.org/editor/cXaoElD7K4eR-JTqP-ViH1LkcCsCBVagXJCfNnhoQZQ.png https://assets.weforum.org/editor/cXaoElD7K4eR-JTqP-ViH1LkcC... https://climateataglance.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/lomborg-climate-related-deaths-1920-2021.png https://climateataglance.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/lomb... (disclaimer: quickly looked these up from memory, haven't verified their accuracy)

pdfernhout 2y ago

Thanks for the reply. You make an excellent point on the systems aspect of all this. And I personally agree things like poverty, fishery depletion, and so on are important issues to address. But, I am not sure Freeman Dyson intended to imply these are disconnected problems. With his broad-ranging mind, Freeman Dyson was definitely a systems thinker -- though with a bias to quantification. Assuming what you say is true, he might ask, to what degree are those problems made worse by CO2-driven climate change? 1%? 10%? 100%? 1000%? Assuming that is a significant amount, we can choose to invest some resources to reduce emissions and/or we can choose to invest some resource to mitigate the consequences and/or we can choose to invest resources in some other way like space program, UBI, the arts, creating 1000s of free water-only-fasting and nutritional-reeducation health clinics like True North Healthcare to deal with the "diabesity" crisis overwhelming the USA and making things like respiratory viruses more deadly given comorbidities, to come up with safer plastics and safe ways to detox people of their current microplastics, and so on. "Water-only Fasting" https://www.healthpromoting.com/water-only-fasting https://www.healthpromoting.com/water-only-fasting "Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic" https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/ https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middl... "Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see." Which of those options should we do to what degree? That is the sort of question Freeman Dyson might ask. On the other hand, maybe the alarms are overblown and CO2 increase at this point is mostly a non-issue? ==== More details If you want to go one step further in considering systems effects, consider this article from 2022: "Why global warming is good for us: Climate change is creating a greener, safer planet." https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/15/why-global-warming-is-good-for-us/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/15/why-global-warming-... "Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions in the UK by 2050 is controversial enough as a policy because of the pain it is causing. But what if that pain is all to prevent something that is not doing net harm? The biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet. Forests grow more thickly, grasslands more richly and scrub more rapidly. This has been measured using satellites and on-the-ground recording of plant-growth rates. It is happening in all habitats, from tundra to rainforest. In the four decades since 1982, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, NASA data show that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains. You read that right: every year there’s more greenery on the planet to the extent of three Britains. I bet Greta Thunberg did not tell you that. The cause of this greening? Although tree planting, natural reforestation, slightly longer growing seasons and a bit more rain all contribute, the big cause is something else. All studies agree that by far the largest contributor to global greening – responsible for roughly half the effect – is the extra carbon dioxide in the air. In 40 years, the proportion of the atmosphere that is CO2 has gone from 0.034 per cent to 0.041 per cent. That may seem a small change but, with more ‘food’ in the air, plants don’t need to lose as much water through their pores (‘stomata’) to acquire a given amount of carbon. So dry areas, like the Sahel region of Africa, are seeing some of the biggest improvements in greenery. Since this is one of the poorest places on the planet, it is good news that there is more food for people, goats and wildlife." (I have a lot of issues with Bjorn Lomborg's work, but on that greening I think he is probably mostly correct.) Also from the article: "But are we not told to expect more volatile weather as a result of climate change? It is certainly assumed that we should. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest weather volatility is increasing and no good theory to suggest it will. The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little." (Continued in another comment.)

pdfernhout 2y ago

(continuing my previous comment) The fact is, the weather has always caused issues. About 100 years ago in the US North East there was massing flooding and great loss of lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(1900%E2%80%931999) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_before_1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_be... California, for another example, seems to flip-flop between big droughts and massive floods every couple hundred years based on slight changes in atmospheric conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_California "Geologic evidence indicates that "megafloods" occurred in the California region in the following years A.D.: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, and 1750. Prior to European settlement, these early floods predominantly affected the indigenous peoples of California." (And of course then there are West Coast major earthquakes...) Tens of thousand of years before all that, a mile or two of ice settled over the North East of North America among other other parts and the globe. Imagine the problems of living somewhere the snow stopped melting in summer and just piled up year after year for centuries. Our ancestors somehow made it through that. As well as later catastrophic flooding from breaking ice dams that might have raised sea levels by 10s of meters in a few days wiping out many coastal villages. Then there were failed harvests from the Little Ice Age. And there was associated social dislocation from other climate change, like the apparent "Sea Peoples" who invaded Egypt and elsewhere. Back to the present day, we've got all this tech to both reduce emissions (solar etc), and to ameliorate consequences (weather satellites, boats, railroads, 3D printed housing, insulation, LED lights, indoor agriculture, air conditioning, amazing materials, and so on). As "nucrow" pointed out in a graph they linked to, the annual number of climate-related deaths from 1920-2021 from about 500,000 to about 10,000. Why? Presumably better weather forecasting and improved infrastructure are part of it. But rather than optimism, some people are forgoing having kids because they are worried about climate change meaning there is no future for the human race. They are spiraling into dysfunctional despair. I pointed to Reddit "CollapseSupport" previously to be kind because there is a genuine community there of people helping others deal with their fears, and anyone on HN who really is in despair over this climate change topic might find some help there (among other places). But if you really want to see what ongoing doomsterism and despair looks like, "/r/collapse" is the companion to that other group: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/ I find it interesting and educational reading -- including about new things to worry about like post-Covid increased violence. There are many anecdotes there about personal despair and local despair. I have to agree many of them are things I share some concern about. The question is, in a world that has invented social media where people can see the worst stories from around the planet due to for-profit algorithms that promote engagement even if it is toxic to the user, do those selected anecdotes add up to an overwhelming trend? I saw something similar as far as a zeitgeist of worry starting in the 1970s with Peak Oil fears that grew to a crescendo in the early 2000s (e.g. Michael Ruppert, perhaps contributing to his death), and fought against that despair somewhat then in various online discussions. But who really worries about peak oil now with EVs and cheap solar? Yes, it was good to be concerned about the transition, but humanity invented and deployed solutions (in part due to the concern). The USA always had hundred of years of coal supply -- but it would have caused a lot of ecological damage to use it. In the 1800s, there was a despairing concern about Peak Whale Oil too, presumably, given declining Whale populations from all the harpooning. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Can-We-Learn-From-Peak-Whale-Oil.html https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Can-We-Learn-From... I saw another zeitgeist of fear in the 1980s with fear over nuclear war, especially coincidental with the movie "The Day After" and other previous things like the downing of Korean Airlines 007. Sadly, nuclear war is still a very realistic fear, even if such war is ironic, as I suggest in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Odd that the media and most people seem to have mostly stopped worrying about nuclear war over the decades as a day-to-day worry, even though Russia is increasingly rattling the nuclear option a lot. That is a much more likely apocalypse than climate change, especially since the lives of most US Americans are totally dependent minute-to-minute not so much on the US military's technical prowess as instead on probably-lowly-paid Russian service technicians probably using scrounged parts to maintain a 1970s-era "Dead Hand" computers (which the US tried to sabotage) so they don't launch nuclear missiles accidentally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand I would expect that is the sort of issue that Freeman Dyson too might be more concerned about than rising CO2 levels (including as he wrote a peace-exploring book about the nuclear arms race called "Weapons and Hope"). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028642.Weapons_and_Hope https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028642.Weapons_and_Hope "In this book, Professor Dyson explores how national decision-makers think about nuclear war, and how this isn't always well-considered or intelligent thought. He also applies the same criticisms to how leaders in various peace and disarmament movements think about nuclear war. The result's an unflinching assessment of how we think about actually using (or defending ourselves from) the world's still-massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons. (Vance Frickey, 2018)" Of course, there are always other fears like (more?) engineered plagues. Here is a list of my technology-and-society related fears circa 1999: :-) https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm In any case, as linked above at spiked-online, there is a plausible case that rising CO2 is a good thing. And as I previously linked to, it's quite possible that we have already passed the maximum level of atmospheric warming (although there still might be knock-on effects as systems that are reservoirs of "coolth" like the deep oceans continue to absorb heat until some equilibrium point). That means that any effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions and keep CO2 at current levels may be essentially wasted because it won't affect atmospheric warming and it also harms the greening of the planet and the blooming of deserts. So such money would be better spent on either mitigation or other socially beneficial projects (like, for example, eliminating malaria and/or easily curing it?). In general, these are the sorts of systems effects that Freeman Dyson was concerned might be missing from the models or related policy. He presumably felt some things that should be better understood before making certain broad policy investments. For example, there is an argument that plants growing faster given more CO2 might be weaker or less nutritious (mentioned in part in the article), so another issue to be explored as a system effect. Personally, I am all for replacing fossil fuels with decentralized renewables like solar and also energy efficiency including passive-solar homes (and maybe someday fusion power, perhaps even via local-scale "Back to the Future" "Mr. Fusion" household systems). Such innovations produce less local air pollution and water pollution than fossil fuels burning does which otherwise harms and even kills a lot of people via health issues (potentially costing in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually plus many lives as an externality of fossil fuel use). Smog and oil slicks are unpleasant to be around and cause a lot of environmental damage to other creatures (including mercury pollution from burning coal which makes many fish unfit to eat much of). Decentralized electrical power sources help shift political power in a more decentralized way too, which can potentially help shift the overly-hierarchical wealth-concentrated society we live in towards a better balance of meshwork/hierarchy (using Manuel De Landa's terms). Such decentralized power systems also tend to be more resilient, with longer time-scales of stand-alone operation, which makes them better to have around in times of most disasters or war. So, we should move away from fossil fuels for those sorts of reasons, not because of potentially-flawed-or-incomplete doomster academic models. (A supervolcano eruption would definitely be bad for solar though, and we'd be better off with nukes or geothermal or fusion in such circumstances, or even desperately going back to burning fossil fuels for a few years until the air cleared.)