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I never knew what to think of the whole Climate Change thing. I consider myself a careful skeptic, going on the assumption that the science is much too large to

• 7952 13y ago
  Personally I think that climate change is a bit of a distraction. There are lots of good reasons for cutting pollution beyond carbon. Moving to sustainable energy would be worth doing even if climate change didn't exist simply to cut the health impact of dirty energy.
  • cdash 13y ago
    My biggest problem with many of the people that warn of global warming is they proclaim we need to take serious action and then ignore the most plausible solution which is nuclear power. I know not everyone is against using nuclear power but if global warming is a serious issue and I think it is plausible that it is thats where we should be heading, as a bonus nuclear power is great anyways.
    • threeseed 13y ago
      Because nuclear power comes with plenty of short/medium term problems as we are seeing today in Fukushima. Much better to exhaust every ounce of potential out of safe, clean renewable sources first.
      • waps 13y ago
        I thought the point was to reduce carbon emissions ?("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save) And please skip the "but this one version now in the lab ..." speech.
        • eru 13y ago
          > ("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save) I don't think that's true. Do you have anything to substantiate that claim?
      • jamesaguilar 13y ago
        Compared to nuclear, far more people die because of renewable energy per megawatt. It is not better to exhaust the potential of renewable sources, since they lead to more excess deaths. There are a lot of sources that demonstrate this, so I just searched for one: http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/21104091117.pdf http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/...
        • grannyg00se 13y ago
          That article is written by a scientific adviser to the Atomic Energy Control Board, Ottawa, Canada. If that doesn't bother you, consider that the facts cited come from a "recent" report published in 1978.
          • jamesaguilar 13y ago
  • ryguytilidie 13y ago
    The thing that bothers me the most is that every single one of these climate change skeptics seem to turn off their brain when it comes to the obvious effects of pollution. Even if climate change isn't occurring, many major cities are covered in smog. Is the next step to deny that breathing dense fog is harmful?
• rdl 13y ago
  One of the problems with focusing only on CO[2] (or global warming in general) is that it sometimes is in direct conflict to other environmental improvements. Spending energy to keep air/water/land clean of other pollutants, either on remediation or lower overall efficiency, can boost CO[2] emissions. I'd personally prefer to take the risk on GW if we could cut down on mercury, localized pollution of land and water, etc. There are some cases where CO[2] reduction is generally related to environmental improvements overall, like swapping in nuclear or (in some places) wind for dirty soft coal, but it's not all the time.
  • MichaelSalib 13y ago
    I don't think this is really true. The biggest public policy advocated by people who care about climate change is a carbon tax. The effects of such a tax on the margins are more energy conservation (better weatherization, green roofs, smart grids, etc), and shifting fossil fuel consumption to natural gas and wind/solar. Every single one of those changes yields significant non-CO2 related environmental benefits. The worst you can say is that natural gas burning requires higher temperatures that produce more NOx emissions, but they also take out a lot more mercury and SOx emissions produced by equivalent coal fired plants. Moreover, because old coal fired plants are grandfathered in, they face less stringent air pollution control regulations than brand new natural gas plants that replace them. Finally, the costs of doing serious air pollution control in power plants is generally tiny and such controls probably pay for themselves just in reducing asthma cases alone. My source is my father, who designed air pollution control systems for power plants for the last 30 years or so.
    • rdl 13y ago
      I agree coal -> natural gas is almost exclusively good (the only real counter-argument is that coal -> natural gas precludes coal -> something better than natural gas (nuclear, hydro, magic, etc.)). The "CO[2] optimization, but otherwise moronic and environmentally destructive" is most biofuels. They're arguably lower CO[2] output (since it's atmospheric carbon), minus the CO[2] used to grow them, but let's assume EROEI of 1+epsilon. You still destroy a bunch of land, use up water (including often fossil water), fertilizer runoff, etc., so the environmental harm outweighs the minor net CO[2] reduction benefit. Not true of things like the Brazilian fuels, I think. Mainly just that corn ethanol is at best stupid and most likely a crime.
• threeseed 13y ago
  No offence but people such as yourself really are the worst. It's clear that you have absolutely no scientific knowledge about the subject but yet believe you know enough to disparage experts in the field. If you don't know about the subject (and I don't) the only sensible position to take is an objective risk management one: Chance of worse case scenario (10%) x Impact of worst case scenario (Severe) = Prepare Contingency Plans.
  • InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Ah, pascal's wager. So, which god do you believe in then?
    • jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Risk-management of a risk for which there is evidence is not the same as picking among imaginary entities for which there is effectively no evidence. Plus, Pascal's wager suffers from the issue that for every god X, there is a possible opposite god who really hates people who mistakenly believe in X. This offsets the value of believing in X. Evaluating the wager under that observation leaves you with a net belief change of nil. Contrariwise, there's no evidence of a countervailing benefit to global warming that offsets the possible risk of doing nothing about it. That said, I do have one issue with the argument in that one possible outcome of global warming has effectively infinite cost. That is when everyone dies. I do not know how to multiply (low probability) x (infinity). Maybe someone can explain how a rationalist would handle this case. (Actually, I don't think it's right to call this an "issue." Point of confusion is more accurate.)
      • InclinedPlane 13y ago
        You're overlooking the opportunity cost that comes with spending effort and money on "forestalling climate change" today. Read my other post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6388344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6388344) for why this is likely an extremely bad idea.
        • 13y ago
• acqq 13y ago
  Do you understand math or logic enough to see that the article author ignores the whole mathematical sentences which state different things in the two reports and just compares the numbers in them, and how invalid that approach is? Why should you give any trust to such an article? Because it gives you the false hope that "everything will be OK no matter our inaction?"
• hannibal5 13y ago
  You feel. You know what. It can be shown that climate skepticism is mostly Anglo Saxon phenomenon. It seems to be related to political and lobbying efforts. Most of the world, South America, Europe(outside UK), Russia, India, China, ..., acknowledge the climate change and not because of politics. Maybe you guys should change your Anglo Saxon "I'm not an expert but I have feelings and an opinion" attitude.
  • dizzystar 13y ago
    I grew up in a neighborhood that was enveloped by smog so thick that it left soot on the cars and peeled the paint off your house. Not sure what all of this is about, but there is a lot of destruction done to the "Anglo Saxon" you refer to. Look no further than your nearest ghetto or factory town.
• MichaelSalib 13y ago
  It is really strange how many allegedly technical people are so invested in believing that thermodynamics isn't real.
  • CamperBob2 13y ago
    (Shrug) Many technical people have learned to be cautious when dealing with complex, incomplete models that don't always yield good predictions.
• graycat 13y ago
  > Although I never really questioned the idea that there is evidence of warming or man-made warming, I always questioned the the stated impact. You are just leaving yourself open to manipulation. Whatever the science said, 99 44/100% of the whole global warming/climate change movement was a flim-flam, fraud, scam for a few people to grab power and money. The recipe goes back to, say, the movie 'The Music Man' about the terrible threats of a pool table in town, to the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock to "keep the sun moving across the sky", English morality plays 1000 years ago, and various other charlatans trying to scare people and, thus, get power and money. It was about power and money. For the science, there was some careful work on diffusion in an ideal column of gas. Cute, but not much reason to shut down all the coal fired electric generating plants with, in a US DoE report a few years ago, 49% of US electrical energy and about 23% of all US energy. Then there was the IPCC report with Ramaswamy's radiative forcing not much based on science and not in any physics book I saw. Best I could say about it was that, mathematically, it was local, linear, and differential. Then there's the fact that we know a lot, likely enough, about the basic chemistry and physics and know what to calculate -- the Navier-Stokes equations, black body radiation, molecular spectral lines, etc. But we also know that if we set up such computing, then really we are trying to calculate long term climate change by weather prediction one microsecond at a time and that fails to predict actual weather for longer than about two weeks. Bummer. But that's the basic chemistry and physics, and we know that. Moreover, less detailed but more stable calculations are necessarily just approximations and not from first principles of the basic science where we have confidence. So, we know too much, that is, know what we have to do but find that doing the calculations accurately enough for meaningful answers is too difficult. Next, we can be empirical: So there is the US National Academic of Science report of about 2006 with a graph on page 2 that shows temperature reconstructions for the past 1000 years or so. The graph shows (1) as far as we can tell, in about 2006 the temperature was exactly the same as in the year 1000 and (2) the increase in the 100 years before year 2006 was exactly the same as the increase from year 900 to year 1000. Since year 1000, for whatever reasons we fell into The Little Ice Age that did influence some history -- killed off Viking settlements in Greenland, had three years of crop failures before the French Revolution, killed off nearly all of Napoleon's army on its way back from Moscow, put ice in the Delaware River the night Washington crossed it, etc. By year 1900 or so, we were still pulling out of The Little Ice Age. Then there was the bad data: Trying to measure temperature of the earth by trying to measure the temperature of the Arctic by pictures of polar bears and ice bergs falling from glaciers that reach the ocean. Net, empirically, the actual temperature record gives no significant reason for alarm, certainly no reason to shut down the economy of the Industrial Revolution which Al Guru would have us do. The science is too difficult, e.g., we are not able to do anything like accurate calculations of the future climate. In a sense the Al Guru community picked a good problem, much like the Mayan charlatans did: Pick a problem too complicated to debunk with current knowledge, and then bleed people. Flim-flam, fraud, scam.