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I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me: "And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g.

• TelmoMenezes 13y ago
  > No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doensn't matter. Of course it matters -- in terms of the amount of impact human activity has on the climate. The less impact it has, the less beneficial you can expect energy policies to be to the environment. Since these policies have a non-trivial cost in terms of human suffering (less energy for heating, growing food, etc.), it is crucial to estimate their effectiveness.
  • jbooth 13y ago
    It doesn't matter in a moral sense. If someone proves that CO2 emissions don't cause global warming, then yeah, it makes it less effective to focus on CO2 emissions. But we still want to stop warming from happening, so we'd increase our efforts on whatever they pinpoint as the alternative cause. The linked article I was rebutting wasn't making that utilitarian case, they were making a moral case about not being obligated to avert warming at all, which I think is thoroughly bullshit, because I live here.
    • 001sky 13y ago
      It matters precisely in a moral sense. Because of the (in)effectuality of the action. Resources are scarce, and you are taking food from a baby...somewhere in the world. Of course none of this matters if you are having "first-world" pyschological problems about guilt...or you are trying to secure some money or presige for your first-world cushy lifestyle.
      • vehementi 13y ago
        Scarce resources aren't the cause of starving babies
        • glenra 13y ago
          > Scarce resources aren't the cause of starving babies They aren't? Wait, let's make the claim more specific. Biofuel mandates that had been justified in part based on CO2 concerns have driven up the cost of corn and other grains - crops and farmland is being needlessly diverted from food to fuel. Making grains more expensive has indeed been a cause of starvation in the third world. Um, here: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62609/c-ford-runge-and-benjamin-senauer/how-biofuels-could-starve-the-poor http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62609/c-ford-runge-an...
      • 1stop 13y ago
        Energy production is the main 'human contribution' (I think?). Are you really saying, that the Energy industry is a starving baby? They are the richest companies in the world, they can easily afford ALL of the changes that have been suggested, but it isn't about 'affordability' it is about profitablity. Making things more efficient, and encouraging more self/clean power generation runs contrary to Energy companies profit motive, so of course they will resist it and even run marketing to say that the world will be worse off if it is more efficient and "cleaner". And as a collective we have and continue to be stupid enough to buy into their narrative.
        • 001sky 13y ago
          This is an argument from convenience. Its like blaming the drug dealers for wall street's cocaine problems. Notwithstanding that issue, you have the opportunity cost of focus and attention on something. Which means you likely have remidiable inefficiency in other areas. It is that which kills...like taking your eye off the road and having a car accident. Again, that has nothing to do with the (oil,power,auto) companies or whether or not you dirve a prius, a tesla, or an F-150.
          • 13y ago
    • TelmoMenezes 13y ago
      > The linked article I was rebutting wasn't making that utilitarian case, they were making a moral case about not being obligated to avert warming at all I re-read the article and I don't understand how you arrive at this interpretation. This appears to be something you're assuming. The article is precisely about the utilitarian argument: the trade-off between the expected effectiveness of energy policies and their cost.
  • nraynaud 13y ago
    that's a bit strange to me, there is a lot of economic activity for to be gathered from re-newing things and insulating houses in rich countries. It's just rich kids churning around disposable income in products made by poor people (basic trickle down), it's not really relevant if it's for new gas-guzzler cars parts and AC units or insulation panels and busses they spend it on.
• eagsalazar2 13y ago
  Thank you. What we are seeing here is nothing more than a rationalization and opportunistic bolstering of his preexisting belief system. In the end global warming might be better than we're expecting but it is the political and social inferences, like in the quote you included, that belie his true intent.
  • gruseom 13y ago
    nothing more than a rationalization and opportunistic bolstering of his preexisting belief system Whose behavior does that not describe?
    • eagsalazar2 13y ago
      Fair.
    • dredmorbius 13y ago
      Believe it or not, there are people who consider evidence, logic, and consequences, and base their understanding off of that.
      • gruseom 13y ago
        There may be a few, but there are countless more who falsely believe this about themselves. Therefore it is wiser in most cases, especially one's own, to presume that this belief is self-deception. Self-observation quickly reveals how often the emotional reaction precedes and conditions the cognitive one.
        • dredmorbius 13y ago
          If someone can show a track record of having changed their views, and their arguments are from the perspective of achieving a greater understanding, and not of cramming some ideology down others' throats, I'm markedly more willing to consider that they are sincere in this statement. It's not necessary to bend in every wind, but I look for some signs of adaptability.
• nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  If we're only the cause of 50% of the warming that implies curbing our behavior only has half the impact that it would if we caused 100% of the warming. Granted, geoengineering projects that impact total warming are different.
  • Jtsummers 13y ago
    Throwing out a percentage like that is meaningless. I contributed to 50% of the trash in my household last month. If that's 300 lbs, then curbing it is significant. If it's 3 lbs, then it isn't. If he can't provide more concrete figures for his argument then the argument has no meaning.
  • auctiontheory 13y ago
    If we're only the cause of 50% of the warming that implies curbing our behavior only has half the impact that it would if we caused 100% of the warming. No, it does not imply that, not unless we know of a linear relationship between "warming" and "impact." From what I understand, the relationship is far from linear, i.e. our changes can have disproportionate impact.
• jlrbuellv 13y ago
  I think you're missing the point. Climate change policy is an optimization problem: how much money do we spend (either active on counter-measures or passively by capping energy usage) to reduce temperature change by some amount. If we can only affect it half as much as we thought we could, would we still spend the same amount? Maybe, but it's not exactly a no-brainer.
  • smoyer 13y ago
    " If we can only affect it half as much" You've made a great point - if we've really reached a tipping point at some of the more extreme global warming alarmists, you wouldn't spend any money at all. So they've inadvertently caused logical people to decide we shouldn't do anything. The other end of the spectrum would try to convince you that global warming isn't real (global warming and cooling has happened for eons - without man's help) and that it's therefore not worth doing anything. As an ecologist, I drive my wife and kids nuts with my need to recycle ... and take it a step beyond. I've repaired all sorts of "throw-away" household gadgets (most recently my wife's straightening iron) and try to give away working items we no longer need (freecycle). So I still believe we should each do what we can to minimize our impact on the planet, whether or not global warming is real.
  • wmf 13y ago
    If we can only affect it half as much as we thought we could, would we still spend the same amount? Maybe you'd have to spend twice as much to have the desired effect.
• nieksand 13y ago
  If the impact of global warming is significantly smaller than predicted and the human-induced contribution to that reduced warming is also much smaller than claimed, then expensive "green" policies indeed need to be reevaluated. Your fault reasoning has nothing to do with it. Think of it from a programming perspective. You've suddenly discovered that your program runtime wasn't near as slow as you thought. Plus you've shown that most of the runtime is driven by systems external to your code. It makes sense to reconsider how much effort to invest in for code optimization.
  • polemic 13y ago
    Except that the entire "humans are responsible for say n%" is the latest diversionary tactic by climate deniers to sucker rational people onto opposing policy that mitigates climate change. The argument is akin to saying "your program slowdown is - and I'm making up a number out of thin air - 50% caused by systems outside of your control so you should definitely spend 50% less time optimizing the things you can optimize". The logical flaws are blatant: the % is an invention, and the truth or otherwise of the premise has no bearing on the action you can and should take.
    • marcus_holmes 13y ago
      Let me get this right: you're saying that human emissions of CO2 need to be reduced in order to mitigate climate change regardless of whether CO2 emissions cause any warming? If humans caused 100% of the change then we can stop causing it. If humans caused 0% of the change then we can't stop causing it and must adapt to it. If humans caused 50% of the change, then we can stop some of it but will have to adapt to the rest. Obviously the premise has a huge bearing on the action we can and should take.
      • polemic 13y ago
        Firstly, I said it was in invention. It's an argument that has the benefit of never having to provide any sort of evidence to back it up. But since I'm forced to attack the strawman: let me put it another way: if humans are responsible for less warming than 100%, then we're going to have to do more to mitigate our effects, because we have to mitigate more human behaviour for the same outcome. Until we're making meaningful changes - yet to happen - it's utterly irrelevant if we've caused 50%, or 100%.
• anigbrowl 13y ago
  prosperity-destroying energy policies Ever notice how climate change skeptics implicitly claim perfect economic foresight? They may not buy that the Earth is warming or what the cause is, but they're absolutely certain that trying to weatherproof our civilization is going to result in collective bankruptcy. Oh yes.
  • Bahamut 13y ago
    I knew a brilliant math professor who was a skeptic based on his statistical analysis, but did not have any interest in trying to influence policy there.
  • gwern 13y ago
    > but they're absolutely certain that trying to weatherproof our civilization is going to result in collective bankruptcy. Oh yes. ? This is hardly a deep economic forecast. If you force people to engage in expenditures they were otherwise never going to make, it's a pretty safe bet they're not going to be better off. After all, if they were better off for it, why weren't they already going to do it? We can maybe imagine a few scenarios to do with personal health and things like that where paternalism works, but nothing to do with global warming looks like that. Working against global warming is going to be expensive, there's no question about that; the question is whether working against global warming is less expensive than not.
• auctiontheory 13y ago
  would we reason against sending Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to stop it Yes, because Tom Cruise could stop it better.
• api 13y ago
  The climate change thing is almost a red herring vis a vis fossil fuels. The supply of fossil fuels is absolutely limited. We don't know where these limits are exactly. But what we do know is that if we have no alternatives, our entire civilization will collapse when we run out of them. Billions of people will die. Centuries of learning will be forgotten. A new dark age will result. Now that is "prosperity-destroying." This is reason #1 to do everything we can to move beyond fossil fuels. Climate change may be reason #2, or maybe reason #3 after geopolitical concerns. But even if there is no manmade climate change at all, we must do everything we can to develop alternatives to fossil fuels now while we still have the time and energy to do so. The danger of collapse due to fossil fuel depletion is so great that I'm not even sure if climate change ranks. So why are we still even arguing about this?