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If people had started to worry about the long-term effects of carbon output before it was already widespread, the Industrial Revolution would have been strangle

If people had started to worry about the long-term effects of carbon output before it was already widespread, the Industrial Revolution would have been strangled at birth (the road from wood fires to solar panels leads through coal-burning steam engines; refuse to ever burn coal in large quantities and the chain is broken), and we would have stumbled around banging the rocks together until evolution optimized general intelligence out of existence or the sun autoclaved the biosphere. Nothing in the world is more dangerous than premature attempts at safety.

one-more-minute 12y ago
Who said anything about refusing to burn coal in large quantities? The benefits of the industrial revolution may well have outweighed the costs, and no one is saying it was a bad thing – or likewise, that developments in AI are a bad thing. But are you saying there's absolutely nothing that could've been done better in the industrial revolution? With some foresight we might have thought to develop solar power more urgently, for example, but no one thought we needed to. Worrying just a little might have changed that. The point is not to stop progress, just to approach with caution and be mindful of what the long-term implications are.
- rwallace 12y ago
  I'm saying there is nothing that would in fact have been done better by premature worry about global warming. If your argument is that any sequence of actions will be less than optimal - compared to, say, the actions that could have been carried out by a hypothetical omniscient entity of infinite wisdom and benevolence - then that is certainly true but irrelevant. But the previous argument was that convincing actual humans in the nineteenth century to start worrying about global warming would have been net beneficial, and I'm pointing out it would have been disastrous. And that, mind you, is still with the anachronistic application of 21st-century knowledge to the matter. If people in the 19th century had actually tried to figure out what they should be worrying about if they were going to worry two centuries prematurely, they would likely have come up with something completely different.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >With some foresight we might have thought to develop solar power more urgently, for example, but no one thought we needed to. With some foresight, people were trying to develop solar, nuclear, and fusion all the way back in the '60s and '70s, but political interests ensured that research funding was reallocated towards shorter-term political projects.

one-more-minute 12y ago

Who said anything about refusing to burn coal in large quantities? The benefits of the industrial revolution may well have outweighed the costs, and no one is saying it was a bad thing – or likewise, that developments in AI are a bad thing. But are you saying there's absolutely nothing that could've been done better in the industrial revolution? With some foresight we might have thought to develop solar power more urgently, for example, but no one thought we needed to. Worrying just a little might have changed that. The point is not to stop progress, just to approach with caution and be mindful of what the long-term implications are.

rwallace 12y ago
I'm saying there is nothing that would in fact have been done better by premature worry about global warming. If your argument is that any sequence of actions will be less than optimal - compared to, say, the actions that could have been carried out by a hypothetical omniscient entity of infinite wisdom and benevolence - then that is certainly true but irrelevant. But the previous argument was that convincing actual humans in the nineteenth century to start worrying about global warming would have been net beneficial, and I'm pointing out it would have been disastrous. And that, mind you, is still with the anachronistic application of 21st-century knowledge to the matter. If people in the 19th century had actually tried to figure out what they should be worrying about if they were going to worry two centuries prematurely, they would likely have come up with something completely different.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>With some foresight we might have thought to develop solar power more urgently, for example, but no one thought we needed to. With some foresight, people were trying to develop solar, nuclear, and fusion all the way back in the '60s and '70s, but political interests ensured that research funding was reallocated towards shorter-term political projects.