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This is a reasonable question to ask. If global warming is "wrong" but the accepted answer, pollution heavy businesses go through some inefficiencies and there

This is a reasonable question to ask. If global warming is "wrong" but the accepted answer, pollution heavy businesses go through some inefficiencies and there's a smaller amount of pollution production. If global warming is "right", but not accepted as something that requires response, potential existential crises ensue. It seems like betting on a Jack-high hand with your life on the line.

dantheman 17y ago
But there a lot of decisions like that. 1. If we don't invest in SETI aliens could come and wipe us out; seems like a bad bet to make we should fund set at 10000% 2. We need better protection from asteroids one could wipe us out; we need to tax every human being @ 80 % to build a giant defense network. 3. There could be a disease that wipes out the human race we need to increase the amount of spending on health care... etc etc Looking at the extreme edges with out an idea of probabilities is an easy way to get confused.
- crystalis 17y ago
  I'd say you've gone wrong twice, here. You have included problems (with unusual "solutions") with probabilities on hugely different magnitudes on the same list, and presumed that every problem is equally soluble. Global warming has a reasonable probability distribution and a very feasible solution. Compare that to hostile aliens with the ability to travel from the far reaches of undetectability to Earth- the technology gulf would be impossible to overcome.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
Pascal asked a similar question: If the bible is wrong but the accepted answer, you lose a finite amount of hedonic pleasure in the near term and there are some short term benefits (smaller amount of killing/stealing/coveting). If the bible is right, but not accepted, you will burn in hell for all eternity.
- tome 17y ago
  Sure, but that's rather over-exaggerating to make a cheap point. Every business asks a similar question every day. "If I decide to do A, I might make $B dollars or lose $C dollars. Is this a wise thing to do?" We tend to think that Pascal's cost benefit analysis was flawed. That doesn't mean we should drop the principle altogether!
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I'm not advocating against cost benefit analysis. If the original poster said "anthropogenic warming has a cost $X with probability P, the fix costs $Y < $P X, therefore do the fix" I wouldn't have said anything. I'm all in favor of the rational cost benefit analysis you hint at. Most environmentalists are not - witness the reaction to Bjorn Lomborg.
- youngian 17y ago
  http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/02/pascal-and-global-warming.html http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/02/pascal-and-global-warmi... I totally beat you to the punch on this one :D
- andreyf 17y ago
  The flaw in Pascal's argument is that just because we can imagine something, doesn't make the probability of it occurring greater than 0. Since there is evidence for it, however, the probability of climate change is certainly greater than 0.
  - prewett 17y ago
    If I recall correctly, Pascal's argument was that if the Christian God is truly the one and only god, then if you follow him, you go to heaven and have infinite pleasure. Nothing else gives you guaranteed infinite pleasure, therefore the expectation value for being a follower of the Christian God is the highest.
    - dave_au 17y ago
krschultz 17y ago
If global warming is "wrong" we needlessly reduce our economy and people today feel real hardships from lower wages, lost jobs, and higher prices. If global warming is "right" we might have a problem 100 years from now with rising sea levels and different weather. If you have the luxury to be worrying about rising sea levels 100 years from now, you haven't seen someone trying to scrape together a buck in change to buy a cheeseburger at McDonalds recently. Who do you think businesses will be cutting first when they have to make up for carbon credit costs? Hint - not from the top. This is what people who are pro-climate change legislation sound like to me, a bunch of whiners completely over exaggerating the consequences of global warming (existential crisis? really?) while completely ignoring the real human suffering their ideas will cause in the short term. Lets wait until we can really prove global warming is true before we jump to conclusions, because we could very well be inducing even more massive suffering on the lower class in our country who have already been squeezed very badly over the last 10+ years with stagnant wages, lost jobs, and rising healthcare costs. I haven't seen inconclusive proof in a scientific sense (we're programmers, we all know you can put garbage in and get garbage out from a computer "model" if you do it one way or another. and if they aren't showing the data they have (see the whole lost temperature data debacle) and in same cases the code for the models, what are they showing?)
- tome 17y ago
  Well I don't know about you, but personally I'm pretty scared of the damage that could be sustained to me and my country over the next 50 years when I'll still be alive, and the next 70 or 80 when I might be. If we have to make sacrifices now to mitigate that risk I'm prepared to do so. I'm also prepared to pay more tax to help the less well off who lose their source of income. We've been doing it in my country for nearly a century.
  - krschultz 17y ago
    Then you are out of touch with the realities of what is going to happen if we pass this bill. We already pay more for labor, energy, environmental regulations compliance, and corporate tax in the USA than pretty much anywhere else. When you start making energy even more expensive, the economics are going to shift for the remaining factories and we're going to ship pretty much every one left in this country to somewhere they don't have cap and trade. That is going to cost a lot of blue collar jobs. Then food will be significantly more expensive because of the increased energy costs - and not to mention they produce a lot of CO2. Who gets hit most by the cost of food? Those at the bottom or those at the top? Everything about this is really really regressive. You are willing to "make sacrifices now", because frankly you don't have to make any sacrifices. "I'm willing to pay more tax". Wow, what a sacrifice. Might have to pass up on the next iPhone. Taxes take away discretionary income from the upper classes. Big deal. Regressionary laws that destroy blue collar jobs and make the cost of living higher for those at the bottom cause real, true, heartbreaking hardship. Get off Hacker News and go into an area like Detroit that has been hit by these problems and see what I mean. If you can't afford food and can't afford your rent and lost your job and are trying to raise kids, those are more than just little sacrifices. Honestly that is way worse than the alternative. What is going to happen if climate change comes? Sea levels will rise and some houses will be lost in most areas on the coast, and cities will have to have levies built. Is that better or worse than destroying the lives of millions of people today? Not to mention, if you pass cap and trade you won't actually do a damn thing to help the climate. Every factory that moves offshore will be going somewhere they don't enforce these kind of laws. In fact a lot of countries you offshore to have incentives to reduce automation and increase job supply, so something that might take 1 guy here takes 4 there. Generally that is related to reduced automation and reduced technology. Which is also related to lower efficiency and higher emissions. The power plants in the US are a heck of a lot cleaner than the equivalent in a lot of the countries we are outsourcing to. And then you have the transportation emissions getting it here. So you are talking about definitely hurting a lot of people today, and hoping that just maybe you might be able to make tomorrow better than it could turn out to be if these computer models are correct, or it might make tomorrow just as bad or worse if compliance isn't 100% globally - which it won't be.
cschneid 17y ago
You touch on a point that swings my view of the political response towards the "do something" end of the spectrum. Climate change, true or false, is tightly tied to pollution. By taking action against climate change (in the traditional ways, less coal, more wind & solar, less waste), we also take a big step towards reducing pollution, and nobody is a pollution denier....

dantheman 17y ago

But there a lot of decisions like that. 1. If we don't invest in SETI aliens could come and wipe us out; seems like a bad bet to make we should fund set at 10000% 2. We need better protection from asteroids one could wipe us out; we need to tax every human being @ 80 % to build a giant defense network. 3. There could be a disease that wipes out the human race we need to increase the amount of spending on health care... etc etc Looking at the extreme edges with out an idea of probabilities is an easy way to get confused.

crystalis 17y ago
I'd say you've gone wrong twice, here. You have included problems (with unusual "solutions") with probabilities on hugely different magnitudes on the same list, and presumed that every problem is equally soluble. Global warming has a reasonable probability distribution and a very feasible solution. Compare that to hostile aliens with the ability to travel from the far reaches of undetectability to Earth- the technology gulf would be impossible to overcome.

yummyfajitas 17y ago

Pascal asked a similar question: If the bible is wrong but the accepted answer, you lose a finite amount of hedonic pleasure in the near term and there are some short term benefits (smaller amount of killing/stealing/coveting). If the bible is right, but not accepted, you will burn in hell for all eternity.

tome 17y ago
Sure, but that's rather over-exaggerating to make a cheap point. Every business asks a similar question every day. "If I decide to do A, I might make $B dollars or lose $C dollars. Is this a wise thing to do?" We tend to think that Pascal's cost benefit analysis was flawed. That doesn't mean we should drop the principle altogether!
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I'm not advocating against cost benefit analysis. If the original poster said "anthropogenic warming has a cost $X with probability P, the fix costs $Y < $P X, therefore do the fix" I wouldn't have said anything. I'm all in favor of the rational cost benefit analysis you hint at. Most environmentalists are not - witness the reaction to Bjorn Lomborg.
youngian 17y ago
http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/02/pascal-and-global-warming.html http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/02/pascal-and-global-warmi... I totally beat you to the punch on this one :D
andreyf 17y ago
The flaw in Pascal's argument is that just because we can imagine something, doesn't make the probability of it occurring greater than 0. Since there is evidence for it, however, the probability of climate change is certainly greater than 0.
- prewett 17y ago
  If I recall correctly, Pascal's argument was that if the Christian God is truly the one and only god, then if you follow him, you go to heaven and have infinite pleasure. Nothing else gives you guaranteed infinite pleasure, therefore the expectation value for being a follower of the Christian God is the highest.
  - dave_au 17y ago

krschultz 17y ago

If global warming is "wrong" we needlessly reduce our economy and people today feel real hardships from lower wages, lost jobs, and higher prices. If global warming is "right" we might have a problem 100 years from now with rising sea levels and different weather. If you have the luxury to be worrying about rising sea levels 100 years from now, you haven't seen someone trying to scrape together a buck in change to buy a cheeseburger at McDonalds recently. Who do you think businesses will be cutting first when they have to make up for carbon credit costs? Hint - not from the top. This is what people who are pro-climate change legislation sound like to me, a bunch of whiners completely over exaggerating the consequences of global warming (existential crisis? really?) while completely ignoring the real human suffering their ideas will cause in the short term. Lets wait until we can really prove global warming is true before we jump to conclusions, because we could very well be inducing even more massive suffering on the lower class in our country who have already been squeezed very badly over the last 10+ years with stagnant wages, lost jobs, and rising healthcare costs. I haven't seen inconclusive proof in a scientific sense (we're programmers, we all know you can put garbage in and get garbage out from a computer "model" if you do it one way or another. and if they aren't showing the data they have (see the whole lost temperature data debacle) and in same cases the code for the models, what are they showing?)

tome 17y ago
Well I don't know about you, but personally I'm pretty scared of the damage that could be sustained to me and my country over the next 50 years when I'll still be alive, and the next 70 or 80 when I might be. If we have to make sacrifices now to mitigate that risk I'm prepared to do so. I'm also prepared to pay more tax to help the less well off who lose their source of income. We've been doing it in my country for nearly a century.
- krschultz 17y ago
  Then you are out of touch with the realities of what is going to happen if we pass this bill. We already pay more for labor, energy, environmental regulations compliance, and corporate tax in the USA than pretty much anywhere else. When you start making energy even more expensive, the economics are going to shift for the remaining factories and we're going to ship pretty much every one left in this country to somewhere they don't have cap and trade. That is going to cost a lot of blue collar jobs. Then food will be significantly more expensive because of the increased energy costs - and not to mention they produce a lot of CO2. Who gets hit most by the cost of food? Those at the bottom or those at the top? Everything about this is really really regressive. You are willing to "make sacrifices now", because frankly you don't have to make any sacrifices. "I'm willing to pay more tax". Wow, what a sacrifice. Might have to pass up on the next iPhone. Taxes take away discretionary income from the upper classes. Big deal. Regressionary laws that destroy blue collar jobs and make the cost of living higher for those at the bottom cause real, true, heartbreaking hardship. Get off Hacker News and go into an area like Detroit that has been hit by these problems and see what I mean. If you can't afford food and can't afford your rent and lost your job and are trying to raise kids, those are more than just little sacrifices. Honestly that is way worse than the alternative. What is going to happen if climate change comes? Sea levels will rise and some houses will be lost in most areas on the coast, and cities will have to have levies built. Is that better or worse than destroying the lives of millions of people today? Not to mention, if you pass cap and trade you won't actually do a damn thing to help the climate. Every factory that moves offshore will be going somewhere they don't enforce these kind of laws. In fact a lot of countries you offshore to have incentives to reduce automation and increase job supply, so something that might take 1 guy here takes 4 there. Generally that is related to reduced automation and reduced technology. Which is also related to lower efficiency and higher emissions. The power plants in the US are a heck of a lot cleaner than the equivalent in a lot of the countries we are outsourcing to. And then you have the transportation emissions getting it here. So you are talking about definitely hurting a lot of people today, and hoping that just maybe you might be able to make tomorrow better than it could turn out to be if these computer models are correct, or it might make tomorrow just as bad or worse if compliance isn't 100% globally - which it won't be.

cschneid 17y ago

You touch on a point that swings my view of the political response towards the "do something" end of the spectrum. Climate change, true or false, is tightly tied to pollution. By taking action against climate change (in the traditional ways, less coal, more wind & solar, less waste), we also take a big step towards reducing pollution, and nobody is a pollution denier....