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srid  15d ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 15d ago   2941 thread views

The Vacuity of Climate Science

cafeamericainmag.com

There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.

I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!

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I always thought one of the paradoxes of climate science was that (1) climate modeling is sound enough to project far into the future and determine magnitude, causality, and predict ecological, social, and economic impacts. And (2) geoengineering would be too dangerous because we don't know what the long term effects will be. That's probably not the exact phrasing of the IPCC or other consensus positions, but I don't think it's unreasonably far off either. Very speculative, but I suspect some of the skepticism of climate activism is that the solution always seems to be more socialism, rather than we would like to spend 0.005% of GDP to spray some calcite into the stratosphere.

I think one of the better arguments against geoengineering is that I don't trust the geoengineers to remain aligned with what works out best, but will likely end up with internal incentives which could possibly lead to a dramatically messed up climate. You could easily imagine people spending too much to cool the earth, if the incentives were such that that were high-status or otherwise rewarded behavior.

That said, it's probably worth attempting anyway, if we're going to be trying to mitigate anthropogenic climate change (assuming the article here is wrong and that's a thing), as it's so much cheaper. Just, it'll require care in how it's set up.

By that logic, how do you trust anyone to do anything? Stuff still needs to get done, even if the incentives aren't perfect. The world turns.

Most actions don't have externalities at that scale.

If you over correct you just stop, it requires constant pumping into the upper atmosphere. A snowpiercer apocalypse isn't even possible.

Ah, good point that it'd go away before long.

My concern, I guess, would be that people wouldn't stop.

It's not exactly like the goals of climate activists is to achieve some socially and environmentally optimal level of fossil fuel usage, so I see no reason why we'd expect people to self-regulate here.

That said, you're right that it going away makes this unlikely to be too much of a problem.

I think we've seen after 80 years of atomic brinkmanship that most countries aren't actively suicidal, if you started getting below average temps and massive problems from cold weather the relevant authorities would stop the pumping, regardless of what the "coldies" are screaming about; maxing the temp drop to protect against future bad actors etc...

And if the relevant authorities are all "coldies"?

If the relevant authorities are all atomic apocalypse positivists we're also fucked. Yah' just have to trust in people not ending the world sometimes.

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