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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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But there will be an impact, that's for sure.

How do you have any idea what order of magnitude the impact will be? How do you have any idea what the sign of the impact will be?

Sign - yes. It will be a net negative.
Magnitude and scaling characteristics - no.

All the promising positive effects are associated with warming in the north. Based on my previous research, Canada's North is a rocky shelf with a thin soil layer and Siberia's newly defrosted regions will be acidic marshes. There may be agricultural gains in the southern reaches of the Lena/Ob/Yenisei, but those will be limited. The Northern trade routes will reduce dependency on the Panama and Suez, but won't create any novel ground breaking trade routes per-se. Unless birth rates see radical change, the north simply isn't a place with enough people to require the sort of shipping activity that would benefit from Northern trade routes.

If I had to guess, the impact equation would be super-linear with a near impossible to compute constant term.

Economic loss = Humanly_computable_linear_term * temperature_rise^(1<super_linear_exponent_a<2) + Expected_penalty_from_catastrophic_outcome

To me, catastrophic outcomes = simultaneous famine in multiple bread baskets, AMOC weakens, irreversible drop in marine life.

The discussion devolves into a philosophical shouting match because the Expected_penalty_from_catastrophic_outcome involves multiplying infinitesimally small probabilities with negative infinities. The combination leads to a sensitive tail that can collapse to zero or balloon to negative infinity depending on which set of plausible assumptions you start with. Objectivity goes out the door at that point.

Sign - yes. It will be a net negative.

How do you know this? From what I see, you just sort of guesstimated some things on different sides and don't take the timescales of the coupled systems into account. For example, you say:

Unless birth rates see radical change, the north simply isn't a place with enough people

Isn't this one of those things that could plausibly change? There have been entire reports on possible migrations of people, and people can move, populations can grow/dwindle on much faster timescales than climate changes. How do you account for the timescale effects?

Magnitude and scaling characteristics - no.

This is likewise concerning. Reddit search is hopelessly broken, but a while back, I remember one of these "estimates of climate change economic effects" papers coming out, and while I've already said that I think the task is actually impossible, I took the claim at face value and compared it to a contemporary Krugman NYT column that talked about tariffs. His approximate estimate of the reduction in GDP due to tariffs was ~3%, and I don't recall exactly what the particular climate paper gave, but the number that sticks in my mind was like 0.7%; I'm pretty sure it was something less than 1%. If we have no clue whether it's more like 1% or 10%, why should one think that it's more like 1% than 0%... or -1%? Like, how do we actually estimate this with anything other than vibes?

That paper -- one of the IPCC reports -- is something David Friedman (the anarchist, not the ambassador) bangs on a lot. He mentions it here

I think the one I'm remembering might have been a different one that came out later, but yeah, probably similar. There is, of course, a wide range of estimates, depending on model details.

Yeah it’s literally impossible. First, climate science itself is based on thousands of different interactions that are hard to model out with degree of accuracy.

Then teasing out that highly uncertain future impact on the economy is nigh impossible.

A limited precaution principle is reasonable but a destroy the economy one isn’t

climate science itself is based on thousands of different interactions that are hard to model out with degree of accuracy

I actually kind of go the other way on this, depending on how strict one is about the "degree of accuracy". There's an at least plausible way that you can approximate the high-dimensional system with a low-dimensional representation with one primary input (carbon-equivalents). Of course, one needs to consider a range of possible time series inputs and acknowledge that it's a pretty noisy model, but you can do okay-ish, about as okay-ish as you can do with other noisy models. And of course, you have to acknowledge that your estimates are genuinely dependent on the chosen time series inputs (e.g., it took a long time and a lot of people saying, "RCP 8.5 probably isn't very likely," for folks to sort of grudgingly accept that it wasn't the most useful time series input; but maybe things could change and it becomes more likely! There's a genuine dependence on the time series input). But you can do alright.

It's when we glom on a coupled system, that operates in a vastly different timescale regime, that we run into serious theoretical problems.

How do you have any idea what order of magnitude the impact will be? How do you have any idea what the sign of the impact will be?

And this is why I am extremely skeptical of "Pigouvian" taxes. If you don't know the sign and magnitude of the externality, you can't tax (or subsidize) it to compensate.

Pigouvian taxes are just a more granular way of discouraging something instead of outright banning it. Sure, you do need to know the sign, but even if you're wrong on the magnitude, a wrong Pigouvian tax is usually going to be better than doing nothing. There's a wide range of estimates? Pick something in the middle and be done with it.

As for the sign of the impact of climate change, arguing that it might be beneficial at this point, given the evidence we're seeing, seems a bit like arguing "maybe smoking is good for you, actually".

But I think one of the strongest arguments is that, if you don't know what's going to happen when you fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition, then be conservative and don't fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition. We know what the climate is like now -- it's not perfect but it's alright. So it makes sense to take some effort to NOT fuck with it, even if there's some economic cost.

Being unnecessarily cautious and certainly weakening our economies to perhaps protect some aspects of the climate or the environment is a recipe for making irrelevant those who choose that path, and giving power to those who do not. We irreversably fuck with everything. It's a given. You can't stop it. Nothing will remain untouched. If altering the atmospheric composition is actually as bad an idea as some claim, then we will just have to find out about it the hard way, because reducing human economic activity will not happen.

Pigouvian taxes are just a more granular way of discouraging something instead of outright banning it.

That's how they're used, but that means they're not Pigouvian.

Sure, you do need to know the sign, but even if you're wrong on the magnitude, a wrong Pigouvian tax is usually going to be better than doing nothing.

No, if you know the sign but don't know the magnitude, you can overshoot and end up with much worse.

But I think one of the strongest arguments is that, if you don't know what's going to happen when you fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition, then be conservative and don't fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition.

That's just the Precautionary Principle, and it's a recipe for nothing but death.

That's how they're used, but that means they're not Pigouvian.

Yes, you're correct, I mean in the sense that we should try to match them to the cost of the externality - which a ban doesn't do. I was just trying to draw a contrast with banning things, which involves far more deadweight loss, in the case where the thing being banned is useful. In the case of extremely addictive drugs, they're almost never good even for the person using them, so a ban makes sense, while for fossil fuels, they have a big benefit but also this externality, so a Pigouvian tax is a good fit. I just worded it clumsily and confusingly and didn't make the point I was trying to.

No, if you know the sign but don't know the magnitude, you can overshoot and end up with much worse.

My point is that even if we think that the damage caused by carbon emissions is somewhere between $5/ton and $2000/ton, a $50/ton carbon tax is much more likely to be beneficial than no tax.

That's just the Precautionary Principle, and it's a recipe for nothing but death.

Isn't the Precautionary Principle more about only allowing things once we're sure they're safe? That would have been like not allowing fossil fuels to be burned at all back when they were discovered. We have piles of evidence that what we're doing to our atmosphere is already fucking us over.

I'm not some sort of neo-luddite or de-growth advocate. Yeah, there are some things we could have avoided like leaded gas and CFCs (even for CFCs I don't think we probably should have prevented their use until we had a non-ozone-destroying alternative, given the benefits of refrigeration), but we've really screwed up by not allowing nuclear power to flourish, and on the whole, technology and building new things is good. I just think that for carbon taxes, at this point the debate should be at what level they should be, not whether we need them at all.

Isn't the Precautionary Principle more about only allowing things once we're sure they're safe? That would have been like not allowing fossil fuels to be burned at all back when they were discovered.

Yes.

I'm not some sort of neo-luddite or de-growth advocate.

If you want to end fossil fuel burning, you most certainly are.

I just think that for carbon taxes, at this point the debate should be at what level they should be, not whether we need them at all.

Yes, and a car salesman thinks the debate should be about how much profit you'll give him on the car sale and not whether you are going to buy the car at all. This is just a tactic.

  1. Smoking might actually be good on the margins. Sure, the more you smoke the more likely you’ll die sooner. But smoking also comes with good effects (eg social). There is a case where it is okay used marginally.

  2. What signs are there that climate change is negative? The greening of the planet?

  3. I agree re precaution principle but you can take that too far. For example, we could get rid of all oil uses tomorrow. Society would collapse but perhaps that would be better for maintaining the environment (or perhaps not — people might burn wood).

Smoking might actually be good on the margins. Sure, the more you smoke the more likely you’ll die sooner. But smoking also comes with good effects (eg social). There is a case where it is okay used marginally.

I don't disagree, though maybe once most people don't smoke, being a smoker is actually negative socially. So nobody smoking is better than everyone smoking a little bit, probably. If you're in a society where everyone already smokes, smoking socially might be the right thing for you though, assuming you don't hate the experience.

What signs are there that climate change is negative? The greening of the planet?

The greening of the planet isn't actually good for agriculture. Most plants are what we consider weeds, so faster growing weeds means more pesticide use. And the big issue is really instability more than heat, as you get crazy weather, where the growing season starts early but then there's a frost, or severe droughts and heat waves, or floods, all sorts of stuff like that. Predictability is really good when in comes to farming, and the weather unpredictability caused by a warmer planet more than makes up for any benefit you might get from a longer growing season and more CO2 for plants to consume, in most places.

I agree re precaution principle but you can take that too far. For example, we could get rid of all oil uses tomorrow. Society would collapse but perhaps that would be better for maintaining the environment (or perhaps not — people might burn wood).

No disagreement on that point. I think a carbon tax of somewhere between $30 and $100 / ton CO2 is anything but taking things too far, though. A $100/ton tax would add about $1/gallon on the price of gas.

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