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Notes -
Shifted?
People have been smugly telling me that climate change isn’t real(ly a problem) for years. They had studies and everything. Why is this time different?
Cowen has previously called for measured, rational responses to the problem rather than knee-jerk authoritarianism. Reblogging an article which finds exactly that shouldn’t be surprising.
The actual contents of the article are a little above my pay grade. There are an awful lot of simple graphs which show curves that don’t line up. I can’t say I understand why that’s irreconcilable. Couldn’t some of the models just be…wrong? Bad? Maybe even dishonest?
Then again, better scientists than me have found it noteworthy, so maybe the conclusion is obvious. What does that mean for us? What trillion-dollar bills should we stop throwing in the trash? The introduction suggests “insurance markets,” “climate-risk-evaluation products,” “tools for evaluating risk,” “carbon pricing,” and the mysterious “policies affecting GHG emissions.” Some of those might be actionable. Others…how are you going to tell insurance companies to put less stock in climate change? How much money does that reallocate to more productive endeavors?
I think my takeaway is that there’s little reason to believe the most extreme estimates of damage. If someone tells you the only way to save the economy is to renounce electricity and retvrn to pastoralism, they’re probably
a bad actorworking off of very incomplete information. Conversely, the probability distribution for positive effects is also awfully thin. “Nothing ever happens” is about as well-founded as the doomer argument.I guess that’s what the authors conclude. Don’t stop improving batteries and public transit and methane, because they’re already more or less economically viable. But maybe hold off on that deindustrialization plan. Sure, fine.
'Working off very incomplete information' like it's 800 AD and information is bound up in decaying manuscripts written in a language no one speaks. This is the era of wikipedia, of adjunct professors running patreon oriented blogs to make up for their poor career decisions/DEI(depending on your politics- I lean towards 'both', of course). I dropped out of highschool and bootstrapped my way to scientific literacy. Sure, I'm probably a bit smarter than the average HVAC tech, but I'm not that smart. We don't rely on our village elder repeating the hearsay of some traveler he may or may not have spoken to/actually existed, hearsay either way. There's not really such a thing as 'working off very incomplete information', not in 2026, not with people posting it on twitter(uncontacted primitives worrying about the ancestor spirits aren't doing that) as a reason not to participate in society like a normal person, like Aristotle's natural slaves, unsure of what to do without the lash so they just complain endlessly.
Face it, it's ideological priors, all the way down. Like the turtles under the flat earth, in some tortured counterfactual metaphor. In the era of ChatGPT, Google, and Wikipedia, ignorance is inherently willful. You can spend thirty seconds before you post. Sure, there's some information not available to the public- at least not until someone posts it on warthunder forums- but it doesn't change the broader point what the finicky details of the maintenance schedule for the F-35 actually are. People have ideological priors, regardless of medium, and empty rationalism doesn't change that. You think Scott(pbuh) will ever publish a blog on the original site saying 'Actually, the state of the evidence says gays are generally unsafe around children', even if there's an increasing volume of evidence saying exactly that? Yes, I know there isn't very much evidence at all showing the gays are generally pedophiles, run with a hypothetical(witness the sura of 'Extremism in Thought Experiment is no Vice'), to process the experiment. People who believe they shouldn't have to participate in society are just reaching out for straws to justify that belief, they have an ideological prior it's all pointless. Sometimes they get a platform to air their mental illness, self induced as a justification for that belief, it's not incomplete information. It's an ideological prior defended against all oncomers, just like all sorts of other ideological beliefs.
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