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The rot runs deep.
Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:
Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient:the author assumes a 2% growth rate for humanity's energy use and projects that forward a thousand years.
The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:
1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...
One swallow doesn't make a summer. One paper (by a non expert) doesn't invalidate an entire field of experts.
I think looking at proposed answers to climate change is what turns evaluating the climate change hypothesis form a reasoning exercise into an emotional/political endeavour - and it cuts both ways. This is the only way I can explain all the special pleading for climate change as uniquely suspect for decades, despite being a bland, intuitive hypothesis. I think it's helpful set aside looking at proposed answers before thinking about the hypothesis.
We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic. We've known the atmosphere:earth is roughly proportional to apple:apple-skin for a fair bit too. I'd be shocked if adding ~1 quintillion Kg's of CO2 to the atmosphere had precisely no effects. Measuring CO2 in ppm is trivial. Measuring temperature is trivial. Even if climate change isn't human caused, it'd still be worth investigating so we can engineer around it.
This is also a dubious line of thinking (its something like the appeal to ridicule). Chess computers, controlled flight, weather prediction, gene editing, nuclear fission, were all once claimed to be too outlandish to be possible. They still feel outlandish, but all can be done by hobbyists.
Most of those things are much easier to model than the climate because there are thousands and thousands of inputs into the climate. GIGO
This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.
Can we predict the weather tomorrow? Yes and no. There are just too many variables and randomness in the system to be exact but have a decent approximation.
Climate is more complex. We don’t know how to measure every variable. We don’t know what variables should be included. We don’t know how much each variable should matter.
Chess is simple. There are 9 kinds of pieces and 64 squares. Climate is a lot more complex.
Right, but this line of reasoning could be used to dismiss as inaccurate anything sufficiently complex and niche. The human body, the universe, and AI are complex, but people don't dismiss medicine, astrophysics, and LLM's because of complexity. What is special or unique about decades of climate science that gives people pause?
I don't want to put words in peoples mouths. If people think decades of climate science is uniquely dubious because they reckon its just too complex, that's fine. Special pleading is an informal fallacy anyhow. OP found climate science to be nonsense, and the idea of climate modeling to be outlandish, and didn't elaborate. But saying this isn't special pleading by pointing out complexity is a non-starter. It's rare that, for decades, 90+% of trained scientists agree on some domain specific thing in a heavily quantitative field, yet popular sentiment demurs without easily explaining why.
Astrophysics is interesting but doesn’t really make any demand upon me. Whether they are right or not is by and large irrelevant.
The complexity of AI is part of the argument against AI. That is, we don’t understand exactly how it works and therefore the alignment problem is a concern.
Medicine — well the answer is it depends. The older a practice the more I trust it. I like lindy things.
But it isn’t just climate. I think when it generally comes to predicting complex phenomena we overstate our ability to predict things.
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