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srid  1mo ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 1mo ago   3253 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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All of those positions predate global warming as a salient issue. The Population Bomb was written in 1968. Orwell complained about vegetarians taking over socialism in the 1940s. Sociologists have been slagging car centered suburbs since they were built after WW2.

in fact, these are prone to being vilified by far left activists for being insufficiently radical

Right, because the activists (the people who matter) have more important goals than cutting emissions.

Right, because the activists (the people who matter) have more important goals than cutting emissions.

As a counterpoint, one of the biggest, most effective climate change activism groups (Citizens Climate Lobby) focuses almost exclusively on practical policy to cut emissions, mainly a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Going back to the root though, with things like geoengineering -- I'm not 100% against it, but I'm much more in favor of addressing the root cause, rather than trying to put a band-aid on it. First issue, and maybe the biggest, is the moral hazard -- if you start geoengineering, that means countries won't try as hard to reduce emissions, immediately negating some of the benefit of geoengineering. Second, specifically for putting sulfur into the atmosphere to reduce solar irradiance, you don't get to control where that goes. It wanders all over the place, changing weather patterns, possibly causing storms or droughts. Third, cooling the earth but leaving CO2 levels higher doesn't solve ocean acidification.

I suspect that we'll need to do it at some point, but I think it is best to push hard on reducing emissions first and foremost. And maybe I partly believe this because I think that practically speaking, we can do it without a substantial reduction in living standards, if we start using carbon taxes effectively, and streamline nuclear regulations to the point where it's actually viable again.

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