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srid  18d ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 17d ago   2978 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 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.

It takes years for it to come down, and some of the possible failure modes can't wait years (e.g. crop failure).

Well you don't go crazy with it all at once, you add a little more till you get the climate you want. If we were on on the edge of crop failure we would pull back.

We're doing the same experiment now, only with zero controls or plans, we may as well take charge.

GHG has nothing to do with incoming shortwave; the only crop-relevant effect is temperature. I don't object to longwave geoengineering such as, y'know, air capture or olivine beaches; that's bounded to stuff we're fucking with anyway, as you say.

I object to shortwave geoengineering via aerosols and such, because there are other effects than temperature and some of those could have dire consequences. Almost everything in the Earth system comes back to sunlight in one way or another; you fuck with it at your peril.

We already are fucking with it, so does nature, volcanoes etc.. at least this would be on purpose and controlled.

The amount they're talking about doing, to cool Earth by over a degree, is more than any volcano in recorded history, and the eruptions that even came close caused worldwide famines (most notoriously, the Year Without a Summer). As such, I am not assuaged.

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