I need to understand more about...
… the general take on climate change here.
Please read a little more before voting this down—I am not looking to initiate a debate on climate change—merely to understand what goes on when it is mentioned.
Disclosure: I am personally concerned about the impact of climate change in the medium term; I am largely convinced it is caused by human activity; I can get moralistic about it. I won’t push any of that in this discussion.
I am a relatively recent habituee of the these fora, and mostly I find it full of entertaining, intelligent people talking thoughtfully about things that interest/concern me. I’m pleased—this is rare. Thanks, all.
I searched for mentions of climate change, and read some threads. I got the impression that a majority viewpoint here was that it is not an issue that concerns people here. I got the further impression that it is an issue which arouse feelings of irritation or worse in a significant minority of people here.
Neither of these impressions were strong enough to give me any useful level of certainty, though.
So I thought Will Newsome’s wonderful Irrationality Game post might help me with an experiment.
I posted the following:
“Human activity is responsible for a significant proportion of observable climate change. 90% confidence”
I expected (in the topsy turvy context of that post) to get UPvoted, as I assumed a majority of viewers would disagree. I hoped to see some comments which would help clarify my weak impressions.
In fact, I got downvoted (-7), suggesting fairly significant agreement. At the same time, the comment is invisible (to my attempts) in the list of comments to the post, leading me to suspect that it has been removed by a moderator (perhaps on the grounds that CC is viewed as ‘political’?).
Can anyone help me? I do not intend to use anything here as a platform for pushing an agenda—I’d just like to understand.
The comment is invisible because you haven’t adjusted your settings to have comments with a score below −2 visible to you. When I clicked on your overview (your name) it was there, and when I ctrl-f-ed your name it was there with −7 and “comment score below threshhold, no children”
Thank you
EDIT—I’ve tried altering my prefs and still can’t find my post—even though I CAN find ones with scores <-30...
My own brief and mostly ignorant thoughts: Climate change is probably anthropogenic. Climate change is possibly very dangerous, with, say, as a wild guess, a 10% chance of having severe socioeconomic worldwide repercussions, conditional on no AGI and no nanotech. There seem to be various easy ways to solve or ameliorate the problem (pumping stuff into the atmosphere or oceans), and if it came down to it, I think we’d implement those. The relevant nanotech doesn’t seem incredibly difficult. Trying to cut down on carbon emissions seems obviously insane. Moralizing about the virtues of being green sounds obviously insane unless you’re a politician or liberal socialite. If you find yourself caring deeply about climate change, your time would probably be better spent caring about bigger, more urgent, and less well-funded problems, like aging/death, or existential risks.
Well, I promised I wouldn’t, so I won’t, but there are lots of broad statements without justification here, that I would love to expand.
Nevertheless my actual question is being answered, if you and SarahC are at all representative (obviously, I understand that many other opinions will exist). Climate change IS seen as a serious threat, but the idea of changing lifestyles/direction of industrilaisation is seen variously as difficult/impossible/not objectively worthwhile—so we’ll deal with the consequences as they arise.
On the personal level, yes to an extent. If the government wasn’t crazy then of course changing the direction of industrialization would be best (after funding tons of existential risks research groups). But in the real world, for any sufficiently advanced social engineering project the quickest and easiest fix is to just build god. (Vassar said something like that.)
There are lots of us here who broadly support the scientific consensus on climate change.
My own brief and mostly ignorant thoughts:
Yes, climate change is happening and mostly anthropogenic. (I believe this not because I’ve studied arguments and counterarguments, but because this is the claim that several public “global warming skeptics” have changed their minds to believe; there’s a good bit of diversity among people who think AGW exists.)
I’m really skeptical that we can do anything about climate change through policy. I’ve seen the kinds of bills that get passed in the US; they don’t actually reduce carbon emissions on net. I’ve seen what happens at international meetings; poorer countries want a chance to industrialize too. A third option would be exhorting people to live green—but to actually have an effect on climate change, we’re not talking a few CFL bulbs, we’re talking a complete overhaul of one’s lifestyle, and most people (myself included) are not willing to live like that. Many simply can’t.
I’ve also seen convincing arguments that, even giving ideal policy and angelic people, the cost of mitigating climate change isn’t worth the benefit.
So basically I think we’re all going to die. In rich countries we’ll buy our way out of most of the trouble, and feel it mostly in higher prices and water rations in desert regions and truly nauseating summers. People in poor Equatorial countries will actually have humanitarian catastrophes. The rest of us won’t care very much.
You may be curious about this information collecting project. Concerning “skeptical that we can do anything … through policy”: Just a few months before people teared down the Berlin wall, even the most respected researchers in sociology and economy estimated that East-Germany would last at least one hundret years more. Like cold war, which was generally extected to be solvable only by politics, but that this should be extremly complicated. Actually, it was easy. (And even more urgent than everyone had guessed, as an aquaintance had researched.
Warning, “there should be” statement ahead: How good a measure of truth do we think this method provides? There should be a source that analyzes what (and what type) of minds have been changed to and from positions on all Big Issues, the diversity of types of minds on each side, stratification of contrarian and meta-contrarian positions. Perhaps Take On It could or already does serve in this capacity? Is there something to this; a meta-memetic analysis of widely held beliefs?
My position is that I don’t know what’s going to happen with the climate, because the whole topic has become so murky with politics that acquiring a reliable grasp of the truth for laymen like myself would take more effort than I’m willing to invest.
I do, however, think I can say something about the proposed solutions. Most of them fall into two broad categories.
Let’s give governments more power to control our lives. I think this is a terrible idea, regardless of what the climate is or isn’t doing, for reasons adequately discussed elsewhere.
Lets push harder to develop and deploy practical, renewable energy sources. I think this is a great idea, the more so because there are several good reasons we need to be doing it, not just climate. Wider deployment of nuclear energy, with further improvements in cleanliness and safety; cheaper solar panels; electric cars; oil from algae; investments in these have been paying off already. Let’s do it some more.
So my position seems to be one of epistemological apathy but instrumental optimism; oddly, more or less the reverse of some of the other comments.
Climate change is probably happening. Whether it is caused by human activity is a moot question; either way, the idea that it can be stopped by “simply” not burning as much fuel appears to be a wishful delusion.
I’m curious why nobody seems to be jumping in on the skeptical side.… I know I’m not the only climate skeptic on here, because my comments on the topic seem to get upvoted, yet nobody ever seems to actually post in agreement, just upvote. Perhaps my fellow skeptics just avoid the topic in order to stay clear of the “no current politics” rule… although this introduces an asymmetry, in that people who hold the consensus view don’t shy away from mentioning it (perhaps because they don’t view it as being political), so you end up hearing from only one side.
If you squint at it just right, you could even view this as a microcosm of the climate change debate in general.
I’m curious as to why people don’t think policy to ameliorate climate change is reasonable. While governments are often disappointing, Paul Krugman at least seems to think that significant progress can be made to make global warming palatable at a reasonable cost (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?_r=1).
Disclaimer: I know little about climate change, but my impression was that Krugman is competent at his job.
http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Saul+Griffith#climate_change_recalculated_3
James Hansen, who is quoted in that article, claims that “changes needed to reduce global warming do not require hardship or reduction in the quality of life, but will also produce benefits such as cleaner air and water, and growth of high-tech industries” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#cite_note-53). I remain very confused as to why everyone seems convinced that stopping climate change is a hopeless cause.