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srid  7mo ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 7mo ago   4093 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 always thought one of the paradoxes of climate science was that (1) climate modeling is sound enough to project far into the future and determine magnitude, causality, and predict ecological, social, and economic impacts. And (2) geoengineering would be too dangerous because we don't know what the long term effects will be. That's probably not the exact phrasing of the IPCC or other consensus positions, but I don't think it's unreasonably far off either. Very speculative, but I suspect some of the skepticism of climate activism is that the solution always seems to be more socialism, rather than we would like to spend 0.005% of GDP to spray some calcite into the stratosphere.

David Friedman had a post on it where a simple regression modeled the observed phenomenon much better than the complex IPCC models.

It's more than a little suspicious to me that every solution to climate change is something the left already wanted to do for other, unrelated reasons.

Is this true? Many of the proposals you identify with left wing now-more-than-everism emerged as reactions to climate change and other environmental problems. Others are of questionable popularity even on the far left (anti-natalism and mandatory vegetarianism are distinctly marginal position). Beyond that, you have boring centrist proposals like carbon taxes and emissions regulations (in fact, these are prone to being vilified by far left activists for being insufficiently radical, probably because they're more likely to be implemented).

In any event, it seems of little surprise that most proposed solutions for climate change are left-coded when the standard right-wing position is that climate change either isn't real or isn't a problem. The argument takes place almost entirely between the center and the left because the right refuses to participate.

Vegetarianism/Veganism has already been extremely popular on the left due to animal sympathy, and they can be quite pushy about proselytising. Mandatory Veganism is imo a weakman. Anti-natalism is the same; Having less kids has been quite popular on the left (arguably in general) because it means less obligations, more money you can spend on hedonistic pleasures, more time to do whatever you want. In both cases, climate justifications have come long, long after people argued for & adopted the change in the first place.

Also disagree on the second point. If you're actually seriously trying to tackle a problem, you'll usually end up with some technical, politically agnostic solution. If I notice that a certain widely used statistical measure is biased by, say, base rates, then I'll just recalculate it with a correction term, write a proof that the correction term indeed does what it should and maybe write a paper about it. I don't advocate that more BIPOC representation will somehow solve it (well, maybe I'll advocate for more statisticians, but that's not considered political yet). If engineers notice a turbine having a rare but potentially dangerous unexpected failure mode, they'll add a component to compensate or re-design it.

Vegetarianism/Veganism has already been extremely popular on the left due to animal sympathy

The bare minimum requirement to even begin considering the statement "vegetarianism/veganism has already been extremely popular on the left" truthful would be a majority of leftists being vegetarian or vegan, which isn't even true here, where these things probably have a stronger hold on left consciousness than most other countries, and hasn't been remotely true in any of the other countries I've visited and where I've encountered leftists.

FWIW, a large part, possibly majority but at least close to 50%, of our college-educated left-leaning friends (and it's not even unpopular among our non-college-educated friends) is some kind of vegetarian. Among those who aren't, the majority is constantly stressing how little meat they're eating. The line between them is pretty fuzzy, since there's a decent number of people who claim to not eat meat at home, but sometimes outside when there's no other option, and these people will sometimes consider themselves vegetarian anyway, sometimes not. Almost nobody is an unabashed meat eater. As justifications go, animal sympathy is at the top for the stricter vegetarians, health benefits for the less strict (this actually includes myself), climate considerations are generally second line ("and btw it's also good for the climate I've heard").

Surprisingly, this did not greatly change when we became parents; Yes there's very few super-militant vegetarian parents, but we know multiple families where only the children eat meat, not the parents, and eating relatively little meat is actually the norm.

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.

"Never waste a crisis."

The solution to a crisis is always that thing you wanted to do anyway for unrelated reasons. That much just seems like human nature.

More effort, please. We do not allow "I agree!" or "This" or "Nuh-uh" posts.

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.

We are already geoengineering the Earth via agriculture. Apparently it occupies around 11% of the land surface and lets see what we did to that land. In general before agriculture that land was pasture or forests, which have their complex ways to mitigate heat absorption and emission throughout the year. We replaced those with arable land, which for at least 4 months of the year sits barren tilled and mostly wet. This resulted in around 3% of the Earths surface absorbing around twice the usual amount. This is significant and is in line with observed warming trends of the winters in the Northern Hemisphere. If this is the case then the current warming is anthropogenic, not really problematic and will plateau at some point. This can also be mitigated by adjusting tilling practices, but the question arises, do we want to?

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.

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.

You might have noticed these days we (I) don't trust the media and authorities to tell us the sky is blue today. I seriously don't trust these people not to fuck it up and engineer an even greater climate disaster.

That is your prerogative, things still happen.

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.

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Ah, good point that it'd go away before long.

My concern, I guess, would be that people wouldn't stop.

It's not exactly like the goals of climate activists is to achieve some socially and environmentally optimal level of fossil fuel usage, so I see no reason why we'd expect people to self-regulate here.

That said, you're right that it going away makes this unlikely to be too much of a problem.

I think we've seen after 80 years of atomic brinkmanship that most countries aren't actively suicidal, if you started getting below average temps and massive problems from cold weather the relevant authorities would stop the pumping, regardless of what the "coldies" are screaming about; maxing the temp drop to protect against future bad actors etc...

And if the relevant authorities are all "coldies"?

If the relevant authorities are all atomic apocalypse positivists we're also fucked. Yah' just have to trust in people not ending the world sometimes.

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If “more socialism” is a good descriptor for most climate interventions, it’d apply just as well to spraying calcite. Or to building highways, or to national defense, or any number of other collective-action problems. Clearly some of these are judged to be legitimate.

One could flip the argument by observing that communists just love their mass ecological interventions.

I was more referring to statements like (from the IPCC Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report pp. 101)

Redistributive policies across sectors and regions that shield the poor and vulnerable, social safety nets, equity, inclusion and just transitions, at all scales can enable deeper societal ambitions and resolve trade-offs with sustainable development goals.

I'm not even saying it's wrong, but putting redistributive policies ahead of mechanical interventions is what I would argue could be perceived to be driven by a political agenda. That perception can erode trust in the institutions advocating for those interventions, even if the "Equity and Inclusion" and "Scientific Basis" sections are not logically dependent on each other.

I certainly was not making the argument that general public sector works are always bad. Even for things like highways though, there are clearly different strategies that spread the costs and responsibilities differently. For example, the primarily toll-based privately maintained and operated Autoroutes in France vs the free at the point of use Interstate Highway System in the US.

You can do it ancap style with https://makesunsets.com/

That's more or less what I was gesturing at with 0.005% of GDP.

Though I would prefer they not exhaust the worlds supply of helium to do it. It's a very usefully industrial gas, and basically not renewable. Using hydrogen balloons would be much more "sustainable," though not supper feasible to do at small scale. Using their cost projections you actually get ~0.05% of gross world product per year. I assumed you could get the cost down with economies of scale by using some mix calcite substituting for the sulfur and hydrogen substituting for the helium.

I suspect some of the skepticism of climate activism is that the solution always seems to be more socialism

Undoubtedly some of it is that, but it seems likely that the primary driver is the aggregate weight is economic interests and cultural/lifestyle preferences.

A technocratic-capitalistic response that involves stopgap geoengineering + carbon taxes + a transition to net zero emissions is still going to mean a shift from policies that privileges fossil fuel usage, car-centric lifestyles, and low-density development to policies that penalize them. This is bad news if you work in the fossil fuel industry (or just live in a state where the fossil fuel industry is a major economic engine) or like car-centric lifestyle and low-density development. For that matter, it's bad news if you like beef.

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