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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 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.

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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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.

I'd rather have a system set-up where we don't have to trust the people in charge with not ending the world :). They should not have the power to unilaterally do so.

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