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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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Approved vaccines are effective, they stop infections at least in 95% of cases on average for 10 years. Covid vaccine was tested in clinical trials which showed strong efficiency preventing infections.

That means that covid vaccines should be mandated to everyone, young and old and they will help to almost eliminate covid via heard immunity, right?

What went wrong with this reasoning? Despite vaccination most people got infected with covid anyway. The protection was short lasting (3-4 months at most). It reduced severity and hospitalizations in elderly though. Other people especially children were not that much affected anyway.

Biology is more complicated than we could infer from a simple graph.

I have no strong opinion about global warming but I am against trivialization of this science. Too many unknowns for me. How believable are the models? How warmer temperatures will affect us? I can see both negative and positive aspects. How much would it cost to prevent that versus to adapt to the change?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01990-8?fromPaywallRec=false

Global GDP is estimated to be 3.2% lower (lower/upper decile: 1.2–5.4%) at +1.5 °C of global warming, compared to a world with no further climate change beyond recent levels. At +3 °C, global GDP decreases by 10.0% (5.1–14.9%).

The damage of climate change, up to 10% of global GDP, is such an enormous sum that it is always cheaper to instead invest in carbon reduction and reduce climate change.

Of course all the same arguments and attitudes from before apply here: If one doesn’t believe in the scientific consensus in climate change why should one believe the financial modeling and projected costs of extreme weather events are correct?

Regarding the comparison and how to deal with uncertainty: I think one main difference is that vaccination was not needed for the survival of civilization. But renewable energy and electrification is needed in any case, sooner or later, because fossil fuels are a limited resource. Even under most optimistic calculations we have only 100-200 years of oil reserves left.

“up to” could mean less than 10%. Could be 1% or whatever. Even if we accept 10% figure, we also expect the GDP to grow more than 10% during this period.

Many suggested measures talk about degrowth. That could have severe impact on our growth, even more than 10%.

That's why I want more detail analysis and our confidence levels about this analysis. Obviously we will need to stop using oil sooner or later but it is not about that. It's about the politics that surround all these decisions.

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