Comment by rybosome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rybosome | Hacker News Reader

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When speaking with people who do not agree with me on the correctness or urgency of global warming, this is the argument I traditionally make: let's examine the worst-case scenarios. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the science, taking it seriously is a logical choice.

The plausible worst-case scenario of charging ahead with measures to combat climate change isn't actually that bad, not to mention the ancillary benefits outlined by Schwarzenegger. Aggressively stimulating the renewables economy would be a death knell for the fossil-fuel industry, which could harm the overall economy (though renewables would also contribute positively). It would be disruptive to sections of the country that are dependent upon the fossil-fuel industry (coal country in Kentucky, for instance), which would be very hard on the people living there. This is certainly bad and should not be done lightly, but it's hardly apocalyptic.

The plausible worst-case scenario of failing to address climate change is _really_ bad, ranging from property destruction all the way to civilizational collapse or even potentially human extinction[1]. In a world with nuclear weapons, large-scale destabilization resulting from famine, drought and loss of land to flooding is a very dangerous thing. The Earth is the only home we have, why even flirt with the possibility of disrupting our currently livable climate?

...and that argument doesn't even take the scientific consensus on the existence of human-cased global warming into account.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Atmospheric_effec...

I think the drawback to your argument is that you're not considering all scenarios. One "worst-case" I can think of is that we charge ahead with measures to combat climate change, harming big parts of the economy in the process, and wind up with the famine, drought, and flooding anyway because we didn't charge ahead with the right measures.

It's extremely important to determine whether the global warming is caused by us or not, and whether or not we can alter global warming whether we caused it or not. If it's mostly natural (and we know the earth has gone through much warmer periods long before we showed up) then the measures we need to take involve protecting our coastal cities and our food and energy supplies. If it's mostly caused by us, then we need to stop doing what's causing it, and probably need to protect our coastal cities and food and energy supplies anyway.

Why does it matter if we caused anything? If the Earth is going to get too hot or too cold for our survival, we should try to stop it. Maybe we haven't affected the climate yet, but if we try we probably can.

It matters because it changes how we would try to stop it. If it's caused by something we're doing, we could just change what we're doing. If it's natural, then we need to find a way to alter nature. That gets into terraforming, which we really don't know how to do, and it'd probably be safer to to learn to live with the climate change rather than trying to stop it.

So, basically, the Precautionary Principle [1]

"The precautionary principle or precautionary approach to risk management states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action."

Perfectly sound, perfectly logical, and the basis of (much the same as you) the argument I present when I find people who either don't understand, or disagree with (a subset of not understanding?) the science.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Here is Lindybeige using that argument to justify why you should hop on one foot, and ban football.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R999ZLlSdI

But I agree that in general it's good principle. For climate change it's not that applicable. It's easy to show that burning oil is good for the economy. It's difficult to show that it's bad for the climate. If we say that Shell needs to show some proof that burning oil is overall good two things will happen: 1. Shell forges bullshit. 2. Everybody keeps burning oil just like today until there is some kind of replacement. Just for practical reasons.

So then it goes to "why we need to invest money to the alternatives". And then that precautionary principle could be applied to that investment.

TL;DR You need to show fossil fuels are bad, for practical reasons.

Isn't this the same as Pascals Wager then? We should pray to God since the upside result is worth the downside cost.

The problem with Pascal's Wager: which God and thus which set of rituals and rules do you follow? You've got quite a selection to choose from. You go from having a simple Yes/No choice to having thousands of choices.

In the case of action against climate change, the downsides of doing something are minimal compared to the downsides of inaction. It's a much more binary choice than what Pascal put forward.

Not to criticize taxing CO2 emissions (which has a solid case), but there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?", sampled from the set of events that respectable scientific movements have demanded immediate action on.

In the 70s, for example, one respected movement held that there would be an overpopulation crisis that justified drastic measures to halt the birth rate. There have been similar movements against nuclear power.

Alternatively, if we took immediate action on the crisis global poverty and got everyone up to Western living standards, that would conflict with the goal of reducing our environmental load. (Just as taking Pascal's Wager for God one conflicts with God 2.)

there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?"

Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming/manufacturing/transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villages, not acidifying oceans, not tainting arable land with heavy metals etc? Belief in a certain God among many seems more variable than reduce pollution, aim for zero.

if we took immediate action on the crisis global poverty and got everyone up to Western living standards, that would conflict with the goal of reducing our environmental load

You make an interesting point - the big one is India which needs cheap energy to bring itself up from having no clean running water, no integrated sewerage system and severe poverty to competing with Europe and the Americas who have reaped the benefit of cheap [polluting] energy for a long time and before emissions were taxed.

But I see it as a benefit, at least in the long term, to start from this stage. Just as African countries have benefited from mobile networks and services like M-Pesa money transfer and microfinancing, never having to deal with maintaining an aging wired telecom infrastructure - India could reap the benefits of starting with a peer-to-peer energy network using residential solar, similar to what Germany has implemented. Of course this would need to be supplemented, however using fewer base load power stations than if it were purely centralized energy production.

>Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming/manufacturing/transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villages, not acidifying oceans, not tainting arable land with heavy metals etc? Belief in a certain God among many seems more variable than reduce pollution, aim for zero.

But what you really want is a method of weighing the harm of a given amount of pollution against the benefit. "Reduce it" doesn't translate into a heuristic for deciding which uses should be targeted first, and regresses to the original problem of "for which crisis is it okay to emit an additional unit of pollution to emit in service of fighting?"

An obvious difference is that we do have scientific models of global climate change that give us at least some evidence, but we lack any such information for the case of the existence of a god.

Except God isn't 97% certain to exist

Pascals wager is a simple false dichotomy, a logical fallacy. It's not a rational argument.

http://www.climateactionreserve.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/...

Exactly. Even if anthropogenic global warming is somehow completely not real, the expected value of acting as if it were real is much much greater. It's kind of like Pascal's wager, except with different probabilities. And millions of scientists.

aggressively stimulating renewables is one thing, but a lot of people are calling for a world wide flat carbon tax. That is a very regressive tax that will hit the poorest the hardest. It will barely register for the average californian, but it will cause many products and services to be priced out of reach from people in developing economies.

So the worst case scenario all depends on what is being proposed.

The "regressive" part of the tax can be mitigated just by rebating some (most?) of the money back to the people who would be most impacted. The rest can be used for R&D into clean energy, power grid improvements, etc.

The bigger issue is making sure the tax is applied consistently everywhere, otherwise we just move polluting industries to countries with lax enforcement and put countries that are enforcing the tax at a disadvantage.

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