The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science | Hacker News Reader

The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science

blog.dilbert.com

As I have posted in the past [1], you do not need to be an expert to understand the basics of global warming. You need to be an expert to doubt it.

That's why it is so significant that so few scientists doubt it. Not because reality depends on some sort of popular vote of scientists, but because expertise increases the opportunity for doubt.

Also: you are reading about a scientific topic on the blog of someone who got famous for drawing cartoons. Ask yourself, if you are a developer, how seriously you would take a blog post from Scott Adams about whether bubble sort is actually faster than quicksort.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961996

From [1]

>kapitza 19 days ago [-]

>This is slightly misleading. What we've understood for a century is the thermal forcing due to CO2, which is a logarithmic function of the CO2 concentration (ie, forcing == O(log n) in CO2 concentration). What we don't understand (unless we decide GCMs are predictive and can be validated) is the impact of a given thermal forcing on planetary temperature. This is the "climate sensitivity." Unfortunately, this is the number we actually care about. If climate sensitivity is low (negative feedback), Earth is thermally buffered and we have to worry less. If climate sensitivity is high (positive feedback), the opposite. (Note also that Arrhenius, the discoverer of this effect, and pretty much everyone through the '60s, assumed that global warming was a positive side effect of burning fossil fuel, just from the preindustrial assumption that warm winters and high crop yields are good for humanity.)

Kapitza is agreeing with me, although he/she might not realize it.

Climate sensitivity is just shorthand for the question of how harmful global warming is going to be. The concept concedes the correctness of the simple model I outline.

As it should, because basic physics would have to be wrong for the simple model to be wrong.

There can be a debate about how much global warming would happen or even, potentially, whether or not there are highly complex forces at work that could potentially cause it to be null. And, there's also the potential question of how much the climate would change given a certain amount of increased energy in the system (global warming just means that there's increased energy in the system). However, it seems like, from the measurements we have seen, there is quite a bit of warming from this and that the climate change is likely to be severe. We're already seeing quite a lot of it and we'll almost certainly see a lot more.

So, sure, there are questions about how bad it'll be. But those questions are just: will this be bad or really bad. They're not: is global warming occurring or not?

My impression is that most of those who doubt human-caused global climate change that is harmful do so for one or both of two general views.

One is religious. As promoted by Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, it is that it is impossible because God controls the atmosphere and would never allow that sort of harm to the human race.

The other is based on conservative economic philosophy. It is that it can't happen because most of the CO2 is being put into the atmosphere through the operations of coporations and the free market, and that these can't possibly cause harm to the human race.

He seems to take the stance that it is safe to ignore problems until they are large problems and he references Y2K as an example. A large part of the reason Y2K wasn't a problem is that fixes went out for potential issues before they happened.

Actually, if you look at the link for "Adam's Law of Slow-Moving Disasters", it states: The idea is that society always avoids global disasters that are slow-moving because we rise to the challenge even when it seems impossible.

In other words, he believes (w.r.t individuals not solving the large problem) its safe to ignore large problems because "we have an unbroken track record of avoiding doom".

A problem with unbroken track records is that they can eventually be broken.

I think it's kinda making the argument of "humanity always avoids large disasters" means that "humanity doesn't need to work to fix large disasters". I think this is wrong and we have avoided most large disasters by actually expending effort to fix them (e.g. Y2K). I think the thesis falls apart if you stop trying to actually attempt to make it better, which is what people are advocating for climate change.

I could easily demonstrate to you that Y2K would be a problem were you to ignore it. It also came with a hard deadline. You could dick around saying, "2% of computer scientists don't think Y2K is real", but come January 1, 2000, you could have been cleaning up a disaster while the rest of the world went on about their day. The disaster would be localized, so no one would care even if your business went under as a result. But you could still fix your code after reality set in, it would just cost you a lot both in expense to fix and lost business.

In contrast to climate change, where we're still arguing about the details. We don't have a hard deadline, and even if we did, it would occur (most likely) after we're all dead. So we get to kick the can down the road a little longer. Should disaster actually strike, I don't think we get the opportunity to do the equivalent of putting four digit years after the fact.

So not a direct comparison, IOW.

Fascinating how the dude says he has no way to validate the science because he's not versed enough, and goes on to explain why climate models are not credible because of their complexity. ...?

He's pointing out a pattern of human behavior, where we can have experts all agree on something, yet still be wrong.

When it comes to something as important as climate change, you'd hope we think about it long and hard from every angle.

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