'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will mention | Hacker News Reader

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will mention

theguardian.com

99 pointsrbanffy121 comments

We don't hear enough serious talk like this. Dr. James Hansen called out the problem as Scientific Reticence [1].

While I'm not certain that CO2 is the primary driver of climate change, it's clear that there are wildly out of norm changes occurring. Minimum Arctic sea ice extent is one of the main measurements that I've started paying attention to lately, and it's been outside of, or close to the -2s mark for five of the last seven years compared to a 1981-2010 average [2].

According to the IPCC things will be very bad somewhere near the end of the century, and according to Guy McPherson civilization is coming to an end within the next ten years [3]. There's a huge variation in time frame and severity in predictions, but it's clear that climate change is already severely affecting certain groups of people, and changes are occurring faster than expected [4].

[1] http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/2016/03/24/dangerous-scientific-...

[2] https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqIt93dDG1M

[4] http://www.fasterthanexpected.com/

"While I'm not certain that CO2 is the primary driver of climate change..."

The alternatives being methane, increased albedo, loss of biomass...?

And emission of methane and other hydrocarbons from thawing permafrost. Plus changes in global ocean currents. Plus emissions of sulphide and nitride into atmosphere.

The answer is all of the above and they feed into each other. The main question that remains is whether we should try to attack CO2 or methane emissions first. Which will be more cost effective and more attainable in short term.

Ok, thanks. I misunderstood, worried tejohnso was ‘skeptical’ (denier). Agree on thawing permafrost, don’t know anything about atmospheric sulphides & nitrides (will read up, thanks).

Regarding (human) emissions, sure, reduce at best available speed. But now that warming is self sustaining, we need to aggressively sequester, and hopefully figure out ways to slow and reduce ongoing methane release.

I don't think skeptics and "deniers" should be considered equivalent. One group endeavours to verify facts before accepting them, while the other ignores facts or deliberately misrepresents them.

> I don’t think skeptics and "deniers" should be considered equivalent.

You’re right in that they’re not equivalent, but often deniers (of any widely supported viewpoint) have learned to speak in terms of skepticism in order to deflect criticism of their denial. They say “oh, I’m a skeptic”, but provide the same stale arguments, and when those arguments are refuted (yet again), they don’t move their position one jot. They just retreat, and bring them up again at the next opportunity.

So no, they’re not the same, but plenty of people are suspicious of “skeptics”, having run into too many that don’t argue in good faith.

So would you say you're... skeptic of skeptics?

IMHO our only hope are technologies that actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, i.e. "unburn" the fossil fuels we used so far. Turning massive amounts of biomass into charcoal and burying it seems to be the most low-tech solution. That's even an energy positive process. But maybe we need faster methods to avoid catastrophe.

Do you have any references for the process you describe? It sounds interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

It's not hard. You light a decent amount of wood and let in burn in an oxygen poor atmosphere, e.g. by covering it with sand. You get a bunch of charcoal, which you then bury. Charcoal is stable in the ground for a couple of millennia.

Who supplies the fuel though? It's not like charcoal forms at low temperatures...

Making charcoal is an exothermic process. You only need a little bit extra fuel to get it started.

It's called biochar. I don't have specific recommendations, but searching the term on Google and Amazon will turn up a lot of resources.

This is pretty fast. From memory regrowing tropical forests can fix 20 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. Most of these forests are slash-and-burned on a 30 to 50 year cycle that is carbon neutral, but a slash-and-char approach of about 30% of the forests would capture our total carbon output [0]. It would also have the nice side effect of providing local jobs to some of the poorest people in the world.

0. Research I did when I was an academic and never published. I really should get around to finishing it.

This sounds like a quick, easy and effective solution. Why is nobody doing this?

Probably because there is no quarterly profit associated with it.

Is there money in it?

Because the people who have the money to do it have absolutely no immediate incentive to do it.

We don't have a global political consensus that we should be spending massive amounts of money to reduce global warming at all and, more importantly, who will be paying for that.

A few reasons, but the major one is the lack of money interested in actually doing something about pulling the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

I actually worked on a solution for the money problem too (I got a bit obsessed with doing something about climate change back in 2007). This I have written about if anyone is interested [0].

0. https://www.tillett.info/2015/12/13/preventing-global-climat...

>Turning massive amounts of biomass into charcoal and burying it seems to be the most low-tech solution

If you've found a way to convince people to do that wouldn't it be easier to just not burn coal for energy? Or do you mean doing it at such a massive scale we reverse the net flow of coal from the ground to the atmosphere?

Not burning coal kills the job market for coal miners. Presidents have been elected on promises of keeping them employed. Burying more charcoal than the amount of coal we dig out creates jobs ("clean coal" can even be reused as a slogan!), and you can sell the energy you get from burning the wood gas.

There's not many coal miners, don't worry about that. 50000 in usa, just pay them all to not work.

Or pay them to be coal sequesterers.

Not sure if clever satire.

>Or do you mean doing it at such a massive scale we reverse the net flow of coal from the ground to the atmosphere?

We have no other choice. We either do that or it's possible that somebody is alive today who will see the collapse of human civilization.

There's always a choice. Even assuming that "We either do that or it's possible that somebody is alive today who will see the collapse of human civilization." is literally true (it's debatable - even the worst case scenarios stop at major population reduction, but quite a few areas would do no worse than the aftermath of a major war), choosing not to take major action and accept that the destruction will happen is not only possible, but actually very, very plausible for all kinds of political reasons. I'd be willing to bet with more than 50% odds that those who can do that will choose not to do actions like this and that plans like this won't actually be done.

There is no way that human civilization collapses because of climate warming.

Among all higher life forms (fish, reptiles, mammals and even most plants), humans with technology are the most robust.

Some billionaires waste even time and money for the colonization of dead spaces like Mars or the Moon.

You're assuming that we don't drive the entire ecosystem into the wall. The life forms with the highest chance of survival are bacteria, and maybe cockroaches and other insects, because of their fast reproduction rate and associated fast evolution.

Not burning coal is a critical first step, but at this point we already have enough CO2 in the atmosphere to cause serious damage, especially considering feedback effects.

What about mega structures...like super huge 'sun glasses' or shades that partially block sun rays from hitting earth so we can cool the planet that way? Maybe we just deal with 'near ice age' like weather for a couple years... we let the sun shine on farms only, block it for most other places forcing winter-like conditions year-round until the icecaps re-freeze...

And where would we find the resources to build something like that? Let alone move it to orbit.

We're passed the point of no return... because the ice has melted, permafrost is about to unleash a feedback loop that will warm us even more. I'm not sure if we could remove all c02 from the atmosphere today, if that would have a net effect. -- We need to find a way to recool and rebuild the ice deposits we've lost at the north/south pole and refreeze all the permafrost -- that's the only real long-term solution... -- As for resources for something like this...no effing idea, it'll cost in the trillions... maybe Bezo's could get it done, or Elon ... If we could get space mining going we could mine the resources needed in space, and build it on the moon to make it easier to launch... We could also make it modular so we don't need to build it all at once but could build it in portions...

Bottom line, we need a space elevator.

It's not clear if a space elevator on earth is physically possible.

On tiny scales, carbon bonds have sufficient strength/weight ratio so that the elevator might support it's own weight, but there's not that much margin left. As the macrostructure likely requires a multiple of weight, to account for the fact that a kilometers-long string can't be manufactured perfect to the single atom, and that damage can and will occur (e.g. any radiation), etc, etc - according to our current knowledge of physics it might as well be that a sufficiently strong macroscale material for an Earth-sized space elevator cannot exist. Moon or Mars is a different issue, though.

The melting arctic ice sheets cause an influx in cold freshwater in the north atlantic which works to slow the rate of thermohaline circulation, which is responsible for bringing warm sea water (energy) to the poles which accelerates melting. It's a big unknown what exactly will happen, but it's possible that the damages of climate change are less than projected if the thermohaline circulation slows sufficiently to bail out the world until it can start reducing carbon emissions cost effectively.

Or it could go the other way. No one is sure what happens if the major currents change. Northern Europe should probably get ready for a cold spell.

Space-based reflectors on the scale of 600,000 square miles could cost about $800B if we could get transport costs down to $50/kg, it'd cost about $400 Trillion at the current cost.

It is probably cheaper to confer cities with huge geodesic domes with high reflectivity and deal with excess heat.

Ecosystems may have some trouble with it.

With the amount of energy it takes to bring anything to orbit, I suspect a ground based solution that just recaptures CO2 or regrows trees is going to be much more cost effective.

There is some interesting work being done that also restores topsoil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svNg5w7WY0k

One begins to wonder if there's going to be a future business in climate modification. Could the UN spend money to pay for a reduction in world wide temperature?

This isn't all hypothetical either. Release a large quantity of sulfur dioxide, like one sees in a volcanic eruption, and you can measurably reduce the global temperature for a year or two. Capture carbon or other greenhouse gases and bury them. Somehow reflect a large amount of sunlight from hitting the Earth. Probably a dozen other good ideas exist- this is hacker news, I'm sure we could invent a hundred more.

The only challenge is going to be convincing the powers that be that it's on their economic interest to pay you to do so. But as sea level rise, it may quickly become self evident.

This is called Geoengineering and most proposals mimic some form of natural effect that reduces net energy absorbed by the earth. It actually is significantly cheaper to reduce the physical effects of greenhouse gas emissions than it is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions themselves. Cloud ships which turn seawater into clouds to reflect light back into space before it hits the darker ocean beneath sounds like an interesting plan, but the issue with geoengineering is it does little for ocean acidification.

>The only challenge is going to be convincing the powers that be that it's on their economic interest to pay you to do so. But as sea level rise, it may quickly become self evident.

I don't believe the idea that hurt from climate crisis spurs sufficient action. Our time horizon shrinks during crisis.

Any corrective actions starts to have an effect decades in the future. Once the sea level raise starts to inflict "unbearable pain" all money is channeled to treat the acute consequences. If governments go to emergency mode, they put trillions to relocating people, solving immediate food crisis, stopping hunger , fighting military conflicts etc. All the cool technical solutions requiring trillions in investment go out of the window.

The trouble is, nobody is equipped for this large scale of interventions. Cool technical solutions will be required, such as genetic adaptation, building nanostructures with internal climate systems, artificial islands etc. And power sources and/or ethical changes to run all of this.

Let's do an exercise as presented in the article and accept CO2 level increases are irreversible:

The Jurassic had 5 times more CO2 than today. [1]

Modern climate change is slower than the K-T mass extinction event, when photosynthesis was halted. [2]

[1] https://www.livescience.com/44330-jurassic-dinosaur-carbon-d...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous–Paleogene_extinctio...

> Modern climate change is slower than the K-T mass extinction event

We haven't seen how fast our change can get. We are not over out own mass extinction event yet.

What conclusion are we meant to draw from that exercise?

Humans: Better for Earth than being hit by a giant asteroid

Human carbon release rate is unprecedented in the past 66 million years of Earth's history [2016] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160321123656.h...

Otherwise, I can't imagine what point you're trying to make.

No one said that CO2 level increases are irreversible. Just that they're pretty much irreversible on the required time scales.

We can deal with small and fast changes, or big and slow changes, but not big and fast. The problem is not the CO2 levels themselves, or the heat, or even the climate. Life can exist and thrive in phenomenally hostile environments. It's the speed and size of the shift. Life needs time to adapt, depending on its size (which is why almost nothing >25 kg survived the K-T event).

I'm comfortable when my car goes from 60 mph to 0 in half a minute. I'm not going to be comfortable when my car goes from 60 mph to 0 in a second.

Additionally, what "life" are we talking about? We know about certain lifeforms existing in hostile environments, but can we talk about humans?

To quote George Carlin: The Earth will be fine, you're screwed though.

> "The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels."

Climate change is a problem of grave concern but isn't doomsaying a hyperbole? Most countries plan to make transportation fully electric by 2040. But even without that, the cost of green energy is going down every year. The moment—which might be forthcoming in a few years—when owning a fossil fuel vehicle becomes an exorbitant deal, people will switch in droves.

And it will still be too late. It's already too late. That's the point of the article.

Like being in a car going 60 mph and there's a cliff 100 feet away... But we're not talking about braking, we're arguing about by how much we should take our foot off the gas pedal.

That's a great analogy.

It's not hyperbole when it's an absolute... we've passed a point where we can't come back from without some MAJOR scientific breakthroughs -- think a huge megastructure like a dyson sphere that controls how much 'heat' hits the earth and acts as a thermometer basically... Or something that can filter all air in the entire world for carbon and remove it 100%... Even then we'll need to figure out a way to rebuild the arctic and antarctica so the permafrost doesn't escape--the gas in the permafrost will unleash a huge cycle of warming that will be hard to stop once it starts.

Wouldn't a large forest act like a carbon filter? Something we could easily start with our current level of technology.

Forests can be carbon sinks, but they'll need water and sunlight, as well as fertile soils.

Could be; we will see.

But, let’s say we get past this, and in a few decades or hundred years, a large asteroid (or similarly existential imminent threat) appears. I surely hope that Humanity doesn’t opt, again, to assume that the market will solve it. [That would be a good comedy skit though.]

Targets in 2040 or 2050 make me laugh, for one it's just politicians making statements to make some people feel good, and for another, in 20 years it'll be a bit late.

Targets for 2040 and 2050 are required.

The problem is what targets will be determined for 2020, 2030, 2040 and 2050.

Several Trillions of dollars have been wasted just to finance war in the Middle East.

Support of the fossil fuel industry and wars and military and waste of time and money and lack of technological investment is the shame and inexcusable guilt of politicians and the democratic majority worldwide for the last 50 years.

> Targets for 2040 and 2050 are required.

Unless politicians of 2030 decide it's 2050 and 2060.

This is one generation of politicians making commitments the next couple generations of politicians will have to honor.

If we want to have any chance of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees we would need to stop emitting any carbon dioxide at all a lot sooner than that.[1] I'm really pessimistic that we'll manage to do that.

[1] http://trillionthtonne.org/

We won't limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees, and we won't stop emitting any carbon dioxide any time soon, that's not likely to happen.

The question is how do we adapt to living in a warmer world, and what actions we might take, say, 30 years later when we'll have actually moved away from fossil fuels, to reduce the damage further on.

While it'd be preferable to take a large action now instead of much, much larger corrective actions in the future; the former is so extremely unlikely that we should plan for the latter.

That would have been great 20 or 30 years ago. As the article mentions, even if we went zero emission right in this instant, it is unlikely that the feedback loop we have started will stop (some models predict an ice age or a delay as the heat exchange between equator and poles stops)

>But even without that, the cost of green energy is going down every year. The moment—which might be forthcoming in a few years—when owning a fossil fuel vehicle becomes an exorbitant deal, people will switch in droves.

This is one case where the market based approach simply cannot deliver. The objectives of continued growth and reduced emissions cannot be reconciled. Energy consumption is directly tied to global consumption and hence growth. [1]

The fallacy that increasing energy efficiency will somehow allow us to mitigate climate change whilst maintaining the growth rates we're accustomed to has no empirical or theoretical basis. Classical economics failed to recognise that energy is a factor of production akin to labour and land. Once we account for this growth becomes endogenous and there is no longer any reason to assume that perpetual growth is sustainable. [2] As long as economic growth remains the primary goal any efficiency gains (manifesting as lower energy prices) will simply be cannibalised through increased consumption. [3]

Simply put, we are past the point where 'sustainable growth' is a possibility; as long as growth remains paramount and economic incentives do not change then the choice between growth and sustainability has already been made. The cake is disappearing slice by slice.

[1] http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

"Green enery'. Realize that much of it is just a greenwash. Example: in my country there is now an assault on every last tree. Why? Well, 'biomass' lobbies succeeded in having 'wood-pellets' declared as 'renewable' (they aren't, even appart from the ludicrous lag in the process still >30% is 'wasted' in the cycle). This means that in order to avoid a European fine tied to the government reaching a certain level of renewables by 2020, they are now strip clearing all public land and turning into wood-pellets for burning.

The minister in charge has even admitted it is ludicrous, but he will not change the policy as he does not want to risk the EU fine.

I see the problem to be that any investment in greenhouse gas reduction now takes away from present consumption or other investments so that future generations can benefit, but it is generally considered that as time goes on people get more wealthy. Furthermore, it'd take significant emissions reductions commitments from the US and China in an international climate agreement to make any progress, while countries like Maldives, Turkey, etc benefit greatly.

Basically the incentives arent necessarily aligned because not all countries will be impacted the same by climate damages. Although, economists consider climate damages to be externalities which are market failures that cause economic inefficiency. I believe that with the right carbon tax, unpaid externalities can be resolved by correcting the price of energy such that the future damages are accounted for. The issue again is no nation can agree to anything on an international scale and steps to decarbonizing must start from the bottom up.

You recognize the real problem. It's the incentives and time horizon that dooms us. It has never been the case that we don't have a solution. There is always a technical solution but it does not matter. We had several solutions decades ago, we have several solutions now, we have even more in the future.

Our incentive structure means that we can only modulate the intensity of hell for the future generations with our electric cars, next 30-50 years is already locked in.

We are not willing to invest enough. Economic analysis puts the current cost of timely and sufficient corrective action around 0.5 to 1 percent of global GDP. That would be a real cost and money out of other things. Even concerned voters don't want to hear that. They want to hear green jobs and green growth. You can't sell actions as a net cost and sacrifice.

When the effects really hit it's too late. The idea that people take an action when it really hurts does not apply to climate change. If the global GDP stats decrease and we are constantly in recession and conflicts survival values take precedence. Investments go to military, food security and welfare and climate actions get little or no attention. Many developed countries will be at least 'okayish'. If the price of wheat and rice increases 500% they still make it. It's the others who die. We could develop carbon capture and suck the CO2 out of air but nobody wants to invest trillions into something extra that has noticeable effect 30-40 years from now when there is constant downturn.

Unaccounted externalities aren't a 'market failure', they are exactly what the market is optimizing for. even if you could ever get support for the accounting you propose (you wouldn't, as no popular politician will truly sacrifice for it), you'd still be fighting the 'creativity' of the market to find exploitable loopholes in ever escalating ways.

The endless rolling stream of ‘we’ve only got x years left to do something’ from scientists does seem rather suspicious

Alternatively, they could say: "It's already too late", but then surely nobody would do anything.

It's better to keep coming up with new goals, so they can say "Do something in the next X years or Y" will happen. Then at least we might be able to prevent something.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16929405

Want to make the US carbon zero? Plant and maintain a forest 5x the size of New Zealand on a cheap piece of land somewhere.

Or just start a damn carbon tax priced at the cost of offsetting the carbon. Which will turn out to be so freaking cheap, almost certainly less than ~$10/tonne. To put this in perspective, you know how air travel makes you a terrible person? Well not if you offset with a dollar of trees per hour of airtravel.

What pisses me off most about climate change is that it is stupidly easy to solve. Offsetting the 5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum the US produces would cost at most $50B per annum. And I suspect a lot less if you actually put some thought into it, or better yet, got market forces to work on it.

Those cheap areas with no trees would need irrigation (fed by what?) and ridiculous tons of organic matter. You can’t just plant a tree in the desert and call it a day. The carbon market is a shell game and this is why.

It can be done, maybe not on literal desert but on what is currently marginal farmland. People do it on smaller scales and offset at a rate of less than $10/tonne.

>> ...or better yet, got market forces to work on it.

This is not an area where market forces can work. Market forces got us to where we are now. There will never be a healthy free market for carbon sequestration. It is an energy-negative activity. Absent artificial stimulus, it ain't going to happen.

Government is for doing what the market (ie Freedom!) cannot. This is a multi-decade problem for which open markets are ill-equipped. We need massive government intervention. This is an area where we need to take tax dollars and spend them directly on both reducing carbon output (now) and active sequestration once that becomes more efficient than further reductions.

In New Zealand, the government buys drugs from pharmeceutical companies. There is no reason why the US government cannot buy carbon offset from the free market, using the revenue generated from a carbon tax. There will be monitoring/inspection issues, to ensure the carbon is actually being sequestered, but this doesn't make it impossible.

Because carbon offset is a shell game. Paying people to not emit at X so that other people can emit at Y opens too many loopholes. The desire for profit by cutting corners and cheating will creep in. Emissions need to be directly curtailed. W don't need "if you want to burn, pay someone else to not burn." We need "thou shall not burn", or at lease "thou shall burn less tomorrow than thou didst yesterday."

It's not "pay someone else not to burn", it's "pay someone else to eat all the carbon you are spitting out". It would totally work, and it's the only way to get to zero emission.

Does I matter from where the intervention comes from?

We probably can't just do one thing and wait.

We probably have to try all the things.

This completely ignores the fact that climate change is not local problem, as well as the difficulty that has preceded all previous attempts at multilateral action.

Good luck convincing the manfucaturing lobby that they should have to pay additional carbon taxes when their foreign competitors already enjoy significantly lower regulatory costs. All that a carbon tax would acheive is carbon leakage, with production eventually being shifted abroad. [1]

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

Everyone massively overestimates the actual cost of offsetting carbon. $50B more tax per annum on the US economy is jack shit. It's like 1% of the current US federal tax. It's barely gonna affect any industry. No-one will change their ways. And yet it will get us to carbon zero.

That is just USA. Then we need to get China, India and Russia on board...

The key word is "then". That is the right word. Arguing that the US can't move first is like arguing that we can't have a proper democracy and proper human rights in the US until China, India and Russia all agree they will do the same.

"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

My understanding is that the climate sensitivity per doubling of CO2 is about 3 degrees celsius; if we keep putting CO2 into the atmosphere at our current rate we'll get to one doubling in about 56 years; therefore we'll probably wind up at one doubling or a bit less by the time we go completely renewable. That would be around 2.5 degrees of warming. Which is very bad, but not civilization-ending. Have I missed something?

A fascinating talk, and a counter viewpoint from a top physicist:

"Freeman Dyson on the Global Warming Hysteria" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs

One who is supremely unqualified for commenting on this topic and an outlier within the mass of scientists.

Science is about seeking the truth, not "mass" numbers.

I'll take a well-informed, nuanced opinion of Dyson, a colleague of Einstein and Feynman, over "The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet" (actual quote! the hubris) social scientist any day of the week.

I realize this is an emotional, politically charged topic. It's unlikely anyone's changing their mind, one way or another.

> Science is about seeking the truth, not "mass" numbers.

Oh yes, how convenient that this argument is used to basically say "scientific consensus is wrong, science goes by truth, not by consensus". How odd that scientific consensus always seems to converge around the truth.

> I'll take a well-informed colleague of Einstein and Feynman over "The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet" (actual quote! the hubris) social scientist any day of the week.

And all those colleagues say the situation is dire.

The consensus per ipcc is that agw is very unlikely to lead to human extinction.

That doesn't mean it's fun.

Or that more than a couple million could possibly survive and repopulate the Earth.

This is banking on the assumption that ocean ecosystems will adapt to vastly acidified and warmer waters...

(Or that we will help them via introducing GM species.)

Later effects would be acidified soil. In large enough amounts, the results look like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Triangle_(region)

Again, we are talking about human extinction. The stakes are pretty high and I'm sure at least one group would set aside the resources to preserve a minimum viable number of humans (and a lot of fertilized eggs) along with enough environment to sustain them long enough.

Extinction implies all humans will die. That's very unlikely, even if the planet takes a very significant hit.

> I'll take a well-informed, nuanced opinion of Dyson, a colleague of Einstein and Feynman ...

I'm sorry, but being a colleague of Einstein and Feynman is not a qualification.

Einstein famously rejected quantum mechanics because he felt that God would not create a world where it can be true. Feynman (a personal hero of mine) did not brush his teeth because he thought there was not sufficient scientific evidence that it helps keep them healthy.

History is full of brilliant people who make mistakes.

Freeman Dyson has not done sufficient research to reach the conclusion that he has, and he certainly hasn't gone back to look at how the predictions have panned out (both from the climate change camp and other one). He is a charlatan when it comes to climate science.

It is not wise to worship any single person and accept their claims uncritically, and an appeal to an authority is usually a weak argument.

I agree with most of what you said.

(with the caveat that unless you're an expert yourself, common sense and appeal to authority are about all you have)

> Freeman Dyson has not done sufficient research to reach the conclusion that he has

Out of curiosity, which conclusion is particular are you talking about? Let's be specific—the strawmen have received enough beating today already.

It doesn't matter, though. The way your brain is wired, if you read one article denying climate change for every article you read that warns about it, your brain will consider the two hypotheses about equally likely, and you'll probably believe the more comforting one.

That way, it doesn't matter that there's a shitload of significant evidence to one and only circumstantial evidence to the other. Your brain just goes by volume.

You are absolutely correct. However, it’s still important to vocally disagree with opinions that dismiss the impact of climate change. It could prevent observers from falling into the trap of thinking those old and tired red herrings lead to some undiscovered path that the rest of us have missed.

Oh yes, certainly.

Accusing Dyson, of all people, of "believing comforting hypotheses"…

And why jump to the strawman of "denying climate change" right away? Did you actually watch the interview? You might be feeling righteous zeal, but ideological lenses don't do people any good in the long run. That is exactly Dyson's point.

By reading his Wikipedia page, I felt that he would be able to form an informed opinion on the matter. Why do you think he is "supremely unqualified"?

Exact quote from his Wikipedia page: "m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have".

Sounds unqualified to me. Knowing the technical facts seems like it would be important.

Really how is he supremely unqualified for stating his opinion on this? He is a fucking legendary physicist and when compared to the guy who is quoted in this article he has way more credibility. The article takes pains to refer to Mayer Hillman as a "social scientist" but he is not even that kinda of "scientist" he has a degree in Architecture and has worked as a city planner. He has never worked as a scientist in his life. Look I think climate change is a real issue that needs addressed but we can't let these so called "social scientists" spew bullshit and then wonder why people are losing trust in real science.

Climate change policy is a political and moral issue, not a scientific matter. Science can certainly inform that debate, but it cannot give an objective answer to what we should actually do. The world is more complicated than a simple lab experiment where you can control the variables. Social scientists are eminantly qualified to advise in those kind of situations.

It can certainly give us what we should actually do.

Reduce all carbon emissions to zero, effective immediately, to minimize the damage caused by the feedback loop we started here.

The policy we implement will of course weigh in the various problems with that approach and delay the zero emissions goal.

Man made climate change might have been a scientific issue 50 years ago but science has been clear for several decades and politicians should have reacted very differently.

Only science can give an objective answer about what we can and should do. Politicians should inform people about the scientific facts and not waste time and money with insane debates of the facts and too optimistic targets.

I actually think history will look back on the carbon blanket with thanks. Without the warmth of the carbon blanket the earth would likely be entering an Ice age, based on the cycle of energy release of the sun which is entering a long cycle of which the last minimum presented as an Ice age. By protecting ourselves with the carbon blanket we actually are protecting our civilization and giving ourselves enough time to tech past our survival being so critically linked to the sun.

I am not convinced of this.

I think I would need calculated study into the interrelated variables involved before I would begging to entertain this idea.

If there is really nothing we can still do, the best thing to do is to go on with our lives, and forget about it.

Business and entertainment.

Climate change seems too much to me like a stick being used to advance an agenda. Whenever a solution is proposed it always dovetails with something the person proposing it would want anyway.

Instapundit - right wing law blogger - used to put up posts that would start "I'll believe Climate Change is a problem when X believes it is" and then link to an article about some celebrity flying 50,000 miles a year or doing something else that put a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Good for a laugh I suppose but honestly I wonder if there's not some truth there.

Why are the solutions always sold on the basis of "win/win" with the both wins going to the same end of the political spectrum? I understand that it sounds like extortion or blackmail but it seems like if you really want a solution you have to sell it to people who don't agree with your politics not just try and ram it down their throats.

At this point, there really is no discussion anymore about whether or not there is climate change. The question is what we can do to survive as a global civilization.

Continued survival seems pretty like win/win to me, no matter what the political orientation.

Also, I seem to remember that environmental protection came pretty much out of the conservative corner. See Teddy Roosevelt and his national parks.

Also also, coal vs. renewables is /not/ a conservative vs. progressive discussion. I've yet to find a conservative that thinks the public should allow the externalization of the costs caused by private pollution.

Note that the original author is 86. He does not fly and that is great. But he is also heading into a very energy-intensive period of life. Most of a person's lifetime heath costs come in the last few years of life. Health care is expensive for a reason. It consumes massive amounts of energy and generates enormous piles of waste. Will he forgo medical treatments as willingly as he has forgone flying?

> Health care is expensive for a reason.

Yeah, but there are other reasons than just energy use. IP laws for example, or market segmentation. Or do you think that the regular edition of, say, Visual Studio is more energy-intensive than the student edition?

In 2013, the health care sector was also responsible for significant fractions of national air pollution emissions and impacts ... greenhouse gas emissions (10%),

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

That puts health care far ahead of aviation in terms of carbon emissions. Anyone rationally looking to be carbon neutral for the good of the planet should therefore address their consumption of health care before their consumption of aviation.

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