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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Sure. You live in an echo chamber on HN where everyone is worried about climate change. The WSJ is another echo chamber that is almost the polar opposite where people either don't believe in climate change, or that it's greatly exaggerated.

I've engaged with commenters in the WSJ hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Basically, you'll talk yourself into one big circle. People have all sorts of standard answers like "the climate is always changing", references to debunked movies, a handful of "scientific names", the Global Warming Hiatus, etc.

You can address all of them but they'll simply start over again with the same comments in the next article.

Several years ago I was even going to create an FAQ of questions.

https://2cco2.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/hello-world/

The only positive is that recently the WSJ stopped letting people comment on most articles.

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While we're talking about this, I just listened to an older Freakonomics about climate change (http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-the-planet/)

One of the guests was Nathan Myhrvold, who was advocating for geoengineering. I'm wondering why geoengineering is not being seriously considered as a solution at this point.

Perhaps your understanding of both camps might help explain this.

Many of those in the 'doubt climate change' camp are deeply suspicious of anything any government body wants to do.

I've also widely engaged people who doubt or deny climate change, trying hard to approach in an open handed, friendly way, and mostly succeeding.

In my opinion, a big chunk of the people who doubt climate change are and will remain extremely opposed to any kind of geoengineering. Perhaps violently so.

In people's minds, there's a huge leap between trusting scientists' saying that the earth is warming fast, fucking things up in the future, and trusting scientists' saying that we need to actively change the world right now in response to climate change. And I appreciate that distinction.

In truth, I think quite a few people unconsciously push back against climate change because they are afraid of the possibility of active geoengineering in response.

I am extremely skeptical of climate change arguments because I overwhelmingly hear it from politicians who lie through their teeth about virtually everything and typically for their own gain. I want to believe but my bullshit meter just goes off so strongly whenever I hear a politician say anything

Look at it this way: if an ideologue, or otherwise motivated actor, can accomplish their goal or spin their story using facts that happen to be true, why wouldn't they? If someone is politically motivated, for example, to tighten border security, it's surely possible they'll fudge numbers about criminal immigrants to tell their story; but if a real, un-p-hacked statistic tells that story, why bother bullshitting when you can shout the truth from the rooftops?

I don't trust politicians, but I have some trust in nerds. While scientists and engineers are far from immune to groupthink or perverse incentives, there is so much clout to be gained (not to mention a feel-good pro-growth story), if the case for AGW wasn't strong, I think we'd be seeing a stronger contrarian pushback from within scientific communities (including taking their case to the public through TED talks, podcasts, YouTube, etc) [1]. Be it string theory, or the lipid hypothesis, or OOP-vs-FP, how rare is it to actually get 95%+ of nerds to agree on anything?

[1] For an example in action, see physicist Richard Muller, who spent years as a skeptic and founded an organization to debunk climate change, only to change his mind after examining the results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth

> I'm wondering why geoengineering is not being seriously considered as a solution at this point.

Because an overshoot in the other direction would be even worse than a couple degrees of warming. Feedback loops can work both ways. We are currently in an ice age[1] and glaciation covering most of the northern hemisphere could happen in about a decade[2]. Reducing emissions is just tuning a known activity and second order effects aside is perfectly safe, but geoengineering is a giant unknown that could cause catastrophic consequences.

[1]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/cause-ice-age/

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/

That was an interesting read. It suggests that really abrupt changes in warming are possible. The downside seems that only one good data source exists.

Are you aware of any computational modeling of the large scale mechanisms? I'm coming from computational neuroscience and bayesian modeling and found this data pretty interesting

I don't, but the data quality really is impressive, so it would be interesting to see if anyone has tried to develop a model using it, especially since you could test it by taking other cores.

I started reading a bit and found CESM but it seems like a lot of these models require supercomputers. It's not clear that simulation of many years (ie predicting what a core might look like) is feasible.

As for why people there might be so reluctant to embrace it, I think Upton Sinclair's words: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Well, the issue no-one on the climate change side wants to address is that the ramifications of most of the proposed solutions are as bad as the effects of climate change itself.

Can you elaborate on what specific policy proposals would be "as bad" as extinction?

Making energy more expensive makes everything more expensive. Those at the margins will find themselves even closer to the edge, while those who thought they were secure find themselves less so. The vouchers and whatnot that were supposed to offset the effects are mostly captured by the same type of rent-seekers and parasites that capture nearly any other form of aid. Widespread unrest and starvation result.

The unwashed masses you speak of, those that are struggling, simply don't use that much 'energy'; or at least the most polluting forms. They live in small flats, eat whatever's in the shop, sit in and watch TV, and walk or get the bus to work.

If they pollute, they do so as a side-effect of misallocation - e.g. food is shipped halfway across the world not because it has to be or should be but because low fossil fuel prices make it viable; electricity has high carbon impact (e.g. UK ~0.3kg/kWh) for historical reasons; etc.

They certainly don't fly about or do anything that has no replacement at present.

A country letting things get become "too expensive" in these silly monetary coupon terms and so everyone starves would be a complete governance failure.

Then again, some countries are currently failed states in that sense; in the UK we don't care if people get enough to eat, we give them some pictures of the queen's face if they jump through a ton of hoops and hope it works out. That likely wouldn't be viable.

Can you elaborate on how you came to the conclusion that global warming == extinction? To discuss the question of what would be "as bad" as global warming, me need to ~agree on what those bad outcomes actually are.

Im skeptical that climate change will ever make humanity extinct. Lead to highly undesirables states, yes, but extinction, no.

I've been what many would call a climate change alarmist for a couple of decades now.

I think it's also quite unlikely that climate change, or even results from it, will make humans extinct. Even if climate change triggers some kind of global thermonuclear war, which I think is a small possibility, I'm pretty convinced that humans are here to stay.

Maybe not many of us, but some.

In my opinion, extinction isn't the main worry. Collapse of civilization should be what we're trying to avoid. And that is a real possibility I think.

Thank you. Regardless if I can follow you to "collapse of civilization" being a likely consequence or not, this is a step in the direction of a nuanced discussion.

(As an aside, Im not convinced humans are here to stay, but for very different reasons.)

> Im not convinced humans are here to stay, but for very different reasons

I hear you, and I agree.

that is not even remotely accurate

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