How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong

I really don't understand. We're told the scientists have a consensus and we must believe them. (I'm inclined to do so!) But at least the IPCC has projected changes that weren't so bad. Is there a new consensus? Were the scientists who were supposed to be right actually wrong? Who are we supposed to believe? This is not denialism. I’m firmly inclined to believe the IPCC consensus. But it’s disconcerting to see a new narrative where those same scientists are incorrect. It seems to amount to “panic even more than the scientific consensus warrants.” Maybe that’s true but it’s an odd argument.

> More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became a mainstream issue.

5.4F is 3C. The cost of 3C change is projected to be up to 13% of GDP relative to keeping to 1.5C. See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-.... Over the 30 year time horizon of the calculation, world GDP will grow by 140%. (Climate change will cost just 1/10 of total growth by that time. )

I suspect that the problem will end up being something quite 'simple.' Our time didn't have the horsepower nor know how to accurately compute feedback loops in our environment. We didn't understand the numerous and unforeseeable tipping points that we tipped. We didn't understand the dance of nature and how disparate events tied into the pattern of our actions.

The deliberations, however, are over and the verdict is in. We have done fucked up. There's no point in lamenting our failure. We've made the mess and now we need to fix it. The only real question facing us is how.

Whether it's carbon sinks in the form of olivine and 20 million trees, new methods to suck carbon out of the air, or some desperate act of geoengineering. Humanity needs to come to grips with the situation and act quickly and decisively. Like we did with nuclear weapons and space races. An Earth Race (so that we don't regress), if you will.

I really hate this headline and I don’t think it should be rewarded with clicks. NYT knows that a certain population is going to read that headline, and nothing else, and then take away that “they were right all along and climate change isn’t real”. It does absolutely nothing to help move things in the right direction and just further fuels the fire of false “debate” over the issue.

My understanding is that many climate scientists want to avoid a kind of paralyzing alarmism/catastrophic fatalism, and that this might be where the conservative consensus comes from.

Just as a thought experiment, suppose the best prediction that could be made right now would see the earth's carrying capacity drop to under a billion people in the next 50 years. What would you expect to see different, in media, in papers in top journals, in public discourse, than we see right now? I think the world might look just as we see it today.

There is no going back, our entire way of living is unsustainable, climate change is going to happen. Good news is, planet Earth will be fine, give it a few thousand years, it has survived far worse.

An element of this story and challenge is the nature of technology. I've spent a few years on the problem of what technology is, or more specifically, what technolgical mechanisms are. There several obvious ones: new fuel sources, materials, better understandings of processes, and information flows -- acquisition, processing, storage and retrieval, transmission, and controls. I've come up with a list of eight.

It wasn't until some time that I hit on a ninth element, what I've called "hygiene factors", in that the address the overall health of a system or the human technosphere and environent. They're based on unintended consequences, a term introduced in 1936 by the sociologist Robert K. Merckton, which he describes (I'm just realising) using the same term I'd landed on: manifest and latent functions and dysfunctions.[1][2][3]

Hygiene factors tend to be saturation of sinks, exhaustion of sources, or disruptions of endogenous or exogenous systems on which we rely -- say, urban filth and public health (endogenous) or ecosystem disruption affecting resources, food supply, or disease reservoirs (external).

A specific technology might be thought of as some cluster of effects, both positive (or intended) and negative (or unintended), both manifest and latent. A specific technology -- a device, technique, management method, practice, convention -- approaches some theoretical physical limit of efficiency, also introducing unintended consequences.

We're pretty good at choosing technologies which have manifest positive effects, and at rejecting those with manifest negative effects. We're less good about adopting technologies with latent positive effects or rejecting those with latent negative effects.[4]

We can think of an entire technosphere as the set of interactions between all technologies and the environment.

As both our technology and role within the environment extend, we find ourselves running up against inherent limits. That is, the capacities of either fixed-capacity or rate-based sinks to absorb effluents, of fixed-stock or flow-based sources to provide resources, or disruptions of either our own endogenous or exogenous systems on which healthy function rely.

The problem is that as we start hitting one set of limits, we tend to spill over to others. In agricultural science, there's the notion of Leibig's Law of the Minimum: "growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor)." It seems that this should have some reciprocal principle, that health is dictated not by the total sinks available, but of the most currently binding one. As the first contraint(s) are lifted -- low-hanging fruit -- subsequent constraints of greater effect, or more difficult mitigation or management, emerge. (I'm not aware of any named principle matching this, though I strongly suspect it exists.)

We also end up with interactions between the consequences -- one system interacts with another, producing their own sets of effects.

It's the latent negative consequences which catch up with you. Since they're not apparent, they're not evident and available for planning or modeling when looking at future direction. As systems generally become more optimised, the odds of any further change tends to fall -- you've exhausted most of the good interactions, the remaining ones are bad.

And the worst of all is a set of compounding, latent, negative 2nd and higher-order interactions. These are conceptually, and probably statistically, inevitable. We can't point to them specifically, as we don't know what they are. There's a tremendous tendency in human nature to dismiss and minimise future and latent risks (though yes, also benefits), especially where personal or private interests are served by optimism bias.

The result then would be that increasingly complex circumstances in which the tolerances of multiple systems are stressed to their limits, an apparent zone of stability is actually an illusion as still-fermenting latent negative interactions are developing, beyond the realm of detection.

Which seems to be exemplified in the global warming case.

I struggle with whether this is tremendously insightful or blindingly obvious, or possibly a case of overfitting to available information. Responses have been rather all over the map, though the "blindingly obvious" criticisms frequently seem to come from those afflicted with blindness to latent benefits and risks.

But I'm fearful.

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Notes:

1. Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...

3. I'd been working with the notion of "manifestation", though I'd not settled on a good term for its opposite. "Covert", "emergent", and "latent" were optons. And this is a reason why I research and footnote my HN (and other) comments and posts. I'm learning.

4. For concreteness, some possible examples:

- Manifest positive: Movable type, water wheel, medical anaesthesia.

- Manifest negative: Hydrochloric acid skin treatment. Taunting lions.

- Latent positive: Medical hygiene, handwashing. Seismic building standards. Limiting building to above the Tsunami line.

- Latent negative: Lead plumbing, asbestos insulation, CFC refrigerants and aerosol propellants, residential laundry chutes.

5. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum

I dont think anyone really cares what the scientists predict. Its the tragedy of the commons, no one will really change their behaviour anyway, even when it becomes unbearable to live in many parts of the world.

Meta: Why are paywalled articles doing so well on HN lately? I know about the "web" link, but it never works for me. It's frustrating to want to participate in the comments on a subject, but not have access to the specific content that everyone seems to be discussing (and no, I am not paying for an NYT subscription).