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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players. There is also zero introspection - the people who were wrong about covid-19 are simply denying they said what they said. The truly scary part is they are getting away with it in real time, and changing a large populations' memory of contemporary events. I realize it's hard to remember further back with the enormous amount of information we're all bombarded with, but you can just go back to 2005 and see Larry Kudlow (Dir. NEC) just as wrong about economic policy and the depth of the financial crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Kudlow#Economy) but here he is again. Consider Navarro vis a vis trade. I don't think anyone will learn anything, and for smart enough people, that needs to be the lesson.

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> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players.

No, global warming has a very different dynamic. With a virus, if you do the right thing and protect yourself, you’re more likely to survive. With global warming, if you get a lot of people to emit less CO2, you might just end up making CO2 emissions cheaper for everyone else.

That's a very reductive and defeatist way to view the problem, and potential solution. The reality is there is no silver bullet. Emissions have to be reduced by means of an energy revolution. Sure, some will benefit in the short term. But everyone will benefit in the long term.

It's not reductive and defeatist to point out that the global warming issue has a tragedy of the commons aspect, on both personal and national levels, which could hardly be more different to the current pandemic.

So what should we do?

Carbon taxes, and protectionist trade tariffs against countries who don't adopt carbon taxes.

Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line.

>Make non-compliance painful enough, and the defectors will fall in line.

Maybe they don't, or maybe in the end that's all too little too late, which is why I'd suggest adding adaptation initiatives to your list.

We're going to have to turn to adaptation initiatives even if we go net-zero-carbon tomorrow - that's kind of baked into our future planning at this point.

What if the defectors have more nukes than you do?

For a lot of countries it’s either emit pollution and feed people or don’t and let lots of people starve. Do you think your privileged life worth more than someone from third world who can barely afford to eat?

The United States military could best be used to fight this by destroying (with warning) global fossil fuel infrastructure that wasn't voluntarily closed, bit by bit with a decade long schedule. The announcement alone would prompt a massive shift in energy production, use, investment etc. Our own legacy infrastructure would also have to be on the list. Call it a Paris accord with teeth.

It will never happen, because collectively we don't believe the cost of climate change is greater than the cost of leveling the landscape of incentives to reduce emissions + reducing emissions. The US could unilaterally leverage its remaining military lead to enact global change.

That sounds like a good way to start World War III. The top oil producing countries after the US are:

Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, China, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Iran, Kuwait

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6

Nuclear winter would solve global warming though it still would count as climate change, so maybe it's a wash.

Well, Russia doesn't seem so happy about global warming. I gather that melting permafrost screws up gas production. So maybe they'd want to work with the US.

The US is well versed in "the lesser of two evils"

All signatories of the Paris accord. All are nominally thought to be rapidly transforming their economies in response to an existential crisis.

"including high polluters such as China, the US, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Indonesia and Mexico, which generate more than half the world's greenhouse gas emissions, will somehow drive down their carbon pollution voluntarily and assiduously without any binding enforcement mechanism"

What is the binding enforcement mechanism?

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

Wow... So the military of the state that has contributed most to the global cumulative CO2 emissions (25%) can "solve" the problem with indiscriminate attacks and war crimes everywhere else now. Fascinating. Are people forgetting about this practice of thinking about their idea at least for 30 seconds before starting to type?

Targeting unoccupied fossil fuel infrastructure on an announced schedule is indiscriminate? War crimes for killing an oil derrick?

That is fascinating to me. We know the Paris accord cannot work without enforcement. It is economically disadvantageous to go first. As I said, it will never happen. We don't take the threat seriously, we don't believe it is an existential threat.

Well, it happens to be both things. I have no doubt that you will find international criminal law fascinating, you just have to google it.

The US military is a leading source of carbon emissions

Can militaries around the world even operate without fossil fuels? Some of the larger ships and submarines are nuclear, but pretty much everything else is fossil fuel dependent AFAIK.

Buy carbon and store it somewhere.

Hum... The GP seems to be talking about Global Warming denialists, and the dynamics of how they communicate with people. This one is the same.

But yes, Global Warming has the bad quality that it is completely not obvious how to solve it. There is an entirely different dynamic at the side that accepts it for settling on a solution... and what is more disturbing, R&D and science are mostly neglected there too, even by the academics so prone on applying science to predict the problem.

Umm it is pretty obvious how you “solve” global warming and that is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It's not obvious how to do that

Apparently with a global pandemic. /s

Not on a global scale but on a national it's very obvious.

The only thing that matters is the global result, and the only policies that we know how they work at global scale are the ones that we know that they do not work.

There is an incredible lack of actual social and political scientists discussing those policies, and the few economists that are there seem focused on hitting known bad policies (what is easy to understand, since politicians keep pushing them).

It's entirely not obvious how to best solve the coronavirus situation either, though.

On the short term, I will disagree. And we are all living on the short term now. The only thing that works is isolating people.

On the long term, it's even worse, nobody seems to have any idea what to do. But we are doing the opposite than we are doing with Global Warming, we are heavily funding the kinds of research that may solve the problem. All of those kinds.

If I do the right thing and protect myself, I reduce strain on hospitals, allowing the careless to receive better care. But enough people being careless will overload the healthcare system all the same, reducing its ability to serve me.

If you catch coronavirus, you’re roughly twice as likely to die this year as if you didn’t (this is true for most age groups).

Most people have a vanishingly low probability of dying in the next 12 months. They shouldn’t care much if they get it or not, unless they’re worried about the welfare of others.

This seems very similar to CO2 to me, except that global warming affects younger people more, and coronavirus primarily affects older people.

It saddens me that our leaders won’t act to prevent a planetary disaster that will that affect their children and all future generations, but are willing many more times the resources on a comparatively minor crisis that will last at most a year.

That‘s statistics. In reality there are many factors that make COVID-19 much more dangerous for a lot of people. Besides, i don‘t feel like taking an extea 2 in 1000 chance of dying, thank you very much.

This is a topic near and dear to Philip Tetlock's heart and something he pragmatically tries to address in books like Superforecasting and the Good Judgment Open project (which unfortunately seems to be becoming less open over time). It's also a preoccupation of his Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/PTetlock

On the subject of predictions and credibility, when the question "what's your brilliant startup idea" comes up, one of my half-joking responses: an ESPN site for CNBC and other cable news sites where talking heads spend all data talking about the prediction performance of other talking heads and making predictions about future prediction performance of those talking heads.

> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life

Before making such a confident statement, I would recommend re-reading this particular statement in pg's essay...

"These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."

...and consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.

Central America (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-...), Syria (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262981...), Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...), and Alaska https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/sockeye-salmon-and-cli... might beg to differ, among others.

It is happening now. It's happening in line with predictions by IPCC. It gets pretty bad. I can't help what people have said that has been wrong, but the world is measurably and visibly warming and that itself was denied for a long time. Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening, have agreed for quite a while, and think the impact will be dire and potentially irreversible in the timeframe of human lifetimes. It feels like the zoonotic coronavirus situation played out over 50 years, rather than the 15 or so since SARS. Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are. A large group of experts in another field is telling us a similar thing with similar urgency. That's my only point.

Your reply, while valid in isolation, isn't a meaningful response to the parent post. There is no single "global warming prediction", there have been thousands. The parent was speaking to those, not whichever one ends up being closest to the truth.

>>consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.

There have been thousands of predictions, but only a subset of them have consensus. The IPCC is that consensus across varying stakeholders. It's looking like the consensus has been too conservative with it's predictions and that's the scary part.

Science and proof is not based on consensus. It’s not a vote. A best bet. Until then we should of course act towards the most probable act and cause but remain healthy in our skepticism of the effect of global warming and our faith in computer modeling of inherently chaotic systems.

I see this sentiment a lot. It seems really obvious to me that no, science is actually about consensus now. If you disagree, you're shunned and labeled "dangerous."

Maybe this is in conflict with what science should be. But it's also definitely what science is now.

> Very nearly 100% of experts in this field agree it's happening

None of these "experts" have a track record of correct predictions that justifies taking their current predictions seriously. Remember we are not talking about the fact that the climate changes: yes, it does, it always has, and it always will (unless at some point in the distant future we learn how to control it accurately). We are talking about the dire predictions of catastrophe that have been made to try to justify spending many trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. Those predictions have never come true.

> Epidemiologists told everyone for a decade and a half this would happen, but here we are.

To know whether these were useful predictions, we would need to know more details. Did they predict when it would happen? Did they predict how it would spread? A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful. AFAIK no epidemiologists were making predictions much more precise than that.

Looking at the actual frequency of epidemics of various sizes in the past, we might very roughly estimate that we will have one serious enough to involve a significant portion of health care resources once every decade or so. But you don't have to be an epidemiologist to do that; you just have to do the simplest possible extrapolation of the data. We had H1N1 about 10 years ago, and SARS about 18 years ago. That's still not a very strong prediction, but it would seem to be as good a basis for public policy discussion (which is to say, a fairly weak one but not negligible) as anything more complicated that has come from epidemiologists.

>A prediction that "this will happen, some time in the future" is not very useful

Yes it is, if taken seriously.

What does "taken seriously" mean? We don't even know that from a prediction that vague.

If the prediction is "we can expect a serious epidemic once every 10 years", then we have something definite that we can plan for, or at least discuss the costs of planning for. There's no way to discuss the costs of planning for "this will happen, some time in the future" without more detail.

Seems like the only correct response to that level of prediction is increasing investment in studying the problem.

Which has largely happened in a lot of areas...

except for the people who think the correct response is to ignore any prediction that isn't perfectly specific?

> increasing investment in studying the problem.

That would be nice, yes.

> except for the people who think the correct response is to ignore any prediction that isn't perfectly specific?

If a prediction isn't giving you any useful, actionable information, you can't act on it.

That doesn't necessarily mean you do nothing. If our public policy decision is "well, we don't really know how often epidemics like this will occur, but just to ballpark, let's plan on one every 10 years and see what we would need to do to prepare", that's fine. Just don't say we need to do that because the experts made a prediction. It's just a best judgment call based on very incomplete information.

Just a friendly reminder that the consensus estimates about climate change have been reasonably accurate. Not perfect but decent enough as decision making tools. See for example the IPCC report from 1990:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report

There have certainly been very dramatic (all overly well reported) warnings representing a minority of researchers which have not been accurate. These should not invalidate the whole lot of predictions.

Sure. And while opinion polls are lagging, almost everyone in decision-making positions is on board with the minimal predictions in this report. (Even a lot of people normally considered climate change deniers are on board - according to Wikipedia, the report doesn't rule out that climate change is largely driven by natural variability!)

> the minimal predictions in this report

Those minimal predictions don't justify spending trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation. They basically say "the climate is going to change, so be ready to deal with it".

This is a false economy. Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects.

Switching to low- and zero-carbon fuels, achieving greater efficiencies and so on, is expensive, but still a lot cheaper than e.g. moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding, dealing with huge numbers of migrants, dealing with massive changes in agriculture, worse natural disasters, and so on.

Plus even if you deal with the effects for decades, your problem has not gone away. The situation is worse, and the planet is still heating.

> Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects.

Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming, plus economic and sociological models that have even less predictive power.

> moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding

If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. How is that all of a sudden a climate emergency?

> your problem has not gone away

I've already said climate change is something we're always going to have to deal with, just as humans have had to deal with it during all of human history. The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.

> Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming

Models in general haven't overpredicted warming, as several people in this discussion have tried to educate you.

> If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it.

I'm not at all clear what your point is here. It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem. Surely that can't be it though, because that makes no logical sense. From an economic sense it's just as expensive.

> The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.

A strawman argument. That is not what I wrote.

The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet.

Dealing with the effects is also much more difficult now compared to most of human history. When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging.

It's just a lot easier and cheaper to avoid breaking something in the first place than it is to try to fix it afterwards.

> Models in general haven't overpredicted warming

Yes, they have. We're obviously not going to agree on this point.

> It looks like you're arguing that because something is changing over the course of several decades it's not as much as a problem.

No, I'm arguing that the problem is not new, and it's not a climate problem. It's a problem of misgovernment and has been around for quite a while. But that doesn't stop cities and countries to try to get the rest of us to pay for fixing it by trying to claim that it's a cimate problem.

> The climate is changing faster by far than it has in all human history, and probably in the history of our planet.

This is ludicrous. Nobody has the data to back this up, and there is plenty of data contradicting it.

> When you have 7 or 8 billion people living on the planet, largely in huge cities, it's far more challenging.

When the "problem" you're talking about is a degree of so of temperature rise and a foot or two of sea level rise over the course of a century, to call dealing with it "challenging" is an egregious misuse of language. This is simply not that big a deal compared to all the other things we humans have to deal with. And the things we will need to do anyway to deal with those far more challenging problems--like how to bring billions of people out of poverty and how to make our infrastructure more robust--will end up adapting us to the change anyway. If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody regardless of what happens with the climate, instead of on a huge CO2 mitigation boondoggle that will transfer a lot of money from your and my pockets to the pockets of politicians and "green" business executives, but won't actually help much of anything.

> This is ludicrous. Nobody has the data to back this up, and there is plenty of data contradicting it.

The data on this are so clear I don't really know where to start if you don't believe it. I feel your opposition on this issue is ideological, and there's no data that will change your mind.

> If we're going to spend trillions of dollars on something, let's at least spend it on something that benefits everybody

Given I think there's no arguing data with you, I'll try some arguments that might be more in line with what I guess your beliefs are.

Switching from fossil fuels brings huge benefits. Solar, wind, hydro, small nuclear plants etc. are much better for society.

Energy security increases if energy is produced locally. Democracies have less pressure to prop up dictatorships. Smaller countries are less at risk of getting bullied by larger countries.

Decentralisation of energy production makes the world more stable, less fragile. Energy policy can be set locally rather than centrally. Regions, communities, even individuals, can decide for themselves how to source their power. You can do that with e.g. solar power, but you can't do that with huge gas- or oil-powered plants.

Renewables are actually getting more cost-effective to use than fossil fuels. Government subsidies, direct and indirect, are distorting the market. End government support for fossil fuels and let the market free. There are huge opportunities for private enterprise in switching society to use the better technologies.

Air pollution is a huge killer. A study I saw yesterday showed dramatic increases in death from COVID-19 where air pollution was worse. Even in normal times, life expectancy and health quality is adversely affected by air pollution.

A switch to electric transport improves air pollution massively. There are also technical advantages to electric vehicles, such as improved reliability.

> The data on this are so clear

No, they're not. The data are a mess. Temperature records have been "adjusted" and the original raw data thrown away all over the place. I understand you don't believe this; I'm simply stating what I believe for the record. As I said, we're clearly not going to agree.

> I feel your opposition on this issue is ideological, and there's no data that will change your mind.

I have spent two decades now closely following the global warming/climate change alarmism issue. What I'm basing my statements on here is not ideological opposition to anything: it's the result of two decades of watching a long con in operation. And note carefully that this does not mean that I don't think the climate is changing or that I don't think we will need to do things to deal with climate change. It simply means that I do not trust the people or the institutions that are clamoring about catastrophe if we don't spend trillions of dollars to stop CO2 emissions now. Those people and institutions have no credibility with me after what I've seen them do for the past two decades, and what I've gone back and found out about what they did further back than that.

> Switching from fossil fuels brings huge benefits.

Agreed. But we don't have to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation to do that. We just have to, you know, switch. Spending money on CO2 mitigation (unless by "CO2 mitigation" you just mean "build more non-CO2 emitting power plants") hinders that, it doesn't help it.

I mostly agree with your points on energy security, decentralization, removing government distortions of the market (I think this is a good idea in every sphere, not just energy), and air pollution. Kudos to you for including small nuclear plants, btw; most people don't. The only caveats I would make are:

Decentralized power from solar or wind won't provide reliable base load power in many places, at least not without a solution to the energy storage problem that currently doesn't exist except for very small loads. You need small nuclear plants. Hydro by itself can't really be decentralized, since there are only a limited number of good locations for it and basically all of them are already developed. (Hydro in the form of pumped storage powered by solar or wind is a different matter; for many small scale needs that might be a viable solution to the energy storage problem.)

Electric transport is great, except for one mode: airplanes. I just don't see a viable alternative to liquid chemical fuels for airplanes any time soon. But that can be dealt with by using other energy sources to make liquid fuels, either by directly powering chemical reactions or by using living organisms like algae.

> the IPCC report from 1990

Which overpredicted the warming that has occurred from 1990 to now (though its predictions overall were certainly much milder than the catastrophic ones that are being trumpeted as reasons to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation).

Not to mention that there have been four more assessment reports since then (and the sixth is in the works now), and the more alarmist ones (in particular the third and fourth) are the ones that climate change alarmists are basing their predictions of catastrophe on. (Even though the fifth report actually backed off in some respects, particularly in admitting--though as obliquely as possible--that the climate model predictions were not matching the data.)

Yes, but it's not like the 1990 model was massively wrong or something. The (now historical) observations are riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990, but even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century. All models are wrong and some are useful. Even a 3C rise would be pretty bad. Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models?

> The (now historical) observations are riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990

No, they're lower than the low end of the predicted range. Plus, the low end of the predicted range was based on assumed CO2 emissions that were significantly lower than what has actually occurred since then. So we have more CO2 than predicted and less warming than predicted even from the lower than actual CO2.

> even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century

That's not 3C rise from where we are now. It's not even 3C rise from where we were in 1990. It's 3C rise from the "pre-industrial" temperature, i.e., the mid to late 1700s, i.e., in the middle of the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have already risen (largely due simply to coming out of the Little Ice Age) by about 1.6C since then, so that low estimate is about 1.4C rise from now to 2100. And, as noted, actual temperature rise is running below the low end estimate. We're looking at roughly a degree C rise in a century. The idea that humans cannot adapt to that so we have to spend trillions of dollars to stop emitting CO2 right now is laughable.

> Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models?

We should not be using the models to drive public policy decisions with multi-trillion dollar costs. They're simply not good enough for that.

Do you even read these papers before posting? Here's what the Syria paper actually concludes:

> In light of the above we can now return to our main questions: is there clear and reliable evidence that climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory factor in the onset of the country's civil war?; and, if and where yes, was it as significant a contributory factor as is claimed in the existing academic and expert literature? On each step of the claimed causal chain, our answers are no. We find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in northeast Syria's 2006/07–2008/09 drought; we find that, while the 2006/07–2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will have contributed to migration, this migration was not on the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation than drought; and we find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment, there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country's civil war.

Science isn’t consensus! Proof isn’t determined by “very nearly 100% of scientists agree”. Just ask Copernicus.

We don’t vote on scientific proof. Yes evidence leads us to believe climate change is happening, but why and predicting it’s trajectory and effect should be met with scientific standards not scaremongering and “CLIMATE DENIER” hyperbole.

If the pursuit of scientific rigour and fact has taught us anything over our history it’s that skepticism and challenging the status quo is necessary and should be welcomed. In today’s climate debate it it’s nothing but derided.

I think you're not reading his comment in good faith. He's clearly not suggesting that whether or not something is true is decided by a vote of scientists. He's saying that the people who are most familiar with the science overwhelmingly believe that the evidence suggests that global warming is in fact real.

Further, people are wise to be skeptical or even dismissive of climate denialist claims because there is a long history of politically motivated people making deliberately but subtly specious arguments for it. Given both the overwhelming consensus and the glut of misinformation, it makes sense to filter it with a very high bar.

You are right. It is decided because not only do almost 100% of climate scientists agree, but there in indisputable proof of the basic method of action (CO2, CH4, H20 greenhouse effects) and we can measure that effect in the lab and then correlated it to measured climate change that normalized for various known climate cycles. The consensus in the fields is driven by the overwhelming evidence of the multidisciplinary field results, experiments, and modeling.

The benefit of science (reproducibility, falsifiability) has been hacked by commercial interests. This isn't even in dispute (Heartland, IER, many others). Groups that dispute climate change are all funded by CO2 emitters and the results are coordinated by enormous lobbying and donation campaigns.

Flat earth proponents are not operating within a scientific framework of doubt and proof, and neither are climate change deniers.

> but there in indisputable proof of the basic method of action (CO2, CH4, H20 greenhouse effects) and we can measure that effect in the lab

Yes, and those measurements tell us that without a large amount of positive feedback, the effect of greenhouse gases alone is too small to worry about.

> and then correlated it to measured climate change that normalized for various known climate cycles

Nope, this has not been done. The climate models cannot reproduce the data at all with just the measured greenhouse effect of the various greenhouse gases. They have to dial in a large amount of positive feedback, and even then the only period of time for which they reproduce the data tolerably well is the latter half of the 20th century. The model outputs don't match the early 20th century warming, they don't match the mid 20th century cooling, and they don't match the early 21st century pause.

The correct, honest scientific conclusion from all of this is that the models are simply not good enough at this point, i.e., we don't understand how the climate works well enough at this point, to support multi-trillion dollar policy decisions.

You just completely prove my point.

First there’s the “almost 100%” of scientists agree argument again. Sorry, that’s not a valid argument for saying something is true!

Second. Models aren’t proof. They’re models. Yes we can measure gas quantities and determine correlations. But we haven’t scientifically proven it. We’re dealing with chaotic systems. Until we can, we need to remain skeptical and open to other ideas. That’s my point. Not that it isn’t happening.

Third. Then you bring politics into it. Oh the 1% are funded by Big Oil. Oh and the 99% aren’t funded by politically motivated players either? See point (1), scientific fact isn’t determined by who agrees with it or not. Until it’s proven, it may be unproven.

And fourth. Flat earth, again, the relationship to climate deniers...you don’t need scientists to agree the world isn’t flat. It’s proven. Scientifically. See the difference?

Thanks for eloquently providing examples to exactly what I was saying

As long as everybody who has even a question about the topic is publicly yelled at and insulted, there will be many people who will simply ignore the topic.

The main reason global warming isn't taken more seriously is because of the way it is discussed.

Could you share some of these confident predictions regarding global warming?

Confident predictions regarding climate change over the past 100 or so years[0]

[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2010/10/goosey-goosey-gander.ht...

I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist. It reads:

"So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually."

>I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist.

The original conversation was regarding all public statements, not scientists. This is more about journalists than scientists.

>...and consider how it applies to all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.

Who cares what journalists say? IPCC and nasa reports are publicly available and use plain language anyone can read.

> Who cares what journalists say? IPCC and nasa reports are publicly available and use plain language anyone can read.

Investigating geological or ecological truth is one thing, investigating causes and consequences for widespread ignorance and bad policy decisions is another. You and I are approaching this from different angles. Unfortunately, journalists have power to shape our society. I would argue that as a group, they have more power than scientists.

Sadly journalists seem even more in the pocket of big biz than scientists.

> Sadly journalists seem even more in the pocket of big biz than scientists.

I think you may be suggesting that there have been journalists who push climate denialism at the behest of the oil industry? My apologies if I misunderstood, but I would agree emphatically.

There are also other jouranlists who push climate alarmism because alarmism sells.

> I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist.

That's a nice "No True Scotsman" right there. Unless, of course, you can give me a non-arbitrary reason why Dr. David Barber of the University of Manitoba speaking in 2008 is a "pre-modern" climate scientist, whereas Dr. James Hansen of NASA writing in 2009 is a "modern" climate scientist.

That's a good point. The conversation is about a history of irresponsible public statements, but the evidence for this history is dismissed with:

>actual modern climate scientist

With this rhetorical technique, it could be impossible to provide evidence. Who gets to decide what makes a climate scientist 'modern'? Disregarding alleged 'non-modern' climate scientists is the last thing we should do when discussing prior decades of alarmism.

I've seen this game played countless times.

"Sources?"

Then you do the job of googling for them. Retrieve a few relevant sources.

And they proceed to shoot them down, even moving goalposts if necessary. They might come back with their own confirmation biased sources.

This instance is even more egregious. There is a growing mountain of evidence for climate change. Multiple books, across multiple disciplines, can and have been written. Numerous peer reviewed papers.

What's more infuriating is that you don't need climate scientists to corroborate climate change. Because it's not a prediction anymore, climate has been changing already. Disciplines as diverse as geology and biology can detect the effects. If you want to do projections, sure, biologists may not be able to help. But if you want to see the effects today, they certainly can.

With such an enormous pile of data, I can't believe this is a legitimate discussion.

> With such an enormous pile of data, I can't believe this is a legitimate discussion.

Much like flat earthers, climate deniers seem to have attached their identity to this claim rather than viewing the data with any objectivity.

Sure, David Barber was off by a bit in that particular sentence, but arctic sea ice minima are now half of their historical values, and dropping. It is true, that in complex dynamic systems, predictions have to have wide error bars, but he was way less wrong than the charlatans who claim this isn't a problem or isn't a trend.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/

I have every confidence that David Barber is an honest scientist doing his best to apply rigorous science to an inherently complicated system.

The objection here is that we live in a media environment which continually emphasizes one end of that error bar. So long as we live in that sort of environment claims of catastrophic consequences are going to be taken with a degree of skepticism.

Why would your beliefs about the "media environment" influence your view of the reports from scientific bodies? The claims of catastrophic consequences are coming straight from the literature. You can't explain those away by waving your hands and saying "the media."

> Why would your beliefs about the "media environment" influence your view of the reports from scientific bodies?

If the media present bold predictions intended to reflect the views of scientific bodies, and those predictions fail to come to pass, then we have reason to doubt at least one node in the flow of information. It could be that the media incorrectly portrayed scientific results, or it could be that the scientific model upon which the prediction was based was flawed.

For instance, when the NYT says in 1978:

> An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

Clearly the statement has been proven false. But why was this false statement made? Is the problem with the NYT, or the international team of specialists?

That's the problem with the media environment, because it's not always clear (certainly not to the lay person) when the media is representing their sources faithfully.

> The claims of catastrophic consequences are coming straight from the literature.

There are a few things one needs to sort out:

1. What are the actual expected range of consequences stated in the literature?

2. What is the confidence with which the literature expects these consequences?

3. What are the necessary interventions to prevent these consequences (if they can be prevented)?

4. How do the costs of the interventions compare with the consequences?

It's actually quite hard for a lay-person to sort out. The IPCC reports are a good place to start, but still very dense for most people. Also, every seemingly erudite critic of those reports is viciously attacked as a bad faith actor.

Here is a decent place to start [for anyone truly unaware of the history of bad climate predictions]:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=bad%20climate%20predictions

Here's an AP article from 31 years ago[1].

> A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

...

> The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.

Since that article was published, atmospheric CO2 has gone from 355ppm to 410ppm (a 15% increase). Global surface temperature has risen 0.6°C since 1989 (1.1°F). Sea level has risen by 8 centimeters.

I realize the UN official wasn't a scientist or an expert, but neither are many of the people quoted in articles about climate change today. Global warming is a bad thing, but it's not as bad as a lot of media & activists are portraying it. It's not an existential risk.

1. https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

This sounds like it refers to various island nations in the Pacific, which are, indeed, under existential thread from global warming and the associated sea level rise.

If you actually look at what those predictions have been, you'll find that they're pretty consistently on the mark. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

There is no quantification of the predictive power of any of these models presented in the linked-to article.

In fact it appears highly misleading, since they directly contrast (a) data from 1970-2017, with (b) a model written in 1973 predicting out to 2016, and (c) a model written in 2013 that can be compared to the data up until 2017.

So for this "pretty consistently on the mark" model, it only encompasses predictions for the years 2014-2017, based on observations from 2013. Many ARMA-type regression models do that well, since on average each year is mostly similar to the previous one.

In short, this doesn't support the credibility of this body of work.

You aren't giving any indication in what you've written that you've read and understood the article.

You are comparing subjective predictions and mathematically modeled predictions. They are not the same thing.

We have enormous amounts of mathematical modelling and a vast history of information about our atmospheric history. Using this, we can make inferences about what is likely to happen due to climate change.

If I were to just make a rando statement about what will happen when climate change comes, that's different.

Learning to separate the two is an important tool.

Your response is quite remarkable. PG's article contrasts 1) the careful predictions of experts, who study an issue in depth their entire life and pronounce on it carefully based on scientific models, with 2) the remarks of politically motivated hacks that seek to distract from the consensus for their own political agenda, often with remarkable (but unjustified) confidence.

PG warns against 2), the hacks, and points out that here we can see how utterly wrong they are, because the time frame is so short.

Now, GP points out that something similar happens regarding climate change, with 1') climate scientists and 2') climate change denial, and you take PG's warning against facile hacks (ie 2') and apply it to 1'), the climate scientists and experts? That's quite some nerve.

You're misrepresenting what GP said. They didn't say "experts", they said:

> all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.

You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly, and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters that never happened.

But judging by the downvotes, I guess that's an inconvenient truth.

No, it is the scientists that have predicted the disaster, with an overwhelming consensus, hence the downvotes.

No, journalists and politicians are misrepresenting what the IPCC says. The IPCC are not alarmists, and they aren't predicting "The world is going to end in 12 years."

The actual report is far more balanced. Yes, they are predicting some negative consequences, alongside potential benefits and measures for adapation and mitigation.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm...

> journalists and politicians are misrepresenting what the IPCC says.

And the IPCC Summary for Policymakers itself misrepresents what the actual science says. All of the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, and so forth in the scientific working group reports (and even more so the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, etc. in the actual peer-reviewed papers on which the working group reports are based) are ignored in the Summary for Policymakers. The policy recommendations are already determined and published before the scientific working group reports are released.

So there are actually three levels of misrepresentation involved: first the IPCC WG reports misrepresent the actual primary sources; then the IPCC SPM misrepresents the WG reports; then journalists and politicians misrepresent the IPCC SPM. At each stage the predictions get more alarmist and the recommendations get more draconian.

Why would you link to the fifth edition of the report instead of the (complete) sixth edition or the in progress work now?[1]

Of course the IPCC doesn't predict the world is going to end in 12 years. That's a strawman - I'm sure you can find someone who has predicted the world will end in 12 years, but that isn't the disaster people are concerned about.

Instead, they collect five key "reasons for concern" by "using the following specific criteria: large magnitude, high probability, or irreversibility of impacts; timing of impacts; persistent vulnerability or exposure contributing to risks; or limited potential to reduce risks through adaptation or mitigation." [2]

Some of the risks associated with these include:

Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other smallislands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea level rise.

...

Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes,particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ (click "Assessment Reports")

[2] Pg 12, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm...

I don't think the sixth edition of the assessment report is complete. It's "AR6 Climate Change 2021" so I assume it will be released next year. But if it's available somewhere, let me know.

"The world is going to end in 12 years..." is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat. I'm surprised you haven't heard it.

Personally, I bought into the climate alarmism about 30 years ago, and my skepticism is based on seeing so many things I've heard and read (even from scientists) turn out to be exaggerated.

>The world is going to end in 12 years..." " is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat.

This isn't true, and you should probably cut whatever source told it to you out of your life. The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years, which is the gist of what the IPCC report says.

My quote is literally what she said. (She later claimed it was "dry humor plus sarcasm")[1]. Perhaps she meant something more like what you said.

It doesn't matter.

"The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years" is also false, and not at all what the IPCC report says. When O'Rourke said something similar, the AP fact checked the claim:[2]

> THE FACTS: There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.

> “This has been a persistent source of confusion,” agreed Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.”

And no, I'm not going to cut the AP and PBS out of my life just because some alarmists are delusional.

1: https://apnews.com/1c663bcb294c1752573f45fc5bf5e0f9/

2: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-fact-check-orourke-...

You don't appear to have read the things you linked. The argument Ebi is making is that we shouldn't give up if we don't hit that 12 year deadline, because it's continuous, and things keep getting even worse. She's trying to communicate that there are worse things than 1.5C that we could still prevent.

There are worse things than 1.5C that we could still prevent because 1.5C isn't the "end of the world".

If your quibble is with the precise definition of "the end of the world" and not with the rest of the statement then I think we're well outside of what concrete facts can resolve. The impacts of 1.5C are going to be horrific. The fact that the impacts of 2, 3, 5, 5C are more horrific doesn't change that.

> it is the scientists that have predicted the disaster, with an overwhelming consensus

No, they haven't. The IPCC reports are political documents, not scientific documents. One key fact that shows this: the Summary for Policymakers is written and published before any of the Working Group reports, and the Working Group reports then have to be edited and massaged to be consistent with what the Summary for Policymakers says. A true scientific report with scientific predictions would be the other way around: first you would write, review, and publish the scientific analysis and predictions, and then you would write, review, and publish the policy recommendations.

GP was incorrect in taking a position that global warming was not a threat. The actual threat of COVID is going to be much lower than global warming, COVID is either going to be temporary or in the long term settle to look a lot like all the other diseases we put up with. Climate change could be a legitimate crisis at some point.

However, directionally speaking, they have an excellent point that people who predict the future are very common in the climate lobby; and within that group people who correctly predict the future are going to be rare. It is not a lobby made up of scientists because there aren't that many.

> The actual threat of COVID is going to be much lower than global warming, COVID is either going to be temporary or in the long term settle to look a lot like all the other diseases we put up with. Climate change could be a legitimate crisis at some point.

I think you are conflating two different possible meanings of the term "threat".

Climate change is likely to be much more of a "threat" than COVID-19 in the sense that we are likely going to have to be dealing with it for a much longer time. But humanity has already been dealing with climate change through all of human history, so having to deal with it for the indefinite future is nothing new. It's only more of a "threat" in the sense of it being a long-term thing we need to factor into our planning, as opposed to COVID-19 being (hopefully) a short-term crisis that we weather and then move on.

Climate change is not more of a "threat" than COVID-19 in the sense of causing more disruption to our society; COVID-19 has already caused far more disruption in a few months than climate change has caused over decades, if not centuries, and also far more than climate change is likely to cause in the future. Time frames matter. Having to restructure the global economy over a century is one thing; that's already been done multiple times in the past, and happens as a natural result of people gradually changing the way they live and work in response to other changes. Having to restructure it in a few months is a very, very different (and much, much more difficult) problem. In that sense COVID-19 is a far worse threat than climate change.

Hey, wait until the US midwest goes dust bowl.

You're conflating a lot of different points there.

Most obvious is the definition of "deal with." During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."

If you're happy for humanity to "survive - barely" for the next couple of centuries, then perhaps you have a point.

But our definition of humanity is much richer and more interesting than it was at the end of the Younger Dryas some 14,000 years ago.

Now a reasonable definition of "deal with" is "survive without losing significant acquired knowledge or skill."

That's a much bigger ask when survival-critical choke points are all on the line, which include food production, water supply, and the loss of key living and working space on the coastlines are all on the line. And that's not even considering the general inhabitability of inland areas that will become increasingly prone to storms, floods, forest fires, tornadoes, and so on.

We can already see this happening. Denying it is a form of delusion, in very stark and literal terms.

In fact the political problem we're dealing with is a cult-like mindset that considers "the economy" more real than the physical environment it exists in.

The bottom line is that "the economy" is a quasi-religious political construct, while the real world is... the real world. The economy needs to change, because otherwise reality will kick its ass whether it likes it or not.

The change can be planned and strategised intelligently as an immediate priority, or it can be suicidally chaotic, with huge unplanned loss of acquired knowledge and future potential.

Those are the two extremes on offer. There are no others.

COVID-19 is a handy dry run. We'll see how we do.

> During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."

That's how humans have lived for almost all of human history; only in the last couple of centuries have a significant number of humans been able to have a standard of living much above bare subsistence.

> The economy needs to change

The economy is always changing, just like the climate. We certainly need people to be inventing new technologies and creating wealth; that's how the economy changes in response to changing conditions and changing needs.

What we do not need is a bunch of draconian centrally controlled policies that will do more harm than good, based on invalid alarmist predictions.

> The change can be planned and strategised intelligently

Nobody knows how to do that on a global scale. No such planning and strategizing has succeeded in the past. To use your phrase, reality has always kicked the ass of such planning and strategizing.

Fortunately, we do not need a central authority planning and strategizing everything. What we need is to do common sense things to make our society and economy more robust, and give people the tools they need to adapt to change in whatever way seems best to them given the unique conditions of their own lives, instead of having policies dictated to them from the top down.

There's a story that a Soviet minister of something or other was visiting London and asked some UK government official who was in charge of the daily supply of bread to the city. He was utterly unable to fathom the answer, which was "nobody". Central planners just can't get it through their heads that central planning doesn't work.

> PG's article contrasts 1) the careful predictions of experts, who study an issue in depth their entire life and pronounce on it carefully based on scientific models, with 2) the remarks of politically motivated hacks that seek to distract from the consensus for their own political agenda, often with remarkable (but unjustified) confidence.

To the extent your 1) and 2) are reasonable categories, I don't see PG giving any examples of 1). I see him giving examples of 2) trying to pass themselves off as 1). Which is what I see happening with claims of catastrophe related to climate change.

This happened over a longer timescale with the Iraq War too. Pretty much everyone who was right remained marginal. Those who were prominently wrong became more prominent.

Barack Obama wasn't exactly marginal.

Obama lucked out that he didn't have to cast an actual vote on the Iraq War due to vicissitudes of his congressional career; based on how he actually governed and the allegiances he has demonstrated, we can reasonably guess he would have voted in favor. He also cemented our endless imperial interventionism in the broader Middle East including with an absolutely disastrous campaign in Libya. And, just like George W. Bush and his lackeys, paid zero price for it.

It is true that Obama was not yet in the senate for the original Iraq war vote, so we can only speculate what his vote would have been.

Support for the war among his peer moderate Democrats in the senate was near unanimous: Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all voted in favor. It's not unfair to assume he would have as well. https://progressive.org/op-eds/clinton-s-iraq-war-vote-still...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2013/09/...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-bi...

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/joe-lieberman-iraq-war

His withdrawal of forces from Iraq for which many give him credit was on the schedule of the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration before he took office. It would likely have happened the same under a McCain administration.

He bears 100% of the responsibility for the shit-show that happened in Libya.

The US policies that prolonged and worsened the Syrian civil war were birthed under his watch as well. The "we're fighting ISIS" while simultaneously arming anti-government Al-Qaeda-aligned groups was a recipe for disaster.

Obama "surged" to double US troop levels in Afghanistan shortly after taking office. Also from this era: The drone assassination program. Lots of extra killing, to no lasting effect.

https://www.wired.com/2012/09/surge-report-card/

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/oba...

Let's not pretend that Obama was in any way but rhetorically anti-war.

The post was specifically talking about media commentators.

I do agree that Obama’s position helped him in 2008 re: clinton. But politicians are judged on deeds as well as written opinion. But in the media sphere, most of the prominently wrong got promoted.

There's a really nasty that is looming in my nightmares. Hurricane season is coming earlier now, due to warming, and the Hurricanes are bigger. And The South is going to be in the thick of the epidemic in mid to late may.

Yes that's a real risk. The current consensus forecast is for a slightly above average hurricane season. In a few months we may have thousands of people evacuated into shelters.

Obviously the US Administration is urgently planning and preparing for this?

So what do we do about all of the doom and gloom climate predictions of the past that failed to materialize[0]?

If something has changed about either the science or the media reporting of scientific results, what evidence do lay folk have that this is the case?

[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2010/10/goosey-goosey-gander.ht...

How about you look at what they actually predicted? https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

That's a useful start. I'll definitely dig into this.

The question still stands as to why, even if the problem lay with journalists/media rather than scientists, is why did they get it so wrong?

Also, if I as lay person am going to be getting my information from sources like NYT and National Geographic instead of IPCC reports directly, have they fixed the problems that led to the erroneous reporting?

A list of cherry picked quotes from a motivated contrarian is not evidence that they "got it so wrong."

That the media have (with some regularity) promoted the most catastrophic predictions, predictions that were subsequently falsified, is not exactly news.

If your only experience of how the media has covered climate change is through posts like the one you linked, then you'll naturally come to that conclusion, but I don't think it has any basis in reality.

So you're going to ignore actual climate experts because you don't like how the media has portrayed the issue?

No, that's not the argument.

Again, my root question is "why have there been so many prominent predictions of climate disaster that have failed to materialize?"

The sources for these predictions have largely been the media, but the sources are generally respected institutions or individuals, and the articles have claimed the backing of scientific authority. To what extent have these failed predictions stemmed from the media, and to what extent have they stemmed from the scientific authorities themselves?

A good part of the blame certainly rests with media. The media is motivated by what is advertiser friendly, and fear sells. However, I do not think the scientific establishment is without fault here.

No doubt part of the problem is the sheer complexity of the system they are studying, and perhaps premature confidence in the methodology of using computer models in the study of complex systems. But it also seems that a bias towards certain policy measures has led some scientists to overstate the confidence, severity, or urgency of predictions.

I do not mean to imply some sort of conspiracy theory here. I simply think that, psychologically, scientists tend to be a of a sort more attuned to "far problems". This tendency allows scientists to sometimes correctly anticipate threats, such as those from a global pandemic, but can also lead to a false equivalence between future uncertain costs and present certain ones.

I am not ignoring experts, nor am I claiming that they are completely wrong about global warming. I would more consider myself in the company of folks such as economist David Friedman or climatologist Judith Curry (neither of whom are in the employ of Big Oil) who both express doubts about the degree of consensus[0] and the severity and certainty of the warming and the value of drastic action in the present[1].

[0]https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falseh... [1]https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/curry-testimony-...

> if I as lay person am going to be getting my information from sources like NYT and National Geographic

If you'd like to have better understanding of any topic you have to learn to improve your critical thinking capabilities. The media simply print different "opinions" and "statements" and even mark them as such. You have to learn that the media never reflect the truth, the way they are used to cover almost any topic. They are simply the reflections of the power of those who do the influence. Big corporations (or organizations having immense funding) have big influence even when it is not obvious to the "lay person".

From the media side, how it typically work is that the "debate" and the "controversy" sell (more ads, more readers, more viewers). So very often they would give as much attention to one person representing the conclusion 95% of all world scientist as to another person representing a set of fringe "contrarians" financed by some NGO's which are actually financed by some corporations whose interest is to promote that view:

https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Ob...

Yes, for sure. You have experts who admit that they aren't sure, and then say what the evidence seems to show. And you have bloviators who spew BS, based on some more or less hidden agenda.

But about global climate change, it's crucial to keep in mind that it's just one aspect of human population growth and "economic development". Another huge impact is increasingly intensive and extensive land use, plus pollution with excess nutrients and toxic chemicals, which leads to loss of biodiversity and species extinctions.

Indeed, it's possible that COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases, such as HIV and ebola virus disease (EVD), are also consequences of increasingly intensive and extensive land use. That might seem ironic, but it's just how ecosystems work.

And they both use the same scare statistics. (covid) 2 million Americans will die. (global warming) If we don't stop emitting CO2 the world will collapse by 2030.

You're exaggerating, which is just as bad.

NYT reported that "200,000 to 1.7 million" people could die on March 13th [1]. Most of those calculations had to do with the fact that the hospital system would get overwhelmed at some point, compounding the deaths.

None of that is "scare statistics". It's useful modeling.

I think what you consider to be "scare statistics" is more lack of education. Similar to how people saw the Trump win as meaning "The media/polls were wrong! They had Clinton winning at 85%! They can't be trusted!". When in reality, flipping a coin and getting 3 heads in a row is all it takes for Trump to win. Or rolling a standard 6-sided die and correctly guessing the number once. It suddenly doesn't sound outlandish.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est...

Edit: The downvotes are concerning. If you have a problem with my argument, please respond.

Exactly. Both the media and the anti-media/anti-expert crowd both have a poor understanding of probability and confidence intervals.

With the media, I think it's sometimes intentional and not ignorance, as a ploy to get clicks.

With the anti-media, anti-expert crowd, I have to believe it's usually simple ignorance.

Mostly agree. Some media is certainly better than others. The NYT article I linked has a very responsible title (IMO) of "Worst-Case Estimates for U.S. Coronavirus Deaths".

It clearly says that the estimates they're about to talk about are worst-case and estimates.

True, I should have qualified that with "most" or "much" media. I agree there are still some responsible outlets out there.

Do you realize that if the media write "could die", readers will interpret it as "will die" ?

If you actually read the NYT article, it's really hard to come out of it thinking "1.7 million people will die". This is because of a few reasons:

1. They have a good, responsible title.

2. They bury the 1.7 million number a bit so you're forced to at least understand some of it.

3. They talk about how and why the estimates will change over time:

>“When people change their behavior," said Lauren Gardner, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering who models epidemics, “those model parameters are no longer applicable,” so short-term forecasts are likely to be more accurate. “There is a lot of room for improvement if we act appropriately.”

I see no reason why this article shouldn't have been posted in its current form.

Of course, as you get further away from good sources of news, you're going to get less responsible reporting. NYT is an example of very high quality reporting.

CNN at the time probably had a breaking news line item on TV of "1.7 million could die". This would be irresponsible.

Fox News at the time probably had a breaking news line item on TV of "It's just the flu". This would be irresponsible.

And that's certainly a problem.

Two million was at the very high end of only a very few models (one?).

That said, Italy is at the top of their curve (hopefully, apparently) with 16,000 deaths. However, their excess deaths this past month (compared to baseline for March) are extremely high, and equal almost as many deaths as the official Covid-19 death toll. According to at least some Italian demographers and epidemiologists, it's likely most of those deaths are due to Covid-19 and were uncounted. But let's say that only half of those deaths were Covid-19, and that the curve turns out to be relatively balanced, as with most epidemics that don't come in waves. If that's the case, Italy will see around 50,000 deaths from Covid-19. Spain will likely see around the same proportion of Covid deaths.

If the US were to experience a similar proportion of deaths, we'd be at around 500,000 deaths. I don't think we'll see nearly so many deaths from Covid-19 now but in early March, it just wasn't clear. It's not 2 million, but my point here is that this was a model that likely turned out high, but it was within the same order of magnitude. And again, I'm using the actual deaths that have occurred in Italy at the top of the curve to make that estimate. It's possible that both the curve will suddenly drop precipitously, and that most of those excess deaths were caused by some other phenomenon, but it's highly unlikely based on behavior of past respiratory pandemics.

Many more models people have discussed have predicted anywhere from 48,000 to (most commonly) around 200,000 deaths in the US from Covid-19. I think we'll probably end up around the 50,000 death figure, and that's with us shutting down our economy. I think it could have easily been much, much more (although probably nowhere near 2 million) if we had carried on business as usual (and could still end up like that if we're not careful).

So complain that the media latched on to the most dire model, that's OK. I agree the media sensationalizes. "If it bleeds, it leads".

But don't complain about the model itself. Those papers are always very clear about the degree of uncertainty.

I don't know of any serious scientist who is predicting global collapse by 2030 from global warming. Do you have someone specific in mind?

That's the so-called free media's fault. You can very easily discredit these people by deep-diving into their performance during nightly news or some program after, but the media actively avoids that in favor of infotainment and propaganda. You can even argue that the contemporary age is devoid of substance and there is no true mass news organization in existence. It is characterized by a high degree of anti-intellectualism and thought control.

> exact same dynamic with the exact same players.

There are some who might be in the climate skeptics/deniers camp who were concerned about coronavirus[0]

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-...

> but here he is again

what do you mean by this?

I like how all our problems get tied to global warming these days. Certainly boosts the theory's credibility.

Heck, tobacco is a greater threat to human life than covid-19. How many millions die every year, year after year, because of tobacco?

vehicles killed more than WW2. Coal kills more than Chernobyl, but our instincts are bad in assessing risks like that.

COVID-19 just isn't that important on the global scale.

Car accidents last year almost certainly cost way more QALYs* than COVID-19 will this year (particularly if Imperial College in their 13th report is right about how badly undercounted the case numbers are).

* Car accidents affect most ages and health levels relatively equally, while COVID-19 mostly kills the old and infirm who are unhealthy, with poor quality of life and have few years left.

You guys are still doing this..?

1.3 million people a year killed by car crashes, biased moderately towards the young (around 3 to 1 is comparing a 30 year old and a 60 year old).

In contrast, COVID-19 has a fatality rate that looks roughly like the normal yearly death rate for the UK (so you'd expect as many people to die at least partially of COVID-19 as of every other cause combined this year)... Making it around 50 million people killed if everyone got it (many won't) and if the world age distribution matched the UK.

But the average person killed by COVID-19 is a lot closer to death. Even if you just go by age the actuarial tables put for remaining life years, those killed will average a fifth as many years as those killed by car accidents.

Hmm

Ok, maybe COVID-19 WILL cause more QALY loss after all. But it's certainly not entirely clearcut.

Particularly if Imperial is right about >15% of Spain having already been infected (which would imply a MUCH lower death rate than that commonly reported given that Spain has only recorded 13 thousand deaths and has already passed their peak), in which case cars last year might still "win".

Being rational? Yes. This is not smallpox. This isn’t even MERS from a mortality perspective. It’s real, rapid-spreading, and terrifying in how it kills those few who succumb, but people need balanced perspective. All they are getting is impending doom reported on television 24/7 and it’s nothing but.

The future is bright. The 1918 Spanish Flu was followed by the roaring 20s!

At best, that’s “straw Vulcan” rationality. The emotional reaction of a crowd is an important part of any world model.

At worst, without all the anxiety you’re opposing, too many people catch it at the same time and the death rate rises to match the hospitalisation rate. When that happens you’re not talking 75 million dead, you’re talking 375 million to 2.25 billion dead depending on which of the enormous range of hospitalisation estimates I look at.

5% to 30% of the world dying?

Yeah, that's bollocks.

At least 80% of people don't even notice they have it (so the BBC has told me today).

Only 5% of cases require ICU, let alone 5% of infections (and if Imperial modelling is right that number is far lower). ICU saves at most half of the people who go in based on CDC numbers.

I have not seen any modelling by any source of even the slightest repute suggesting a 2 billion dead number is even possible. This alarmism makes people roll their eyes at all things COVID-19 and violate lockdowns, stick to the facts, they're bad enough.

The ICU is fine (fsvo) if, and only if, everyone doesn’t get it all at the same time.

"""Mississippi currently has the highest COVID-19 hospitalization rate in the nation, at 31 percent, according to states’ health department data gathered by The COVID Tracking Project. """ - https://mississippitoday.org/2020/04/01/mississippi-has-nati...

The hospitalization rate is dependent on the denominator, how many people you test.

Even NYC is doing just fine. Number of beds needed was overestimated, Cuomo himself said they have enough respirators, and the hospital ship has a handful of patients on it.

The unnecessary panic diverts attention away from real problems like lack of PPE. We ordered GM to make respirators when what we really need, even in NYC, is PPE.

Have you noticed that the same statisticians who claim that 80% of people don’t know they have it fail to multiply the denominator when reporting statistics like mortality rate?

For example here in NJ we have about 40000 confirmed and tested cases and 1000 deaths. The mortality rate for our state is about 2%.

But if 80% of cases have no symptoms and are not tested, then the denominator should be 5x higher.

The real mortality rate is .4%

The same as a bad flu, but less than many flu seasons.

Trying to retroactively excoriate people for under reacting to a crisis is a little unfair. Nobody knew how this would play out, and going off half-cocked at every threat that appears, and there are a lot of them, is destructive.

Nobody likes to be wrong, and people always try to rewrite history so they were right all along. Rush Limbaugh made hay by hanging democrats with clips of their previous statements, and Jon Stewart made hay by doing the same thing to republicans.

Nobody knew how this would play out

Yes they did, because most of the people we're talking about had real time examples going on while they were denying there was a problem. In Italy, they could have looked at what happened in China, but chose not to. You could perhaps forgive that, possibly they thought that population density, smoking rates or other demographics made a huge difference. But Spain has no excuse at all because they literally had an example of an (for all intents an purposes) identical country right on their doorstep and still chose to ignore it. My wife is Spanish so I followed a lot of the reactions there and they were flat out ridiculous. Similarly with the e.g. the US - did they really think the virus was going to act differently there than in other parts of the world?

> Yes they did

If it was all so obvious, the stock market would have dumped weeks before it did.

Did you sell in early February? Did you take out shorts on the market? Why not?

I'm a passive investor, I don't try to make money by playing the market. But yes, in mid-Feb I moved all my investments from growth funds into conservative ones, and avoided a major haircut.

Congratulations, you are smarter than I am and smarter than Wall Street.

But my point still stands - if it was obvious to people, the market would have dumped earlier than mid-Feb.

I don't claim to be smarter than anyone, I'm just some guy. I just think the "no-one could have seen this coming" is obviously bogus when it was literally occurring at the time, just in different regions.

> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life and has the exact same dynamic with the exact same players

Oh, please, enough already!

Global warming is nowhere near to what a virus can do. This thing could have killed half the population of this planet in weeks had nobody done a thing about it.

The comparison is nonsensical on many fronts. Perhaps the most significant of them is the reality of climate change: We cannot do a thing about it. Period. We cannot change it. We cannot reverse it. We cannot magically fix it in fifty years.

This is already well understand by the scientific community. Researchers don't get out there and expose it because they would instantly destroy their careers, lose grants and generally ruin their lives. It's a truly dishonest and damaging feedback loop driven by ideology, money and politics.

All you need to do in order to understand this reality is analyze ice core atmospheric sample data. That's it. It's that simple. Calculate the rate of change with CO2 increasing and decreasing. Write down those numbers.

Then realize this is what would happen if humanity left earth next Monday. It would take somewhere around 50,000 years for CO2 to decrease by 100 ppm.

We cannot accelerate this rate of change by 1000x without likely killing all life on earth. We can't. It would require such vast amounts of energy and resources that it might even be beyond what's available on this planet.

In other words, everyone is lying: Climate change deniers are nuts and those who claim we can fix it within even a few generations and just as crazy. The entire thing has become politicized beyond all comprehension. Science has left the building.

So, no. Let's focus on pandemics, they are far more likely to wipe us out than the entire "save the planet" fantasy.

> This thing could have killed half the population of this planet in weeks had nobody done a thing about it.

What? No, there's not a single credible model that predicts that this virus could have wiped out half the population, even with 0 mitigation efforts. Such a virus is a possibility, but it certainly wasn't this one.

You clearly haven't done the math.

EDIT 1: Even if my statement is off and the number is 10% to 25% --pick a number, any number-- it is still more serious than the fantasies we have been choosing to focus on.

The calculation must also include the massive mortality rate that would result from the collapse of all supply chains, medical systems, transportation, etc. People with "minor" medical conditions would die on the streets everywhere. The virus would kill indirectly by destroying society. Think it through. If the world did nothing the loss of life would be massive.

EDIT 2: Imagine a world without hospitals (at scale), doctors, nurses, transportation, factories, food, water, medicine, power, gas, petroleum.

You are focusing on direct mortality from the virus while ignoring that, without any mitigation at all, it would absolutely destroy society.

Look at what happened in Italy. Now shut down all hospitals and remove all mitigation. Get the picture? Now, go do the math on that scenario. A scenario where people die from strokes, heart attacks, infections from cuts, appendicitis, diabetes (no drugs), hypertension, tooth infections, etc.

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