Chilling Effects
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
Combine that with jungle-savvanah-desert "exotic foreign wilderness" conflation. The jungle you really do dress scantily for given humidity, temperature, and most importantly the exact opposite thermal mass situation. There is a reason desert dwellers prefer covering garments beyond just sun reflection.
Greenland I can only guess as possibly related to volcanic warmth and being used to dressing for warmth combined with familarity with hypothermia's symptoms including feeling hot. If you are used to dealing with getting so cold you feel an urge to strip naked and dive in the snow you may double down on heat because it is usually cold. But if it is actually heat this time you die an absurd seeming death. I also assume heat deaths exclude fire related deaths.
Cold can kill, too, but it usually hits the very poor and those caught in a bad situation ; heat stroke, on the other hand, can be pretty subtle. I can imagine someone who thinks of 20°C as hot is rather vulnerable to it.
What?
I think the quality of the data for this analysis is just poor (the analysis is good, but the data is really questionable), there's no way we're going to figure this one out using the data we have for it in my opinion.
As an aside, I wish that absolute numbers were also presented. Comparing things in relative ratios gets very confusing to reason about.
- Statistically, an order of magnitude more humans die from colder temperatures than from hotter ones (as discussed in this article). So hotter temperatures could easily lead to net lives saved, at least in this area.
- Hotter temperatures and higher CO2 in northern/arctic areas will increase (net) crop yields substantially. Many areas which formerly weren't hospitable for certain types of crops will suddenly become so. This isn't so surprising since CO2 is an input to photosynthesis.
- Global warming will free up northern trade routes and make potentially millions of square miles of land more habitable for humans.
- The distribution of global temperature increases is expected to be tilted towards colder areas (that is: higher temperature increases in colder regions than in hotter regions). This means we get to experience the positive effects of global warming disproportionately to the negative effects.
- Slight temperature increases might even hedge against long-term climate risk: we are technically still in an ice age, and there is long-term tail risk that we will recede back into a deeper one within a few millennia. So how do we know that stopping CO2 emissions won't make human climate long-term worse?
- Even from an ecological standpoint: hotter climates will positively impact some species (including species which don't even exist yet!), while negatively impacting others. It seems to me a general rule of thumb that more life flourishes in hotter climates than colder ones. So why be so confident that the net effects of global warming will be long-term negative to animals, en totale?
Of course, the negative effects of global warming (flooding, rising sea levels, etc) are well-known, so I omit them. My point is not that global warming is definitely a net positive; it's that it's not clear why there is so much confidence it's "definitely" a net negative.
[1] Credit to David Friedman for helping point out many of these things.
Because the immediate (up to decades or even a couple of centuries long) effects will be overwhelming bad. There's just no chance we will end with a climate that is better than the one we optimized the hell for. There will be almost no positive effect on that horizon, that's how extreme optimization works.
About the long (after a century or so) effects for humanity, I really doubt anybody knows them. Humanity will optimize itself for them, and make lemonades out of lemons anyway it can. For nature, it's still too short a timeframe for it to adapt, and global warming means a loss on diversity on a several millenia horizon; the same happens every time there is a large climate change.
(About that new land for agriculture, plants need solar radiation, and that area has little of it. That's why it's frozen.)
This just seems like dogma to me. Of course there will be both negative and positive effects. The question is: which is greater?
Suppose I "optimize" my life for $60K/year income, but suddenly get a job which pays me $80K/year but with longer work hours and less interesting work. Question: Is my life definitely worse because my current optimization will be disrupted? The answer is that it's completely unclear. $20K more per year is good; less interesting work is bad. We need better models of what we're going to do with the money, and exactly how less interesting our work is going to be.
W.r.t. to global warming: some of our existing "optimizations" will no longer be necessary, since life will just be easier in certain ways (e.g., more crops and ecnomic opportunities in the northern regions which currently make human living very hard). Some of our existing "optimizations" will fail, and need to be adjusted (e.g., areas where the sea line is expected to rise).
The question is: why think "there's just no chance" (<- your words, not mine) that we're going to be net better off in the long-term?
The worry isn't that global warming will be bad for animals, you're right, there will be winners and losers, likely in comparable amounts. The worry is that it will be bad for biodiversity, a resource that is extremely slow to replenish (even taking into account these new opportunities). On the edges of the curve, some animals will be huge winners, and some will be huge losers. 10xing the populations of some species while others go extinct is only a net null on the very surface, it's still a huge loss diversity wise.
> Researchers examined the number of known families of marine invertebrates, as well as sea-surface temperatures, over the course of 540 million years of Earth's history. They found that when temperatures were high, so was biodiversity. When temperatures fell, biodiversity also declined.
This happens because global warming causes a marginal increase in tropical areas:
> Tropical ecosystems are known to be Earth's most diverse, and the tropics would be expected to expand during warm eras.
Of course, from a short-term timeline (say 100 years), the rate of species extinction from global warming will surely outpace the rate of species creation, since evolution has no time to act.
Which is really the only factor that matters here.
A large quantity of things will likely go extinct before being able to adapt or migrate sufficiently to keep up with the changes.
The re-development of biodiversity takes millions of years, and that’s basically irrelevant from the timescale of humanity.
You could claim that we humans on earth are all equal and reasonable and it shouldn't be so hard to get along.. Except this breaks down in practice as soon as people want to move from where the climate got tougher and into the places where you said the crop yields will only get bigger. It gets ugly. Migration and turmoil.
I'm not saying that change doesn't cause any local instability, but the world very frequently net improves from change when its long-term benefits outweigh its short-term costs.
It's not clear to me that several million square miles of land suddenly becoming more habitable wouldn't provide a better economic arrangement for the world 100 years from now, even when you net out the costs of people having to migrate to new areas.
But I think a good starting place is to model the expected effects on various populations of all of these various factors (increased floods, increased crop yields, etc). If the vast majority of these models are tilted overwhelmingly negative or positive, we can somewhat adjust our confidence levels. Of course, we'll never be able to be that confident when the time horizon stretches so long (100+ years) and the effect sizes are so small (e.g., sea levels are expected to rise by a lower amount on average than the existing low-tide to high-tide variance). But..that's also my point: it's not merited to be so extremely confident that the effects of global warming are going to be so negative (or positive) over 100+ years.
People focus extremely hard on the negatives of global warming, don't focus much at all on the positives (my guess is most people living in urban areas aren't even aware there even exist any positives), and focus their debating efforts on the (as far as I can tell) long ago settled question of whether or not the climate warming is happening, or is caused by humans. My guess as to why this happens is that considering whether global warming could be a positive thing for the world conflicts with an anti-market bias that people in urban areas frequently share.
But we weren't even around yet when the current ice age started 4M years ago.
If we continue at current rates of fossil fuel use for another 200 years, the acidification of the ocean will start to endanger phytoplankton, which makes much of the oxygen we breathe. The loss of phytoplankton drove the most serious mass extinction in the Earth's history:
https://earthsky.org/earth/ocean-acidification-drove-earths-...
The article that started this thread on Hacker News suggested that the death rate goes up 10% in the winter, which gives some sense of what the tail risk is from cold weather. By contrast, the tail risk from the acidification of the oceans is something like the Permian/Triassic mass extinction. You ask "How are you so certain to know which tail risk is larger, or likelier?" We can be certain because one risk is many orders of magnitude worse than the other.
The extinction event you're referring to was hypothesized by these researchers to have come from volcanic erruptions:[1]
> During the eruptions, huge amounts of carbon dioxide and molten rock burst through the Earth's crust, burning through coal and limestone, and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That made oceans and rainwater more acidic, and dissolved more calcium from rocks into the ocean.
So far, so analogous. But does it seem like you might be exaggerating a tad by comparing human fossil fuel usage to this level of carbon release?
> Payne calculated that the eruptions, which lasted upward of a million years, released 13,000 to 43,000 gigatons (1 gigaton equals 1 billion tons) of carbon in the atmosphere. By comparison, scientists estimate we would release an estimated 5,000 gigatons of carbon if we used up all the fossil fuels in the Earth.
AFAIK, we aren't even at 50% usage over the past 150 years. We can also check this theory against long-term carbon PPM charts, which show at various points in earth's history significantly more carbon concentration then either now or even 250 million years ago.[2]
In any event, the researcher admits himself that the tail risk is not directly comparable to the Permian/Triassic mass extinction (though it's still an important consideration):
> Payne said humans may not ultimately release as much carbon dioxide as the Siberian Traps, but we may be doing it at a faster rate. "We won't necessarily end up with a world that looks as bad as it did after the end-Permian extinction, but that event highlights the fact that things can go very, very wrong," Payne said.
In any event, I think you have a point (in fact I think you've made the best point of all of the responses), but you've exaggerated it to make it as if it's the dominant risk factor in the net calculation as to whether global warming is long-term harmful or beneficial. I don't think this is so clear.
Acting as if our current levels of fossil fuel usage is going to lead to a mass extinction comparable to the end of the Permian/Triassic era comes off as alarmist and motivated.
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/april/prehistoric-mass-e...
[2] The way to extend this conversation productively would be to estimate the rate at which these volcanic eruptions were dumping CO2 in the air and compare it to the rate at which we are.
"AFAIK, we aren't even at 50% usage over the past 150 years"
Yes, but the rate keeps increasing, yes? 50% of what's been used has been used since 1990. That's 25% of the total in 30 years. But I suspect you knew this, so it is curious you chose to ignore this.
I propose we deescalate this conversation. I just checked out some of your other writings (demodexio), and it looks pretty interesting (the Soviet Economy series in particular). Still amazed at the talent and perspectives HN attracts.
I wish you and your projects the best.
To boot, "excess deaths" is a pretty nebulous topic and once you start analyzing differences between regions using their political borders (comparative politics), you're only making the concept more abstract. Just as an example of what I mean by this: something not analyzed herein was demographic differences between regions. What is the median age of populace in Nigeria vs. Greenland? Just citing this as an example -- my point is really that the variations between a Scandinavian region and equatorial one could really exceed the scope of any topical research.
Also, there are no answers, just (intellectually challenging) questions.
> The question raised is valid: do we suffer more with a colder climate, or a warmer one, and where are the boundaries, and how far does our understanding reach
That was definitely not the question being addressed here. The question was much more specific (which is good, but I still maintain it was not specific enough); it was basically: "will fewer people die of cold?". Which is a simplistic question mainly because: what does it even mean to "die of cold?" The author never defines that but seems to imply that he thinks its "any deaths above the full yaer average level of death during the winter." Meanwhile, he was comparing disparate regions, some of which don't even have winters. Again, I would argue the whole piece revolves around extremely simplistic thinking about a complex issue.
Uganda has seasons - rainy seasons and dry seasons. If you are trying to understand seasonal mortality trends, you should be considering the seasons that exist in that part of the world. I would imagine that monsoons and flooding bring public health risk - from hypothermia to compromised access to clean water to stagnant water for mosquitos to breed.
Discussing the temperature-dependence of African mortality without discussing other known-to-be-seasonal mortality factors is is bewildering to me. Mosquitoes thrive in certain temperatures. Child and maternal health in Africa remains a serious issue and birth rates are seasonal in many part of Africa. This article asked a question with an incredibly complicated set of answers and tried to come up with a one sentence explanation.
I would suggest that the author spend less time analyzing bad data and more time talking to domain experts. Without sufficient domain knowledge, this analysis has no hope of being accurate.
It's plausible that many of the adaptations are trade offs. You do better in the cold by not doing as well when it's hot. Then if it gets warmer in the place it's usually cold, your adaptations to the cold are impediments and make things worse.
And the same thing the other way around. In the place where people have adapted to the heat, if it gets even a little bit cold, they're in trouble.
This implies that climate change could still be making everything worse for everyone. You make it warmer for people adapted to the cold and that's bad. You make it warmer for people adapted to the heat and that's still bad, because they're still where they are. Now it's 145 F there instead of 135 F and their adaptations are insufficient.
Although, it really makes me think of the words of the Big Lebowski: "That's just like, your opinion, man" which I think aligns with his ultimate conclusion.
I wish more author instead of saying, this is where my bet would be, they would just say, ya there's no good information and this whole thing is up in the air, we just don't know and here are the next steps if we wanted to get closer to knowing.
Because otherwise it leads to a weird bias. For some reason, we have the tendency to believe that someone who's done the research would be more likely to be correct in their bet, but inconclusive research doesn't actually make this true. If the research is inconclusive, having done it doesn't help the prediction.
The rationalist movement is all about being able to accurately forecast the accuracy of your predictions. Saying we shouldn’t discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems odd - by making early/fuzzy predictions (and acknowledging them as such) we may ex find that we are more accurate than we realize.
> Saying we shouldn’t discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems odd
I don't think we're even talking low accuracy here, low accuracy still implies some accuracy, what I'm seeing here is random or potentially even worse than random prediction. The data points to things that are way to broad and general to reason about the cause.
I think knowing that is valuable, don't get me wrong, but my conclusion would be, don't bet on this, unless you like playing roulette.
I take your point, but he is one of a very few people on this planet who would reliably say he just didn't know if that was a more accurate statement than what he said. The whole thing is not up in the air, there is limited but useful information available now, and he's trying to correctly integrate that.
That said, you're right, but I was not focused on him, but on the bias that can be produced in other people when reading things like this.
Though to be honest, I even worry that I have this bias as well. Like because I researched something, yet pretty inconclusive, I feel somehow better equipped to bet on it, and yet I have no idea if at that point I'm doing better than random.
I thought it was well worth the read and he left no uncertainty about the uncertainty of his test results.
Maybe not the most 100% rigorous analysis that one could do, but certainly well beyond how self-accountable most people are.
> Deaths definitely go up every winter, from about 4000 to 4500. So yeah, this is about 10% extra deaths during the cold season.
This second point isn't confirming the first. A ~10% increase in deaths during the cold season isn't enough to attribute ~10% of all deaths to cold, unless the cold season lasts all year.
> But [minimum mortality temperature] is very different in different regions. In Sweden, it’s 18C (64F). In Florida, it’s 27C (81F). The only constant is that it seems to be about 80% of the way through the temperature distribution of a region
> You could argue that this is at least partly because of cultural adaptation. The “effective temperature”, the one that’s reaching your blood vessels and your heart, depends on things like how many layers of clothing you wear, how often you go outside, how much air conditioning you use, et cetera. So for example, in the figure above, Stockholm doesn’t get any increased mortality from the cold, no matter how cold it gets. Plausibly that’s because they’ve organized their lives and built environment around surviving cold winters. One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).
But the chart shows lots of excess cold mortality in Beijing, with its frigid winters. You can't live in Beijing at all without being able to deal with lethally low temperatures. The cultural adaptation story must be partially true, but it has some serious problems.
The author, being an (anti)rationalist, is well aware of these issues : "The map is not the territory." is a popular mantra of theirs.
But I guess that it's much harder to apply in practice...
If heart attacks are a significant component, then maybe some of these deaths can be explained by what amounts to shock from one's baseline?
Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself, but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are living things too, they have their preferences !
Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ? Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle ?
I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be very interested if anybody else does the same, share your findings !
Death is (most of the time) not related to temperature itself, but to some bacteria/virus/infections/X, and that's the important point, X varying with the temperature ! Bacterias and viruses are living things too, they have their preferences !
Yeah, many common cold occurs during winter ...! But also, you're most subject to contracting malaraia if you're in a hot/humid weather., because, yeah, that's where malaria lives, not in NY or Tokyo, september to june. Then, which one will kill you ? One ? Both ? Or also the one your immune system is least able to handle ?
I did not dig a lot into the mathematical models here ... But somehow it tickles me ! I'll have a deeper look, and would be very interested if anybody else does the same, share your findings !
I would say that on the contrary, this kind of blogpost can be useful to make people that can still change their mind to think about this issue.
> One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).
At one point, in the 00’s, they were using late USSR data, which they thought was doctored too, but that was cancelled off by the improvement in health standards.
What interestingly means that warming Siberia may increase the number of people dying due to the cold.
"[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]"
This is Scott having a conversation with his readership, not asserting a Bold New Idea.
This is how knowledge is created: in communities of smart people with access to diverse sets of information — and crucially, with an open-mindedness to whatever conclusion the data points to.
> I realize it’s awkward to propose two different mechanisms for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African extreme, but I don’t have any better ideas.
When do you ever read that in a scientific paper? In a podcast by some (self-proclaimed) science communicators, they mention from time to time how the media gets it backwards and that asserting absolute truths is not very scientific, but rather that questioning things and being open minded to whatever the data tells you is how science works. And then you open a paper that, as obscurely worded as possible, describes that given X you get Y. And the next paper claims the opposite. No doubt indicated, just business language stating things as they are.
I dunno, I like blog posts a lot better than trying to get useful info from scientific papers and weighing diverging conclusions based on methods used and other factors. Also, the lack of hyperlinks in papers. It's 2021, people, try clickable words or links in footnotes rather than having to DDG for (and then pay 40 bucks for or sci-hub) the citation mentioned somewhere on page 7 while you were in the middle of a paragraph on page 3 and then still find the relevant part of said citation.
I've found a conversational trick in saying "But I haven't finished thinking about this yet.". It can sometimes be a bit of a thought terminating cliche, but I find it stops people jumping to contest obvious details in order to get started proving me wrong. People seem to acknowledge that I know I could be wrong, so they're more helpful in the conversation rather than antagonistic or dismissive.
1. Average global temperature increases. 2. Winters get colder on average 3. Summers get hotter on average, more strongly than 2.
Or if you prefer simple arithmetic, the average of -1 and 1 is 0. The average of -2 and 4 is 1. The second one has a colder "winter" but it's still warmer on average.
I have never heard this. Do you have a reference?
I am no expert, but I looked for any statement about winter temperatures from the latest IPCC report. I found this in TS.2.6:
> Warming of the land surface during the period 1971–2018
> contributed about 5% of the increase in the global energy
> inventory (TS.3.1), nearly twice the estimate in AR5 (high
> confidence). It is virtually certain that the average
> surface warming over land will continue to be higher than
> over the ocean throughout the 21st century. The warming
> pattern will likely vary seasonally, with northern high
> latitudes warming more during winter than summer (medium
> confidence). {2.3.1, 4.3.1, 4.5.1, Box 7.2, 7.2.2,
> Cross-Chapter Box 9.1, 11.3, Atlas 11.2}
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (warm days and
> nights) and the intensity and duration of heatwaves have
> increased globally and in most regions since 1950, while the
> frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased
> (virtually certain). There is high confidence that the
> increases in frequency and severity of hot extremes are due
> to human-induced climate change. Some recent extreme events
> would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human
> influence on the climate system. It is virtually certain
> that the further changes in hot and cold extremes will
> occur throughout the 21st century in nearly all inhabited
> regions, even if global warming is stabilized at 1.5°C
> (Table TS.2, Figure TS.12a).
Also the most recent National Climate Assessment says this in its summary finding (https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/):
> Declines in snow and ice cover caused by warmer winter
> temperatures are expected to negatively impact the winter
> recreation industry in the Northwest, Northern Great Plains,
> and the Northeast.I can find references in the latest IPCC report to increased frequency of droughts, heavy rain, and heat waves, but I can't find much mention of extreme cold events; I was under the impression that these were predicted to be increasing too (i.e. more severe winter weather systems with most non-storm winter days being warmer, or put differently increased variance as the mean increases), but maybe that's not correct.
I stand by my main point which was that you _could_ have an increase in both extreme cold events and extreme hot events while the average temperature is increasing, to correct an oversimplification I believe the GP was making. I think this sibling made that point more concisely though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961979.
I believe my quoted text above states that the frequency and intensity of cold extremes has decreased, as a "virtually certain" fact.
> I stand by my main point which was that you _could_ have an increase in both extreme cold events and extreme hot events while the average temperature is increasing, to correct an oversimplification I believe the GP was making.
Yes, as a mathematical fact this is undoubtedly true.
Note in your quote how they refer to both:
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (warm days and nights) and the intensity and duration of heatwaves
And for cold they say:
> while the frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased
But no mention of extreme weather events like storms. This might sound pedantic but I think it’s two different meanings of “extreme”, they discuss the differences a bit in https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-6/.
Anyway, low epistemic confidence on this bit, just my read is a bit less certain on that last point than yours.
average(20, 20, 20, 20)
=> 20
average(40, 23, 23, 5)
=> 22
The term "global warming", while scientifically correct, was dropped for "climate change" to remove this type of confusion, you know the kind - "if the whole world is warming, why did we just have a huge ice storm in Texas?"
"This Is Why Global Warming Is Responsible For Freezing Temperatures Across The U.S." (Forbes): https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/30/this...
"Climate change: Arctic warming linked to colder winters" (BBC): https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58425526
"How global warming can cause Europe's harsh winter weather" (DW) https://www.dw.com/en/cold-winter-global-warming-polar-vorte...
"Record cold, intense storms and tornadoes amid global warming: Could there be a connection?" (USA Today): https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/17/global...
"How Warming Winters Are Affecting Everything": https://www.npr.org/2020/02/18/803125282/how-warming-winters...
"5 reasons why your warmer winter is so alarming": https://www.edf.org/blog/2020/02/12/5-reasons-why-your-warme...
"Winters are warming faster than summers. These US cities could lose weeks of freezing days by 2050." https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/12/20/18136006/c...
I’ll give an anecdote. I’m working on a project that tracks the length of the rainy season over time in a certain region. There is no clear trend one way or another, but what does stick out as a super strong and clear trend is that the variability of both extremes occurring is increasing.
"50 percent more extreme cold weather events under RCP8.5"
Not
"This is how a polar vortex works, therefore there will be more cold weather events"
(which is obviously faulty logic since that doesn't account for an increasing mean temp, which is why modelling is needed to balance out these offsetting considerations)
See:
Anyway - the next article, from the BBC, is a report on a study published in Science. The study is linked to in the text, it’s called “Linking Arctic variability and change with extreme winter weather in the United States” if you prefer papers over news articles summarizing them.
I reject the accusation that I'm pulling a "citation needed" trope. The citation I shared above, which more directly addresses what I'm asking and is from more reputable bodies than your citations, says the exact opposite thing to what you're claiming and so what I'm doing is not an example of this trope (which is where someone asks for a citation for a well established fact as a rhetorical device).
Anyway: it’s definitely interesting and surprising that the IPCC’s report states that extreme cold events will decrease, when you’ve got experts and studies and mechanisms claiming otherwise, not to mention non-stop record breaking winters. The IPCC report is 4000 pages long and I’m not qualified (or blessed with the time) to pick through it and reconcile those things. Maybe the IPCC paper doesn’t consider the impact climate change is having on the polar vortex settled enough to factor it in (at least one of the articles above claims it’s still not universally accepted); maybe, as you suggest, the net warming will offset it; maybe, as someone else suggests in that thread, we're operating on different definitions of "extreme"; maybe certain areas will see an increase of extreme cold spikes but on net they’ll go down around the surface of the planet, which depending on where they are still complicates the calculus in the fine article quite a bit - if Texas has increased days or intensity of extreme cold but Antarctica has less, well, there’s a whole lot more people who might die in Houston than at McMurdo Station, even if Antarctica is quite a bit bigger than Texas. I’ll revise my priors and was wrong to state with certainty that extreme cold events will increase given the IPCC report, but after a near-decade of unprecedented winter weather disasters happening annually and a well-established mechanism that explains it, I’m not willing to write the claim off.
I reacted in such a way because I interpreted your initial response to be a "let me google that for you" flavor of borderline sarcasm, as if the question I was asking had an obvious answer and was clearly settled, when the articles you shared don't answer the question I was asking. My initial read on your sarcastic intention was confirmed when you accused me of repeating a "citations please" trope. So if you're going to take such a sarcastic approach, then I am not going to pretty up my language when you share news articles that do not address the question I'm asking.
"when you’ve got experts and studies ... claiming otherwise"
"there’s a whole lot more people who might die in Houston"
EDIT: Of course, with changing climate: some crops will benefit; others will not. But how do we know in net that crop yields will definitely decrease under global warming?
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/warmer-wetter-climate...
Personally I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the first .5 C of global warming was a net benefit for humanity. I'd be pretty surprised if the second was, though, and very very* surprised if the third was. And that's just what takes us to our current target for limiting warming.
This is junk science.
The CO2 level of the open atmosphere is ~400 ppm. The CO2 level aboard a nuclear submarine can range between ~2000-10000 ppm. 10000 ppm is enough to cause sleep disturbances and headaches, and we're less sure about the range between 5000-10000, but we're talking orders of magnitude away before we start seeing issues among people who engage in cognitively challenging work on a daily basis. The CO2 levels aboard the ISS are usually a bit lower--they try to keep it under 5000 ppm--but the astronauts there are even more closely monitored for medical issues and also have to perform cognitively challenging work. These are over extended periods of time between 3-9 months.
If the CO2 concentration of the Earth's atmosphere went up 10x, you'd have much bigger problems than the cognitive effects of CO2 exposure.
> Just carry a CO2 meter around and measure it yourself. Once you're aware of it, the feeling is impossible to miss.
Sounds like a combination of confirmation bias and psychosomatic placebo effect to me. Plus you’re assuming a specific correlation between subjective minor discomfort and cognitive performance.
There's a reason why we already have universal colloquial language to describe a room with too much CO2, "stuffy," "getting some fresh air to clear your head." We all know this stuff intuitively, we've experienced it directly our whole lives.
Edit to reply to ninja edit:
> There's a reason why we already have universal colloquial language to describe a room with too much CO2, "stuffy" "getting some fresh air to clear your head." We all know this stuff intuitively, we've experienced it directly our whole lives.
First off, you're going back to the perception of minor discomfort to defend the claim that CO2 levels that aren't even high enough to cause minor discomfort are high enough to cause "detectable society wide problems". This strikes me as incoherent and evasive. Secondly, you're assuming that the minor discomfort of being in a "stuffy" room is entirely caused by CO2 concentration. (In my personal experience, body and food odors are the main sources of discomfort when I'm in a poorly ventilated space.) And thirdly, you're assuming that this discomfort necessarily causes poor cognitive performance.
If CO2 was actually high enough to be a problem, the first symptoms would be an increase in heart rate and rate of respiration. Kinda the opposite of lethargy.
We see no slowing down in the rate of co2 production and according to many studies we might reach 1000ppm or more by the end of the century.
Anyways, I'm not saying each of these are the end of humanity, I'm just saying that "it's going to be 2c more so whatever" isn't the whole picture
Astronauts stay on the ISS for six months at a time, not “a few weeks”.
So far, conflicting conclusions are more common throughout much of recent climate science than any of us like. The basic lab bench physics behind CO2 is obviously very well-understood but long-term global climate (as opposed to regional, seasonal weather) is a 'wickedly' hard problem.
Modeling future global climate shifts over years and decades is hard because Earth's climate is a highly-complex, dynamically coupled system with thousands of interacting variables and possible feedbacks. Then extrapolating the output of those models to estimate significant changes to health, agriculture and extreme weather event severity and frequency requires making assumptions which are not nearly as well-understood. Then trying to adapt those estimates to further estimate the relative benefits, costs and impacts of myriad regulatory, economic and behavioral policy proposals is the kind of thing which would cause my favorite stats prof to say "It's fine... that's why god made error bars".
In theory a rising sea level isn't a big deal in the abstract, but we have already built a ton of property along the coast ...
Posting level of epistemic certainty makes this not so. This is just a hypothesis and summary post.
But also in a UI question, it appears that people are unable to read content without updating their priors significantly, even with a low proposed information gain multiplier.
This helps understand comments like this.