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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me:

"And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive and prosperity-destroying energy policies down our throats."

No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doesn't matter. If there were a meteor heading towards us on a collision course, would we reason against sending Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to stop it because it wasn't caused by us?

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> No, there's the exact same amount of reason. This isn't a morality play, who's "fault" it is doensn't matter.

Of course it matters -- in terms of the amount of impact human activity has on the climate. The less impact it has, the less beneficial you can expect energy policies to be to the environment. Since these policies have a non-trivial cost in terms of human suffering (less energy for heating, growing food, etc.), it is crucial to estimate their effectiveness.

It doesn't matter in a moral sense. If someone proves that CO2 emissions don't cause global warming, then yeah, it makes it less effective to focus on CO2 emissions. But we still want to stop warming from happening, so we'd increase our efforts on whatever they pinpoint as the alternative cause.

The linked article I was rebutting wasn't making that utilitarian case, they were making a moral case about not being obligated to avert warming at all, which I think is thoroughly bullshit, because I live here.

It matters precisely in a moral sense. Because of the (in)effectuality of the action. Resources are scarce, and you are taking food from a baby...somewhere in the world. Of course none of this matters if you are having "first-world" pyschological problems about guilt...or you are trying to secure some money or presige for your first-world cushy lifestyle.

Scarce resources aren't the cause of starving babies

> Scarce resources aren't the cause of starving babies

They aren't? Wait, let's make the claim more specific. Biofuel mandates that had been justified in part based on CO2 concerns have driven up the cost of corn and other grains - crops and farmland is being needlessly diverted from food to fuel. Making grains more expensive has indeed been a cause of starvation in the third world.

Um, here:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62609/c-ford-runge-an...

Energy production is the main 'human contribution' (I think?).

Are you really saying, that the Energy industry is a starving baby?

They are the richest companies in the world, they can easily afford ALL of the changes that have been suggested, but it isn't about 'affordability' it is about profitablity.

Making things more efficient, and encouraging more self/clean power generation runs contrary to Energy companies profit motive, so of course they will resist it and even run marketing to say that the world will be worse off if it is more efficient and "cleaner".

And as a collective we have and continue to be stupid enough to buy into their narrative.

This is an argument from convenience. Its like blaming the drug dealers for wall street's cocaine problems. Notwithstanding that issue, you have the opportunity cost of focus and attention on something. Which means you likely have remidiable inefficiency in other areas. It is that which kills...like taking your eye off the road and having a car accident. Again, that has nothing to do with the (oil,power,auto) companies or whether or not you dirve a prius, a tesla, or an F-150.

Then please refute the "energy is the largest contributing industry" statement with some fact rather than rhetoric.

In your metaphor, this is like blaming the drug dealers for the "drugs being sold on the street" problem. The drug dealer has no interest in selling you a 'drug manufacturing kit' for your home, he/she wants to keep you coming back.

I was pointing out, that given it is a humanistic/moral issue. The corporate 'profit motive' has nothing to provide. We have the resources to do everything we want to do, and it makes ethical sense. But a rational organisation (which is, by definition driven by profit) would never invest in this, because it would reduce its profit.

This isn't an argument of convenience, this is a "point out the fucking obvious"

This is a political argument about taxes, and has nothing to do with either climate or science. If you want to tax these people, go ahead...get together a bunch of special interests and some money and go lobby the relevant folks.

"I was pointing out, that given it is a humanistic/moral issue."

It may very well be indeed. But in the context of the submitted article and its discussion, it is proving the point about the use and abuse of data and science. There is a difference between a "moral use of science" and dressing up a "moral/political special interest position" as a <position of science>.

As I am sure you would appreciate.

I have no 'special interest'. I was responding to the idea that "we can't respond because of starving babies" comment.

That is factually untrue, and my response was based on fact, there is money, and it could be used, no babies would stave.

But I pointed out it was never considered because if the profit motive.

You seem to be railing against a position I am not holding.

To simplify:

"We could do everything we thought was needed to decrease global warming and no baby would need to starve".

I'm not saying:

- We need to do something

- We are the cause of global warming

- Doing the things we think will reduce global warming will actually reduce global warming.

> The linked article I was rebutting wasn't making that utilitarian case, they were making a moral case about not being obligated to avert warming at all

I re-read the article and I don't understand how you arrive at this interpretation. This appears to be something you're assuming. The article is precisely about the utilitarian argument: the trade-off between the expected effectiveness of energy policies and their cost.

that's a bit strange to me, there is a lot of economic activity for to be gathered from re-newing things and insulating houses in rich countries. It's just rich kids churning around disposable income in products made by poor people (basic trickle down), it's not really relevant if it's for new gas-guzzler cars parts and AC units or insulation panels and busses they spend it on.

If the impact of global warming is significantly smaller than predicted and the human-induced contribution to that reduced warming is also much smaller than claimed, then expensive "green" policies indeed need to be reevaluated. Your fault reasoning has nothing to do with it.

Think of it from a programming perspective. You've suddenly discovered that your program runtime wasn't near as slow as you thought. Plus you've shown that most of the runtime is driven by systems external to your code. It makes sense to reconsider how much effort to invest in for code optimization.

Except that the entire "humans are responsible for say n%" is the latest diversionary tactic by climate deniers to sucker rational people onto opposing policy that mitigates climate change.

The argument is akin to saying "your program slowdown is - and I'm making up a number out of thin air - 50% caused by systems outside of your control so you should definitely spend 50% less time optimizing the things you can optimize".

The logical flaws are blatant: the % is an invention, and the truth or otherwise of the premise has no bearing on the action you can and should take.

Let me get this right: you're saying that human emissions of CO2 need to be reduced in order to mitigate climate change regardless of whether CO2 emissions cause any warming?

If humans caused 100% of the change then we can stop causing it. If humans caused 0% of the change then we can't stop causing it and must adapt to it. If humans caused 50% of the change, then we can stop some of it but will have to adapt to the rest.

Obviously the premise has a huge bearing on the action we can and should take.

Firstly, I said it was in invention. It's an argument that has the benefit of never having to provide any sort of evidence to back it up.

But since I'm forced to attack the strawman: let me put it another way: if humans are responsible for less warming than 100%, then we're going to have to do more to mitigate our effects, because we have to mitigate more human behaviour for the same outcome.

Until we're making meaningful changes - yet to happen - it's utterly irrelevant if we've caused 50%, or 100%.

Suppose that it's significantly greater than predicted? Are you willing to bet your future happiness, and the health and wealth of the rest of humanity, that it isn't?

> Suppose that it's significantly greater than predicted? Are you willing to bet your future happiness, and the health and wealth of the rest of humanity, that it isn't?

Yes. Of course I am. We make those sorts of bets constantly, because Pascal's Wager doesn't work. We can't not make those sorts of bets.

When somebody says "the end of the world is nigh!" it is almost always worth waiting a bit to see if in fact the thing they're worrying about is actually a problem. Hindcasting is nice and all but the real test is: Does the warming trend actually continue as predicted and if so, once it does get warmer, do we actually see negative effects from it that significantly outweigh all the likely positive effects of warming?

The warming trend is continuing, and the insurance industry is already seeing significant negative effects. See for example [0], [1], [2], [3], all from a single search on "insurance industry extreme weather trends"

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/extreme-weat...

[1] http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2014/02/14/allianz-sto...

[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/partners/advinsurancetrends11...

[3]

Even if it's still "warming" at all - whether it is depends on what timescale you look at and how you average the data points - it's certainly not continuing as predicted, but rather at a lower rate than expected. Breathless media stories notwithstanding, nobody thinks the amount of warming we've seen thus far is likely to have generated measurably "more extreme" weather. One of your links is about Sandy, but atlantic Hurricane activity has been unusually LOW over the last decade, with 2013 one of the lowest yet. You should perhaps balance your diet with more stories like this:

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/what-happened-to-the-2013...

(Regardless, even if there were measurable negative effects you would need to balance them against the measurable positive effects to determine if the NET externality was positive or negative. It's silly to add up just one side - even the IPCC doesn't do that.)

I think you're missing the point. Climate change policy is an optimization problem: how much money do we spend (either active on counter-measures or passively by capping energy usage) to reduce temperature change by some amount. If we can only affect it half as much as we thought we could, would we still spend the same amount? Maybe, but it's not exactly a no-brainer.

" If we can only affect it half as much"

You've made a great point - if we've really reached a tipping point at some of the more extreme global warming alarmists, you wouldn't spend any money at all. So they've inadvertently caused logical people to decide we shouldn't do anything.

The other end of the spectrum would try to convince you that global warming isn't real (global warming and cooling has happened for eons - without man's help) and that it's therefore not worth doing anything.

As an ecologist, I drive my wife and kids nuts with my need to recycle ... and take it a step beyond. I've repaired all sorts of "throw-away" household gadgets (most recently my wife's straightening iron) and try to give away working items we no longer need (freecycle). So I still believe we should each do what we can to minimize our impact on the planet, whether or not global warming is real.

If we can only affect it half as much as we thought we could, would we still spend the same amount?

Maybe you'd have to spend twice as much to have the desired effect.

prosperity-destroying energy policies

Ever notice how climate change skeptics implicitly claim perfect economic foresight? They may not buy that the Earth is warming or what the cause is, but they're absolutely certain that trying to weatherproof our civilization is going to result in collective bankruptcy. Oh yes.

I knew a brilliant math professor who was a skeptic based on his statistical analysis, but did not have any interest in trying to influence policy there.

> but they're absolutely certain that trying to weatherproof our civilization is going to result in collective bankruptcy. Oh yes.

? This is hardly a deep economic forecast. If you force people to engage in expenditures they were otherwise never going to make, it's a pretty safe bet they're not going to be better off. After all, if they were better off for it, why weren't they already going to do it? We can maybe imagine a few scenarios to do with personal health and things like that where paternalism works, but nothing to do with global warming looks like that. Working against global warming is going to be expensive, there's no question about that; the question is whether working against global warming is less expensive than not.

If we're only the cause of 50% of the warming that implies curbing our behavior only has half the impact that it would if we caused 100% of the warming. Granted, geoengineering projects that impact total warming are different.

Throwing out a percentage like that is meaningless. I contributed to 50% of the trash in my household last month. If that's 300 lbs, then curbing it is significant. If it's 3 lbs, then it isn't. If he can't provide more concrete figures for his argument then the argument has no meaning.

If we're only the cause of 50% of the warming that implies curbing our behavior only has half the impact that it would if we caused 100% of the warming.

No, it does not imply that, not unless we know of a linear relationship between "warming" and "impact." From what I understand, the relationship is far from linear, i.e. our changes can have disproportionate impact.

The climate change thing is almost a red herring vis a vis fossil fuels.

The supply of fossil fuels is absolutely limited. We don't know where these limits are exactly. But what we do know is that if we have no alternatives, our entire civilization will collapse when we run out of them. Billions of people will die. Centuries of learning will be forgotten. A new dark age will result.

Now that is "prosperity-destroying."

This is reason #1 to do everything we can to move beyond fossil fuels. Climate change may be reason #2, or maybe reason #3 after geopolitical concerns. But even if there is no manmade climate change at all, we must do everything we can to develop alternatives to fossil fuels now while we still have the time and energy to do so. The danger of collapse due to fossil fuel depletion is so great that I'm not even sure if climate change ranks.

So why are we still even arguing about this?

Thank you. What we are seeing here is nothing more than a rationalization and opportunistic bolstering of his preexisting belief system.

In the end global warming might be better than we're expecting but it is the political and social inferences, like in the quote you included, that belie his true intent.

nothing more than a rationalization and opportunistic bolstering of his preexisting belief system

Whose behavior does that not describe?

Fair.

Believe it or not, there are people who consider evidence, logic, and consequences, and base their understanding off of that.

There may be a few, but there are countless more who falsely believe this about themselves. Therefore it is wiser in most cases, especially one's own, to presume that this belief is self-deception. Self-observation quickly reveals how often the emotional reaction precedes and conditions the cognitive one.

If someone can show a track record of having changed their views, and their arguments are from the perspective of achieving a greater understanding, and not of cramming some ideology down others' throats, I'm markedly more willing to consider that they are sincere in this statement.

It's not necessary to bend in every wind, but I look for some signs of adaptability.

would we reason against sending Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to stop it

Yes, because Tom Cruise could stop it better.

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