I'm flattened by the degree to which people assume that, because I'm willing to go along with the guess that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, I must also be in favor of loony policy proposals.
Was saying that I was against ethanol-from-corn, and for building 10,000 LFTR nuclear power plants, not enough of a clue?
Was saying that I don't worry about AGW in the real world because we have much worse problems not enough of a clue?
Is all that just flatly overridden by my being willing to provisionally believe what mainstream climate scientists say? It's a question of simple fact, not values! I should be able to believe something about how the Earth's atmosphere works without automatically ending up lumped in some particular political cluster! I'd understand if you assumed that by default, but I went out of my way to provide you with specific evidence to contradict that assumption! Geepers.
Thank you for arguing the issue much better than I could! I'm open to discussions about what to do about AGW (absent loony policy proposals like fusion or "clean coal"), but I don't understand those who say the state of the science justifies saying we just don't have to worry about it.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of environmentalists.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "catastrophe is coming" people.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "regulation is the answer people".
Subset of AGW people DOES NOT overlap much with pro-thorium/pro-fusion people.
It'd be like if I made the argument that I'm against income inequality, that we need a "fair distribution", and things like that for an article - but wrote a couple sentences that I'm not in favor of taxation/redistribution. I'd be one of the few alive that thought that way. "AGW is happening, but isn't a big deal" is a rare position. "AGW is happening, but we've got bigger fish to fry" is a very rare position. "AGW is happening, and so I'm for nuclear" is also relatively rare.
For the record, I believe some global warming is happening, much of it isn't human created, some of it is, it won't be a catastrophe, bureaucratic regulations would be poorly implemented and accomplish very little, there's more bang for your buck in working on local ecosystems, and better nuclear power/batteries does to energy what modern farming and biochemistry did for food while largely ending problems of air pollution. Finally, I think people in the future laugh at what a panic those silly folk back in the early 2000's were thinking.
So yes, when you go heavily against the grain, you've got to keep disclaiming every paragraph or people will just assume you're for the things that everyone else with those positions is for. Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and all of that. If you use terminology and speak of things in a certain way that almost everyone else who speaks that way is in favor of certain kinds of solutions, people will drift into thinking you're in favor of them. That said, enjoyed this article quite a bit besides that.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of environmentalists.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "catastrophe is coming" people.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "regulation is the answer people".
Subset of AGW people DOES NOT overlap much with pro-thorium/pro-fusion people.
You're just making that up... Personally I think a huge amount of people who believe that AGW is happening are huge proponents of nuclear fusion. In fact, I think that almost everyone is pro-nuclear fusion if it is scientifically possible. As far as fission goes, a large part of the Obama administration favors expanding nuclear fission and they also take an AGW position.
Yes, we've never actually experimented to observe the results over 50 years of artificially adding a large amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But we know from physics that it's a greenhouse gas. It's not a privileged hypothesis we're pulling out of nowhere. It's not like saying "You can't prove there's no invisible pink unicorn in my garage!" [Anthropological Global Warming] is, ceteris paribus, what we should expect to happen if the other things we believe are true. We don't have any experimental results on what will happen 50 years from now, and so you can't grant the proposition the special, super-strong status of something that has been scientifically confirmed by a replicable experiment. But as I point out in "Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence", if science couldn't say anything about that which has not already been observed, we couldn't ever make scientific predictions by which the theories could be confirmed. Extrapolating from the science we do know, global warming should be occurring; you would need specific experimental evidence to contradict that.
We are, I think, dealing with that old problem of motivated cognition. As Gilovich says: "Conclusions a person does not want to believe are held to a higher standard than conclusions a person wants to believe. In the former case, the person asks if the evidence compels one to accept the conclusion, whereas in the latter case, the person asks instead if the evidence allows one to accept the conclusion." People map the domain of belief onto the social domain of authority, with a qualitative difference between absolute and nonabsolute demands: If a teacher tells you certain things, and you have to believe them, and you have to recite them back on the test. But when a student makes a suggestion in class, you don't have to go along with it - you're free to agree or disagree (it seems) and no one will punish you.
Polarity conventions are arbitrary. "Greenhouse gas" is an analogy, one that is deliberately deceptive in order to provoke a maladaptive political response.
I don't mean to single the author out- and maybe I'm just off to a rough morning - but, while good, that article is unnecessarily verbose. As much time as I spend reading nowadays, I've grown an appreciation for straight-to-the-point articles that use flowery language sparingly and only when it adds meaning to the article itself.
I've had that thought before, when reading Yudkowsky's articles. But, given the number of misinterpretations of Eliezer's basic points even amongst the relatively erudite and incisive audience here at Hacker News, it's hard to say what he could've cut out without sacrificing even more reader comprehension.
I do not see any flowery language in the article. Eliezer is, as he often does, making subtle points about rational thinking, knowledge and basic probability analysis. These topics require precision. Unfortunately, being precise sometimes means using a lot of words to make sure you've covered all cases.
Well, I'm going to approach this from the political angle instead of the scientific angle, because I have my doubts about the accuracy of modern climate models. The Earth is really complex, and while single float thermodynamics equations recalculated on a grid map of the world are probably pretty close to reality, I have yet to see any reason why a few degrees error per century is unthinkable for these computer models.
That said, I have seen two political motions within AGW. One, to motivate people to consume less, to accept a reduction in their standard of living. Two, to motivate people to confront and resolve an issue in a sensible way with modern technologies. The latter actually makes sense, AGW or not, unless you really do like breathing exhaust fumes; unfortunately the former seems more common, and less acceptable.
> One, to motivate people to consume less, to accept a reduction in their standard of living.
While I agree with your point that some people do argue in favour of ACC for the reason you've given, I'd point out that consuming less doesn't mean a lower standard of living. For example, per capita oil consumption is lower now than it was during the 1970s, yet per capita GDP is a lot higher. So we're doing more with less.
I suppose I wasn't clear. A drop in raw material consumption is not a bad thing, as long as it is accompanied by an increase in material efficiency to match it.
For example, we may be buying less gas at the pumps, but that's just because our cars have improved. This did not effect our standard of living, because we still have the same individual mobility.
Regarding motivating people to consume less, maybe there are some people for whom this is the equivalent of a blue law (i.e. don't drink alcohol on Sunday and you'll be a 'better' person), but that's really not the common case. The motivation is sustainability.
Sure some people really don't care whether this level of consumption is sustainable on an equitable basis worldwide, and are willing to use military might to hold that position, and you may be one of those people, but sustainability is the basis for these considerations, not random do-gooder pronouncements.
But the Copenhagen Climate Summit/Council/Conference was not called the Copenhagen Sustainability Summit. I think some people are suspicious of the larger green movement because it seems so shifty. Basically the conversation between "earthers" and "doubters" has been going like this:
Earther: global warming is bad.
Doubter: if the planet is warming, why is it so cold?
Earther: actually it's climate change.
Doubter: what's so bad about changing climates?
Earther: actually it's about sustainability.
The message needs to be consistent and clear. Snapshot of earther and doubter sentiments in time:
1970 Earther: Split wood, not atoms.
1970 Doubter: I like big cars.
1980 Earther: There will be no oil in 20 years.
1980 Doubter: I like semi-big cars.
2000 Earther: There will be no oil in 20 years.
2000 Doubter: I like big cars.
2010 Earther: Split atoms, save the trees.
2010 Doubter: I like semi-big cars.
''Because your point on "consistent and clear" is based completely on a made up discussion between what sounds like 3rd graders (or politicians)''
Unfortunately, it's the politicians that are making the decisions - and a lot of the interest in current affairs from the general public is around the level of the third grade. Look at the writing standards in many tabloid newspapers for evidence of that.
Without spending an awful lot of time examining the data (which I am not willing to do), I cannot see a way of having a view on AGW. The entire issue is so politicised and so tribal (with astonishingly naive, provably false claims from both sides of the argument) that I've given up caring. I just don't have the time or energy to make a sound judgment precisely because of the tone of the debate.
I agree, voter apathy due to political shenanigans is a huge problem. People just disengage from the process.
Straw man arguments don't fix it, instead they perpetuate the same useless bickering. Trumpeting dishonest scientists or shifty politicians without seeming interest in rising above their quality of debate is just more of the political game.
Madair, politics, not science operate on "quality of debate". Science operates with the assumption that all claims are false until they have been proven to be true by an empirical observation.
Therefore, the only way this conversation could scientifically meaningful is if someone provided an empirical experiment that verifies that the error range of modern climate models is small enough to make them meaningful. I don't claim to be capable of proving that they aren't, I merely observe that such an experiment has not been done.
Until that occurs, those models (and this discussion) are effectively meaningless unless viewed from a political angle. So, welcome the useless bickering, because you are a part of it.
You're making the same mistake that Eliezer describes in his essay.
Many things in science are not proved true - in fact, it's fundamentally impossible to prove a scientific theory is true. You can only disprove - falsify - it. The best we can do with a scientific theory is say it agrees with all observations.
While I'm not sure I am arguing for a reduction in standard of living, my question is: would you be willing to accept a reduction in standard of living if it were to avoid an even larger reduction for your children and grandchildren?
In many cases (not climate change so much, but other supposed "reductions" of standard of living) it's also a matter of weighing things like "can I eat fish that I pull out of a lake and exercise without getting an asthma attack?" which are normally not taken into account in such statistics.
The article makes a false assumption. He starts by saying that AGW has the ball, but then carries that on through the rest of his reasoning as a proxy for "global temperatures will be 6 degrees higher in 2100 hundred has the ball", although he doesn't come out and say it.
Few educated people disbelieve in the evidence for some AGW. There are a few things that many of us don't believe.
We don't believe that there is any reasonable evidence that the magnitude and impact of AGW will be dire. When the IPCC reports come out, there is tons of evidence for weak AGW. But that tons of evidence applies to weak AGW. Each of those studies is evidence for modest claims. It doesn't matter if you accumulate 10 times as many studies supporting those modest claims, it will not be evidence for the incredibly less likely hypotheses that they are made to do work for by the press and politically-motivated scientists.
In fact, there's plenty of reason to believe increased temperatures will be a net benefit to humanity. Humanists, but not reactionaries, should be open to this. There is no reason to believe we're currently at our "ideal temperature", and there's no reason to freeze our current ecosystems in time as if they're sanctified objects of a disorganized but fervent religion. Regardless, the claim that rising temperatures will leave us worse off isn't remotely proven.
The author waves his hands by the "cost-effective things we can do to mitigate global warming" as if such a thing exists in the current public debate. Almost every proposal normally under discussion in the public venue have overwhelming costs.[1]
This is a costs/benefits judgment, and you can't make that judgement without knowing the benefits. On an episode of Mad Men, Don Draper is standing in the living room with his wife and the interior decorator. His wife asks him what he thinks about the new furniture and its arrangement. He says, "Well, it's kind of hard to judge without knowing the price." People seem to forget that.
Concerning the benefits, there is no plausible, let alone tested, theory of risk prediction for climate temperatures in 2100. At all. So we're not talking about science here anymore. When you say, well, we can't calculate the risks, but the worst case is the extinction of mankind, you're getting dangerously close to the St. Petersburg paradox. Spreading FUD is a principal mechanism by which con men of all stripes manipulate.
[1] Although I'm all for as many nuclear reactors as we can build. By the steady resistance to this cheap and plentiful source of new energy, it's clear that a certain segment of the alarmist AGW movement is only willing to solve our energy problems by putting a cap on human productivity.
Edit: Meant to write 6 degrees higher, not 106, in the first sentence.
Are people voting this comment up because it's committing the mistake that Eliezer is talking about?
From the parent:
Regardless, the claim that rising temperatures will leave us worse off isn't remotely proven.
From the Less Wrong post:
And so the implicit emotional theory is that if something is not proven - better yet, proven using a particular piece of evidence that isn't available and that you're pretty sure is never going to become available - then you are allowed to disbelieve; it's like something a student says, not like something a teacher says.
What evidence would you expect to see today in a world where increased average global temperature helps humanity? If you're going to argue from ignorance, you should be on the side wanting to prevent change. Our understanding of the earth's climate is incomplete at best. The same is true of our understanding of the organisms that are adapted to that climate. We have historical evidence of changes CO2 in the atmosphere causing changes in climate, in turn causing extinction events. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoo_Ice_Age )
Your comment touches on a lot of topics, and I don't have time to respond to all of them. Still, here's what I gleaned of your opinions:
- AGW might not be true, so we don't need to worry about it.
- Even if it's true, it might not be large enough to have a significant effect, so we don't need to worry about it.
- Even if it's large enough to have a significant effect, it might be beneficial, so we don't need to worry about it.
- Even if AGW is harmful, current popular proposed solutions are ineffective, outrageously expensive, or both. Since the costs of the solutions are higher than the costs of AGW, we shouldn't do anything about it.
Doesn't this line of reasoning seem strangely convenient? Don't you think that you're being just a little bit biased toward the "do nothing" approach?
Both of the harmful climate events you have described were cooling events and were also many millions of years in the past. Why not consider more recent climate events which are closer in scale to those suggested by AGW proponents?
What evidence would you expect to see today in a world where increased average global temperature helps humanity?
Overall, if warming were beneficial for humanity, I'd expect to see human expansion during the medieval warm period, and human decline during the little ice age.
Further facts: quite a lot of land is too cold for humans to prosper in. Crop yields are poor, heating is costly, and life is generally unpleasant.
Regarding the "strangely convenient" line of reasoning by ellyagg, that's simply the line of reasoning we must take when evaluating any measure designed to prevent any event. We must evaluate whether the event is real, whether it is significant, whether it is harmful, and whether the cost/benefit of the mitigation scheme is favorable.
This writer missed or is ignoring both the deliberate fraud known as Climategate, and the new discovery about the importance of sunspots; does he know or care about climate change in the past, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the freeze towards the end of the Roman Empire, and the like? He seems to be too committed to American liberalism, and to have spent too much time arguing with creationists (which, from my personal experience arguing with them, is not good for anyone's sanity), to be able to discuss these issues scientifically.
Also, does anyone else get tired of the canard about apes evolving into humans? Recent science indicates that apes and humans are different evolutionary paths; no human or human-precursor species ever evolved knuckle-walking or the simian proportions of arms to legs (and both Neandertals and Cro-Magnons looked mostly like Germans, Scandinavians, or Finns). Pop-cultural understanding of human evolution -- including the pop-cultural understanding held by the evolutionary apologist culture -- is frozen in time at 1945 or earlier; the Holocaust has frightened us away from discussing human evolution (and its natural corollary, human race).
This is all the more ironic because, if we _were_ willing to discuss human evolution and race, we would discover pretty quickly that the Nazis were wrong. There is an Aryan race, but it's local to Persia and the Indian Subcontinent (hint: languages and cultures can spread without genetically significant numbers of people spreading with them); there is no Nordic race, but two mostly-unrelated races coexisting in northern Europe; the whole narrative of the development of Western man is the evolution of the Iberian race and its descendants...
Do sunspots, climate change in the past, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, etc answer the question of whether producing large amounts of greenhouse gases is bad for the planet and its current inhabitants? And does the deliberate fraud of one group of scientists mean that the question has gone away or been definitively answered?
Even if CRU was full of evil. It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW.
Given the sheer enormity of attention given to this; that a few non-peer reviewed items in the IPCC report and comparatively small number of bad emails out of years is all thats turned up should give more weight to the remaining evidence not less.
The idea that one part was wrong therefore we are allowed to not consider the rest is what the article is trying to remove. If CRU means we should reduce probabilities then do so. But after you update deal with the question again. Don't feel that it's then safe to ignore it until absolute evidence appears.
Humans are evil. The CRU is full of humans. The CRU is full of evil. QED.
It's not just the CRU. Any large organization like the CRU should be held with extreme skepticism. Members make lots of money off grants to study climatological effects on the planet. There are billions of dollars involved and people are extremely greedy.
I think the question the OP of this thread raised is this: There have been times in the past without lots of CO2 where extreme climate change has occurred. Is it possible, that the same causes of those changes are the causes of the current changes? If not, why not? It could be possible that those factors are contributing -- even more dramatically -- to the rise of CO2, than man.
No one has answered that question yet as far as I know, but there is a correlation between the same causes of past warmings the current physical space in this environment, so why aren't the same things then doing the same things now?
Even if CRU was full of evil. It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW.
There are multiple sources for climate data, some of which are independent of the CRU data. This increases redundancy and the reliability of our conclusions.
However, much of the "weight of evidence towards AGW" has CRU/other historical climate data as a dependency. For example, climate models (which are a necessary component of the evidence for AGW) are calibrated against historical data.
These dependencies make the rest of the evidence potentially less reliable. Until we can sort out which CRU results are correct, which are not, and which external results depend on them, the reliability of many results has taken a serious hit.
> It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW.
Not so fast. CRU didn't do measurements - it did adjustments and analysis. Christy now claims that all of the temperature stations are pretty much useless for determining changes over a few years, let alone multiple decades.
If there's no observed temperature change, Christy's current position, then the other observed changes can not be due to temperature change.
(1) You make a lot of bold statements to refute a highly researched article full of references, with not so much as a nod to your sources
(2) Your first sentence makes an assumption that he's missed or ignoring the very thing that the article is reacting to. The _whole_ point of the article is to discuss first principles. The author of the article is pretty well known for his ability to do so
(3) I'm unclear on your statements about human evolution, all sorts of potential background for those statements spring to mind, but whatever it is, it is on you you to provide _strong_ references or original research in order to refute evolutionary science
Thank you for your defense, but it is only with respect to probability theory that I can claim to write anything highly researched. Where AGW is concerned I'm an outsider.
I'll try to answer objections here in two sets of comments, one on climate, the other on human evolution.
On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" research of which the CRU was one. Again from what I understand, all three of these sets do not have the raw data available.
I can also say more confidently that none of these people have theories with operant mechanisms that explain the Medieval Warm Period or the cooling cycles towards the end of the Roman Empire and during the Little Ice Age -- nor do they seem to be in a hurry to discover the operant mechanisms behind these changes to world climate.
This does not mean that toxic effluvia like DDT, or the sulfides contributing to acid rain, or whatnot are harmless; but it does mean that it's not clear that "the science is settled" on global warming -- which seems to have stopped and started going the other way in the past 20 years, regardless. I'm not a climate scientist even as an amateur, but recent research seems to point to sunspots as an, or the, operant mechanism.
On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" research of which the CRU was one
False. There is data from weather stations, tree rings, ice cores and others.
Again from what I understand, all three of these sets do not have the raw data available.
I can also say more confidently that none of these people have theories with operant mechanisms that explain the Medieval Warm Period or the cooling cycles towards the end of the Roman Empire and during the Little Ice Age -- nor do they seem to be in a hurry to discover the operant mechanisms behind these changes to world climate.
From the IPCC: "current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries."
Unfortunately, I'm not a specialist in the subject -- I have an interest in it, but also an interest in everything from artificial intelligence to Indo-European linguistics -- so I will reluctantly say that I'm out of my league here; but I advise that you look into the field more widely, and not confine yourself to RealClimate.org -- which has long struck me as on the same level of sincere inquiry as the kinds of people who deny the reality of the Sun Streak project or the plausibility of plasma cosmology. (Make of that what you will, of course; you may be proud to be a member of that group...)
Edit: One thing I can say is that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did occur world-wide; following Fernand Braudel's _The Structures of Everyday Life_ and the _Annales Histoire_ school of economic historians in general, the same climate phenomena were encountered in both Europe and China, which are by no means part of the same sub-planetary climate spheres.
I was under the impression that all humans were of the same race (i.e. species) and that humans are apes, which would make any common ancestor apes too. Wikipedia agrees, got any links to support your hobby horses?
Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.
My information is from Wikipedia and from a general amateur interest in the subject. (I find that Wikipedia is reliable when you stay away from the politicized and widely-known subjects.)
The obscure field of forensic anthropology has a fair amount of information about the dichotomy between Iberians and Upper Paleolithic survivors (Cro-Magnons, plus Neandertal genes if the two subspecies of H. sapiens were inter-fertile).
However, the whole question of human races and human differentiation in general is anathema in this day and age because of Hitler -- although for some reason social engineering is (mostly) not anathema because of Stalin. The result of this is that somewhere in the back of everyone's mind is the tripartate division into "Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is not correct. I know much more about Europe than about the rest of the world; but Europe was first peopled by Cro-Magnons, who evolved
"Race" and "species" are not the same thing in this context. I don't want to get into semantic games, but the difference between an Iberian (dark-white, small, long-headed, fine-boned) and a Germanic or UP Survivor (pinkish-white skin, tall, broad-faced, 'uncouth', large-boned, broad-headed) is plainly visible, and the differences between either of these and, say, the mainstream Chinese type (broad, stocky, somewhere between these two in height) or the small "Bushmen" type (related to the Iberians, but with a different type of hair) or the large, "archaic" "Bantu" type of Africa.
While there seem to be some correlations of race with temperament, intelligence, social fluency, and so on, these are generally not very strong, and individuals can generally overcome them -- and as a Catholic, I'm not about to start advocating apartheid or genocide or anything _regardless_ of what the genetic studies say.
For a little more on Iberian spread in Europe, see Stephen Oppenheimer's _The Origins of the British_; Iberian or pre-Iberian descent tends to correlate with mtDNA haplogroup H and Y-DNA haplogroup R1a and its relatives; but I'm afraid that most of what I've figured out here has been my own piecings together, and I have more urgent things to do than to write a book on the subject.
And it's not Godwin's Law if Hitler was actually a factor. (http://xkcd.com/261/)
I don't have a dog in the fight of evolutionism versus creationism, but if I had to pick an "ism" I'd pick the former. I'm a Catholic, but I'm certainly not a Creationist -- and I find evolution to be thoroughly consistent with the style of a God Who, as Dawkins lamented, couldn't even be bothered to tell his followers to wash their hands before eating. (However, I find it troubling that "posting something that may be an oblique challenge to my beliefs" is an adequate criterion for a down-vote.)
Regardless, I'll say one thing: this comment has taught me a lot about the contents of "what you can't say" (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) on Hacker News. (Yes, that was a sneer, but I hope a sneer can be forgiven me after getting as badly flamed as I just did. And perhaps it'll inspire some of my interlocutors and down-modders to reconsider their beliefs...?)
Edit: I have another comment in response on my position on global warming, so look for that as well as this one.
Was saying that I was against ethanol-from-corn, and for building 10,000 LFTR nuclear power plants, not enough of a clue?
Was saying that I don't worry about AGW in the real world because we have much worse problems not enough of a clue?
Is all that just flatly overridden by my being willing to provisionally believe what mainstream climate scientists say? It's a question of simple fact, not values! I should be able to believe something about how the Earth's atmosphere works without automatically ending up lumped in some particular political cluster! I'd understand if you assumed that by default, but I went out of my way to provide you with specific evidence to contradict that assumption! Geepers.