Comment by jhedwards
5 hours ago
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense.
Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.
Climate science is much more complicated - there are many things you could disagree with beyond will tons of carbon change things, yes or no.
Like are we doomed or will it just get a bit warmer before we switch to solar for example.
There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.
> There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.
Absolutely
And if this can upend the business model of some big companies we'll give some "incentives" to some "doubtful" scientists even if their doubts are unfounded (actually very well founded but you get the gist)
Which sucks because such work should be free of pressures and incentives
Yes I believe GP was focused on the catastrophe part. It's very likely correct that our CO2 emissions are warming the atmosphere ocean etc, but it's not clear that runaway warming is inevitable or that life or geology have feedback mechanisms that turn an exponential into an S curve. That is, after all, basically what natural selection tends to do. Turning the table again, even if there are corrective factors humans might have immense suffering before it stabilizes. So we don't know.
You didn't ask, but my opinion on it is that we'll probably stabilize on a cleaner energy source and find natural countermeasures when suffering ticks up. Any top down pressure to change things whole cloth seems doomed, no matter how benevolent. We're closed loop creatures.