The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die. Meanwhile, all the observed evidence either fits the models or is rapidly outpacing the predictions made by the models. We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now. If you look through the links in my above comment you'll see that a lot of them are talking about observed events.
>The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die.
That's literally an absolute worst case prediction. You cannot guide policy exclusively with worst case predictions.
>We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now
No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now - and even this is less certain than people would have you believe, we only recently realized for example that the mismatch between expected and current warming could be explained by the ocean acting as a heat sink. Imagine how many other similar phenomena we have yet to discover.
Physical systems tend to be nonlinear. Even a high rate of warming now does not preclude a comfortable maximum due to nonlinear restorative forces.
That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.
When the worst case scenario is the end of human civilization we absolutely should drive policy to avoid that. It's absolutely surreal that anybody would argue otherwise.
>No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now
Read the links I provided earlier. These are not minor events. You're just parroting dangerous nonsense here.
>That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.
And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now. It's the same pattern with the same dangerous fools putting the rest of humanity at risk.
>And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now
There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.
If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages. Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic? Look at the forces that caused us to fruitlessly pursue the amyloid plaque hypothesis for decades.
Consensus has a strong normalizing effect, but that does not necessarily mean that a given consensus is correct.
Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.
Edit: by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy? A single 15k line C file which, among other things, does not seed random number generation and cannot be reproduced. So bad that I just found there's an entire website dedicated to a teardown[0]! But I'm an "idiot" for showing skepticism. Do you think climate modeling code is any better? Have you worked with academic code? I have. It's universally bad. But, again, I'm an "idiot" for expressing any degree of skepticism.
>There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.
There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.
>If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages.
Your skepticism is not rooted in facts and evidence, but rather has an ideological basis. When all the experts in the field unanimously say we should be dealing with global warming, that's what we should be doing. Anybody who is not an actual climatologist needs to get the fuck out of the way.
>Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic?
Sure, it's possible, but only a fool would gamble the fate of humanity on that. The stakes are simply too high here. There are also no actual downsides to addressing climate change. Imagine the horror of having a cleaner environment and sustainable industry creating millions of new jobs and advancing our technology and science.
>Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.
It's good to see that majority of people see the dangerous absurdity you promote for what it is.
>by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy?
And just like with climate change you ignore the actual facts all around you. 80,000 people died in US while 0 people died in Vietnam. Chew on that for a while next time you claim that following scientific consensus is the wrong thing to do.
>There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.
Again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey. You weigh probability of outcomes and cost of outcomes and come up with a value. That's literally my point, that the you are at one end of a high dimensional extreme. That's what this entire argument boils down to.
Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades. Your exploration constant is far too low if you respond with such blind hostility to anyone with criticism. You're hindering progress and when your policy is guided by such one sidedness, that's dangerous. This doesn't just apply to climate science. We couldn't even get the nutritional pyramid right, and climate science is hard for the same reasons - non-expert mental, data and model driven and only verifiable in hindsight.
Not all scientific fields are equally rigorous. An appeal to a climatologist on the subject of climate is far weaker than an appeal to a physicist on the subject of physics because of the nature of the fields. Climate science by nature is extremely uncertain, i.e. you search the high-d space with less gradient information, and personal/institutional biases can converge to fill in those gaps nicely enough to have you trapped in a local minimum.
>again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey.
There is no meaningful comparison between the risk of human extinction with having to transition off fossil fuel economy. This is what this entire argument boils down to. On one hand, you have the end of civilization and possibly end of human existence, and on the other you have some temporary inconvenience. These are fundamentally not comparable.
>Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades.
You're creating a false equivalence between the two possibilities. All the best available science tells us this is happening. There is absolutely no scientific basis to doubt that this is happening.
So, yes there may be a chance that all our accumulated decades of observation and models are wrong, but it's far more likely that is not the case. Our observations are either matching or outpacing what the models predict. You just keep parroting the same nonsense over and over like a broken record. It's dangerous nonsense, and you don't seem to understand what's at stake here.
