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Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

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Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#71

Post by nostrademons »

I've got somewhat unorthodox views on global warming that might make for a good test of this:

I fully accept that global warming is real, human-caused, and a major problem in the coming century. However, I don't believe we should limit carbon emissions. Instead, we should earmark all the money that would've gone into reducing carbon emissions (a carbon tax could be useful for this) into developing comprehensive evacuation plans for every major city, as well as a fund for rebuilding. As the effects of global warming hit (which will more likely be in the form of severe weather events than a global rise in sea levels), we migrate away from the hardest hit areas and rebuild in the areas made more hospitable by climate change.

There are two advantages of this:

The first is that many climate scientists believe that it's already too late, and a tipping point was reached around 2000 that's set in motion a catastrophic climate shift that we can't reverse now. Cutting carbon emissions now is a bit like closing the barn door after the horses have left. It won't actually fix our predicament, though it may slow it.

The second advantage is that this covers a number of contingencies other than climate change. A freak hurricane sweeps up the Gulf Coast, headed for Houston or New Orleans? No problem, all of the evacuation routes have been mapped out, we've built enough roads that the population can get out (as an additional plus, this helps rush-hour traffic), and the insurance companies are ready to pay out to help the victims. Drought in California? Move to Seattle or Portland and stop buying beef and almonds. It'd help if we let the price of affected commodities (water, and the things it helps grow) float to reflect their true scarcity rather than subsidize them.

The idea is to fix the problem closer to the symptoms rather than trying to get to the source. Accept that the planet's climate will change, and then work to adapt to that with minimal dislocation rather than prevent it from changing.

Thoughts? It's certainly not the party line, but it makes sense to me. And if you're currently a climate-change denier, would this proposed solution make you reconsider the facts?

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#72

Post by guscost »

jfoutz wrote: post #62
guscost wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may come down to our individual philosophies, but I'm far more interested in what would convince you that a model is wrong . It's a Popperian sentiment, which may be considered quaint these days, but I rarely hear any kind of answer. Anyway, I don't think we are talking about even close to the same meaning of "complex", but one possible situation that would help convince me is if we had a "control" planet, and a…

No, i'm with you. Falsification is a huge deal. As far as "complex" goes, i'm thinking of the old strange attractor. I don't know if it'll rain on sept 19 2016, but i think it's safe to say there will be 3 inches of rain next september. If we refine our understanding and language, there's a nice probability density function for quantity of rain over the month of sept 2016. Not much probability around 0, not much beyo…

I'll agree that your favorite model is lot more likely to work than the "because gay sex" model, because your favorite model presumably has causal relationships based on measurable reality.

And I like the idea that atmospheric composition could be a strange attractor in the climate system.

But then you'd have to throw the simple forcing model for CO2 out the window, and come up with a hypothesis for why there is a strange attractor somehow causing CO2 and temperature to exhibit a linear relationship. Wouldn't your favorite model have to be rewritten at that point?

And then you'd need an explanation for how the water vapor feedback forcing (a critical part of most alarmist models) fits into those dynamics. And why a similar albedo forcing or plant cover forcing or fracking-earthquake forcing or Chinese economic forcing does not. I don't think you will find it simple to describe at anything but the most abstract level. But it is an interesting idea.

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#73

Post by nitrogen »

asgard1024 wrote: post #57
speccy_geek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common liberal blind spot is the genetic basis of intelligence and other aptitudes, and the extent to which that determines life outcomes.

I consider myself liberal yet I don't agree with it, though you're right, there are many elitist liberals around. I think they are easily spotted by their opposition to direct democracy. And I actually think we should always assume "nurture". My reasoning is when you assume "nature", that's a dead end. This is a similar argument to whether the world is knowable - assuming it is will get you further.

How is that a dead end? I have greater confidence in humanity's ability to find a genetic therapy to boost intelligence than its ability to compensate for bad parenting and culture.

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#74

Post by jfoutz »

guscost wrote: post #72
jfoutz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, i'm with you. Falsification is a huge deal. As far as "complex" goes, i'm thinking of the old strange attractor. I don't know if it'll rain on sept 19 2016, but i think it's safe to say there will be 3 inches of rain next september. If we refine our understanding and language, there's a nice probability density function for quantity of rain over the month of sept 2016. Not much probability around 0, not much beyo…

I'll agree that your favorite model is lot more likely to work than the "because gay sex" model, because your favorite model presumably has causal relationships based on measurable reality. And I like the idea that atmospheric composition could be a strange attractor in the climate system. But then you'd have to throw the simple forcing model for CO2 out the window, and come up with a hypothesis for why there is a st…

Point me at the paper that outperforms that model. I'll do my best to read and understand it.

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#75

Post by guscost »

asgard1024 wrote: post #63
guscost wrote: post #37

Time to spend some karma. Literature like this makes me happy, because it is further evidence that the alarmists have very little material left. Mercifully we may have hit the high-water mark of this generation of misanthropic environmentalist nonsense and can now enjoy several decades of joking about it. The "Recursive Fury" paper[0] was probably the actual high-water mark, and this looks like pretty much the same t…

> I remain astonished that supposedly educated people could ever believe otherwise Let me take a stab at this: > thoroughly insufficient as proof of any long-term trend we can expect to continue in a non-linear system as complex as the global climate Sometimes, non-linearity doesn't really matter. Human body is complex system, we don't fully understand it, but you wouldn't stand in front of a car that runs 100kph. Be…

Whoa, you're citing the consensus as an experimental result? What is this, economics? ;)

And Plass definitely missed at least one non-linearity. Out of curiosity do you have a list?

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#76

Post by mdorazio »

nostrademons wrote: post #71

I've got somewhat unorthodox views on global warming that might make for a good test of this: I fully accept that global warming is real, human-caused, and a major problem in the coming century. However, I don't believe we should limit carbon emissions. Instead, we should earmark all the money that would've gone into reducing carbon emissions (a carbon tax could be useful for this) into developing comprehensive evacu…

I see two problems with this proposal.

1) Migrating an entire city's population elsewhere is a MASSIVE undertaking. Not just in cost, either; we're talking about uprooting an entire population's lives and moving them elsewhere, which has all kinds of social problems. Look at New Orleans and Katrina for a great example of this. Under your strategy, pretty much the whole city should have just been abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere, but for the people who lived and worked there, this simply wasn't even on the table psychologically.

2) How do you propose to both earmark enough funds for realistic relocation/rebuilding efforts, and keep those funds safe from political interests over the span of 100+ years. It's been damn near impossible to keep Medicaid and Social Security funding in place, and those are being used by millions of people every day. "Rainy day" funds are an easy target for reallocation when budgets start getting tight.

Realistically, I think we're going to see individual cities deal with this in different ways, mostly on their own.

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#77

Post by guscost »

jfoutz wrote: post #74
guscost wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll agree that your favorite model is lot more likely to work than the "because gay sex" model, because your favorite model presumably has causal relationships based on measurable reality. And I like the idea that atmospheric composition could be a strange attractor in the climate system. But then you'd have to throw the simple forcing model for CO2 out the window, and come up with a hypothesis for why there is a st…

Point me at the paper that outperforms that model. I'll do my best to read and understand it.

This is an irrelevant tangent, but I liked the previous dialogue.

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#78

Post by Udik »

pekk wrote: post #28
Udik wrote: post #9

I wonder if the study is able to make a distinction between solution aversion and what could be called "proponent aversion". That is, it is normal to be skeptical of a statement when it comes from somebody we don't trust. And our level of trust can be dependent from another statement coming (or perceived to be coming) from the same source. In this case, the proposed solution to the problem. I've concocted an example:…

I wonder if we can make that distinction either. It would be solution aversion if you denied that the rate of suicides has been growing because you perceive that the main use of citing an increasing suicide rate is to push homeopathic education. If your aversion to certain proponents relates back to what it is they are proposing, it is not really an aversion to those proponents but to their proposals. Maybe proponent…

> It would be solution aversion if you denied that the rate of suicides has been growing because you perceive that the main use of citing an increasing suicide rate is to push homeopathic education.

It's not as I understood it. Solution aversion would be denying that the rate of suicides has increased just because I don't think anybody should be administered psychological well being tests. Maybe because I'm secretly afraid that the effectiveness of those tests would prove my ideologically-motivated position wrong. Other than that, I shouldn't be able to provide much logical support for my stance.

> If your aversion to certain proponents relates back to what it is they are proposing, it is not really an aversion to those proponents but to their proposals.

If it were just an aversion to their proposals, it wouldn't reflect itself onto the statement that is ultimately being denied. I could be completely averse to the teaching of homeopathy, but that wouldn't influence my attitude towards the stated problem. In order to be so, there might have to be the relation:

Proposed solution -> assessment of the proponent -> assessment of their original statement.

> because Obama (or black people, "liberals" etc.) had made that claim, independent of the qualities of proposed solutions.

The proposed solution in fact allows me to place the proponent into a classification bin: scientist vs homeopath, conservative vs liberal, alarmist vs denialist. Or just savy vs fool.

> shouldn't normally mean that "Obama says that P" is evidence of not-P.

Not strictly, but remember that, in general terms, non-P is not equally probable to P. P is a specific statement about reality; non-P is any possible other configuration of reality that negates P. That's why the burden of the proof is generally on who makes assertions, not on who denies them.

Re: Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions

#80

Post by guscost »

paulsutter wrote: post #70
guscost wrote: post #37

Time to spend some karma. Literature like this makes me happy, because it is further evidence that the alarmists have very little material left. Mercifully we may have hit the high-water mark of this generation of misanthropic environmentalist nonsense and can now enjoy several decades of joking about it. The "Recursive Fury" paper[0] was probably the actual high-water mark, and this looks like pretty much the same t…

So Guscost, when you net it all out, what do you think is the probability that continuing use of carbon fuels will cause a significant climate problem? 10%? 30%? 0.01%? 0? I don't understand these arguments that global warming is "true" (100% likely) or "false" (0% likely). Because those probabilities are nonsensical. Reasonable people might assign anywhere from 10% to 90% to that. Even if a person thinks it's 30% li…

Everything depends on your definition of "significant" so I certainly can't just guess at a number. More significant than any other problem humanity is facing, perhaps?

If that is what you mean, my completely unscientific guess would be a decimal, then a whole lot of zeros, then a one. And I would not find it prudent to do anything to avoid that possibility that takes longer than five seconds. The steps usually recommended are much bigger than that.

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