Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change • Hacker News Board

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#171

Post by vlehto » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:37 AM UTC

gnaritas wrote: post #149

vlehto wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite normal to deny something the entire scientific community is saying. In everywhere except math it's business as usual. Most of our current scientific knowledge was originally someone disagreeing with the majority. It's weird you are attacking someone who agrees with you in policy. Just because he does not think "correctly". Given that your argument is out of authority, it's bit alarming. https://en.wikipedi…

> It's quite normal to deny something the entire scientific community is saying. By other scientists when doing science sure, that's cool; by the ignorant public when working on policy, that's just ignorance. > Most of our current scientific knowledge was originally someone disagreeing with the majority. No, if you are not a scientist in the field, your disagreements are just ignorance. Science can and should be chal…

If you agree because someone says so, that's just another form of ignorance.

If you really wish to know the shit, you find the facts science has provided. There are facts. This "99% of scientists" stuff is making the signal/noise ratio quite bad.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#172

Post by kbutler » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:38 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #39

merpnderp wrote: post #18

I like that he makes it more about the economics of saving lives, which should be the primary argument. But that is a tricky problem since we have 4 million a year dying from indoor cooking smoke, and millions more from other various aspects of extreme poverty. Most of which would be a greater ameliorated by cheap coal plants. Cheap coals plants are horrible polluters, but they are cheap, aren't as bad as indoor poll…

With too much reliance on cheap coal for economic growth, you end up here: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861174/beijing-pollution-... China's use of coal has probably peaked. Any developing country would do well to follow China's lead and build renewables rather than coal, whatever its short-term advantages.

> China's use of coal has probably peaked. Any developing country would do well to follow China's lead...

Hmm. I think it's more correct to say the /rate of increase/ of China's use of coal has probably peaked.

"China added 39 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity in 2014 — 3 gigawatts more than it added in 2013. That is equivalent to three 1,000 megawatt units every four weeks.[v] At the peak, from 2005 through 2011, China added about two 600-megawatt coal plants a week, for 7 straight years. And, China is expected to add the equivalent of a new 600-megawatt plant every 10 days for the next 10 years. "

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutte...

China is increasing renewable power generation, but they continue to add coal power generation as well.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#173

Post by icanhackit » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:40 AM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #140

icanhackit wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Pascal's Wager: which God and thus which set of rituals and rules do you follow? You've got quite a selection to choose from. You go from having a simple Yes/No choice to having thousands of choices. In the case of action against climate change, the downsides of doing something are minimal compared to the downsides of inaction. It's a much more binary choice than what Pascal put forward.

Not to criticize taxing CO2 emissions (which has a solid case), but there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?", sampled from the set of events that respectable scientific movements have demanded immediate action on. In the 70s, for example, one respected movement held that there would be an overpopulation crisis that justified drastic mea…

there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?"

Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming/manufacturing/transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villages, not acidifying oceans, not tainting arable land with heavy metals etc? Belief in a certain God among many seems more variable than reduce pollution, aim for zero.

if we took immediate action on the crisis global poverty and got everyone up to Western living standards, that would conflict with the goal of reducing our environmental load

You make an interesting point - the big one is India which needs cheap energy to bring itself up from having no clean running water, no integrated sewerage system and severe poverty to competing with Europe and the Americas who have reaped the benefit of cheap [polluting] energy for a long time and before emissions were taxed.

But I see it as a benefit, at least in the long term, to start from this stage. Just as African countries have benefited from mobile networks and services like M-Pesa money transfer and microfinancing, never having to deal with maintaining an aging wired telecom infrastructure - India could reap the benefits of starting with a peer-to-peer energy network using residential solar, similar to what Germany has implemented. Of course this would need to be supplemented, however using fewer base load power stations than if it were purely centralized energy production.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#174

Post by gnaritas » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:41 AM UTC

vlehto wrote: post #171

gnaritas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite normal to deny something the entire scientific community is saying. By other scientists when doing science sure, that's cool; by the ignorant public when working on policy, that's just ignorance. > Most of our current scientific knowledge was originally someone disagreeing with the majority. No, if you are not a scientist in the field, your disagreements are just ignorance. Science can and should be chal…

If you agree because someone says so, that's just another form of ignorance. If you really wish to know the shit, you find the facts science has provided. There are facts. This "99% of scientists" stuff is making the signal/noise ratio quite bad.

> If you agree because someone says so, that's just another form of ignorance.

No it isn't, it's not possible to educate yourself to the depth required on a great many things without becoming a professional in the field and while that's cool for those that want to; it's utter arrogance and ignorance to ignore the entire scientific community as a laymen and pretend you know better. Quite simply, if you are not a climate scientist, you're talking out of your ass. The people educated enough in the evidence to have the rational debate, have already had it, the intelligent debate is over and the conclusions have been publicized. The only people still debating are the few scientists in the extreme minority (which is fine), and the utterly ignorant (i.e. the public).

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#175

Post by refurb » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:41 AM UTC

narcissus wrote: post #165

refurb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a terrible idea. For hundreds of years, people thought stress and food caused ulcers. It was scientific fact and if you doubted it, you'd likely be labelled a crackpot. Until a scientist in Australia proved ulcers were caused by bacteria. So consensus was wrong. Very wrong. I'd prefer it if people kept questioning everything. How else do we push forward our knowledge?

The thing that I hate about this argument of 'consensus has been wrong before' when it comes to climate change is that essentially, the argument seems to be 'everyone always said we were pumping too much CO2 into the air and that would cause global warming and now there's people saying that consensus is wrong'. Unless I'm seriously wrong with my scientific history (and it's extremely possible!) I didn't think this wa…

But I think that's true of everything, no?

Before people thoughts ulcers were caused by stress they probably thought it was due to too much "humor" and required treatment by bloodletting.

The point is that we advance scientific thinking by challenging ideas. If right now most scientists thinking global warming is real, then fine. Just don't try and shutdown the ones that don't agree.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#176

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:44 AM UTC

EdSharkey wrote: post #164

nmridul wrote: post #12

The global warming brigade hijacked the pollution issue. There always will be a debate on global warming. So keeping global warming as the prime focus of fossil fuel usage kept people divided. If pollution was the prime focus from day one, then more push would have been given to renewable. Maybe, Arnold is able to bring more people to think in this direction.

So is the conversation something like, "air/water/ground pollution" X "planet is becoming uninhabitable"? Where X differs depending on who is talking? For Schwarzenegger, X seems to be "therefore". For me, X is more like, "but not". I treat the two arguments as separate. Shocking warnings have always come with pollution. For me, those warnings have mostly born out as true. I have chronic asthma, probably from air pol…

I have no idea where you get the idea that the planet is cooling, but you're 100% wrong about this.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-guide/science/temp-recor...

This is not "bad science."

And it leads to predictable effects. The North West of England is partly underwater this week because of yet another "once a century" storm - the kind that have been rolling around every few years since 2000 or so. Increased rainfall for the UK has been predicted since the late 1980s as an effect of CO2 output.

"The sun, being the primary energy input for the system, is never causally linked to warming or cooling trends on our planet."

Climate change models have allowed for solar output for decades. See e.g.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08...

It might be an idea to educate yourself on the real science.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#177

Post by kgmpers » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:45 AM UTC

EdSharkey wrote: post #164

nmridul wrote: post #12

The global warming brigade hijacked the pollution issue. There always will be a debate on global warming. So keeping global warming as the prime focus of fossil fuel usage kept people divided. If pollution was the prime focus from day one, then more push would have been given to renewable. Maybe, Arnold is able to bring more people to think in this direction.

So is the conversation something like, "air/water/ground pollution" X "planet is becoming uninhabitable"? Where X differs depending on who is talking? For Schwarzenegger, X seems to be "therefore". For me, X is more like, "but not". I treat the two arguments as separate. Shocking warnings have always come with pollution. For me, those warnings have mostly born out as true. I have chronic asthma, probably from air pol…

> Global warming appears to me to be bad science, however...

Climate scientists do and have studied the link between climate and the sun, as well as many other factors, but in the end GHG emissions from humans are contributing the most to increasing global temperatures.

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wor...

Also while it's a big system, there are also 7 billion of us. In 2012 we released over 30 billion tonnes of C02 into the atmosphere.

https://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=90&...

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#178

Post by gnaritas » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:49 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #175

narcissus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that I hate about this argument of 'consensus has been wrong before' when it comes to climate change is that essentially, the argument seems to be 'everyone always said we were pumping too much CO2 into the air and that would cause global warming and now there's people saying that consensus is wrong'. Unless I'm seriously wrong with my scientific history (and it's extremely possible!) I didn't think this wa…

But I think that's true of everything, no? Before people thoughts ulcers were caused by stress they probably thought it was due to too much "humor" and required treatment by bloodletting. The point is that we advance scientific thinking by challenging ideas. If right now most scientists thinking global warming is real, then fine. Just don't try and shutdown the ones that don't agree.

No one is trying to shut down scientists that don't agree; they're trying to shut down the ignorant public who's non agreement is baseless because they're getting in the way of setting public policy based on the best information science has to offer us at the moment.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#179

Post by gnaritas » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:52 AM UTC

vlehto wrote: post #169

acqq wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case that you seem to support the skepticism is based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Argume... "If P were true then I would know it; in fact I do not know it; therefore P cannot be true." For example, it's not that Einstein in 1905 made Newton's formulas from around 1700 unusable, quite the opposite, for a lot of purposes they are still used: it's just that for the very high speeds t…

I didn't say anything about climate change on the above comment. I only said the argument was not solid. I'm not "climate skeptic", I'm true believer. I just try to combat these authority heretics.

Argument from authority is not always invalid; especially when virtually all of the authorities on the subject agree. In fact you can't find a statement I made in the original post you objected to, that isn't true. It is factually true that if you disagree with most scientists on a subject, you are probably wrong. I didn't say you were definitely wrong, I said it was near 100% certain that you were wrong.

> It's weird you are attacking someone who agrees with you in policy. Just because he does not think "correctly".

No, it isn't weird. It's perfectly rational to disagree with people because they reach the right conclusion for the wrong reasons because "thinking" wrong is often dangerous and leads to superstition.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#180

Post by coldtea » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 12:58 AM UTC

vlehto wrote: post #161

coldtea wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought the 97% of climate scientists claim (based on Cook et al) was shown to be a really flawed study. Only according to really flawed and biased sources. > In any event, Consensus does not equal science. Actually science is very much the consensus among practicing scientists. Short of reproducing millions of man-hours of international research to verify or refute it personally, what exactly would be the altern…

Science is about finding truth. Truth doesn't give shit what anybody thinks. (Except in psychology, but lets not get there.) Scientific consensus is just educational and political tool. Get everybody on the same page. But it's pretty detached from the actual process of science itself. Questioning established consensus has been scientifically very valuable in the history.

>Science is about finding truth. Truth doesn't give shit what anybody thinks.

Truth is an abstract concept. You can't get hold of "truth" in raw form. Consensus is the only thing that validates a statement, and scientific consensus, that is consensus among experts following (each perhaps imperfectly) the scientific method, is the only thing that validates a scientific statement.

Even direct experience is not some failsafe -- a single person might just be misinterpreting, lacking skills and knowledge to understand what you see, or plain delusional (e.g. Wilhelm Reich and orgone or Linus Pauling and vitamin C).

>Scientific consensus is just educational and political tool. Get everybody on the same page. But it's pretty detached from the actual process of science itself.

Not according to any philosophy or practice of science that I know of.

>Questioning established consensus has been scientifically very valuable in the history.

Sure, but only to establish a new consensus, not to say that "my sole opinion, that remains my sole opinion, is more valid than the rest of the scientific world's".