171–180 of 181 posts
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Funny :) But we're all running around with flamethrowers. And we can't imagine life without them. That's the hard part.
Not just that: The rest of the world are running around with matches and lighters, are watching us, thinking "Damn, I want one of those" and have started building their own flamethrowers. Now we're telling them to stop building flamethrowers while we keep insisting that we keep our own.
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I have no idea why people aren't more concerned. I think the desire to avoid sounding "apocalyptic" has led to people not emphasizing the expected damage if we keep using CO2. Anyone with a child born this year can expect that child to live past 2100. A future grandchild will live well past 2100. Even most people reading this can probably expect to live past 2050. It's not an abstract issue that will affect future ge…
Well, that is because things aren't literally apocalyptic. The science says that sea levels will rise by a meter or so over the next hundred years. That won't end the world. The science says that climate change will cause trillions of dollars of damages, over the next hundred years. Trillions of dollars in damages is bad. But it is on the same scale of "badness" as another iraq war. I'd want to prevent a third Iraq w…
I very much doubt the Federal government will be providing (or will have the funds to provide) much of the assistance required to mitigate this kind of rise, and it will come down to cities / states handling it themselves for a lot of this.
As for the lives in danger - I was considering this in terms of economic damage to the NE United States, but I'd imagine globally it could be on the scale of millions having to migrate / move.
I would not personally equate the impacts of climate change to the Iraq war because of the overall scale and global impact, but I understand how it compares in terms of order of magnitude for a mental model.
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Well, that is because things aren't literally apocalyptic. The science says that sea levels will rise by a meter or so over the next hundred years. That won't end the world. The science says that climate change will cause trillions of dollars of damages, over the next hundred years. Trillions of dollars in damages is bad. But it is on the same scale of "badness" as another iraq war. I'd want to prevent a third Iraq w…
Science can't predict the economic effects of such a change over a 100 year period. Economic forecasting just isn't that good. That's also not the right way to look at Iraq war costs. A lot of the war cost is just "shuffling". Eg pay $1,000,000 in soldier salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to soldiers. Then the soldiers spend the money. What was lost? The real cost is the alternative work the soldiers could…
Eg pay $1,000,000 in construction worker salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to workers. Then the workers spend the money. What was lost?
The comment about alternative work still applies, but much of the money is still recycled back into the domestic economy.
So it's not a trillion simply lost.
All in all, I think the comparison to war is very apt.
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> "convince businesses that they're going to be impacted financially" Yes and no. My take is this: there's too much time and energy being put into why and who does or doesn't believe (it's human-made), and not enough focus is on "solutions" (to the higher waters). Often this distraction seems to be generated by politicians. I wish I had $10 for every time I've seen an article misuse the phrase "climate-change deniers…
There’s a team of guys with flamethrowers running around the house lighting everything on fire, and some of the inhabitants are saying “well you can’t discount the possibility that the fires started themselves, and having a house on fire isn’t really so bad, and we probably can’t do anything to fix it anyway.” And now you are standing up for them. Our problems cannot be summarized as “higher waters”. We are talking a…
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>this seems like one of the least worrisome -- we even know how to fix it already! The biggest struggle with climate change (in the US at least) is trying to convince businesses that they're going to be impacted financially. If anything we need more industry-specific reporting to try to show companies how ignoring climate change will impact their bottom line.
Amtrak is weirdly a company that will suffer from climate change and could actually start addressing it (they end up shipping the vast majority of coal and could at least tax the movement of that good to recoup this expense) but most companies that will be hit by the effects of climate change won't be significantly contributing to it. Industries that see ever more profit in fields with high externalities won't have d…
It'd honestly be easier to just shut down Amtrak and do without rail service. As a nation, we simply are not willing to do what it takes to have a decent passenger rail service, and that isn't going to change.
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Isn't "attacking the motive" a logical fallacy? https://study.com/academy/lesson/attacking-the-motive-fallac...
Saying something is biased might be a fallacy in a debate, but not in statistics. In a complex topic, where the data is fuzzy and misrepresentation is easy to do and harder to detect, you must consider biases in your sources. An alien can look at this "debate" and make a rational decision without even knowing what the debate is about. The world's scientists study X and overwhelmingly agree: X is going to wreak havoc…
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CSX is what you’re thinking of. Amtrak is passenger only. They share track with CSX and many others.
Amtrak owns all their own trackage on the Northeast Corridor.
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I don't think it's made up but I think there's a good chance we're wrong about the cause. The theory is not falsifiable. There are too many interacting variables. The models have all been fit to the data and not vice versa. We've been wrong about other things that were universally accepted as true (e.g. dietary fat is bad) and later turned out to be wrong. Doesn't really matter what I think though. I'm one person, no…
Just to be clear, dietary fat is not good as implied by your statement: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/CIR.000000000000...
Now if they actually took people, and replaced saturated fat in their diet with polyunsaturated fat, holding other variables constant, then measured whether they lived longer, they'd have something. But they haven't done that.
Their reasoning is that this measure of blood lipids is associated with CVD, so if we do something that lowers that measure of blood lipids, it will also lower the incidence of CVD. That's just bad science, and they should know better.
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Science can't predict the economic effects of such a change over a 100 year period. Economic forecasting just isn't that good. That's also not the right way to look at Iraq war costs. A lot of the war cost is just "shuffling". Eg pay $1,000,000 in soldier salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to soldiers. Then the soldiers spend the money. What was lost? The real cost is the alternative work the soldiers could…
But a lot of the catastrophe cost is just "shuffling". Eg pay $1,000,000 in construction worker salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to workers. Then the workers spend the money. What was lost? The comment about alternative work still applies, but much of the money is still recycled back into the domestic economy. So it's not a trillion simply lost . All in all, I think the comparison to war is very apt.
Whereas, soldiers probably weren't doing much economically productive in the first place. And as long as there is spare capacity in the labour force, moving people from "unemployed" to "soldier" isn't a massive misallocation of resources.
It's not nothing - taxpayers could habe spent the money better had they kept it. But it's not the same as if you levelled a city.
Further, the vast bulk of costs associated with the iraq war are interest on debt. That is really just shuffling money around. Especially if the debt is held by americans.
Money is just a unit of exchange. It isn't synonymous with wealth itself. Climate change will actually directly destroy wealth: it will level capital stock, it will lower crop yields, etc.
This is very different from movements of money back and forth that leave the physical economy untouched.
Iraq suffered destruction of capital during the Iraq war. Not sure if a dollar figure was attached to it, but that would be a more comparable situation.
Iraq's economy is $200 billion per year. I'm guessing the dollar loss to them was much less than 2.4 trillion. And yet I'm sure the real hardship caused by capital loss is greater than americans feel from their financial loss - even if you account for population size differences.