Also, if one is doing a cost benefit analysis - one has to include things like political instability caused by oil dependence(see Middle East politics), funding of extremist groups, and health benefits due to reduction of air pollution.
Once religion demands dedication most people will find paradigm where they skip working while still consider themself pious.
It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...
1. Infinite badness of hell;
2. Infinitesimal possibility of religious truth.
Reasoning about climate change doesn't really involve multiplying infinity by zero. There is more evidence to back up a non-zero chance of catastrophe, and we don't have to rely on inifinite badness to make action worthwhile. Finite badness does the trick just fine.
Unlike Pascal's wager, the question of climate change action is rooted in knowable quantities. Unfortunately, a lot of these are still unknowns to a degree, and a lot of misinformation exists, making it difficult for non-experts to keep up.
EDIT:
Looking at that a bit closer, I get peak temperatures at ~ 412.5k, 322.5k, 237.5k, 127.5k, and 7.5k years ago.
> It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...
Are you saying that it's not a good thing to have lived a good life and done good by your fellow humans?
Premise A: Pascal's wager is based on sound reasoning.
Premise B: People who live by pascals wager "live a good life", etc.
Premise C: "Living a good life" is a desirable thing.
Somehow you are arguing that if I reject premise A I must also reject premise C (if I were to act rationally), but I don't follow it.
The problem is that the religious books want you to do a bunch of things that really are bad and awful. Aside from the bits about murdering unbelievers and apostates, and stoning your disobedient children, and not eating pork (which is actually good for the pigs I guess if you follow it), they'd also have you do things like forgo all contraception, leaving you with a bunch of children you're not prepared to take care of, or being celibate, which really isn't fun or healthy, and basically living like they did in Victorian times (see the other article here today about the "scandalous" behavior at Victorian beaches with some men and women actually swimming together--the horror!). If there isn't a really good reason to enjoy various human activities that really aren't harmful, then why shouldn't you?
If it's replaced by what alarmists actually claim is necessary, it becomes very clear why it's not that simple.
Transformation has costs, it's not a free ride. The investment that you do there is not being done somewhere else.
Care to elaborate about the benefits of the Apollo project?
For Apollo in particular: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/flyers/apollo.htm
Good search query for finding more detailed analyses (not in a snarky LMGTFY way, there's just so much to list either as a direct benefit or as something made possible by those early innovations): apollo spin off technologies
I look forward to home solar and the supporting technology. The prices aren't quite there for me but I think they will be in the next five years.
In the meantime, I grew up being told "turn off the lights to save electricity!" and now with more efficient bulbs, power consumption is down about 80-90% to where energy for lighting is rounding error.
This should be of interest: http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCF...
The unmet need for cheap, plentiful, reliable energy:
There are 7 billion people in the world who need cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to flourish. Some 3 billion have virtually no energy by our standards, which means we need vastly more energy.
It is extremely difficult to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. In the entire history of humanity, only three industries have achieved this on any scale: the hydrocarbon (fossil fuel) industry, the nuclear industry, and the hydroelectric power industry.
>> For the last 40 years, so-called environmentalists have held back industrial progress around the world. That's why we're helping industry fight for its freedom, with new ideas, arguments, and policies that will improve our economy and our environment.
I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that fossil fuels have helped technological progress over the last century and a half, which seems like the core of his thrust.
The problem is the almost dismissive attitude about the future prediction consensus. Generally, the scientific consensus is against his statement: "The [future] warming impact of CO2 is mild and quite possibly positive".
From there, it seems like he is selectively framing his arguments. For instance, higher CO2 concentrations does increase crop yields (as stated), but scientists believe this will be offset by higher temperatures and drier conditions. (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...). Statements like "Warming is almost universally desired among civilizations" seem to ignore that there is such a thing as too hot for the human body, let alone for other things such as food or having a reliable water supply (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5188e.pdf).
It seems like a strange bias to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now. Or that only three industries (hydro, fossil fuel, nuclear) will possibly ever exist to provide cheap, plentiful energy. (For a start, I'll ding him an additional point for forgetting about the original cheap, plentiful energy source humans used: "traditional biomass". EG: wood, crop waste, dung, etc.)
But many implicitly ignore the benefits of fossil fuels. I hear many variations of the comment I originally replied to, i.e., "even if there's no climate change, reducing fossil fuel use is pure win". I think many imagine we could keep roughly the same quality of life with the majority of our power coming from solar panels and wind farms. Smarter environmentalists realise this is not true, but the general public is very confused on the issue, especially as the more rational greens get lumped in with the activist crazies.
(One very important point in to explain Alex's context: many greens (not all, granted) are opposed on moral grounds to nuclear, and even to hydro, which floods valleys and messes with nature. The root of this is the desire to minimise human impact, but "minimising human impact" is ultimately at odds with "maximising human flourishing").
to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now
He doesn't think this. Obviously improved nuclear power, ultimately fusion power, is the real long-term solution. However, hopes that we can significantly improve solar or wind power are doomed to crash into reality -- there's fundamental limits to how much energy you can extract from the wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law) or from photons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...). Burning wood and dung works for poor countries that lack infrastructure, but it's more expensive that fossil fuels, and more polluting, even more polluting than coal.
Yes, there are limits to extraction, but solar and wind power's advantage is that, location wise, it is viable in far more places than something like hyrdo power; it also can be set up in a more decentralized fashion which can be advantageous for some scenarios (remote areas with little existing infrastructure for instance). I've always thought that solar and wind's biggest challenge to overcome is more the non-continuous nature of that power source. At any rate at this time I don't think it's safe to predict what a long term solution might be or might not be. There probably is (as like now) no single solution that is right for every location.
In this specific situation, I'd rather not know we were wrong that know for a fact we were right.
Just because we averted disaster doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen.
Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean we "averted disaster." It's entirely possible that much (or even all) of the build up was normal media fear mongering and loosely based on reality.
We're in the same position with climate change. All we've gotten out of it so far is affordable renewable energy, better tech for power monitoring and distribution, and a lot of new jobs. So far, solving a maybe is proving to be a good investment, and may save us all if the worst case scenarios are realistic.
TANSTAAFL.
Also, there are plenty of costs for the default option which should be included in the analysis. These are severe especially for low lying countries with a big coastline. But even for other countries, public health suffers due to burning fossil fuels, and political instability in oil rich countries has a big effect on the world.
He does argue that we should be spending a lot more on research to find cheaper solutions, however.
[Update]
While you're downvoting me, you should understand that I'm simply passing along one of main arguments made by the Republican party. You live in your echo chamber and they live in their's.
Can anyone guess why we are moving backwards in addressing the problem?
For example, he argues that fixing poverty with cheap energy has bigger economic impact than fixing climate change. He then puts up a statistic connecting expansion of coal energy in China with a fall in extreme poverty. However he doesn't mention that the fall in poverty can mostly be attributed to improved agriculture and happened a decade before the coal expansion. Further, if you really wanted to get energy to rural areas far away from the power grid, distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable.
Bjørn is not the worst denier, but he is also not intellectually honest and you get a strong feeling that he intentionally tries to make preventing climate change seem at odds with fighting poverty, when it is really to sides of the same problem.
Do you believe it's possible for intelligent, informed, people of good will to look at a set of facts and come to different policy proposals?
Public policy is informed by science, but it is grounded in values. It seems to me that you call Bjorn Lomborg intellectually dishonest simply because he disagrees with you on policy.
Also Occam's razor really doesn't apply: a) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in good faith and the parent is wrong b) Bjorn Lomborg makes arguments in bad faith and the parent is right
To my eye, a & b are equivalently parsimonious in their assumptions.
How can you claim that energy production subsidised with public money is cheaper than the same energy produced with no subsidies? The Chinese government could spend the money saved from solar subsidies in unemployment salaries or hospitals and free health care.
The numbers are a bit out of date. All I could find other than that is a reference to a study in 2015 on Wikipedia, but it links to a page that's missing the data the reference was pointing to.
Btw, I got downvoted because people don't like my comment?
I really wish HN readers would get out of their echo chamber and understand the other side. The controlling Republican party really does believe that it's not worth investing the money into fixing climate change because of arguments like Bjorn's.
Pick ANY article on the WSJ that discusses solar, climate change, or even Tesla, and it degenerates into bashing subsidizing solar, climate change bashing, etc
Here's today's article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipu...
By the way, can you provide references for your claims?
Some time during the 21st century there will be a critical event that prods us into dramatic action, some real disaster that even the critics won't be able to deny. After that, things will be different. It may be the first time we have to abandon a major city. Perhaps Miami. Unfortunately, at that point, it will be too late to stop many large-scale effects.
See, for example, the current state of migration from Syria, Iraq, and Northern Africa. Slow and easy, right?
As I understand, the main point of the article is that if the huge sheet of ice dislodges from main land, it is essentially going to melt entirely and no longer slow more land ice from getting to the ocean faster.
The timeframe in which the ice will melt is uncertain, but it will surely melt. So by the time you noticed water rising, it will be too late. By taking this wait and see approach, you are basically negligencing the problem to the next one or two, maybe three generations to helplessly endure.
The main test for humanity here is if it can coordinate and take one for the team economically so as to prevent itself from actual catastrophe in the future generations. So far it's not looking good.