BTW, calling it a "debate" pretty much automatically puts you in a category also. The only reason it's even put into the public's mind as a debate is because of the huge business interests which are threatened by the science. You might as well say that you aren't on either side of the "cigarettes cause lung cancer" debate. Do you think Exxon is going to do anything different than R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris did when they spent decades challenging the science of tobacco induced cancers?

I am all for questioning and challenging the science WITH SCIENCE, as opposed to economic arguments and ad hominem attacks.

In other words, you are punting at precisely the critical point in the analysis.

Fact: If you just calculate the effect of CO2 on its own, it's too small to be significant. To make CO2 significant, you have to assume large positive feedbacks elsewhere in the system that amplify the effect of CO2. That assumption has not been validated.

There are very few authorities who flatly deny the planet has warmed a degree or so over the last 100 years. There are very few authorities that deny that man is the most likely cause of this warming. And yet, nearly every post in this whole thread is essentially debating how moronic, on a scale of 1-10, those "climate deniers" are.

I find this even more fascinating from a place like HN, where the users are generally very intelligent and often have some science education. It's ironic that the users ranting against these uneducated people who don't believe in climate change are exhibiting the very same sort of ignorance they decry: they've accepted the media's characterization of the debate.

To clarify: those in the Al Gore camp calling for drastic reductions of CO2 are essentially asking the third world to remain poor, and are asking the first world to become a little less rich. Their justification is that there will be catastrophic results unless emissions are immediately curbed. The reasoned opposition is not that humans cannot affect the atmosphere, or that warming hasn't happened. The argument is that the hypothesized positive feedback loops that make the models predict catastrophic warming are wrong. Interestingly, many scientists have continued to lower their forecasts for just how sensitive the climate is (See http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/a-closer-look-a..., for an example in the news just today).

To clarify the clarification a bit further: those in the Al Gore camp are asking most people in the first world to become less rich, but that's mainly because some (like Gore himself) stand to make quite a bit of money by using "carbon credits", cap and trade, etc. to siphon wealth from other people's pockets into their own. That's a key reason to oppose such centralized schemes: even if there is a real problem, it won't get fixed that way, because any expected benefits will be more than swallowed up by the social costs of people gaming the system.

> That's a key reason to oppose such centralized schemes: ... any expected benefits will be more than swallowed up by the social costs of people gaming the system.

Wait, what? I'm not sure I've understood this allegation here, or that I have all the facts, so please correct me if/where I'm missing something. With that in mind, here's what I know.

With respect to solutions, I think you're saying that "centralized" incentives are a bad idea because they can be gamed (to various degrees). Suppose with me (just for this paragraph) that there is a catastrophic problem looming. What alternatives are there to centralized schemes, whether absolute restrictions, or capitalist incentives? Are you hoping that everyone will spontaneously change their behaviour? If that's what you're proposing, I disagree violently. If you have some other proposal (other than centralized planning, and other than spontaneous distributed action), I'm curious what it is.

With respect to Al Gore in particular, I think you're claiming that Al Gore's bona fides as an objective judge are compromised by his profit opportunity. All I'm aware of is that he is a partner at KP, which is invested in greentech, where he has forfeited his salary. He presumably has some equity there (not known to be forfeited), so I guess he might profit some if centralized schemes are implemented. But it strikes me as downright crazy reasoning to assume that because he has allocated (some of) his personal wealth to a capitalist solution (in the capitalist country that he is loyal to) to a problem he's worried about, that therefore he's not _sincerely_ worried about the problem.

If there is a catastrophic problem looming, and we can't adapt, we're probably screwed. I agree people aren't likely to spontaneously change their behavior just because someone tells them there is a catastrophic problem looming; they will need much harder evidence than that, and on the hypothesis that there is a catastrophic problem looming, by the time there is hard evidence it will probably be too late.

However, that doesn't make centralized schemes look any better, because on the hypothesis that there is a catastrophic problem looming, the schemes will have to be so drastic and so draconian that to say they will be gamed is a massive understatement. The sorts of relatively mild things that are being proposed, like a carbon tax or cap and trade schemes, won't stop a catastrophic problem. We would have to massively re-engineer the world's entire economy. And nobody knows how to do that, so even if we tried a centralized scheme, it wouldn't work; we'd be at least as badly off as if we'd hoped people would spontaneously change their behavior.

(The above is all irrelevant anyway, because we already know we can't re-engineer the world's entire economy; China and India and the rest of the developing world won't let us.)

If there is a catastrophic problem looming, the best we can do is to try to figure out how to adapt. If sea levels are going to rise, build levees. If agriculture is going to have to shift to different areas of land, work on how best to shift it. Or figure out how to induce cooling to offset the warming--for example, by pumping aerosols into the upper atmosphere to simulate a volcanic eruption, since those are known to have a cooling effect. (To me, trying to induce cooling is more risky than adapting, because I'm not convinced we understand the climate well enough to predict the effects. But since we do have past data on volcanic eruptions, we can at least use that as a benchmark if we were desperate enough to try such a scheme.)

I think you're claiming that Al Gore's bona fides as an objective judge are compromised by his profit opportunity

That's certainly not the only reason I think Al Gore isn't an objective judge. I just point it out as an example of the sorts of conflicting interests that are in play in any centralized scheme.

As far as Gore being sincerely worried about the problem, I think he is, but it's hard to be sure, just as it's hard to be sure with any politician. In any case, whether or not his worry is sincere is irrelevant; people can be perfectly sincere and still game the system, because they don't see what they're doing as gaming the system. The very fact that their beliefs are sincere makes it harder for them to do that; they think their beliefs are just reality, since that's how sincere beliefs present themselves to the human mind, so they don't even bother exercising critical thinking about them.

"[If] there is a catastrophic problem looming, the schemes will have to be so drastic and so draconian" Citation needed. I claim that there is no reason to believe that moderate action, taken collectively, cannot meaningfully improve our long-term outcomes. In fact, as a general rule of thumb, for arbitrary problems, I tend to assume that results generally improve monotonically with (productive) effort taken, although usually not linearly (and admittedly not ALWAYS monotonic). If the no-coordinated-action-taken path is ten feet of sea level rise, maybe with reasonable coordinated action we can limit it to 9. Or 1. Maybe with draconian and drastic coordinated action we can limit it to 5 or 0 respectively. If the no-coordinated-action-taken path is ecocide, maybe drastic action would be required to maintain our standard of living, but moderate coordinated action could improve from "ecocide" to "many disasters". In any of these cases, people gaming the system is a source of friction, and we should resist that, but not at the expense of tackling the problem!

So, then, usually coordination on things like environmental change requires a certain amount of majority-rules coercion. Libertarians might think it's better to die free, but most people seem to agree that sometimes this sort of coercion is worthwhile (but surely not for every little thing!). So reasonable people are left without the solace of blanket statements like opposing all centralized schemes without a cost-benefit analysis.

"That's certainly not the only reason I think Al Gore isn't an objective judge"

I didn't say it was the only reason, I said you made that attack. I think the context in which you made it makes it look like Al Gore is markedly unworthy of the trust we might place in a randomly-selected human (that is, I think you're proposing that we have extra reasons to mistrust him). I think that the very evidence of his investment is, in fact, a reason to trust him slightly MORE than a randomly-selected human.

And the (purported) conflict of interest (singular) that you point out is not a conflict of interest in a centralized scheme. That's completely missing the point. Even if people take action collectively, without any centralized incentive structure, green companies will profit. So arguments about gaming the system are generally not arguments against centralized action. People are taking decentralized action doing things like buying carbon credits for airplane flights. You think that's not being gamed? The question is how to take effective action, and then to coordinate people to take that effective action together.

"If there is a catastrophic problem looming, the best we can do is to try to figure out how to adapt."

That might be true, but it's not at all clear.

If there is a catastrophic problem looming, the best we can do is * understand the scope of the problem, and the true cost to us * understand what levers will move the problem * make cost/benefit analyses of which levers we should move, and how hard * coordinate people to take action, and hopefully share the cost somewhat "equitably" (including figuring out what that means)

Let me acknowledge that a large part of the cost to us is really "lose lives", "lose cities", "lose agricultural land", and thus "build levees, shift farms, etc" MIGHT be the most effective solutions. But I think that it's hard to imagine how high those costs will be.

(Especially considering that we're all gonna hafta get off the oil soon anyway, when it runs out.)

Saying that there are things humanity could collectively do in theory is not the same as saying that centralized "solutions" will actually achieve those things. To do that, we have to actually know the right solution; we have to have enough understanding of the problem domain to be able to make accurate predictions of the effects of our actions. We don't have that knowledge in the case of climate change; indeed, we don't have it in most areas in which we currently force collective action on people.

Take the recent mortgage bubble as an example. This was the result of a centralized "solution" to the "problem" of not enough people owning their homes. The result was to create a new way for people to game the system that ended up tanking the entire economy, and now all those additional people who were supposed to own their homes are being foreclosed on and evicted.

In short, you appear to have a lot more faith in centralized solutions than I do. I would have thought that the twentieth century, if it showed anything, would have showed that centralized control doesn't work--after all, the Soviet Union was a 70-plus year experiment demonstrating that.

Let's translate this into another domain: the very evidence of Wall Street's investment in mortgage securities is a reason to trust them more than a randomly-selected human. Does it still seem reasonable?

Even if people take action collectively, without any centralized incentive structure, green companies will profit.

Why? Because they're actually solving a problem, or because they're gaming the system? You admit carbon credits are being gamed. Al Gore is therefore one of the gamers. How is that supposed to increase my confidence in him?

I should note that, as I've posted elsewhere in this thread, I agree there are good reasons to reduce fossil fuel consumption that are independent of the climate change issue. (Among them are national security and foreign policy: as I've noted in other posts, if we were smart we would have made eliminating our dependence on foreign oil a national priority in the 1970's.)

It's not just the media's characterization; it's the characterization of mainstream climate science. They are equating any opposition to the "consensus" to being a "denier". There are lots of positions in between.

Thanks for the support, btw. :-)