
How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong - deegles
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opinion/sunday/science-climate-change.html
======
rayiner
I really don't understand. We're told the scientists have a consensus and we
must believe them. (I'm inclined to do so!) But at least the IPCC has
projected changes that weren't so bad. Is there a new consensus? Were the
scientists who were supposed to be right actually wrong? Who are we supposed
to believe? This is not denialism. I’m firmly inclined to believe the IPCC
consensus. But it’s disconcerting to see a new narrative where those same
scientists are incorrect. It seems to amount to “panic even more than the
scientific consensus warrants.” Maybe that’s true but it’s an odd argument.

> More likely, a separate United Nations report concluded, we are headed for
> warming of at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That will come with almost
> unimaginable damage to economies and ecosystems. Unfortunately, this dose of
> reality arrives more than 30 years after human-caused climate change became
> a mainstream issue.

5.4F is 3C. The cost of 3C change is projected to be up to 13% of GDP relative
to keeping to 1.5C. See:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/23/hitting-
toughest-climate-target-will-save-world-30tn-in-damages-analysis-shows). Over
the 30 year time horizon of the calculation, world GDP will grow by 140%.
(Climate change will cost just 1/10 of total growth by that time. )

~~~
dwaltrip
It seems pretty fool-hardy to me to think that we shouldn't act on climate
change on the chance that we can simply spend a few dozen trillion a few
decades down the road to try to mop up the problem.

Perhaps we should find a report that also analyzes how much human suffering
and ecological damage would occur with a 3 degree C increase versus a 1.5
increase?

One point that isn't stressed enough is how much humanity depends on rich
ecosystems for so much of our technology, medicine, and science. Life would be
much harder for us on an ecologically devastated Earth.

~~~
rayiner
> It seems pretty fool-hardy to me to think that we shouldn't act on climate
> change on the chance that we can simply spend a few dozen trillion a few
> decades down the road to try to mop up the problem.

That’s not what the UN report means. What they’re saying is that GDP will be
that much lower from the effects of climate change (extreme weather events,
loss of farm land, rising water, etc.)

If we’re really looking at a 10-15% reduction in GDP, that suggests we
shouldn’t take drastic steps in response to climate change. Massive
restructuring of the economy like the Green New Deal could easily cost us more
than 10-15% in GDP. And most likely it won’t work, so we’ll suffer the double
whammy of reduced growth plus the effects of climate change.

------
areoform
I suspect that the problem will end up being something quite 'simple.' Our
time didn't have the horsepower nor know how to accurately compute feedback
loops in our environment. We didn't understand the numerous and unforeseeable
tipping points that we tipped. We didn't understand the dance of nature and
how disparate events tied into the pattern of our actions.

The deliberations, however, are over and the verdict is in. We have done
fucked up. There's no point in lamenting our failure. We've made the mess and
now we need to fix it. The only real question facing us is how.

Whether it's carbon sinks in the form of olivine and 20 million trees, new
methods to suck carbon out of the air, or some desperate act of
geoengineering. Humanity needs to come to grips with the situation and act
quickly and decisively. Like we did with nuclear weapons and space races. An
Earth Race (so that we don't regress), if you will.

~~~
kiba
What does "quickly and decisively" mean in term of timeframe?

~~~
dredmorbius
The IPCC's 2014 AR5 WG3 report is the latest to provide a detailed mitigations
response. That would be the concensus view. There are a wide range of others.

I've only just now looked it up, so while I can't answer your question
directly, it's all but certainly the most comrepensive concensus answer you'll
find.

[https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/)

For the Paris accords: _net negative_ emissions by 2050, now 30 years away.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AM...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#/media/File%3AMitigation_pathways.svg)

~~~
javagram
When people riot in the streets and demand their luxuries back, what will you
do to stop it? Authoritarian repression? Massacres?

Yellow vest protests in France were caused by a modest increase in fuel taxes.
Serious belt-tightening to stop global warming is going to be far worse in
most countries - heck, France already generates most of their energy from
nuclear and renewables so they are way ahead of the US and others.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Meanwhile in the UK, nearly half of Conservative voters and a majority of the
country think we should be aiming to decarbonise far faster[1]. Namely by 2030
and not kicked off into the long grass of 2050 as the government committed to.
Committed to purely because they don't have to _do_ anything. Apparently even
their voters aren't properly signed up to the denial hymn sheet.

Yellow vest protests were far more about inequality than a modest increase in
fuel taxes. If government makes an equitable policy that spares the poorest in
society the disproportionate impact that would naturally fall on them, there
need be no riots - especially if they had a warm, well insulated house for the
first time. The middle classes don't, generally speaking, riot.

So what luxuries are you expecting to be taken? Decarbonising doesn't mean
deindustrialising. It means winding back some of the excesses of capitalism
and consumerism. Done properly we should expect better made, longer lasting
but sustainable products. Which I suppose should have the multinationals
rioting if we take away planned obsolescence... :)

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/07/majority-
of-uk-public-back-2030-zero-carbon-target-poll)

~~~
javagram
In terms of luxuries being taken away, I’d point to electricity and
transportation as the #1. For those calling for immediate decarbonization,
that would mean shutting down all our coal, gas, and oil burning power plants
and scrapping our gas burning cars. Electric heating costs more than gas
heating, electric cars cost more than gas cars, and so on. All of these costs
hit ordinary people directly in the pocketbook.

Economists estimate a carbon tax high enough to force fossil fuel plants
offline in a couple decades would need to be quite high. Meanwhile, in
democratic societies like the USA it’s very difficult to even raise the gas
tax a few cents to fund needed repairs to bridges and other infrastructure. To
get people out of their SUV’s and into Teslas, for instance, you’d need to put
multi-dollar taxes on gas to make it make sense (e.g. Norway where Tesla is
doing well because they put a 100% tax on normal gas cars). Democratic
elections often result in the rejection of such taxes because voters value
their immediate standard of living over that of future decades (e.g. WA state
initiatives for carbon taxes, which were soundly rejected at the ballot box in
2016 and 2018).

And to do all this without affecting the standard of living of the poor and
middle classes, and without slowing down the growth of developing countries
and China - I think it’s a bit of a dream. There’s a reason market-based
societies selected to use fossil fuel technology and it’s because it’s cheaper
than other energy generation tech. Transitioning off of it is now a massive
capital investment and will hurt.

You say the yellow vest protest were about inequality - but the result of them
was that the fuel tax was put on hold and the speed limit was kept high.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
That doesn't make sense though. If you're outside the USA, ending coal is
coming. It might just take a little longer in the US and Poland. The UK has, I
think, five remaining coal plants - all spending 90% of their time idling as
source of last resort. They'll all be gone before 2025. Offshore wind is
already competitive with gas, and the expectation is it will be cheaper than
_existing_ gas in the next round of auctions, i.e. electricity will cost less
from closing and demolishing gas plants and building new offshore wind.

There we do get to a slight issue - UK doesn't currently have enough pumped
hydro or other storage to underpin 100% renewables, so gas will probably
survive a while as the fill in source, in lieu of batteries and pumped
storage.

That has been done with a low carbon tax - $25 per ton[1][2]. Brought in under
the Conservative coalition government - not one you'd expect to tax
excessively. Democratic societies in Europe manage to tax petrol and diesel
enough to bring it to double or more the US price.

You're conflating far too much though. Elections come with hundreds of
promises and policies - there are multiple issues, and multiple often
conflicting policies that get or lose a vote. It is _exceptionally_ rare for a
single point to swing a vote one way or another. Thus despite winning
politicians of every nation trying to claim 100% support of every
controversial policy, nothing could be further from the truth.

As far as being equitable is concerned, it's perfectly feasible to bring a
carbon tax that spends the take subsidising the poorest to enable them to
insulate their home, get solar panels, or replace their car with an EV. Maybe
with a policy to build out or subsidise more public transport. Car taxes based
on a combination of weight and emissions should help push the rest toward EVs.
If voters consistently claim they want more action, and far faster, then it's
reasonable to suppose that at least most realise that will come with a cost,
whether in increased state borrowing or adjusted taxes. The magic money tree
only gets brought out for illegal military adventures in Iraq.

Without going into growth as an unwise Ponzi scheme, there's no reason to
suppose huge spending on modern sustainable infrastructure would hurt
economies - it would boost a new and growing sector in place of an incumbent.
Growth would probably surge due to the additional government funded activity.
The New Deal was an attempt to boost the economy though didn't spend enough -
ultimately it was spending on WW2 rearming that brought the necessary effect.
Little wonder some transition policies have been labelled Green New Deal -
attempting to achieve similar during a transition to sustainability. The logic
is sound, though I don't know enough detail to know if the numbers add up.

Fossil simply isn't the cheapest fuel any more, far from it. Which is why the
transition is happening anyway, even without policies to encourage or require
it.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/uk-renewables-out-
ge...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/uk-renewables-out-generate-
fossil-fuels-for-an-entire-quarter/)

[2] [https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-renewables-
generate-...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-renewables-generate-
more-electricity-than-fossil-fuels-for-first-time)

~~~
javagram
The transition is happening, but we’re nowhere near on pace for negative
carbon by 2050. Here in the US, most of our emissions reduction has been
switching from coal to gas, while energy consumption continues to rise and
politicians block offshore wind farms for aesthetic reasons (e.g. Cape wind in
MA).

Once the coal->gas transition completes, the easy gains on emissions reduction
are gone - now it’s cheap, already built gas plants with cheap fracked gas
that need to be out competed by renewables + as yet to be invented cost-
effective storage technologies.

GND policies don’t add up as far as I can tell, in fact they are probably
counter productive since they promise voters that they can have carbon
friendly policies and everything else they want too.

I’d be happy to see a tax on carbon and more subsidies for green cars and so
on (right now, a gas car is still a better deal despite the tax subsidy on
electric, especially with our low US gas prices). But I’m skeptical that we’re
anywhere near on track to convincing voters to get behind it.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/10/the-
surp...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/10/the-surprising-
energy-math-behind-us-climate-policy-failure/#31af9da734b7)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Now there I agree, but that appears down to the unique success anti-science
lobbying is having in the US right now. The US has long had a political
structure that is not amenable to regulation -- so it comes particularly
slowly, and often later than elsewhere.

Forbes piece is correct that much coal has been replaced by gas, but it is not
(necessarily) as bad as it tries to make out. That mirrors the UK experience
10 or so years ago, when we had a dash for gas. Already those gas plants are
becoming uneconomic -- so much for their expected 50+ year life. We've already
had a couple of closures, and one of the gas generators are busy trying to
pivot to renewables. This under a Conservative government that has outlawed
cheaper onshore wind and backed fracking, two decisions even their own
membership disagree with.

So it may well be gas starts dropping out of US generation in a decade, not
ideal, but potentially OK on course for 2050 neutrality. US gas prices and
love of the car may prove more intractable, but I haven't quite lost hope yet.

------
orev
I really hate this headline and I don’t think it should be rewarded with
clicks. NYT knows that a certain population is going to read that headline,
and nothing else, and then take away that “they were right all along and
climate change isn’t real”. It does absolutely nothing to help move things in
the right direction and just further fuels the fire of false “debate” over the
issue.

~~~
PleaseLoveMe
I hate clickbait as much as the next person but in this case... aren't the
people you're talking about the people you want to read the article?

~~~
orev
Most people don’t actually read the articles. They just scan the headlines and
take away whatever they want from that. This would have been much better if
the headline was more like: Scientists grossly underestimated the impact of
climate change. That would have been sensationalistic while also conveying the
main point of the article to those people.

------
macawfish
My understanding is that many climate scientists want to avoid a kind of
paralyzing alarmism/catastrophic fatalism, and that this might be where the
conservative consensus comes from.

------
jeremyjh
Just as a thought experiment, suppose the best prediction that could be made
right now would see the earth's carrying capacity drop to under a billion
people in the next 50 years. What would you expect to see different, in media,
in papers in top journals, in public discourse, than we see right now? I think
the world might look just as we see it today.

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
There is no going back, our entire way of living is unsustainable, climate
change is going to happen. Good news is, planet Earth will be fine, give it a
few thousand years, it has survived far worse.

~~~
AstralStorm
It is sustainable, barely, with major reinvestment into nuclear, renewable and
electric battery storage, for about 300 years. (Taking into consideration
countries catching up on development and increased demands for air
conditioning and water purification. This is a conservative time estimate,
there are more nuclear fuel sources.)

That's not too long of a time, but maybe enough to solve these problems in any
number of available ways, from biotechnology through cybernetics,
nanotechnology, new advanced energy sources (some of which are being developed
right now), even perhaps space travel or mega structures.

------
mc3
[https://outline.com/BX3pHp](https://outline.com/BX3pHp)

------
dredmorbius
An element of this story and challenge is the nature of technology. I've spent
a few years on the problem of what technology _is_ , or more specifically,
what technolgical _mechanisms_ are. There several obvious ones: new fuel
sources, materials, better understandings of processes, and information flows
-- acquisition, processing, storage and retrieval, transmission, and controls.
I've come up with a list of eight.

It wasn't until some time that I hit on a ninth element, what I've called
"hygiene factors", in that the address the overall health of a system or the
human technosphere and environent. They're based on _unintended consequences_
, a term introduced in 1936 by the sociologist Robert K. Merckton, which he
describes (I'm just realising) using the same term I'd landed on: _manifest_
and _latent_ functions and dysfunctions.[1][2][3]

Hygiene factors tend to be saturation of sinks, exhaustion of sources, or
disruptions of endogenous or exogenous systems on which we rely -- say, urban
filth and public health (endogenous) or ecosystem disruption affecting
resources, food supply, or disease reservoirs (external).

A specific technology might be thought of as _some cluster of effects_ , both
positive (or intended) and negative (or unintended), both manifest and latent.
A specific technology -- a device, technique, management method, practice,
convention -- approaches some theoretical physical limit of efficiency, also
introducing unintended consequences.

We're pretty good at choosing technologies which have manifest positive
effects, and at rejecting those with manifest negative effects. We're less
good about adopting technologies with _latent_ positive effects or _rejecting_
those with latent _negative_ effects.[4]

We can think of an entire technosphere as the set of interactions between _all
technologies_ and the environment.

As both our technology _and_ role within the environment extend, we find
ourselves running up against inherent limits. That is, the capacities of
either fixed-capacity or rate-based sinks to absorb effluents, of fixed-stock
or flow-based sources to provide resources, or disruptions of either our own
endogenous or exogenous systems on which healthy function rely.

The problem is that as we start hitting one set of limits, we tend to spill
over to others. In agricultural science, there's the notion of Leibig's Law of
the Minimum: "growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the
scarcest resource (limiting factor)." It seems that this should have some
reciprocal principle, that _health_ is dictated not by the total sinks
available, but of the most currently binding one. As the first contraint(s)
are lifted -- low-hanging fruit -- subsequent constraints of greater effect,
or more difficult mitigation or management, emerge. (I'm not aware of any
named principle matching this, though I strongly suspect it exists.)

We also end up with interactions between the consequences -- one system
interacts with another, producing their own sets of effects.

It's the latent negative consequences which catch up with you. Since they're
_not_ apparent, they're not evident and available for planning or modeling
when looking at future direction. As systems generally become more optimised,
the odds of any _further_ change tends to fall -- you've exhausted most of the
good interactions, the remaining ones are bad.

And the worst of all is a set of compounding, latent, negative 2nd and higher-
order interactions. These are conceptually, and probably statistically,
inevitable. We can't point to them specifically, as we don't know what they
are. There's a tremendous tendency in human nature to dismiss and minimise
future and latent risks (though yes, also benefits), especially where personal
or private interests are served by optimism bias.

The result then would be that increasingly complex circumstances in which the
tolerances of multiple systems are stressed to their limits, an apparent zone
of stability is actually an illusion as still-fermenting latent negative
interactions are developing, beyond the realm of detection.

Which seems to be exemplified in the global warming case.

I struggle with whether this is tremendously insightful or blindingly obvious,
or possibly a case of overfitting to available information. Responses have
been rather all over the map, though the "blindingly obvious" criticisms
frequently seem to come from those afflicted with blindness to latent benefits
and risks.

But I'm fearful.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Bio:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_and_dysfunctions)

3\. I'd been working with the notion of "manifestation", though I'd not
settled on a good term for its opposite. "Covert", "emergent", and "latent"
were optons. And this is a reason why I research and footnote my HN (and
other) comments and posts. I'm learning.

4\. For concreteness, some possible examples:

\- Manifest positive: Movable type, water wheel, medical anaesthesia.

\- Manifest negative: Hydrochloric acid skin treatment. Taunting lions.

\- Latent positive: Medical hygiene, handwashing. Seismic building standards.
Limiting building to above the Tsunami line.

\- Latent negative: Lead plumbing, asbestos insulation, CFC refrigerants and
aerosol propellants, residential laundry chutes.

5\. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum)

------
rb808
I dont think anyone really cares what the scientists predict. Its the tragedy
of the commons, no one will really change their behaviour anyway, even when it
becomes unbearable to live in many parts of the world.

~~~
dyslexit
You're talking in generalities. Even if it's not the majority of people,
_some_ people will change their lifestyles, or at least parts of it (buying
eco friendly cars, using less AC, eating less meat, etc.) But in general,
you're right, most people won't do enough. That's why there need to be
_institutional_ changes, like investments into green energy/tech and
incentives for companies to pollute less.

------
daenz
Meta: Why are paywalled articles doing so well on HN lately? I know about the
"web" link, but it never works for me. It's frustrating to want to participate
in the comments on a subject, but not have access to the specific content that
everyone seems to be discussing (and no, I am not paying for an NYT
subscription).

~~~
danzig13
Reader view on iPhone gets past New York Times paywall for now

~~~
greenyoda
Or use the uMatrix browser add-on to block cookies and JavaScript on NY Times
domains.

