[ExI] libertarian (asteroid) defense

[Anders Sandberg]

Samantha Atkins wrote:
> On 03/01/2011 03:39 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>>
>> Climate change is indeed a reshuffling of the cards, in itself fairly 
>> neutral but on one hand breaking down structure (all the winery 
>> infrastructure will be in the wrong place, and it takes money, time 
>> and expertise to build it somewhere else) and on the other affecting 
>> people differently depending on their resilience (the dirty secret of 
>> climate impacts on society research: the developed world is fairly 
>> likely to withstand even pretty big climate effects, while the 
>> undeveloped won't). 
>
> Please point to irrefutable non-fudged evidence of actually dangerous 
> levels of current climate change.  Otherwise could we move on to 
> something actually important?

It is worth noting that in this thread the issue is not so much 
anthropogenic climate effects as *any* climate effects. Especially of 
course asteroid-caused climate changes (which, however, are not likely 
to be a mere reshuffling but a serious impulse deviation from the 
current climate). Given past climate variability data and the power-law 
distribution of drought-induced famines (plus the bad food security at 
present) we should be paying serious attention to what we can do about 
the climate.

I think people underestimate the impacts on non-dangerous climate 
change. For example, this year will likely have a food price peak as bad 
as the one 2007-2008 partially due to bad weather in China messing up 
the wheat harvest. This will not be very noticeable to most westerners 
since we already eat very processed food: the raw food price is a small 
component of what we pay. But it does have plenty of impact on marginal 
people, and their reactions have political repercussions (food prices 
are one extra reason so many people in the Arab world are angry right now).

Of course, sometimes causality goes the other way around. If you want a 
good reason to kick the church of climate change, look at biofuels. 
Biofuels have been a spectacular disaster because they tie food 
production and fuel production together. Since there is more money in 
selling fuel than food (especially given current oil prices) that means 
a lot of edible calories get turned into fuel. And since a lot of 
well-meaning subsidies for "green" energy have been added, rich 
countries are now subsidising the distortion. Developing countries sell 
their calories north, and northern farmers now have yet another subsidy 
to efficiently fight to keep beside the usual ones. So in this case, 
trying to be green has significantly increased food prices.

To get back to the theme of the thread, it just hit me that biofuels are 
also disastrous from an asteroid damage perspective: an impact winter, 
and we will neither have food, nor fuel.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
James Martin 21st Century School 
Philosophy Faculty 
Oxford University