[extropy-chat] Climate skepticism patterns

Anders Sandberg asa at nada.kth.se
Tue Jun 6 22:44:54 UTC 2006


A fun way to annoy both climate sceptics and greenhousers alike is to
point out the need for climate regulation.

Even without believing doomsayer predictions the historical evidence shows
that climate change can be bad from a human perspective, both in the small
(like the Little Ice Age) and the large (climate changes before, during
and since the ice Age). So clearly we need to be on guard for climate
change no matter its cause, and to prevent undesirable changes. If the
current climate swings are in some significant part due human action, that
implies that human action can affect the climate and we ought to
interfere. If we are not the cause, we better learn to be the cause.

A common argument against climate control is that it is so complex we
don't know what we should do. This is rather interesting as an argument,
since it is often made by the same people who presupposes that emission
reductions would have a predictable effects. However, that is based on the
assumption that climate is not path dependent and that other factors like
albedo change can be disregarded. This seems pretty implausible, given the
changes in biome distribution caused by climate changes, the spread of
human-modified land with deviant albedo, contrails, ship tracks and
aerosols. In fact, just reducing greenhouse gases without fixing albedo
change might be a bad thing. Hence even a return to some baseline state
would require much more than reduction of emissions, and most likely
properly would require a fairly tricky balancing of different factors.

That the climate is complex is no excuse for inaction but rather suggests
a need for more attempts to both understand it and finding ways of
affecting it (even if those methods might not be useful in our current
situation). Similarly, many people who think that climate is too complex
to mess with think that the economy is something simple where interference
produces reliable results. A curious assumption, but most people do not
really understand dynamical systems. My guess is that we can map out the
major interactions within the Earth's dynamical upper layers to a high
degree within a few decades, and we will be able to use chaos control to
influence at least short term cycles much earlier (for chaos control one
only needs reconstructed phase space, not a real model).

The deep issues that make people dislike climate control is IMHO the
natural order assumption (nature is good whatever it does, human action is
neutral or suspect), the need for global agreements and that it forces us
to consider what we would regard as the ideal climate. As long as it is
only about avoiding a waguely dark future by doing one simple thing, the
greenhouse debate can bludgeon everybody in the same direction. A wider
debate about what we actually want to do with the Earth would be far less
easily cohered.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University





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