I went to Glacier National Park a while ago and stood before a sign that said "The glaciers you see will be gone by year 20xx" or something like that. The year was 20xx and I was looking right at the glaciers and they were decidedly not gone. I understand the motivation. The reality is that an action of strength A is required to create outcome X, but if one expresses this need, it's likely one achieves only an action of strength A- < A and consequently the outcome X- != X. This encourages us to say "we need an action of strength A+ or we will get the outcome X-". The hope is that the discount that people apply on the prediction results in an action of strength A' ~ A and an outcome X' ~= X.
But public exhortation is a repeated game and unless you're Heaven's Gate the success of your popularized predictions has a significant effect on the discount that the public applies to your predictions. Failed predictions have an effect on the discount rate asymmetric to the direction. It is likely that a successful public authority allows some number of people to experience catastrophe pour encourager les autres. Attempting a zero error rate by biasing to zero catastrophe is likely to cause repeated discounting until true catastrophe cannot be averted.
I'm reminded me of the short story The Wandering Earth. Spoilers to follow so don't read if you care. In the story, a group of scientists determine that the Sun is going to flare enough to kill everyone, so all of humanity mobilizes to install massive engines to move the Earth far enough to survive while creating technology that survives the dark. After years of traveling to past Pluto, no Sun catastrophe materializes, resulting in a massive Earthwide revolt that eventually takes control of the control center and the scientists and government officials are sentenced to death by walking into the cold waste. Just as the last of them dies, the Sun flares as predicted, just a little later.
In a democracy, credibility is an important resource. To avert actual existential catastrophe, it is better to err on the side of local under-predicted disaster. It is probably best to let Rancho Palos Verdes fall into the ocean without compensating the homeowners. It is probably best to let the Texan flood plains flood and people to lose their homes entirely. It is probably best to let the Californians lose their homes to the wildfires.
Then opening scene of The Ministry for the Future reflects this view. We won't get serious until there is a major catastrophe where millions die. And it needs to be millions of the "right people". Sadly, 10 million people dying in the DRC won't move the needle in the US. 1 million people dying in Texas might.
OTOH in 2020-2021 we had over 800,000 additional deaths due to COVID (conservative lower bound), and people are still made that they had to get vaccinated and schools were closed. Look at the Fauci scapegoating going on right now.
So, maybe 1M people in the US could die in a head wave or climate catastrophe and we still wouldn't do anything about it. However, the difference with COVID is that number happened over 2 years so "feels" less critical than if 800K people had died in the course of a week.
I was on a cruise ship to Alaska and we went to see Dawes Glacier, and people who had been on that same cruise 10-15 years earlier commented on how much smaller it was. I don't have the most recent numbers but it retreated by 3.8 km between 1985 and 2020.
That sign could have been better worded, but it doesn't change what's happening.
I just think of easter island deforestation, endangered species poaching, container ships and bunker fuel, and setting the oil wells on fire in kuwait.
I've read though that if we raise the standard of living of a population, they pollute less, so there might be a self-interest-based solution if we can do it globally.
Given how we are at the tail end of a small ice age, shouldn't it be expected that temperatures recover to what they were previously? I never quite understood how climate is simultaneously too complicated to understand and predict the weather accurately while also a solved problem that we just need to take action on. And somehow the action we need to take is more taxation?
Since I keep hearing about this for at least 30 years now and still nobody took action the whole thing might be a bit more complicated than what the news media would have you know.
We need to get serious about geo-engineering of some form or another. We have seen time and time again that we simply do not have the willpower to reduce climate change. So I'm becoming convinced that the only short- and medium-term solution is geoengineering to stop global warming.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 15.0 ms ] threadAnd it won't be the only big thing that will be sensibly changing by then.
But public exhortation is a repeated game and unless you're Heaven's Gate the success of your popularized predictions has a significant effect on the discount that the public applies to your predictions. Failed predictions have an effect on the discount rate asymmetric to the direction. It is likely that a successful public authority allows some number of people to experience catastrophe pour encourager les autres. Attempting a zero error rate by biasing to zero catastrophe is likely to cause repeated discounting until true catastrophe cannot be averted.
I'm reminded me of the short story The Wandering Earth. Spoilers to follow so don't read if you care. In the story, a group of scientists determine that the Sun is going to flare enough to kill everyone, so all of humanity mobilizes to install massive engines to move the Earth far enough to survive while creating technology that survives the dark. After years of traveling to past Pluto, no Sun catastrophe materializes, resulting in a massive Earthwide revolt that eventually takes control of the control center and the scientists and government officials are sentenced to death by walking into the cold waste. Just as the last of them dies, the Sun flares as predicted, just a little later.
In a democracy, credibility is an important resource. To avert actual existential catastrophe, it is better to err on the side of local under-predicted disaster. It is probably best to let Rancho Palos Verdes fall into the ocean without compensating the homeowners. It is probably best to let the Texan flood plains flood and people to lose their homes entirely. It is probably best to let the Californians lose their homes to the wildfires.
OTOH in 2020-2021 we had over 800,000 additional deaths due to COVID (conservative lower bound), and people are still made that they had to get vaccinated and schools were closed. Look at the Fauci scapegoating going on right now.
So, maybe 1M people in the US could die in a head wave or climate catastrophe and we still wouldn't do anything about it. However, the difference with COVID is that number happened over 2 years so "feels" less critical than if 800K people had died in the course of a week.
That sign could have been better worded, but it doesn't change what's happening.
I've read though that if we raise the standard of living of a population, they pollute less, so there might be a self-interest-based solution if we can do it globally.
Since I keep hearing about this for at least 30 years now and still nobody took action the whole thing might be a bit more complicated than what the news media would have you know.