Quora – Why are climate scientists so bad as a group?

Quora – Why are climate scientists so bad as a group?

They’re not.

They are a spectrum of humanity, just like the rest of us.

Some are better at explaining to different levels of understanding than others.

I have no shadow of reasonable doubt that human induced warming is real, and that we need to do something about it reasonably soon (20 year time horizon).

If it weren’t we’d be worried about the impending ice age.

And it is pointing to something much deeper – a fundamental issue in the way we measure value, and the implications that has on how we behave.

No amount of tinkering, planting trees, or recycling is going to solve the issue, the numbers involved are of a different order of magnitude. We like our houses, our healthcare, and our ability to travel. We need to keep those abilities, and extend them to everyone on the planet, but using technologies that do not break the ecosystems.

We need a radical technological shift, involving fully automated systems, and a complete move away from fossil fuels to solar energy; and doing that in any reasonable time-frame requires exponential technology with a relatively short doubling time (less than a month). That appears to be technically achievable on a 15 year time frame, on current technological trends, but not with any sort of “business as usual” approach.

Two major issues.

One is, that doing so, producing a realistic technology that can effectively manage climate, does something else – it breaks markets as a measuring tool of value. That sort of manufacturing capacity enables universal abundance of most goods and services, and anything universally abundant has (by definition) zero market value.

So we need to start seriously thinking about how we do all sorts of essential things that markets currently do, without the idea of money or markets. All doable, and we need to get the development and testing of those systems under way. Soon!

The other is that it requires a new level of global cooperation. That is entirely possible, and it will take a bit of adjustment in thinking by some; but for the majority it will be quite straight forward, as it is essentially what they are doing anyway.

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Hi Lembit

Most things are much more complex than people would like them to be.

The evidence of an association between CO2 and temperature was strong in the 70s, but the detailed mechanics were unclear.

The reality seems to be very complex, and the balance of evidence that it is actually happening is really strong. The evidence from multiple sets of satellite data, sets of oceanic data from hundreds of sensors distributed around the globe.

The earliest link I can find to it was published in the Rodney and Otamatea Time on August 14 1912 “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year” ….”This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”

He was right. That aspect of the science hasn’t changed. Except he didn’t calculate in a double exponential in growth, which reduced centuries to century – singular.

It is a solvable problem.

There is no need to panic about it.

And it is a real problem.

To solve it, we must go beyond scarcity, and into abundance – but do so with a full awareness of the ecological and social impacts of our choices in technology.

That involves change.

Real change.

Social and political and economic change.

Elon’s idea of escape to Mars is not a viable option; but if anyone could make it happen it is probably him.

Tesla is a far better response; but the battery tech needs updating.

The boring company is part way there, but it needs exponential tech to make it happen.

And yes – no shortage of zealots of all flavours willing to use science for alternative purposes.

I’ve been quite straight for over 40 years.

We need indefinite life extension, and for anyone to have a reasonable probability it must be universally available (not everyone has to do it, but everyone must have the option); and it requires using exponential technology to go post scarcity (ie beyond markets and money – and I get how scary that is for many).