Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

This is specificly why I am a climate skeptic. Not a denier, mind you, but a skeptic when it comes to anything purporting to be “settled science.” It’s specifically because there is a strong resistance to anything damaging to the status quo, as supported by grant funding and, to a lesser extent, political agenda.

Frankly, it’s hard to trust academia on controversial topics.

View on HN

What we need to distinguish here is what exactly we're talking about being "settled science".

Is "human CO2 emissions are causing an increased greenhouse effect and ocean acidification" settled science? Yes.

Is "how much will that affect us and the planet at different time scales" settled science? Not completely, no. The climate system is incredibly hard to model.

What scientists are doing in the latter regard is making their best estimates, seeing that these predict very bad things happening, and then saying we should work as hard as possible to reduce emissions.

Which, incidentally, nobody is actually doing.

Well, reduce emissions and more seriously consider geoengineering. A lot of otherwise-reasonable climate researchers seem to have an unduly negative view of potential direct interventions in the climate.

We may well be forced into geoengineering. Because, by the time enough people/firms/governments are sufficiently motivated, it'll be too late for anything else. Except adapting, I mean. But anyway, CO2 capture is the obviously safest bet. Adding shitloads of iron to the oceans, or injecting shitloads of SOx into the stratosphere, are just a little too likely to have serious downsides. Or putting screens at L1, for that matter.

The down side of this is that once carbon capture becomes viable the amount of CO2 Canada and Australia want in the atmosphere are very different.

Should Canada take it as a declaration of war if Australia starts a program to reduce CO2 to 150 ppm?

That is an interesting question.

By then, it seems likely that Canada will be part of the US. Or at least, that the northern US and Canada will have merged. And impacts do seem horrible for Australia.

But damn, war over atmospheric CO2 management. What a trip.

I like the L1 screen idea. It's quickly reversible, after all. Besides, in the long run, if we're going to because a Kardashev type I civilization, we're going to need some kind of planetary energy management. Why not start now?

The screen itself can be quickly removed, yes.

But will the effects of it being there for some time be also temporary? No one can say.

edit: better phrased as

On what timeframe the negative effects of a temporary screen will revert?

How can you tell that they didn't seriously consider your favorite argument? Usually geoengineering is not a direct part of the science of measuring climate change.

A lot of otherwise-reasonable climate researchers seem to have an unduly negative view of potential direct interventions in the climate, and for good reason. Scientists know that theory and practice often are very different. You can't 'experiment' with global scale geo-engineering.

To put it in HN terms: you're deploying untested code for a global scale life support system written by a first-project-junior in an experimental new technology stack directly to production without having a test or staging environment, and there are no backups.

> Scientists know that theory and practice often are very different.

Obviously! But the theory of Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Climate Change is different. This one is beyond reproach and matches practice perfectly.

> ...we should work as hard as possible to reduce emissions. Which, incidentally, nobody is actually doing.

You may wish to reassess your remark for accuracy after actually taking the time to digest the Clean Air Act codified in 42 U.S.C. Ch 85[1].

[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2016-title42/html/USCOD...

Did you search through that document for "carbon dioxide"? Because it only appears in 10 places, and in none of those does it define any limits or reductions.

Did you search through the legislation for "greenhouse gas", whose definition is explicitly defined and includes carbon dioxide? This is federal code written by lawyers; it isn't exactly considered afternoon pleasure reading and generally requires a bit of effort to parse.

With climate change though, it seems that the academic consensus is that humanity has an effect on the climate, while (some significant portion of) media seems to regularly depict it as more of a 50/50 up-in-the-air situation.

In this article, it's not about media depiction vs academic consensus, but friction within academic sciences itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com