Review of The Signal and the Noise
In Science magazine, Ben Campbell and I have a review of Nate Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise. Briefly…it was good for people wh...
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It boggles my mind that people are selfish enough that they don’t care about their children’s or the grand children’s future. Even if you don’t believe in climate change how can you believe it is good idea to pump toxic (fill in the blank) into the air day after day after day…..
The root issue is global over-population. If not for things like the Haber process (itself a big CO2 emitter), there would already not be enough food.
Too many children, too many grand-children for the earth to bear … the atmosphere is no worse off than our horribly polluted oceans.
Scary graph, but then they all are. I’ve given up. Even the liberals are hard to talk to with their fascination for high speed rail and hyperloops and electric cars.
As for the cons, at this point the only explanation that makes sense is the most cynical one. These people know slow but catastrophic change is coming, and they are figuring out how to best position themselves for maximum gain.
I gave a global-warming talk about 10 yrs ago to a group of local business people. After the talk we were discussing things like sea level rise and flooding risk. One of my hosts said “when you say flooding you are thinking of human misery, but a lot of people in this room are thinking they should start investing in companies that build seawalls and flood remediation and selling sump-pumps to subways.”
It’s not a catastrophe (for rich countries). It’s a jobs program!
… or a research program.
Even if you give up on stopping CO2 emissions, it might still be possible to stop global warming:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/can-geoengineering-save-the-world-20111004
Geoengineering is frankly more terrifying than global warming. In the 1980’s this was the crowd arguing for Reagan’s Star Wars (hit a bullet with a bullet).
Geoengineering is scary, but we need some solution. And let us not forget how U.S. voters acted in 2016 …
Where is “My child dies in an apocalyptic hellscape”?