The reality is that consensus does play a part in science, this is because intuition also plays a large part - both in guiding experimentation but also in interpreting findings.

Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist).

The means by which scientists and engineers reach consensus are very different from politicians and other soft studies. Because of the role peer review plays in the scientific community consensus is built up over time, not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data. Consensus is less "we sat around and decided X is true" but rather "there is an overwhelming amount of data that suggests this is true". This is often translated into models which spur further experiments to attempt to verify or disprove these models (for instance the LHC and the Higgs boson as a high profile example).

So no. 99% consensus in science isn't that uncommon and no it's generally not a bad thing. A big difference is also that in science it only takes a single very compelling counter-point to significantly disrupt consensus. See here Einstein's photo electric effect or his theory of relativity - both disrupted fairly intrenched consensus.

This latter point is very important because unlike scientists soft fields often struggle to break consensus even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Everyone feels like they should get an "opinion" and that scientists are just voicing "opinions". This leads to people equating the voice of relatively uninformed individuals with that of scientists. I don't know this can be resolved but if it could be it would allow society to move forward at a much faster rate.

It's important to note that this pattern plays out for many issues. It's reactionary politics and rhetoric, which is simply against things and for nothing - to deny: climate change, covid, racism, etc.

Which of course, is the point: it's a stupid argument however you look at it. If you up vote it, it's only because it confirms your priors, not because of the quality of the point (non-existent).

Sure, good luck with that, but why impose it on others?

Interesting enough, this tactic can also be deployed on strong believers in climate change in several ways. For example, the very idea of a carbon footprint is invented by BP in order to shift responsibility towards the consumer, which deflates pressure on corporate action and regulation. The gun lobby, tobacco companies and softdrink industries have employed similar campaigns - such as inventing recycling.

The very term 'climate change' is a friendlier and successful rebranding of global warming by the way. It suggests something natural, maybe even benign. That's why I prefer climate crisis.

Another example is the idea that renewables are not 'green', like wind turbines kill birds, EV requires lithium etc. The proposed alternative is always either some future technology or a complete non-starter like dismantling capitalism and just stop using electricity.

Yet another tactic is to make the case that we are doomed and no action can be taken.

All these serve the interests of the fossil barons very well as they divide, cast doubt on, delay or otherwise frustrate the efforts to genuinely decarbonize our economy.

Thus, one needs to be careful to distinguish between actual science and marketing disguised as science, or more insidious: bits of science employed in a psyop campaign.

Recycling is green and economic. This is the scientific consensus and also blatantly logical. Anyone arguing otherwise has consistently been in the pocket of big business or political parties that thrive on letting big business do whatever they want. We have decades of evidence of that.

But the most common story you hear about recyling is that it's a pointless greenwash and the alternative is ..... the status quo. Constant stories of how it went wrong in some case, or got subverted by those same big companies and the moral always seems to be "don't try to do green stuff, it's all a scam and/or silly hippies who do more damage than good", which is exactly the "doomed" strategy you mention.

Almost certainly a whole bunch of people reading this comment have a direct mental connection of "recycling" -> "scam", "waste", "not even good for the planet" similar to what has been cultivated for wind turbines, solar, EVs etc though most of those seem to be losing steam faster, probably only because those industries have their own lobby groups now.

Recycling plastic for example is very limited. It's very hard to get everybody to perfectly recycle, then we can still only recycle a limited amount of plastic a limited number of times. Clearly, recycling plastic isn't green. It's only ever so slightly less harmful.

We have been recycling plastic for a long time and we are still choking in it's waste.

I still recycle myself though, even as I'm trying to reduce my consumption of (single-use) plastics, which isn't easy at all. But I also support a ban on as much plastic products as possible, since recycling is a non-solution and the problem unacceptable. I think such bans are gaining public support, at least in Europe. Just like the public is starting to become aware that individual action on reducing footprint isn't enough and even distracts from holding the right actors accountable. Landmark cases here in the Netherlands such as the Urgenda case and the case against Shell help spread that awareness.

"Biomass is so bad it's worse than coal" "EVs are so bad you're better of with an ICE" "Recycling is so bad you're better off not bothering"

Notice a pattern there? Attacking alternatives that are better, but not perfect (nothing is) is an obvious tactic to fall back on once the more blatant denial starts to falter.

Meanwhile, if you looked up a study about recycling, including specifically plastic, you'd see the consensus is that it saves energy, and carbon and money.

There's definitely nuance but plastic is unavoidable in modern society. No one is going to ban it entirely, even if they do ban most disposable uses. And if they don't ban it, then the people who create products with it should be forced to pay for the recycling and someone should check it actually happens. There is no downside to this. The extra cost being borne by the producer even makes it less attractive to people who only care about money.

Ignoring that easily achievable collective goal in favour of an impractical personal achievement of avoiding plastic is exactly the kind of thing people seem to be waking up to these days.

Reduce reuse and recycle. Yes they all matter, but not bothering to recycle the stuff you don't reduce or reuse is obviously only beneficial to the people who sell the fossil based input materials.

> you're better off not bothering"

Nowhere in my comments did I say that it's better to not recycle. I've even made the same argument as you did regarding EV elsewhere, debunking the idea that because EV isn't perfect, it's not worth the effort.

I've said "I still recycle myself" and "Of course recycling as a mechanism is part of a sustainable economy". I do not have, expressed or implied, anything like that recycling plastic is a bad idea. I don't know how to make that point clearer. My point however, is that it isn't a solution and convincing the public that it is, was a deceptive corporate propaganda campaign by the leading beverage and packaging corporations, designed to avoid taking responsibility and more drastic actions.[1] It's painful, but the green movement must recognize it has been misled and that recycling is really not enough, not by a long shot.

> plastic is unavoidable in modern society

This doesn't mean we can't significantly reduce our consumption of single use plastic and avoid a substantial amount of plastic usage, which is only increasing.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...

You said this:

> Clearly, recycling plastic isn't green. It's only ever so slightly less harmful.

You didn't need to emphasise how little you think recycling helps. I take it to mean "it's better to just not use plastic" and agree but as I said, on a society wide scale that is simply not happening so advertising that attitude to other people, who certainly will not stop using plastic, spreads the meme that recycling is basically useless and that is a bad strategy. Which coincidentally is the same message that fossil fuel providers push.

Collectively we need to use less and recycle the stuff we do use efficiently. As I said, there's no downsides to this, nor any conflict between those two things any more than saying we should use both wind and solar.

You don't use solar when wind makes more sense nor vice versa. But if you personally decide to install solar panels because that works well for you, it's not helpful to say "wind is not green, just ever so slightly less harmful". We need both, both are better than the status quo.

Unfortunately the term and concept of recycling covers all of these plus plastics, which have been largely a failure. This confuses both consumers and policy makers.

The people against any kind of market regulation will argue that all recycling is inherently inefficient if the market doesn't do it spontaneously.

This is obviously undermined by the obvious success of many metal recycling schemes where the regulations created a market.

So they then flip from recycling to "plastic recycling". If you then point out the many plastic recyling successes they'll jump to specific plastics and ways of using plastics that make it harder to recycle them. The obvious solution of using further regulation to get people to update their processes to use the easily recyled plastics is mysteriously avoided even though it has literally been done for decades across the globe, sometimes led by corporate co-operation (e.g. milk in various countries is in semi-standardized containers).

If you have a gut reaction that recycling, or just plastic recycling is a bad thing, you've been conned by fossil fuel producers who compete with recycled plastic as a feedstock.

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/drilled/id1439735906?i...

To put things in perspective, there is a 97% consensus on evolution theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution....

That basically means we are more certain about the cause of climate change than about evolution.

FWIW, my experiences have been the precise opposite. My colleagues never seem to have consensus about anything. But companies move forward with our recommendations, both because we're more likely to be right, and if our recommendations happen to serve the company's goals.

I'm sure a bunch of people will read into this comment, but I am speaking purely about my experiences as an ML scientist. It would be valid to say that ML represents a very small fraction of the global scientific apparatus, and I certainly don't claim to know what it's like to work at CERN.

It surprised me, though, how often you were right -- there often is consensus, in the sense that everyone reads about a certain technique in papers and automatically assumes it's applicable to their own situation. For example, everyone in language modeling almost universally agrees that "lower loss is better," ("loss" is a specific ML term,"). But that's only true for general language models trained on large quantities of data. If you're fine-tuning a language model, you almost never want the steepest loss slope, because it means your learning rate is too high and you'll destroy the existing knowledge.

I would say that experience matters, and each situation is different. It's super tricky to make an argument that consensus is both universally common and universally good.

Still... in particle physics, for example, I've heard that there was consensus in favor of certain particles existing, even to the extent of "multiple experiments have achieved an N-sigma result showing that this particle exists," for some fairly high N. And then a later experiment showed that the particle simply didn't exist, and that the previous results were experimental error. (Specifically, experimental bias – they were expecting to see certain results, and so they were probably subconsciously combing the data for such results.)

My knowledge on that subject comes from Veritasium, not from reading physics papers or following along with experimental breakthroughs. But I've seen similar things happen in ML, where people are pretty convinced a certain technique is good (hello, style mixing in StyleGAN) and no one ever bothers to check whether it's true in reality (style mixing is what prevents StyleGAN from being as cohesive as BigGAN).

I guess I broadly agree with your point. There is consensus that black holes exist, and that we've even observed one, so it's pretty likely that if you were to travel there, you'd find a black hole. But given how much science itself has changed throughout history, alarm bells start going off when hearing things like "Consensus is extremely common, and it's almost universally a good thing."

Take your example about StyleGAN vs BigGan, I assume once it became clear that the latter was superior to the former that likely resulted in changes to existing architectures that then found additional improvements. This change in consensus is what enables that and is a good thing.

I think the problem here is conflating consensus with faith, that is assuming truth in absence of data. Consensus is easily changed with the introduction of new data, faith hangs on no matter how much evidence is put forward that it's horseshit.

Well, no. :) But I think the "no" is because of the uniqueness of ML rather than a "no" to your point in general. You might be right about other fields; I don't have experience there.

In ML, there an enormous number of techniques. Style mixing was presented as a core feature of StyleGAN (https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948) and was enabled by default in the codebase (https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan/blob/03563d18a0cf8d67d897...).

So there's a lot of "inertia" -- for example, when StyleGAN 2 came out, style mixing was still the default (https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2/blob/f2f751cdc7f996e3138...).

I haven't had time to dig into StyleGAN 3, but I suspect that style mixing might still be enabled by default.

It wasn't until we did a detailed, methodical analysis side-by-side with BigGAN, specifically to answer the question "Why is BigGAN so much better for diverse datasets?" that, on a whim, I turned off style mixing and was astonished to see BigGAN type quality pop out of a StyleGAN type arch.

Discoveries like that usually go unnoticed, frankly because it's a lot of effort to write a paper specifically to say "Hey, if you're training StyleGAN, definitely turn off style mixing. It only seems to work well on faces."

However, if such a paper were to be written, and accepted into a peer-reviewed journal, then your original point would probably be valid. So I don't even know if it's worth writing all of this -- I just thought it'd be interesting to point out the "Well, not really" in this case. The knowledge ends up floating around on Twitter and Discord rather than being transmitted via scientific papers...

But, this all does tie in to your final point:

> Consensus is easily changed with the introduction of new data, faith hangs on no matter how much evidence is put forward that it's horseshit.

It's remarkably easy for old, accepted ideas to hang around. You'd think it'd just be a matter of "Run the experiment; experiment proves thing; thing becomes accepted." But in practice it's felt quite different...

The thing is, everything you're saying is true in general. As t approaches infinity, there tends to be more and more consensus about older ideas, like the existence of black holes, or the validity of laws like F=ma. So we should probably pay attention when there is 99% consensus on a particular topic.

But, for example, one reason I wouldn't want to publish a paper claiming style mixing was bad, is because it would contradict the results of Karras, who is famous. I'd better be very certain about my claim! So there's sometimes a reluctance to contradict the consensus, too, which ends up equivalent to "faith" in your example -- we have faith that famous scientists are correct. (They usually are.)

As a cherry on top, I'll just leave a link to Feynman's messenger lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kFOXP026eE&ab_channel=TalkR... ... the history of science is fascinating. I'd dreamt for years of becoming a scientist, but the actual experience turned out to be surprisingly different than what I thought it'd be. I love it though -- all these weird corner cases are the spice of life.

In a thread where people are parsing the meaning of consensus with respect to climate change, citing the atypical example of the state of consensus in a unique field is going to contribute to the loss of context that makes people confused about the original subject at issue in this thread.

It's great to know about BigGAN vs StyleGAN, but I'm almost positive people will skim this detour into increasingly detailed elaboration on machine learning and think the upshot is supposed to be "and therefore we shouldn't put stock in climate science consensus."

Thanks for your really in depth and informative reply though, I'm only cursorily interested in ML through its relation to data, which is my speciality. My exposure to ML is mostly through said ML teams making requests for data and systems like feature stores to run their models so I have some understanding of how they construct their overall architecture but not the specifics so this was super interesting.

Regarding your comment on ML and consensus, I think there is a bit of a misconception of what scientific consensus is. I would say it is much broader than the examples you give. ML is essentially terrible example to argue about consensus, I would say there isn't even consensus about what ML even is, let alone any of the details of how you train a network.

Regarding your earlier example about loss, I'm a bit confused. Isn't it that in optimisation theory the goal that you want to minimise your loss (so lower loss is always better)? Now that might not mean that you should travel along the steepest gradient (this might lead you to a local minimum) and your loss might not represent what you actually want to optimise for (i.e. your loss function is faulty). But from a fundamental theoretical point of view, you always want the lowest loss?

The cliff's notes are: the first time I was able to train GPT 1.5B on gwern's poetry, I was super proud of myself, because it was extremely hard to get 1.5B to train back in those days. So we let it train as long as possible, and the loss kept dropping lower and lower. So we'd periodically dump samples -- surely we'd get better poetry, right?

No. Eventually the model degenerated into broken-sounding English. Because our training data was 50MB, so it quickly forgot how to speak English at all -- the prior knowledge got wiped out, and was replaced by that 50MB dataset.

The term for this is "overfitting," and it's remarkably easy to run into it in practice. The cure is to have more data. But how do you gather more than 50MB of poetry? That's a lot of poetry. So what do you do when you want to train a poetry model?

The answer is to train a general model on a massive dataset (https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027), and then to fine-tune it on a smaller dataset (like 50MB of poetry). But during that fine tuning step, you'd better watch out, because everything you thought you knew about ML is wrong: You need to have a gentle downwards-sloping loss curve -- steep curve is terrible, since it means you're destroying the old knowledge without giving it a broad view of the new knowledge. And you need to stop before hitting loss < 2.1, otherwise you'll be overfitting and the model will suck.

I suspect that hundreds of great ML models were overlooked for these reasons. There are hundreds of thousands of people messing around with ML models for fun. Lots of them try to train those models on small datasets, because small datasets are all you have when you start out. So they google how to do it, hear "Low loss is good," train overnight, dump samples, and then end up going "Oh well, the model seems to suck, but the loss is low, so I guess I didn't do it properly." They probably did train it properly, but they weren't continuously dumping samples, so they didn't notice they needed to stop before the model turned into word salad. (Or art salad if it's a GAN.)

I would say that from a fundamental theoretical point of view, "you always want the lowest loss" is only true when you have an infinite amount of data in a target domain. But in practice, you probably have a few gigabytes if you're lucky. Even imagenet is only 1,000 different image classes, which means it's possible for a model to memorize those 1,000 classes and overfit, rather than achieving a general "understanding" of different kinds of objects.

I got all of these details wrong when I first started out, so it was really eye-opening to see that it's a terrible idea to rely on common knowledge in ML. Common knowledge is an excellent starting point, but you quickly learn to think for yourself, or you just end up imitating what the big players are doing while wondering why none of your models seem to be working.

(... I guess I wrote a detailed reply after all. Ah well, sleep is optional as long as you choose to ignore the effects of sleep deprivation. That's how that works.)

I think with everything you describe is one of the main "gripes" I as a more traditional engineer/scientist have with ML. It often seems like a giant black box that I know is generally vastly overfitted and it is often extremely difficult/impossible why we get the solutions that we get, i.e. we don't really get scientific insight. Nevertheless I realise it is an extremely powerful tool.

Hope you can catch up with some sleep today, sleep deprivation effects can only be ignored for so long (especially as you get older as I have noticed).

The most biased super-precise physics I can think of offhand is when someone measures a physical constant slightly wrong and then subsequent results all lean in the same direction. This happens more than once, most notably with fundamental electric charge, but it's absolutely nothing compared to a nonexistent value!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_experimental_errors_... has https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oops-Leon? But that is a single experiment which very specifically did not have a high sigma result.

I’m not sure what your point is, unless it’s saying that a lack of consensus is indicative of being wrong.

Which would support the commenter you replied to’s argument.

This 99% is basically like a meta-peer-review of all peer reviewed papers.

1. https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Highlighting how this stuff really isn’t credible. It’s junk.

Regarding your link, those counter points are... very unscientific or well reasoned. Take point #1, we all agree climate changes, it snows half the year in the northern hemisphere. What caused the snow isn’t anything we did. But I’m 100% sure you could find correlations, which is all these papers do. Just like humans likely didn’t cause the earth to heat 20,000 years ago when the North American ice sheet melted. But that correlates to when humans arrived in North America.

The problem with correlations are that you need a large volume of data to suggest causation. We don’t have that.

Because of those claims of causation, the field has lost significant credibility

Just based on this sentence I have a hard time believing you really are a scientist as you claim. There is no requirement on large volume of data to suggest causation. In fact no amount of data and correlation by itself can establish causation, because they are very different concepts (Hence the correlation!=causation). You need mechanisms to explain the causations, and you need to verify the mechanisms. This has been done extensively for climate change.

> Because of those claims of causation, the field has lost significant credibility

I would say your claims lost you a lot of credibility just now.

We don't have the full dataset so effectively we're seeing two lines go up at the same time and claiming one is causing the other.

We can't even really make a correlation case, besides to say these two time series loosely correlate.

Put another way, we suspect one event causes another, which are tracked via a time series. Normally, when you're discussing causality you'd looking for multiple instances of said event causing another. We don't have that. Hence, we're effectively shooting in the dark.

You do have a point on credibility though, in that over-politicization causes the field to look much less credible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate&oldid=104...

IMO as we don't have accurate data measuring far enough back we're effectively shooting in the dark.

It's fine to say, these two things could be correlated, it's another to say these things are correlated AND to fix it we have to force everyone to stop traveling, be less healthy (eating a worse diet), etc.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

If you drink a bunch of methanol and then go blind without knowing the exact biochemistry, you don't say "eh, there's no causation proven yet" and keep drinking, you stop the things which correlate until you can show they are safe. Where's your credibility? What have you done to give an alternative explanation to anthropogenic climate change? If you don't have one, you aren't acting in good faith here

1. Numbering your opponents arguments isn't a response to them.

2. He isn't asking questions, he's making a variety of statements that have a factual basis and can be debated to determine to what extent they're right or wrong. You're straw-manning to claim these are questions.

3. Asserting there's no debate when someone is telling you there is debate, is exactly the kind of strategy that makes neutral onlookers more likely to agree with him, not you, especially as one of his claims is that journals etc block any alternative viewpoint.

2. The debate you are alluding to has been done, see point 1. But he ignores this, because as long as the debate don't stop, his position is unchanged

3. Asserting there is a debate until someone who has done 0 to engage with an overwhelming scientific consensus agrees there isn't is false neutrality. That one random guys opinion (and mine, for the record) is worth jack shit compared to the IPCC ans the 97-99% of experts who have come to a consensus based on the data they spend their whole career studying. To go against their consensus is perfectly valid but needs to be done in a manner which integrates all the data collected in the consensus explanation at least as well, or better. Not just by listing context free gotchas and claiming the debate hasn't been finished yet

As for the question of creating climate skeptics: I'm much more interested in pointing out to readers that a rhetorical playbook is being used and provide a counter voice than to argue with someone who isn't themselves arguing in food faith. See point 1

For example, point 43 is "CO2 is plant food". No such point is made anywhere in the post you're replying to, so you must be reading it into something else he said.

Point 44 is "there is no empirical evidence". Again, the person you're responding to didn't say that. This time I can't even see anywhere you might be reading an implication of it.

Regardless, the given answers are often not really answers at all; e.g. point 90 "Q: Peer review process was corrupted" is answered by "A: An Independent Review concluded the CRU's actions were normal and didn't threaten the integrity of peer review". I recall reading those emails and they were very explicitly doing exactly that. The "independent review" in question is actually organized and the website is hosted by the University of East Anglia itself. The answer is basically saying everyone should trust academics when they clear themselves of wrongdoing, and if you don't you're a conspiracy theorist.

I looked into this one a bit more and there's a response written by the climate skeptics themselves to this review here, which is far more convincing:

https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climat...

Russell's inquiry was slated by MPs, apparently for good reasons:

"The Muir Russell inquiry held no public hearings and did not interview any CRU critics ... Although Muir Russell had been appointed in December 2009 and was due to report in spring 2010, as of the start of April, nobody at CRU had been interviewed on anything to do with the Hockey Stick or IPCC"

An MP said: "In a situation that is almost beyond parody Muir Russell stated that he didn’t ask Jones whether he had deleted the e-mails because they would have had to interview Jones under caution. What was the solution then? The Vice Chancellor asked Jones whether he had deleted the e-mails. This rather negated the purpose of having an independent Inquiry when the only person to ask the crucial question was the Vice Chancellor who saw his prime responsibility to the good name of the University. The accused investigating themselves again."

"Subsequently, it turned out that Vice Chancellor Action’s reassurances that nothing had been deleted were untrue. Following up on that supposed reassurance, one of us (McIntyre) submitted an FOI request for the attachments to the emails which Jones had sought to destroy, attachments which contained the surreptitious and hidden edits to the IPCC report by Mann’s associates after close of external review. The University reported that the documents about which Acton had reassured the Committee did not exist after all."

But that is ok, because precision isn't and shouldn't be the goal. What is important is the direction, we need to know whether or not heating is occuring, roughly the rate of change and if there is anything we can to do stop it.

None of these require hard "X *C by Y year" and not being able to make such predictions shouldn't invalidate the rest of the evidence that says it's happening.

https://impactlab.org/research/valuing-the-global-mortality-...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w

Exxon's 1982 predictions about the global average temperature in 2022 are pretty spot on.

https://xkcd.com/2500/

I think a better argument would be to say that we certainly know more about climate now, and we have a lot more computational power to construct more detailed models.

[1]: There is a positive side to wrong historical predictions: that people actually dared to make concrete assertions, instead of waving hands.

It is probably true that there was no consensus about it back then though. (I do not know enough about it to be completely sure.)

If consensus is needed, it's probably because rigorous science cannot be done for whatever reason, like maybe not having enough fossil evidence.

- Insider knowledge on state of green tech (carbon capture, progress in solar tech, industrial hydrogen, any energy prices analysts here?)

- Anything new happening with load-balancing for renewables? Solar has been tomorrow's energy for a while, but what's the best way to store excess and rebalance today? Batteries?

- Speaking of batteries: any discussion on batteries devolves into worries about lithium mining / shortages. How big is that problem, quantitatively?

- A typical argument is that coal is worse than Nuclear, but everyone accounts for externalities / black swan events differently. Do modern coal plants still pollute as much? Are the claims about coal plants releasing nuclear material into the atmosphere true?

- Is nuclear waste as big a problem as we keep hearing? We've been dumping old tires in a 100km2 are of kuwait for years - worse, they've been catching fire and burning away (https://insiderpaper.com/video-worlds-biggest-tire-graveyard...). But it would be unacceptable to condemn a similar area for radioactive waste? Why / why not?

- How temperature rise would / wouldn't affect the SV / Europe / Israel / Asia tech scene. Will people move? Why? How much can be mitigated with industrial solution (AC, etc)?

- What are energy technologies where the widespread / mainstream / media belief and the reality are not aligned?

Reversible barrages. Some innovation in pumped gaz.

-----------------

> Speaking of batteries: any discussion on batteries devolves into worries about lithium mining / shortages. How big is that problem, quantitatively?

Its an issue for the price and how fast new vehicles can be produced. We will either change our battery tech or try getting lithium/cobalt from less concentrated deposits.

The main issue for lithium/cobalt is how destructive it is when the mining is done in unregulated environments. Heavy metal pollution that will kill for millions of years.

----------

> Do modern coal plants still pollute as much?

Not the new german one, no. Still worse than any other plant, even oil plants.

-------------

> Are the claims about coal plants releasing nuclear material into the atmosphere true?

Yes, but it isn't worse than natural radiation in granitic areas. And since its in the air, it wont produce enough radon to kill someone. Not a real issue.

--------------

> What are energy technologies where the widespread / mainstream / media belief and the reality are not aligned?

I'd guess offshore wind? I've a childhood friend who is working for total, in the NRE department, and the only reason offshore is done is subsidies and "plan" that the mast will stay 20 more years than planned. And that the maintenance crew will get cheaper.

For example, a person in support of human-caused climate change might be quick to report that solar tech has been progressing nicely. But the person against would be quick to point out the inefficiencies.

What is that based on? Scientists use the concept, including in this scientific paper and many others.

> Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force.

Certainly not: They knew there was a lot unknown about gravity; they just didn't have the answers. And after Einstein, there was plenty scientists were aware was unknown, such as the mechanism for mass - the Higgs Boson wasn't discovered until 2012. There's a lot unknown now; no scientist will tell you that we have the ultimate description; for example, we can't reconcile gravity yet with other fundamental forces.

Newton's predictions are accurate to this day, except in the narrow circumstances described by Einstein.

And what does it have to do with climate change? If the predictions are as accurate as Newton, we aren't going to get much more certain information. What alternative theory is a better bet?

What does repeatable experimentation prove?

For that matter, what about the Apple falls to the ground experiment disproved Newton’s theory?

This assumes a very naive view that the average university researcher is trying to challenge prevailing theories on a daily basis. The reality is that challenging prevailing theories of science is near impossible in today's grant-chasing arena called academia. Do you really think a grant proposal that questions some of the prevailing views in climate science is going to get funded? And even if does get funded, good luck getting it published in any mainstream journal.

Why does every fossil fuel company accept the science of climate change.

Not just that they are unable to get their contrarian studies published in academic papers.

No, they literally spend a ton of money in Super Bowl ads trying to convince the world that they are trying to reduce climate change.

And they have pages on their websites:

BP: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability.html

Exxon: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/Sustainability/Environmenta...

There’s almost no organization other than the American right in the world that currently denies the reality of climate change.

Wouldn't there be a bunch of companies with a lot of wealth and strong incentives to fund that sort of thing?

I would assume that there are organizations that try to fund proposals that question some of the prevailing views in climate science otherwise where do all these papers come from that anti-climate change people like to refer to?

The correct way to accomplish this is to take something that you think you can disprove, design an experiment that would show that the existing theory may be incorrect and then successfully defend that.

Say for instance you hypothesised that methane doesn't in fact act as a greenhouse gas, you design an experiment that shows that increasing the % methane in the upper atmosphere doesn't result in additional heat being captured. You would then need to collect the results, properly show they are consistent with your hypothesis vs your control data and then defend that in peer review.

In this case you would most likely be wrong because we are pretty damn sure methane isn't great but if you had an idea that had a chance I am sure you could get funding.

It is worth mentioning that the ability to get funding is somewhat correlated with the interestingness and likelihood of a groundbreaking finding. Finding methane is not contributing to greenhouse effect would be a massive finding, however the likelihood it isn't is low because there already exists a huge body of evidence that supports the opposite conclusion.

TLDR: You can definitely work on attempting to prove climate change isn't happening but you probably need a very clever idea as everyone else that has looked at it thus far hasn't come up with anything capable of disproving it.

Put your money where your beliefs are, so to speak

Heck I can't even challenge my own supervisors when they make swallow statements that are in fact contradicted by a bunch of papers, how could I get funding from external entities by submitting socially unpopular ideas? Impossible, especially in highly politicized fields.

And even if you did, it wouldn't disprove the consensus on climate change in any way. Or are you also saying that all the research was falsified? Any evidence of that?

No, science depends on falsifiable theories being tested and proved. The whole point of science is to remove flawed, human bias, of which consensus depends on.

The tests passing or failing. And sure, the tests are designed by humans, but that's why there are controls, and there is no limit on how many tests per hypothesis. Each test can improve on the previous one, every time removing more and more of the bias, if needed.

This is what I'm calling consensus btw. Because in science we don't just trust the experiments of a single person or group. They present it, we say "wow that's cool. Let me try to poke holes in it" and then a bunch of people do that and we gain strong evidence that that person was correct.

This is ahistorical. The Annalen der Physik, where Einstein's four Annus Mirabilis papers were published, did not have peer review.

Only one paper by Einstein was peer reviewed. It was -- in effect -- rejected from Physical Review. While the paper ("Do Gravitational Waves Exist?", with Rosen) was mistaken (in its conclusion of "no"), even then the referee wrote that Einstein "is a man of good scientific standing, and it would seem to me that if he insists, he has more right to be heard than any single referee has to throttle!"

We post papers on ArXiv now and they don't have "peer review", except they do because our peers read them and talk about them, open issues on GitHub, exchange emails, and write blogs. If that isn't peer review, I don't know what is. Your definition of peer review is far too limited and not what science actually is doing.

However, I agree that in the context of this thread, post-publication peer review -- usually referred to by another name -- is very important, as it plays a strong role in the formation of consensus being discussed.

I believe the OP's point was around consensus as truth, rather than which example is used to demonstrate...

The point is that unless you're omniscient, using the best knowledge available at your time to choose which policies to apply is the best course of action. Of course it might later turn out to be wrong, but you don't know in which way it might turn out to be wrong.

This based on where political interference abuses the scientific consensus or manipulates it. As the OP said, there's a difference between science and consensus (not saying I disagree with the climate change consensus, I think it's absolutely an anthropogenic issue)

Funny how this standard is never applied to oil companies. You know, the ones that figured out half a century ago that climate change was a problem, and have been running an interference campaign since then?

Given the state of energy consumption today, the idea that it’s the green side that’s abusing the political process to get what it wants is downright laughable. Meanwhile congress is openly bought by fossil fuel interests, and we can’t even stop burning coal.

> not saying I disagree with the climate change consensus, I think it's absolutely an anthropogenic issue

Ahh, the anti-anti position, how annoying. You’re convinced that climate change is real, but you’re going to waste a lot of time making bad arguments about consensus and scientific change because…? For someone who thinks it’s “absolutely” an anthropogenic issue, you sure are trying to muddy the water a lot.

I am always happy though to argue for space to exist for those that I disagree with to speak, we are in the most trouble when only the 'truth' - as much is it seems certain - is allowed to exist at all.

We tend not to care if we agree with the consensus, but imagine if Facebook/Twitter decided (or were influenced to...) that Solar energy solutions are misinformation and started removing/labeling that content. Is that fine, or is it a trickier question when you no longer agree with the 'truth' they are protecting?

You’re wasting a huge amount of energy and time arguing about … well to be honest, I can’t figure out what your point is. Consensus is bad? Consensus is wrong because science changes? Consensus leads to censorship? Your point seems to shift around every time someone gives a counter argument, which makes me doubt that you’re acting in good faith.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

Not in science. The difference is everything: Scientific knowledge has proven to be accurate. Other methods have been much less successful.

Only if you go back far enough to predate the notion of the scientific method. Plato wrote "My conviction is that the Earth is a round body in the centre of the heavens" in about 400BC, nearly 2500 years ago.

E.g. Dante's Divine Comedy contained a detailed explanation of how the Earth is round, including a description of how this means daytime comes at different times in different locations in the 14th century, well before the fanciful fictional descriptions of Columbus struggling to convince people the earth was round (rather than the more realistic argument over distance)

Dante wasn't first in literature by any means either, and at most the detail in which it is described might indicate it was something he may have thought his audience were unfamiliar with the consequences of, but it doesn't appear to be presented as some shocking, controversial idea even for a non-scientific audience, more than just illustrating the sheer scale involved.

It's interesting how the notion that the belief in a flat earth was widespread, may well be far more widespread today than the belief itself was.

Re. Newtonian physics, the scientific method demonstrated otherwise. That’s how it works.

Your point simply means that anthropogenic climate change may be incorrect. However, currently, it’s far and away the most likely explanation.

This is something that is often misunderstood by those who dismiss scientific knowledge: accumulated observations and experiments don't end up in the trash. Any new breakthrough theory is first going to have to be in agreement with all of them.

That's why classical mechanics is still not only taught at school, but also widely used by engineers to this day: it's extremely accurate (within some bounds).

Your analogy doesn't work.

The consensus on man-made climate change has grown following the rise of aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture on social media.

Looking at another political/scientific issue, abortion, that is also steeped in aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture which instead of growing in consensus that it is bad seems to be declining, I would argue that politics and social power follow rational thinking, not the other way around. At least on long enough time scales.

So many person-hours spent arguing this point online. So much of our lives. I'm as guilty as anyone.

Yes, "someone's wrong on the Internet", haha. But really. This guy isn't arguing in good faith. Frankly at this point nobody arguing online that climate change is not real is arguing in good faith.

Can we find a way to channel our collective energy towards productive climate action? Serious question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe...

For nearly 50 years, the "consensus" was "Newton's theory explains most things but doesn't explain this one big thing". The same could have been true of climate change, but there is no "precession of Mercury" for human-caused climate change. The data is clear, and the theory matches the data close enough to justify overwhelming consensus.

For instance we can disagree with and admonish others' views without silencing and removal through the 'disinformation' label. worrying times seeing this grow.

> Consensus is the currency of politics, not science

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus

"Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus generally implies agreement of the supermajority, though not necessarily unanimity.[1] Consensus is achieved through scholarly communication at conferences, the publication process, replication of reproducible results by others, scholarly debate,[2][3][4][5] and peer review."

> Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force.

Again, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity

"Albert Einstein published the theory of special relativity in 1905, building on many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others did subsequent work. Einstein developed general relativity between 1907 and 1915, with contributions by many others after 1915. The final form of general relativity was published in 1916."

...but it's worth noting two things. The first is that Newton himself found his own theory, to put it colloquially, fucking absurd, and said that anyone who believed him was out of their goddamn gourd. He was never able to experimentally show the cause of gravity.

Second: you have a strange basis for your criticism of science, given the scientific community tossed a centuries-old theory about motherfucking gravity out the window pretty rapidly once there was experimental evidence to back the new theory. To this day, we're still finding all sorts of new evidence that Einstein was right.

Just like we keep finding new ways to verify almost every aspect of human-induced climate change theory.

We have exhaustive amounts of evidence around CO2 levels, climate change, and sources of said CO2. The state of science is such that we've been able to figure out CO2 levels on earth going back 400 million years, with ice cores alone providing evidence of CO2 levels going back 800,000 years. Some of the evidence and experiments around CO2 date back more than a hundred years.

"We're causing the climate to change" was something that scientists theorized several centuries ago. Almost every day, as science keeps gets better, we keep confirming that centuries old core theory.

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...

Except that he wasn't sentenced to prison, and what he was sentenced to was not for that reason, either in the superficial sense (that wasn't the nominal offense) or the substantive one (that wasn't the thing that changed between the time when the same people wanted him punished where he wasn't and when he was.)

Besides, modern climate scientists are hardly a mob. They collate data and come to their own conclusions. Those conclusions happen to agree, indicating a very strong position.

1. His heliocentric theory wasn't noticeably better at explaining or predicting the motion of heavenly bodies than the geocentric theories such as the Ptolemaic system. Galileo, like the Church, believed in a universe that was intelligently designed by an all-powerful God, and he believed that the laws of physics that such a God would choose would be mathematically beautiful and elegant. If observation did not match beautiful and elegant rules, then he would dismiss the observation as error or optical illusion.

The Church's position was that God made the universe, and if empirical evidence from observing the universe showed it clearly working in ways that didn't fit what the Church believed the Bible said the mistake must be in the Church's interpretation of the Bible.

2. He had a big ego.

His genius brought him fame. He became a celebrity who was regularly invited to hang out with the rich and famous and powerful. His big ego really loved that.

3. He was an asshole.

He was rude and intolerant to those he saw as rivals or that he saw as his inferiors (which due to his big ego included pretty much everyone).

4. He had a poor sense of politics.

He failed to realize that some of those rivals or inferiors that he was a major asshole towards either had way more political power than he did or they had good connections to such people, and that they could wield that power to make his life miserable if he kept being a major asshole to them.

That was not the scientific consensus.

> Just because the mob is with you doesn't make you right.

Science is not a mob. What basis do you have, other than the mob with you?

Reminds me of this:

The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested:

“Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.”

—Dr. Richard Tol

“That is not an accurate representation of my paper . . .”

—Dr. Craig Idso

“Nope . . . it is not an accurate representation.”

—Dr. Nir Shaviv

“Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument . . .”

—Dr. Nicola Scafetta

Like, choose an unusually hot year (1998?) and then draw a straight line after that to give a false impression that the curve is flat.

Now that we're in 2021, we can see more data - turns out 1998, an unusually hot year (and the hottest in record since 1880), would be an unusually cold year if it happened right now.

He even openly admits in the article:

"Even if 97% of climate scientists agreed with this, and even if they were right, it in no way, shape, or form would imply that we should restrict fossil fuels--which are crucial to the livelihood of billions."

[1]: http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/c...

We went from significant consensus that a pause or at least slowdown happened to "there was no pause". It's now being "debunked" as a myth which is amazing because that means some climate scientists are actively "debunking" other ones.

And maybe someone can explain why we don't have a reliable way to measure the temperature change? Apparently the new models say there was no pause, but why is that model correct and the old one wrong?

It seems to have received attention and was entertained seriously by climate scientists. Ultimately, confidence in the models that predict a sustained pause diminished, and all current research shows that the data from that period fits into our improved climate models[1].

In other words, science "worked" exactly the way it was supposed to. There was no "debunking" -- climate scientists took the best models and information they had at the time and drew conclusions from them, and those conclusions have been (and will continue to be) revised as the data and models improve.

And, for what it's worth: the new models don't say that there wasn't a pause. They account for the pause using our improved understanding of global weather patterns. The page I linked about goes into some detail about it.

[1]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-ear...

"Craig D. Idso is the founder, former president and current chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a group which receives funding from ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy and which promotes climate change denial."

Shaviv is an astrophysicist who claims that passing through the arms of the milky way are what caused climate change in the past. As far as I can tell, he's merely generated theory after theory, with no experimental evidence to support his claims. He's also the darling of the Heartland Institute. If you haven't heard of them, they are a conservative "think tank" whose two purposes are denying climate change and disputing that smoking causing cancer.

Nicola Scafetta is a statistician who has never produced the code used to generate the models he's touted as evidence of the same milky way-induced-climate-change nonsense.

Try again.

Give me a subject that has companies interested in, you get scholarships and the companies lobby to get your paper published. You barely have to do any work.

You are correct that there are biases in climate research and in scientist's selection of fields, experiments, and data.

...but even still, it needs to be quantified as well as possible, that the vast majority of published science confirms (or at least does not contradict) human driven climate change.

"North Carolina GOP lawmakers want to require teaching 'balanced political viewpoints' in schools"

— https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-gop-lawmake...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

Anyone who takes this topic seriously understands that the environmental problems we face today are in the 1000s. And the solution to one problem is the producer of another. Environmentalism does not equal climate change does not equal global warming does not equal planet health.

This is why it is such a frustrating topic to talk about. Saying I'm skeptical about the political influences and thoughtful about the multi-variate problem means people call you a 'climate denier'. You're right - it doesn't matter how many 9's there are. I'm still going to be skeptical about this and everything else I'm told.

For example, I explained my position with my sister in-law that Greta Thunberg is a child who is used by the politicians around her and that she has never had anything thoughtful to say on the subject despite her prowess in the media. Apparently, now I don't care about the environment.

It's not the skeptics you need to watch out for who are capable of original thought. It's the ones who treat the term 'climate change' as their dogma and cannot handle any thoughtful debate on the issue.

In the face of overwhelming evidence? Emphatically yes. Pursuing skepticism for the sake of skepticism results in one refusing to acknowledge reality, and often leads to people being a crank.

Skepticism is a tool, not a destination.

> Come one...you can't say you don't believe that 'climate change' is a political bat used to beat opponents with.

My eyes rolled so hard I almost hurt myself. Do you believe that climate change is happening because of human activity; yes or no? It is a very simple question, and whining about it being a “political bat” makes me suspect your answer might be “no”.

Also, it’s funny how nobody worries as much about how jobs and the economy are used as a “political bat” by the fossil fuel industries, who are being nakedly self interested.

> Anyone who takes this topic seriously understands that the environmental problems we face today are in the 1000s.

So? You don’t know how to fix your own car (probably) or cure yourself or all kinds of diseases; that’s what we have experts for.

What is it about global warming that makes everyone decide that having thousands of experts telling them the same thing isn’t good enough? Makes you wonder if this argument isn’t made in good faith…

> Environmentalism does not equal climate change does not equal global warming does not equal planet health.

Completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not climate change is happening. The solutions are nuanced and complicated, yes, but this reeks of prevarication over whether or not the problem is real.

> For example, I explained my position with my sister in-law that Greta Thunberg is a child who is used by the politicians around her and that she has never had anything thoughtful to say on the subject despite her prowess in the media. Apparently, now I don't care about the environment.

When discussing the environment and suddenly you change the subject to Greta Thunberg, it does seem like you care about the culture war more than the subject at hand. In this forum it is extremely weird to bring her up.

Personally, I don’t really give a shit about her one way or another. Climate change, is it happening? Yes or no.

Being skeptical of the politics around climate change? Totally rational, and digging will show bad faith actors.

Being skeptical if the climate is changing? Completely irrational on the level of being skeptical if the Earth is a sphere or if Gravity will work tomorrow.

A thought being original doesn't mean it's valuable: just that it's different.

And in today's environment any professional clamming the opposite would promptly be fired from University or institution

There is no more debate, all science has to be approved by the ministry of truth

Two thirds falls short of what I would consider "consensus", but it is a solid majority. In a well-functioning democracy one would think that should be enough, but unfortunately our democracy is not particularly well-functioning which means that the backing of two thirds of the public isn't enough to get legislation passed.

To be fair, though, once you start talking specific proposals you'd get variable levels of public support. Cap and trade? Carbon tax? Biden's platform when running for president, if I remember correctly, was essentially all carrots and no sticks -- additional subsidies for EVs, federal funding for solar and wind, and so on. That's one way to get the public on board, though I personally think we ought to have a carbon tax too.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...

"Deniers" aren't standing in the way of this. Even in the countries with the highest levels of deniers, they are under 20% of the population. America it's about 13%, and the people who want to do more to combat climate change is 60-70%.

Far far less popular agenda gets shoved through all the time by politicians, it's never stopped them before. But somehow in this one instance, when politicians attempt to deal with what they call the greatest problem ever to face humanity, the arch-enemy "dumb redneck unemployed coal miner" has used their vast network of power and influence to put a stop to it. They couldn't stop their Robert E Lee statues from being torn down by unruly mobs, but they'll go toe to toe with the Bilderberg Group? Get real.

It's just so hilariously stupid I can't understand why people don't see through it. Utter rubbish. The failure rests 100% on the shoulders of the politicians, corporations, and international groups who have been claiming they will do something about it while clearly never having any intention to solve the problem.

And while we are on the subject of popular opinion, a huge amount of damage has been done by hypocrite politicians and elites. I don't care if the private jets they use to fly around the world and their huge electricity-guzzling mansions "don't emit much in the scheme of things", what people hate more than anything else is hypocrisy and unfairness. Particularly when the commoners are admonished if they claim their contribution or their country's contribution is insignificant in the scheme of things, because "everyone has to sacrifice because we're all in it together". I bet that 13% would be 5% and the 30% would be 10% if it wasn't for the entitled, wasteful, hypocritical and hateful behavior and rhetoric from these people -- our "betters" -- who have proclaimed themselves to be in charge of solving this problem.

And what we should be discussing is not stuck on the idiotic yes/no whether it's a problem and whether we should do something about it. That is done. The popular mandate for this has existed almost globally but certainly throughout the west for 20 years or more. What we should be talking about is having a real debate and ask difficult questions about the proposed solutions that are not well explained to the public.

We should ask why countries with high emissions intensity of production are getting concessions. That's an incentive to increase emissions of production. We should ask why talk about per-capita concessions have so much weight, when that is a good incentive for countries to increase populations and reduce living standards for their people.

If we want to slow down global warming, we need to stop burning fossil fuel right now.

Hoping for a technical breakthrough of infinite "free" energy that would not only allow us to consume more, but also to do efficient carbon capture, is magical thinking.

It may happen! But it most probably won't, and we should be preparing for when it doesn't. The fact that we don't, and we keep waiting for a miracle that would be just around the corner, is pathetic.

That energy has to first be replaced by wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, electric transportation, etc.

Probably not the best step 1

There is no step 3.

I think what you mean is that there's consensus on "Everyone else stop burning fossil fuels, and I'll get around to it as soon as it's convenient for me. By the way, no nuclear, it's scary. And make sure to keep my AC running, it gets stuffy here. And my current car needs gas, so buy me a Tesla instead. And my jet rides around the world don't count, because travel is a culturally enriching experience so it's exempt."

The focus on individual choices is flawed because industrial processes and infrastructure emit the most GHGs.

Regardless, there’s no laws of nature that say you shall burn fossil fuel to transport and cool your self. The issue is that if the machines that produce carbon were to be replaced with machines that do not emit, many institutions would find themselves with stranded assets that required large capital investments.

Circular reasoning is fallacious.

Is it possible that everybody has missed something and the field is totally wrong? In theory, yes. But that is almost entirely irrelevant to whether we should act. This whinging over the nature of science is just a distraction tactic.

Manchin has blown up the CEPP and he's against a carbon tax (clearly he's against anything that's going to hurt coal), meaning the kind of transformative climate change legislation we desperately need is going to require some republican support.

The last time we had a decent chance of passing large climate change legislation was 10 years ago. It's possible we might not have this chance for another 10 years. And by then it might be too late for the planet.

1. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/mitt-romney...

There is a lot more going on than greenhouse emissions. Soil health is in many ways, more vital, and mainstream commercial farming practices degenerate our soil year after year. We make poor use of water. Ocean acidification is problematic. It is impossible to sustainably fish — regenerative kelp and fish farms are a better practice. Diversity is how we can become more resilient, and we have been making it go away because diversity is too complex.

Growing and buying local, helping our neighbors will build stronger communities and resilient economies; thinking globally, systemically, and holistically allows each of us to contribute something meaningful for something greater than ourselves.

We can take care of the land, of each other, and still get our fair share.

All the buying local in the word won’t mean anything at all when vast swathes of land are inhospitable to human life, there is unprecedented mass displacement, a lack of potable water, and all the other horrors that are coming unless act fast and big.

(Also ocean acidification is a consequence of climate change — they are absorbing co2.)

Those same degenerate processes can be reversed by taking advantage of the very second-order effects and feedback loops. Do things that will regenerate and restore the land. Regenerative agriculture has a much bigger impact than reducing carbon emissions. Even stuff like, modifying the “slash and burn” for clearing out to Amazon to “slash and char” taps into that feedback loop.

Buying local — or better yet, growing local, like in your backyard — isn’t just to develop resiliency for what is to come. There are specific practices local people can do to restore and regenerate the local ecosystem. They are highly specific to the local area.

Everytime you buy from outside the local area, you are contributing towards overharvesting, but you can’t see it because it doesn’t give you the feedback loop that locality does.

It is the same with potable water. We have very poor water management practices. As an example, Tucson sits on a plateau. It pumps water from the canals (sourced from the Colorado River; Arizona is at the bottom of water rights among four states). That water gets purified to drinking water standards all so that residents can flush their toilet and water their lawns. Meanwhile, the local aquifer has been depleting, and rainwater was not being captured in the soil.

Tucson is also the city that pioneered municipal codes for better water management because some residents pioneered greywater systems and curb cuts to capture monsoon rain.

But you want to see an example of communities fixing their potable water situation? How about this one: https://youtu.be/-8nqnOcoLqE

It does not require big actions.

If peace with your friends is the priority, then that's great. If the truth and future of humanity and of you and your friends is the priority, then that's highly irresponsible.

> There is a lot more going on than greenhouse emissions. Soil health is in many ways, more vital

In what way is it more vital? Will more people die and more money be lost?

As far as soil goes, there is a lot going on there. Soil is living and dirt is not. Having soil means having plants, fungi, microbes all participating. Bare dirt strips away the ecosystem’s ability to regulate water and temperature. Living soil with at least polycropping (in cultivated land) changes the microclimate — making it cooler or warmer, wetter, less wind erosion.

Monocropped agriculture using fertilizers, herbicides, fungalcides, and pesticides is why every year, we see upticks on temperature on the satallites correlating to planting and harvesting cycles.

It is connected to poor water management. Poor soil does not hold water very well and now you keep adding more to get less. Monocropping doesn’t just mean our food supply chain is one year of failed crops from shortages, it also means the thin, depleted soil is unable to sequester carbon.

What does this even mean in practice?

All of that is to separate the carbon cycle from the hydrological cycle. I am actively planting on the yard I have for food resiliency, and as a side effect, carbon sequestering. The amount this small ecosystem will sequester will increase once I get biochar into the mix.

There is already a slight cooling effect happening. I am looking for ways to plant in a way to shade the house during summers. If I were able to build from scratch, I’d try for earthship designs or at least use rocket mass heating/cooling, which would minimize the amount of solar cells needed to provide electricity.

We have already reduced meat consumption for health reasons. I have already been working remote for years before the pandemic, so no commute. We already got the house to energy-star certification, got the solar, got a high-efficiency ac unit, upgraded the windows … but there are far better things we haven't tried. I had already practiced minimalism before I met my wife.

When my child grows old enough, I am looking for ways to participate in the community. The local high school has a gardening club and one possibility is to join it as an advisor to introduce polyculture, companion planting, composting, etc.

Another is joining or creating groups working with food pantries to introduce perennial food forests. Or get a master gardener certification and start teaching this stuff locally.

Being able to grow locally — and it doesn’t get as local as the backyard — does not just promote food resiliency and shorten supply chain, it can help rebuild the soil.

I posted that book because it teaches frameworks on what someone can do in their own life to make a difference without needing heroic effort, or activism even. The actual things I am doing are what permaculturists are doing right now.

I am not trying to get brownie points. I am practicing articulating the worldview and practices to the HN tech crowd. Your feedback is appreciated.

(note: i was taught climate change back in middle school in the mid 80ties in USSR, and only coming to US i discovered to my big surprise that there are still people who thinks the other way - notable though that those people are mostly well under influence of the forces/people standing to lose much from public acceptance of climate change. This is how Russia prepares for the climate change for example https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/russiaa...)

This phenomenon used to be called "Global Warming" till narrative builders decided that the term was inconvenient and switched over to "Climate Change." You can see Google Trends for the terms over a period of time and even predict with some accuracy as to which party is in power in any given US state based on searches for the two terms in those states.[1] Then you have the nice propagandists at Wikipedia rewrite history by pretending that the article had always been on "Climate Change."[2][3][4][5]

This is how you manufacture consent. And consensus.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g...

[2] Global Warming. 21 August 2020. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&ac...)

[3] Global Warming. 29 July 2019. (https://web.archive.org/web/20190730111640/https://en.wikipe...)

[4] Climate Change. Today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_change&di...)

[5] Climate Change. 29 July 2019. (https://web.archive.org/web/20190730191647/https://en.wikipe...)

It makes science better manageable, but makes it less precise and varied.

But what if the consensus is right? Demanding diversity of opinions for the pure sake of avoiding consensus is a good way to end up producing wrong results too.

Yes, some of that opinion will be ignorant, foolish or based on willful lies and conspiracy theories, but much of it won't be. In either case, even the more radical opinions deserve the right to be spoken because they also allow useful debate to slowly evolve. the contrary of this is repressing all but "correct" points of view in a way that also suffocates controversial but intelligent disagreements. The COVID pandemic and its still highly debated science and politics have if anything demonstrated the importance of this even more. (Lab leak theories anyone? Or how about the debate over mask use?).

This is all to say that while many denialist points of view about climate change are flatly absurd, there are many others that are also much more nuanced and worthy of entertaining. I personally don't deny that we're changing the world's climate, and that this could have catastrophic consequences down the road. However, what I also accept as possible is that for one thing, politicians will absolutely take advantage of a dramatic scientific topic to hijack its vagaries in favor of their own agendas. Also that scientists are just as fallible and subject to prestige-seeking and ideological bias as anyone else with an opportunity for self-gratification, and that the mix of both of the above can easily lead to certain still ambiguous topics being pushed forward as concrete absolutisms for the sake of specific motives that are less altruistic than they seem at first glance. Will anyone deny that these characteristics are unlikely or impossible?

Then of course there are the ideological fixations around proposed solutions too, such as the absolutely anti-nuclear stances of a large number of those who also claim that climate change should be battled. Are they really open to all scientifically/technically valid remedies, or are they selectively choosing those that fit their very personal political dogmas?

As for the science itself, I don't know nearly enough about it to claim any expertise, but from everything I have read, it seems extremely dubious to think that the climate isn't being changed by human activity, generally in the direction of a warming trend. However, to what extent this will devastate us down the road, or to what extent we'll be able to counteract it with policies, technologies and social/economic tendencies that we today in 2021 might not even yet be conscious of is something nobody can claim to be certain of.

This doesn't mean that concrete safety measures shouldn't be promoted now, based on what we do know, but it also doesn't negate open debate or acknowledging that emotional reasoning also exists among people who fervently believe in inescapable catastrophe over the next few decades of climate change. These people might be wrong, and they certainly can't say with absolute certainty that they're completely correct. Right here on HN i've seen comments that practically go into hysterics about how we're already fucked and that our future is deeply grim because of our climate actions. Can anybody seriously say that they're reasoning soberly and with all the known science on their side? I don't think so.

If I were to bet on anything, it's that the world one century from now will be so different from what we know today in so many ways that few of our modern fears, even about climate change, can be considered settled. I'd also bet that by then we will have arrived at solutions to this global climate problem that many of the more extreme fears present today aren't even considering or aware of at all. Consider the major specific extrapolations of thinkers, politicians, scientists and many among the public and media in the year 1900. How many of them have more than minor relevance today? We're no less excempt from such blind spots than they were back then.

Those that are antivaxx, are also climate deniers. To the core.

So no, there is no reason to be kind to people spreading anti-vaxx or anti-climate change propaganda. That's not to say that they should be harmed or anything like that, but it's necessary to silence and combat their "arguments" and not allow them to spew their propaganda anywhere unimpeded.

Writing from a country where anti-vaxx idiots are partly responsible for the worst death toll from the 4th wave of Covid.

You are needlessly equivocating. Some facts are known, and anthropogenic climate change is one of them (as is the efficacy of vaccines). We don't have all the answers, but we do have plenty of answers.

Your skeptic attitude borders on solipsism - the only thing I know for sure is what I see, so perhaps the whole world is just an illusion before my eyes, right?

no, because these statements do not come with an assertion of imminent, irreparable global disaster prophesized to occur in the nebulously nearish future, unless mankind takes swift action, and we have to act now dammit, because people did the math and this is what we have to do or else! notice that this general framework applies to both topics that you seem to feel very strongly about, and you've lumped your ideological opponents in each of these axes together as one unified "other"! this "othering" of anyone who disagrees with any disparate aspect of your worldview (apparently they're all the same group of undesirables) makes you come across as indistinguishable from a religious zealot. I truly don't mean this as an insult, it's just the most obvious comparison. I know plenty of people who share your general perspective but only a few of them share the zealotry. this specific anthropological phenomenon is very interesting to me, and after thinking about it quite a bit for many years now, it starts to make quite a bit of sense, but further analysis would be unwelcome here.