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I’d like to see this same report circa 1970: “Inaction will lead to an ice age costing $X by 2020” meanwhile there’s another thread here about a “Contrarian V
by whb07 4y ago
I’d like to see this same report circa 1970:
“Inaction will lead to an ice age costing $X by 2020”
meanwhile there’s another thread here about a “Contrarian VC” investing in climate change…
- dgs_sgd 4y agoExactly. It's hard to take any prediction more than 5-10 years into the future seriously. Not because the predictors are being insincere or deceptive, just the inherent inability for prediction models to account for unknown unknowns.
- mhh__ 4y agoIf you go back and read old climate papers from the 80s a lot of them are pretty reasonable if they made a correct estimation of greenhouse gas emissions.
- civilized 4y agoPredictions of the actual future are hard, but predictions of the future we will encounter if we stay on the path we're on can be very straightforward and reliable. If I move a shovel full of dirt to the same place in my backyard every day for 20 years, I'm going to have a big pile of dirt there. It's the same for climate. If we keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, physics says we're going to warm the planet. It's a more complex system than the dirt pile, but no reasonable person thinks some unknown unknown is going to randomly overturn that and cause an ice age (other than possibly nuclear winter). We can see the warming signal from CO2 in history and we can reasonably project the future as well, if current emissions continue.
- rileymat2 4y ago> If I move a shovel full of dirt to the same place in my backyard every day for 20 years, I'm going to have a big pile of dirt there. Not that I disagree with your general point, But this is why prediction is tricky, because unexpected flooding and your prediction is false.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago> Predictions of the actual future are hard, but predictions of the future we will encounter if we stay on the path we're on can be very straightforward and reliable This is completely false. We are not interpolating with climate science, we are extrapolating. That is why the variance in the models is so wide (and expands rapidly). That variance, also, only applies to the known mechanisms: when a new important factor shows up, that can cause the predictions to be very wrong. This happened with ocean acidification in the early 2010's - the climate models had predicted increasing temperature, but it didn't materialize because the oceans were absorbing a lot more CO2 than we thought. In your example, an earthquake, a tornado, a flood, a strong storm, another person stealing your dirt, or even a heavy wind can make your projection false. You can keep doing the same thing, but you will have no idea how big that dirt pile will be 20 years from now.
- dgs_sgd 4y agoI don't think you're wrong to say that if we keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere then we're _eventually_ going warm the planet to the point predicted in the article. But > 10 years out, unpredictable technological innovation (either improvements to decarbonization tech or other tech that would make a lack of decarbonization irrelevant) would almost certainly change the path we're on to a point where projecting the current path isn't useful. To that point, Deloitte's finding of "insufficient action" on climate change couldn't possibly take into account actions happening today that could build toward useful climate change solutions if their only concept of action is applying existing tech to the problem.
- alfor 4y agoI agree with you. But we are already doing ton of things. I know it doesn’t show on co2 concentration yet. Solar, wind power, batteries, EV are all on exponential growth curves. In 10 years we will be in a much different place.
- celtain 4y agoThere was never a scientific consensus that there was a coming ice age. There were already more papers being published about global warming than about global cooling throughout the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling