Addressing global warming, the first step is to break the question down into two separate questions-
A- Is the Earth's surface temperature going to be enough higher due to anthropogenic influences to be important?
B- What influence does anthropogenic increases in global average temperature impart upon a baseline course of action?
Note that I am looking at global warming as a series of predictions. Whether the Earth has already warmed due to anthropogenic influence is not relevant beyond the extent to which it evidences further warming to come.
Note the word important. Strangely, even if global average temperatures increase 10 degrees, this would not be important if the increase occurred entirely in the Sahara, Antarctica and a series of other carefully chosen spots where the temperature increase would be unimportant. Similarly, if global average temperatures increase by 1 degree, but the increase is focused entirely in Australia, that would be important.
In other words, global warming is not simply an assertion that human action will increase global temperatures. The model goes beyond this assertion and asserts additionally that the temperature increases will have significant ramifications. IE- Global warming is true only to the extent that temperatures increase due to anthropogenic causes produce results such as rising sea levels, natural disasters and decreased farm yields.
Projections that accept the general principles of global warming predict over the next 85 or so years we will see a temperature increase of 2 to 11 degrees F. 2 degrees is an unrealistic scenario wherein we stop emitting greenhouse gasses tomorrow. 11 degrees is unlikely and would require such geometric increases in emissions that we would have to overturn modern physics and come up with more than a few new sources of fossil fuel. (Of course, by "overturn modern physics", I don't mean anything beyond the sort of changes we've made multiple times in the last century.)
Given that the models being used are accurate, we will not see a temperature increase outside the range of 2 to 11 degrees.
Most of the energy available on the Earth comes from the sun. As such, if humankind proceeds forward on a path of technological and industrial expansion it will inevitably adopt solar at some point. I do not believe it is reasonable to expect both geometric population growth, and an expansion of per capita fuel use. As such, the maximum line I'm willing to accept follows a steadily decreasing acceleration wherein populations rise drastically but each new unit adds less than the previous. The carbon output curve should have a shape resembling sqrt(x)=y.
If we really do discover a new and cheap way to produce more emissions, and population continues to expand geometrically, then it will most likely be neither possible nor desirable to limit emissions. In other words, for scenarios beyond the root curve presented, reducing emissions would cause mass blackouts if not mass starvation. Since either could serve as a trigger for thermonuclear war, such scenarios constitute true out of control global warming, and the only policy initiative that should be pursued to mitigate them is space colonization.
So, returning to the root curve, this follows a similar to modern curve until around 2050 but plateaus before 2100. I'm now working with a maximum at about 60% of the accepted maximum. (which follows an accelerating square curve.) of course, that's 60% carbon output not temperature. Anyway, that places us at 600 ppm as our maximum peak carbon dioxide, which should result in a temperature disparity of around 6 degrees Fahrenheit. This is somewhat low compared to mainstream but not incredibly.
It is unrealistic to assume immediate worldwide political revolution. At the least, we should assume that carbon output will be maintained for the next decade. A minimum of 4 degrees increase should be expected if the science behind global warming is at all accurate.
In other words, any project designed to reduce carbon emissions is trying to move us from the future increase of 6 to the future increase of 4. This is generally not sufficiently addressed by proponents of global warming prevention, who try to make out the future as being far more malleable than it is.
With that said, accepting the basic models, and accepting that a program is capable of achieving the future of 4 over 6, the proposed program must cost less than the resulting expenses from the two degree gap.
Of course, it's not exactly easy to project expenses. Liberals like throwing various numbers out, mostly by relying on complicated mathematical simulations. Actually, that's how they invented global warming to begin with.
That said, if we fail to upgrade a building today it could collapse tomorrow. If we do upgrade it today, resources can be freed to feed the homeless and educate the ambitious tomorrow. In other words, opportunity cost is exponential and huge beyond comprehension. It's not even reasonable to think in terms of cost benefit, so much as world line.
Of course, any particular world line is mutually exclusive to any other. The future is always orders of magnitude larger than the past. So, rather than trying to say, X policy will cost Y but reward Z, it's more reasonable to compare X model to Y model.
It would be easy for me to present models wherein global warming is eliminated without affecting critical elements of a baseline world line. However, this is unrealistic. We cannot expect that all the funding for our programs will come from waste spending, nor can we expect scientists to invent anything we can imagine on demand. I insist that any comparison of world lines follow normal paths comparable to past events.
That's not to say that the future will necessarily or even probably follow an easily understandable standard world line. However, unpredictable factors will likely fall into one of two categories:
A- Completely overrides the world line, voiding all previous predictions. IE, a singularity scenario such as the extinction of mankind following our replacement by transcendent ai beings.
B- Variable neutral. Or rather, we can expect that the world line will be drawn severely off course by random factors, but that these factors will be sufficiently unpredictable that any attempt to take them into account will have a probabilistic cost above expected return.
With this said, we now reach an issue, wherein global warming prevention enthusiasts share a major overlap with supporters of popular Keynesian economics.
To be particular, they are not supporters of Keynesian economics per se (only a true Keynesian economist such as Paul Krugman can fit into this category.) but of the popular version which predominates liberal ideology. Or, to phrase my statement differently- Politicians, economists and climatologists are three separate groups, none of which understand the other at an advanced level, yet to address global warming through a government program, all three fields of thought must be used in concert.
The idea I want to take note of in this regards is basically-
"So long as resources remain unemployed forcibly increasing consumption will not result in significant costs."
That said, while senators with a nobel prize in economics and a seat on the UN climate advisory board are hard to find, a CEO within that group is even more difficult to locate.
Most people are not entrepreneurs. We are not brimming with ideas that we can implement. In fact, even entrepreneurs only have a narrow and well defined set of thoughts and goals. Ellis Wyatt's ability to produce torches cannot be used to produce railroads, engines or music. Heck, Thomas Edison's talent with DC power and Nikola Tesla's talents with AC power neared mutual exclusivity.
I won't go so far as to entirely dismiss G, but people are not one dimensional entities that fare equally across all environments, and this effect is amplified many times over when a truly ambitious man dedicates himself to a particular field of thought.
As such, under the above concept any idea that is both productive and scalable becomes precious. In the modern day, our road network is strong enough that additional expansion tends to provide highly questionable benefits. The same can be said of everything skyscrapers to medicine. Roads go unused, buildings are left empty, and lifespans remain unfazed after significant projects to improve them.
Thus, the green energy movement. Any number of solar panels can be built, and all of them reduce demand for carbon. To replace our entire energy grid would take decades, and trillions of dollars. In other words, for the immediate future, solving global warming has presented itself as a scalable project that can be significantly and reliably influenced by spending.
The green energy movement stands atop these three models-
Model A- Carbon emissions lead to increased temperatures, lead to natural disasters and/or other meaningful harm.
Model B- Arbitrary spending increases lead to increased employment, leads to increased worker skill and economic stability, leads to general increases across the entire economy, which then results in meaningful improvement of general quality of life.
Model C- Reduction in carbon output will displace spending from cheaper fossil fuels to more expensive renewables, thus creating an increase in consumption, leading to an increase in quality of life exceeding that of alternative world lines.
I dislike all three models.
Model C is wrong for the simple reason that many Americans are not securely in possession of food, housing, electricity, transportation, computation and access to information. All of these things are worth dying over. It is nearly insulting to even suggest spending on something outside of these categories.
No one is really suggesting that a few hurricanes, bigger and larger dikes, better air conditioners, and other answers to global warming that can be implemented in the future rather than the present will have costs exceeding our productivity. Only Hollywood is willing to suggest that global warming is an existential threat.
Rather, Model C relies upon a further model-
Model 甲- Engagement in the economy gives a public gain at a private cost. Individuals are able to view only a small portion of the utility they produce, and thus are unwilling to work for the sake of the utility they produce. In turn, they will never do as much work as they should. Instead, people will only do the minimal amount of work to obtain their minimum demands of society. For an average person the minimum standard of what a human should have to obtain a net positive utility is a significant portion of what they will be willing to work for to acquire. Thus, any substantial increase in a person's personal wealth beyond that which is afforded by the current environment will result in a greater loss of utility than gain.
In other words, Model 甲 states that while benefits that people don't need increase utility, benefits that people do need will, unless they come with stringent conditions attached, result in a net decrease in utility. In turn, people advocate a 'balanced' approach wherein people are given jobs to produce unneeded but desirable public goods.
Model 甲 and Model B share the same fundamental flaw. Public good does not inevitably exceed private good. Doing more work does not insure higher utility. In fact, work, when avoided, will almost always result in a higher overall utility. If a person can find a way to live happily while doing less work, he should normally take it.
If work were productive, then charting out nations based on work done should produce some correlation between work and productivity. Korea, Russia and Estonia do not share any of the characteristics that pro-workers continually espouse. And, of course, Germany, Denmark and Netherlands are not the pits of the earth. Rather, the hardest working nations and the most lazy nations are distributed fairly randomly across the spectrum of respectable to reprehensible nations.
Another thing to note is- working consists of suborning yourself to others, so that, in return, others will suborn themselves to you. A good example of work's benefits would be when an electrician rewires a plumbers house while the plumber cleans the electrician's pipes. With this, it's almost as if the electrician understood pipes and the plumber understood wires. Similarly, a farmer can manage a farm, and then buy a tractor, making it as if the farmer could teleport to a factory, assemble a tractor and then timeleap back on time to fly his crop duster.
The workload isn't exactly reduced, but people can more easily mitigate issues such as organization, learning and talent.
However, it also means that we have to set aside the things we actually desire, in return for things that aren't quite what we want. To put it differently-
If you were a master car designer working with a 3d printer capable of creating a wide range of cars, would you prefer to leave your car to some other designer while you worked, or would you design your car yourself? (spending a period of time equal to the amount it would take to earn the money for the alternate design.)
The things we do for ourselves are more specific and more meaningful than the things we do for others. A job must be done to a substantially higher quality or lower cost to merit a trade.
To put it yet another way, every time a trade is done, information is lost. If people are capable of achieving all of their objectives without doing anything they do not wish to, they will be better able to achieve their true purpose.
Which in turn reaches the question of a person's true purpose. Under many models we reach a stumbling block here, wherein work is reintroduced specifically to cull people from their desires.
I think this is wrong. When people have the chance, they have been known to rape and slaughter, to become fat and decadent, and to degenerate in many ways, but much more of human history has been characterized by people who desire something above themselves rather than below. Or rather, those that care not for beauty center their lives upon themselves, and abandon the world. They fall to the wayside and vanish, uncaring and uncared for. But those that see something greater than themselves shine brilliantly and become a light which illuminates the world.
In other words, Dhong Zhou is remembered by many but revered by few. His entire existence has been reduced to a memory of barbaric lust. But Socrates is admired and glorified, and his existence has now expanded into something surpassing the man himself, and even the world in which he lived.
People are weak. They are easily lead astray by stupidity lies and greed. As such, people will use freedom for evil. But, that does not force them to admire evil. So long as, in the end, they see that which is right, they accept that which is good, they can proceed down the right path. In turn, it is not simply a person's direct path which dominates him, but the existence of light itself which will determine his destiny.
The darkness isn't something that ensnares and consumes. A man can always choose to walk in the light.
In turn, it is allowing good to exist which results in a beautiful future. When a single man is able to walk forward, that is all the guidance needed for humanity itself to proceed down the correct path. As such, it is wrong to stifle a man's possibilities, and force him to travel a predetermined journey.
Now, to address Model A, which in turn addresses Question A. To repeat-
Is the Earth's surface temperature going to be enough higher due to anthropogenic influences to be important?
Regarding this, climatologists are basically in agreement. So the question that follows is-
Are the beliefs of climatologists reliably related to the truth?
Secondly-
Why are the beliefs held by climatologists treated as if they were significant?
Being an expert, being mainstream, holding the same beliefs as your peers and calling your beliefs scientific do not mean that you are correct. In fact, the four concepts are basically different ways to say the same thing. In turn, even if 97% say X and 3% say Y, that information is insufficient to declare with any real degree of certainty whether X or Y is more reasonable.
With that said, we need to ask-
Why are the beliefs of any scientist in any field treated is if they were significant?
Here we finally reach accessible answers.
Physicists provide us with computers and machines, and if I refuse to accept the Higgs boson they're able to explain exactly what that would mean and how physics would work without it. Physics is analyzed by string theorists and engineers, businessmen and entertainers, all of whom find it meaningful and important. We know physics works. We can see examples of it working all around us.
The same can be said of many fields, from chemists to mathematicians, biologists and even historians.
I don't believe in science because of peer review and the scientific method. Everyone has methods and peers. That's nonsense. Real science is when you say something, and the people who listen are able to build upon what you say and create something larger. Real science is when an idea grows from a seed into a flower, finally expanding to create an entire sea of blossoms.
Of course, even that seed, unrefined and unused, is part of science. It's wrong to be overly dismissive. Or, to put it in another way, if only nobel prize winners were listened to, no one would be able to obtain the title to begin with.
Even so, I don't have to show scientists who hide away in ivory towers fiddling with simulations that are impossible to verify in any substantial way (peer review does not count as being substantial.) with the same respect I have for those that explore the depths of nature and logic, and return with theories that can be used for a million purposes.
I dislike this new method of science, wherein arcane (and often secretive) models are mounted one atop another, and through some strange ritual, selected and gathered around.
Typically speaking, a model is judged by its ability to, given some portion of available historical data, produce the remainder.
There are several fundamental flaws to this plan-
A- Correlation is not causation. It is not even evidence for causation. For any set of points, an infinite amount of lines can be graphed which fit the points. Empiricism is fundamentally wrong. As for the rest, this is a debate as old as philosophy, so I won't address it further.
B- Historical data is only as accurate as the instruments used. In general terms, modern record keeping has existed for about half a century. Anything further than that is basically just speculation. To make matters worse, different models will give different meanings to the same instrument readings.
C- This method is totally incapable of isolating variables. Often times many variables are controlled by a single overriding variable. Just looking at the data, it can give an appearance that any number of variables influence each-other when they are all controlled by a much greater force.
D- This method is totally incapable of handling complex relationships. Or, to put it otherwise, if you throw a baseball against a brick wall at 80 miles per hour, it will ricochet off at around 80 miles per hour. If you throw a baseball against a brick wall at 50% of the speed of light, it will annihilate the wall, and quite a bit else besides. If you throw at 110% of the speed of light, it will pass through the wall without affecting it.
The real world doesn't follow the simplistic and direct relationships that models rely on. Even if a model fits the data available, that only makes it reliable under the conditions in which the data was derived.
Some of the science used by global warming alarmists is based on physics and other fields, and can thus be accepted. However, the bulk of the modern liberal drive to reduce carbon emissions is groundless. Complicated feedback loops are espoused and defended with irrelevant Newtonian physics. Dire predictions are made of events, that, should they happen, would cost us very little. Humanity's ability to prepare for a wide range of futures, while taking action in the present world against present threats is dismissed, alongside all hopes and expectations that a hundred years from now we will have the science and infrastructure to easily handle a slightly more hostile planet.
