Jere Krischel
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

Not sure which point that was — you said that it was abused, if I recall correctly, but I’m not sure if you were doing anything but claiming that the precautionary principle is one we should follow because of Pascal’s wager.

Could you reiterate what point you were trying to make on that?

“because the graph shows only a temporary effect on emissions lasting only the 14-year duration of the Paris agreement.”

They actually have the graph with the assumption that it is sustained beyond that, but it’s in a very quick transition:

Carbon taxes are just an application of free-market principles to deal with a negative externality.

There can’t be a free-market for negative externalities if they aren’t calculable, but rather assigned by fiat, or under great uncertainty.

Internal variability asymptotically has little or no trend, since it is merely the result of weather shifting energy around.

That’s an assertion, not an argument. Internal variability can have trends at every time scale.

Moving energy around, whether from the atmosphere to the hydrosphere, or the biosphere, or the planet’s solid mass, varies at all timescales, and can have trends at all timescales. Assuming that they always cancel out at 30 year intervals or 60 year intervals, or any interval, is completely unfounded.

“Major ocean processes like ENSO are monitored, so yes, they can plausibly limit the trend to 0.1°C.”

Yes, they’re monitored. That tells you nothing about how to attribute natural secular trends over many ENSO cycles. You can build a model that attributes 100% of all observed warming to a natural secular trend within ENSO. You can build a model that attributes 0% of all observed warming to ENSO. Now, think about what kind of observations would falsify either of those assertions. Can you list any?

Meanwhile, given the Milankovitch cycle, decreasing solar output, and volcanoes, it makes sense there would be more cooling than warming in terms of natural forcings.

So, if an Ice Age cometh, isn’t burning all the natural petroleum we can the responsible thing to do, if you believe CO2 is the control knob for the temperature? Maybe there are positive externalities governments should pay people for :)

That’s like saying “how do you know your bank account will only give 0–2 percent interest in 100 years”; I don’t need to predict the economy to know that.

But, you don’t know that. You’ve got zero chance of reliably knowing that. You have zero clue as to what interest rates are going to be in 5 years, much less 100.

Do you really believe there have been any accurate economic models that have been able to predict the state of the economy on ANY time scale?

“All IPCC is saying is that the sum of natural forcings and internal variability is close to zero in the 1950–2010 period.”

Again, that’s an assertion, not an argument. Follow the argument closely enough, and you’ll eventually get to an argument from ignorance (“we couldn’t think of any other ways to tweak the model, so it must be our preferred hypothesis).

“ It is all the evidence together that leads to the conclusions of climatology”

Astrology also has a lot of confirming evidence. So did eugenics. So did phrenology. The difference between science and pseudo-science (aka, the “demarcation problem”), is falsifiability.

If someone is convinced simply by a long list of evidence, they’ll be easily fooled by charlatans.

while the overall effects of CO2 and aerosols are not known precisely, they are still bounded

I think you have some upper bounds, but I’ve never seen any papers that have managed to assert any lower bounds. If you have a cite, it would be appreciated.

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Jere Krischel

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Socially liberal, fiscally conservative, born again carnivore, musician, firearms instructor and skeptical civil rights activist.

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