Can someone in this thread please give me a good steelman that humans don't have a significant affect on climate change? This seems to be a growing sentiment among friends who I regard as intelligent, but goes against what I've believed to be the scientific consensus for years. I'm willing to admit I've been misled or wrong.
Of course humans have a significant effect on climate change - the steelman versions of why that doesn’t matter are: 1) It doesn’t matter because we will figure out some technological solution in the future. Or 2) it doesn’t matter since I personally will be ok (because I am rich and/or live in a rich country that can afford to pay the costs)
I'm of the view climate change is real but not as big a deal as some people make out. A couple of reasons:
- Solar power has been growing exponentially for years and will continue for a while allowing carbon usage to be phased out and maybe carbon capture done.
- The climate has changed naturally more than most people realise and life goes on. The sea is forecast to rise 60cm or so over this century but has risen ~120m over the last 20k years which was hardly noticed. (graph from wikipedia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Post-Gla...)
On point 2 - notice how flat your graph is for the last 6k years?
Also, why do you think the impact of past changes on a tiny group of humans living as hunter gatherers is of any relevance to 8 billion people living in the modern world (including, for example, in massive coastal cities?)
I can point you to two legitimate climate scientists who in some sense deny climate change. They work on the satellite temperature record, which very clearly shows the increasing temperature:
Spencer's view is that there is a natural climate change going on that just happens to coincide exactly with increasing greenhouse gases. Christy believes that climate change is real and partly anthropogenic but that it's just not going to be all that bad.
If your friends think that it's not happening, you can point them at the data that these two gather:
They'd disagree with your friends that humans are not involved at all. But your friends could switch to the position that climate change just doesn't matter and it'll all be fine.
I had a look at those two and they are both strongly religious and I guess of the view that god put the resources there for mankind to make use of. Which I guess is a view, although I'm not religious personally.
You need to consider if your friends are high decouplers or low decouplers. If they're the latter, then their support for a position like "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change" can't be construed to mean that they actually believe that "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change". Instead, it should be taken to mean that they agree with the implications of a world where "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change".
Aside, but I've come to believe that the insistence of looking for steelmen explanations instead of engaging with reality as it's happening is not a positive trait.
