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I want to say something on conservatism and burden of proof, too, since that's been obviously out of whack for a while.
Climate scientists, for reasons I disapproved of but yet understood, have long seemed to operate on an apparent theory that a statement was conservative if it only said things known to be true. That's radical and scary to me.
One does not prepare for war by only arming oneself against attacks one can prove will happen. Conservatism is more commonly about preparing for what cannot be disproven.
I think the reason Climate Scientists did this is that they didn't want over-claiming to become a way to lose credential. But at this point, who cares if you lose credential if no one is listening anyway? It's time to say what is really true.
If we cannot prove we won't see 2, 3, 4 or whatever degrees this century, then it's conservative to pick the highest of those numbers that cannot be disproven. It is not conservative to say "well, we can prove at least 2". That is simply reckless, because it leaves us preparing for something that only by the most amazing of luck is likely.
The burden of proof should always be on the person who's making the claim that something is safe because safety allows us not to act. We're so much better off acting and then finding the action was unnecessary than we would be not acting and finding out that action was necessary and we just didn't see it. So anyone claiming safety is urging inaction and the burden should be on them to suggest why inaction is safe.
All proposals that are analyzed in framework that discuss conservative positions should be re-categorized using a theory like this.
I think in such a light, James Hansen's remarks would have a lot easier time being seen as conservative, not radical, for example. He's been speaking plainly about risks for a while, and the people countering him are basically saying the burden is on him to show he's right. It is not. The burden is on others to show he's wrong. And so far, all I hear is story after story about how surprised people are that things are worse than we thought.
The conservative position should be to assume that Antarctica and Greenland could melt pretty fast because we really did not have a proof otherwise. If we did, it was a pretty crappy proof because I keep seeing stories about how surprised climate scientists are.
And maybe they are. But I'm not that surprised. I'm not a Climate Scientist but I read Hansen's book (among others), and he seemed to say clearly "this is what I can prove, but also, I'm worried about the things beyond what I can prove." That left me with the distinct impression that things were not as safe as we were being led to believe and that we should be prepared to be surprised. That didn't sound radical to me, it sounded conservative. It's served my intuitions well so far. I'm not happy about where we are, but I'm rarely if ever surprised.
I suggest the idea that climate scientists should prominently adopt a new theory of "possible". I'm going to sketch it here, and it needs wordsmithing, but basically the notion is that if we have not seen evidence that many/most countries are willing to do a thing, then we should consider that not a possible thing. That's a "conservative" reading of "possible".
For example, speaking in purely abstract terms, let's suppose that stopping climate change meant no more eating of bananas. Climate scientists might imagine that it's easily possible to stop eating bananas and so would feel uncomfortable with a claim that it's impossible to reach climate goals because in principle banana-eating should be possible to reduce. So they would feel like they had to say that targets were reachable that merely required the cutting of banana consumption.
But if, over time, we see that no country has in fact reduced its banana consumption materially, then we need to simply line out actions like that as "possible" in the sense that a thing may indeed be "physically possible" and yet "politically impossible", much as the wearing of masks during covid was possible in some countries and next to impossible in others (sadly, I'm looking at my own country).
This kind of pragmatic terminological notion is essential because the ordinary "stretch" of words is such that we allow ourselves to say "yes, it's possible to reach 1.5C" because we see physical possibility, and so some people feel they'd be lying to say we can't reach it. And yet now the very people who said these things feel, I'm guessing, almost like they've been duped into lying to the public about what's possible, maintaining a story that allowed people to not act because some politician could point to "it's still possible" as if that was meaningful.
Or maybe in order to get the terminology to be good for everyone, a modifier or other term needs to be used, literally never saying "possible" and always saying "practical" or "pragmatically possible" and then giving that some formality by simply keeping track of what each government is committing to and which commitments they are really keeping, so that over time as people fail in their promises, what is practical or pragmatically possible is seen to be less available than what was previously thought, and so the urgency goes up because many of the possible paths are simply not reachable politically even though they are reachable physically.
I guess we each see the problems of the world through the lens of our own experience. I do language design (computer language design, but the concepts aren't that different than human language in many ways). I see this as a problem of making the words say what we need them to say, and I feel people are getting tricked by the incredible breadth of what "possible" means. What's frustrating everyone is that we have to mean something much more precise than just "theoretically possible". We have to mean something that accommodates political friction, which is every bit as real a problem right now as physics, perhaps moreso, since the physics is clear and we're only just starting to profoundly see that the problem was never one of physics but that it simply does not suit The Plutocracy to even admit or focus on the problem, however physically clear. I fear that without factoring this in, physicists will never end up saying what they mean.
I'm being approximate here. I happily accept similar-but-hopefully-better proposals along these lines that in some way accommodate the political physics, so to speak.
Or maybe someone will tell me there's a better way to conceive the source of frustration, and I'm open to that. But language seems the enemy here, and it is too easily cooptable.
If I say I've halved something, the meaning is obvious. But if I say I've thirded something, have I taken a third, or have I left a third?
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