22 Comments

This reminds me of Scott's joke: "Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”" http://slatestarcodex.com/2...

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I wonder what would constitute "too little" for Robin, given that he thinks amelioration is more efficient than prevention.

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Thanks Stephen. I think that in practice many people will interpret "do too much about" as "overcorrect", i.e. as a question about whether it is possible to trigger unacceptable global *cooling*. Such a results-oriented interpretation seems both common (impatient manager to complaining employee: "why don't you stop complaining and *do* something about it?") and a reasonable question to ask in the context of AGW mitigation discussions.

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Take a person who believes that no plausible concerted worldwide effort can avoid horrible temperature rise over the next 200 years. It might seem they should say No. But if they also believe the optimal cost-benefit mitigation strategy has diminishing benefits which are outweighed by its increasing costs at a certain still-feasible point, their answer might instead be Yes.

But failure to consider the second aspect is precisely what is unreasonable about the No answer.

Apart for those who simply don't believe there's climate change, the question seems like it could be a test question from an Econ 101 course regarding the law of diminishing returns.

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A co2 tax might be good but the ethanol program is too much.

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Or if one assumes its existence but assumes (or decides from the models!) that it is of low importance in its impact, or far cheaper to ameliorate*.

"Do nothing" is certainly a possible decision. Nearly always, in fact, whether or not it's wise.

(* If we assume "do ... about" is limited to prevention rather than response, that is.)

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(Also, the idea that it "isn't possible to do too much"?

Taken literally, that's completely insane; one assumes that they are implicitly leaving out options like "destroy the human race" or "a global police state enforcing stone-age living conditions" as options.

So we have to decide what the discussion parameters between "not too much" and "unthinkable for the responders" actually are.)

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What does the "about" mean?

"Trying to stop it somehow" or "ameliorating its effects on people"?

(The former's not happening, meaningfully, short of forcing the developing world to either be poorer, or skipping straight to a huge investment in nuclear power, which powerful hippies hate.

When Germany decides it'd rather burn coal than Save The Planet, as they're doing right now, you have no chance of getting India and China to Just Go Solar, guys.

The latter is not popular, because the former is better for fundraising. I mean, that's been Lomborg's stance for, what, nearly 20 years? And for it he gets called a "climate change denier", despite actively affirming it!

The issue - in human terms, that is - is not rational, nor are the common responses.)

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"I don’t get how you can be confused about the meaning of the second question, yet can easily answer the first question"

In my case, the answer is that every ambiguity I listed 21 hours ago applies to the second question but not to the first.

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This is my thought. It's theoretically possible to do too much about global warming, but it's so far from likely that I might call it "not possible". It's like asking whether the Catholic Church will officially repudiate the doctrine of Jesus being literally the son of God. You can say it's "possible" because there are churches that have said that and the Church leadership is physically capable of saying that, but it's just not going to happen.

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"Possible" is ambiguous. To a mathematician it's any non-zero probability, to an average person I'm guessing it's at least 1% probability.

This survey didn't include "possible" as an option but does exhibit how probabilistic statements can be ambiguous: https://github.com/zoninati...

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How little we can do is clearly bounded below. "We should do nothing at all" seems more reasonable than "we should allocate each working hour of every person to fighting GW".

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The phrase "doing too much about global warming" seems too vague. Doing something that will reduce the global warming that would otherwise occur clearly comes under the phrase, but suppose we went beyond reducing global warming to zero and brought about actual global cooling: would that be "doing (even) more about global warming"? Arguably, instead it would be doing something that must be separated into two components: (a) reducing global warming (to zero) and (b) reducing global temperatures even further, below where they are now. (I am writing as if "global warming" means a temperature increase relative to the temperature *now*, but if people have in mind some other baseline temperature it can easily be inserted here.) The former would be "doing something about global warming," the latter would not. If you also thought that global warming is occurring but that the best measures to bring it to zero pass the cost/benefit test, then *relative to these assumptions* we cannot do too much about global warming. (I am also assuming that adopting suboptimal measures to achieve the goal does not count as "doing more" than adopting optimal measures; i.e., that throughout we are, in effect, considering only measures that are maximally efficient.)

Everyone knows that there are logically possible scenarios in which we could do too much "about" (i.e., to retard or eliminate) global warming. But I suspect that your respondents interpret your question to concern not logical possibility but possibility *relative to well-established facts* about our climatic situation, plus well-established theories in climatology and economics.

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It would be reasonable to deny the possibility of doing too little about climate change if one denies its existence. That creates an asymmetry.

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The first question is just as much about politics as the second one.

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The problem is the second question is not really about facts but politics, so to answer it politically is appropriate. Ask a stupid question..

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