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WARMING_FENCE

                                             November 08, 2022

Back on November 8, 2003 I posted this to alt.gothic:

   "It was a strange autumn: late
    October, but the trees were
    still pretty green, with only                 Bruce Sterling in those days
    a few exceptions, I guess                     was convinced global warming
    because things had been so                    was a bad problem, and he had
    warm lately. If I were Bruce                  a theory that someone needed
    Sterling I would be telling                   to make being green seem
    you that this means that the                  *cool*: he was trying his hand
    end is near, but for good or                  at it with his "Viridian
    for ill that's a fence that                   Green" movement.
    I'm still sitting on."

This is a good bit for me to have on record,
because I'm clearly stating that I'm unsure about
whether the global warming scenario was for real--
I at least wasn't *denying* it, but my stated
position was "on the fence".

There's a tendency for people to edit their memories
after the fact-- a good example is the invasion of
Iraq, where polling was showing popular support, but
after it was a clear debacle many folks developed
amensia on that point.

It may not be a burning issue for any one but
me, but I like to make an effort to track what
I was wrong about-- but it can be hard to          Was I solidly anti
remember *precisely* what my position was on       or just skeptical?
something decades ago.
                                                   Was I a true believer,
                                                   or just very interested?
In this case I was clearly a bit slow
on the uptake-- precisely *why* might                Sorting out these things
be hard to pin down precisely...                     can take some work on my
                                                     part, and I'm always
                                                     reluctant to go into it:
                                                     there's no particular
                                                     reason why you should
                                                     care about my current
                                                     position statments,
     A few lines to follow up on...                  let alone my old ones.

     It was clear tom that environmental
     alarmists could get things very wrong,                FLIP_TEST
     and predicting the behavior of complex
     systems was difficult:

         I understood then (and
         still do now) that nuclear        NUKE
         power had gotten a bad rap.

         Ehrlich's "Population Bomb"
         had fizzled.

         There had been some high profile
         cases of computer simulations               THE_HERETIC
         turning out to have poor predictive
         power-- e.g. The Club of Rome.

         The Julian Simon/Paul Ehrlich
         bet was on my mind.                      https://www.aier.org/article/julian-simon-and-paul-ehrlichs-second-bet/


     I had a copy of Lomborg's
     "Skeptical Environmentalist"
     on my shelf: historically
     warming trends were arguably
     good for humanity--

        I believed that was true-- I think--
        though I also understood that effect
        had limits: warmer was better didn't         (Or at least I
        mean that warmer was *always* going to       think I understood
        be better.                                   this back then.)

             But then: I was on the fence,
             not insisting we should stop
             worrying.


                In point of fact, I thought the entire
                debate was a little besides the point            MITIGATE
                as far as policy recommendations goes:

                If global warming was a big threat, then
                public enemy number one was burning coal.

                If we phased out coal power and it turned
                out the global warming scenario was
                exaggerated, then we would *only* be saving
                tens of thousands of lives annually in the
                US alone.

                         I'd been opposed to coal power
                         since the mid-1970s: it was one
                         of the main reasons I thought
                         the opposition to nuclear power
                         was off base.





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