Why we don’t let climate scientists determine what to do about climate change

Sadly though we do, to an extent, but this is why we should not allow climate scientists to determine what is done about climate change:

But planetary overheating is really just the most geophysical symptom of extractive colonial capitalism – “billionairism” – a system designed to pump wealth from the poor to the rich, creating billionaires, the healthcare crisis, the housing crisis, genocide, hierarchies like racism and patriarchy, and a great deal of suffering.

Umm, right.

The thing that gives me hope, strangely, is that I’ve accepted the end of this form of profit-obsessed modernity. Extractive colonial capitalism has been a death cult for hundreds of years, and now the masks are off. I know humans can do much better than this. But before the new thing can emerge, we have to let go of this billionaire-creating, planet-overheating, healthcare restricting, genocidal thing we have now. I hope to live to see something better arise, a society whose goal is the wellbeing of all, even though it will, unfortunately, be on a hotter planet.

A level of analysis that Wolfie Smith might feel was a tad naive.

The actual climate change problem is that humans like travel, mobility, cooked food and houses that are warm and toasty. Plus all the benefits of industrial civilisation. Fossil fuels are - directly - cheap ways of getting all of those things but with those large indirect - the externalities - costs to them. Nothing to do with billionairism at all. Societies that didn’t have either billionaires nor even capitalism, colonial or not - say, the Soviet Union - made exactly the same calculation. Fossil fuels were the cheap - directly - way to provide what the populace wanted.

This comes from:

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution

Who is actually employed to be expert:

I am a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. I use satellite data and models to study the rapidly changing Earth, focusing on extreme heat and human health, ecosystem breakdown, and severe weather. I have a PhD in physics from Columbia University and a BA in physics from Harvard.

In his specific field he is in fact expert. But we must always recall Professor Feynman’s point:

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

As everyone will tell us all these days economics is not a science. Therefore scientists are indeed just as dumb as the next guy.

We’re perfectly happy with the idea that we should indeed listen to the physicists, meteorologists, chemists, even the climate scientists, in their field(s) of expertise. Outside those knowledge realms not so much. More specifically, what we do about climate change is the province of resource allocation and human incentives. That not a science of economics.

That’s the only way to avoid proposed solutions that would embarrass Wolfie. Perhaps we should try that idea out?

Tim Worstall