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Steven's avatar

"myopic jerks"? For somebody who theoretically wants to build the bipartisan political support necessary for your preferred policies to get government approval and funding in democracies, choosing to insult roughly half the electorate is a spectacular way to shoot yourself in the foot. Most especially since you aren't following your own advice here: taking action NOW to prepare for possible natural disasters in the future STARTS with the measures that are NOT "deeply uncertain", the measures we KNOW are affordable, effective, and politically sustainable: which incidentally, I've read the reporting of a climate modeling analysis showing that reducing the brush as suggested would lower SoCal's wildfire risk by more than twice as much as even a successful NetZero would. Bluntly, the local factors demonstrably vastly outweigh the global factors into mere statistical insignificance.

"We should start with the cheapest mitigations that will predictably provide the biggest reductions to our risks" is the same underlying argument for BOTH brush clearance against wildfires AND your proposed albedo salts & oceanic iron against climactic warming.

Seriously, the proper response to deep uncertainty isn't to obsess over what you can't know or control, but rather to get the maximum benefit from those things that you do know and can control. Similarly, the proper way to think about aggregate risk is to first remember that it is ultimately about expressing the predicted frequency of events. Aggregate risk does NOT answer "Will X event happen?" (causal), only "How OFTEN is it likely to happen?" (frequency).

The question "Will X event happen?" is relevant for planning mitigating measures. It tells a planner what the maximum event severity might be to require mitigation. The question "How OFTEN will X event happen" is also relevant, but mainly for how soon the mitigation needs to be ready and what the sustainment costs may be based on expected expenditures per event. Between the two, the latter is generally more important for effective planning because it rarely matters how many times the X event will happen if the mitigation isn't effective the first time. Having a fully funded and staffed fire department, working and stocked emergency water reserves, and sufficient defensive depth from brush clearance can be calculated to the standard of preparedness for the worst wildfire in SoCal history (plus a decent margin of error for reserve capacity). That's a causal mitigation: it works whether the next big burn is this year or a hundred years from now. It also works even if the frequency of such fires outright doubles or the severity increases into the reserve margin a bit. Proper preparation prevents piss poor performance.

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Michael Magoon's avatar

Developing cost-effective geo-engineering solutions to climate change seems like a reasonable and important goal. I wish the climate change movement would focus on that goal instead of Netzero by 2050.

I am not convinced that that the risk that a 2.5 degrees hotter-than-preindustrial world is much, much riskier than the 1.5 degrees hotter world we have now, but it is always better to have a solid Plan B ready to go.

Same goes for asteroid impacts and other low-odds planetary hazards.

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