> Today, it looks like Tesla will fix the problem if you're within the warranty, and outside-of-warranty repairs can cost $1,800 to $3,000, depending on your location. Tesla’s method is to replace the entire MCU.
This is ridiculous. Can we all agree that this is ridiculous? Because that's what it is. If we can at least all agree that this is indeed ridiculous, perhaps the collapse of modern civilization can be avoided.
> If the ebola infections started appearing in all the major cities with airports and seaports, would you want the experts to try their best to stop it, or would you shrug and say, eh, sometimes people live and sometimes they die
That highly depends on what "the experts" recommend that we do. In any case, your bad analogy is bad.
> I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational.
...which is what makes me far less worried about climate change.
> Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it.
All this talk about "95% of scientists agree (that the charts point up)" and "science denial" is an argument from authority.
Given that 50% of science is estimated to be wrong[1], I'm willing to take my chances on this one, especially since there's a strong ideological component to it.
The actual simulations are drastic simplifications with wide margins of error, and even those margins have been crossed by observation even in the close term, where the margins are still narrow. All the interesting stuff happens way further down the line, however.
Perhaps a bit more humility regarding the practical limits to the scientific method is in order, at least in this case - but then how would you make your argument from authority?
> One of the problems cited: the temperature/CO2 graph probably came from an antarctic ice core sample ... and temperature leading/lagging there is different than in non-polar locations.
Specifically, he points out that CO2 lags temperature by hundreds of years in the southern hemisphere, but that temperature lags CO2 by again hundreds of years in the northern hemisphere.
CO2 is claimed to have accelerated natural warming through a feedback loop - until it didn't, and temperatures began drifting down again.
That's fair enough. That's reasonably nuanced. I'm missing the extent to which this feedback loop actually made an impact though, because clearly it can't be the dominant driver or ultimate control lever. Otherwise, we'd have had a runaway greenhouse already.
> Nobody is saying AGW is going to kill off all life.
One might get that impression from the media narrative though.
> But in the short term we humans are going to have to deal with the consequences: displacement of millions of people through crop failures and loss of coast, disruption of economic systems, and more civil unrest.
I don't think that's such a big deal, all things concerned. Sometimes, people have to move. Sometimes, crops fail. Sometimes, coasts move. Sometimes, there's civil unrest. Telling people in China or Brazil that they'll have to cut down on their emissions is going to cause civil unrest. "Vote for me, I'll make you poorer" is not a winning political provision.
> The US military is gaming out these scenarios because they believe the science, not because they are pinko tree huggers who hate freedom.
They're also gaming out scenarios of mass epidemics, or political secession. What do you expect them to do?
> Instead, we have a lot of observations and modelling that allow us to run those experiments, and the weight of those say we have a problem.
No, the weight of those say there will be an increase in temperature. Never mind that the weight of these have been wrong for more narrow definitions of the word "wrong":
If those models can't predict ten years into the future with any reasonable amount of confidence, how can we trust them to predict the next 100 years?
Even then, let's say these models are more or less correct, what exactly says "we have a problem"? What problem? We already have tons of problems! Not being able to emit CO2 would be a huge problem in and of itself. What are the models to predict the actual problems caused by climate change? How good are those? Do 95% of scientists agree on them?
> The majority consensus is not to drop everything but to continue making substantial changes to human activity to reduce warming.
Okay, I don't exactly feel like making substantial changes to my lifestyle based on these predictions, especially since the impact doesn't concern me much at all. Now what? Good luck getting all that political support that you will need.
> It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before.
If you want to see civil unrest, just raise the taxes on gasoline, like Monsieur Macron.
As for mass migration, if there really is such a big fallout due to climate change (or anything else) rendering places uninhabitable, let the people migrate. Humans have always migrated. Why stop now?
As for mass starvation, I don't buy it. Most crops today are fed to cattle, there's a lot of leeway in terms of repurposing it for human consumption.
> You can do the experiment yourself with some children using a plastic water bottle, a thermometer, and a mixture of baking soda and vinegar. We understand this physics extremely well.
If you can't see how ridiculous that sounds, you might not understand how people become skeptical about climate science.
If we really understand these physics so well, why have most of the predictions been wrong?
> Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
"Without adaptation" is not a plausible scenario. Of course there will be adaptation. But let's take those numbers anyway, and take a very liberal estimate of six degrees of temperature increase: That's 36% (wheat), 19.2% (rice), 44% (maize) and 18.6% (soy), respectively.
That may sound alarming if all that produce had to be turned into food that people need to live. In practice, most of it goes to livestock or even biofuel production. Being forced to have less cattle and fuel might be good for the climate, no?
> Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech cautious us technical success in raising food production is only a temporary victory - we must also limit our population.
Perhaps, but the best way to limit your population growth is to deliver a better standard of living.
> When you write "Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate" ... how is that even a valid argument? Where are the Canadian orange groves? How's the Brazilian maple syrup industry? They don't exist, because the climate is wrong for those crops in those areas.
I'm talking about actual crop production, not hypothetical crop production. Nobody is starving because farmlands that never existed stop producing. With bad weather, that's different.
If we're talking about climate and agriculture, the argument goes both ways: If global temperature rises, then new places will start making sense for certain forms of agriculture, just as old places will stop making sense. This also will happen regardless of human intervention.
> In the past, temperature rises caused by other factors have in turn caused the release of CO2, raising the temperature further.
That's your claim, but you can't actually derive that from the data. It may just as well be the case that rises in temperature cause the release of more CO2, period.
> This does not in any way call into question the causality between increasing concentration of CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and increased warming as predicted by gas absorption equations which we teach in high school.
The climate on the planet isn't a simple gas absorption equation, there are other factors. Even if the greenhouse effect is a factor, it couldn't be the dominating factor.
Otherwise, how could an ice age just "end" a period of high CO2 concentration? Shouldn't the greenhouse effect prevent it? And if so, will the next ice age be "tamer" if we keep CO2 levels up? Wouldn't that be good?
> These are two different things, and taken together only implies a positive feedback loop.
If it's a positive feedback loop, then why hasn't there been a runaway greenhouse effect in the past? Something must have stopped it. What was that?
> Concretely, there are farmers at the edge of the Sahara, who are adapted to a semi-arid conditions, and when the Sahara moves south, then they have to deal with desert conditions.
Yes, they will. They'll have to move. The Sahara didn't use to be a desert for all of human history, it used to be fertile at one point. Now it isn't anymore, so we don't have agriculture there. So what?
> Similar, when the Great Barrier Reef moves south, then there are dive centers without a reef north of the new location.
First-world problems...
> So we will have to adapt to a warmer climate anyhow, but not cutting down emissions is an entirely unforced error, it makes global warming worse, without any concrete benefit.
No concrete benefit? You mean, besides the fact that our entire standard of living rests on the fact that we can emit CO2 more or less undisturbed?
> Cutting down emissions is precisely the "smaller fallout of manmade climate change" you are arguing for.
Not if you take into account the standard of living of the people calling the shots, right here and now.
> Life adapts, when it can. The rate of change you mentioned ensures that a majority of life will not be able to adapt and it's not impossible that another K-T level extinction event is already taking place.
It's also "not impossible" that a meteorite wipes us all out tomorrow. Which serious scientist is predicting a K-T level extinction event?
Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over thousands of years. That's not out of the ordinary in terms of variance for life on earth right now. Sure, some species may have to migrate, some will go extinct one way or another, but not a K-T level event.
> Past periods of high CO2 do not contradict the notion that CO2 leads to higher global temperatures. Indeed, it confirms that there is a strong relationship between the two.
The relationship, at least in the smaller graph, isn't in question. The causality is. I didn't say it contradicts the causality, I say it doesn't support the causality.
If you look at the larger graph, whatever relationship there is between CO2 and global temperature becomes indiscernible.
> There are other sources of temperature change so you can't use one indicator to prove there is no effect
You can't prove a negative in the first place. Of course there's bound to be some effect, but how large is it really?
> On the right of that graph, there is a vertical red line. That's not an axis or a border, that's the recent rise in CO2 levels, and it's unprecedented.
The rise may be unprecedented, the level isn't.
> The overwhelming majority of evidence shows that human activity, mainly greenhouse gases, is causing climate change.
That's a strong statement for what it is at best a discernible correlation.
I'm willing to take it on faith. Humans cause climate change? Now what? We absolutely have to drop everything and start cooling the planet? Until the next ice age, when presumably we'll have to warm it?
> The issue is the rate of change, which is unprecedented.
Perhaps over some arbitrary timeframes within the measured record. On the other hand, a volcanic eruption can immediately cause a change of 1K or more.
But let's say it is unprecedented, so what?
> The path we're currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop production.
[citation needed]
This has been predicted numerous times, it didn't come to pass. Crop production depends on the weather far more than the climate, we have to deal with that issue anyway. So let's deal with the actual issue, not part of what may cause the issue, some of the time.
As for ecosystems getting "devastated" - so what? They get devastated one way or another all the time. They recover.
You can see that most of the time, temperature rises lead increases in CO2. This implies that rising temperature increases CO2 levels, but not necessarily the other way around.
If you zoom out even further, the correlation isn't clear anymore at all:
Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts. In the interest of our descendants, we had better develop technology to deal with a tougher climate, rather than cut down on emissions so that maybe ten or twenty generations can live with a somewhat smaller fallout of manmade climate change.
> Maybe not, flash is likely not the only component in there that has an age limit.
The MCU itself should outlast the lifetime of the car in the vast majority of the cases.