michael_nielsen

I'm not wild about gotcha journalism. But geez I'd love to ask some of the people writing about climate some basic questions. What are total CO2 emissions per year? What percentage is due to the US? To China? To coal? To power generation?

How does the impact of methane compare to CO2? How long does CO2 last in the atmosphere (& how do we know)? Etc. When reading I often have the sneaking suspicion that the person writing has no quantitative understanding at all of climate.

Good intentions + no detailed quantitative understanding is simply a recipe for bad outcomes, in my opinion.

I’ve been restraining myself from writing about this... understanding climate change as a moral crisis is somewhat correct, but risks making it impossible to address the practical crisis.

As a moral crisis it seems somewhat similar to air pollution in the 1960s to me. So many people moralistically saying we need to carpool, drive less etc. Turns out those things had little impact. But catalytic converters, emissions standards etc reduced pollution enormously.

This doesn't mean analogous solutions will help here. But I'm pretty suspicious of the motives of many moralizers.