[dbingham]

This is what happens when you optimize for only a single variable.

And the end result won't be what you want it to be. It doesn't do us any good to stop climate change if the ecosystem still collapses out from under us.

Creating a sustainable environment is a systems problem and carbon is just one of many variables in that system. Yes, it's a really important one and in many ways it is the most pressing. But biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services are close seconds, and if you optimize your eating for carbon in the way the author is describing you inevitably end up doing more net harm by undercutting those other two.

Further, a lot of the "data" she's linking is completely with out method or context. And method and context can make a huge difference in these sorts of lifecycle analyses. They are fraught with pitfalls. It's one of the reasons it's been so fucking hard to pin down exactly what the most environmental behavior is.

And this whole mess is one of the prime motivators behind my current effort to write an open academic publishing platform [1] that would allow review to be crowdsourced so that we can open and centralize the whole literature. Because then we actually could get a complete picture of what the best current answer to these questions is with out having to go through secondary sources like this which inevitably cherry pick studies, data, and lack context.

[1] https://blog.peer-review.io/we-might-have-a-way-to-fix-scien...

[Blahah]

The project looks cool! I've built quite a few open academic publishing platforms, we would have a lot to talk about I imagine :)

You might be interested in what we're doing at LabDAO, including our publishing lab and the community governance we're developing. Note: we're a DAO but it's not about crypto.

Contact in my profile if you'd like to chat.

[dbingham]

Cheers! Would love to chat!

[dr_dshiv]

What do you anticipate the effect of GPT3 will be in the reviewing process?

[dbingham]

I honestly have no idea. I don't think I know nearly enough about GPT3 to hazard a guess.

I could imagine using natural language processing as part of looking at generating an automated Q&A algorithm or attempting to automate literature reviews in some way, but in the review process?

Someone I was talking to the other day was suggesting using sentiment analysis during the review process as a kind of tone grammarly aid to help people write constructive reviews, which is interesting. But I think that's different from GPT3.

Judging from your bio, I would guess you have much strong ideas about that answer to that question than I do. What are your thoughts?

[dr_dshiv]

If you like, you can link me to a paper you know well and I’ll send a review based on gpt3, without reading it. You can tell me if it is sensible.

I rather like the frontiers review process as a gatekeeping process. Papers get much better through their interactive review. But I don’t think peer review should stop with publication. I think there is a need to rate and rank and otherwise gather sentiments from researchers on papers in their field —ideally in a manner that allows for new important work to surface more easily. Whether the goal is to make science human and machine readable, for the further advancement of science. There is going to be a lot of science.

* check this out: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02787-5

[dbingham]

> I think there is a need to rate and rank and otherwise gather sentiments from researchers on papers in their field —ideally in a manner that allows for new important work to surface more easily.

I think what I'm building in peer-review.io actually achieves this. Because I've split out the two functions of review into pre-publication review and post-publication integrity management.

Pre-publication review is entirely about helping authors improve their work. It's rather akin to a Github PR.

Post-publication integrity management happens through voting and responses. More akin to StackExchange. Votes require responses, though responses don't require votes. That part is all public and on going. If you vote on a paper based on reading it, and then later discover its fraudulent in some way, you can come back and change your vote and edit your response. Both review and voting/response stay with the paper in perpetuity.

Also, thanks for the link, I'll give it a read!

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

By the way, this is exactly what a climate change denier would write, except that that would talk about collapsing the economy if we focused too much on reducing carbon emissions.

The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic.

At this point, we would have been in a much better position if the Greens had no been so rabidly anti-nuclear. Germany is restarting coal plants now.

At some point, as the article argues, following “environmental intuitions” is self-defeating.

[wizofaus]

> reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic

I don't think that latter sentence follows from the first at all - it's very much a slow emergency that will play out over decades and indeed centuries, and furthermore with a global population of 8+ billion, clearly it's not feasible for all of us to drop everything just to focus on any one single environmental issue. There are inevitably going to some actions that need to be taken to ensure long term ecological health that aren't related to mitigating against climate change, but are just as important, esp. wrt release of toxins/agricultural runoff into the environment, or drawing down water tables or monitoring invasive species (a problem already, but often exacerbated by warming temperatures). Thankfully we can walk and chew gum at the same time. (FWIW I agree re the anti- nuclear stance of environment groups - and would do so regardless of the need for low-emission power: nuclear energy production generally has a much lower environmental footprint than fossil fuel generation)

[pasabagi]

It's a slow emergency in the sense that the effects will slowly increase, but it's very much a fast emergency in that the actions we take now are vastly more effective than they would be in a decade, or even a year. Because it's a self-feeding system, we will have to work much harder in the future to get the same results we could get by making reasonable mitigations today.

[wizofaus]

Sure - I don't think that changes my point though. And I have some sympathy for the argument that there may be some changes we shouldn't rush into without understanding them better (e.g. Sri Lanka's experiment with organic farming), or until we have better/cheaper technology available - what we should be doing now is a lot more research into mitigation and adaptation options.

[dbingham]

I agree that following environmental intuitions is self-defeating, but so is chasing red herrings. And this is exactly why I'm trying to build something that will allow us all to make these analysis on primary sources, not secondary ones like the OP.

Climate is an emergency, but if we go chasing the wrong "solutions" based on bad data or incomplete data, or take the base of the ecosystem out from under us in the process, then we won't resolve the emergency or we'll end up in a worse place.

There are some things we know - transportation, housing, urban design, energy, many aspects of industrial manufuaction and waste disposal. These are still complex, but have much clearer cost benefit analysis. We know what the answers are there. Some of them involve individual action (like I laid out below) others are going to require collective action.

Agriculture is a mess with a pitched propaganda war taking place around it. I've spent a decade trying to sort out what is true, and I'm still no closer to feeling like I can say with certainty what the most ecological diet is. But I know that anyone who can say it with certainty has not done complete research.

[sdenton4]

It's really not a single variable problem, though. We're also looking at biodiversity collapse as humans atomize and invade wild spaces, and declines in insect populations which prop up the rest of the biosphere, including human agriculture.

We're making significant progress on cleaning up energy production, as wind and solar are now the most economic ways to produce new energy by a very long shot. The trajectory of the temperature curve is bending in the right direction, and should bend further. At some point we also need to pay attention to the rest of the quality of life on earth.

[matkoniecz]

> The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency

Almost nobody among claiming that treats it seriously.

Prominent celebrities claiming that travel by plane.

Greenpeace continues to oppose nuclear power.

Solar power gets blocked because some endemic species or pretty views are threatened.

Noone supports killing air travel.

---------------------------

Almost nobody among "CO2 is emergency" is actually willing to sacrifice own benefits or other priorities. At most they demand sacrifice from others.

I am not going to treat plane-travelling celebrities declaring climate emergency that threatens survival of humanity. The same goes for eco-organizations not willing to support deregulation of nuclear power.

[zahma]

“The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic.”

This statement is wrong. Climate and collapsing ecosystems/biodiversity are connected, and one is not more urgent than the other.

[Gibbon1]

We would have been in a much better position if nuclear and fossil fuel interests hadn't been rabidly anti-renewable either because we could have started the transition 20-30 year earlier.

[kcplate]

> if the Greens had no been so rabidly anti-nuclear.

honestly I never understood this. Always seemed a more Luddite response than a environmentally principled one.

[s17n]

"Environmentalism" didn't originally have anything to do with preserving human life. If you don't regard the preservation of human life/civilization as the goal, what's the argument for CO2 emissions being an emergency?

[prmoustache]

The emergency was 50 years ago.

[willis936]

And today and 50 years from now and very likely at least another 100 years beyond that. Prior inaction does not mean it's over. We don't get the luxury of having a "oh well we lost this round" mentality.

[prmoustache]

If you really want to curb co2 emissions significantly, the only effective way would be to nuke the USA, Europe, China and sterilize all but 5% of the remaining world population.

Anything else is just greenwashing at this point.

[willis936]

That is not true. The all-or-nothing mentality is why vegetarian purists do little to curb mass meat consumption. We don't need to choose between industrial society and destroying our habitat. We can have both if we're thoughtful about what indulgences we allow.

[prmoustache]

> We can have both if we're thoughtful about what indulgences we allow.

Which we don't because we fear losing comfort/commodity and can't agree on modalities.