[trescenzi]

His rationale for ignoring climate change is a great example of a fallacy, I don’t know if it’s named, where the inaccuracy of extrapolations is used as a reason to fully discount them.

> Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

> Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.

He’s not wrong that predictions 100 years out are going to almost always be wrong. What he is wrong about is that fact is a reason to do nothing. It’s become a very common assertion that clearly since extrapolations are wrong it means we actively should do nothing.

We’re not not drowning in horse shit because extrapolations done in 1900 were wrong. We’re not drowning in horse shit because someone invented another tool which caused the extrapolation to be wrong.

[snowwrestler]

The truly funny thing is that at least one eminent scientist in 1900 (before, even) was in fact already worried about global warming.

Why? Because it was an incredibly obvious hypothesis once they understood that some atmospheric gases act as a heat reservoir, and burning fossil fuels adds those gases to the atmosphere. A hypothesis which has now been thoroughly confirmed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

[scientator]

I think he is wrong that predictions 100 years out are almost always going to be wrong, because city and government planners routinely do this kind of stuff. They predict future growth rates and plan accordingly. They invest in reservoirs, wider roads, bigger power plants and transmission lines, etc. Sometimes those predictions are wrong and they build for growth that never happens, or vice versa. But much of the time they get it right and that contributes hugely to our present-day quality of life.

[trescenzi]

Yes exactly. He, and many others, get the causality wrong. The extrapolation is not wrong because extrapolation is always bad but partly because the knowledge spurs people to do something. Moore’s law is a good reverse example of this. It’s not magic, humans invest massively in making it happen.