Equilibrium systems can be sensitive to very small changes that add up over time, especially if they don't have a strong negative feedback mechanism. For example, the 2 degrees in 100 years often quoted by alarmists is just .02 degrees per year. Teeny tiny effect, adding up over time. Now, thermal systems have built-in negative feedback and Earth has a lot of extra dampening systems (for example CO2 promotes plant growth which pulls CO2 out of the air and stores it in wood). But then the sun also throws a metric shitton of energy at us (not to be confused with the imperial fuckton, which is about 62.8% larger), so a teeny tiny increase in retention rate could theoretically be a lot of heat, maybe enough to push against that negative feedback far enough to be uncomfortable. And so you get glacially slow, but noticeable on century-plus timescales, heating out of a miniscule change in atmo comp. Now, one thing I'd like to lay to rest is the common alarmist claim that skepticism amounts to denial and that any skeptic must be crazy or malicious: neither of those are true, and the stubborness of skepticism in this case is partially the alarmists' fault. Back in the early 00's we had far less data and some people were jumping to conclusions on what turned out to be some really bad extrapolation. Skepticism was quite justified at that time, but likely would have been overcome with better data had the alarmists not declared the sky to be falling and hadn't invoked the mantra of Us vs Them. Note to future scientists: alarmism doesn't create action, it creates backlash and gridlock that lasts long after a reasonable argument would have been settled. Now we have much more data though and it is seeming pretty likely that something is causing us to take on more heat than we should. I expect that just blaming CO2 is a vast oversimplification, but I can see it being a contributing factor and so at least tackling that should help a little. The main thing I take issue with now is many of the proposed solutions. Many of them have been frankly draconian, and kneejerk reactions that ignore the time scales we're working with. People panicked and wanted to remove the mountain with a nuke when we had at least 100 years to dig a tunnel. We can do a lot in 100 years, especially with exponentially accelerating technology. This is a problem that we can solve technologically without having to resort to drastic economic or political sacrifices. That's another thing that really soured the discourse early on: a lot of extreme fringe groups tried to latch on to global warming and ride it into the mainstream, which made it really hard for people to accept it with all the crazies hanging on to its coattails. The malthusians leapt on it and said "well killing 70% of the population would solve global warming right away, we should do that!" The communists said, "Economic activity causes emissions, wealth causes economic activity, communism has a stellar track record of destroying wealth. We should establish world communism!" The primitivists said, "See? We need to start living lile cavemen NOW, it's for the planet!" Unsurprisingly, with pretty much every fringe group and their tinfoil hat trying to use global warming alarmism to push agendas that were only tangentially related at best, it was pretty easy for normal people to be really cynical about it. At this point, the warming effect is more likely to be real than not. But it is still important not to panic. Panic short-circuits our brains and prevents us from thinking rationally. We can solve this with technology, and we can do so while preserving our way of life. If we're a little too slow on it we might have to turn up the AC for a few years, but I'm confident we'll be able to get it under control. And by then we'll probably have the tech to just set the global thermostat wherever we want it, which will be a handy trick on Mars.

This is basically a good example of over-reductionism, and nothing more.

How does investment in alternative energy direct money away from alternative energy? Nuclear power is our ace in the hole against climate change, hands down. An aggressive generation-four nuclear rollout could within two decades leave us joking about climate change the same way we joke about Y2K. If we had started said rollout 20 years ago we wouldn't even be having this conversation, if we had started in 2008 we'd be just about 10 years from completion, but hindsight is 20/20 and 20 years is probably the shortest time we can manage for any comprehensive solution, so let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We have more than enough nuclear fuel to last until we commercialize fusion and/or work out the storage problem with solar, so the "well ten thousand years is technically not renewable" argument is moot. It doesn't have to last forever, it just has to last long enough. We've even solved the waste problem on paper, it's just a matter of building up the infrastructure to implement the solution. It turns out that in sufficiently advanced reactor designs, like we are capable of building now, almost all of the most dangerous, longest-lasting waste is fissionable. Meaning we can just keep tossing it back in the reactor until it comes out as something much safer that has much shorter storage time. This has the nice side-bonus of vastly increasing the effective lifetime of our fuel reserves, because we can burn the same fuel two or three times before it's fully depleted. The only real problem with nuclear is that people are irrationally afraid of it. People like to say that building reactors is too expensive, but the largest expense is fighting off lawsuits from NIMBYs. It's only expensive because we *make* it expensive. Nuclear power is the most reliable, most efficient, densest form of power generation we have and it just so happens to be emission-free.

There's actually a pretty good argument to make against nuclear right now. With the current rate other technologies like solar, tidal, and wind are improving right now nuclear could actually be a bad investment. Nuke plants are expensive, and about 75% of their lifetime operating costs are in construction, with a 60-80 life time expected. They tend to take about 6-10 years to make. You can end up in a situation where by the time the reactors are actually coming online, they're competing with renewables which are now a fair amount cheaper than coal by then, and can be installed very quickly. All of a sudden that investment in nuclear starts looking really bad, as those really high start up costs basically make them noncompetitive with near future renewables, and you're stuck with a bunch of expensive plants which don't need to exist. Now, 20 years ago this wasn't an argument, but it could happen now with some ease. Of course, if we get a miracle and one of those fusion start ups actually gets something, none of this really matters. On the other hand, going nuclear wouldn't actually stop CO2 emissions, as power generation isn't the only cause. It'd make it vastly more manageable though, but it wouldn't Y2K it.

Regarding the random non-sequiteur about "technology doesn't replace social progress": first of all I don't see why they would be mutually exclusive, we can develop technology and learn to use it responsibly at the same time, but more importantly "social progress" doesn't keep the lights on or put food on the table. We didn't get where we are today by holding hands and learning to share what we have better. We did it by extracting and exploiting resources that our ancestors didn't even know existed. The poor in the west live better than kings of old because using technology we have created more wealth than those kings could have possibly imagined. All the gold of Solomon couldn't buy what we take for granted today. I poke fun at Malthusians a lot, but at Malthus' time his concerns about running out of food were entirely legitimate, at least to someone unaware of just how much of an impact better technology would have. The technology of Malthus' time actually was entirely incapable of feeding two billion people, much less seven, no matter how equitably they may have tried to distribute it. It is technology that derailed Malthusian predictions, and which continues to do so every time they crop up again. As for science hitting a dead end, where to you get that idea? Moore's Law is alive and well, though it may experience some turbulence as we shift gears to maintain the price/performance curve through a new paradigm. Robots are getting better and cheaper every day, the price of solar drops by half every couple of years, neural interfaces are leaving the lab and entering real-world medicine, a 3D printer costs $300 now and is getting cheaper. Fusion is only 10 years away now instead of 20, virtual reality is here, augmented reality is right behind it, we have auto-lacing shoes, power armor (~$5000 from Panasonic IIRC), giant mech fights, and within a few decades all the resources of the asteroid belt will be ours to command. The future is here, and it's only getting better. As an aside, we should probably consider a thread merge. These two threads are pretty much about the same topic.

While technically elevating ourselves with technology does give us farther to fall if, say, nuclear war sends us back to the stone age, we've been all-in on this bet pretty much since we invented farming and backing out really isn't a realistic option. After all, do you want to be the one to tell seven billion people, "Look to your right and to your left. Of the three of you, only one will see tomorrow. It's for the Greater Good."?