Do we Still have a Chance? The Challenge of Emergency Measures for the Survival of Humankind
The epidemic of COVID-19 seems to have snuffed out all other subjects of debate. But there remain problems that we could define as a little more worrisome than the COVID pandemic, for instance, the possibility of the extinction of humankind and, perhaps, of the Earth’s biosphere. Here Dr. Ye Tao is giving an effective presentation that highlights that we are in a dire emergency. Perhaps, the pandemic can at least teach us what NOT to do in an emergency.
Caution: highly catastrophistic post!
The Problem
The clip above shows a recent talk by Dr. Ye Tao, interesting for several reasons. One is how it goes to the core of the climate story with the typical approach of the physicists: based on data and on the laws of physics. This approach bypasses much of the ongoing debate, in large part hijacked by modelers and their opponents.
Unfortunately, the emphasis on models has generated the diffuse misunderstanding that climate change is mainly a question of models and that the future climate can be predicted by models. That resulted in an attempt by skeptics to show that models generated poor predictions in the past. From that, they maintain that if models can’t predict things right, then climate change doesn’t exist or is not a problem. One reason, although not the only one, why the debate remains stuck and leads to no decisions.
Instead, if you go to the basic physics of the issue, you’ll discover that models are certainly wrong as predictive tools simply because they can’t include the non-linear forces that push the system to change its state. But physics tells you that the problem is way worse than models can calculate. That’s what Dr. Tao does.
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