Draft of Henderson reply

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Do you happen to have the page number(s) or is it easy to find in the index?

Sure! I have a digital copy so it's easy to grep. Quoting a footnote: "See 'The Bathtub Problem' beginning on page 15 of chapter 1 and the 'Bathtub' entry of page 30 in chapter 2."

I’m not sure why you use the verb “seize.” It was a big part of their argument.

They do talk a lot about how cheap and easy it would be to bring global temperature down by injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. I said "seize" because of how your review focuses on that -- even concludes with it -- without the context of how dangerous it would be to actually implement that form of geoengineering.

I actually did engage with one important argument for why it would be so dangerous.

I believe you successfully countered only the dumb arguments against geoengineering, like how hard it would be to agree on a temperature target, and didn't touch the important arguments like ocean acidity and other ecosystem impacts.

I actually dealt with the urgency argument

I think the entirety of your argument against urgency was "the soonest this may be catastrophic is 90 years from now so what's another decade or two?". I refer again to the bathtub analogy to rebut that.

I assure you that I didn’t. As I always do when I review a book, I read every page and every footnote and, as I point out in the review, the footnotes mattered because in some of them they hedge on some of their major points without giving the reader any indication that the footnotes would do that. Question for you: did you read the footnotes?

I retract that accusation and I believe you. As for whether I read the footnotes, it looks like I did but it's been over two years so I'm not confident of how well I did.

But now, deep breath, I was ex ante hasty in my poor opinion of your review but I've now carefully read and reread it and I'm doubling down. Some specific responses:

When they consider geoengineering solutions -- technological methods to alter the climate that they admit would cost a small fraction of the carbon tax -- they raise the specter of unspecified unintended consequences and even construct a scenario in which a mysterious foreign government could engage in unchecked geoengineering

Unspecified? They devote many pages to the danger of allowing atmospheric CO2 to increase while counteracting only the warming via reflected solar radiation.

But turn to the footnotes and you see that they are less certain about those storms than they seem in the text

Fair. Like I said to Bryan, the part about extreme weather events seemed least convincing.

Wagner and Weitzman’s strongest and most important claim is that there is an 11 percent chance the earth will warm by 11 degrees or more. How do they achieve this level of specificity?

This line of attack feels like it really misses the point. Wagner and Weitzman go to great lengths to describe the huge amounts of uncertainty surrounding the impacts of climate change. This is what's so frustrating about climate skepticism. "It might turn out fine! The models are horrible! We don't know anything!" Well, we are Bayesians. We put probabilities on everything no matter how deep our ignorance and we do what the math says to do. I think the math says to simultaneously (a) gather more information to refine the probability estimates and (b) reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Crude models and other forms of ignorance make our probability distributions more diffuse. Pointing out that diffuseness isn't a rebuttal.

Judith Curry, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, writes: "[...] These new climate sensitivity estimates add to the growing evidence [...] the much-discussed 'pause' or 'hiatus' in global warming -- the period since 1998 during which global average surface temperatures have not significantly increased"

Aha, that's what Bryan Caplan and Yoram Bauman's bet was about. There has turned out to be no pause. See my other comments in the dialog with Jonathan S above, with link to the temperature graph.

Other commenters are pointing out updates and errors in the IPCC's 2007 report that some of Climate Shock's numbers are based on. I haven't dug in on that but just want to emphasize that this update on the illusory pause in warming seems like a bigger deal.

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Economically illiterate climate activists may say dumb things like "you can't put a dollar value on human lives" or "you can never be too careful" or "if we save even one polar bear, it's worth it" or whatever but "we have no clue how catastrophic this will be or how soon, so let's take a chill pill" is even dumber.

https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/852981816180973568?lang=en

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PS: Oh look, Scott Alexander named Yudkowsky's thing: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy

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