Respectful dissent is my favorite, as I get to learn. It's the very point of this. So thank you!
Your comment is fair. To react, I need to explain what I'm trying to do with Uncharted Territories (UT).
I believe it's very important to have an deep and accurate understanding of a very broad set of topics to be able to predict where the world is going. For example, if you study fertility crisis you might be happy because you fear about the environment, or you might be worried about the drop in innovation and thus the economy. Or you might realize it doesn't matter because there will be an AI singularity. So to understand fertility well, you need to know about environment, innovation, economy, and AI.
Naturally, it's hard to go both broad and deep, so I need to be careful in both directions: What topics should I dive into? How deep should I go?
I also try to accelerate the process as much as possible, and a key way to do that is studying in public. The last 5 climate articles are this: Me looking into the current status of climate, sharing with everybody, and then giving me feedback on what's right or wrong. This helps me figure out next steps.
For example, as you mention, what's very clear is that a next step would be to look into non-linearities (aka tipping points). Another is more geoengineering. Planetary boundaries. How to apply the precautionary principle. And so on. So over time I'll probably dive into these.
This is why I'm much broader in my statements about climate change. I've been looking into it for 4 months, whereas I've been looking into COVID for 3 years, and my accuracy record on it is quite high, which means I'm better calibrated there. If / when I get to the same level of calibration with climate change, I will quantify my predictions.
Does that make sense?
A good example of this process is iron fertilization. Having read about a dozen papers on it, I'm more confident on my predictions there than in other parts of climate change. So I can have immediate reactions to what you say:
- Iron usually is not a pollutant in the ocean, as it falls relatively quickly in the worst case scenario, and the ocean depths have been a de facto geologic dump for eons.
- Iron is already everywhere. It's in fact one of the most common elements on Earth. So it's not really a pollutant
- Nearly every single time iron fertilization has been tried, there's been algal blooms, suggesting there is a need for it
- Iron bioavailability is not usually a pbm. The pbm is nitrogen bioavailability, and iron is the limiting factor to make nitrogen bioavailable. So it's not like iron is there but ocean algae can't metabolize it. When it's there, they do. It's just not usually there, so algae can't take it, and without it, the few that can break down the N2 triple bond to make nitrogen bioavailable, can't do that.
As I'm reading your link now, a few more reactions:
1. Ocean circulation takes hundreds or thousands of years. By then, we will have a much better understanding of the world and a better ability to affect it. So we need to solve our problems in the next few decades, not centuries. Depleting north atlantic iron through south atlantic fertilization should not be a concern.
2. The paper linked by the article is confusing, I think because it's not phrased properly. The very 1st sentence is "Marine microbe growth is limited by iron over about half of the global ocean surface" so it's absolutely impossible that the conclusion is "therefore there's enough iron available". What I *think* it says is "iron would be even more scarce without the ligands, making it a total and critical limiting factor, but thanks to the ligands it's only limiting growth in about 50% of ocean surface". If this is true, it's still limiting bacterial growth in 50% of oceans! Also, this is for microbes, but does that include all bacteria? Cyanobacteria? Algae? Seaweed? Phytoplankton?
3. My current thinking about the precautionary principle is we should never stop doing something because we can imagine that maybe something bad happens. With that logic we wouldn't do anything. If we know something bad happens, we stop. If we fear, we try and then assess the issues that emerge. The faster we try, the more we learn and adjust.
Note that the article doesn't mention a single thing we know would jeopardize this idea. Only fears. And opinions: “I THINK we should tackle the source of the problem — reducing our carbon emissions — rather than trying to come up with band-aids”. Well guess what, we're not cutting emissions fast enough, and this doesn't seem like just a band-aid, so maybe we shouldn't close doors that make us uncomfortable just because they're alien.
This type of comment really gets my nerves: "“We shouldn’t do it, unless there are concomitant major reductions in emissions,” he said. “We shouldn’t do it until we know significantly more about how effective it will be. We should only do it if the alternative is major ecosystem/human civilization collapse.”
Well we don't reduce emissions fast enough, if we wait to know for sure it will be too late, and we need to do it now, not when civilization collapses.
Respectful dissent is my favorite, as I get to learn. It's the very point of this. So thank you!
Your comment is fair. To react, I need to explain what I'm trying to do with Uncharted Territories (UT).
I believe it's very important to have an deep and accurate understanding of a very broad set of topics to be able to predict where the world is going. For example, if you study fertility crisis you might be happy because you fear about the environment, or you might be worried about the drop in innovation and thus the economy. Or you might realize it doesn't matter because there will be an AI singularity. So to understand fertility well, you need to know about environment, innovation, economy, and AI.
Naturally, it's hard to go both broad and deep, so I need to be careful in both directions: What topics should I dive into? How deep should I go?
I also try to accelerate the process as much as possible, and a key way to do that is studying in public. The last 5 climate articles are this: Me looking into the current status of climate, sharing with everybody, and then giving me feedback on what's right or wrong. This helps me figure out next steps.
For example, as you mention, what's very clear is that a next step would be to look into non-linearities (aka tipping points). Another is more geoengineering. Planetary boundaries. How to apply the precautionary principle. And so on. So over time I'll probably dive into these.
This is why I'm much broader in my statements about climate change. I've been looking into it for 4 months, whereas I've been looking into COVID for 3 years, and my accuracy record on it is quite high, which means I'm better calibrated there. If / when I get to the same level of calibration with climate change, I will quantify my predictions.
Does that make sense?
A good example of this process is iron fertilization. Having read about a dozen papers on it, I'm more confident on my predictions there than in other parts of climate change. So I can have immediate reactions to what you say:
- Iron usually is not a pollutant in the ocean, as it falls relatively quickly in the worst case scenario, and the ocean depths have been a de facto geologic dump for eons.
- Iron is already everywhere. It's in fact one of the most common elements on Earth. So it's not really a pollutant
- Nearly every single time iron fertilization has been tried, there's been algal blooms, suggesting there is a need for it
- Iron bioavailability is not usually a pbm. The pbm is nitrogen bioavailability, and iron is the limiting factor to make nitrogen bioavailable. So it's not like iron is there but ocean algae can't metabolize it. When it's there, they do. It's just not usually there, so algae can't take it, and without it, the few that can break down the N2 triple bond to make nitrogen bioavailable, can't do that.
As I'm reading your link now, a few more reactions:
1. Ocean circulation takes hundreds or thousands of years. By then, we will have a much better understanding of the world and a better ability to affect it. So we need to solve our problems in the next few decades, not centuries. Depleting north atlantic iron through south atlantic fertilization should not be a concern.
2. The paper linked by the article is confusing, I think because it's not phrased properly. The very 1st sentence is "Marine microbe growth is limited by iron over about half of the global ocean surface" so it's absolutely impossible that the conclusion is "therefore there's enough iron available". What I *think* it says is "iron would be even more scarce without the ligands, making it a total and critical limiting factor, but thanks to the ligands it's only limiting growth in about 50% of ocean surface". If this is true, it's still limiting bacterial growth in 50% of oceans! Also, this is for microbes, but does that include all bacteria? Cyanobacteria? Algae? Seaweed? Phytoplankton?
3. My current thinking about the precautionary principle is we should never stop doing something because we can imagine that maybe something bad happens. With that logic we wouldn't do anything. If we know something bad happens, we stop. If we fear, we try and then assess the issues that emerge. The faster we try, the more we learn and adjust.
Note that the article doesn't mention a single thing we know would jeopardize this idea. Only fears. And opinions: “I THINK we should tackle the source of the problem — reducing our carbon emissions — rather than trying to come up with band-aids”. Well guess what, we're not cutting emissions fast enough, and this doesn't seem like just a band-aid, so maybe we shouldn't close doors that make us uncomfortable just because they're alien.
This type of comment really gets my nerves: "“We shouldn’t do it, unless there are concomitant major reductions in emissions,” he said. “We shouldn’t do it until we know significantly more about how effective it will be. We should only do it if the alternative is major ecosystem/human civilization collapse.”
Well we don't reduce emissions fast enough, if we wait to know for sure it will be too late, and we need to do it now, not when civilization collapses.