Essay by Eric Worrall
Sabine Hossenfelder is a high profile science influencer. I’m a fan – except for her misconceptions about climate change.
Why I fear for the future of mankind
0.00 We’ve given up on climate change. This is what I take away from the news.
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0:36 About 10 years ago I was diagnosed with a tumour. The doc said I should have it removed as soon as possible. I had a preventive surgery. I voluntarily made myself temporarily miserable, to avoid worse consequences later.
Climate change is like that, just not on an individual level, but on a species level.
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1:59 Another problem has been all the people who claimed that solving this problem would be “simple” and that the energy transition is a win-win solution. Everyone is going to be better off with renewables, because it will create jobs and wealth and prosperity and so on. The most vivid demonstration of this problem has been Greta Thunberg. A child of a reasonably wealthy family in a wealthy country who has never had to work to heat a house or feed a family. Most people knew that these “win-win” tales were always lies.
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2:50 energy transition that isn’t happening because it’s never been realistic. It’s because everyone knew they were being lied to about the true cost. And that’s why they’re against it.
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3:07 isn’t just an American thing, we have this here in Europe too, just not as explicitly. It’s no longer because they don’t believe that the climate is changing or that we’re causing it. It’s because they think they’re being lied to about what the “green deals” will actually mean for them. And it’s why now, I think, a lot of people are relieved that it’s over.
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5:01 This failure worries me not so much about climate change itself. It will be bad for my retirement savings, it will be bad for our children, but maybe in two or three generations, progress will resume. No, it worries me because it means we are almost certainly also too stupid to solve other problems. Regulating artificial intelligence is a good example.
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Read more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBHSmwxgLfQ
Sabine’s video from which the above transcript was taken;
Who am I to criticise a famous physicist like Sabine? Thankfully I’m not alone in calling out Sabine’s climate change blind spot;
I had a conversation with Dr Peter Ridd, the author of the video above, about this time last year. He’s still hopeful Sabine will make that same final leap of understanding which helped his awakening.
There is so much Sabine gets right – she calls out Greta Thunberg’s hollow posturing, she calls out the fatal engineering flaws of the green energy revolution and hydrogen economy, a year ago she called out the absurd attempt to link the LA wildfires to climate change. But like an electron trapped in a potential well of misplaced trust in the scientific community, she can’t quite tunnel her way to intellectual freedom, to the realisation that claims we face an imminent climate crisis are just as nonsensical as claims that renewables are a viable solution to the world’s energy needs.
