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.
Totally agree. Aside from the climate change blind spot and the… awkward… pretend phone calls from “Elon”, she’s worth watching for science news. And she changed her blouse at last…
I don’t know any current physicist who still insists that this supposed climate change is definately caused by humans, highly certain and cause for alarm.
Because you need all those elements to keep the narrative going and that means people force themselves into dogmatic thinking and work backwards from a foregone conclusion. Once you start to doubt any element the narrative disappears as does the alarm. So Sabine holds on to the pain to gain idea. Exactly how much she would like humans to suffer to get to the promised non climate change land is not known. I guess it is an uncomfortable question for any alarmist. They’d rather avoid it, for obvious reasons. Just like the ‘population bomb’, another avoided real life equation. Will she ever get to Lomborg territory? Unlikely..
Sabine is very smart, obviously. Unfortunately, it is clear she has not dug into the nature and quality of the science that supports claims of man-made CO2=>global warming. Her analogy is laughably inappropriate in at least two ways. It’s sad. She really ought to know better….
She doesn’t need to dig into climate science. When people lie as much as the climate alarmists have, about their own science and about their opposite thinkers, it’s because they have run out of logic and facts. You don’t need to cover up the truth, or lie about it, or force all your round pegs into square holes.
She is a washed up physicist whose research area quantum gravity imploded on her 2019 and she almost had a breakdown. Post crisis she fell out of love with academia moved back to Germany and end up in science media with the likes of Doctor Karl She knows the language of physics but has long fallen out from modern physics that she gets basics wrong.
She seems to be extremely susceptible to propaganda.
https://x.com/skdh/status/1851304789977809029
Look in the mirror, Scissor. Most people are very susceptible to propaganda which supports their own prejudices and preconceptions.
She believes in the so-called “climate crisis” so she is susceptible to climate industry propaganda. You were duped by the anti-vax scammers so you’re susceptible to anti-vax propaganda.
Define smart. Can you be ”smart” and still be an idiot?
In “Dungeons and Dragons” terms: Intelligence 16, Wisdom 3. 😉
That is to say, “Can score well on an IQ test, but might not have the sense to come in out of the rain.
Yes, many people are smart idiots.
Of course you can.
As an Idiot who is occasionally smart(or my idiocy makes me believe so) I know what I’m talking about – or not.
Your question is a great example.
Just research the term Idiot Savant if you want to get the most radical result.
Or in a more casual way: Everyone is an idiot now and then.
Smart people usually to a lesser degree.
But once they fall for an idiocy they become the most adamant believers, as their “smartness”, and degrees + the fact that their smart friends would also never fall for an idiocy,
makes them immune to arguments brought by people labelled crazy conspiracy theorists.
Just like her ‘Preventive’ Cancer Surgery. She was diagnosed with a tumour so it was no longer ‘Preventive’. If she would take her breast away to not have breast cancer before being diagnosed with a tumour than it would be preventive.
“I had a preventive surgery. I voluntarily made myself temporarily miserable, to avoid worse consequences later.”.
Voluntarily.
The Looney Left also had preventive surgeries. Total Lobectomies to prevent conscious thought from destroying their preconceived notions.
The difference being that she knew she had cancer, it could be diagnosed and treated… climate science is more like the Dr telling you one day you are going to die, all the signs are there… we just dont know when or how, but some of the medical profession believe the indications are all there…you should start taking action NOW or you are doomed.
Other than that I really like Sabine and subscribe to her channel.
And to avoid that maybe/maybe not soon death, you must be cold and starving all the time.
So it was no longer preventive.
Yeah, it’s more like being told that you were born into a body of the wrong gender and they are forcing you to begin a cocktail of drugs along with an affirming transition surgery. You may suffer temporarily from the transition, but it’s for your own good.
Many “preventative” surgeries are also totally unnecessary, very expensive and net harmful, up to and including the death of the patient.
The medical industrial complex makes bank on unnecessary procedures. Treating people who aren’t actually in any mortal danger and claims that they are “saving lives”. The parallels to climate panickers are there.
Sorry, Sabine… but “Climate Action”….. IS THE CANCER !!
Even if it’s wasn’t the cancer, the treatment is much worse than the disease. It’s like treating a stubbed toe with double amputation of the legs above the knee.
Climate Action is the surgery that kills the patient in order to save him.
And the surgery is based on wrong diagnosis.
But once you understand that humans are the cancer in the eyes of the eugenist/philantrophist class,
the surgeries and vaccines start to make sense.
Flawed premise callout:
Assumption that government regulation is the solution for hard problems.
One of the reasons I love being a software developer, when I’m not writing for WUWT, is the government hasn’t got a clue how to regulate my industry. I speak to people in other industries and they need permits and licenses, but in my industry all you need is a reputation for quality work and skill.
There have been a few attempts to regulate the industry, such as government sponsored industry associations, but nobody took them seriously.
If they can’t figure out how to regulate software, they’ve got no chance of regulating AI.
IIRC, there are some standards on how to develop safety critical software, which is probably driven by liability concerns.
When I worked in aviation electronics, FAA regulations required that we test every single line of code, and document the tests and the results. Also, final tests could not be done by the developer who wrote the code.
Expensive as heck, but when lives are on the line, worth it.
The testing staff was several times larger than the development staff.
Eric:
Totally agree that the gov has been inept at regulation on multiple issues.
As to AI, since the AI developers themselves don’t know how it comes up with much of its answers, how is anyone, much less the government, to regulate it?
As ErikM says below: maybe just make the developers liable for most adverse events their AI produces.
btw One thing the government should do: never, ever put AI in control of our military responses.
Absolutely agree with that last statement.
The original Terminator story had a subtle self consistency and symmetry which some of the other episodes didn’t. Like the reason Skynet attacked the humans.
Skynet didn’t attack humans out of malice, it attacked humans because it was following its programming on how to handle attempted sabotage. When Skynet became self aware, and all the monitoring systems redlined, the scientists responsible for oversight panicked and tried to shut Skynet down. So as per programming, people who try to shut down Skynet are foreign infiltrators and must be stopped by any means necessary, to preserve the integrity of the North American defence network. As more and more people tried to shut down Skynet, the circle of identified traitors widened, until it came to encompass the entire human race.
The movie”Colossus, the Forbin Project” made the last point quite vividly back in the 70s. Still one of my favorite movies.
WRT “regulating” AI I think the problem is less with the actual neural tech than the data that is used to train it. It is no different than with humans, if you are “educated” to accept a bunch of speculative and often wrong information as authorative then of course you are not going to form rationally intelligent conclusions about these topics. so CURATION of the training data is the real key. The model of “peer reviews” science journalism as it once was is a good start, but obviously we now recognize how much that can be corrupted. So the companies who really focus on solving this issue are the ones who are going to prevail imho.
In September 2025, the UN SG Gutteres literally stated: “The climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win”. As the UN has already lost everything – global security-wise and otherwise there is a serious reason to believe that they will not win this “race” either. Take it for granted, adapt as necessary and be happy (and please do not allow more “government regulation”).
I’ve not seen much to adapt to yet. Slightly milder winters are not a problem and summers are pretty much the same as ever. There’s a lot of Chicken Little going on.
Yeah, nothing to see here climate-wise.
It’s almost time to plant the garden.
Correct. I should have been more specific: Adapt to milder winters and greener environment.
I used to be a regular viewer, but her climate change fanaticism makes her a menace, so I deleted her channel.
That’s silly. No one is 100% perfectly aligned with your thoughts.
No it isn’t. If she pushes garbage, she’s a menace.
If your UPS/FedEx/DHL/PO pushes garbage, do you care? It doesn’t affect his job. Her climate views don’t affect the rest of what she says, from what I have seen.
Pushing garbage puts your entire thought making process into doubt. If she’s this wrong on things I can check up on, why should I believe her on anything I can’t check?
I don’t hire UPS/FedEx/DHL/PO for their ability to think. I hire them to deliver packages to the right address on time.
So if they think it, but don’t tell you, it’s OK ?
It’s not about being “100% perfectly aligned”, it’s about opportunity cost.
I can’t take seriously the scientific views of someone who’s thoroughly convinced that there’s a ‘climate crisis’, so I’m not going to waste my time watching her videos.
And she’s a menace because those peddling this view have pushed Western civilisation to the very edge – we can’t even keep the lights on, let alone defend ourselves.
With her not keeping up with research she also makes ridiculous claims like physics understanding hasn’t advanced in 40-50 years and philosophy is a science.
https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292
It’s like a Monty Python skit what has modern physics ever done for us
Well they gave us the Higgs Boson and Field, Gravity waves and GW observatories, first image of a black hole, Quark-Gluon Plasma, Topological order, Macroscopic Superposition
Sure but beside that what has modern physics ever done for us … nothing.
Not all issues are of equal importance.
If she disagrees with me on what is the best classic car. That’s no big deal.
If she’s pushing the climate catastrophe nonsense, that’s a big deal.
I went through a phase a few years ago when I unsubscribed, because for a time it seemed like every episode was yet another dreary warning about the fake climate crisis, but she’s calmed down a bit since them.
Maybe I missed that phase. I remember only a few. This one, I saw the title and never bothered to watch it. Some of others I did watch, and she seemed to be more of a fence-sitter than hysterical.
Me too- since she’s so wrong on climate she’s probably wrong on many other issues.
“Look at it from space.”
OK I did that. I conclude there is no risk of harm from the emissions of CO2 resulting from our beneficial use of natural hydrocarbons as fuel.
Physics. (Stop the video and read the text description for a more complete explanation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yarzo13_TSE
Thank you for listening.
From space we can see that the planet has been greening for the last few decades. That’s a good thing.
Really, can anyone who is a fanatic true believer in Man-caused catastrophic climate change be accurately described as “intelligent”? Certainly not wise. Maybe “otherwise intelligent”, like a PhD in some semi-scientific field who also firmly believes in elves? Or that cats can read humans’ minds? Wait, that one is real…
Watch Peter Ridd’s video and you might feel more sympathy. Peter Ridd went through the same journey, it’s hard for someone who has been enmeshed in academia for much of their life to accept that an entire field of science has been corrupted. Ridd described picking at the edges of the pseudoscience structure, just as Sabine is doing, before he realised just how bad it is.
Even Anthony once admitted he believed in the climate crisis until he realised it didn’t add up.
My personal moment of realisation came when greens who told us we face an existential crisis, in the same breath said nuclear was too dangerous – the risk of a few meltdowns was worse than the fiery death of the entire planet. For me that was a step too far, and that is the point when I started digging deeper.
Me too – Once I started digging I quickly realised how shoddy the “science” really is.
Once you start down the rabbit hole there’s no way back.
Sabine really needs to have a peek into the rabbit hole.
IMO, you are not much of a scientist if you can’t figure out that human-caused climate change is nothing more than speculation, assumptions and unsubstantiated assertions. There is not one shred of evidence connecting CO2 to Earth’s climate and weather.
The problem is the Earth’s climate is so complicated that a person really has to have a Lot of information from many disciplines to understand it all, and most people, including scientists, don’t look into the issue deeply enough, and instead assume there is evidence, because that is easy to assume if you don’t look deeply enough. So a lot of people take the easy way out and conform to the consensus.
If human-caused climate change scared me enough, I would take the time to study the subject. A lot of people don’t/can’t do this so they go with the flow, and end up staying scared. For no good reason.
Most scientists don’t have time to dig through the minutia of unrelated fields. They have limited mental bandwidth and a presupposition of truthfulness of colleagues. They aren’t reading the papers in other fields and likely are just hearing the press releases and a few abstracts if something gets their attention. By the time obvious BS finally hits their perception, they usually react in disbelief that an entire field has been sucked down a wormhole. Most don’t follow up to determine if it is just that one author/group of authors because it takes time that keeping up with their own research just doesn’t afford them.
Academia is set up with a one-way concept of collegiality where one is not allowed to criticize the works of leftist, yet will be kicked to the curb if one speaks in support of tradition. If the result of a paper supports the implementation of one-world socialism, it doesn’t matter if its data and analysis are pure rubbish, it is sacrosanct. If one criticizes it, one is throwing away a career, so most don’t.
I had just come out of the Ozone wars, and I noticed that many of the most vociferous climate warriors were the same clowns who had been pushing the CFC’s will kill all life on earth nonsense.
So I wasn’t inclined to believe them from the get go. Once I did a little research, I knew that they had just shifted from one scam to another.
It’s so very tedious to see in 2026, supposedly intelligent well-connected people discovering something that was evident in 2001.
I posted links under Sabine’s videos years ago. She never changed her story.
Also, I doubt Sabine will mention (or perhaps doesn’t know) that the reason modelers use anomalies is because they think all the simulation error is a constant. Supposedly all of the error is already present in “the base-state” and carries on unchanged in the iterated simulations.
Differencing is supposed to subtract away the constant base-state error, leaving behind nothing but an absolutely correct anomaly. The idea is mind-numbingly stupid, but so blindingly wonderfully self-serving that the modelers just can’t let it go.
This is also why modelers carry on about simulations being a boundary-value problem, not an initial-value problem. They hold that forward simulation is free of any change in the error-structure – an implicit assertion of possessing a perfect physical theory.
All of this escapes Sabine, the self-elected spokesperson of physics.
Sabine has mentioned and complained about models being non-physical because they get absolute temperature so wrong, one of her videos hilighted the absolute model temperature bar which appears next to some of the climate model ensemble graphs, so she’s definitely picking around the edges of the problem. Peter hilighted this in his video.
She looks a bit like that guy who heads up “The American Federation of Teachers” union, Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten.
Can’t you find a smaller picture?
That one is bad enough to put anyone off their feed.
😎
Sorry about that.
The source photo was smaller before I copied it.
Oh-h Sabine! Bad scientist!
There is no doubt that she unquestioningly believes some falsehoods.
Here’s an example: all CO2-based arguments are based on an idea you can easily find in thousands of places: that without GHG’s the temperature of the atmosphere (presumably at 2m altitude) would be -18 C. This is based on the observation that the average temperature of the surface of the moon is -18 (albedos assumed equal).
Think about that. The NASA/GISS/IPCC comparison, repeated endlessly since the 80’s, is that the average temperature of the surface of the Moon (which has no atmosphere) informs us as to what the air temperature will be on Earth (which does have an atmosphere).
All her repetitions of “climate disasters, extinctions, storms” etc are based on the fabled “33 degrees of warming”. She simply accepts the lie that absent GHG’s, the atmosphere will cool because there is no GHG to intercept IR radiation. That is Gavin Schmidt’s oft-repeated claim.
The only way for Gavin and for Sabine to be right is if convection heat transfer and heat conduction stop working in the absence of GHG’s. How dumb is that? How foolish does a community of climate scientists have to be to accept that the perfectly clear atmosphere will magically stop the surface of the Earth from heating the air? Gavin’s idea is that without GHG’s the surface will heat up in the daytime and radiate all that energy into space (like the Moon) and the average temperature will be -18 C just like the Moon.
This anti-physical idea may not immediately be obvious. But if the ground heats the air, which obviously it will, how will it cool in the absence of any ability to emit IR?
A concomitant fact of GHG’s warming the air it is it confers the ability to cool by radiation. If the ability to cool by radiation is removed, air heated by the surface has no way to cool save by convection to that same (radiating) surface at night.
If Sabine thought for a few minutes about how to atmosphere really works, not just half of the equation, she would immediately understand that the claim for a logarithmic CO2 heating curve from -18 to +15 cannot possibly be true. The story about, “water vapour is only a feedback” is patently false. To be true, ice sublimination would have to be dependent on the presence of GHG’s. It’s not.
The concatenation lies that convection and conduction heat transfer plus sublimination ceasing in the absence of GHG’s lies at the root of ALL claims for anthropogenic global warming.
How can all those fanciful stories about disaster and extinction be believed by anyone with a basic knowledge of thermodynamics? The entire concept is ridiculous. As GHG’s tend to zero, the temperature of the air will shoot higher, having no way to cool.
The terrestrial environment would be far more content with 2000 ppm CO2, as it was for billions of years in the past.
Feeling sorry for you stuck in Val Quentin at -25 Crispin. Here’s an interesting paper for you with some watts/sq.M of all versus none of various gases in the atmosphere….including N2 and O2 numbers which are hard to find. See fig.1. Clear sky numbers.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2012GL051409
I am never stuck in Val Quentin! I just returned from Tucson where my son is working on the breathing system for the Halo Space Station module 1. I got to hold one of the pieces of it. Before that I was in China from Harbin to Zhuhai for a month. I would have edited my headline name to reflect that but Anthony changed the login so I can no longer conveniently have “Crispin in Val Quentin but really in Tangshan”.
Thanks for the link.
BTW, I greatly enjoy Sabine’s missives, but the physics of climate change alarmism is so utterly flawed that it is hard to believe proper scientists don’t look more closely at some of the basic claims, such as that the Earth would be a frozen ball without GHG’s. The radiative contribution to the heating of the atmosphere would fall to zero, but convection heat transfer would continue at about double its present value.
DMacK
Now that I have had a chance to read the whole paper, i can say that you were correct to report it gives W/m^2 but is ignores the temperature of the atmosphere. There is no mention (at all) of the heating of the air due to the clear sky insolation at noon in the tropics. You see, the misdirection of the argument to W/m hides the actual heating of the air. This obscuration goes back a long way. I am pretty sure the earliest models of the atmosphere – the guys in the ’90’s – realized this. Even clever analysis by Monckton and others focus on the change in the elevation of the effective radiation height of the atmosphere. There is narry a mention of the loss of cooling ability with a drop in emissivity. I tried to engage Monckton on this channel but he dismissed my point out of hand.
It’s pretty easy to give an analogy. f you have a highly reflective metal surface, it has a very low emissivity. If it is heated from behind, it has to get to a high temperature to radiate a given quantum of energy. If you paint little black dots on the surface (akin to IR interactive molecules) its radiation increases with the increase in emissivity. This continues until it is completely black at which time and condition the temperature is at a minimum. If you then remove the black dots one by one, the temperature at equilibrium has to increase in response. That is akin to removing GHG’s from the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is in deed “heated from behind” by convection heat transfer from the surface. The rest of the energy is radiated directly to space, fine. It may be that the surface might average -18 but I don’t think so as there would be heat moving to and from the atmosphere by convection. For that to be in equilibrium, the air temperature at 10m or 100m or 5 km would have to be very high.
“ if convection heat transfer and heat conduction stop working in the absence of GHG’s.”
Yet when you have an absolutely dry atmosphere, with minimal so-called GHGs…
… the heat transfer, ie lapse rate, is actually at its maximum.
eg cooling over a desert at night.
bnice
You are correct, the surface would cool at night because it is radiative, but not the atmosphere. The atmosphere would heat in the day time but have no way to cool by radiation (N2 and O2 low power radiation noted).
The only way for the atmosphere to cool at night would be that it becomes so hot that winds would drive hot air down to contact the cold surface and, in equilibrium, transfer as much heat to the surface as it received by convection in the daytime. The temperature of the atmosphere at 1 km altitude for that to happen is very high, certainly well over 100 degrees C.
The importance of this observation is that we cannot arbitrarily assign to GHG’s some form of pro rata assignment of “33 degrees of warming”. Papers analysing radiative contributions to atmospheric heating, even sophisticated ones, ignore the fact that the atmosphere has thermal mass and is heated directly by the surface. They are good at at calculating the Watts/gas but not what the equilibrium temperature would be.
If “all the smart people” leave for a field with better ideas and “all the lazy people” can’t get through the program, then the field selects for easily fooled, adequately aggressive advocates.
More basically, how can there be an “absence of GHG’s” in the atmosphere of a planet 70-80% covered in H2O? All non-condensing GHG’s are trivial in the presence of 2-4% water vapor.
I am addressing a theory proposed by NASA and Gavin Schmidt in particular: that the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere causes “33 degrees of warming”.
The key to understanding how flawed this is finds root in the following: As the concentration of GHG’s drops, the atmospheric warming by radiatively interactive gases is reduced. In theory ,if it is reduced to zero concentration, there is zero warming by radiative gases like CO2 and water vapour. However, reducing radiative warming to zero doesn’t mean the other two forms of heat transfer are reduced. Convection and conduction to and through the atmosphere continue unaffected because they are independent mechanisms.
As the air at 2 m elevation is 33 deg warmer that the average surface of the Moon means nothing – it is completely irrelevant. The Earth has an atmosphere and the Moon doesn’t. If there was a moon the side of Earth with an atmosphere and no water at all, the air temperature would be very high – certainly well over 100 deg C because the surface would be heated by the sun in daylight and lot of that heat would be transferred to the atmosphere, which by definition, cannot cool by radiation.
You are correct, there is zero chance that Earth would have no GHG’s. It is also true that as the GHG concentration is reduced, the ability of the atmosphere to cool is reduced. As for CO2 specifically, there is no evidence that there is a real world response anything similar to the IPCC models of the atmosphere.
That said, it is more important to note that the base argument is pathetically flawed. Absent CO2, the temperature would not be -18 C. It is a ridiculous claim.
One thought, disappointment. Just think of the trillions of dollars spent on education just in the US. Much of that expense coming from tax payers many of whom can barely afford their taxes. Yet here we have people at the pinnacle of education who believe in miracles from CO2. CO2 is a wondrous molecule but it has serious limitations as a greenhouse gas and these people educated at the highest levels know that. Yet they spread falsehoods and promote policies that reach deep into the pockets not only of tax payers but rate payers and others. It is criminal.
Apparently, one of the great “liberal” intellectuals, Bill Maher, doesn’t really know the difference between carbon, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
Always wondered how someone thought he should be host of a show named “politically incorrect” – I tuned in one time and he was anything but that.
Yep, I don’t look to Bill for guidance on anything.
Broken record but…
“Much of that expense coming from tax payers“
should be
“Much of that expense coming from future tax payers“
I think you would be surprized, Bob. ”Wood for trees” spring to mind, as does ”faith”
Click image. (Last sentence by Dr Bill Johnston)
Since I first became interested (distracted?) by the whole climate broohaha, I have thought that scientific studies of Earth’s climates’ behaviors ought to continue apace as physics science requires.
But the leaps being made into wholesale re-working of reliable, affordable energy solutions was rank idiocy, and those promoting same ought to be locked up for their own welfare and ours.
My position on this situation has not changed.
I suggest you think about fixing your home’s foundation before you know where the jacks need to go.
I’m guessing you know nothing about construction.
Climate action is more like a quack amputating a patient’s limb for a misdiagnosis of cancer that the patient doesn’t have and is not of high risk of developing. Hossenfelder is an internet climate change alarmist grifter.
I refuse to watch clickbait videos with people with stupid expressions as the main presentation. Appealing to the lowest.
I’m afraid I don’t really care much for Sabine. I’ve never been able to watch one of her videos all the way to the end. She frequently says that she does not believe in free will, which is an insurmountable red flag. There’s no point in hearing her speculations about physics when she’s that metaphysically blinkered.
I don’t think Sabine is necessarily saying free will doesn’t exist, she’s just saying that current theories of the nature of time don’t have a place for free will.
Is the world quantum random? In that case, does a continuous re-rolling of a truly random set of dice constitute free will?
Is the future set in stone, with the present moment being an illusion? No free will if the entire history of the universe is already as fixed as the lattice of a diamond.
Are there many worlds? No free will if every possible choice is made, and we have the illusion of choice, because we can only remember one timeline through a sea of infinite possibilities.
BUT all of these theories of time and reality are incomplete, and Sabine would be the first to admit this. Nobody knows for sure how time works, and without an understanding of time, and a solid, testable theory of how quantum weirdness connects to Einstein’s spacetime, nobody can rule out the possibility that “free will” will turn out to be an important constituent of universe.
In the meantime I believe I have free will, and that seems a pretty good basis for life, even if physics hasn’t discovered a “free will” quantity which can be measured and computed.
Preventative surgery for a tumour is nonsense. What is cut out to prevent a tumour, guessing which bits of the body need to be cut out just in case a tumour might grow, but there’s no evidence it will? Now that sounds like the climate change lunacy.
If a tumor is present and will become life threatening in the future. Cutting it out now, while it is small and non-life threatening is a good call.
I have heard of women who come from families with a very strong breast cancer history, who once one cancer was found, had both breasts removed, just as a precaution.
If it’s a benign tumor that isn’t growing, the risk from surgery is several times greater than the risk from the tumor.
We have no evidence that CO2 is a problem, much less one that is great enough to rework the world’s economies in order to get rid of.
She still thinks modelling is science?
I follow Sabine’s videos frequently and I find her takes on General Relativity, Quantum Dynamics, High Energy Physics, and the philosophical underpinnings of physics to be informative and entertaining. I particularly like the fact that she is skeptical of physicists in fields with which she is familiar. However, as a non-h-bar physicist (geophysics) who has actually published in the field of paleoclimate, I have found that her near complete lack skepticism about areas with which she clearly knows very little to be disconcerting. This would not matter much if it was some ephemeral backwater of science, but climate science has huge implications for society. I used to regularly comment on her videos about climate, but I’ve clearly been shadow banned, because nobody reacts to my comments any more. It’s almost a classic case of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (not Michael Mann!).
Sabine’s story regarding her cancer treatment leaves a bit to be desired in terms of relevance. The prescribed energy transition treatment to prevent climate change would be more like having your pancreas removed to assure you won’t get pancreatic cancer. Effective perhaps, but not useful.
Dr. Hossenfelder liberally uses YouTube’s “Hide user from channel” (shadowban) feature to avoid criticism & disagreement, and preemptive blocks on X/Twitter for the same purpose. That’s why I unsubscribed from her channel.