QNA about Climate Change with Professor Jordan Peterson

I Found this old clip so interesting..

Professor Jordan Peterson on climate change and climate policy at the Cambridge Union

Question:

Drought, Flooding, and Ocean Acidification unanticipated for 65 million years. All result from climate change according to over 700 of your fellow scientists so..

I was wondering whether you thought climate change could be an issue that could unite us all or left and right?

Moving us beyond debates about C16 to discussions at the UN Katowice next month where perhaps humanity might finally discover its global map of meaning?

Answer:

No.

Mean those there's a couple of reasons.

I mean the first reason is is that I spent a lot of time, really I worked for UN committee for two years on sustainable economic and ecological development and read a very large amount during that period of time and learned a lot much of which made me much more optimistic than I had been before I read the relevant literature which was a real shock to me,

But the climate change issue is an absolutely catastrophic nightmarish mess and the idea that that will unite us is, that's.. that's.. that's.. not going to unite us. 

I mean first of all, it's very difficult to separate the science from the politics, and second even if the claims, the more radical claims are true, we have no idea what to do about it and so, no. 

And besides it's even worse than that,

Here's one of the worst things about the whole masses. So as you project outwards, with regards to your climate change projections, which are quite unreliable to begin with, and the unreliability of the measurement magnifies as you move forward in time obviously, because the errors accumulate. And so if you go out 50 years the error bars around the projections are already so, so wide that we won't be able to measure the positive or negative effects of anything we do right now.

So how in the world are you going to solve a problem when you can't even measure the consequence of your actions. 

Like how is that even possible?

And besides that what's the solution?

What are we going to do?

Switch to wind and solar? 

well good luck with that. Just try it and see what happens.

We can't store the power. Germany tried it. They produce more carbon dioxide than they did when they started because they had to turn on their coal-fired plants again. That wasn't a very good plan. 

Well we don't want nuclear. It's like okay, what happens at night, huh? The Sun Goes Down. Well isn't that something we should have taken into account. All right we gotta flip on the coal-fired plants. 

Well so it was a complete catastrophe, and all that happened was the price of electricity shot up. There's like zero utility. So that's that's not a solution. 

So what are we gonna do about it?

Well we should cut back, we can't consume as much as we should as we are all consuming.

It's like, well maybe except the data that I've read indicate that if you can get the GDP of people up to about five thousand dollars a year. Then they start carrying about the and the environment cleans up. 

So you could make a perfectly strong case. I think at a reasonable one perhaps even a humane one, that the actual idea would be to get everybody in the world who's poor desperately so, out of poverty as fast as possible which would increase consumption in the short term because then they'd start to care about the environment and things would clean up.

It's like okay, well what are we gonna do about global warming? 

Well good luck figuring that out. I don't see a solution on the horizon.

I look at Bjorn Lomborg work. I really like Bjorn Lomborg. I think he's a real genius. You can look them up if you want. 

He took the UN Millennium Goals. There's 200 of them. That's way too many goals if you're serious about goals by the way, because 200 goals isn't a plan, it's a wish list you have to prioritize. 

I'm serious, you have to prioritize, but they won't prioritize because each of the goals has its constituents and if you prioritize then you irritate the constituents, and but if you don't prioritize then you can't implement the plan.

So what Lomborg did was gather a team, of teams of economists, multiple teams, some of whom were Nobel prize-winning economists. He had them assemble teams. He had them rank order development goals in terms of the return on investment all of the teams, then he averaged across the teams and came up with a final list.

And an addressing global warming wasn't even on the list. The most fundamental. He wrote a book called How to Spend Seventy Five Billion Dollars To Make The World a Better Place, and that's not very much money on a global scale. 

Almost everything that he recommended had to do with increased child nutrition in developing in developing countries. It's like these things are complicated man. These are complicated, it's like well let's fix global warming. It's like okay, well good luck with that.

First of all how are you going to do that? 

And to think that will unite us but certainly not uniting us so far. 

So no, and it's just.. it's just.. it's the kind of low resolution thinking that just gets us absolutely nowhere.

I like what Lomborg did way better. I think it's way more intelligent. So you know maybe if you,

if you increase child nutrition, enough and you produce another, I don't know 10 million geniuses as a consequence of that. 

And maybe way they must figure out what to do about global warming. 

Well I'm serious about that you know. It's not a bad thing to increase the total sum of human brain power you know.

And so we treat these things so lightly.

Well let's fix the planet.

Well we're going to concentrate on global warming.

Well why global warming?

Well cuz everyone thinks that's the biggest catastrophe. 

Well maybe it is, but if you don't have a solution?

Well then what about all those other problems? 

What are you gonna do about them? 

Well we'll ignore them because we can feel good about, you know being concerned about global warming.

It's like I don't.

You know one of the reasons there's more trees in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago. No one knows that, but it's true. And by substantial margin you know. Why in part, because people burned coal instead of wood.

It's like everyone says, well we shouldn't burn coals, like ok fair enough.

What do you want to do burn trees instead? Because that's what poor people would have done. It's like, coal isn't good, well it's better than burning wood.

So these things are complicated. So they're unbelievably complicated, 

and so no. It's not going to unite us and we're not gonna do a damn thing about it either. So it doesn't really matter. 

So well what are we gonna do?

You're gonna stop like having heat?

You're gonna stop having electricity?

You gonna stop driving your cars?

You're gonna stop taking trains?

It's like you're not gonna stop using your iPhones. You're not gonna do any of that. And no wonder.

So, So No. 

Thank you.