My own brief and mostly ignorant thoughts: Climate change is probably anthropogenic. Climate change is possibly very dangerous, with, say, as a wild guess, a 10% chance of having severe socioeconomic worldwide repercussions, conditional on no AGI and no nanotech. There seem to be various easy ways to solve or ameliorate the problem (pumping stuff into the atmosphere or oceans), and if it came down to it, I think we'd implement those. The relevant nanotech doesn't seem incredibly difficult. Trying to cut down on carbon emissions seems obviously insane. Moralizing about the virtues of being green sounds obviously insane unless you're a politician or liberal socialite. If you find yourself caring deeply about climate change, your time would probably be better spent caring about bigger, more urgent, and less well-funded problems, like aging/death, or existential risks.
Well, I promised I wouldn't, so I won't, but there are lots of broad statements without justification here, that I would love to expand.
Nevertheless my actual question is being answered, if you and SarahC are at all representative (obviously, I understand that many other opinions will exist). Climate change IS seen as a serious threat, but the idea of changing lifestyles/direction of industrilaisation is seen variously as difficult/impossible/not objectively worthwhile - so we'll deal with the consequences as they arise.
... the general take on climate change here.
Please read a little more before voting this down - I am not looking to initiate a debate on climate change - merely to understand what goes on when it is mentioned.
Disclosure: I am personally concerned about the impact of climate change in the medium term; I am largely convinced it is caused by human activity; I can get moralistic about it. I won't push any of that in this discussion.
I am a relatively recent habituee of the these fora, and mostly I find it full of entertaining, intelligent people talking thoughtfully about things that interest/concern me. I'm pleased - this is rare. Thanks, all.
I searched for mentions of climate change, and read some threads. I got the impression that a majority viewpoint here was that it is not an issue that concerns people here. I got the further impression that it is an issue which arouse feelings of irritation or worse in a significant minority of people here.
Neither of these impressions were strong enough to give me any useful level of certainty, though.
So I thought Will Newsome's wonderful Irrationality Game post might help me with an experiment.
I posted the following:
"Human activity is responsible for a significant proportion of observable climate change. 90% confidence"
I expected (in the topsy turvy context of that post) to get UPvoted, as I assumed a majority of viewers would disagree. I hoped to see some comments which would help clarify my weak impressions.
In fact, I got downvoted (-7), suggesting fairly significant agreement. At the same time, the comment is invisible (to my attempts) in the list of comments to the post, leading me to suspect that it has been removed by a moderator (perhaps on the grounds that CC is viewed as 'political'?).
Can anyone help me? I do not intend to use anything here as a platform for pushing an agenda - I'd just like to understand.