[QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?

VipulNaik

Note: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.

I have written a couple of blog posts on my understanding of climate forecasting, climate change, and the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis (here and here). I also laid down the sources I was using to inform myself here.

I think one question that a number of readers may have had is: given my lack of knowledge (and unwillingness to undertake extensive study) of the subject, why am I investigating it at all, rather than relying on the expert consensus, as documented by the IPCC that, even if we're not sure is correct, is still the best bet humanity has for getting things right? I intend to elaborate on the reasons for taking a closer look at the matter, while still refraining from making the study of atmospheric science a full-time goal, in a future post.

Right now, I'm curious to hear how you formed your views on climate change. In particular, I'm interested in answers to questions such as these (not necessarily answers to all of them, or even to only these questions).

What are your current beliefs on climate change? Specifically, would you defer to the view that greenhouse gas forcing is the main source of long-term climate change? How long-term? Would you defer to the IPCC range for climate sensitivity estimates?
What were your beliefs on climate change when you first came across the subject, and how did your views evolve (if at all) on further reading (if you did any)? (Obviously, your initial views wouldn't have included beliefs about terms like "greenhouse gas forcing" or "climate sensitivity").
What are some surprising things you learned when reading up about climate change that led you to question your beliefs (regardless of whether you changed them)? For instance, perhaps reading about Climategate caused you to critically examine your deference to expert consensus on the issue, but you eventually concluded that the expert consensus was still right.
If you read my recent posts linked above, did the posts contain information that was new to you? Did any of this information surprise you? Do you think it's valuable to carry out this sort of exercise in order to better understand the climate change debate?

Note: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.

What are your current beliefs on climate change? Specifically, would you defer to the view that greenhouse gas forcing is the main source of long-term climate change? How long-term? Would you defer to the IPCC range for climate sensitivity estimates?
What were your beliefs on climate change when you first came across the subject, and how did your views evolve (if at all) on further reading (if you did any)? (Obviously, your initial views wouldn't have included beliefs about terms like "greenhouse gas forcing" or "climate sensitivity").
What are some surprising things you learned when reading up about climate change that led you to question your beliefs (regardless of whether you changed them)? For instance, perhaps reading about Climategate caused you to critically examine your deference to expert consensus on the issue, but you eventually concluded that the expert consensus was still right.
If you read my recent posts linked above, did the posts contain information that was new to you? Did any of this information surprise you? Do you think it's valuable to carry out this sort of exercise in order to better understand the climate change debate?

When I was young I was quite the environmentalist, but I grew out of it around age 7 or so(~1992, when it was still fairly new). Didn't have much of a rational basis for it(truth be told, the moment I remember was reading a book by a lady named Harms, and thinking that didn't make any sense for someone named Harms to be doing something I so strongly associated with helping, so I drifted off to other things to geek out about instead - yes, I was a strange kid). I sort of dropped AGW with all the other baggage of that era for many years.

Didn't think about it much until I got into political debate again around 2001. I was a hard-line libertarian by then, and hung out in a pretty sarcastic circle, so seeing AGW as a big-government plot was easy. Defaulted to that for a little while, but then I took a spectroscopy class in university and a simple look at the absorption spectrum of CO2 makes it clear that it is, in fact, a greenhouse gas, so the theory must have some truth.

It was still a second-tier issue for a long time - Iraq took up most of my political debate time for years. The next moment I remember was reading Bjorn Lomborg in about 2005, and thinking that there was finally someone who I thought really made sense on the topic. AGW is real, but it's not a catastrophe waiting to happen - if it was, it'd have happened at some point in our planet's history, so negative feedback has to exist. It'll raise temperatures, which will have both positive and negative effects, and while the cost of the negatives outweighs the benefits of the positives, the present value of the sum is far too small to be worth worrying about.

My views largely haven't changed since then. AGW is scientifically real(though somewhat overblown, and I don't have a lively confidence in the accuracy of their pretty bad models), but worrying about it is economically silly. And the economic studies seem to back me up - the ones that say it's bad use ridiculously low discount rates, which is about the only number that matters over that time scale. I favour some mild mitigation efforts - a revenue-neutral carbon tax for example, since it has no real societal cost - and research into how to geoengineer for cooler temperatures if we hit the black swan and have to worry about a catastrophe, but put the real money into bigger problems.