Q4RP: Red-Pillers of PPD, what are your political views? Is it true that Red-Pillers tend to lean right? And what (if anything) about TRP philosophy leads to right-wing views?

I assume that you guys are educated on global warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujkcTZZlikg.

It's really scary stuff.

See this:

The world’s coastal planners are preparing for as much as three feet or so of sea-level rise over the next century in response to continuing, rapid planetary warming, but Thwaites could drain enough ice in West Antarctica to raise sea level by an additional 11 feet or so.

We may have already crossed the threshold for an irreversible collapse of this ice sheet, though the data is not conclusive, and there may be processes at work that we don’t fully understand. Given these considerable uncertainties, it is possible that the Thwaites ice sheet will remain nearly stable, or melt slowly enough to have relatively small or long-delayed impacts on coastal regions. But we don’t really know the worst-case for how fast Thwaites could go, and to add to the worries, some parts of East Antarctica and Greenland may behave similarly as the climate continues to warm.

Solid scholarship shows almost no chance that rapidly rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will create a new Garden of Eden, but some chance of rapidly breaking many things we care about. The impacts of warming may be slightly better or worse than we expect. Or much worse. In response to this warming, sea-level rise from melting ice and expanding ocean water is almost unavoidable. How high will depend, to a substantial degree, on what happens over the next few decades in the West Antarctic.

There was a big furor when Bret Stephens published an article in the NYT saying that climate activists should stop being so certain. One climate scientist responded:

(You might refer to http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2147184/component/escidoc:2147185/uncertainty-guidance-note.pdf the 7-page “Guidance Note for Lead Authors of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties”, properly referenced and very frequently cited since in the literature. I am not sure who Mr. Stephens is accusing of certainty, but if it includes the assessed science from the IPCC or the National Academies of the Royal Society, then he is very wrong.) But, my piece also goes further. Mr. Stephens acknowledges that humans are affecting the climate. Humans are raising CO2, and that is having a warming influence, with very high scientific confidence. But, across many parts of the science, the more uncertain you are after that, the more expensive the possible futures, and thus the greater gain to be had from wise policies addressing the issue.

For sea-level rise, a little bit is a “nuisance”, but too much requires abandoning land or building levees or otherwise engaging in more-expensive responses, and higher levees will probably also need to be stronger and perhaps longer, so the costs probably are super-linear; the cost of two feet of rise is more than twice the cost of one foot of rise. Given uncertainty, one can look at various possible futures, estimate the cost and the probability of each, and then average across them to give some “best” cost estimate. For a bell curve of uncertainty and super-linear costs, the more uncertain you are, the more costly the average of those possible futures. But, this isn’t a bell curve; the rise could be a little less or a little more or a lot more. (There is enough ice to raise sea level roughly 200 feet over long times, so the absolute worst case would have really big impacts, and it is hard to think of anything that could offset this on the “good” side.) So, averaging over all possible futures, more uncertainty makes the costs much higher than if we were certain we would get the most-likely IPCC projections. Putting that into economic models seeking efficient or optimal paths has a tendency to recommend greater actions now to restrain warming or prepare for it, in essence taking out insurance against the uncertain future.

Now, given that, would a reader of Mr. Stephen's column learn how much effort scientists put into understanding, quantifying, and communicating uncertainty, and would a reader learn of the many cases (and it is not just sea-level rise) in which greater uncertainty leads to an efficient path involving more actions to reduce warming? And if not, is it really representing what we know?