1) they are way outside the consensus;

2) I would respect someone who said, “Things will be really bad with more CO2. For the benefit of life on earth, I am sad to say that the world’s poor must stay poor. And since it is only fair, I am drastically reducing my own carbon footprint.” Garrett Hardin might have said something like that but I don’t hear it from anyone today.

Fail to safe nuclear design, thorium, fundamental research into solar with storage, consumption/pollution taxes, coal carbon sequestration. In other words it is still just an energy problem with energy solutions.

It would be nice if college leaders did not participate in political strawmen.

We also have this, which brings into the realm of massive doubt any and all numbers produced heretofore and hereafter with respect to temperature measurement. How do you maintain any degree (pun intended) of data credibility when you massage your numbers and tout the revised results?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/noaa-caught-rewriting-us-temperature-history-again.php

But the majority of news coverage is just, more carbon dioxide=bad, for instance this piece from USA today http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/05/06/carbon-dioxide-global-warming-climate-change/70881210/ , so unless you’re pretty scientifically literate (the perils of overfitting should be taught to all high school students IMO), motivated to look at the evidence yourself, and by default a contrarian, it’s going to be pretty easy to accept the narrative that CO2 is bad and that the best way to deal with it is to reduce its output.

Bryan Caplan’s theory of policy preferences as an irrational good here makes a lot of sense to me. No one will perceive themselves to bear the costs directly for being overly-pessimistic about global warming. So you can hold whatever beliefs make you feel like part of the club.

How is it even remotely defensible that the governors of Swarthmore so egregiously ignore the scientific consensus represented in the IPCC Assessment Reports? You can cite scientists (350.org) and nonscientists (Naomi Klein) who accept conclusions that go well beyond the science and economics. But why should the governors of a prestigious institution accept those extreme conclusions? Are they all such experts in the field? What does this say about them? About their institution?

Seriously, the very best thing it can say about their institution is that its managers will parrot what they think an overly concerned and undereducated audience want to hear when they’re not thinking seriously. All other conclusions are worse!

Dropping CO2 to the replacement level involves about a 90% reduction in total world CO2 emissions, and thus going back to the level of emissions of around 1910. Anything above the replacement level is going to let CO2 keep rising, and thus temperature rising, and thus merely delay any coming catastrophe rather than prevent it. I have not seen anyone put forward a real proposal to drop CO2 to the replacement level; have you?

Alternatively, someone worried about CO2 might allow the emissions to continue, but take steps to either sequester CO2 back out of the atmosphere, or to mitigate the negative consequences of CO2 (assuming there are any). Again, I see very little activity in either of those areas. I would welcome any pointers you can provide on someone pushing for them.

I see neither of the above approaches, which is what I’d expect from someone who consistently believes CO2 is highly dangerous. Instead, everyone who talks about CO2 seems to push the less coherent green policies that have been pushed for many decades, only now with CO2 being used as an excuse for them. Things like ethanol, wind power, electric cars, and trains. I think anyone serious would concede that these measures are all ineffective if CO2 is truly a catastrophic danger.

This is a great line.

I wouldn’t think of Swarthmore as uniformly buying into the rhetoric of catastrophe. Here’s a history professor there writing against it http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2015/02/11/against-divestment/ .

A more accurate read of this announcement, I think, is that the only real piece of news is that they continue to not divest, and the rest is just cheap talk indented to placate activists. It’s been a tough few years at Swarthmore, partly due to Title IX stuff http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/04/what-have-we-done-to-our-young-men-and-women , a testy fight over Robert Zoellick withdrawing from a commencement speech in 2013 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/swarthmore-commencement-speaker-withdraws-over-controversy , climate activists hijacking a BoM meeting two years ago http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324216004578483080076663720 , and some race/power/privilege issues that came to the fore in a particularly memorable act of defacement a few years ago http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/swarthmore-colleges-rude-awakening-to-oppression-in-its-midst/ (piece is written by a very far left professor at Swarthmore, George Lakey).

All these details might not be of interest to an outsider, but I think they’re pretty important for understanding the context of why the BoM has decided to go with such a strident message.

-Seth Green
Swarthmore 2010

I personally don’t think the evidence justifies that belief, no. I think activists vastly underestimate future generations’ ability to adapt. But I think you’ll find that if you dig a little bit, the activists do have a consistent belief system built around a worst case scenario, mechanisms by which it would happen, and what we should do in the short term to stop it. Here’s an excerpt http://350.org/about/science/

“That “350 ppm” is where 350.org gets its name. “PPM” stands for “parts per million,” which is simply a way of measuring the ratio of carbon dioxide molecules to all of the other molecules in the atmosphere. Many scientists, climate experts, and progressive national governments agree with Dr. Hansen that 350 ppm is the “safe” level of carbon dioxide… Right now we’re at 400 ppm, and we’re adding 2 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Unless we are able to rapidly turn that around and return to below 350 ppm this century, we risk triggering tipping points and irreversible impacts that could send climate change spinning truly beyond our control.

So far, we’ve experienced about 1 degree (Celsius) of warming, and the impacts are frightening. Glaciers everywhere are melting and disappearing fast, threatening the primary source of clean water for millions of people. Mosquitoes, who like a warmer world, are spreading into lots of new places, and bringing malaria and dengue fever with them. Drought is becoming much more common, making food harder to grow in many places. Sea levels have begun to rise, and scientists warn that they could go up as much as several meters this century. If that happens, many of the world’s cities, island nations, and farmland will be underwater.”

And you’ll see on the bottom a bunch of citations.

I think a more productive conversation would come from suspending disbelief for a moment and engaging with the evidence they present. At the moment I don’t have time to do more than a brief review but someday I’d like to.