Comment by obin on Yudkowsky vs Trump: the nuclear showdown. · 2016-11-13T16:37:18.352Z · LW · GW

Scientific consensus is that warming under 2 degrees c could be good, warming over that is bad.

There's no such consensus. There is a consensus (which may be more political than scientific in nature) that below two degrees is somewhat safe, globally and on average (locally, not necessarily; ask the island nations of the Pacific). And my impression is that more recent research has suggested that two degrees may be worse than previously though.

Naively extrapolating, by 2060 solar power should be 20x cheaper, so -- we should still be able to move most of the economy onto clean energy even without subsidies long before we reach dangerous levels of warming.

Naively. I think solar currently accounts for less than one percent of global energy consumption. With CO2 levels still on the rise, there's a long way to go before the world economy is rid of fossils, and we don't know if solar and other renewables can actually scale high and fast enough. There are reasons to suspect they can't. Plus, with renewables like solar, we would also need to be able to store electricity on a massive scale, and that may not be possible either.

Edit: Whoah, -3 with no responses. Now I get why LessWrong shuns politics.