What we’re about
We meet monthly for dinner on the second Monday of the month to discuss climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering. These dinners are free to attend, but everyone is to pay for their own meal. We always use restaurants which do separate checks for a large group, so we don't have to split the bill and everyone can pay with their own credit card.
We feel that you can't be of much use as an environmentalist unless you are technically well-informed. Environmental problems are scientific problems, and how to solve them is an engineering question. If you are not technically well-informed, you will make inaccurate statements about science that are an embarrassment to the environmental movement, and the solutions you advocate will be ill-advised and/or counter-productive. So the purpose of these dinners is to create a space for informative discussion of climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering.
Another problem is that too many meetings occur on Zoom, which is an unsatisfying social experience.
So the purpose of these dinners is two-fold:
- Foster discussion of scientific and technical aspects of climate change and its solutions, thereby elevating the discussion among environmentalists.
- Create a social environment for the NYC climate movement.
Upcoming events
1
Monthly Climate Dinner
Skylight Diner, 402 West 34th St. (10th Ave.), New York City, NY, USThis month we're going to be talking about a report I did on what the IPCC Reports say about the impacts of climate change that will be felt by humans by 2100.
One thing that I have found large language model AI's are very good at is reading long documents and then answering questions about them.
Every few years an IPCC report comes out, and they're typically 1,000 pages long. A lot of careful work goes into them. Most environmentalists, particularly those with jobs, lack the time to read and digest them in their entirety. Often, some of the most famous voices of the climate movement make all sorts of bold statements that are just not backed up by the reports, which is an embarrassment. ChatGPT accounts are free and ChatGPT has read all the IPCC reports. Most environmentalists should be encouraged to engage in conversation with it about what is and isn't in the reports.
Some climate skeptics like to argue that the negative impacts from climate are unlikely to be bad enough to justify the expense and inconvenience of decarbonizing the economy, but they ignore the fat tails -- the low but substantial probabilities of dire worst-case outcomes.
5 attendees
