Are environmentalists cowards on immigration?

[magellan01]

@GIGObuster

@RaleighRally

Originally Posted by RaleighRally
They just care about what’s best for their own wellbeing. Just like the nativists. If you really want to help poor people, you should not take them to the US at all. Here’s a video to educate you: Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs

And that is not the subject at hand.

What RaleighRally offered is fascinating. But you are right, it is not the subject at hand.

But neither is this:

With many issues to be considered in setting a climate policy one can end up wondering what the role of climate science is in all this.

After all, climate science doesn’t tell us what to do. It doesn’t tell us whether to have a carbon price or where it should be set. Those decisions ultimately involve a range of normative and deliberative issues which are beyond the scope of climatology.

Climatology can tell us, however, what is likely to happen if we don’t act, or if we don’t act with sufficient speed to keep total emissions within specific carbon allocations.

There is no single threshold above which climate change is dangerous and below which it is safe. There is a spectrum of impacts. But some of the largest impacts are effectively irreversible and the thresholds for them are very near.

In particular, the melting and breakdown of polar ice sheets seems to be in the vicinity of a couple of degrees warming. This expectation is based on current high rates of mass loss from the ice sheets compared to relative stability through the Holocene (the past 10,000 years) and on past ice sheet response in periods such as the Pliocene (a few million years ago) when the Earth was a couple of degrees warmer than preindustrial times (and sea level up to 25m higher).

We have already had about 0.8°C warming globally, with another third of a degree locked in by the inertia of the climate system.

That leaves, somewhat optimistically, perhaps a degree or so of wiggle room. Translating that into carbon emissions, if we wish to keep the total warming below about 2°C (with 50% chance), then we have a total global carbon emission allocation of between about 800 and 1000Gt carbon.

We have already emitted about 550Gt, leaving perhaps another 250–450Gt. Current global emissions are about 10Gt per year, growing at roughly 3% per year.

That leaves a few decades at present rates before having committed to 2°C warming and crossing the expected thresholds for ice sheet disintegration. And that is for a 50% chance of not crossing the 2°C threshold. For more comfortable odds of staying within the threshold, the total carbon allocation drops and so the time to threshold is even shorter.

Or this:

A vast number of scientists, engineers, and visionary businesspeople are boldly designing a future that is based on low-impact energy pathways and living within safe planetary boundaries; a future in which substantial health gains can be achieved by eliminating fossil-fuel pollution; and a future in which we strive to hand over a liveable planet to posterity.

At the other extreme, understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to whip up ill-informed, populist rage, and climate scientists have become the punching bag of shock jocks and tabloid scribes.

Aided by a pervasive media culture that often considers peer-reviewed scientific evidence to be in need of “balance” by internet bloggers, this has enabled so-called “sceptics” to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny.

The OP is not about global warming (as much as you’d like it to be). It is about sustainability, the ways population and immigration relate to it, and the extent to which environmentalists did an about-face on the issue and are afraid of it. Now it might very well be that global trumps these considerations, but that does not mean that they are not valid considerations in their own right.

One valid consideration is the environmental health, not of the globe, but of a particular region, or nation. One can very well be concerned about global warming and the health of particular ecosystems or areas. Rather than be chalked up as a failing, you should be thrilled that there are people out there looking at global warming AND other environmental issues. But it does seem that your emotions regarding the issue get in the way of you acknowledging some basic facts. Even when you agree that other issues are valid, and being concerned locally is valid, you in the next breadth revert back to a blustery dismissal of the issue of environmental health/sustainability/population as “silly”.