Approximately 10 years ago my opinion was that anthropogenic climate change was more likely to be true than not, but that there was no consensus among experts and the science was ambiguous. My opinion was based just on the evidence I had incidentally encountered in the media. After an argument with somebody who I suspected was an ideological devotee of the “climate change must be true” camp, I decided to do a little focused review of the scientific literature. It only took about two weeks of article reading and googling to find out that there already was a consensus, and that the science was pretty darned good. In fact, the scientific consensus had been reached many years prior. It was not at all difficult to sift the facts and reach this conclusion.
The reason ADW still appeared to be undecided 10 years ago was that the issue was being clouded by horseshit arguments and obfuscation from legions of people who were ideologically and politically disinclined to listen to the scientific communty.
Now here we are having lost 20-30 years of precious time that should have been spent making substantive global efforts to reduce emissions. I think the article quoted in the OP is one indication among several that we may have, at long last, reached a point where there is consensus among policy-makers as well as scientists.
Hooray.
The idea that we have just now reached the point where the science is good enough to stop bickering and do something is ludicrous, self-serving, and insulting to anyone who has ever bothered to read an IPCC report or google the term “climate science”. It is my sincere hope, as AGW plays out, that society does not forget or forgive the ideologues who caused decades of delay with their willful ignorance.
One positive effect that should be achieved from reaching consensus that AGW is real should be that the ideologues can now be utterly ignored when they question whether or not AGW is actually a bad thing, or make asinine statements to the effect that trying to save ecosystems and existing natural balances is not worth the pain of emission reduction. I doubt this will come to pass, but one can hope.
I am startled, once again, at all the chit chat about AGW with nary a comment about the underlying problem: TMP. TOO MANY PEOPLE.
We got too many people, folks. That’s our problem. TMP means that AGW is fundamentally unsolvable, especially once you take nuclear power out of the grid.
Let’s say I account for 20 or 30 tons of CO2 per year. Maybe more. I’m rich, I love to travel, and I fly instead of taking the bus. First class when I can; corporate jet when I can. I get new golf clubs almost once a year, and live with only one other person in a big house.
I am the Problem, in short.
Now here’s the thing. My buddy in Tanzania is emitting a couple hundred pounds a year. But if he could, he’d bike instead of walk; bus instead of bike; fly instead of bus; and also live in a big house.
The idiots chasing the AGW solutions are obsessed with teaching me how to be that weirdo living off the land, using his persimmon wood from 1958 to play golf in a cow pasture. It ain’t gonna happen for me, and my Tanzanian friend is trying as hard as he can to make sure he gets his share of cool Stuff, too.
So…why is it that we attack AGW with ‘clean energy’ crapola that has no chance of replacing the current grid before we cook ourselves, or ‘carbon footprint awareness’ that is tantamount to peeing in the ocean?
Should not every AGW thread and editorial address the root problem: Too Many People?
It’s as if we are obsessed with repairing our gutters for an approaching rainstorm when our house is about to be washed over the cliff by a raging river.
I smell a rat here: AGW is a fabulous way to drive more government, more taxes, and more control. TMP must not be a very good liberal cause.
Ah yes Chief Pedant always ready with the mega straw man.
Before we continue it has to be pointed out that on conservative sources they even crucify people like Al Gore when he suggested that people should have less children.
So 1) Scientists have advised on population control and have included it as part of the solution like Lester Brown (indeed, Al Gore gets his information on this issue from Lester Brown)
Right wingers are the ones that complain most when that subject is mentioned now.
Learn what is going on before reaching for the straw man.
Who said it was supposed to save us, through innovation and the workings of the free market, without regulatory intervention?
Oh yeah, that would be conservatives. Who else? And of course they were wrong.
They’re being driven out of business by other solar and wind companies, because, you know, the technology is rapidly improving, and targets that looked tough a few years ago have been surpassed.
This is why any carbon tax or cap-and-trade regime worth its salt includes carbon tariffs to equalize for the differences in costs between countries that are reducing CO2 emissions and those that don’t bother trying.
That’s how you get those countries to ‘play ball.’
Well sure, if you’re not the world’s biggest market like we are, and you raise prices on your products even a little bit, it’ll have real economic consequences for you. Duuuuuuuuuuuh.
I agree. But people are dumb. Even after greater Atlanta runs out of water, that metro area’s residents will still mostly be against doing anything about global warming.
“Not doing anything” when the truck’s barreling down on you has 100% chance of backfiring on you.
Yes, it is possible to screw up when you’re trying to do the right thing.
At that juncture, there are two paths that you can go by: one is to throw up your hands and give up, and the other is to learn from your mistakes and improve. There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
I think we’re in agreement that making up excuses for avoiding change on political grounds is a big problem. To give examples we need only look at your own post.
First of all, it is interesting that you would rather speak of “blockading” and “bombing” China rather than reducing emissions. :smack: You’re correct that a country of 1.3 billion persons is ultimately of more importance than a country of 0.3 billion, but a click to Wikipedia might have informed you that P.R. of China ranks only #99 in per capita CO2 emissions and
Here’s another comment by Mr. Stone:
Again, I guess it’s simply more fun for some people to blame liberals than to cooperate with them in policy improvement:
The only substantial reduction of CO2 emissions growth that has happened so far has been due to market forces. Specifically, the rapid introduction of cheap natural gas due to fracking and other new extraction technologies has resulted in a shift away from coal, and natural gas emits much less CO2 per BTU. In addition, the recession has reduced CO2 emissions, and high gas prices are pushing people into smaller, more efficient vehicles.
None of this has anything to do with government initiatives, except that many on the left lobbied to stop the shift to natural gas by opposing those new extraction technologies.
Really? Can you name some traditional energy companies that have been driven out of business by solar and wind companies?
You might want to look at this chart: Alternative energy contribution in U.S. It shows that both as a percentage of total power and in absolute terms, the contribution of alternative energy types to overall energy use in the U.S. has been flat for more than a decade, and was significantly higher in the mid-1990’s than it is today.
The data ends in 2010, but I’ll bet you the contribution today is even lower, because recessions tend to drive people to the cheapest energy, and in economic good times people are more willing to spend a little more on ‘clean’ energy.
Look: I’m a fan of both wind energy and solar energy. I think solar has a potential for dramatic reductions in cost, which will increase its use. But you don’t get there by having government technocrats involve themselves in the market, picking winners and losers and trying to subsidize the ‘right’ energy. The last time they succeeded at that, they shoved biofuels down everyone’s throats, and that’s been a disaster for the environment and for other alternative energy sources. It’s also driving up the cost of food for poor people around the world.
And when the Solyndras of the world gain market advantage through government subsidy, who do you think that hurts? It hurts the other solar companies who aren’t as well connected and can no longer compete in a market where one player has a huge government-granted advantage.
The government is generally a disrupting force, and since there are no bureaucrats smarter than the collective knowledge of all the participants in an open market, their disruptions are more likely to be damaging than not.
Yeah? Get back to me when you’ve managed to slap carbon tariffs on all the countries of the world in proportion to their CO2 output. You do know that China has already said that any attempts to put carbon tariffs on their products would be met with a trade war, right? Is that what you want in this economy? Or maybe it is, since the logical consequence of any tariff regime is to reduce economic output. So good luck with that.
It’s also an incredibly difficult project, because it is impossible to measure the CO2 footprint of many products since supply chains are global and the same product may have multiple suppliers of its components. Can you imagine the bureaucratic nightmare of attempting to track every CO2 contribution in every product, and to assign the right tariffs to every part? And you’re planning to get some sort of global agreement that every country will sign on to, when each one is trying to protect its own comparative advantage?
Your global carbon tariff regime is an unworkable pipe dream, unless you’re planning to impose it on the world by force.
Anyone who tosses off what would be the most complex, burdensome, economy-damaging regulatory regime in history with ‘Duuuuuuuh’ isn’t living on the same planet I am. Look at the trouble you had just trying to get Kyoto adopted, which didn’t have 1% of the economic consequences of the tariffs you are talking about. And in the end, even the countries that signed off on it ignored it when it became a financial burden.
So what’s your plan B? Because your global tariff framework will NEVER happen.
Because anything the metro residents could do, absent that magical global framework, would result in little more than a wealth transfer from them to someone else. In other words, it’s not them who are dumb.
It’s more like, “there’s something coming towards me I can’t quite see. Could be a truck, or a kid on a bicycle. I guess I better jump over that bridge railing, and hope I survive the fall, because hey, I’ve got to do SOMETHING.”
Or, you know, you could realize that the options for completely avoiding the truck appear to be completely unworkable, so instead you could start planning a wall to stop it. Or if it’s actually going to hit you, you could start saving your money for the medical care you’re going to need, instead of spending it all on something that’s 100% guaranteed to fail anyway, just so you’re ‘doing something’.
Well, you kind of have to if there are regulatory issues involved. Either you disincentivize emissions-heavy energy sources by taxing emissions, or you incentivize emissions-light energy sources by subsidizing them. The only thing markets are capable of understanding about emissions is their financial cost.
I quite agree with you that market forces are the most efficient way to get the cheapest results within a particular regulatory framework. But market forces cannot be a substitute for a regulatory framework.
The free market by itself is a purely economic system that’s blind to environmental issues unless and until environmental damage starts producing direct economic impacts. The market has no mechanism for predicting and avoiding environmental damage before its impacts become too expensive. Only government intervention can achieve that.
But the last time you looked, it was just a 5-10 foot fall but it’s foggy out so you’re not sure. Or you could just stick really close to the barrier without jumping, but you’re not sure how wide the object is. And that horn sure is loud: it probably is a truck.
The earth is around 4,400 million years old, and the oldest climate records come from glaciers and ice caps, for which cores extend back almost half a million years (in Antarctica), according to http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/paleoclimate.html, which supports the argument that the globe is warming.
Aren’t we basing this argument on evidence that is limited to just the most recent, extremely short history of the earth? How do we know that the whole half a million years for which we have evidence wasn’t just a tiny little cold spot in the earth’s history?
It seems presumptuous to assume that the way the earth was during man’s ascent, and how it was during the extremely short time covered by the evidence we can collect, is the way it must always be. The earth’s climate changes and it’s rather ballsy to think that what happens, good or bad, is up to us. Our existence on the planet, and certainly our industrialized existence, hardly registers on the earth’s timeline.
Presumption has nothing to do with it. It’s basic science. Greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. The only question is how much and how long do they stick there for.
A couple thousand years ago it would probably be thought preposterous that we could destroy mountains, or create city-sized explosions, or walk on the moon, but just because it seems presumptious does not mean that we have not done it. Reality doesn’t care one way or the other for presumption.
Hardly anyone says that the Earth will care what we do. It can be rather important for us, though.
Nobody is arguing that the planetary climate of the earth wouldn’t change very dramatically over the next few billion years even without human inputs. Of course it would.
What we can say with a high degree of likelihood, though, is that the global climate at this time wouldn’t be undergoing a lot of its current drastic and fast changes without human inputs.
There is nothing “presumptuous” about observing that human activities are significantly changing the composition of the atmosphere in ways that are unprecedented within the existence of modern humans. For at least the past million years, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have stayed at less than about 300 parts per million. Within the last few decades, they have risen to nearly 400 parts per million.
There is no serious scientific disagreement that this change was caused by human activity, and nothing like it has been experienced over the history of human civilization. *This rise in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations is something new on the timescale of modern humanity, and we caused it. That is not in dispute. *
Nor is it “ballsy” to point out that atmospheric physics predicts that changing the composition of the atmosphere in such a drastic way will significantly impact global climate. And in fact, the changes in global climate that we’ve been seeing recently are quite consistent with those predictions.
Your vaguely woo-ish speculations about how it all might be the result of greater forces beyond our control are kind of like somebody eating ten bacon cheeseburgers a day for months on end and then attributing his weight gain to a random change in his metabolism.
“You ate lots of excess calories in those ten daily bacon cheeseburgers. Chemistry and biology predict with very high certainty that eating excess calories makes you gain weight. You gained weight. Isn’t it more reasonable to suppose that the cause of the weight gain is all that cheeseburger-eating, rather than some mysterious unexplained metabolic shift?”
We put lots of additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Physics and chemistry predict with high and growing confidence that putting additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere produces higher global temperatures, sea level rise, and changes in climate. We’re seeing higher global temperatures, sea level rise, and changes in climate. Isn’t it more reasonable to suppose that the cause of those changes is all that greenhouse-gas emitting, rather than some mysterious unexplained natural climate anomaly? #ConservativeEcoMystic
I think it’s more like, "There’s a truck coming towards me, but I can’t quite make out if it’s a big truck, a huge truck or a really freakin’ enormous truck. My only chance to get out of the way is to release my hold on this shopping cart full of cheap plastic crap and high calorie food, and just hold onto my shopping bag with essentials. "
Basically some folks are saying “I see no truck, and anyway, there’s no way in hell I’m letting go of my Dr. Pepper, Twinkies and plastic crap from the dollar store. I’d rather take my chances with the truck than lose my junk food. Whoops, did I say truck? I see no truck. La la la la la la la la”
Personally, I agree with this. 7 billion is just too damn many.
Promoting family planning, contraception, sex education, and smaller families, all via voluntary choices, show some promise. This is a pretty fundamental human rights issue, and doesn’t respond well to coercion or regulation.
Reduction of industrial gas emissions is exactly what modern governmental regulations are for. The EPA succeeded in cleaning up America’s rivers and skies. We know they can do the job, if Congress is ever persuaded of the need.
Convincing 435 people is a lot easier than convincing 7 billion people…
The problem is, the Climate Change group is targeting the US for a decrease in production. Look, wouldn’t the rest of the world like this? So, the actual science gets co-opted by many diverse interests, and the average American isn’t quite as stupid as they’d have you think. When you eagerly pair a scientific finding with trashing the production of the US, you’re going to get 1) support from all the other nations, and 2) intransigence from the US population.
The exercise is a joke. People don’t change until their thumbs are in the screws. Once people start starving and affecting the rich countries, maybe the eco-nuts will see their desires implemented. I think it’s unreasonable to expect the US to impoverish itself so that some sub-saharan peoples that hate the US have an easier time of things.
I see the anti-global warming argument has morphed yet again. A brief history of the opposition viewpoint goes something like this:
Stage 1: “Climate change is not happening.”
Stage 2: “OK, perhaps the climate is changing, but you can’t prove it’s the work of man.”
Stage 3: “Climate change may be real and plausibly caused by human activity, but it’s impossible/economically infeasible to reverse it.”
Stage 4: “Climate change may be real, plausibly caused by human activity, and perhaps is reversible with current economies/technology, but we don’t know if global warming is actually bad; perhaps it’s a good thing.”
I eagerly await stage 5: “Climate change may be real, plausibly caused by human activity, is probably a bad thing, and was possibly reversible at one tiem, but thanks to our dithering we can do anything about it, so why bother?”
Your humanitarian concern for the suffering imposed on developing nations ultimately as a result of emissions generated largely in the US is deeply touching, but I think you’re somewhat exaggerating the extent of the sacrifice that the US would be required to make.
I agree with the CBO that the design of emissions reduction measures should be considered very seriously with regard to its economic impacts, and I appreciate the fact that even modest economic impacts are going to be very unpopular.
But let’s not go off the deep end here. To argue that emissions reduction measures are the equivalent of the US committing some form of economic suicide or “impoverishing itself” or “jumping off a bridge” is hysterical horseshit. And that’s even without comparing their costs to the future costs of not mitigating climate change.
