athelas:
I’m sorry, that’s a smug and dumb argument, which is a shame because there are so many better ones. Doing stuff about global warming takes away resources that we could use to, oh, say, alleviate poverty, or ameliorate the national debt, or any number of other worthy causes.
While this is true, we both know damn well the money would never go to those causes. If people can be persuaded/compelled to live cleaner I’m all for it simply because the aesthetic result is pleasant–the VAST majority of people are not rational thinkers and lack the will-power to live well if left to their own devices.
I really don’t have a dog in this fight–I’m not convinced humanity is a significant factor in climate change. It’s been a planetary phenomenon since way before we fell out of the trees and as I understand it we’d be due about now even if we never figured out how to bang rocks together. Ok, maybe we sped it up by a hundred years, but it was in the mail anyway. Personally I think rather than spending resources on holding back the inevitable we should be preparing for the change.
athelas:
Sure, I can buy that (incidentally, my do you manage to paint your opponents as low status!) But I don’t see that in this thread; I see halo effects that “stuff I emotionally associate with environmentalism is good.” See, we’re not playing status games of whose team is better; we’re looking at actual arguments.
The cartoon lists several outcomes of combatting climate change that are unrelated to climate change. The money could be spent elsewhere, certainly, but it’s hard to think of an investment that would result in better value for money even if climate change didn’t exist.
Aren’t most of the climate change projects to do with reducing fuel use and finding alternative fuel supplies, anyway? Even the CO2 emissions are to do with reducing fuel use. I know there are a few people who claim that the world has unending supplies of oil, but they’re rare; most people accept that fossil fuels will run out within a few generations, so it’s worth continuing with anything that helps with that, regardless of any climate change.
Those are the actual arguments and they were right there in the cartoon in condensed form. It wasn’t just an ideological statement.
There are more than 10 scientific lines of evidence that point to humanity being the cause of the recent warming.
#1 Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (CDIAC). Of course, it could be coincidence that CO2 levels are rising so sharply at the same time so let’s look at more evidence that we’re responsible for the rise in CO2 levels.#2 When we measure the type of carbon accumulating in the atmosphere, we observe more of the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Manning 2006).#3 This is corroborated by measurements of oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen levels are falling in line with the amount of carbon dioxide rising, just as you’d expect from fossil fuel burning which takes oxygen out of the air to create carbon dioxide (Manning 2006).#4 Further independent evidence that humans are raising CO2 levels comes from measurements of carbon found in coral records going back several centuries. These find a recent sharp rise in the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Pelejero 2005).#5 So we know humans are raising CO2 levels. What’s the effect? Satellites measure less heat escaping out to space, at the particular wavelengths that CO2 absorbs heat, thus finding “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect”. (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007).#6 If less heat is escaping to space, where is it going? Back to the Earth’s surface. Surface measurements confirm this, observing more downward infrared radiation (Philipona 2004, Wang 2009). A closer look at the downward radiation finds more heat returning at CO2 wavelengths, leading to the conclusion that “this experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.” (Evans 2006).#7 If an increased greenhouse effect is causing global warming, we should see certain patterns in the warming. For example, the planet should warm faster at night than during the day. This is indeed being observed (Braganza 2004, Alexander 2006).#8 Another distinctive pattern of greenhouse warming is cooling in the upper atmosphere, otherwise known as the stratosphere. This is exactly what’s happening (Jones 2003).#9 With the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) warming and the upper atmosphere (the stratosphere) cooling, another consequence is the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere, otherwise known as the tropopause, should rise as a consequence of greenhouse warming. This has been observed (Santer 2003).#10 An even higher layer of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, is expected to cool and contract in response to greenhouse warming. This has been observed by satellites (Laštovi?ka 2006).
Inigo_Montoya:
It’s been a planetary phenomenon since way before we fell out of the trees and as I understand it we’d be due about now even if we never figured out how to bang rocks together. Ok, maybe we sped it up by a hundred years, but it was in the mail anyway.
Natural climate change in the past proves that climate is sensitive to an energy imbalance. If the planet accumulates heat, global temperatures will go up. Currently, CO2 is imposing an energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Past...
Natural climate change in the past proves that climate is sensitive to an energy imbalance. If the planet accumulates heat, global temperatures will go up. Currently, CO2 is imposing an energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Past climate change actually provides evidence for our climate’s sensitivity to CO2.
If there’s one thing that all sides of the climate debate can agree on, it’s that climate has changed naturally in the past. Long before industrial times, the planet underwent many warming and cooling periods. This has led some to conclude that if global temperatures changed naturally in the past, long before SUVs and plasma TVs, nature must be the cause of current global warming. This conclusion is the opposite of peer-reviewed science has found.
The experts looking at the changes coming would tell you that us making them to be less intense in the future is worth it. This is an item that many who think that the coming changes are inevitable do miss: the probabilities. Having an easier time to deal with the future changes hinges on a reduction of CO2 and other GW gases, doing nothing will increase the chances that we will have an even worse time.
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“The take home message from the new greenhouse gamble wheels is that if we do little or nothing about lowering greenhouse gas emissions that the dangers are much greater than we thought three or four years ago,” said Ronald G. Prinn, professor of atmospheric chemistry at MIT. “It is making the impetus for serious policy much more urgent than we previously thought.”
According to the research group, there was no single factor that caused the new computer modeling to project a greater amount of warming compared with their 2002 simulations.
“In our more recent global model simulations, the ocean heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower,” the group’s web site states. “Rather than interacting additively, these different affects appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the chance of much higher temperatures.”
Under the policy scenario, in which global carbon dioxide concentrations would reach about 550 parts per million by 2100 (the current level is about 385 ppm), the projected magnitude of climate change is significantly less than under the no policy scenario, but it still would warm more significantly than the 2002 projections.** Under the policy scenario, there is a 90 percent chance that climate change could be limited to below 3°C (5.4°F), compared to just a one percent chance of that occurring in the no policy case.