Alright, here’s my problem. I don’t understand global warming deniers. I get some of their arguments against global warming being man-made, but so what? Pumping chemicals into the atmosphere is either going to turn the earth into Mars while giving everyone cancer, OR it’s just going to give everyone cancer. No one doubts that shit in the air is bad for you; look at what Los Angeles used to be like. Or deforestation. Either it’s going to significantly impact world temperatures and oxygen levels, or algae in the ocean handles most of that and we’re gonna be fine. Either way, it’s still ruining beautiful environments, biodiversity, and driving plants that could have medical uses to extinction.
The thing about global warming is, if it IS manmade, it’s a side effect of other activities, all of which are terribly harmful in their own way, with or without global warming. So can we all agree to disagree about the minor detail of whether global warming is man-made and do our best stop pumping cancer-causing shit into the air?
Actually the point of true alarmists like Lovelock is that we could become like Venus, Mars would actually welcome warming if we could inhabit it.
BTW, deforestation and several other factors you mentioned are included on the reasons why many researchers report that the most likely temperature that we will get from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere is around 3 degrees Celsius.
My “so what” on deniers is that we are reaching the levels where it is clear that they are not listening to reason, they are not getting respect among scientific organizations that track the issue, and that leads many developed nations to relegate climate change deniers into the same column as creationists. But that “so what” is tempered by the only realm where they have any weight: the political one, and unfortunately it is in the USA where they are doing the most harm. It is no coincidence that climate change deniers are joining forces with creationists in the USA as the National Center for Science Education reports almost daily.
Well, clearly it matters whether anthropogenic changes to the atmosphere are causing global climate change, as opposed to involving only “ordinary” pollution.
Climate change caused by anthropogenic global warming is likely to have various specific and serious consequences for ecosystems worldwide that can be effectively prevented only within a fairly limited timeframe. “Ordinary” pollution, on the other hand, may be bad for us and other critters, but it’s perceived as more reversible and controllable.
So I can see why a global-warming denier would think that “mere” pollution is not such a big deal, or not as time-critical, as climate change.
Last I saw, CO2 and methane aren’t considered to be carcinogens; most of the efforts to “clean the air” have focused on the nastier stuff like coal emissions (excluding GHGs). This of course is also one of the arguments used by deniers (in addition to them not really being GHGs/having little effect) as a reason not to control them (also that CO2 is good for plants, which may be true but only in isolation, not considering the effects of changing temperature and rainfall, plus they tend to be less nutritious).
I’m not sure what point you’re making. The issues of air pollution and global warming are almost totally unrelated.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Other than that, it is essentially totally harmless, and not a pollutant by any definition. Current atmospheric levels of CO2 are about 400 ppm, up 150 ppm since the pre-Industrial era. Your own breath contains approximately 40,000 ppm CO2. Indoor CO2 levels frequently rise to several thousand ppm. It certainly does not cause cancer.
Global warming deniers see little reason to limit CO2 emissions if global warming is not a problem, since there is essentially no point to such a limitation other than curbing global warming.
Ordinary pollutants, that cause cancer or whatever, are already highly regulated, and not really an issue in the global warming debate.
So what is your point exactly? You want less conventional pollution? Sure, whatever, I’m okay with that. But that has very little to do with the warming debate.
I don’t deny global warming in the sense that Earth is warming at least partially due to man-made reasons. However I want a transition to cleaner energy in a more gradual process so there will be no economic disruption-Kyoto is clearly not working.
Various studies have shown that, in addition to the well-known positive effect of CO2 on plant growth, it also causes them to store lower overall levels of other nutrients.
Research is still ongoing, but the gist seems to be, if the plants have access to more CO2, they need less other stuff.
Alright, fine–so CO2 and methane don’t cause cancer. Pumping them into the air is STILL bad, for any number of reasons:
They’re accompanied by other chemicals that DO cause cancer.
They are most likely harmful to the environment in SOME way, even if it’s not due to global warming but due to some strange interaction with plants we don’t understand yet, or anything of that sort.
And deforestation? Does anyone doubt that’s bad? Even if we could live in a world where the only plants are crops and the only animals live in farms, would anyone dispute the fact that that is a bad thing?
If you are concerned about the health effects of air pollution, let’s talk about that. There are ways to reduce the emission of cancer-causing pollutants without reducing CO2 emissions. If you are not worried about reducing CO2 emissions, you actually have more flexibility in reducing other kinds of emissions. As I said, these are separate problems.
Good luck getting anywhere with that argument. CO2 is a natural part of Earth’s climate. CO2 levels have been higher than this in the past, and they will be higher than this in the future. It is ludicrous to suggest we will “damage” the environment with CO2 emissions. At worst, we’ll return it to the same situation it was in millions of years ago. All we’re doing is releasing CO2 that used to be in the atmosphere, and was then captured in plants and animals that died and got turned into fossil fuels (hence the term “fossil”). Unlike nuclear waste, heavy metals, or chlorofluorocarbons or something, CO2 is a natural part of the environment already.
If you are going to discount the potential for global warming, it is an incredible stretch to call CO2 emissions harmful to the environment.
Note that I am not a global warming denier, and I fully support rational measures to limit CO2 emissions (such as a global carbon tax). But attempting to build support for such limitations using arguments other than global warming is futile.
But with an ecology adapted to the present day, not to the environment of tens of millions of years ago. That argument could be used to say that the plants and animals of a region will take no harm by being inundated by a dam because the region was underwater millions of years ago. It doesn’t work.
I want the transition to be as quick as possible, so we can minimize the economic disruption. Climate change is a lot more disruptive to economies than changing over power plants would be.
Whether they’ve worked well or not, is not the point.
If you’ve failed to convince people using the strongest argument you can make, switching to arguments that are orders of magnitude weaker (at best) is not going to succeed either.
Perhaps I was unclear. If you are willing to accept global warming, sure you can call CO2 a pollutant if you define the term very broadly.
If you do not think that humanity’s CO2 emissions will produce significant global warming, there is much less basis to call it a pollutant. The OP seems to be trying to make other arguments for reducing CO2 emissions, besides global warming, but the point is that there are very few other arguments to be made.
And personally, I find the idea of emphasizing the environmental damage even from global warming to be missing the point. Many people bemoan the loss of endangered species of toad in the Amazon rainforest, or worry about whether a dam will inundate the last refuge of the great northwest horned salamander. Others don’t really care. Good luck telling some town in China that they have to pay 3 times more for electricity because you are worried their carbon emissions will cause more trees to die along your favorite hiking path in Yosemite.
The real point that people should be making on global warming, that all of humanity can recognize and identify with, is that global warming will cost humanity more money than it would cost to prevent it.
Who doesn’t want cheap energy? Every progressive energy project I see is searching for energy that is less polluting (or not at all) AND cheaper. Cheaper, that is, to the end user. They will require significant $$$ of R&D.
How does CO 2 make plants less nutritious? Or am I mis-reading?