Here is the link to a previous thread that I promised so that we don’t spend too much time going over the same ground.
Well, the problem is that reading this site is just giving you one (very deceptive…not in anyway scientifically peer-reviewed) side of the political argument surrounding the science of global warming. That might seem reasonable if we here had linked to Greenpeace and so forth. But, what we have linked to hear are things that give an unbiased summary of the current state of the science. Hell, I even linked to two fossil fuel companies (admittedly more enlightened ones that are trying to remake themselves as more than just fossil fuel energy suppliers)…I always forget if BP is the 7th or 11th largest corporation on the planet.
No…It has been a favorite target and has attracted more than its share of people attempting to refute it. And, that is the way science should work (although it should be done within the peer-reviewed scientific literature [and preferably in journals of high enough quality standing that they are known to have good editorial / reviewing standards]). The only critique that I know of that really meets that last standard is the paper published online just a couple weeks ago in Science that is referred to in passing in the article that Sam Stone linked to. Of course, even such a critique does mean that the Mann et al. paper is wrong…Only time will tell as things continue to get hashed out in the literature.
Where I stand on this issue:
I think the evidence that man-made warming is occuring is compelling. I’d go so far as to say that it is currently accepted science.
From that, there are three big questions: The first is, “How much warming?”. The second is, “What damage will it cause?”, and the third is, “What are we willing to pay to stop it?”
Related to the last question: “What is it even possible for us to do?”
Economic models I’ve seen indicate that warming below 2.5 degrees C would actually have a net economic benefit for the earth as a whole by lowering heating costs in the rich, populous northern countries, increasing croplands, etc. On the other hand, the poorer nations which tend to cluster near the equator would be worse off. Draughts, poorer crop yields, etc. But if the net effect is positive, we can ‘solve’ the problem through foreign aid.
But warming above that is a possibility, and that creates a cost that we have to pay for. So then the cost-benefit equation is clear: We will pay to stop Global Warming as much as what it would cost us to not stop it, plus whatever premium we are willing to pay for uncertainty of even greater warming, plus the value we put on the environment as a hole outside of economic damage/benefit.
So then the costs need to be figured out. Kyoto was just on the ragged edge of public acceptance, and its overall effect on Global warming was just not very much.
Since the costs are enormous, we need better science to allow us to make better decisions. Knowing a range of 2.5 to 10 degrees just isn’t good enough when the money we’re contemplating spending is measured in the trillions of dollars. Money which could be spent on the infrastructure, health care and economic aid to disadvantaged countries.
Plus, any agreement needs to include the 800lb Gorilla, China. China’s rise out of hte 3rd world is causing a strain on many resources. In fact, almost all of Asia. China needs to be part of the solution, and I don’t believe Kyoto did that.
…as a hole
um, as a whole…
China is indeed the second biggest emitter in the world, and was not subject to the rigid targets of, say, the EU. But the bottom line is that China did ratify the treaty, and has actually reduced its carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent since 1997, despite the fact that its per capita emissions are a tenth of the US’s. That the country which produces 36% of global emissions has done precisely nothing in this regard is the reason why Kyoto might have had so little effect.
As for the cost benefit analysis, you are treating this as though it were a linear problem: that we could somehow gauge the rate of increase of temperature and associated negative consequences and make calculations based on that. Like I said, we might be OK no matter what, Kyoto might be “just enough”, o we might be screwed already.
But the fact is that the world, under the vastly disproportionate influence of the US, is still forcing its climate further and further off equilibrium. If you are trapped in a room with a device which you know exploded for no apparent reason 10,000 years ago, when do we stop hitting it with a stick?
When the environmental movement gained such an enthusiastic following in the last 10-20 years, they chose to throw their political clout and cultural currency into social reform.
Not science.
There are people still chopping up plastic six-pack rings where I live. Christ.
Now the sky hasn’t fallen. Death beams haven’t streaked through the hole in the ozone layer to destroy us with cancer, and my condo hasn’t been washed away in an apocalyptic flood.
It seems to me that if the environmental movement had ever had an honest dedication to the safety of the human race, rather than merely being a socio-political expression for leftist self-loathing, they’d have directed their efforts toward learning everything possible about global warming and climate change, starting with the last half dozen or so ice ages we’ve had on this planet. What, did the dinosaurs burn coal on their little dinosaur railroads? The shame of it is that most reasonable people are willing to be persuaded that the planet is warming up, including me. But until I can be told why it has done this before, without any human intervention whatsoever, I absolutely oppose any further environmental efforts.
We’ve got recycling programs and bio-degradeable plastic now. That money and effort could’ve been directed towards discovering why our planet appears to have a fundamental instability in its climate sufficient to cause 10-20 degree variances in temperature coupled with changing sea levels, and what we can do about it. Instead it was spent on kneejerk, emotional reactions with no answers to the underlying questions.
Enough is enough.
Yes, this is unnecessary.
Because the CFC ban actually worked
OK. So melting ice caps can disrupt the Great Ocean Conveyor bringing about abrupt climate change, like it did 8200 years ago. What do we learn from this? Errrmm…
What, releasing the CO[sub]2[/sub] stored underground all at once cannot achieve whatever caused those previous instances of abrupt climate change? Evidence of this would certainly set my mind at rest.
One cannot prove that striking a possible explosive with a hammer will detonate it. Would it not seem prudent to proceed under some kind of precautionary principle?
Hallelujah! We’re saved!
Again, this is an absurd formulation of where the burden of proof should lie. Proving that the device has detonated in the past is surely sufficient to demonstrate that the composition of the atmosphere is not something with which we ought to fuck.
Agreed. Even the CIA and oil companies agree. Let’s stop whacking this timebomb like a Mexican piñata.
Sam,
A few comments:
(1) I’d like to know where you get the claim that warming below 2.5 C would have a net economic benefit. In fact, some people such as Jame Hanson think that that would already be enough to eventually cause the melting of much of the land ice; the resulting rise in sea levels which would be quite catastrophic for large populated areas of the planet.
(2) There is a lot of debate over the economic costs of Kyoto and other such measures. Historically, the cost of complying with environmental regulations has generally been less than what was anticipated…often much less…particularly when the regulations are flexible (such as emissions trading schemes). One data point we have, as I noted, is BP who did a cut as drastic as Kyoto, completing it 8 years early and claiming to be saving money. There is definitely a lot of essentially “no-regrets” actions that could be implemented.
(3) The point of Kyoto, in my view, is not so much to achieve a certain reduction in emissions as it is to put a cost on the emission of greenhouse gases so that the market will come up with intelligent ways to solve the problem. When the costs of the emissions are not internalized into the market, the market doesn’t “know” there is a problem and does not work to solve it (except by some external-to-the-market pressures such as public relations, a concern for the future, and the expectation of future restrictions on emissions).
(4) There was an article in this week’s Science (you may need a subscription to read the whole thing) that implemented an economic model to try to determine the best course of action. They suggest the optimal ecnomic course of action is an initially fairly-modest price of $10 per ton of carbon emissions that increases with interest rates over time. Here is their conclusion regarding the issue of uncertainty:
[nitpick]I think the 36% figure is for how much of the world’s emissions we were responsible for in 1990. The current number is now around 25%.[/nitpick]
This begs the question of which “we” is being referenced.
I must say, I’d be a bit more inclined to take the Greens seriously if they were willing to give up something (e.g. their peasant-superstition nucleophobia*) rather than declaring that, wonder of wonders, their preexisting agenda is the perfect cure for the problem.
*This is not to say that objections to nuclear power development are ipso facto invalid, but the simple fact is that political objections outnumber sound technical concerns by several orders of magnitude.
SentientMeat has answered most of your post. But, just to expand on this one: In fact, the scientific community has directed considerable efforts toward learning about previous climatic changes. There is a whole field of paleo-climate dedicated to understanding past climatic changes. Thanks to the great data provided by ice core samples, there is much understanding of the glacial-interglacial cycles over the past ~half million years, although certain aspects remain mysterious too. Noone has claimed that a rise in CO2 levels is the only reason for past climatic changes. In fact, it is understood that the warming from glacial to interglacial is initially triggered by increases in solar radiation due to oscillations in the earth’s orbit. However, for reasons that are not completely understood, this “trigger” then seems to lead to an increase in the CO2 levels, which in turn leads to more warming. The evidence from this is what tells us that the climate system is quite unstable and also gives us some estimate of the sensitivity of the climate to changes in CO2 levels (modulo the issue of how much of the warming in going from glacial to interglacial is due to the CO2 rise and how much is due to the other effects).
Well, I agree with you that the environmental movement needs to compromise more on this. But, so does the other side…If you look at Bush et al., what they propose are lots of subsidies and such for nuclear (fission) power. Given that nuclear power is a pretty mature technology and that there are legitimate environmental/safety concerns about it, I don’t see the justification for subsidizing it like this. The only justification would seem to be to put it on a playing field better able to compete with fossil fuels. But, I think the way to do that would to get rid of the subsidies and effective subsidies on fossil fuels, rather than to subsidize nuclear and thus advantage it relative to other technologies that are not yet mature and are not likely to have as many of the environmental/safety problems as nuclear energy.
Grossbottom: *It seems to me that if the environmental movement had ever had an honest dedication to the safety of the human race, rather than merely being a socio-political expression for leftist self-loathing, they’d have directed their efforts toward learning everything possible about global warming and climate change, starting with the last half dozen or so ice ages we’ve had on this planet. *
In the first place, why would you expect the environmental movement of 20 years ago to have been more knowledgeable about the possibilities and dangers of anthropogenic climate change than the climate scientists of 20 years ago?
In the second place, why and how would you expect an amorphous, decentered social and political movement to fund long-term professional scientific research?
In the third place, a lot of the changes that environmentalists have been recommending for decades (reduce automobile use, switch to renewable energy sources, etc.) are in fact good strategies for helping minimize anthropogenic climate impact. So to some extent, they were right all along.
Gb: The shame of it is that most reasonable people are willing to be persuaded that the planet is warming up, including me. But until I can be told why it has done this before, without any human intervention whatsoever, I absolutely oppose any further environmental efforts.
This sounds to me like a ridiculous, not to say suicidal, standard of certainty to impose on something as complex and significant as climate science and environmental policy. By the time the climate scientists have figured out every last detail about the physics and history of global climate change and explained it with enough clarity and precision to satisfy you, you might be already up to your teakettle in rising salt water.
I don’t see what’s so terrible about having wasted a certain amount of environmental effort on minor problems or non-problems (like the pointless “paper or plastic” and “cloth or disposables” disputes). Yes, it would be good to improve our overall knowledge of the environment and our prioritization of the problems, but that doesn’t mean that we’d be better off never taking any action until we can be 100% positive that we’re 100% right about it.
Sometimes Ford wastes its money on a crappy engine design, or MGM loses millions on a lousy movie. Do they say “Well screw it, we’re just going to stop all efforts in making cars or movies until we can guarantee that we’ll never make another wrong guess?” No, they just suck it up and try to do better the next time. Why should we fall into an immobilized sulk about past flaws in environmental policy, rather than just sucking them up and trying to do better the next time?
Exactly my point. Timebomb. It’s going to go off anyway. It’s gone off before, and it will go off again.
How much time do we save by reforming the entirety of our industry? Five years? Ten years? A century? For all we know, we’re whacking the pinata with a feather. BFD. We could spend decades making the changes the greens want, climb back up into the trees and have the entire thing be for naught if we get a few extra volcanic eruptions. One big oceanic earthquake could send enough CO2 into the atmosphere to make the entire exercise futile.
Changing our behavior will not stop the event. It will postpone it for an undetermined time. I’m glad that you like the precautionary stance, but until we know just what our precautions are buying us, I fail to understand why we continue to make them, and furthermore, why the greens continue to demand more.
It’s like tossing a cup full of water on the flowers while sitting in a burning house. Isn’t there something we could be doing to put the fire out? Stabilize the orbit? Armor the planet from excesses in solar radiation? Massive concrete dykes? I’m certainly one hundred percent behind sacrifices needed to solve the problem. I’m just not behind nonsensical reform that serves only to placate alarmist predicitons.
Of course, actual solutions that may exist (not that we would know, having concentrated on putting cheeseburgers into non-styrofoam containers) will almost certainly require the industry that environmentalists work so hard to deconstruct. This isn’t science for them, it’s religion. An irrational practice that offers only conformity and orthodoxy, not real answers.
The problem exists, yes. How does anything we’ve done do anything except prolong the apparently inevitable, by a totally random amount of time? Environmentalism isn’t about saving us or the planet, it’s about people looking for a cause and finding it, and like any crusade, its objective quickly became the crusade itself. Crusaders like crusading, that’s why they do it.
So the timebomb is ticking. While you run to the closet for a raincoat, I propose we whack that mother until it breaks or goes off. Maybe we find a solution or maybe we don’t, but it beats standing around in a raincoat, feeling guilty and waiting to be blown to pieces.
Another example where we have wasted a lot of money because of uncertainty is on the Iraq War. And, I would argue that in that case, the case for taking such action in the face of uncertainty was far weaker than in taking modest actions in the climate change case.
It is interesting that some of the same people who demand a very high state of certainty in the case of climate change before they are willing to do anything were quite content to pursue the most drastic course of action, and dump on the order of $200 billion into it, in the case of Iraq when there was considerable uncertainty and there were relatively low-cost ways to improve our certainty with very little risk (like letting the inspections go on longer).
How do you know? Why can’t limiting greenhouse emissions have an effect?
If it was vast enough to release an amount comparable to annual human activity, it would be worrying enough itself. Let us not fish for red herrings.
How do you know?
Correction: why the greens demand any. Without Kyoto there is nothing. Nobody is saying it is certain to work, only that it is feasible.
No, it’s like radically changing the composition of a notoriously unstable system.
Are these as feasible as limiting greenhouse gases by such inconceivable feats as, say, not heating empty office buildings?
Pollution and biodegradability here being, of course, herrings as red as Chairman Mao’s curtains.
I will leave it to the audience to decide which of us is being more dogmatic here.
I sincerely hope you are not in the medical profession.
Like I said, some people reading this might well decide that it is actually you who is Quixotically tilting at wind-turbines here.
If you genuinely do hold this philosophy, Grossbottom, I cordially invite you to the Welsh coast where all manner of suspicious rusted spheres from WWII occasionally get washed up. I’ll provide the sledgehammer, but forgive me if I don’t accompany you, whether it’s raining or not.
Gb: It’s like tossing a cup full of water on the flowers while sitting in a burning house. Isn’t there something we could be doing to put the fire out? Stabilize the orbit? Armor the planet from excesses in solar radiation? Massive concrete dykes?
Wow, your position is apparently even more absurd than I thought it was. You seem to be saying that we shouldn’t do anything to minimize anthropogenic climate change until we’ve figured out how to prevent, or protect ourselves from, non-anthropogenic climate change.
You also seem to have pretty extreme ideas about how severe and sudden non-anthropogenic climate changes are. Yes, it is possible that massive natural disasters would bring about major changes fairly quickly, but it’s not as though the odds of that happening are very high. The odds of our causing major catastrophic changes with anthropogenic warming, on the other hand, are looking quite a bit higher.
Just because I might someday get hit by a car doesn’t mean it makes sense to throw myself in front of a train today. Just because we’re always in a certain amount of danger from potential non-anthropogenic catastrophes doesn’t mean it makes sense to go on manufacturing an actual catastrophe for the near future. The idea that we shouldn’t bother, say, reducing our CO2 emissions until we’ve figured out how to stabilize our planetary orbit to avoid the next ice age a few millennia from now is IMO mindbogglingly dumb.
Grossbottom’s rant has been responded to nicely by kimstu and SentientMeat, but just to a few other things:
(1) We know with a fair degree of certainty that we are not hitting the climate system with a feather. The current CO2 levels in the atmosphere are higher than they have been in the last ~half-million years (when we have excellent data from the ice cores) and likely higher than they have been in the last 20 million years. And, of course, they are going to go considerably higher under any realistic emissions scenario. The current hopes are to stabilize the CO2 levels at something like 550 ppm, as compared to the pre-industrial baseline of ~280 ppm and the current level of ~375 ppm.
(2) We are currently in an interglacial period, so as long as the current natural cycles of glacial-interglacial continue (as they have been for at least the last half-million years and perhaps considerably longer…several million, I’m not exactly sure), we would not be expected to get much warmer naturally than we have already. We would expect to get colder again…i.e., to enter another ice age; I think the recent belief on this is that it would likely have occurred on the order of another several to 10,000 years from now, although I am not sure how settled that is. However, the amount of CO2 we have put into the atmosphere is believed to be far more than enough to actually stop this. They have various names for the various periods of climate (like “holocene” for the current interglacial) and James Hansen and other scientists like to say that we entered the “anthropocene” period where the largest perturbation by far is the one that humans are putting onto the climate system.
(3) I have no idea why you are so enamoured of wild ideas that are either likely to be incredibly expensive (like the massive dikes) or we don’t even know how to do (like stabilizing the earth’s orbit or armoring the planet against excess radiation but are opposed to taken commonsense actions, many of them no-regrets policies that cost nothing because the savings exceeds the benefits, in order to buy ourselves more time while we develop new sources of energy, learn more about carbon sequestration, and so forth.
Actually, the most recent thinking seems to be that, in the absence of human influence, the current interglacial would have lasted about another 15,000 years or so:
SentientMeat: How do I know the timebomb will go off? Or rather, how would I defend the metaphor that you brought to the argument? I lost track, is the globe heating up not, has it heated up in the past or not? You seem confused. I refer you to Part (2) of jshore’s last post. As for the rest, well, the cut’n’paste selective quote game is such an astonishing debate technique I can’t keep up. But ask yourself this: if incontrovertible evidence were produced tomorrow that everything really was going to be okay, would you really accept it?
Kimstu: Not at all. If I gave that impression, I apologize. I’m not in favor of reducing any forward progress in the area. I like less pollution and greater efficiency. I’m merely against further expenditure of effort until we know with reasonable certainty that our efforts will solve the problem. Or are we not supposed to be solving it? Since we have limited resources at our disposal, I propose analyzing the problem thoroughly and dealing with it effectively, not merely prolonging it. You may be right though, it could be really stupid to direct our efforts into practices that produce some sort of tangible results.
jshore: All very nice but my point still stands, the bomb went off before regardless of human interference. And while my ideas seem ‘wild,’ I’d like to get a rough estimate of the combined cost of all the reforms we’ve undertaken in the past couple decades before I discard the ideas. Recycling centers, emissions testing, research and development, endangered species protection, legislation and the litigation necessary to ensure the legislation is upheld, raw manpower studies…as a social project, the environmental movement probably hasn’t been inexpensive.
Now a simple question: are we, or are we not, in danger? What kind of danger? Extinction? Dark Age? Give me an idea so I know. Because apparently my ‘wild’ ideas are just a little too much. A little not ‘feasible,’ to use SentientMeat’s terminology. Which is amazing to me, because just a little while ago this was a freakin’ disaster. I mean, hey people, the sky is falling. Isn’t it? I mean, to listen to the dire predictions of many environmentalists, we should be building interplanetary colony ships.
Or not, because I can only suppose, it wouldn’t be feasible to evade…whatever this…emergency?..has become.
I like how this global warming is a threat sufficient enough to take all necessary steps in prolonging it, but not quite threatening enough to find a solution, thereby rendering the crusade complete and the danger averted.
And therein, my answer to the OP, take it or leave it. Yes, it’s serious. Yes, the planet is warming. No, it’s not a joke, though it’s not an immediate, meteor-strike-style, break-out-the-Bat-Signal emergency…though it will be parlayed into one, depending on the particular desire of the person doing the speaking.
Decrying the horror of it is encouraged, making personal lifestyle changes is lauded, damning The Man is required and solving it is said to be infeasible except through the increasing adoption of practices and values that smack distinctly of Luddism. Then you too might be save…I mean, your doom may be delayed awhile.
We don’t know how long though. Ask again later. Much later.
Amen. :dubious:
You say it’s not an immediate emergency, but it seems you would have to take the following into account when coming to that conclusion:
- How fast can you initiate a response (you may be delayed by social/economic/technological reasons)
- How long will the response take to achieve it’s results
- How catastrophic (in terms of human life and plant/animal life that we depend on) will the effects be prior to bringing the system back to an acceptable state
Keeping in mind that, for example, variations in water temperature of just a few degrees has a large impact on spawning salmon populations, don’t you think that it is better to be safe than gamble that we “might” survive a significant change in the global tempurature?