Read it again, I’m saying indeed that I’m directing my criticism to the contrarians out there, not with you. But you lost my point, in reality there are already well researched predictions of what effect our stopping of the use of fossil fuels will likely do to the atmosphere.
Ok. I haven’t seen any good predictions of what will happen if we stopped using CO2, though I know it’s been modeled. Perhaps they do know with a good degree of certainty what the effects will be and maybe we can do climate engineering (which is basically what we’d be doing by stopping using CO2…just like it’s what we were doing by using the stuff in the first place). I’d say that doing so is the BEST of the options we have at this point, but I won’t be surprised when/if we do that there will be unintended effects. Certainly not as many or as potentially extreme as trying to deliberately block the sunlight and induce global cooling, though.
Huh. That’s not awful. If the 2% estimate holds up. I like it. Someone call Musk, get his ass on it.
Also, WERNSTROM!
The article I quoted from is referring to the IPCC scenarios, particularly the one where we do stop making emissions cold turkey.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html#10-7-1
As usual one has to point that what the IPCC is doing is based on current peer reviewed science that is once again reviewed by the scientists that volunteer their time to make the IPCC report.
The problem is that a solution like that ignores the other evil twin of the increase in global warming gases, the released CO2 is also causing ocean acidification.
If we do anything besides take CO2 back out, we risk a cure worse than the disease.
I think what will happen is that we’ll figure out how hard it is to live with higher CO2 levels and go from there. If the worst predictions come to pass, we’ll get behind inititiatives to scrub atmospheric CO2. Since we’ve never been any good at predicting future technology, it doesn’t make sense to frame the question of “how hard” by limiting it to today’s technology.
But messing around with the climate by doing anything EXCEPT taking the CO2 out assumes we know one hell of a lot more about what forces climate changes, and to what degree, than we do.
And we may be pleasantly surprised (Well… GIGObuster will; not me) if the direst predictions turn out to be a bit over hyped, as is our historic wont for Impending Doom. 
One thing I WILL bet on: We won’t do shit until our backs are to the wall and the people who pay are the people getting burnt. Until then AGW is marketing hoopla, job corps, and Really Important Accords that politicians reach so they can be perceived as Doing Something. LOL.
I’m not surprised that you continue to demonstrate to all readers that you are not paying any attention to what the scientists are reporting.
The IPCC predictions are the conservative ones as Nathan Lewis from Cal Tech reports, the more some contrarians want to pump up uncertainty and expectations to be “pleasantly surprised” it is the time when we should be more worried:
[QUOTE] Something we do not know: we do not understand the radio of ice melting and if you look at the graphs on the left in the bottom you'll see the Ranger predictions. Others calculated the rates at which ice would melt and you'll see the solid curves at the rate at which it really melted as observed after the predictions were made and you can see it melted much more quickly than even the worst case scenario predicted.…
We know the permafrost is melting and from bubbles in that frost we know that as the sun
melts that, it releases more gas that then accelerates the warming and releases even more gas. And we know there is enough co2 and methane there but if it continues to melt the levels will rise not by a factor of two but could rise by a factor of 10.
We know this happened 230 million years ago in the Permian era, me know temperatures rose on Earth by an average of six degrees centigrade, 12 at the poles; and we know from the fossil record that ninety percent of the species on earth could not adapt and went extinct we absolutely don’t know that will happen again, [but] we absolutely do know that there is only one way to find out.
**Is what we don’t know, that is the very source of our reason to elect [good] leaders, because we pay leaders to act with partial information, not to put their heads in the sand and to wait for complete information in order to address the problems. **
[/QUOTE]
As for people getting burned (not people, I detect only a reduction to the absurd fallacy from Chief Pedant), not now but it is their crops the ones that are.
And while one can not yet point at an specific drought as being caused by global warming it is clear that global warming is making those droughts worse and to come more often than before.
But can we agree that until AGW’s effect is felt by the people who will pay the money, it will be hard to move them to pay in general?
We have a long history of kicking down the road whatever we can. Witness national debts…
As to droughts, I understand that really bad floods are also from global warming, as is last year’s horrible cold in the US Midwest. As was Sandy (from warmer waters) and the following quiescent North Atlantic hurricane seasons (from a dry Sahara). As are any and all bad weather events; also unexpectedly quiet seasons. All Climate Change harbingers.
…got it.
You don’t have to spend time explaining to this dullard over and over again that AGW is terrible terrible terrible, and is visiting its effects upon us Right Now.
I’m just saying that the masses wont start paying until the masses start panicking, and the masses won’t start panicking until they personally feel the pain. Some guy getting rinsed off his remote island because wind shifts have piled up the ocean there is not gonna do it. There isn’t enough altruism to fix the other guy’s problems at a personally painful cost.
I have faith in the human race that we will manage to obliterate ourselves sometime in the future. After that it may take mother earth a while to recover, but I’m sure she will.
Not keeping up with news, except the ones for the right wing blogosphere I see.
In reality just like The Bad Astronomer I was not expecting much from Paris but what we got was a turning point from virtually the whole world. The accord was indeed a demonstration against the very same thing that you are an expert of, the last 2 words on the FUD acronym.
This is an aspect of it that seems to be ignored in most discussions. I think it’s something that most people aren’t even aware of.
Another problem with the idea of blocking sunlight: The problem isn’t too much sunlight coming in. The problem is not enough heat escaping.
Granted, blocking some sunlight might help ameliorate the heat issue, but at the same time, we’re cutting back on the amount of sunlight available for photosynthesis. What will the effects of that be? Less production of oxygen? Less food production? Less removal of CO2 by plants?
Well, I agree hope springs eternal.
And I agree that any politician not interested in career suicide is going to enthusiastically support every Real Big Conference of Universal Accord On How to Approach Major Threats.
One notes with wry skepticism that COP 21 was the 11th Meeting of the Parties since Kyoto. Further, the mechanism by which an INDC is actually enforced feels to me a bit voluntary since it functionally boils down to whether or not the US, China, India, the EU, and Russia will shape up. And, since (per usual) future targets are always generously in the future, what will hit the fan as implementation pains become…painful…is money to save the next generation v money to save current economies from the fiscal fiascos we are creating Right Now.
I am not personally convinced that Name and Encourage is a particularly spectacular way of limiting CO2 if it turns out that it’s just too damn painful for the masses. Heck; I’ve been Naming the deficit “Horrible” and Encouraging more taxes/less spending for years, and…nada. I predict…COP 22; COP 23; COP 24…
But another thread on that, huh?
I believe we agree that since CO2 forces climate change, the only reasonable approach is to either diminish CO2 production or to remove CO2. It shouldn’t be some new experimental approach to create Global Cooling.
The latest issue of Scientific American has a very pessimistic article on possibility of carbon capture and sequestration.
Unfortunately most of the article is behind a pay-wall, but I can summarize the points from the print article.
Basically the point is that it either costs too much or doesn’t remove any net carbon.
Not all power plants are in areas that lend themselves to permanent geologic storage. For those that are, the cost of capture and sequestration would substantially hike utility prices for consumers.
One alternative would be for the government to pick up the cost, something that would be very unpopular and possibly even not possible politically.
Another alternative would be to sell the captured CO2 for industrial use. This can actually make capture profitable - if you sell it to an oil company which will then pump it into the ground to force out, and ultimately burn, hard to extract oil. Obviously this is not much of a solution.
It’s possible that it could be sold to be incorporated into various end products. The problem here is that the current amount of carbon that goes into commercial products is dwarfed by the amount power plants release into the atmosphere, so there’s no way to profitably sell it all for such use.
Then there’s the issue of all of the steel, concrete, etc that goes into constructing the equipment to do all of this. The creation of all of this would itself release substantial amounts of carbon.
At least these are the claims made in the article.
Surely all we need to do to cool the Earth is to increase the albedo and to do that we just need to concrete over some deserts and paint them white? 
I’ve heard it seriously suggested that enough white roofs could make some difference. I’m not sure if it’d be a meaningful difference, or how much carbon would be released in manufacturing and distributing the paint.
It would not be a meaningful difference. land is only 30% of the earth’s surface, and of that 30%, the surface taken by all human roofs is little more than a rounding error.
I think the question should be: How hard is it going to be for humans to cope with what is HAPPENING NOW to the planet’s weather.
Have a read of this:
This is not really an issue, in my opinion. It depends on the plant, but in general, plant photosynthesis (well, for c3 plants) is much less limited by sunlight than it is by [CO2].
Just who determines the optimal climate ?
I guess the only fair thing would be to use historical data and try to get back to 1970s temperature levels or something.
I’m not saying it’s easy, or even possible. I am aware the amount of variables is vastly larger than it may seem at first glance.
I personally thing the two worst things about the human species right now is indifference to human suffering of people far away from us and the incredible failure of agreeing to save our habitat after we’ve known we were destroying it.