Now, I know that the author isn’t saying that we should just roll over and accept climate change…but it seems like the obvious conclusion - he’s just too scared to make it.
If you accept the tipping point model, and it’s a political impossibility to prevent climate change, rather than wasting resources on a foregone conclusion…should we just give up?
Why spend billions making changes that won’t do anything?
I should add, the blog is just the inspiration, the question is as above.
(Of course, if the tipping point model goes away, then the question is somewhat moot)
For one, if we can’t stop it we can at least try to keep it from getting even worse. Second, many or most of the things we should do to stop global warming are things we should or need to do anyway. And third, climate change if it happens isn’t something we’ll “accept”; it’s something we’ll need to spend many, many more billions on. We’ll be dealing with famine, millions of refugees, evacuating the coasts as the seas rise, probably major wars across the world, that sort of thing. How much money do you think it will take to move the entire population of New York, for example?
A few of the recommendations for combating climate change are stupid. The majority of the rest, however, are basically just a move to newer, more efficient technologies. Something which is more efficient, over the long term, ends up saving you money. (Nuclear energy should save money, but hasn’t in the US due to obstructionist law suits.)
One could also argue that since there’s no way to know exactly where the tipping point is, every tiny bit is potentially the tiny bit that saves it from ever going over.
Ultimately, though, if things do start to look like they’re going to hell, geoengineering is what will be called in to try and save the day. It’s almost certain that fossil fuel use is going to continue to rise for the next 40 years and probably not come into disuse for another 40 after that, so the only solution will be attacking the symptoms, not the cause.
Yeah, but if we can’t realistically prevent it, shouldn’t we just accept that we have to spend those billions on refugees anyway?
Why spend money on prevention that won’t work?
Just address the problem when it occurs
And my understanding of climate models is that most of the damage is done after the tipping point, which we can’t avoid reaching - reducing our emissions slightly after reaching that point is ineffective. So we won’t really stop it from being ‘worse’
Nonsense, doing steps to prevent it from becoming it worse is indeed now the default position. If we had started when the issue was identified (from the 50’s) it would had lead to us to be better prepared and on the way to an increase in temperature of less than 2 degrees.
Now we should be more aggressive if we wanted to prevent that increase, but if we should just “throw our hands up and do nothing” as the realistic position, then we should never tell any addict about what drugs would do to their bodies if they do not stop, nor we should have any regulations or interventions to eliminate or at least minimize the problem.
The issue now is that we are already seeing the effects of the warming and there are already very nasty side effects like worse droughts and worse forest fires. Agriculture is already suffering declines just by the increase of about 1 degree C since the start of the industrial revolution.
Now that the sun is becoming more active those “drugs” in the background do not go away, as the video shows normally one would see just about the same rate of cold records compared to the warm ones, now we see three heat records for every cold one, and that was without the sun coming in like a regular tide and make things worse, IIUC these last years the records are like 10 heat records against every 1 cold one.
As I have seen researchers telling it, this extreme situation will get to a better condition once the activity of the sun reduces, but the take home lesson is that we are getting now a taste of what we will be getting every year if nothing is done soon.
In essence, doing noting is the best way to ensure we will spend even more in dealing with the issue, and we will get even more restrictions forcefully, (even geoengineering at that scale to correct the problem will not be cheap, the ones working to making emissions worse will have to pay more to help us be ready for that) as one scientist told the Heartland Institute and directed to the current captains of industry, specially the fossil fuels ones: “Are you cowards?” doing nothing (or worse, financing professional merchants of doubt) is actually working towards making outfits like Greenpeace the ones that will impose solutions in the near future as you are not organizing much to ensure that the mechanisms to deal with the problem will have lots of input from corporations.
Its time to accept that nothing is permanent. As I understand it our level of present day carbon dioxide has increased over the past 30 years to level that existed 15 million years ago. Its a good bet that the increase in carbon dioxide is exponential as well given the amounts we are pumping out today compared to 30 years ago. Any attempt to stop the increase it would be like trying to stop a train with a fly swatter.
Smart people will prepare and learn to adapt. For example lets find out where the shores will be when all the ice melts and place a moratorium on building within the flood zone.
That is the trouble, you are also assuming that nothing will be done, when I look at history it is clear that once the troubles accumulate something will be done, it will not be quite clear how far the changes in the shores will go for example. Only when stabilization (and this does not require us to go to the stone age) is achieved on the rate of emissions, then more reliable calculations of what changes to expect are possible.
I can not find it now, but I remember reading a metaphor that we are like a junkie that instead of CO2 is consuming cocaine. To prevent going over the edge and not die of a heart attack or other side effects of an overdose, there is a budget (like carbon) on how much someone can take with small side effects. (yeah, some do die sooner, and after several years the damage accumulates, but we are talking optimistically about a drug addict that quits or controls his intake of the stuff). In the carbon case, there is already enough carbon emitted that some change is inevitable, but there are worse outcomes to come if all the cocaine put on the table is consumed at the rates that virtually any doctor could tell you that will send you to a hospital.
For years, people were in denial that there was even a problem. “The climate’s getting warmer because of humans? Preposterous! Now break out the grill, sonny boy. I’m in the mood for a juicy steak.” Blind optimism, in other words.
Now that the evidence is hard to ignore, the attitude has become fatalistic. “There isn’t anything we can do, unfortunately. So we might as well break out the grill and live for today!”
There is a middle ground, but it requires thoughtful action.
But honestly I do not see the “middle ground” becoming the norm. Not anytime soon. Not with all the burdens that environmental agencies are already under. I hate to say this, but we don’t have enough money or political will to address both immediate problems (coastal “dead” zones, PBC and mercury contamination, improper sewerage) and long-range CO2-emissions. Something has to give.
Tell someone they have pay an extra $10 a month in water/sewer fees, and MAYBE they won’t complain too much. Tack on extra costs at the pump and the grocery store and you’ll hear some whining. Once you reach a critical mass of enforcement actions against private citizens and corporations, things come to a halt. It becomes a political issue at that point. That’s when folks like the Tea Partiers come out of the woodwork and start demanding the government get out. Then even moderate voices start talking about deregulation and the liberation of business interests. Things get rolled back as a result.
And suddenly we find ourselves in waist-deep flood waters, crying about the lack of government accountability.
In the US, everyone assumes that the EPA is the agency tasked with fighting climate change. In a grand sense, this is true. But really, it will be the states that will be mandated to do everything. The same states that have constrained budgets, conservative administrations, and weary citizenry–who only really care about having clean water and air and whatever else is in the immediate backyards. They want their tax dollars to benefit them directly. Any bill with “global” in its name is seen as pie-in-the-sky waste.
We don’t even know for sure what will happen; we are heading into a climatic regime that humanity has never existed in. We don’t even know for certain if human civilization can survive* the climate we are headed towards, much less how to prepare for it. And given how hard it has been to get society to spend the time and effort to stop climate change, how is anyone going to get society to spend the far higher money and effort necessary to deal with it (if it can be)?
*For example, if it’s chaotic enough large scale agriculture may no longer be possible.
The argument to do nothing kinda defeats itself. It’s kinda like saying;“Well eventually the sun is going to make life impossible on earth, so let’s not even bother with that space nonsense”.
I am guessing we would happily accept climate change as a reality and get on with life, were it not for the awareness of what kind of beast climate change really is.
Sea levels could rise by several meters, inundating coasting areas, where a significant % of humanity lives. Declining fresh-water resources will cause water wars. Crop growth patterns may be devastatingly disrupted. Patterns of famine and drought can make currently arable lands completely useless for agriculture. And so on.
And yes, it would be a whole lot hotter in the summer, but that;s the least of our concerns.
So, we are talking about so many unknowns here, that it’s scary. It wont be easy to fix the planet after the tipping point has been reached. Hence the scramble to do something while we still can.
Boy, for people who claim to be the defenders of science, you guys are sure quick to throw around non-scientific nonsense to make your case.
Ocean rise measured in meters? A ‘Tipping Point’ to a runaway greenhouse? Modern agriculture destroyed? The death of civilizaation? This is crazy talk.
If you want to follow the science instead of the hyperventilating of extremists, you need to look at the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report of 2007, which is still the best summary of the science until the 5th assessment comes out.
In it, you’ll find predictions for a ‘low estimate’ and a ‘high estimate’. The estimates come from different assumptions about the future rate of CO2 emission, atmospheric sensitivity, feedback effects, etc.
These are their basic findings:
That’s the range we are talking about. We’re not talking about the end of the human race or the destruction of our coastal cities. We’re talking about a world which is slightly warmer, with slightly higher sea levels, and a slight increase in extreme weather events.
The costs to the world are largely due to changing weather patterns - increased drought activity in equatorial regions, and increased rainfall in the temperate regions. This will require adaptation if not stopped. The same for sea level rise - 23 inches isn’t biblical wrath-of-god stuff, but it will cause trouble for some cities and perhaps change effluvial patterns and such. Places like New Orleans or Venice would be in trouble, as well as poorer coastal populations in the 3rd world.
We’ll also see more damage from extreme weather like tornadoes, and perhaps more flood damage.
However, global warming will also bring benefits: Longer growing seasons, an expansion of the agricultural band northwards, opening of navigable sea lanes in the north that will lower the cost of shipping, exposure of resources from receding ice sheets, warmer winter nights in cold regions, etc. The IPCC estimates that for warming lower than 2.5 degrees, these effects will outweigh the negative effects of warming, causing an overall global increase in GDP (although some areas still get hammered and we’d have to help them). For temperatures above 2.5 degrees, the net effect to the world would be negative, but not dramatically so. We’re talking about reductions in global GDP on the order of a few percent - not the collapse of the global economy.
So then the question becomes, what kinds of mitigation policies are politically possible, and which can be carried out for a cost that is lower than the damage from the climate change that would otherwise result? In other words, would a program that costs a billion dollars reduce climate change damage in the future by a net present value of more than a billion dollars?
The conclusion I’ve come to is that none of the proposals I’ve heard so far are even remotely feasible, and are more likely to increase CO2 output than reduce it. All they’ll do is transfer wealth from one group to another. The big problem is that China, India, and other similar countries have absolutely zero intention of holding back their economies for the sake of future global warming mitigation. And so long as they refuse to play, there is no solution.
Anything the west does to reduce its emissions of CO2 will give China and India an incentive to emit even more. If we stop using oil the price of oil will drop, stimulating demand elsewhere. If we put carbon taxes on our factories (which are relatively energy efficient) it will cause more production to move to Chinese factories (which are relatively energy inefficient). Thus we’ll simply increase the carbon footprint of the products we consume.
So until I hear a real plan for controlling global warming, it’s all a moot point.
Global warming is a certainty. We need to adapt to it and plan for it. Better insulation and cooling systems, more efficient irrigation, and don’t buy land near sea level. Invest in renewable energy generation and put enormous effort into researching better ways to store electricity.
Low lying nations will be underwater, and at least a billion poor people will lose their land. No plus side for them.
And you are just strawmaning, nobody has talked about a runaway greenhouse, there are more mundane, but still bad tipping points like the loss of ice in the arctic.
As history still continues after 2100, ocean rise will go over those conservative IPCC estimates, estimates that BTW, the IPCC itself pointed out that they did not include any probable acceleration of the ice loss in places like Greenland as the research then was not much available, new evidence reports that we will see even higher sea rises in less time than estimated. And all this is with just 1 degree of warming since the industrial revolution, and you are telling us that 1.5 degrees more will not be a bigger deal.
Mentioned many times before, but as usual you rely more on discredited sources that lead you into complacency.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t talking about a tipping point to a runaway greenhouse effects, but all the other stuff I mentioned has been said in this thread.
And here’s where I think you are too pessimistic: I find it rather inconceivable that the world will still be running on fossil fuels a hundred years from now. And CO2 has a finite lifespan in the atmosphere. So once our emissions fall back to a reasonable level, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will begin to decline, and the Earth will return to an equilibrium that doesn’t include our CO2 forcings.
What we’re really facing, in my opinion, is a choice between a shift to alternative energies over the next 50-100 years or so, and pay for the consequences of that effect on the atmosphere, or whether we should attempt through legislation to force a more rapid shift by punishing CO2 emitters.
What you really need to understand is that CO2 is not a trace gas like SO2 or other gases that can be scrubbed. It’s the prime product of burning hydrocarbons. So limitiing it is to essentially limit energy, which essentially limits economic activity. This is why it will never happen. Or rather, it won’t happen until the alternatives are cheaper. The best way to ensure the rapid development of alternatives is to make sure we have a healthy, productive economy that produces enough wealth to fund that research. And since global warming is going to happen anyway, you have to make sure you have enough wealth to pay for the consequences.
Blowing all your money in gigantic wealth transfers to China is the worst thing you could possibly do to the environment in the long run.
Mentioned many times before, but as usual you rely more on discredited sources that lead you into complacency.
Not even Lomborg goes for that nowadays. A tax (that even he recommends) and other forms of applying the real costs of using fossil fuels is part of the right approach.
Nonsensical reply. Solutions are not limited to that and there are examples from the past that show that we are not going to destroy the economy.
