AGW has become a Great Cause and all Great Causes are marked by histrionics, particularly so in our society where hysteria sells books. Note the 20-year window for your Lovelock dude: it’s perfect. It lets you get on the lecture circuit and sell your book, keeps a long enough window to get rich off the book before your predictions crap out, and is still a short enough window to get Uncle Goat’s goat.
Advice #1: Stay calm. Don’t get sucked into the contest of Who Can Predict the Worst Doomsday. Remain skeptical, especially of the fringes.
Whether the AGW construct is right or wrong, it’s reasonable altruism to minimize your own footprint on this earth. You must be the change you want to see in the world.
Advice#2: Be a good steward of the world personally, and demand that of others.
Until we can figure out how to have lots of us without raping the earth’s resources, we shouldn’t have lots of us, since our collective footprint is proportional to our collective population.
Advice #3: Promote population control
Gold makes even the nearly-dead die happier.
Advice #4: Buy gold
If you do abandon all hope and just roll over, can I have your stuff?
It depends on which way your buttered toast drops. I’m a Murphy’s Law believer.
Note that 2C rise by the end of century was the first ‘worse case scenario.’
That became a 2C rise by 2050 fairly soon after.
Now there’s a 4C rise by 2060 as the ‘worse case scenario.’
6 degrees is in sight from there.
Drastic action needs to take place NOW. Not in 2015, or 2020 or 2030. But now.
Assuming that it won’t be that bad is foolhardy. It’s far better to assume the worst and try to do something about it than assume the best and do absolutely nothing – which is current status quo. Waiting for disaster is totally nuts.
If you’re drunk and manage to drive home without incident, that doesn’t mean drunk driving is something you should do all the time. And if you get away with it nine times, but end up killed on the tenth time, it is unlikely friends and family will brag about your 90% success rate drunk behind the wheel. The stakes are that high.
and while there is some truth to this, be skeptical about this charge on money being made off the hysteria. REAL dollars are being poured in to confuse the issue as much as possible. Lovelock is not gonig to live another 20 years, he’s an old fart. He’s able to give doomsday pronouncements because he has all the money he needs now. No one is rushing to give him funds for more research, instead they are trying to paint him as an old lunatic out of touch.
For all the talk of “money making off global warming” here’s this:
For the second quarter of 2009, here is the top ten of a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying, but still it is impressive):
Chevron $6,485,000
Exxon Mobil $4,657,000
BP America $4,270,000
ConocoPhillips $3,300,000
American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000
Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000
Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000
Shell Oil Company $950,000
Arch Coal, Inc $940,000
That’s a total of $26,922,000 for the top ten. How much pressure does that bear upon the congressmen?
2 & 3. No arguments there. I pull apart small items to get to the metal for recycling. It’s all rather obsessive. Check out VHEMT. “The World Without Us” is a fine read too.
Gold is a sucker’s game. I’m against any ore, and those Cash4Gold guys have got the market on the tons of waste gold laying about American homes.
But yeah, if everyone is dead, you can have my stuff.
Great list, but I do not believe that it includes the money that the energy industry funnels into “independent” groups that actively try to muddy the waters about Global Climate Change.
It’s hard to get any accurate figures on how much money is shoveled into these groups, but they are numerous and well funded:
American Energy Alliance
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)
Natural Resource Stewardship Project (NRSP)
High Park Advocacy Group
Center for a Constructive Tomorrow
Media Research Center
Cato Institute
Heritage Foundation
National Center for Policy Analysis
Competitive Enterprise Institute
The effects of vanishing glaciers has largely been ignored since the top of the thread. Black carbon from Indian ovens is landing on the Tibetan plateau, furthering the effects of global warming. If all those rivers dry up, there will be much destablization.
C’mon, you can’t actually KNOW that for a fact! Perhaps the drying up of the Indian subcontinents rivers will actually be GOOD for the 1.5 billion people living there! They might THRIVE in the new conditions. Didn’t civilization start near a desert?
<sarcasm off>
Absolutely. That there’s an industry out to confuse the issue should be sending out warning signs.
Millions of dollars are spent to keep us tied to our gasoline powered cars, wars are being fought to keep the US in oil, and incredibly damaging things like the oil tar sand processing is being seen as a ‘good’ idea.
Even if it turns out that the worst that will be happen will be some nasty heat waves, what’s the reason to stay fixed to foreign oil? I see no point in debating with a global warming denier. But I am puzzled that the concept of switching over to electric cars, or using more mass transit or working on solar power plants must be totally ignored as well. No global warming? Fine! But as a result we can’t try to help the environment anyway?
The same sort of tea bagger mentality that allows people to scream and cry in support for insurance companies (!?!?) has them screaming in support of oil and coal companies that couldn’t give a rat’s ass if the planet burned to an ash, as long as they have their money. That boggles my mind.
I am willing to concede that I could be totally wrong about global warming. Hell, I sure won’t live to see the worse of it, no matter what happens. But I happen to care for the planet enough that I’d like to think it would out live me. Crashing the biosphere so a couple of guys can die a wee bit richer sounds insane to me.
I think finding a way to have the power we crave that isn’t designed from the outset to heat the skies seems like a wiser choice. But hey, maybe in few more years none of that will matter anyway and the decision will be taken away from us.
Won’t that be grand? We’ll get to visit a third world country without leaving our home!
Glaciers have retreated before (q.v. Switzerland) or even disappeared (q.v. Africa) before. That glaciers have been retreating is not necessarily abnormal.
Actually, I don’t really think it is true that a 2C rise was the first ‘worse case scenario’. Even going all the way back to Arrhenious 100 years ago, the estimates were in roughly the same ballpark as now, albeit the methods were cruder and more uncertain.
I wouldn’t disagree with that completely, depending on how you define drastic action. I think actions to get us on a path to stabilizing and then significantly reducing our emissions over time do need to be taken quickly, because there is a lot of inertia in both the climate system and in our societies.
And, I think we have to take into account the worst realistic scenarios. I don’t know if it is really best to “assume the worst”. I think it is best to plan for our best estimate of what will likely happen but with enough flexibility so that we can adjust to face both the worst and the best realistic scenarios.
The problem with overstating the danger is you run the risks of either:
(1) losing credibility and then having people who want to do nothing use this to prevent anything significant from being done.
(2) making people think it is so hopeless that we might as well just party and enjoy the time from now to Armageddon.
What you want people to understand is that we now know with a fairly high degree of probability that the negative affects of our emissions on the climate and resulting society and ecosystems are likely to be significant and that, while it may already be too late to prevent some of these effects, we most likely still have time to limit the negative effects significantly if we take significant actions to limit the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
They should also understand that there is still enough uncertainty that the effects could be either worse or more benign than predicted…and we need to take this distribution of probabilities of what might happen into account in our planning.
The way I’ve read it (since the 70s, as long as I’ve been around) is “we need to change our evil ways RIGHT NOW lest forsooth it bring DOOM up on our heads! And even if DOOM doesn’t come, I personally can feel good about myself for recognizing and being superior to the evil ways of people all around me. I’m someone who cares, not like [you] assholes.” Nuclear war, population bomb, global warming and (even for that matter) communism and the War on Terror. Something BAD will happen and it’s not a QUESTION of IF but WHEN. Who can blame anybody for tuning it all out at this point?
A sorta aside when it comes to rising water levels.
Shortly after Katrina wiped out New Orleans, I kept hearing how much it would have cost to build the levies so that they would survive a cat 4/5 hurricane rather than a cat 3/4 hurricane.
I recall running the numbers and it was something like a 100 dollars a person per year living in the area for the past few decades. Certainly not free, but then again, certainly not a budget buster by any means.
For most areas subject to flooding due to global warming, I imagine the numbers would be about the same.
Think of the children! Think of the Planet! Think about the little kittens!
But above all, don’t think for yourself. If you do, or challenge the Zeitgeist, well you will be the first person put up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Climate change is the new insane religion that we all must follow, without thinking.
The man behind the curtain is deceiving you, but it is not the one you think.
Nope, we are in this together, and if I was betting, if we get to see the bad predictions turn true* the ones challenging the science will not bother to apologize or suffer any consequences, I have found that no one that has been deceived by the gasbags will ever take them to task.
As this quote demonstrates you do not know the history of how we got to the current consensus:
Religion had nothing to do with it.
*And this has to be mentioned again as many seem to continue to ignore it: doomsday guys like Lovelock are regarded almost as deniers in the science world.
