What are the benefits to Global Climate Change?

Great Debates
41

I’m sure you realize this, but that makes no sense when taken literally. The earth’s ecology will be whatever it is, and if there’s nobody to care about it, what is “best”? Was it “best” when some series of calamities caused the extinction that led to the rise of mammals?

We don’t need to worry about the planet; it’ll do just fine with or without us, until the Sun swells up. Humanity, on the other hand, is another question, and the one that matters to me.

Do you disagree with the counterexamples in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”? He cites cases where people did adapt, and cases where they didn’t. Those societies had much lower technology, but is there some watershed difference, or have the problems we’ve faced just been smaller (in proportion)?

Admittedly, Malthus was “wrong” (or at best, premature), thanks to technology. His argument that agricultural productivity was gaining linearly while population was growing exponentially was wrong about agriculture. The “Club of Rome” was wrong in their estimates in “Limits to Growth”. But have we really proven that there are no limits to growth?

There’s an interesting (though dated) book by Jerry Pournelle, “A Step Farther Out” where he makes the claim that with sufficient energy and technology, we can fix any problem. But, can we fix it soon enough? (I also wondered what he’d do with all that leftover heat, but no doubt he’d say “use energy to get rid of it.”)

Thanks for the link to the TED talk; that’s a great one. I’m reminded by Carl Sagan’s argument that we don’t have a population problem so much as a poverty problem; overpopulation being the result of poverty because poor people rely on children for their “retirement” (among other reasons), while wealthy people choose to have few children.

42

Quite right on both counts – and it’s not a gotcha, just a political impossibilty that the groups don’t want to think about. Don’t tell me what I’m extemely ignorant about, though.

43

I’d say it’s a good assumption that there isn’t anything significant we can do about it, so we might as well look for silver linings. Unfortunately, from everything I’ve seen or read, there aren’t going to be many of those.

Well, during one of the medieval warming periods, I seem to recall that grapes could be grown in the UK, so I suppose that would be a bonus for them. A lot of new land in Canada and northern Europe (I assume especially northern Russia) will become available for agriculture (once it dries out from all the permafrost melting, and once all that methane locked up in it outgasses…trying to put a good face on all that happening, mind).

As others have noted, it should, in theory, open up trade possibilities in the north as well as new oil reserves (for Canada, Russia and other Northern European countries to fight over). Um…I guess they will be able to do those Alaska Gold Rush type shows all year round if they don’t have to leave every winter. And, perhaps the best, most positive benefit would be that Ice Road Truckers will be permanently cancelled!! That’s got to count for something, right?

44

I’m trying to make the point that sentient creatures who can change natural processes are qualitatively different than all other “natural” events.

The argument is advanced that, because we know better, we should not trash the earth simply because we are selfish, and because we can. In most anti-AGW arguments there’s an underlying assumption that we have a larger responsibility than simply wolfing down whatever we feel like consuming with no regard for the earth. Sure; the Big Comet might strike tomorrow, or we might get buzzed with a gamma ray burst. We can’t do anything about that.

But the argument is that we can–and therefore should–do something about destroying the earth with our own hand.

So I’m just saying in a shorthand fashion that worrying about AGW is like worrying about a housefire we’re starting when the volcano of overpopulation is bubbling under the neighborhood.

Assuming we’re going to care about the ecology of the earth at all, we’re focusing on the wrong problem. Our invasiveness as a species and our destruction of the earth to feed and pleasure ourselves will consume it nicely even if we solve AGW tonight.

45

It’s not an either-or situation. Just because a nearby active volcano might erupt sometime soon, or even if it’s strongly forecast to erupt before very long, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t bother me any to find myself in a burning house RIGHT NOW.

It wouldn’t be intelligent to sit there passively while the house and I burn up, just because the predicted future volcano eruption would be objectively worse on a larger scale than the house fire.

(And as I’ve noted before, unless you (generic you) are either refraining from reproducing (like me) or actively doing all you can to dissuade your existing descendants from reproducing, I don’t really believe in your concern about the population problem. I think that a lot of people use hand-wringing about medium- and long-term population projections merely as an excuse for inaction on near- and medium-term problems like GHG emissions.)

46

QFT, and on top of that CP is still going like Elmer Fudd running over the cliff forgetting to notice that the ground is missing for him to run on, the ones reporting on what to do regarding AGW are not avoiding the population control issue, it is a part of the solution.

What I have noticed also is that, besides being an excuse for inaction, the population issue is actually used by many conservative contrarians in an attempt to discredit the environmentalists when they mention family planning: contrarians actually try to convince the public at large that environmentalists just want to impose things like China’s one child solution, just another myth contrarians make when attempting to discredit environmentalists, the point here is that conservatives should talk to other conservatives and make up their minds if environmentalists do not worry about population control and should be condemned for that or if they do worry too much and should be condemned for that instead…

Yeah, I did not say that they are logical, **that **is their problem.

47

[QUOTE=Kimstu]
It wouldn’t be intelligent to sit there passively while the house and I burn up, just because the predicted future volcano eruption would be objectively worse on a larger scale than the house fire.
[/QUOTE]

Sure, and if that were the choice then it would be stupid to do that. However, your analogy, unfortunately, sucks wrt the current situation. It’s more like a city, which might burn down, but that you have to convince a large enough majority of the inhabitants that this might happen AND that they need to pay to replace a large part of it, at great cost, up front. Even that analogy sucks, of course, but it’s closer than yours. The trouble, of course, is that our entire technology base is built on fossil fuels, and that base is the source of our collective prosperity…and, more importantly, the prosperity of the emerging industrial powers such as China and India. You’d need to convince not only the old, established 1st world nations to take a lot of short and medium term costs to make significant changes (if you wanted to do this quickly, instead of letting the market do it which is what we are doing now), but those emerging nations to take a rather large hit to their short and medium term prosperity increases. I just don’t see that as a likely outcome, considering that I’m not even seeing the commitment for this happening anywhere…not rapidly anyway.

What we are seeing is a slow change that might, in a few decades, start to really gather momentum in a lot of the 1st world, and might start to make really significant inroads in the emerging industrial powers such as China and India down the road…maybe. As Cecil’s recent article says, though, many ‘new’ sources of hydrocarbons seem to be increasingly exploited, which is going to keep prices fairly stable and keep alternative technologies on the back burners, or perhaps as slowly evolving niche technologies that build up over time. Again, maybe…currently, even hybrids are a pretty small part of the overall market even in Europe, let alone in the US, and while they have gone up a lot it’s sort of like the way the Chinese have increased their standards of living…when you start really low, even a large increase doesn’t mean that much overall, at least in the short or medium term. And, of course, on the energy production side of things, you still have a lot of folks opposed to things like nuclear, and the realities of solar and wind, of new hydro-electric and the limitations of scale for geo-thermal. We might shift towards natural gas and in the short term away from coal, but that’s hardly going to solve the global climate change equation by very much.

I’d say that climate change is going to happen, and while I don’t think we should sit idly by and watch the house burn, I think that we’d collectively be best served trying to anticipate the change and plan for and deal with the consequences then to spin our wheels dreaming about large shifts in our CO2 footprint that seem unlikely to happen.

48

Thing is, that was granted already, most of the policy recommendations by the experts do acknowledge that some change is going to happen, because there will not be a “cold turkey” approach in dealing with the footprint, but it is even more foolish to not do an effort to prevent the even more dire increases with the probability that temperatures will go much farther than the 2 degrees expected if we implemented the recommended policies. This is IMHO the biggest flaw with the idea that we only need to adapt.

http://test-globalchange.mit.edu/resources/gamble/policy_F.html

http://test-globalchange.mit.edu/resources/gamble/no-policy_F.html

49

I think GW will spur innovations we might not have gotten around to otherwise, or as quickly. Clean renewable energy will benefit everyone. A lot of our climate solutions will probably require even more energy use, rather than less. We may not have a choice about turning up the AC and moving water over longer distances.

50

I didn’t say we ONLY need to adapt…merely that we need to adapt as well, because frankly, I’ve never seen any realistic plan that would get us to the levels of reduction needed quickly enough to prevent or even seriously mitigate global climate change. They have been talking about having to have us reduce massively for years now, and while the US and Europe’s CO2 footprint has flattened out, China and India’s have exploded, and I don’t see that changing in a large enough way to make a big difference in the short or medium term. Do you, seriously?

51

Sure they will…eventually. But it’s going to take years or decades for them to make serious inroads. The one technology that could make a massive difference (though still in years and at a huge cost) is opposed by you and many other environmentalists, despite the threat of global warming…that being nuclear.

52

That is going into a lot of ignorant territory, as it was pointed before there has already been a compromise to civilization, scientists and policy makers do not expect much to be done that can be effective in the short term, the point remains, there is already a lot of change expected and that humanity can deal with, we have to work to prevent it from becoming worse in the medium and long terms.

53

What…the fuck…are you talking about??? :confused:

54

What the MIT people reported, with policy changes, we can expect climate change that it is more manageable, with no policy we can expect worse climate, while it is comforting to some that do not want to see changes that places like India or China are not doing enough, the reality is that not even them will be able to deny the reality of the change so the policy change will be implemented, not in the short run, but it will.

The point is that it would be cheaper to start now rather than wait… And let China eat our lunch, they are also doing a lot of inroads in green technology and in a world where this will be an issue it seems to me that China will be influencing the developed world more than the US will.

55

[QUOTE=GIGObuster]
The point is that it would be cheaper to start now rather than wait.
[/QUOTE]

Even if I grant that this is the case, it’s not happening…at least not quickly. THAT IS THE REALITY. It’s happening slowly, over time…and I don’t see anything indicating that this is going to change any time in the next few years or even decades.

And this is different than what I said how, exactly? For instance, I never said that we shouldn’t continue to try and mitigate our CO2 footprint, or not have an energy policy…you seem to be using a tape recorder to respond. What I said was that we are unlikely to see any large scale changes any time soon, but instead the same gradual shift, possibly (probably) increasing in momentum over time as the new technologies and policies start to make a real impact. If we can wait for that for 10 or 20 years, and if that will mitigate global climate change (which, from everything I’ve read it won’t…not over those time scales), then great…we are doing that already, and I’m all for continuing and increasing those efforts. But, as I doubt that’s going to make a major short or medium term change in the increasingly evident impact of global climate change, we really need to start looking at dealing with that change…a change that’s ALREADY HAPPENING.

56

As the OP, I said that I don’t want a political debate but that is a simple fact that can’t be ignored despite the good intentions of the U.S. and European environmentalists. Global Climate Change is well, global, and there is nothing we can do to stop fossil fuel use in other countries especially China and India. For every Toyota Prius sold, we might as well piss into the ocean rather than let it go into the city sewers to about the same overall environmental impact. Going nuclear decades ago around the world might have helped but that is unrealistic now based on strict regulation and general ignorance from the left.

Fossil fuels are going to be the dominant energy supply for the foreseeable future around the world. The U.S. is scheduled to be energy independent within 15 years based on current reports due to recent massive natural gas strikes in the South but also crude oil in place like North Dakota. The U.S. will be a net exporter of fossil fuels by 2030. That will save the U.S. economy and you are naive if you think politicians value long-term environmental impact over the overall economic health of the nation. It is already starting to happen.Natural gas strikes have already paid my family tens of millions of dollars with much more to come and we are only some of many. Domestic fossil fuel production is ramping up incredibly rapidly.

It doesn’t really matter in for this discussion if China is the one emitting the questionable gases or the U.S. or any other country. The end result is the same for the entire world.

Peak oil was a false prophecy in a huge way. Let’s not ignore the facts in favor of wishful thinking. Even if we didn’t have any fossil fuel reserves left, Global Climate Change may have already reached the tipping point due to any number of factors.

The original question stand and it is how do we live with that and what are the positives?

57

[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
The original question stand and it is how do we live with that and what are the positives?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t see a lot of positives, to be honest, but I’d say the biggest will be the opening up of the northwestern passage and all the trade and resource exploitation that brings about. I guess you could also look at new areas opening up for exploitation both agriculturally and resource wise in many of the northern countries (though, as far as agriculture goes I’d say it will be a net negative if the predictions are true…a large part of the US breadbasket region will lose a lot of productivity, and I’m unsure if increasing Canada’s will make up the difference).

58

This again ignores that

  1. policy makers and scientists already accepted and compromised, before controlling emissions properly we will continue doing a lot of what we are doing in the short run and change in the climate is coming/happening.

And..

  1. IIUC, The problem is that by not controlling the emissions the positives are a constant moving target depending on the latitude of the location and other factors.

The point is that once we do organize and control emissions, scientists and policy makers can then tell us with more certainty where we can expect and use those positive effects. Do not control emissions and then whatever good one sees in a place will be gone in a few generations.

59

Anyhow, for a well researched list of the positive things we should expect in a warming planet we should consult what the scientists say that we can expect:

Unfortunately, the negative column is larger, but at least we will get bigger marmots :slight_smile: .

60

Oh, come on…the demise of Ice Road Truckers has GOT to be worth all the pain of global climate change!!