That’s who Der Trihs is talking about … 99% of Americans.
Translation:
And there’s where the rubber meets the road.
What does the “other forms” actually mean? What do you think the alternative is?
Why is that a problem? At one time Exxon had interests in solar, wind, and nuclear and was doing some leading-edge research. By the late 80’s under Lee Raymond, initially president of Exxon Corp and eventually chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil, that had all been divested. Their focus was entirely on oil, with an interesting sideline in funding climate change denial. Aside from having been publicly shamed into cutting back some of the more egregious forms of anti-science lobbying, that’s still where it is today.
We’ve already had this discussion. What may happen in some high latitudes for a short time is neither the general case nor is it sustainable. This rose-colored simplicity is complicated by real-world adaptive stresses brought on by major climate disruptions, loss of biodiversity, and large-scale incursions of non-native species. Believing in fantasies doesn’t make them happen.
You are right.
Of course that applies to fantasies about doom as equally as it applies to fantasies about nirvana.
While it seems prudent to maintain the status quo climate since we know what that’s like (and since changing it might be bad), the prediction confidence of famine and pestilence will be bad is pretty soft, and we don’t have a good history of getting those sorts of predictions correct. We do have a history of over-predicting doom.
At least, I do.
Very simple answer, learn from it. What you may call global warming, or AGW, I call it terraforming 101, we are actually learning how we can effect a planet’s environment on a global scale. We now have data to work with, and fortunately a fairly stable planet to try these things out on considering it’s the only one we have right now.
Realizing we can do this and having some data to work with may be crucial to the future of humanity as we can’t stay on this rock forever.
I’m not a conspiracist about how the 99% are controlled by the “merchants of doubt,” although I do think at least half of them are stupider than average.
The more probable reason we don’t elect people who are going to fix AGW are:
- Threads like this. No one really knows what to do other than have Plans and Conferences, along with making more green energy which will promptly be consumed without replacing current fossil energy as the world’s burgeoning population gets developed out. Everybody has a roadmap to get green by 20XX (typically, 2020-2050). That’s far enough out so that it’s not within a given politician’s career. I note we have excellent plans to reduce spending and fix the budget with approximately the same timelines.
- The Tragedy of the Commons. All politics is local. We are not going to vote for the putative good of the future public at a cost of net personal pain. Of COURSE I am pro Alarmist! I just need my new golf clubs, better carpeting and my vaca to Playa del Carmen.
- A remarkable lack of proximately painful harbingers. If a big chunk of voters in the US are freezing their ass off and didn’t notice any Atlantic hurricanes in 2013, the will to Do Something Right Now diminishes accordingly.
- Over-reaching by Alarmists in their messaging. Take credit for Sandy; you get skepticism about your predictive capacity when 2013 turns out lame. I was listening to redneck talk radio yesterday (not my style, but I think National Progressive Radio was fundraising or something) and this earnest guy calls in telling the host how “more energy from more heat” was obviously responsible for more drought, more wet, more hot extremes and more cold extremes. Alrighty then…Joe 99 is gonna buy into that Real Soon Now.
We need more voices like Kerry Emmanuel saying, “…we should be wary of our collective ignorance of how the climate system works…”
The reason to be cautious about inducing climate change is not that Doom is the likely outcome. It’s that we have no idea what the consequences will be. When we find ACC bogey men behind every weather event in every direction, we risk being hoist on our own petard when some of those predictions crap out.
Not to digress too far down this path, but broad generalizations like that aren’t productive. Neither pessimism nor optimism are intrinsically more credible, but conclusions based on science are.
To return to the subject of the OP, there is no shortage of recommendations on what we can and must do, the most comprehensive being the IPCC WG3 assessments on mitigation strategies. And I’ve always thought Sokolow’s stabilization wedges concept was an interesting take. All of it is pretty much academic until there is a mobilization of public support, and I just can’t see how that’s going to happen until there is a series of climate disasters so out of the ordinary and so extreme that the existence of a systemic global climate disturbance becomes literally undeniable. We seem to have become a society of self-serving scientific illiterates cocooned in comfortable delusions and a culture of denial.
America is a plutocracy with a thin veneer of democracy laid over it. It’s what the rich want to happen that matters; if a hundred million non-rich people want X and one rich guy wants Y, then Y is what happens.
The scenarios where hurricanes become larger and more common, where Europe becomes as cold as Canada, where global infrastructure falls apart because of the stress of tens or hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing sunken cities, when major crop-growing regions end up underwater or converted into deserts. And those are only the middling bad scenarios; the worst case scenarios are things like large scale agriculture becoming impossible because the climate becomes too chaotic, or gigantic “hypercanes” devastating entire continents on a regular basis.
And the “confidence level” for any prediction we make is low, simply because we are entering a climatic regime that humanity has never experienced. We’re rolling dice with the future of civilization.
We are indeed, self-serving. Newsflash though: we haven’t “become” that way. That’s human–probably animal–nature. The hungry crocodile will happily eat the last remaining endangered crane. At no time in the entire history of the human race has there been a deep and abiding concern for the welfare of descendants generations into the future.
What moves us to sacrifice is not the common good but the immediate good. We are collectively altruistic in spirit but narrowly narcissistic in behavior. For ACC, I and (wait for it, GIGO!) Al Gore are the archetypes.
This has almost nothing to do with anti-Science. Alarmists are barking up the wrong tree with that. Skepticism about the science behind AGW is a front for the real reason Deniers are recalcitrant to change. The real reason is selfishness, in the same way the real reason for skepticism about raising taxes is selfishness–I want to keep my money–and not some fancy-dan superior economic theory.
Neither does a lack of action have anything to do with a secret cabal of evil companies controlling the elected. Those same companies would hop on a green bandwagon the moment it’s profitable to do so, and the elected would drive changes the moment the electorate demands them.
There is a message of sacrifice that the Alarmists do not want to tackle, and until they do, their cause is lost. CO2 effects stay around for a millenium. Science says they are already too high. We can’t replace the grid rapidly enough. We have two choices: Putter along and ameliorate as effects occur, or sacrifice radically and collectively and ameliorate the effects themselves.
We’re gonna choose to putter along, kids. We aren’t going to address overpopulation or the national debt substantively, and we aren’t going to address AGW substantively either. We’re gonna putter along and hope we figure out how to address the consequences as they arise. This is all civilization has ever done.
We are not going to sacrifice collectively. Der Trihs is right: We are rolling the dice with future civilizations.
And nobody gives a rats ass about future civilizations, except at AGW parties. I am constantly amazed at the naivete that they do. Our horizon extends about as far as our kids.
AGW is a Great Cause. It’s part of human nature to get involved in a Great Cause, and to go proselytize for it. It’s not part of human nature for me to forgo my new golf clubs or choose the bus instead of my private jet.
What little is being done is utterly inadequate; even the scientific journals now just assume its gonna happen and we have to to what we can to prepare and mitigate.
I’m seventy, so I suppose I will be dead. Still it fries me that things were allowed to get so out of control when we have known about it so long.
We face both global warming and peak oil. That means we will be forced to use other energy sources whether we like it or not.
Most people worldwide are about to join the middle class, which means energy and resource demand will increase significantly. But since increasing energy and resource consumption means more CO2 emissions, then there will be no solution to global warming. Governments and businesses will also support more energy and resource consumption because that’s the only way for tax revenues and profits to go up.
We should expect economic crises, energy and resource shortages, and long-term effects not only of global warming but also of pollution. Also, we face more wars and social unrest given more armaments and high food and oil prices, unemployment, austerity measures, greater desperation as authorities try to control local populations, etc.
Given these, we will have to learn to localize, e.g., transition communities, permaculture, herbal and alternative medicine, etc.
That assumes all mankind is some sort of “all the same” monolithic entity. Some people don’t believe in “sacrifice” for other groups that are “not us”. In fact, they believe quite the opposite.
The “sacrifice” is going to be other people’s suffering, not “our group”.
No, and since oil prices have a;lready reached the point where more expensive oil is a valuable commodity, oil isn’t anywhere close to running out.
In fact, the amount of oil under the oceans dwarfs all known reserves. But with sideways drilling, ocean oil that would be considered “too risky” or “too expensive” is already flowing down pipelines everyday.
Oil isn’t going to run out anytime soon. It just gets more expensive.
Then there is coal. A man can hold a chunk of coal in his hand, and that chunk contains more usable energy that a strong man can create with a long days work. That equation will never change.
So expecting a poor person to stop mining coal, is useless.
I don’t think the coal and wood that individual poor people here and there burn is the source of the problem.
And we would hope at some point as oil gets more expensive and renew-ables get less expensive that oil will price itself out of the market. My feeling is that this will have via natural gas in twenty years and via solar power in fifty or so. That will probably be too late for places like the Mekong Delta.
There was a time when cars ran on ethanol. And in fact, most cars still can run on ethanol. If ethanol was cheaper than gas (current price 2.45 a gallon) we would use ethanol instead of gas.
Diesel designed his engine to run on corn oil (or any vegetable oil) and if corn oil was cheaper than diesel farmers would grow their own fuel. Current bulk price for cheap non food grade vegetable oil is .50 cents a gallon.
When something gets expensive, people switch to cheaper fuels.
And this is just repeating your same tired points and expecting a different answer. It was already tackled but you are choosing to ignore what was reported before.
As Denmark and other countries show, the opposition here is only telling us of unrealistic scary sacrifice levels that are the real items pumped up to alarmist levels. Doing a concerted effort does not mean the end of civilization.
And me and many others have mentioned many examples of contamination brought to our technology and population increase that were controlled thanks to ingenuity and a concerted effort.
No, as usual you have the naivete with the wrong group. As the example of the CFC,s showed the issue was going to be really damaging decades into the future if they had not been controlled. Someone does “give a rat ass” for the future, and the real ignorance appears when examples like that are ignored to make very silly sweeping generalizations. You once again point at Gore * and ignore that individually he already spends and sacrifices more than 1% of his worth in efforts that are needed, much more than the 1% of the GDP this is likely to “cost” all of us once we do a better effort than what we are doing now, with many benefits that will make that investment a very sound one once the switch to less pollutant energy is made.
That is why there will be regulations, not as effective, but that is the only “solution” that many denier congress critters are allowing in practice in countries like the USA.
- As usual your over reliance of Gore only demonstrates that there is indeed a political reason that permeates the ones opposed to change, This reason is an artificial one as Republican conservative scientists demonstrate. Making efforts to defeat those denier congress critters (that are virtually all republicans thanks to very open efforts from corporations and right wing think tanks -no need for a conspiracy-) is a very important piece for the change that is needed.
I hate to tell ya this, but the replacement also destroys ozone, and is a very powerful greenhouse gas as well.
http://scorecard.goodguide.com/chemical-profiles/summary.tcl?edf_substance_id=2837-89-0#envhazards
Even with it having an ozone destruction level .02 of CFC-12, because 2-CHLORO-1,1,1,2-TETRAFLUOROETHAN is a high volume production gas, there is still a lot of ozone destruction going on. But the greenhouse effect from 2-CHLORO-1,1,1,2-TETRAFLUOROETHAN is high enough, that the amounts released since it began production is considerable, and may be one of the main causes of climate change as well.
Unintended consequences.
Only if you install an ethanol burning engine. The typical gasoline burning engine can only handle 10% ethanol blend and , arguably, up to 15%. Ethanol is hard on aluminum and rubber, not to mention it’s hygroscopic.
The expense of bio-diesel is purifying it, the parts of it that make it non-food grade, when burned, cause horrific environmental problems. We have to take the sulfur out, or we’ll have extensive acid rain again. There’s all the soot produced from low-grade fuels, and what that can do to human health. It’s very expenses to build new refineries under our current laws. That’s why we don’t build one in North Dakota, it’s far cheaper to pipe it down to Texas where refineries are “grandfathered” in. Of course we should pursue both these alternative fuels, but don’t think these will be our silver bullets against the vampire of climate change (“silver bullets don’t hurt vampires, you fool”, “oh right, damn, it’s werewolves”).