Um…I’m doing neither, and as a typical Alarmist, I’d say you have the same binary perspective as GIGObuster.
You want to raise an Alarm. You want to call us to action. You want to defend the Heroes of the Faith. You bristle should a Hero be quoted to support an alternate opinion. Excellent.
But I just want to quote the guy. Read what I said above as neutrally as possible and try not to take an inference that was not made.
Kerry Emanuel, in his book “What We Know About Climate Change,” says this about the degree of confidence with which we can predict what will happen: “…(We) should also be wary of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works. Perhaps negative feedback systems that we have not contemplated or underestimated will kick in, sparing us debilitating consequences. On the other hand, little understood or positive feedbacks might make matters worse than we expect. We are humbled by a sense of ignorance…We know as little about the consequences of our actions as Phaeton did when he took the reins of his father’s chariot.”
It is my opinion (and I have not represented it as Emanuel’s) that much of the doom that is predicted is overhyped and frequently represented as being supported by as high a confidence level as there is general agreement of which way global temperatures are going. This is simply incorrect. We are horrible at predicting consequences accurately, especially for so complex a system as climate.
There is plenty of general agreement that the net effects of AGW might be catastrophic. As Emanuel points out, we really don’t know. For him (I believe) this is a reason to call for strong action and to stop burying our heads in the sand. For the public (I believe) this is not a strong enough reason to sacrifice much of anything for the good (or, at least, avoidance of an undefined bad) of future generations.
But I guess we’ll see how much collective, real sacrifice ostriches like I and strawmen like Mr Gore are willing to make.
If I were the proselytizing type like you and GIGOb, I’d be praying for catastrophe on a daily basis to get these luddites off their asses. And I’d also be praying for better success stories than Germany, but I guess that’s a different part of the thread, eh?
And it remains a cherry pick, the real property of pseudoscience is to grab good science science, or the opinion of a scientist that seems to support the position of the pseudo scientist and repeat it expecting others to ignore the many times where the scientist concludes the opposite of what they claim the cherry pick is telling us.
After taking into account what he has told and explained after the book was made (and in the book also) it is clear that he is waxing philosophically about the unknowns of this issue that could get even worse. As he and scientists like the late Stephen Schneider reported:
Kerry Emanuel is doing the same, the point stands, Emanuel like Schneider is referring to the unknowns that Richard Alley describes in his short video here:
As Richard Alley and many others report, expecting that “unknown negative feedbacks will kick in” to save us from the ones that are positively warming the world is wishful thinking. There are plenty of pieces we do know to say that we need to control our emissions ASAP, because the effects of the pieces that are more certain to affect nations will come and having a government where one party is even denying what we already understand about the main pieces is reckless in the extreme.
As for the unknowns that Emanuel is talking about in your clearly misinterpreted quote they are not seen as a confidence builder for the deniers, but a warning that even those missing pieces can get worse and added to the bad effects that are more certain to come in a warming world.
Actually, when looking at your confirmed errors from post #158 the evidence shows that your points are ridiculous, (besides the ridiculous attempt to use Emanuel for support, no easy pickings left indeed) the only prayer I have made was answered like Voltaire had his answered when he wished that his enemies also ended up sounding ridiculous.
It’s interesting that GIGO mentions the late Steven Schneider, because, like Emanuel, he was also an accomplished climate scientist and, like Emanuel, he was also quoted out of context by those seeking to make a case that was really quite different from what those people really believed. For example, not long ago a conservative columnist quoted Schneider as having said (in the journal Nature in 2009), with regard to climate sensitivity, “We’ve been arguing about this for the last 40 years, and things are still not resolved.”
This was supposed to indicate to all and sundry that “this part of the science is not settled.” As indeed it isn’t. But Scheider deeply believed that it’s settled enough and thus the quote is a gross misrepresentation when taken out of context. Let me just talk for a moment about what he really believed and and how it governed his actions. Steve Schneider cared deeply about the environment and the devastating effects of climate change, and most certainly believed no such thing as the out-of-context quote is trying to imply. He believed quite the opposite, and his deep concern for the environment, like that of other pioneers such as Jim Hansen or Hans Oeschger, drove him to a selfless dedication to public advocacy. At one point Steve personally arranged for 50 of his Stanford students to go with him to the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009. He was the object of hate and derision by the usual gang of denialists, just like virtually every other climate scientist who is in the public eye. As one of his colleagues recently said,
"He had a strange pride but disturbed sadness in his eyes as he showed me the hate email he got. His voice would fall when he wondered privately if it would take an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions to get the world to deal with climate change.
“In his 40-year career, Steve Schneider was at the forefront of the scientific and public battle lines in climate science. He pioneered our understanding of aerosol particle and cloud-feedback effects on the climate. He continually advocated an interdisciplinary approach to many aspects of climate change and founded and edited the first interdisciplinary climate journal Climatic Change. And he blazed a bold new path in engaging the public and media about climate change, urging his fellow scientists to do likewise. He wrote many popular books on climate change, authored hundreds of scientific papers, and gave thousands of public lectures.”
Kerry Emanuel is much the same. So rather than second-guessing what we think such scientists might mean when they make various philosophical generalizations, I suggest that we should be listening to what they specifically say on policy-relevant matters pertaining to their field of expertise. Both Schneider and Emanuel and thousands of other respected scientists just like them have been lead or contributing authors to various sections of the IPCC assessment reports over the years, and this is where we find statements of policy relevance made in an objective forum with carefully calibrated language: the WG1 reports dealing with the basic science, WG2 dealing with risks and expected impacts, and WG3 dealing with mitigation. This is where we find hard evidence and the uncertainties around it, not in our personal re-interpretations of vague generalities.
I forgot to mention Emanuel’s recent open letter than was issued last year along with three other climate and energy scientists – this is just one more item that is part and parcel of my previous post about Schneider and Emanuel; it certainly seems very clear about what Emanuel believes from a policy perspective:
I am “using Emanuel for support” for the contention I have that we do not know much about what will actually happen with climate change. We may have a guess that it will be catastrophic, and we may think it’s prudent to avoid that if we can. But we do not know.
I leave it to anyone reading the quote to decide how accurate that interpretation is:
“…(We) should also be wary of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works. Perhaps negative feedback systems that we have not contemplated or underestimated will kick in, sparing us debilitating consequences. On the other hand, little understood or positive feedbacks might make matters worse than we expect. We are humbled by a sense of ignorance…We know as little about the consequences of our actions as Phaeton did when he took the reins of his father’s chariot.”
If Emanuel, or anyone else, has something different to say elsewhere about how confident we are that disaster will occur, feel free to quote it. It seems a bit imbecilic to me to pretend he didn’t say here what I just finished quoting.
Like most Alarmists, you see the AGW world through the same sort of glasses Jonathan Edward had on when he preached “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God.”
For the same reason, I don’t think your message for change will be effective. It’s a bit over the top, and hell is a bit too nebulous.
But we’ll see.
I think other concerns–even environmental ones–will push ACC off the radar unless a series of warm-direction disasters start showing up. For example, this week air quality in Paris has been horrible. And some fun stories in Germany about how burning wood is crapping up the air (even though it’s been labeled ACC-friendly). As these and other items come to the front, people are going to wonder what all their anti-AGW efforts are actually buying them.
(I get it, by the way, that anything too cold is “weather” while hot things are climate. My point is that every winter like the one the US midwest just had moves Joe Public a little further away from acting Right Now. I’m not interested in arguing about whether or not a polar vortex meander is ACC, weather variation, or whatever…it’s irrelevant to the point I’m making, which you have repeatedly been unable to grasp.)
Expecting something different and getting stuck on the same is indeed a mark of pseudoscience.
The context and what Emmanuel reports later demonstrates that you got it wrong, it is you who need to find another quote or interview where he supports you.
Exactly the same comment can be made about Stephen Schneider. As I quoted, he said “We’ve been arguing about [the magnitude of climate sensitivity] for the last 40 years, and things are still not resolved.” It would seem pretty “obvious” from that that he is saying we still don’t know how the climate will respond to GHG forcings, wouldn’t it? Which is indeed how it was misrepresented in a conservative Australian newspaper, under the general theme of “famous scientist admits we know nothing”. But read the rest of what I wrote about Schneider and/or, better yet, Google his name and discover for yourself his degree of engagement in climate change policy.
Same thing for Kerry Emanuel. Look at some of the consensus statements in the IPCC reports, some of which he co-authored, or quite simply just look at the open letter he wrote last year that I referenced in my previous post. His position is clear and unambiguous and not the rose-colored spin you’re putting on your favorite quote. He speaks of our “ignorance” out of a scientist’s frustration with our recklessness, and not as an endorsement of continuing recklessness. Hence his recurring allegory of Phaeton.
It’s not difficult to know what to do given uncertainty. Because uncertainty works both ways (it will get better or the same or it will get worse), then the logical thing to do is to prepare for worst-case scenarios.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work, because the number of items against which a worst-case scenario can be imagined are too many, ranging from financial to physical.
Most individuals are pretty self-focused, so if they are going to be picking up the bill or sacrificing, they want some fairly concrete, imminent disaster. It’s the difference between preparing for a comet known to be headed our way (proximate problem) and building out a program to head off the one possibly endangering future generations (worst-case scenario).
Most Alarmists have trouble grasping what moves the public to action, and they seem constantly bewildered that this obvious catastrophe headed our way hasn’t created more initiative. Until and unless we can predict better, and those predictions are born out by proximate catastrophes, we won’t ever change this graph.
That’s the only graph that means anything. All the rest is very confused hoopla. What the graph says is that total world energy consumption is soaring, and that fossil fuels are rising every bit as fast (actually, faster) than renewables. In other words, we use all the energy we create, from all sources, and still want more.
But to meaningfully address AGW, we need to replace fossil fuels with renewables (and not fake renewables like firewood). We need to do it right away (within 20 years, say).
Given the burgeoning human population, the drive for the developing world to live better, the lag time practically required to replace the current grid, and our inability to predict accurately, no meaningful change in that graph is going to occur. The dips you see in fossils before 2010 reflect an involuntary world-wide financial recession.
There is no chance the broad public will electively sacrifice until our our prediction accuracy increases and those predicted consequences are upon us, obvious to everyone. Scaremongering from the pulpit of AGW in the name of the Great Cause will yield the Sunday equivalent of “Great Sermon, Pastor GIGO!” and the Monday equivalent of a return to sinning.
I know it’s really really hard for you to admit this, but I have neither quoted Emanuel out of context nor have I implied that he endorses being reckless by doing nothing. He is very clear that we need to act despite being humbled by the limitations of our ability to know what is actually going to happen.
I have quoted him exactly, and in context, in support of a contention that we aren’t very good at predicting what will actually happen. And I have conveyed accurately his concern that that is the very reason we should act, given the potentially catastrophic consequences should some of the predictions prove to be accurate.
I completely understand he is one of your Heroes of the Great Cause, and that the psychology is to not have his words “misused.” For Alarmists, the AGW message is a very carefully managed one, and bristling at a charge that all is not as neat as it seems to be is very natural.
But all is not as neat as it seems to be, and not everyone is moved by the message of hell until hell becomes more proximate.
Let’s hope for some really bad events, really soon. And perhaps you could send a note to fellow Alarmists not to be so honest about where the limitations lie for science.
No. that is avoiding a lot, as the book explains in the afterword.:
Afterword by Judith A. Lazer and William Moomaw
The book then explains that some damage is already inevitable, but as the writers report the scenarios are worse if we do not control our emissions.
Already quoted interviews about the book by Emanuel do show that indeed Emanuel is very sure about the warmer world, with higher seas and more intense droughts and storms.
The allegory of Phaeton is coming from Emanuel warming us that the warming, besides the damage that will cause *, the bits that we are not good yet at predicting (More storms, even more accelerated ice loss with more droughts, worse crop failures, clouds actually causing more warming, etc) could be worse than expected.
*And this damage that could be manageable is not becoming so because we have politicians that are not even preparing for that because as deniers they claim that there is “no ocean rise, more intense droughts, and storms” coming or beginning to show up. Emanuel also points specially at the Republicans for being so shortsighted.
As his MIT course introduction shows, there is a delicate balance that we are changing.
[QUOTE=Emanuel] Climate is changing, we are changing the climate and it is important to educate a young generation of scientists who can make progress in trying to understand this very important problem.
[/QUOTE]
The snark in the last paragraph is unfair and not supported by anything I’ve ever said. My position is one that is supported by science, and I’m happy to continue discussing both the known facts and the uncertainties around them. What frustrates me is how easily the uncertainties can be distorted into reasons for false complacency. Many such distortions have been introduced in previous threads on this subject by various posters that have been without substance or merit. Opposing such claims shouldn’t be taken as scientific arrogance or unjustified certainty; it should just be taken for what it is: exposing bullshit, which is unfortunately extremely abundant on this topic.
My objection to your invoking Emanuel is that you use it to support statements like these:
*(1) Kerry Emanuel thinks we should act because we do not know the consequences.
(2) For example, a Katrina or Sandy doesn’t cut it for hurricanes when we have a season like we just had in the Atlantic. One area of the globe burning up doesn’t cut it when we just finished freezing our ass off for 4 months with a Great Lakes ice cover not seen in decades.*
If (1) is true then one wonders what Emanuel teaches in his climate science courses at MIT, or how the IPCC manages to fill about 3,000 pages in each assessment report cycle, or what it is that is contained the tens of thousands of research papers on the subject that are published every year. Indeed the entire Working Group 2 assessment report deals precisely with consequences and nothing else. A completely new IPCC report on climate change consequences will be released in just a few weeks – the work of 310 senior scientists in various relevant specialties from 73 countries over the past five years, updating the previous 2007 report with new information from about 12,000 research papers. Claiming that we “don’t know” the consequences of climate change seems rather specious and misleading. Nor is it correct to say, as you did, that “much of the doom that is predicted is overhyped”; indeed, as already pointed out, the IPCC tends to be exceptionally conservative and some of its estimates have had to be revised upward. The statement is just wrong when made in reference to sound science. I’m not talking about environmental nutbars making exaggerated claims because no one listens to them anyway; I’m talking about scientists like Schneider and Emanuel and the thousands of others who do real research and contribute to the IPCC.
Item (2) is scientifically unsound on many points. Contrary to popular belief, the evidence doesn’t predict more frequent North Atlantic hurricanes and in fact suggests a possible decrease in frequency, but an increase in average hurricane energy. In the last hurricane season exceptionally dry air from parts of Africa and South America was disruptive to hurricane formation, but the fact remains that everything else being equal warmer sea surface temperatures do create more energetic hurricanes. The hurricane Power Dissipation Index has indeed been increasing on an average decadal basis, with the expected year-to-year natural variations.
And “one area of the globe burning up” while it’s cold somewhere else does indeed matter if average annual temperatures continue to increase because it does affect global circulation systems in major ways, and indeed the unusual cold and snow in much of North America this winter is a direct result of that.
And “Great Lakes ice cover” is quite irrelevant since Great Lakes ice is annually extremely variable and simply a function of each year’s winter temperature, just like Great Lakes water levels can have big annual variations. A more realistic climate metric is to look at the long-term trend in Arctic ice cover or, better still, its overall mass.
The point here being that it’s hard to get away from the conclusions that the sorts of “facts” you’ve thrown out seem to be intended to induce an unjustified sense of complacency about the impacts of climate change. I don’t point out the Arctic ice information because it happens to agree with “my” point of view, but because it’s actually meaningful over the long term, whereas seasonal Great Lakes ice this particular year doesn’t mean anything and is just an argumentative misdirection. What were you just saying about a “carefully managed message”?
Again, it works both ways, i.e., what can be imagined for a best-case scenario.
Actually, they will have no choice given peak oil. For more details, read the IEA 2010 report which looks at peak oil and global warming, if not U.S. military reports that also look at both.
That’s because the main organizations reporting on global warming and peak oil aren’t alarmists.
Also, the warnings are given precisely because of the illogical assumption that energy consumption will increase indefinitely.
Conventional oil production peaked in 2005, and production for the five players have been dropping. Unconventional oil won’t last because its energy returns are high.
In terms of per capita production, oil production peaked in 1979. That time, the global middle class was very small. Now, it’s set to rise to 50 pct of the global population. To meet the demands of that, we will need more than one Saudi Arabia every seven years.
Actually, that’s the same argument given by the IEA because it is expecting a worst-case scenario brought about by global warming and peak oil combined.
That graph is going to change because unconventional oil will only last for a few years. Total oil and gas production is expected to rise, at best, a total of 9 pct during the next two decades, but that assumes that conventional production will simply flat line, which means producers will go for maximum depletion rates. Meanwhile, oil consumption has to go up by 2 pct every year to meet economic growth, and that doesn’t include a growing global middle class.
It doesn’t matter what the public thinks because what will kick in these predicaments are physical laws. We are already seeing them taking place. That is,
oil prices tripling, conventional oil in an undulating plateau, five of the major players seeing production drop by 25 pct, and producers resorting to unconventional oil which won’t last;
over twenty positive feedbacks related to climate change now kicking in, several of them many were expecting to take place decades from now;
a global recession that continues, leading to high oil and food prices plus economic crashes for various countries, stemming from only a trillion dollars in subprime lending leading to over thirty trillion dollars being vaporized worldwide, ultimately requiring massive bailouts in various countries, and feeding what is now an unregulated global derivatives market that has a notional value of between 600 trillion to 1.2 quadrillion dollars.
Thus, we are looking at multiple predicaments creating a perfect storm:
“Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?”
WTF is this? As far as I know, the breakdown on current costs of alternative energy, their viability and their ability to provide our power needs has been done and we are not talking about mild changes to our habits or small investments in alternative energy. We are either talking about large increases to our cost of power or significant changes to how much power our society consumes.
None of it is economically viable without huge subsidies.
I’m all for nuclear power (a lot of the climate change environmentalists are dead set against it), but we can’t build nuclear power plants fast enough to make the sort of difference youa re talking about.
Or we could keep doing what we’re doing and plan to adapt. Or somewhere in between.
It all depends on how much that preparation costs us. There is this show called Doomsday Preppers about these crazy people who are preparing for armageddon. They are stocked up on years worth of food and ammunition. They have basically sacrificed everything they cold enjoy in this world for the sake of weathering an apocaplypse that might or might not happen.
How much is all this preparation going to cost us?
The point is that the real alarmist position comes from the ones that claim that the costs will be so huge as to stop progress, not the case.
Indeed the answer of how much will costs us is mentioned, somehow I think you don’t like that answer means that it will not be as catastrophic as your sources are telling you.
We don’t know, therefore we have to act. In that case, we should also start building planetary defense systems against alien invaders, because we don’t know when we might be attacked. We should start building giant quarantine facilities for a time when our antibiotics stop working entirely and global pandemics break out. We should start evacuating the Midwest because we know there’s a supervolcano under Yellowstone, and we have no idea when it might blow.
The fundamental problem with the precautionary principle is that it elevates the unknown above the known. It also violates everything we know about risk management in a world of finite resources. A 20% chance of something bad happening in the future should result in less money being spent on mitigation than a 100% chance of something bad happening in the future. This is true because resources are finite and resources spent on one thing takes resources away from something else. Money spent preventing global warming is money that will not be spent curing cancer, designing new computers, improving streets and bridges, creating new companies that make products we all want.
The other factor is the time-value of money. A 1 trillion dollar loss 100 years from now is not the same as a 1 trillion dollar loss tomorrow. It can’t possibly be, or we wouldn’t be able to make rational investments at all. The question then becomes, “How much money should we spent to avoid 1 trillion losses 100 years from now?” A simple financial calculation will tell you - not that much. If the real growth rate of an investment is 5%, then $1 today is worth $119 a hundred years from now. So $1 trillion in damages a hundred years from now has a net present value of about 8.5 billion dollars. In other words, if the cost of mitigation is higher than that, we’d be better off investing the money, then using the gains earned to simply offset the cost of mitigation.
It gets worse when you factor in risk. If the most expensive scenario only has a 20% chance of happening, you would want to downgrade the cost by a factor of 5.
The problem for the “we must stop it now!” movement is that this math just doesn’t work out in their favor - and they know it. So instead they talk about a ‘social discount rate’, and make claims that $1 trillion in damages far in the future should be treated the same as $1 trillion in damages tomorrow. That gets us out of the realm of science and economics and into the realm of values and belief systems. A social discount rate of zero may make sense if you’re a hardcore environmentalist who believes man is an invasive species on the planet and must live sustainably and leave no lasting footprint on the environment. But not everyone believes that.
So how unknowable is the future? Well, the IPCC high, median and low estimates carry their own percentages, but whole methodology of determining those estimates has to be considered speculative because it relies on predicting the future behavior of multiple complex systems that we have not demonstrated an ability to predict at all.
First, it relies on a prediction of climate response to CO2 over decades. Climate is a complex system and we are discovering new facts about it daily. Our understanding of this system is miniscule compared to our understanding of, say, the immune system, and we still can’t predict how it’s going to behave.
The second assumption is that we understand how much CO2 will be emitted over that period. The IPCC hedges this by creating three different scenarios, but those are really no better than throwing darts at a blackboard. And those scenarios diverge so wildly in outcome that it’s hard to understand how you could base any policy on them. The low estimate result for climate change would be a net economic benefit for the planet, and in that case we should do nothing.
But all those estimates are still based on extrapolative models that just use different initial assumptions. For all we know, there will be an energy breakthrough next year and a decade from now we’ll be laughing just as hard at these predictions as we laughed about the predictions in 1900 that major cities would soon be inundated with horse manure.
The third assumption it makes is that we can understand what the cost of climate change will be 100 years from now. The number of assumptions baked into that are incredible. We have no freaking idea what our technology will look like in 100 years. We have no idea what human migration patterns will be like, or what mitigation strategies we develop.
Human society is another complex adaptive system. It mutates and shifts as the environment around us changes. The form it mutates into is completely unknowable. For all we know, there will be a nuclear war in 10 years and our coastal cities will be gone anyway. Or nuclear winter will set in, and we’ll be wishing we had pumped more CO2 into the air to help offset it. Or perhaps we’re heading into a golden age of scientific expansion and we’ll be in a position to easily deal with global warming. Or some other major change will happen that we can’t even speculate on now.
One thing all disaster scenarios have in common is that they can only extrapolate current trends into the future. “If this goes on…” is a common science fiction trope, and it’s basically the only tool we have for predicting the future, because by definition the unknown unknowns are, well, unknown. But the history of economic and social development shows us that changes don’t come smoothly - they’re driven by inflection points and sudden shocks.
You could make all kinds of extrapolations about horse populations and city manure problems based on demand curves and extrapolations of them into the future, and they would be correct - until they minute they’re not. Then you get the automobile, and the entire landscape gets upended. You could make all kinds of predictions about the growth in demand for copper and make predictions of when it will run out - until someone invents fiber optics. You could make all kinds of predictions about the power requirements of computing and make claims about how we’re going to be bankrupt if these giant computers with vacuum tubes become more necessary, and you’d be right - until someone invented the transistor.
We don’t know what big changes are coming. But we do know there will be big changes. There always are. Ten or twenty years from now, there will be some new ‘big thing’ that transforms some area of our lives. We just don’t know what that will be. But there’s always something. 100 years is a long time.
In the last century we saw massive transformations of the world economy and social structure happen repeatedly. Two world wars, the rise and fall of empires, the demographic transition in the third world, the rise of the automobile, the airplane, birth control, the computer, the internet… And change is accelerating. We know about as much about what life will be like 100 years from now as people living in the year 1914 knew about our lives in 2014. And that’s essentially nothing.
Full stop, you did not read what we do know that it is more likely to happen, so we must act; as for the items that we do not know… Uncertainty is not your friend. Those can get worse and **added **to the items that are more certain to come.
