The Great Global Warming Swindle

[SpoofyChop]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9005566792811497638&q=The+Great+Global+Warming+Swindle&hl=en

They gave the oscar to the wrong Global Warming film.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

From the wiki entry: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle)

The film is critical of the current theory of man-made global warming, and claims that theory has numerous flaws. Only sceptics of this theory are interviewed, and there is no attempt to present the most widely held scientific opinion on climate change except to present counter-arguments. Channel 4, pre-empting the controversy, said, "It is essentially a polemic and we are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial programming that Channel 4 is renowned for."

...

Published on March 4, 2007, in a report in The Independent about the imminent broadcast of The Great Global Warming Swindle, Geoffrey Lean pointed out that the director of the documentary, Martin Durkin, had been found to have selectively editing footage in order to misrepresent the views of several of his interviewees his earlier film Against Nature (also broadcast on Channel 4) . These interviewees complained to the Independent Television Commission of the UK, which upheld their complaint and ruled, moreover, the documentary filmmakers had "misled" participants over the "content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part."

How's that skepticism thing going for you, Spoofy?

[Jake Plane]

There's a swindle involved alright...


A Leading US climate scientist is considering legal action after he says he was duped into appearing in a Channel 4 documentary that claimed man-made global warming is a myth. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was 'grossly distorted' and 'as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two'.

He says his comments in the film were taken out of context and that he would not have agreed to take part if he had known it would argue that man-made global warming was not a serious threat. 'I thought they were trying to educate the public about the complexities of climate change,' he said. 'This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue.'

Yet another great example of Spoofy thinking "expansively," and lamenting that people don't check their sources or raise critical questions before posting.

[Brian Rucker]

Here's all I could find on the director, Martin Durkin:

http://imdb.com/name/nm1942836/

It seems his greatest achievement before this was a documentary on the sex lives of animals. And there's only one or two other things listed.

When I've more time I'll run down the "experts" and see what their histories really are. I'd also like to see where the funding for this came from.

[Nellie]

I wasn't that impressed with it, it directly raises questions that it then fails to look at. Either Ice Core records show a correlation between CO2 and temperature or they don't. Having decided that actually they show the opposite of what everyone has been telling us, you could at least spend a little time explaining to us non scientist thickos why all the charts everyone else is spewing out seems to show that there is a relationship. Other aspects of what they argue, that climate change is normal and we're not putting out enough Greenhouse gas to make a jot of difference is again interesting as are the points they raise about people "like them" disagreeing with the whole notion of human induced climate change.

I do think it raised some interesting points but I think it concentrates too much on the relationship between Co2 and Temperature increases while ignoring pretty much everything else and makes some interesting accusations about the whole enviromental movement that it then complete fails to follow up.

In a nutshell the conclusion of the programme is that the entire enviroment change "agenda" was cooked up and pushed by Margaret Thatcher trying to break the coal miners and promote Nuclear Power and the environment movement has been "hijacked" wholescale by eastern european communists pushing an anti capitalist agenda and using Pollution/Global warming as the means to do it.

In short turn your lights on, buy an SUV, there's nothing to worry about, it's all a communist plot and legacy of a policy to promote nuclear fuel in England in the 80's.

[edit] Oh yeah and there's at least one major argument that they put forward and then directly contradict about 10 minutes later and obvious enough that both of us watching at the time commented on it.

[DeepT]

Spoofy: Are you even trying to be a critical thinker or have you given up on that? Was I wasting my breath in the "They are all lying to me" thread?

[Phil_Stein]

[edit] Oh yeah and there's at least one major argument that they put forward and then directly contradict about 10 minutes later and obvious enough that both of us watching at the time commented on it.

For those of us who don't want to invest 75 minutes or so watching the program, could you summarize?

[Dirt]

Could Spoof actually be a Bush viral marketer?

[Nellie]

For those of us who don't want to invest 75 minutes or so watching the program, could you summarize?

During their initial argument about Carbon Dioxide and Temperature, they point out that post WWII industrial ouput/CO2 grew exponentially while average temperatures dropped until the mid 70's when they started to rise again and use that time lag as means of debunking the "myth" that Human CO2 is contributing to global temperature changes.

They then move on to discuss the role of the oceans and point out that any warming is related to having heat up these vast bodies of water and that as a result, any changes in temperature can take decades, up to 80-100 years to be evident.

Now I'm obviously just a layman, but 1945/6 to 1975 is a period of time that to me seems to span decades, ok it's less than the 80-100 years that they only just said it could take, but I'd still suggest that it's a relationship that would seem to fit in rather well with the timescales they'd only just finished discussing.

So on the one hand, man made global warming can't be happening because we didn't see temperatures starting to rise for 30-40 years after we started pumping greatly increased quantities of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and on the other we'd expect to see a lag of decades before any warming was evident because we have to basically heat up the oceans first.

[Flowers]

Well there is an interesting scientific point that this discussion has brought out. Apparently, Spoofychop's Down's Syndrome can flare up like Joe Namath's back pain.

[Glenn]

I don't have 75 minutes to spare on a Monday morning, but I'd appreciate a heads up if/when someone manages to disprove either (A) the physical chemistry behind the general concept of an atmosphere with more CO2 trapping more heat, or (B) the rise in atmospheric CO2 since the advent on industrialization. Everything else is just haggling over the specifics.

[RepoMan]

Baaa ha ha! Spoofy gets pwn3d by basically everyone!

Looks like he's pulling a Durkin and avoiding all dialogue about the problems with his position.

[Brian Rucker]

I'm just waiting for Cherub to show up and accuse everyone of group-think.

[Charles]

I look forward to Spoofychop's response!

[FIDGAF]

So on the one hand, man made global warming can't be happening because we didn't see temperatures starting to rise for 30-40 years after we started pumping greatly increased quantities of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and on the other we'd expect to see a lag of decades before any warming was evident because we have to basically heat up the oceans first.

I guess they never considered that the planet might be able to handle that much CO2 for a while but then we started cutting down all those imaginary rain forests. That, coupled with the inconclusive Acid Rain, couldn't possibly be explanations for the time lapse between cause and effect.

[Rollory]

The basic argument, as I understand it, is
- the sun and what it does drives climate on Earth far more than anything else
- CO2 follows temperature rather than driving it
- human-produced CO2 is a tiny fraction of the CO2 going into the atmosphere, and therefore changes in the amount human-produced can reasonably be expected to have little effect
- there is a lot of money available for people who claim that human-caused warming is happening, and very little for those who claim the opposite, and the forecasts are long-range and thus there is little negative feedback for incorrect predictions.

Regardless of shoot-the-messenger aimed at the people behind it, these are pretty solid claims and should be easily tested/disproved, if that is possible.

[extarbags]

Why are conservatives so vehement about this, anyway? I mean, I know they're against environmental legislation because looking after the environment we all live in somehow is beyond the government's purview or whatever, but that's not what this argument is. This is akin to opposing a new law regarding cleaning up the trash in a public park not because the government shouldn't be messing about with it, but because the trash isn't really there. What gives?

[Charles]

They want to drive their hummers and blow through gas and use incandescent light bulbs because GOD DAMN IT, THAT'S THE WAY IT'S ALWAYS BEEN.

[Rollory]

Two main reasons, as I see it.

1) Taking drastic action to "fix" a problem that may not be fixable and/or may not be the result of anything humans have done, may result in side effects far worse than the predictions, and if the science is based on politics and my-job-depends-on-this-being-true rather than facts (which global warming does lend itself to) the odds of such negative unexpected consequences are far greater. Conservatism is not about "do something even if it's wrong".

2) It isn't cleaning up trash in a park. If the Kyoto prescriptions were adopted, it would be a drastic cutback in worldwide industrial capacity, making everything more expensive, and either lowering everyone's standard of living or making it much harder and more expensive to improve one's standard of living. (Or both.) That is a huge cost to take on based on something that, again, looks very politically-driven.

[Charles]

Two main reasons, as I see it.

1) Taking drastic action to "fix" a problem that may not be fixable and/or may not be the result of anything humans have done, may result in side effects far worse than the predictions, and if the science is based on politics and my-job-depends-on-this-being-true rather than facts (which global warming does lend itself to) the odds of such negative unexpected consequences are far greater. Conservatism is not about "do something even if it's wrong".


Restricting the CO2 we pump in to the atmosphere might be bad! How did the earth ever survive before 1940?

That's truly some interesting logic right there.

[AaronSofaer]

Thing is, the industry has for a long time hugely overstated the cost of complying with stricter emcon/whatever legislation.

So nobody really knows how expensive it would be.

[Rollory]

Restricting the CO2 we pump in to the atmosphere might be bad! How did the earth ever survive before 1940?

That's truly some interesting logic right there.

You're not paying attention.

The CO2 we pump into the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by decaying vegetation, animal life, and the oceans.

[Rollory]

Thing is, the industry has for a long time hugely overstated the cost of complying with stricter emcon/whatever legislation.

How do you know?

Why do you get to decide whether it's a reasonable cost or not? You don't own any factories. Why are you allowed to tell other people what is reasonable or not for them to spend on their own equipment?

[Brian Rucker]

Look, I know we've been over this before so I'll assume this information isn't compelling to you, Rollory. But the vast majority of serious scientists do believe humans are contributing significantly to global warming and, from what I can tell, that seems to indicate we might well need to do something to address that. It could be our standards for convincing evidence are different but at some point, really, doesn't Occam's razor suggest that the people pouring money into the anti-environmental movement, being those who benefit massively from the industries most likely impacted, are the ones with the strongest motives for distorting the truth?

[Jake Plane]

I look forward to Spoofychop's response!

You may not get one. Whenever anyone confronts Spoofy he reacts by adding you to his ignore list. Apparently, even though he waxes poetic about the need to think expansively, his own personal guiding principle is to filter out any opinion or facts that comport with his already held world view.

At this point, it's possible Spoofy only ever reads whatever CindySue posts.

[Nellie]

What is disappointing about it is that underneath a lot of the, well, blatant propaganda of the programme were some interesting points.

I do happen to agree with, to a point, some of the elements they raise concerning the "environmental movement", for example. But to tar everyone as wanting to dismantle, essentially, society and go hug some trees and live in a mud hut or try to make a case that it's telling Africa they can only use solar power (cut to hospital where they can only run the lights or a fridge from their one small solar panel, not both) or wind and shouldn't industrialise was simplistic, disingenuous and not even backed up with anything approaching facts. They managed to wheel out one Kenyan representative to complain about how unnamed people or organisations were holding back his country's development and the above mentioned hospital as evidence and left it at that.

They put forward a case that actually all this warming stuff is down to solar activity and the CO2 levels are basically a red herring, put up a couple of graphs that fit what they were saying and more or less left it at that.

Oh and this warming could be great for the UK, we'll have vineyards in Newcastle, economic boom times ahead! Seriously, it was warmer in the middle ages, right around the time they started building Cathedrals and they cost serious moolah to put up, right?

Now not being a Scientist/Climatologist, botanist or anything else ending in -ist I'd have to concede that it's entirely possible that everything they said is right and everyone else is totally wrong and it's all a communist/media plot to dismantle society and keep environment correspondents employed. However, other than temperature and a quick graphic showing polar ice caps melting and re-freezing nothing else was even mentioned, let alone explored in any detail. What about this ozone layer hole thing? the UK is apparently going to have an economic boom as a result of warmer temperatures, how does this affect everyone else? Even if climate change is nothing to worry about, what about when oil runs out? We know fish stocks are migrating, corals are dying, deserts are expanding, storms are getting stronger etc etc etc. None of this was even looked at. Everything was concentrated on "Global Warming though man made CO2" and why this was a myth and there was nothing to worry about because climate changes all the time and we'd be just fine.

[Rollory]

But the vast majority of serious scientists do believe humans are contributing significantly to global warming

Of course they do. But what are their *reasons* for thinking that? How many of them have seriously looked at the question, rather than making the same assumption you are, that "everybody else can't be wrong"?

doesn't Occam's razor suggest that the people pouring money into the anti-environmental movement, being those who benefit massively from the industries most likely impacted, are the ones with the strongest motives for distorting the truth?

Compare how much money is available for anti-global warming positions, with the amount of money available via government grants for people who do research favoring global warming, then get back to me with this argument.

[malphigian]

2) It isn't cleaning up trash in a park. If the Kyoto prescriptions were adopted, it would be a drastic cutback in worldwide industrial capacity, making everything more expensive, and either lowering everyone's standard of living or making it much harder and more expensive to improve one's standard of living. (Or both.) That is a huge cost to take on based on something that, again, looks very politically-driven.

Economics aside, why does it "very politically-driven" to you?

Up until very recently (when Exxon changed their mind), the only major scientific opposition was coming from scientists who received funding from Exxon. Whereas the research supporting climate changes has come from diverse public and private sources.

I really don't understand that complaint, coming up with evidence supporting global warming wasn't even a worthwhile way to score political points until like 2 years ago. There's a couple decades of research that came before that. Or do you just generally dismiss any science because it came from people with jobs?

[Glenn]

How many of them [scientists] have seriously looked at the question, rather than making the same assumption you are, that "everybody else can't be wrong"?Peer review? More like PEER PRESSURE!

[Brian Rucker]

*laugh*

[Rollory]

Economics aside, why does it "very politically-driven" to you?

To start with, that there's lots of public funding for people who want to do research supporting human-caused warming and the effects thereof, and only private funding for people who want to question whether it's happening or human-caused. And the privately funded people immediately get yelled at for being corrupt.

Then there is the issue of the West and the US in particular being yelled at for being industrial, and nobody says a word about the 2 billion people in India and China and their industrialization.

It generally is being used as a tool to attack things about the West that certain Westerners don't like.

the only major scientific opposition was coming from scientists who received funding from Exxon.

Who gets to define "major scientific opposition"? How does that get defined?

There are people who have found the arguments for human-caused warming unconvincing for a long time, and have said so, just not very loudly because they didn't have any real stake in the argument. The people who *do* have a real and immediate stake are, indeed, the industrialists, because they're the ones who are going to have to pay more to do their thing if they start getting fined for using basic fuels.

[Rollory]

Peer review? More like PEER PRESSURE!

It can work that way. Look at string theory. Lots and lots of peer-reviewed articles about it. For a couple decades anybody doing research in string theory was physics' golden boys.

Now, suddenly, more and more people are saying, look, this was all a gigantic waste of time, string theory predicts nothing, is useless, doesn't explain anything, why did we spend all this money?

But the articles were all peer-reviewed!

Science isn't perfect.

[SpoofyChop]

So somebody makes a film about how some of the evidence for Global Warming is BS and the first thing you guys do is look up his past to try to get the juiciest Ad Hominems out there first? Man that was last year's tactic.

Anyway, other people are answering these criticisms better than I probably could.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

To start with, that there's lots of public funding for people who want to do research supporting human-caused warming and the effects thereof, and only private funding for people who want to question whether it's happening or human-caused. And the privately funded people immediately get yelled at for being corrupt.
Could it be that there's simply a lot of funding, in general, available for climate science, and the reason the preponderance of that funding produces results that are in line with generally accepted climate change theory are because that theory is a pretty good model of reality, rather than the funding being "earmarked" for specific results? I mean, I don't really see why the NSF, for example, would want to promote biased science. I do, on the other hand, see why Exxon, for example, would want to do that.

Science isn't perfect.
Absolutely true. And an incredibly simplistic argument to make when discussing a scientific debate.

[TheTrunkDr]

Of course they do. But what are their *reasons* for thinking that? How many of them have seriously looked at the question, rather than making the same assumption you are, that "everybody else can't be wrong"?



Compare how much money is available for anti-global warming positions, with the amount of money available via government grants for people who do research favoring global warming, then get back to me with this argument.
Are you seriously trying to argue that academics and scientists will take a larger financial loss from losing their federal grants than the oil companies, paper mills, various factories, power plants, etc. would by having to adopt more costly environmentally friendly methods and equipment?

You know in cases like this where there's one side with absolutely insane amounts of political power (oil/power industries) and another with comparitively little (science and academia) arguing over an issue that has been in existence for the better part of my life I'm far more likely to side with the political underdogs as they must have significantly more weight to their arguments to keep the debate alive in the face of overwhelming political and financial power.

[antlers]

It can work that way. Look at string theory. Lots and lots of peer-reviewed articles about it. For a couple decades anybody doing research in string theory was physics' golden boys.

Now, suddenly, more and more people are saying, look, this was all a gigantic waste of time, string theory predicts nothing, is useless, doesn't explain anything, why did we spend all this money?

But the articles were all peer-reviewed!

Science isn't perfect.

This is stupid in at least 13 dimensions.

[Phil_Stein]

The basic argument, as I understand it, is
- the sun and what it does drives climate on Earth far more than anything else
This is a debatable point. For serious scientists dissenting from the mainstream global warming consensus, it's probably the best point to argue. There is certainly a significant impact of solar activity and other non-human sources on climate. But from what I've seen (representing the majority view of scientists, IIUC), at a certain level of CO2, the effects of that CO2 (and other greenhouse gases)* overwhelm other sources of climate variability.

* Also note that about half of the predicted temperature impact of greenhouse gases is through secondary impacts. For instance, a warmer climate causes less snow coverage in northern latitudes. Since white snow reflects sunlight and dark grass/trees/earth tend to absorb it, the impact of the CO2-driven temperature increase is thereby amplified.


- CO2 follows temperature rather than driving it
Hard to tell one way or the other from the historical record. There's certainly an association, but whether it's causality or correlation cannot, AFAIK, be proven from ice cores and the like.

However, IIUC, the scientific theory supports causation (CO2 increase leads to temperature increase), as does the more recent historical record (with much more precise measurements). So my money's on causation, as is most of the scientific community, AFAIK.


- human-produced CO2 is a tiny fraction of the CO2 going into the atmosphere, and therefore changes in the amount human-produced can reasonably be expected to have little effect

There has been fairly precise measurement of this since sometime in the 50s. Here's the graph (http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm). It's pretty clear there's a steep increase under way. Now you can say that of the ~360 ppm in the atmosphere now, most was there before mankind started industrializing (true). But the GROWTH in CO2 is human-driven, largely dating from the onset of the industrial revolution (there is proxy data going back before the 50s).



- there is a lot of money available for people who claim that human-caused warming is happening, and very little for those who claim the opposite, and the forecasts are long-range and thus there is little negative feedback for incorrect predictions.
[snip]

True, but also true of most areas of intense scientific study.

The forecasts made before congress by James Hansen in 1988 have been rather accurate (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/hansen_re-crichton.pdf).

[Hawkeye Fierce]

So somebody makes a film about how some of the evidence for Global Warming is BS and the first thing you guys do is look up his past to try to get the juiciest Ad Hominems out there first? Man that was last year's tactic.
Did I imagine the thread you started with the explicit intent of discussing an Ad Hominem against Gore? I think you called him a hypocrite. How deliciously ironic.

In any case, I'm sorry Spoofy, I guess I wasn't clear. I wasn't attacking the filmmaker. I was attacking you and your utterly ridiculous claims of critical thought and intellectual integrity.

Anyway, other people are answering these criticisms better than I probably could.
Yeah, good thing you've got Rollory here to defend your views, cause lord knows you're incapable of it.

[Phil_Stein]

BTW, I accept the IPCC's forecasts as fairly accurate, in their original form, although sometimes I see politicians and the media distort them into scare cases that are not too likely, IMO.

The real debate at this point is not IF man-made global warming is occurring and will continue, but rather, what we should do about it. It's plausible to accept global warming and still conclude that a relatively minimal response is warranted, or conversely that a strong, relatively immediate response is appropriate. That's the real area where debate should be occurring now.

[Woolen Horde]

Now, suddenly, more and more people are saying, look, this was all a gigantic waste of time, string theory predicts nothing, is useless, doesn't explain anything, why did we spend all this money?

But the articles were all peer-reviewed!

Science isn't perfect.

I think trying to figure out the basic, underlying building blocks of matter itself is a helluva lot tougher than figuring out climate change.

But hey, I think the belief that humans don't chug that much CO2 in the atmosphere is kinda silly. Think how many hundreds of millions of cars are running each day. Then throw in the rest of industrialized society, and the fact that it's growing at a rapid clip in Asia. Then think of all the deforestation going on in the Amazon and other places.

As for me, I don't understand the resistance to being greener. If you're going to err, I say we err on the side of caution before we potentially fuck the planet over, and us on it. And I think that not cause I'm a flaming liberal, but because (A) it's common sense and (B) call it a believe that we owe it to our progeny or a belief in being caretakers of the world God gave us or whatever you will, but it's the responsible thing to do.

[wisefool]

Then there is the issue of the West and the US in particular being yelled at for being industrial, and nobody says a word about the 2 billion people in India and China and their industrialization.

It generally is being used as a tool to attack things about the West that certain Westerners don't like.


Right now the United States consumes about 25% of the world's energy with about 5% of the world's population (300 mil / 6 billion)

Ecological Footprint. Use the phrase and watch some people foam at the mouth. I live in the US, and god knows I use a ton of energy - hot water, computers, plasma TV's, etc.


I have the economic advantage of earning more than others, so darnit, I deserve it.


China / Indian economies are heating up but the vast majority of peasants still live on subsistence farming. When they start getting electricity, reality TV, eating beef, and adopting western consumption patterns, the planet's easily-obtainable resources will be in trouble.

Optimistic view: Hope to adopt standards while we're still on top or pay the price later.

Pesimistic view: Hope you and your children are all dead before the resource wars start. Buy an island, reliable ordinance, and bunker-up Unabomber style. Problem is living with other nutties alone in an island may be more scary.

[antlers]

The chief problem I have with the response to global warming is that the very people who have most embraced the idea that we really do have a problem are the people who will be quickest to reject the two most economically and technologically viable responses: 1) a large-scale transition to nuclear power and 2) giant space mirrors (seriously).

So instead we'll continue on pretty much the same course as we are now, burning fossil fuels and causing climate hardship for wildlife and the poorest people on the planet, but at least we'll feel really guilty about it.

[Glenn]

Science isn't perfect.I'll break this down for you as simply as I can. I'm not a climatologist, I'm a chemist. The Earth has a fairly homogenous atmosphere, and calculating the amount of heat retained by a ball of gas from a given amount of radiation is really basic physical chemistry (as basic as that field ever gets, anyway). More carbon dioxide makes the atmosphere more efficient at trapping heat. And unless you've developed a General Theory of Relativistic Thermodynamics, you're just going to have to concede that point, regardless of controversies in the field of theoretical physics or big volcanoes or rotting vegetation or political implications you find unpalatable*. And the preponderance of historical evidence seems to suggest that CO2 levels have spiked dramatically over the last century, which happens to coincide nicely with the beginning of worldwide industrialization. That's it for the global warming "debate". Everything else is just details.

*I do, too, but reality is the thing that doesn't go away when you ignore it.

[Woolen Horde]

*I do, too, but reality is the thing that doesn't go away when you ignore it.

And, in a sentence, you just described the presidency of George W. Bush.

[SpoofyChop]

Hawkeye I'm sorry for your strange fascination with animal reproduction films but I don't see how your personal problems are going to solve this issue we have with faulty global warming science.

[TheTrunkDr]

1) a large-scale transition to nuclear power and 2) giant space mirrors (seriously)
Neither of these are really solutions in the greater scheme of things. Nuclear power comes with it's own laundry list of issues and mirrors simply let us continue further down the same destructive path and there will still be a point where all the mirrors we can muster won't save us.

The solution isn't to find a way to let us continue with our unsustainable lifestyle it's to change it to one which is sustainable.

[SpoofyChop]

Was I wasting my breath in the "They are all lying to me" thread?

DeepT whether or not this particular video turns out to be a paragon of scientific virtue I'm still extremely skeptical of "anthropogenic global warming" as the smart sounding guy calls it.

I am not 100% convinced that global warming is caused by natural phenomenon but I am 100% convinced that the people that now treat that claim like dogma are completely failing to approach the issue in a rational way. Several guys in the video point out that now that the issue has become politicized the institutional ability to investigate the issue in a correct manner has been lost. That's really what I'm concerned about.

[malphigian]

Ten years ago people dismissed climate change because there was a lot of scientific debate, now that there is scientific consensus, it's dismissed because it's dogma.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

Hawkeye I'm sorry for your strange fascination with animal reproduction films but I don't see how your personal problems are going to solve this issue we have with faulty global warming science.
Wow, Spoofy. I was totally wrong to impugn your debating ability. Verily, I am wounded to the core.

Here, try this on for size. It's an easy one, I'm sure you can handle it:

You said in the previous thread that we should discount the content of what Gore said on global warming because he is, you argued, a hypocrite. Now you would like us to listen to the content of this filmmaker despite his record of misleading interviewees and deceptive editing. Can you explain the discrepancy in these positions? Please note that I am not asking you to discuss the content itself, merely your logic in determining which to give credence to. I know how important skepticism and critical thinking are to you, so I'm sure you'll give this due consideration.

[extarbags]

Two main reasons, as I see it.

1) Taking drastic action to "fix" a problem that may not be fixable and/or may not be the result of anything humans have done, may result in side effects far worse than the predictions, and if the science is based on politics and my-job-depends-on-this-being-true rather than facts (which global warming does lend itself to) the odds of such negative unexpected consequences are far greater. Conservatism is not about "do something even if it's wrong".

2) It isn't cleaning up trash in a park. If the Kyoto prescriptions were adopted, it would be a drastic cutback in worldwide industrial capacity, making everything more expensive, and either lowering everyone's standard of living or making it much harder and more expensive to improve one's standard of living. (Or both.) That is a huge cost to take on based on something that, again, looks very politically-driven.

Ok, then argue those two points, how about, instead of saying we don't need to do anything because the problem doesn't exist.

[SpoofyChop]

The solution isn't to find a way to let us continue with our unsustainable lifestyle it's to change it to one which is sustainable.

I have nothing against the idea that our lifestyles may have started to have a negative impact on the environment (although I don't believe climate change is one of the effects). I would even be willing to change behaviors to help combat problems like water pollution or over-reliance on oil.

What I have a problem with is the way the far left environmentalists describe "sustainable" which always seems to involve drastic changes that would very obviously result in a highly diminished quality of life for people in rich nations. This seems to me to be a lot more about the fact that environmentalists and leftists really seem to hate human society than about solving a real problem.

Historically, repressive social movements have almost universally been geared toward gaining more and more control over the populace by severely curtailing economic freedom in the name of some higher good. Anytime I see a political movement whose primary rallying cry is "you citizens have been naughty and now you have to be punished" I become suspicious. It seems the only citizens that can continue to be naughty are the ones that are so powerful or so rich that the regulations magically didn't seem to apply to them for some reason. I'm not interested in the climate change version of Animal Farm.

[Morkilus]

Give it up, SpoofyTroll. Our president gave in, and so should you.

[Charles]

You're not paying attention.

The CO2 we pump into the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by decaying vegetation, animal life, and the oceans.

Okay, so. We may be contributing an insignificant amount. And yet, stopping doing such may "may result in side effects far worse than the predictions."

So how come the world wasn't destroyed before we started contributing CO2?

[jeffd]

Why are conservatives so vehement about this, anyway? I mean, I know they're against environmental legislation because looking after the environment we all live in somehow is beyond the government's purview or whatever, but that's not what this argument is. This is akin to opposing a new law regarding cleaning up the trash in a public park not because the government shouldn't be messing about with it, but because the trash isn't really there. What gives?

Simply put so long as we're all obsessively talking about whether or not it's happening we'll be too busy to actually do anything about it.

[SpoofyChop]

Ten years ago people dismissed climate change because there was a lot of scientific debate, now that there is scientific consensus, it's dismissed because it's dogma.

The earth's atmosphere is an incredibly complex system that I'm not willing to believe we understand well enough yet. I just doubt that ten or twently or thirty years is enough to really understand how global warming works. Has weather prediction gotten any better in that time?

Have we made any progress in figuring out high energy physics in the last twenty years? We've got tons of missing dark matter and dark energy that makes no sense and that nobody can detect but "it has to be there because if it wasn't then our models would all be nonsense."

What I find so disturbing is that as new evidence is brought forth that questions the dogmatic (yes dogmatic!) understanding of climate change it is dismissed because the science is "settled."

[Ch. Hasslbauer]

Having seen you ignore nearly every point made in this thread since its beginning, Spoofy, I'd really wish you'd disclose at least the current number of entries on your ignore list.

[Jason McCullough]

Why are conservatives so vehement about this, anyway? I mean, I know they're against environmental legislation because looking after the environment we all live in somehow is beyond the government's purview or whatever, but that's not what this argument is. This is akin to opposing a new law regarding cleaning up the trash in a public park not because the government shouldn't be messing about with it, but because the trash isn't really there. What gives?

It's pretty heavily in ideological conflict with the "dig up the planet and set it on fire = money" model of development that most conservative donors have. You might as well tell them cowboy hats cause global warming, for an equally comparble ideological shock.

Both parties used to have similar donors, I think, but in the post war period the GOP started to lean towards resource extraction, while the Democrats leaned towards manufacturing. Recently you have the rise of the technology types, which are leaning Democrat and exacerbating this.

At least, I think that's how it is. :)

What I have a problem with is the way the far left environmentalists describe "sustainable" which always seems to involve drastic changes that would very obviously result in a highly diminished quality of life for people in rich nations. This seems to me to be a lot more about the fact that environmentalists and leftists really seem to hate human society than about solving a real problem.

This came up in the last thread, and you and Jeff Lackey both pointed at movie stars as the people demanding this sacrifice, unless you count Al Gore jokes about hair dryers and pro forma "don't waste energy" appeals. Again, please provide mainstream environmentalists and liberals calling for everyone to live in caves to fix the problem.

[SpoofyChop]

So how come the world wasn't destroyed before we started contributing CO2?

Because it's a phenomenally sophisticated system that resists changes and tends to remain stable.

Relax man...the atmosphere doesn't really need us to babysit it.

[Enidigm]

Actually i think it's fear and equality, in many cases.

Fear that "restrictions" on carbon emmissions will hurt industry, and fear that we will be left sticking our necks out alone. Almost every time i bring up Global Warming i always get the rejoinder "Yea, like China gives a f*** about their CO2."

In the age of global markets, and with China holding such an export advantage over the US, environmental restrictions are seen as particularly onerous because they would not be shared by our erstwhile trading partners giving them an even greater competitive advantage.

At least, this is the emotional view. We might burn the planet down, but we won't stop until they stop doing it as well. And if they won't stop, we won't either.

[SpoofyChop]

Having seen you ignore nearly every point made in this thread since its beginning, Spoofy, I'd really wish you'd disclose at least the current number of entries on your ignore list.

It's now got Jake, Jason, and Hawkeye because they do nothing but attempt to goad me into going into long explanations of my position then saying "HAHA YUOR R STUP1D d00D!" without actually reading the links I post or even spending one moment considering what I'm trying to say.

Please try to remember that even without those dorks I can't respond to every post because it's always 20 people to one or two.

[Enidigm]

Because it's a phenomenally sophisticated system that resists changes and tends to remain stable.

Relax man...the atmosphere doesn't really need us to babysit it.

There was an article i just read at home - Nature?, hm, i forgot - anyway, just a blurb, that said that high-altitude satellites' times of decay had been changing from their predicted values, generally increasing; and the explanation was that CO2 greenhouse gases that were trapping heat on the surface was preventing that heat from warming and expanding the outer atmosphere, causing it to cool and fall back to the earth.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

It's now got Jake, Jason, and Hawkeye

Victory!

[Rollory]

Are you seriously trying to argue that academics and scientists will take a larger financial loss from losing their federal grants than the oil companies, paper mills, various factories, power plants, etc. would by having to adopt more costly environmentally friendly methods and equipment?

No, I'm not. Academic funding and industrial costs are largely disconnected.

Could it be that there's simply a lot of funding, in general, available for climate science, and the reason the preponderance of that funding produces results that are in line with generally accepted climate change theory are because that theory is a pretty good model of reality

Say rather "because that theory is what people generally expect and therefore results in line with it aren't always taken apart as carefully as they might be otherwise" and I'd agree 100%.

More carbon dioxide makes the atmosphere more efficient at trapping heat

Except that, as the video in question spent a decent amount of time proving, that's not what is actually happening with Earth's atmosphere.

Which is why chemists aren't climate scientists.

Ok, then argue those two points, how about, instead of saying we don't need to do anything because the problem doesn't exist.

The critics of the human-caused warming idea that I find credible *do* argue those points. I am also not clear how arguing those points leads to the conclusion that anything *should* be done, or *what* should be done.

Suppose global warming will have measurably negative effects on the planet and should therefore be curtailed as much as possible. Suppose also it is caused by the sun instead of CO2. In that case the best remedies are entirely different from the ones the Kyoto lobby has been agitating for, and in fact the Kyoto-based remedies would hurt (through reduced industrial capacity) the ability to implement remedies that could affect sun-caused warming. That is a very serious issue. Understanding what is going on and why is fundamental, *before* anybody says anything about what to do.

Okay, so. We may be contributing an insignificant amount. And yet, stopping doing such may "may result in side effects far worse than the predictions."

Effects on human society, not the planet.

It's pretty heavily in ideological conflict with the "dig up the planet and set it on fire = money"

Is it really that hard to look at the rationale I provided and explain what might be wrong with it?

[Charles]

Because it's a phenomenally sophisticated system that resists changes and tends to remain stable.

Relax man...the atmosphere doesn't really need us to babysit it.

Okay. But then, how can we create "side effects far worse than the predictions" by trying to be more environmentally friendly?


Also, which account is yours? (http://theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=11211.0)

[Charles]

Effects on human society, not the planet.

Ah, I see.

So how does buying compact fluorescent light bulbs and driving more efficient vehicles hurt society again?

[Hawkeye Fierce]

Say rather "because that theory is what people generally expect and therefore results in line with it aren't always taken apart as carefully as they might be otherwise" and I'd agree 100%.

Well, which is it? Is it that there is more funding earmarked for research that supports the accepted climate change theory, or is it that the research doesn't get picked apart as much?

It looks like you're agreeing that the vast majority of funding isn't intended to promote biased research, which is a reversal of one of your earlier points. As for it not getting picked apart as much, what evidence do you have to support that claim? This seems sort of a circular argument to me - climate change is accepted because it's accepted enough that people don't question it?

[Mordrak]

It seems the only citizens that can continue to be naughty are the ones that are so powerful or so rich that the regulations magically didn't seem to apply to them for some reason.

Didn't you just describe our lifestyle in post-industrialized nations relative to most of the inhabitants of the planet?

I'd say we're the "so rich and powerful," except instead of ignoring regulation, we're powerful enough to keep it from happening.

[Glenn]

Except that, as the video in question spent a decent amount of time proving, that's not what is actually happening with Earth's atmosphere.

Which is why chemists aren't climate scientists.
You're going to have to summarize, because you're wrong, but I can't address the specific arguments if I don't know them. I really can't sit here and stream a seventy minute video at work.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by Rollory
Except that, as the video in question spent a decent amount of time proving, that's not what is actually happening with Earth's atmosphere.

Which is why chemists aren't climate scientists.You're going to have to summarize, because you're wrong, but I can't address the specific arguments if I don't know them. I really can't sit here and stream a seventy minute video at work.

I love these kinds of exchanges because of how the challenged person always reacts.

[Rollory]

So how does buying compact fluorescent light bulbs and driving more efficient vehicles hurt society again?

Does it cost more to make them? Then those costs get passed on to the customer. The customer spends money on that they don't have available to spend on other things. It builds up.

Of course, with fuel efficient cars, one could argue that the customer then saves money on gas costs. There are also intangibles; people value aspects of things that aren't explicitly represented in manufacturing costs - which is why the Prius sells well; because Americans like the idea of not damaging the planet. Which is fine. But requiring everyone to buy Priuses or Prius-equivalents, even those people who wouldn't normally do so, forces them to spend money they would have preferred to put into other things, and lessens their quality of life.

Well, which is it? Is it that there is more funding earmarked for research that supports the accepted climate change theory, or is it that the research doesn't get picked apart as much?

It looks to me like it's elements of both. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. That there is lots of funding out there that is much, much easier to get if you state up front you are investigating the effects of global warming - in other words, accepting the idea that it is happening already - well, that makes for a lot of people who have a vested interest in evidence against the idea not getting carefully investigated. You don't need evil motives to have that result.

You're going to have to summarize,

I did, earlier in the thread, but:
- rises in measured CO2 tend to lag rises in average global temperature by a generally constant value, which is backwards from how your model would predict
- they spent some time discussing weather balloon measurements of tropospheric temperatures and pointing out that the data was coming back a lot colder than the models predict, and not rising the way the models predict.

[extarbags]

What I have a problem with is the way the far left environmentalists describe "sustainable" which always seems to involve drastic changes that would very obviously result in a highly diminished quality of life for people in rich nations. This seems to me to be a lot more about the fact that environmentalists and leftists really seem to hate human society than about solving a real problem.

Jesus Christ. How did you even type this? I seriously would have expected your keyboard to cut you off and save itself the embarrassment halfway through that.

[Charles]

Does it cost more to make them? Then those costs get passed on to the customer. The customer spends money on that they don't have available to spend on other things. It builds up.

Aaaactually, you might consider trying it. But I bought a bunch of compact fluorescent bulbs about 6 years ago and still haven't had to change them. They lower my power bill and on top of that, need to be replaced only a small fraction of the amount as incandescents. I've easily saved the amount of money the bulbs cost over the past while by not having to replace them every six months to a year.

But if all you can muster is that incandescent bulbs are a front loaded cost, and that efficient cars are missing that je ne sais quoi, then I'm going to just have to laugh at you.

[SpoofyChop]

Didn't you just describe our lifestyle in post-industrialized nations relative to most of the inhabitants of the planet?

I'd say we're the "so rich and powerful," except instead of ignoring regulation, we're powerful enough to keep it from happening.

Heh. That's true to some extent but the difference is that despite what some people believe I do not buy for one second that the US or any other industrialized nation keeps third world countries down in the gutter as a way of controlling them.

[Charles]

Heh. That's true to some extent but the difference is that despite what some people believe I do not buy for one second that the US or any other industrialized nation keeps third world countries down in the gutter as a way of controlling them.

Mmm mmm sugar and coffee!

[SpoofyChop]

Jesus Christ. How did you even type this? I seriously would have expected your keyboard to cut you off and save itself the embarrassment halfway through that.

Have you heard some of the stuff that comes out of the hard left enviro groups? They would basically prefer it if humanity just died out and left the place to the dolphins and the aphids.

[SpoofyChop]

Mmm mmm sugar and coffee!

Well maybe Cuba.

[Charles]

Have you heard some of the stuff that comes out of the hard left enviro groups? They would basically prefer it if humanity just died out and left the place to the dolphins and the aphids.

Yeah, and they can be balanced by the people who still believe in segregation and slavery. What's your point?

[Raife]

They would basically prefer it if humanity just died out and left the place to the dolphins and the aphids.

You won't be so ambivalent when the dolphin-aphid hybrids come knocking, boyo.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

That there is lots of funding out there that is much, much easier to get if you state up front you are investigating the effects of global warming - in other words, accepting the idea that it is happening already - well, that makes for a lot of people who have a vested interest in evidence against the idea not getting carefully investigated. You don't need evil motives to have that result.
You keep saying that there's all this money available for people who support the current climate change model, but you've yet to show any evidence that it's actually true. Frankly, all your arguments seem to be based on assumptions of this nature.

So please, again - on what basis are you making the assumption that there is lots more money available for research that specifically supports climate change, rather than simply for general climate research without preconceived results? Note that "because the vast majority of studies support climate change" is not an answer.

[SpoofyChop]

Yeah, and they can be balanced by the people who still believe in segregation and slavery. What's your point?

Well extarbags was asking me how I could make those points about what "sustainability" means to some people. What I'm worried about is that to many people in this movement (in which you guys are basically the moderates unfortunately) "sustainability" basically means forcing everybody to degrade their lifestyle to some bleak joyless ascetism in the pursuit of impossible emissions reduction goals.

[SpoofyChop]

You won't be so ambivalent when the dolphin-aphid hybrids come knocking, boyo.

Meh. Maybe I will maybe I won't. Who cares.

;)

[Ch. Hasslbauer]

Have you heard some of the stuff that comes out of the hard left enviro groups? They would basically prefer it if humanity just died out and left the place to the dolphins and the aphids.
Is that it? Is the problem that you're afraid of those leftist environmentalists who want to take every comfort of culture away from you and leave you to vegetate in a puddle of dirt?

Because if that is the case I'd like to assure you that I don't know of any actual environmental organization who even think about the notions you attribute to them. If you can give me a name to prove me wrong, by all means do so.

In reality, one side of environmentalism is about finding a way of life which will allow us to maintain our standard of living for more than the meagre forty years or so before all the remaining abundant and easily reachable natural resources have been dug out and used up. Because nobody with half a brain can doubt that this way of life we're leading is no more than living on borrowed time, putting absolutely nothing aside for the bad times that are to come.

So even if there weren't such things as global warming, mass extinction and ocianic acidification, we would be very well advised to change our way of living and industrial output into something more sustainable and, yeah, modest.

[extarbags]

Have you heard some of the stuff that comes out of the hard left enviro groups? They would basically prefer it if humanity just died out and left the place to the dolphins and the aphids.

Everybody hates extremists. The people you're talking about represent such a tiny portion of the populace that they're not worth mentioning, yet you not only bring them up, you smear the entire political left with that characterization. It's like if I said "the thing that concerns me most about conservatives is that they lynch black people." Don't be an oaf.

[SpoofyChop]

Another article:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2938762&page=1

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about "saving the planet." What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence? We know that the greatest cause of environmental degradation is poverty; on this, we can and must act.

The global warming "crisis" is misguided. In hubristically seeking to "control" climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change. There is no way we can predictably manage this most complex of coupled, nonlinear chaotic systems. The inconvenient truth is that "doing something" (emitting gases) at the margins and "not doing something" (not emitting gases) are equally unpredictable.

Climate change is a norm, not an exception. It is both an opportunity and a challenge. The real crises for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of a modern energy supply. By contrast, global warming represents an ecochondria of the pampered rich.

[SpoofyChop]

Don't be an oaf.

Ok.

You know though when I see that Inconvenient Truth essentially takes the hysterical claims of the nutty guys that you rightly dismiss as ridiculous and makes them sound mainstream I worry that unless the situation is put in perspective we could easily start following the advice prescribed by the nuttiest people.

[Charles]

I don't pick up my dog's shit because somewhere, someone is going hungry. And if I'm not going to solve that, why would I bother worrying about my dog's shit?

[extarbags]

Another article:

Take the plank out of your own eye, mate; the right's obession with terrorism is a far bigger waste of time and money on a far smaller problem than global warming is.

[SpoofyChop]

Is that it? Is the problem that you're afraid of those leftist environmentalists who want to take every comfort of culture away from you and leave you to vegetate in a puddle of dirt?

That really would be like Animal Farm.

[Ch. Hasslbauer]

Another article:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2938762&page=1

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about "saving the planet." What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence? We know that the greatest cause of environmental degradation is poverty; on this, we can and must act.

The global warming "crisis" is misguided. In hubristically seeking to "control" climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change. There is no way we can predictably manage this most complex of coupled, nonlinear chaotic systems. The inconvenient truth is that "doing something" (emitting gases) at the margins and "not doing something" (not emitting gases) are equally unpredictable.

Climate change is a norm, not an exception. It is both an opportunity and a challenge. The real crises for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of a modern energy supply. By contrast, global warming represents an ecochondria of the pampered rich.
You simply gotta love the hypocrisy of so-called conservatives always pointing at another hot spot that needs more attention when confronted with a problem, only they equally wouldn't give a damn about it if it wouldn't make for such an excellent decoy.

Edit: I nearly ignored the fact that global warming is among the very worst things that could happen to those 4 billion poor people whom the author cares so much for.

[SpoofyChop]

Take the plank out of your own eye, mate; the right's obession with terrorism is a far bigger waste of time and money on a far smaller problem than global warming is.

I've been an oponent of the Bush administration and the Iraq war among other bad ideas for several months now since I changed my mind and realized these policies were a huge mistake.

[extarbags]

I've been an oponent of the Bush administration and the Iraq war among other bad ideas for several months now since I changed my mind and realized these policies were a huge mistake.

Oh sorry, I guess I didn't realize that since you're on the same side as them in every P&R thread that you post in.

[cliffski]

I saw the last half of this program on ch4. I couldnt believe the crap I was watching. I expected a scientific discussion that made valid points, but the rantings I saw were:

1) people saying all environmentalists are communists
2) people saying all environmentalists were luddites
3) people saying all environmentalists are opposed to economic progress
4) people saying all environmentaists are racists who want africans to live in poverty

needless to say, as someone who considers himself pretty green, yet is also a C++ programming gadget-obsessed company-owner who dabbles in the stock market, and is very pro the free-market, I wondered what planet these fruitcakes were on?

If they wanted to debunk climate change, they failed big time, coming accross as petty, agitated vindictive name-calling fools.

There *may* be good scientific arguments to be had over the evidence. This program was not it.

[cliffski]

Ah, forgot to mention I'm not racist. :D

[Nellie]

Climate change is a norm, not an exception. It is both an opportunity and a challenge. The real crises for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of a modern energy supply. By contrast, global warming represents an ecochondria of the pampered rich.

Well climate change/global warming by all accounts is going to kill a lot of them soon enough anyway. Can we at least wait a few years, see who is left and spend all that money we didn't on seeing if we could do anything about climate change when we know who is actually worth trying to save?

[Glenn]

I did, earlier in the thread, but:
- rises in measured CO2 tend to lag rises in average global temperature by a generally constant value, which is backwards from how your model would predictUnless you've developed that General Theory of Relative Thermodynamics I mentioned earlier, then what you're describing is a positive feedback loop. More CO2 makes raises the temperature, higher temperature makes more CO2, and we all die in an enormous fireball on the seventh day of creation when God turns his back on us to go "rest" somewhere.

- they spent some time discussing weather balloon measurements of tropospheric temperatures and pointing out that the data was coming back a lot colder than the models predict, and not rising the way the models predict.I'm not interested in arguing about the accuracy of complex predictive models, since, once again, I'm not a climatologist.

If you want to contest the accuracy of the underlying theory, here's what you're going to do: Get two big cylinders, one of which needs to fit inside the second. Fill the first container with some saltwater, then a mix of nitrogen and oxygen gas in a 3:1 ratio. Seal it, and place this cylinder inside the larger cylinder. Pump all the air out of the external cylinder and chill it to as low a temperature as you can get. Now train a heatlamp on the interior cylinder. Conratulations, you've just built your own greenhouse effect simulator!

Now start piping small amounts of CO2 into the interior cylinder and recording the equilibrium temperatures, and if your data disagrees with all the data collected over the last 100+ years, write a research paper and grab some stacks of that phat academia loot.

[Squirrel Killer]

But if all you can muster is that incandescent bulbs are a front loaded cost, and that efficient cars are missing that je ne sais quoi, then I'm going to just have to laugh at you.
This is great. Rollory talks about "effects on human society" in general, so you take him to task on two examples, so he details the sort of effects he's talking about as they relate to those two examples, and you dance like a crappy American Idol contestant singing, "Is that all ya got!?"

[TheTrunkDr]

Another article:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2938762&page=1
I'm confused, what exactly does an obviously politically motivated editorial strawman about the poor and starving have to do with the science (and the politics around that sicence) of global warming?

How about you actually discuss the topic at hand.

[SpoofyChop]

How about you actually discuss the topic at hand.

I've been discussing it. Are you reading the thread? This was just another link to add to the mix.

[cliffski]

but is that it? if the effects of fighting climate change are just slightly less groovy cars, and people paying up front for lighbulbs that save them money, why are people so agitated?

I'd suggest that fighting climate change represents a huge economic opportunity for us as a species to concentrate on maximising the efficient production and usage of energy, which will end up being excellent news for the global economy in the long run.
Wasteful processes are never a good thing.

[Arbit]

Another article:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2938762&page=1

In hubristically seeking to "control" climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change.
Seriously, how do you spin "reduction of human CO2 gas input to the atmosphere" into "hubristic climate control" and not receive a fat fucking paycheck from Exxon?

Maybe he's trolling.

[SpoofyChop]

concentrate on maximising the efficient production and usage of energy, which will end up being excellent news for the global economy in the long run. Wasteful processes are never a good thing.

See now THIS I can agree with! This is a positive forward looking philosophy that wants to improve society. Whether we do it because people think it is going to save the planet or just because it's a good idea I don't really care.

I would much rather have spent the billions wasted on the Iraq war spent on serious alternative energy and efficiency initiatives.

[SpoofyChop]

paycheck from Exxon

Man I wish I could get paid just for being right but sadly it doesn't work like that.

:P

[Ch. Hasslbauer]

And suddenly you begin to make sense. Yet I bet your position on global warming and reacting in any way to minimise its effects is still that it's an evil plot thought up by humanity-hating communists who just want to see you live in a dark cave.

[Arbit]

Man I wish I could get paid just for being right but sadly it doesn't work like that.

:P
Come on. Even in your brain, suspended in kool-aid as it is, there must be some sort of alarms going off after reading that sentence.

[SpoofyChop]

Come on. Even in your brain, suspended in kool-aid as it is, there must be some sort of alarms going off after reading that sentence.

Hrrrrrgggllllhhhh. Kool-aid brains....Mmmmmmm.

[Flowers]

I would much rather have spent the billions wasted on the Iraq war spent on serious alternative energy and efficiency initiatives.

No motherfucker, we would have rather spent the billions wasted on the Iraq war on something constructive. You, on the other hand, supported the Iraq War, which was actually a dumber idea than Crystal Pepsi.

You probably don't even know why it was dumber than Crystal Pepsi. You know what you need to do? You need to stop acting like you know what the fuck is going on at all. Stop telling us that we need to appeal to your sublimated erotic desires of a well-oiled and clean society. Stop telling us that we insult your intelligence. Stop weighing in with your feelings. You just need to realize that the people who think you are agree with are lying to you. The people you think you agree with you do not believe the shit that you believe. Those people know that there is such a thing as Global Warming and they knew the Iraq War would be a clusterfuck and that Saddam didn't have any weapons and they lied to you.

I am not going to put it in terms that invite you to join the bandwagon now that your eyes are opened. I don't want you on my goddamn bandwagon. You repeat whatever claptrap goes into your empty head without checking if any of it could be true and you display remarkable lack of judgment when choosing role-models and information sources.

So here it is. You come up with a fucking engaging way to do the right thing. Don't excuse your bad conduct on the grounds that doing the right thing hasn't been sufficiently polished, packaged, and sold to you.

The people get right with Jesus, Jesus don't get right with the people.

[Bob Cherub]

Whew, man this thread is pure comedy gold. It's like quintessential reading for any new P&R hivemind inductee. Great job guys!

So here's a real question for the hivemind (that I'll surely be insulted for cause like, that's much easier than actually discussing):

Which is it, global warming or climate change? Cause it was global warming until recently when someone, somewhere apparently realized shit like tornadoes and Katrina could be pinned on it too. Not only will the warming kill ya but fucking killer tornadoes will too!

If it's climate change, then why was 2006 the "best" year for hurricanes in a long time? Just pure coincidence? How does it work then...does global warming/climate change also cause good things or is it only death and destruction? Is it just random, like sometimes it will be a great year for hurricanes and sometimes it will be mammoth Andrew sized bitches? Is there some science that determines if it will be good or bad?

Those tornadoes that hit the midwest, Katie Couric asked if those were global warming related...were they? Is every tornado in 2007 global warming related or only certain ones (like ones that cause a lot of death!)? What about the record cold spell in the northeast? Global warming related? But wait I thought it was called WARMING? It can cause cold spells now too? This global warming thing is like a fucking thermos! It knows when to keep things hot and when to keep things cold!

How many deaths can be attributed to global warming in 2006?

So if all cold spells, tornadoes, hurricanes (and lack thereof) are global warming/climate change related, what accounts for the fact that there were all these things before 1900. Or 1800. Or a billion years ago.

Oh yeah, I remember why. Cause it's called the WEATHER.

Don't liberals (including some in this thread) say the Republicans are just creating a world of fear with all this terrorism stuff? According to the BBC, like 8 out of 10 kids have sleepless nights worrying about global warming! We're creating fear! Or is that okay cause global warming is real and terrorism isn't?

Prediction time!

After the world shuts down industry after industry in fear of the next killer global warming caused tornado, and we're paying $200.00 to fill up our car with a tank of gas, you guys are gonna be moaning and groaning that it's those fucking oil companies raping us! Cause as we all know, the entity that makes the most money off gas are oil companies.

Word!

[LesJarvis]

I'm just waiting for Cherub to show up and accuse everyone of group-think.

Whew, man this thread is pure comedy gold. It's like quintessential reading for any new P&R hivemind inductee. Great job guys!

It took you four pages Bob, you're slipping.

[Ch. Hasslbauer]

"I went out the door and looked around in my garden, yet I didn't spot any environmental damage."

[Bob Cherub]

It took you four pages Bob, you're slipping.

Well, I don't refresh P&R 50 times a day like the hivemind. I'm too busy hiding in a bomb shelter hoping some killer global warming-sized tornado doesn't come calling.

[Arbit]

Hrrrrrgggllllhhhh. Kool-aid brains....Mmmmmmm.
Sorry buddy, I don't think anyone's going to be laughing with you at this point, just at you. Can you link another guy equating "pollution control" to "hubristic climate control"?

[cliffski]

Don't liberals (including some in this thread) say the Republicans are just creating a world of fear with all this terrorism stuff?



As I understand it, the whole terrorism thing was hyped up after after 9/11, a single attack where approx 3,000 people were horribly killed.

about the same number who get killed in road accidents in the little old Uk every single year.

On the other hand, climate change has already resulted in polar bears (an entire flipping species) going on the endangered list for the first time ever.
God knows how many extra hurricanes, tsunamies etc etc are headed our way in the next 20-30 years.

Was the asian tsunami related? not sure. was katrina related? not sure.
But one thing is for sure, when nature decides to throw a wobbly, it does it with large city-destroying events like katrina.

If the climate change predictions are right, 9/11 is going to look like small beer.

that's why people are so worried about it. If katrina had flattened your home, you might be a bit worried about it too. *shrug*.

[Jason McCullough]

I know you're just trolling, Bob, but here's some actua links discussing global warming deaths.

In the same way no one is clearly dead due to power planet pollution, but you can estimate the overall mortality impact, some scientists put current global warming deaths at around 160,000 (http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,60640,00.html) annually. Diseases, malaria, crop failures, etc.

[Charles]

This is great. Rollory talks about "effects on human society" in general, so you take him to task on two examples, so he details the sort of effects he's talking about as they relate to those two examples, and you dance like a crappy American Idol contestant singing, "Is that all ya got!?"

I know, I know, it's sad. I expected some arguments that would actually count as bad side effects, and what I get are two non-issues, and so it was low of me to laugh at the responses.

I mean, if it's such a big deal, he should've used a couple of, you know, big deal issues, no?

[Squirrel Killer]

I know, I know, it's sad. I expected some arguments that would actually count as bad side effects, and what I get are two non-issues, and so it was low of me to laugh at the responses.

I mean, if it's such a big deal, he should've used a couple of, you know, big deal issues, no?
The specific examples were yours, his "big deal issues" were "effects on human society" writ large. But he fell for your tactic, so you win. Bully for you.

[Squirrel Killer]

Was the asian tsunami related? not sure.
You're kidding, right?

[shift6]

Okay, so. We may be contributing an insignificant amount. And yet, stopping doing such may "may result in side effects far worse than the predictions."

So how come the world wasn't destroyed before we started contributing CO2?
Assuming that by "destroyed" you mean some kind of CO2/warming event, the climate record shows that it has been, numerous times. The difference this time is man's contribution.

Heh. That's true to some extent but the difference is that despite what some people believe I do not buy for one second that the US or any other industrialized nation keeps third world countries down in the gutter as a way of controlling them.
Actually, we do. Keep in mind I too am a partial global climate change skeptic (I question man's contribution to the whole) so I'm not going off on SPOOFYLOL, but economically, we keep other countries under us like a fat chick sitting on her knickers. link (http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/)

Everybody hates extremists. The people you're talking about represent such a tiny portion of the populace that they're not worth mentioning, yet you not only bring them up, you smear the entire political left with that characterization. It's like if I said "the thing that concerns me most about conservatives is that they lynch black people." Don't be an oaf.
Hahah... dude, do you read the rest of P&R at all?

No motherfucker, we would have rather spent the billions wasted on the Iraq war on something constructive. You, on the other hand, supported the Iraq War, which was actually a dumber idea than Crystal Pepsi.
Now you wait just a goddamn minute. Crystal Pepsi was damn good, and didn't fuck up your teeth like regular!

[SpoofyChop]

You, on the other hand, supported the Iraq War, which was actually a dumber idea than Crystal Pepsi.

Yeah. I voted for it before I voted against it.

[shift6]

Neither of these are really solutions in the greater scheme of things. Nuclear power comes with it's own laundry list of issues and mirrors simply let us continue further down the same destructive path and there will still be a point where all the mirrors we can muster won't save us.
Science space mirrors are pretty goofy. But nuclear does not have a laundry list of issues. And I propose that if people who so ardently cling to science about warming (as they should) would do the same to the science behind nuclear technology, they would agree. Nuclear may be the only reasonable way to slow this whole thing, and even that is an outside bet by this stage.

The two big issues about nuclear power come from public ignorance of the science and opponents taking advantage of it. Nuclear waste: all of the waste in the whole US, and all the waste for a conceivable future, could be held in a single facility the size of a football stadium. Nuclear meltdown: new reactors, such as those based on pebble technology, are seriously hard to cause meltdown even if you want. Plus, after over 40 years of flawless operation (note: Three Mile Island didn't leak one rad anywhere, ever even after being in an unrecognized problem phase for about four hours) we have learned a ton about how to manage this type of power production, and ways to recycle spent fuel so as to produce less. If only we were allowed to build new plants.

Science, the same pursuit that supports global warming, does not support an anti-nuclear power stance IMHO.

[BlueJackalope]

Yeah. I voted for it before I voted against it.


For the life of me I can't tell if Spoofy is actually this spastically stupid, simple and unfunny.

Is he the Star Wars Kid - unselfconscious and retarded - swinging his broomstick/lightsabre at strawmen/stormtroopers that exist only in his mind and right wing talk radio...or is he is trolling on some sort of heretofore unthinkably superhuman level?

[Bob Cherub]

"NY TIMES PLANS HIT ON GORE"

"Scientists argue that Gore's warnings are full of exaggerated claims and startling errors" reporter William Broad filing the story, 'A CALL TO COOL THE HYPE'.

RUH ROH.

[Bob Cherub]

I know you're just trolling, Bob, but here's some actua links discussing global warming deaths.


Heh, I'm not trolling. Though no one really answered real question.

I thought you were wise, ole Jasonsan.

[Bob Cherub]

On the other hand, climate change has already resulted in polar bears (an entire flipping species) going on the endangered list for the first time ever.
God knows how many extra hurricanes, tsunamies etc etc are headed our way in the next 20-30 years.

that's why people are so worried about it. If katrina had flattened your home, you might be a bit worried about it too. *shrug*.

But cliffski, supposedly this is already in full effect. I mean, every night the media wonders if those tornadoes were global warming related. 20-30 years? I thought last year's big 'canes were global warming related. Now it's 20-30 years? Which is it?

Remember when like last May was really fucking hot? That was global warming according to the media. But April was the coldest in decades. Shhh, don't speak of that!

If Katrina had flattened my home, I woulda thought "Those f'in hurricanes." not global warming... cause you know why? f'in hurricanes have been around since, oh I dunno, THE BEGINNING OF THE PLANET.

[AaronSofaer]

I was under the impression that global warming caused bigger extremes, in temperature and weather, according to current thought. Not just more cold weather.

[Gav]

According to the BBC, like 8 out of 10 kids have sleepless nights worrying about global warming!

Two mistakes in one sentence! I'm guessing the rest of your post is as accurate as this sentence. (The actual mistakes are left as an exercise for Bob Cherub)

[shift6]

Even the people in that video agree that there is a global trend of warming. How anyone could not agree with that is way way past me. The debatable portion is the cause, for crying out loud.

[Calistas]

I have an idea. Lets get the creation scientists and global warming rejectionists together and let them make a single, combined film. Then we can all just go home and surrender ourselves to the dark ages. I hear the Pox wasn't so bad?

Oh, sadly, I hear that nuclear power has it's own long chain of problems associated with getting the fuel out of the ground and processing it, so the chain from dirt to electricty in your house doesn't make it much cleaner.

I'm pinning my hopes on some of the newer technologies coming out and governments encouraging (with cash) everyone to throw a solar panel or two (or whatever) on the roof.

[FIDGAF]

I must be missing something...
Isn't the whole reason why you were a Bullet-Proof vest just In Case you get shot? You might get shot so you wear it so that if this unlikely event happens, you stand a better chance of surviving?

How is that any different than Global Warming? We might be causing it so shouldn't we do something about it just in case it's true?

You only pick up a spill if it might ruin something? There's nothing wrong with taking an active role in preventing a possible negative outcome from occurring. Isn't that the same as patching your computer with updates and running an anti-virus program?

The whole argument is ridiculous and fucking stupid. If we can do something to curb our CO2 emissions, we should do so, just in case we actually are indeed the cause.

That doesn't mean putting people in the dark, it means alternate energy sources and reduction of fossil fuel emissions. We have the technology but there's too much $$$ in the status quo.

[MikeJ]

Oh, sadly, I hear that nuclear power has it's own long chain of problems associated with getting the fuel out of the ground and processing it, so the chain from dirt to electricty in your house doesn't make it much cleaner.

Mining uranium is a lot like other hard-rock mining, with some of the same environmental impacts. To me, the mining process almost has to be a lot cleaner than coal, because you have to mine like a million times more coal for the same power output.

I'm not sure about the environmental impact of enrichment (probably depends on how careful you are), but some reactor designs (like the CANDU) can run on natural uranium.

If you know of any specific problems that make it a no-go, I'd certainly be interested in reading about them.

[TheTrunkDr]

If you know of any specific problems that make it a no-go, I'd certainly be interested in reading about them.
The limited fuel source is another problem, aswell as disposal of radioactive materials. Sure the amount of radioactive waste isn't much but it's disposal is still non-trivial.

[Charles]

The specific examples were yours, his "big deal issues" were "effects on human society" writ large. But he fell for your tactic, so you win. Bully for you.

BLARG. I guess I got sidetracked earlier in the thread. What I really wanted was an answer to this:


Okay. But then, how can we create "side effects far worse than the predictions" by trying to be more environmentally friendly?

[Phil_Stein]

How is that any different than Global Warming? We might be causing it so shouldn't we do something about it just in case it's true?

I see this kind of sentiment a lot but consider it a lousy argument.

Humans MIGHT be impacting the world around us in many, many, many ways. But you don't stop all human activity on the slimmest of possibilities.

If I go for a walk outside today, I MIGHT:
- Get mugged
- Trip on the sidewalk and break my leg
- Get hit by a bus
- Get shot by a stray bullet from far away

That's not to say that one shouldn't take certain precautions in life, as an individual or as a society. But you must do so intelligently:

- What is the risk?
- If it happens, what is the impact (how bad is it)?
- What is the probability that it will happen?
- What is the cost of a given preventative measure?
- How much does that preventative measure change the probabilities?

We need to use these as tools to determine an appropriate response to global warming, as we do to various other large scale risks.

[Nick Walter]

- What is the risk?
- If it happens, what is the impact (how bad is it)?
- What is the probability that it will happen?
- What is the cost of a given preventative measure?
- How much does that preventative measure change the probabilities?


The fun part about global warming is that the answers to all the above are "Our best guess is around X."

[Charles]

I see this kind of sentiment a lot but consider it a lousy argument.

Humans MIGHT be impacting the world around us in many, many, many ways. But you don't stop all human activity on the slimmest of possibilities.

Except, no reasonable person is arguing that we should. I mean, straw man much?

[Nellie]

Humans MIGHT be impacting the world around us in many, many, many ways. But you don't stop all human activity on the slimmest of possibilities.


But apart from the "loony fringe" who is suggesting that we do that?

Even if global warming/climate change/migrating fish/dying coral etc is totally "natural" and there's bugger all we can do about it I don't see why that necessarily excuses our continuation of the "slash and burn" lifestyle we're persuing at the moment.

Even if we're not specifically damaging or changing the climate on a global scale I don't think that means we shouldn't try and pollute less or be less wasteful even at a personal level. I know it keeps coming up, but changing away from "standard" lightbulbs is about as easy and non life changing a step as an individual can make and even saves them money yet some people are resistant to even doing that. Maybe they've got money to, literally, burn, but I like having that, albeit small, amount of extra cash in my pocket.

[SpoofyChop]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?ex=1331438400&en=2df9d6e7a5aa6ed6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

The New York Times today makes a number of very interesting points today.

[MikeJ]

The limited fuel source is another problem, aswell as disposal of radioactive materials. Sure the amount of radioactive waste isn't much but it's disposal is still non-trivial.

For a long time, the price of uranium was very low and there wasn't much demand, so there wasn't much call for locating and developing new deposits. I think the idea that the proven reserves wouldn't last very long if all electricity was nuclear is driven by that. Since the fuel cost is a small component of the cost of generating nuclear power, it could still be economical after a large run-up in cost (which would make far larger reserves economically extractable). Actually, the cost has gone up quite a bit already, which is fueling more exploration and expansion of mines that were shut down when the cost went so low. There are also various re-use schemes that could start to make sense if the cost of mined uranium goes higher.

You would certainly want to find a lot more reserves before comitting to going very heavy into nuclear, but my sense is that not much exploration was really done, so it is probably out there.

As for disposal, I think it's a reasonably well-understood problem. The problem is that no one wants it in their back yard and it's hard to predict what might happen over thousands of years. I have to think that by the time 1000 years has gone by, this stuff would be a lot less hot than it is now. Heck, it's a lot less hot by the time they transfer it out of the containment pools. There's some stuff with a very long half-life, but if it is decaying so slowly, it must be emitting radiation relatively slowly as well. Or at least according to my rudimentary understanding.

[Nellie]

The New York Times today makes a number of very interesting points today.

That he's got it broadly right but might have fogged a few issues or exaggerated a few more? You'd never have guessed he used to be a politician would you?

I've not seen "An Incovenient Truth" yet, but the article doesn't seem to suggest that it's radically different to what I'd imagined it to be. If it turns out to be "The day after Tomorrow, the documentary" I'll be disappointed.

[Charles]

Al Gore is the first to admit that he's aimed more towards the alarmist angle, in order to get people worked up. Because until you get people alarmed and worked up, they aren't going to give a shit and there won't be any change.

I think a lot of the points he makes in the movie are more along what could happen, rather than what will happen. And that's perfectly reasonable IMO.

If he made his movie and said "water could rise 20 inches, which could strip a whole four meters off popular beaches!" you really thing anyone would give a shit?

His efforts are bringing about change in the better safe than sorry direction. I can't fault that.

[SpoofyChop]

Al Gore is the first to admit that he's aimed more towards the alarmist angle, in order to get people worked up. Because until you get people alarmed and worked up, they aren't going to give a shit and there won't be any change.

I think a lot of the points he makes in the movie are more along what could happen, rather than what will happen. And that's perfectly reasonable IMO.

If he made his movie and said "water could rise 20 inches, which could strip a whole four meters off popular beaches!" you really thing anyone would give a shit?

His efforts are bringing about change in the better safe than sorry direction. I can't fault that.

Charles, what you just said is exactly what I utterly despise about politicians in general and Gore in specific.

If our society isn't willing to solve problem X then there is no way in hell a movement should start to convince people that the problem is really X squared so they'll get worried about it.

There is going to be a cost to "better safe than sorry" and until it looks like that cost is actually worth paying then it makes no sense to start paying it.

[Charles]

If our society isn't willing to solve problem X then there is no way in hell a movement should start to convince people that the problem is really X squared so they'll get worried about it.

There is going to be a cost to "better safe than sorry" and until it looks like that cost is actually worth paying then it makes no sense to start paying it.

And if by the time it's obvious the costs are worth paying, we can't do anything to fix it? What then?

[Bob Cherub]

Two mistakes in one sentence! I'm guessing the rest of your post is as accurate as this sentence. (The actual mistakes are left as an exercise for Bob Cherub)

Oh crap, sorry.

It was the Scotsman. And half of children.

The numbers really didn't matter given the point I was trying to make.

Kinda like global warming.

No one has still addressed my questions. You guys sure seemed like experts in the first page of this thread.

[DeepT]

The basic argument, as I understand it, is
- the sun and what it does drives climate on Earth far more than anything else
- CO2 follows temperature rather than driving it
- human-produced CO2 is a tiny fraction of the CO2 going into the atmosphere, and therefore changes in the amount human-produced can reasonably be expected to have little effect
- there is a lot of money available for people who claim that human-caused warming is happening, and very little for those who claim the opposite, and the forecasts are long-range and thus there is little negative feedback for incorrect predictions.

Regardless of shoot-the-messenger aimed at the people behind it, these are pretty solid claims and should be easily tested/disproved, if that is possible.

Citations please! Other then the first point, which is like saying "water is wet", the rest of these claims needs to be substantiated.

It easy to make claims like these, but it is hard to back them up. I read the rest of this entire thread and so far, not one shred of proof has been given to support these claims.

I have never heard of the remaining claims you make. By all means, link to a credible source. You say they are "these are pretty solid claims and should be easily tested/disproved ..."

If they are so easy, then I am sure there is an abundance of research you can cite.

Ill give you "conservatives" a big hint here. You keep making the same mistakes over and over. You cite "people", not research. Seriously, look at yourself and what you keep going on about. "Joe Smith said that people do not contribute enough carbon to matter." OK, who the hell is Joe Smith? "He is the guy who made the documentry..." Still, who is he and why does he matter?

To put this in context of what the "liberals" would say to be just like you, is "CO2 raises global temperatures because Al Gore says so." If the left used that kind of "proof" they would be just as whacked as the right, but they don't.

The "Liberal Left" cites studies, while the "Conservative Right" cites people. Doesn't this strike you as a problem? You want to convince people right?

Go ahead and re-read this thread, and re-read other environmental threads. See how many times the left cites "people" vs the right. I am sure it must happen on rare occasion, but it isn't business as usual.

So, Rollory, Spoofy, etc... if you want to offer and argument that has some shred of substance, cite SCIENCE, not PEOPLE.

Furthermore, when you make a claim, ie: "CO2 follows temperature rather than driving it" and someone challenges it, give a citation to back it up. If you can't find one then that means you are very likely wrong, and/or you have no sound foundation for your opinions and are talking out of your ass.

[mouselock]

You're not paying attention.

The CO2 we pump into the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by decaying vegetation, animal life, and the oceans.

Let's grant that as outright true. Do you know the heat response to CO2 presence curve implicitly? It could be monotonic, in which case small deltas in CO2 production don't really affect anything. It could be sigmoidal, in which case if the system is in a near-threshold steady state, small changes can drastically change the baseline. There are precedents for both types of curves in all sorts of natural processes.

Basically, it comes down to how robust you think the ecosystem is. If you think everything will automatically push back toward equilibrium even if we throw things out of whack by, say, 10%, then who cares? If, however, it's a buffered system where there's finite capacity to drive the system back toward normal before we completely exhaust the mechanism, we could be screwed if we don't change anything. Unfortunately for everyone, we can't model the entire earth nearly well enough to say conclusively which is the case. However, whichever happens to be true, cutting back to previous levels of emissions can't possibly hurt the environment since it's been proven to function effectively at those levels of emissions. The same can't be said of going full steam ahead and continuing to ramp up greenhouse gas concentrations.

[Rimbo]

The basic argument, as I understand it, is
- the sun and what it does drives climate on Earth far more than anything else
- CO2 follows temperature rather than driving it
- human-produced CO2 is a tiny fraction of the CO2 going into the atmosphere, and therefore changes in the amount human-produced can reasonably be expected to have little effect
- there is a lot of money available for people who claim that human-caused warming is happening, and very little for those who claim the opposite, and the forecasts are long-range and thus there is little negative feedback for incorrect predictions.

Regardless of shoot-the-messenger aimed at the people behind it, these are pretty solid claims and should be easily tested/disproved, if that is possible.

But why would anyone bother? Anyone who dares even question the possibility that global warming is caused by humans gets vilified, ostracized, and otherwise made fun of.

It's yet another way in which science is slowly becoming less and less scientific and more a kind of dick-measuring political bullshit thing.

I mean, just look at the responses on this thread: "Ha ha, one scientist is mad about how his quotes were used! Isn't Spoofy a loon?"

Whether he's a loon or not is beside the point.

[Nellie]

I mean, just look at the responses on this thread: "Ha ha, one scientist is mad about how his quotes were used! Isn't Spoofy a loon?"

He's mad because in his opinion what he's said was edited/taken out of context to attempt to illustrate that something that he believe is possibly happening actually isn't?

Isn't that a pretty major example to point out when the programme in question is being held up as debunking the whole climate change myth?

The programme raises some interesting points, and if we're going to excuse Al Gore some exaggeration then I guess we have to excuse this guy some as well. But for all the criticism levelled at Al Gore by the scientific community I haven't seen a complaint that he's taken something totally out of context to paint a picture the guy being interviewed doesn't actually believe in as being one of them.

[shift6]

The limited fuel source is another problem, aswell as disposal of radioactive materials. Sure the amount of radioactive waste isn't much but it's disposal is still non-trivial.
Yes it's non-trivial, but it's pretty close to trivial. Here's a previous thread which included good external links: link (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=30683)

He's mad because in his opinion what he's said was edited/taken out of context to attempt to illustrate that something that he believe is possibly happening actually isn't?

Isn't that a pretty major example to point out when the programme in question is being held up as debunking the whole climate change myth?
Again, though, the program doesn't debunk climate change. It debunks (or attempts to) the human cause and the CO2 cause of the current, measured, accurate warming of the earth. That's it.

[mouselock]

The chief problem I have with the response to global warming is that the very people who have most embraced the idea that we really do have a problem are the people who will be quickest to reject the two most economically and technologically viable responses: 1) a large-scale transition to nuclear power and 2) giant space mirrors (seriously).

I'm not sure there's much solution behind giant space mirrors, since the main problem with solar->electric conversion is on device efficiency for direct conversion. (And I'm not particularly fond of the idea of concentrating pure solar heat to convert water to steam to drive turbines directly; one poorly aimed mirror and Aunt Betsy's farm goes boom.)

Nuclear, though, is a fantastic solution. It's amazingly clean in comparison to fossil-fuel based mechanisms, with the only downside being the need to store spent fuel. I'd much rather have all the dirty byproducts of power concentrated in a very small space that can be controlled, rather than floating free in the air. But owing to a lot of folks who had to practice duck-and-cover drills when they were kids due to the cold war, I think we're still a ways away from accepting it as a viable fuel source. Which is a shame, because nuclear fuels are a much more environmentally friendly option with proper regulation. (Though we might have to give up the idea of independent power providers here in America and live with government generated electricity to truly have reliable management; I'm not sure if I trust the government less or more to responsibly dispose of spent nuclear fuels than some corporation looking to make a couple more bucks per megawatt hour.)

[SpoofyChop]

And if by the time it's obvious the costs are worth paying, we can't do anything to fix it? What then?

I guess we suffer through. I'd rather have honest discussion that people ignore and then suffer the consequences than to have lies fed to us.

[Nellie]

Again, though, the program doesn't debunk climate change. It debunks (or attempts to) the human cause and the CO2 cause of the current, measured, accurate warming of the earth. That's it.

I stand corrected, my bad. The main problem that I still have with this programme, forgetting the communist/Media/Thatcherite plot, is that human contributed or not I don't believe that what we're seeing going on now with regards to Climate Change is going to a-ok for everyone, vineyards in Hampshire or not, which is the other assertion of the programme.

[mouselock]

Because it's a phenomenally sophisticated system that resists changes and tends to remain stable.

Spoofster, do me a favor. Look up buffer solutions, and let me know whether there's any applicability between that type of self-correcting behavior and something like the atmospheric response to carbon loading. Let me help you out in drawing some model parallels:

Carbon dioxide -> Cation/Anion concentration
Vegetation/animal binding of carbon dioxide -> buffered ions

If you truly believe that the atmosphere can't be pushed over the brink simply because it hasn't, you haven't learned nearly enough from your brief skimming of pertinent scientific principles.

[flyinj]

Spoofster, do me a favor. Look up buffer solutions, and let me know whether there's any applicability between that type of self-correcting behavior and something like the atmospheric response to carbon loading. Let me help you out in drawing some model parallels:

Carbon dioxide -> Cation/Anion concentration
Vegetation/animal binding of carbon dioxide -> buffered ions

If you truly believe that the atmosphere can't be pushed over the brink simply because it hasn't, you haven't learned nearly enough from your brief skimming of pertinent scientific principles.

You obviously have an agenda.

[Charles]

I guess we suffer through. I'd rather have honest discussion that people ignore and then suffer the consequences than to have lies fed to us.

It's not lies, it's warnings about potential issues that are very valid. Will they happen for sure? Maybe, maybe not. As with anything weather related, it's hard to say what will or will not happen. But if the weather man says there's a giant blizzard heading your way and that you could very well be snowed in, do you keep an empty fridge and just "suffer through" without food for a few days?

And what if what you have to suffer through is the exact worst case scenario that Gore presented, with florida and new york city underwater? How do you justify your willful lack of foresight when the result is millions of people without homes and cities destroyed?

Put it this way, someone mentioned cars earlier, and then spouted some crap about how we shouldn't use cars because we could get in an accident and die. Well, what did we do? Just shrug and say "Bah, I doubt I'll get in to an accident and die." and then not worry about it? No, we implemented things like seatbelts and safety requirements in cars. And now, when you get in to an accident, it's far less likely to be fatal.

From my angle, it seems you are arguing against seatbelts. Which added costs to vehicle production and R&D, which added discomfort to people who use cars, and added overhead in terms of legal fees to ticket people who don't wear them. And even then, some people die in accidents, and some people never have accidents. I still think all the cost and "side effects" are worth it. Don't you?

[shift6]

I stand corrected, my bad. The main problem that I still have with this programme, forgetting the communist/Media/Thatcherite plot, is that human contributed or not I don't believe that what we're seeing going on now with regards to Climate Change is going to a-ok for everyone, vineyards in Hampshire or not, which is the other assertion of the programme.
That's totally reasonable. I think, though, that this changes the tone of the discussion. If we agree that humans probably don't contribute much to it, then we realize we aren't the drivers of the cycle, but part of the natural one. I think this would lead to much more reasonable and reasoned figuring out what is going on and what to do about it.

[Mordrak]

If we agree that humans probably don't contribute much to it, then we realize we aren't the drivers of the cycle, but part of the natural one. I think this would lead to much more reasonable and reasoned figuring out what is going on and what to do about it.

Maybe I'm misreading this, but you just said if we agree to agree with you, then the discussion will be more reasonable?

er? what?

[TheTrunkDr]

Charles, what you just said is exactly what I utterly despise about politicians in general and Gore in specific.

If our society isn't willing to solve problem X then there is no way in hell a movement should start to convince people that the problem is really X squared so they'll get worried about it.

There is going to be a cost to "better safe than sorry" and until it looks like that cost is actually worth paying then it makes no sense to start paying it.
I guess we suffer through. I'd rather have honest discussion that people ignore and then suffer the consequences than to have lies fed to us.
So why exactly did you vote for Bush and support the Iraq invasion?

[mouselock]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?ex=1331438400&en=2df9d6e7a5aa6ed6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

The New York Times today makes a number of very interesting points today.


Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.


So, y'know, the scientists aren't saying that global warming doesn't exist are that there's not evidence that human activity is affecting it, but rather that a piece of propaganda might be, well, propaganda. Shock.


He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

“He has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,” adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists.”


But they take him to task for saying Katrina was global warming related. (Hey, that's a pretty stupid claim to be making since we can't predict climate with models anywhere near sophisticated enough to actually support that claim.)


Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.


So it's not that we're not causing the problems, but simply that we may have longer than Gore pointed out to address them. Damn those alarmists who have been lying to us all along! Oh.. wait..

Nice link Spoofy. Not sure why you liked it, though.

[mouselock]

You obviously have an agenda.

I'm nutty like that. As a scientist, I think that people who use scientific principles as evidence ought to understand them at least a little bit. It's not like I'm asking Spoofs to actually read a peer-reviewed paper. I'd be fine with a late high-school understanding of how science works, really.

[Charles]

I'm nutty like that. As a scientist, I think that people who use scientific principles as evidence ought to understand them at least a little bit. It's not like I'm asking Spoofs to actually read a peer-reviewed paper. I'd be fine with a late high-school understanding of how science works, really.

Dream on, commie.

[SpoofyChop]

I'm nutty like that. As a scientist, I think that people who use scientific principles as evidence ought to understand them at least a little bit. It's not like I'm asking Spoofs to actually read a peer-reviewed paper. I'd be fine with a late high-school understanding of how science works, really.

Dude I'm not going to waste my time on requests like this. You're just playing fancy scientist pissing contest here. You and I are not even debating the same topic unlike some of the other more reasonable folks.

[SpoofyChop]

So why exactly did you vote for Bush and support the Iraq invasion?

Because I was hoping that Al Gore would be drafted when Rangel got the draft reinstituted and he could go over there again and take some nice photos like he did for the last useless war.

Duh.

[mouselock]

Dude I'm not going to waste my time on requests like this. You're just playing fancy scientist pissing contest here. You and I are not even debating the same topic unlike some of the other more reasonable folks.

Dude, your argument is just leave it alone, it's resilient. That's a perfectly valid argument, if you can prove that we're still within the tolerance for that resilience. I can 100% guarantee that if, in 100 years, we've continued to pump out the greenhouse gasses and nothing particularly untoward has happened, the reason will be because the system behaves exactly as you've argued it does.

But the point is we don't fucking know that the system behaves that way for the current load we're putting on it. And you stating that it does because it could is one of those fundamental disservices to science that always gets trotted out as some type of weak, de facto "proof". You're basically making statements based off of ignorance, but believe that you're saying things that are intelligent. That's exactly the type of disservice you're accusing the other side of here.

Here's my disclaimer: We do not know with 100% certainty, or even with 75% certainty, that adding more greenhouse gasses to the environment will represent pushing the environment past a tipping point. However, we do know with 100% certainty that curtailing the rate at which we add these gasses won't hurt the environmental response, because historically in the past we've added far, far less of these environmentally active gasses to the air and we've made it this far.

Now, given that, it seems imminently reasonable from a scientific viewpoint to expend another 10% effort to pluck off the low-hanging fruit from the tree of environmental soundness.

In response to that, you give me empty platitudes that equate to "Well, if we're not 100% sure why should I change my lifestyle?" I somehow doubt you use similar dubious logic when it comes to, say, taking your antibiotics when you're sick or cutting down on your cholesterol.

At least be intellectually honest about wanting to be a selfish prick who doesn't want to have to suffer an iota of loss to his standard of living regardless of the increasingly likely probability that doing so might help the environment in the long run. I'm pretty sure you and I both will weather whatever comes just fine, but I don't think I like the idea of my grandchildren's children suffering 80+ degree climate swings from decade to decade because this "robust" system is frantically trying to reestablish an equilibrium.

To me, that's worth living with the shittier quality of light from compact fluorescents and not driving a beast of a vehicle that gets 18 miles per gallon on the highway. It's probably also worth a 10% across the board price hike on luxury components from the necessary tariffs to impose against industrializing third world nations to try to get them to take the idea of emissions reductions seriously. The extra 2" on my mondo-huge-ass plasma screen would be nice and all, but doing a bit to help better the future of the planet I live on probably just barely trumps that.

[Nellie]

That's totally reasonable. I think, though, that this changes the tone of the discussion. If we agree that humans probably don't contribute much to it, then we realize we aren't the drivers of the cycle, but part of the natural one. I think this would lead to much more reasonable and reasoned figuring out what is going on and what to do about it.

Well the problem is that at the moment the evidence does seem to suggest that we probably are, if not drivers of the cycle, then at least accelerating it or exacerbating it past what it would be doing anyway. That said, not starting to look at whether limiting the rapidly increasing levels of "greenhouse gases" just because we aren't 100% sure that it will do anything to the climate strikes me as being incredibly short sighted. We've doubled the amount of Co2 that we, as a global population, emit in the last 10 years and that rate is increasing dramatically.

We've known lead in petrol hangs around in the atmosphere causes pollution and health problems for decades yet we still add it to aviation fuel and it's still widely available in some parts of the world for use in cars, so even when there is clear irrefutable evidence that we are causing harm through our actions it's going to take us decades to address it.

In the developed world we have the resources and the economies to start to make the change and we're the worst offenders anyway. If India and China industrialise to the state we were at 20 years ago, what effect is that going to have and do we really want to hang around doing nothing to find out?

[skedastic]

There are several fundamental problems with the discourse on global warming. One of them is simply that there are regularly opinions offered on the properties of dynamical stochastic complex systems by people who understand science at a grade 8 level. Those can be dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately, many journalists fall in this category, including those who breathlessly wonder if every storm is "caused by global warming" (climatological models predict that storm intensity and frequency may have increased very slightly by global warming, but by an amount which is vanishing compared to year-to-year fluctuations, so there is no sensible reason to wonder if Katrina, etc, were "caused by global warming.")

A second problem is that many people think that the debate can be cast as between two exhaustive and exclusive positions:

1. Global warming is occurring and man is responsible, therefore, we ought to "do something," something which will prevent the problem.

2. Global warming is not occuring, or is occurring but is unrelated to man, and we ought do nothing.

The evidence is against the second position. But the first position is also wrong, and unfortunately it is a position held by many climatologists, and Al Gore and the like. What we ought to do in the face of man-made global warming is not a question that can be answered by climatology, it's a normative question. Climatological models can give us an idea what options we face, but which option we choose is a matter of public policy.

Most people fail to realize that even if we "do something," we'll still have global warming. For example, contrast the "do nothing" scenario with predictions under Kyoto and predictions under a hypothetical optimal climate policy:


Table 3.
Global Temperature Increase for Different Policies
[Increase from 1800, globally averaged, degrees C]

Policy 2000 2100 2200
----------------------------------------------
Do nothing 0.49 2.30 4.23
Optimal 0.49 2.25 3.99
Kyoto 0.49 2.17 3.97


(Source: Nordhaus, Requiem for Kyoto: an economic analysis of the Kyoto protocol (http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Kyoto.pdf), The Energy Journal, 1999, pp. 93-130.)

That is, in 2200 if we do nothing at all global mean temperature is predicted to be 4.23 degrees higher than it was in 1800. If we implement Kyoto, it is predicted to be 3.97 degrees higher. Florida and New York City are going to be under water even if we successfully implement policies which reduce greenhouse gases. They'll just be under water in, say, 2140 rather than 2120. Further, the costs associated with Kyoto are much higher than the benefits (around 7 to 1). The optimal policy is not to do nothing, but it isn't to implement Kyoto either: Kyoto is actually much worse than doing nothing at all.

[Phil_Stein]

Further, the costs associated with Kyoto are much higher than the benefits (around 7 to 1).

I'm not a big Kyoto fan myself, but frankly, any attempt to quantify it's cost benefit ratio (or that of any other solution/semi-solution to global warming) is built on a teetering tower of assumptions. The most important of these is what discount rate to use. Nordhaus, who I assume is the source of your 7 to 1 ratio, IMO appears to err on the side of using too high a discount rate. Others do the opposite. Unfortunately, I can't speak very definitively to this issue, because wherever I read such economic studies of the problem, the discount rate is often discussed in a hand waving manner, buried by other issues that have FAR less impact on the cost/benefit discussion.

IIRC, both Nordhaus and the recent British study (which reached roughly the opposite conclusion of Nordhaus), hinted at their discount rates, but did not get very specific about what they were using and why in their models.

[Jason McCullough]

Kyoto is the only proposal for dealing with global warming? You learn something every day, I guess.

[skedastic]

I'm not a big Kyoto fan myself, but frankly, any attempt to quantify it's cost benefit ratio (or that of any other solution/semi-solution to global warming) is built on a teetering tower of assumptions.


Of course. Notice that ANY attempt to prescribe policy MUST, if it is coherent, be reducible to a cost-benefit analysis, even if it is only implicit. All such attempts, including Al Gore's, are based on assumptions about both physical and social outcomes centuries in the future, and they therefore rest on tenuous assumptions.


The most important of these is what discount rate to use. Nordhaus, who I assume is the source of your 7 to 1 ratio, IMO appears to err on the side of using too high a discout rate.


"Err" in what sense? You imply that you know what the "correct" discount rate is. What is it and why?



IIRC, both Nordhaus and the recent British study (which reached roughly the opposite conclusion of Nordhaus), hinted at their discount rates, but did not get very specific about what they were using and why in their models.

Both Nordhaus and Stern and every other vaguely credible study on this matter will discuss the discount rate. The paper I cited discusses the discount rate on page 9 and cites more comprehensive treatments of the issue. The discount rate used in this study is allowed to vary by region and over time, for reasons discussed in the paper. In the long-run it is set at 1.4% in high-income countries.

Notice that changes in the discount rate do not have as simple an effect on optimal policy as "low discount rates imply we should do lots to avert warming." The costs of warming are largely one-time, large costs of relocating settlements which are near the ocean. If averting warming reduces economic growth, then the resettlement costs get swamped by lower growth if we set a low discount rate.

In any case, yes, the discount rate is critical, and it is commonly discussed in this literature, not ignored or discussed in vague, hand-waving terms.

[Phil_Stein]

In the long-run it is set at 1.4% in high-income countries.

I just read the paragraph in question, and I don't quite agree with your summary of it. He throws out 4 different discount rates (3, 6, 2.3, 1.4), and talks about ranges and transitions from one to the other. There's a LOT of room in there for fudging. If he starts out the developing world at 6 percent and leaves it there for 60 years, that has a HUGE impact on the analysis versus if he uses the 6 percent rate in only a handful of countries and transitions even the majority of those to, say a 3 percent rate by 2030. It *does* strike me as hand-waving. I'm sure you've played with models like this and know that adding a couple percent onto a discount rate for ~35 years makes a factor of two difference in the discounted values.

And no, I don't *know* what the proper discount rate is, but Nordhaus is on the high side of what I've seen used. I thought I saw another analysis (Nordhaus, I think) using even higher numbers than those in the linked paper, but I may be mistaken, and even if I'm not, I don't want to spend the time to try to Google for it.

[skedastic]

Kyoto is the only proposal for dealing with global warming? You learn something every day, I guess.

You know, every once in a while I add something semi-serious to a discussion on P&R. Then Jason posts in response and I remember why there's no point in trying to discuss anything here.

I didn't say or even vaguely imply that Kyoto is the only proposal, Jason. Do you have some point to make in response to what I actually said, or is your level of discourse on this issue so severely limited that all you can do is make up ridiculous strawmen? Notice I even referred to another policy besides Kyoto in that post, so what the bloody hell are you on about?

[Jason McCullough]

Well forgive me for interpreting:

Most people fail to realize that even if we "do something," we'll still have global warming

.....followed by a discussion of how Kyoto would only partially offset global warming, as "we shouldn't do anything." What with you suggesting lots of alternatives and all. Let me guess: you're on the Bjorn Lomborg boat about pretending to pay the third world for killing them instead? If you're in favor of massive carbon fixing factories, I take it all back.

As Phil points out, the discount rate issue is more than a little bit of an issue, especially when it's not clear you can even ethically use discount rates across generations.

Maybe I'm just touchy because I'm sitting in the Worldchanging panel here at SXSW ten feet behind Bruce Sterling. I'm pretty fucking tired of economists wringing their hands about efficiency on this.

[FIDGAF]

I see this kind of sentiment a lot but consider it a lousy argument.

Humans MIGHT be impacting the world around us in many, many, many ways. But you don't stop all human activity on the slimmest of possibilities.



Yeah, you got me... Just like we might have hunted certain species to extinction. People might be poaching...

Yeah, OK, we might be making some sort of impact with all our Billions of lives and our CO2 waste.

Ya think there might be a little fire to go with that smoke?

My sentiment is more along the lines of, until we understand the whole situation better, it might be intelligent for us to consider reducing our pollution because we aren't sure how it's impacting the environment 100%.

[skedastic]

I just read the paragraph in question, and I don't quite agree with your summary of it. He throws out 4 different discount rates (3, 6, 2.3, 1.4), and talks about ranges and transitions from one to the other. There's a LOT of room in there for fudging.

I don't understand exactly what you disagree with. Nordhaus does use different discount rate, allowing them to vary with time and region. You point out that if he had chosen different numbers, he'd have found different answers. That's correct, but isn't inconsistent with my summary of the paper, nor does it support your claim that economists fail to adequately specify the discount rate used. I would agree, however, that Nordhaus' work would be more compelling if he would undertake more sensitivity analysis to the discount rate (I think he does in other papers and in his book, but like you I'm too lazy to look it up).

[Jason McCullough]

So, a serious example of a minor adjustment that has a surprisingly large carbon savings: Netflix. The worldchanging guy just said this. It chops a 2 round-trip car usage into the virtually zero-impact effect of adding one more thing to the mail. Eliminate the mail and change it to on-demand video, and that makes it even better.

[Phil_Stein]

FIDGAF - we can hardly turn the world economy on a dime, even if we wanted to.

Assuming we make the commitment to major CO2 reductions, it will be an enormous economic change (perhaps on the order of the IT revolution of the 80s or the advent of electricity in the late 19th century) as well as requiring enormous, very complex political and international agreements.

It's ludicrous to undertake events of such a scale on a flyer, as it were.

Now, that doesn't mean that global warming is some long shot, 5% chance sort of thing, nor that we shouldn't act. But whatever actions we take should come from a reasonably good understanding of the problem as well as the solutions (partial though they may be).

I'm not saying nothing should be done about global warming, merely that this particular argument (we must do SOMETHING now because there is SOME risk) is a poor one when the reasonable solutions are so costly and require such a major commitment.

The better argument is:
1) We understand this problem with a confidence level of X% (where X is high).
2) The risks are relatively well understood, as well as the solutions, and by implementing solutions A, D, and E, we can begin to make a major impact now (at a reasonable cost, relative to the risks at hand), and we can make further adjustments and add layers of solutions as we go along and understand both the risks and the solutions better.

Or, by analogy:

1) If you here a shout while crossing the street to watch out - a bus is about to hit you, you will almost certainly react to it (the risk is immediate, the cost of jumping out of the way is minimal), and even if the information you received is bad, you're not very much worse off at all (compared to the opposite risk, where the information is good and you didn't act)

2) But if your doctor detects a lump in your breast (for a woman, or I suppose a man), you do not immediately hack it off. Instead, you research the problem further, both by having the doctor (and perhaps a second), perform further tests, and by reading up on things yourself to understand the alternatives better. You move quickly of course, but don't try to figure everything out in 2 seconds or 2 hours. If the information confirms that it is cancer, then you choose from among the available treatments, maximizing (according to your own internal formula) between long term survival rates as well as disfigurement and other issues (you might go for the absolute best survival rate, or you might accept a very small decrease there for a less invasive, disfiguring treatment).

[RepoMan]

No motherfucker, we would have rather spent the billions wasted on the Iraq war on something constructive. You, on the other hand, supported the Iraq War, which was actually a dumber idea than Crystal Pepsi....

The people get right with Flowers, Flowers don't get right with the people.
Fixed that. TESTIFY, brother. TESTIFY.

[Phil_Stein]

Skedastic - my issue is that you cited only one figure - the lowest one (1.4 percent), amidst a jumble of 4 figures cited by Nordhaus, without a lot of indication by him of how often and long he used the various figures.

Say I have a bank and try to entice you to borrow money from me, and you ask me the interest rate. If I say "as low as 1.4 percent", that's not much of an answer. If I expand that to say sometimes it's 6 percent, sometimes 3, 2.3, or 1.4, but trust me, I know what I'm doing and will charge you the right rate at the right time, I think you'd still likely want to see more details about what rates apply when, particularly if the loan in question will have a duration of a century or two.

[cliffski]

Or, by analogy:

if your doctor detects a lump in your breast (for a woman, or I suppose a man), you do not immediately hack it off. Instead, you research the problem further, both by having the doctor (and perhaps a second), perform further tests, and by reading up on things yourself to understand the alternatives better. You move quickly of course, but don't try to figure everything out in 2 seconds or 2 hours.

true.
With climate change, we have a situation where 9 doctors have told us for 10 years we have a problem, and some proposed solutions. We still have one doctor claiming the other 9 are wrong, and its all hunky dory.
Personally, if its my ass on the operating table, I'm going with the first nine, and doing whatever they fuck they suggest.

[RepoMan]

If it's climate change, then why was 2006 the "best" year for hurricanes in a long time? Just pure coincidence? How does it work then...does global warming/climate change also cause good things or is it only death and destruction? Is it just random, like sometimes it will be a great year for hurricanes and sometimes it will be mammoth Andrew sized bitches?...
Those tornadoes that hit the midwest, Katie Couric asked if those were global warming related...were they? Is every tornado in 2007 global warming related or only certain ones (like ones that cause a lot of death!)? What about the record cold spell in the northeast? Global warming related? But wait I thought it was called WARMING? It can cause cold spells now too? This global warming thing is like a fucking thermos! It knows when to keep things hot and when to keep things cold!
Gosh Bob, you sure make a compelling argument.

Somehow, though, you seem to be the only one who can't grasp the idea that the overall global temperature ON AVERAGE is increasing (http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2007/s2798.htm), and that the science predicts that increased global temperature (i.e. increased global atmospheric energy) increases BOTH the low extremes AND the high extremes (http://www.cnn.com/2003/WEATHER/07/03/wmo.extremes/). Which makes sense -- more energy causes greater shifts in both directions.

There's no FUCKING contradiction here, Bob. So get the fuck over it and enjoy the killer tornadoes coming up your ass.

Edit:
"These record extreme events [high temperatures, low temperatures and high rainfall amounts and droughts] all go into calculating the monthly and annual averages which, for temperatures, have been gradually increasing over the past 100 years," the WMO said in its statement.
If you can't comprehend that, Bob, then why the fuck should any of us bother arguing with you?

[RepoMan]

You're just playing fancy scientist pissing contest here.
I shudder to think what contest YOU'RE playing, then.

[mouselock]

Of course. Notice that ANY attempt to prescribe policy MUST, if it is coherent, be reducible to a cost-benefit analysis, even if it is only implicit.

This is an impossible position, unfortunately, because nobody cares about the benefits in 300 years from incurring costs now. In fact, most economics break down horrendously at that scale regardless of what type of discount rate you use because the scale spans multiple lifespans of people.

The part that boggles my mind is this:

Let's just assume for a moment that there is an irreversible tipping point, beyond which the earth becomes irrecoverably damaged. What possible utility could you put on that point that would ever make it okay to say "Well, this only pushes that point off by 50 years, but we save 15% in terms of net per capita value, so it's okay?"

This is the point that environmental concerns become "alarmist". It comes down to a fundamental, unprovable belief that either there is no amount of damage that can be done which can't be undone given time, or there is. I'm going to throw my hat in with the dinosaurs here, and say there is. So my viewing of the entire issue isn't one of a cost/benefit analysis. I'm pretty sure that the costs are entirely disproportional to the perceived benefits, unless you believe (as I do) that the ecosystem isn't infinitely distendable. At that point I start looking at cost/viability arguments. Can we save the world from this hypothetical tipping point period? And if so, can we do so without utterly destroying the current human way of life. If yes, then a 15 or a 30% premium in the standard of living is a small price to pay.

Unfortunately, because of the complexity of the problem, it's pretty much impossible to prove. So it comes down often to a matter of "religion" whether or not folks are willing to give up some of the cushiness of modern day life in order to pay back the last 200 years of accrued debt in terms of environmental damage towards our future heirs. That's a rather untenable point to try to make when people want their widescreen TVs now.

[Andrew Mayer]

Unfortunately, because of the complexity of the problem, it's pretty much impossible to prove. So it comes down often to a matter of "religion" whether or not folks are willing to give up some of the cushiness of modern day life in order to pay back the last 200 years of accrued debt in terms of environmental damage towards our future heirs. That's a rather untenable point to try to make when people want their widescreen TVs now.

I think that it's had a lot to do with an attempt to game the system over the last few decades to undercut science. It's not religion at all,since there are actual facts here. You're simply falling victim to the idea that we're paralyzed without a higher truth, whereas history has shown that we can use a preponderance of evidence as a motivation for action. It's the basis of our legal system last time I checked.

We spent a shitload of money to go to the moon, and reaped tremendous benefits from the act of simply funding that research. Tang, bitches!

If you don't like regulation, then fine, fight against it. You may find that a little regulation is good for the system as long as it's discussed honestly.

[Jason McCullough]

Looks like I owe Jeff Lackey an apology - China has just passed the US as the biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

[RepoMan]

Yep. And here I was thinking that the west coast was a relatively good place to be, global-warming-wise. But now it turns out that increased pollution in Asia will likely make more severe west coast weather (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/06/BAGCQOG69O1.DTL). Which, judging from the record windstorm in Seattle this past winter (http://www.komotv.com/news/4915091.html), may be already happening. Sigh. The whole planet's gonna get worked over, and no mistake.

Part of me wants to stay in California, because at least earthquakes (as far as we know) don't get significantly worse as the planet gets hotter, and because heatwaves can be effectively managed with solar power on the roof (when the power goes out because of a heatwave blackout, that's exactly when your solar installation will be cranking out the most juice). But then again, Seattle's got a hell of a lot more rain (California is going to suffer when the snowpack goes away) and a lot less quake risk. So probably it's a wash. At least I'm not living in fucking Bangladesh....

[cliffski]

An interesting graph here showing money generated per ton of fossil fuel used:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Fossil_Fuel_Efficiency_png

Even if you think climate change is somehow a con, why would you *not* want your country to move to the left on this graph?

The US is worringly poor at the efficiency with which it is using fossil fuels, down there with iran and russia. I'm guessing this is because european cars have way higher minimum efficiency regulations, and less in the way of SUVs, although I guess a less dense population might imply more long distance travel in the US?

[MikeJ]

An interesting graph here showing money generated per ton of fossil fuel used:

Something here doesn't compute. If China now emits more greenhouse gases than the US (or about the same) and China's GDP is still below that of the US, then how can China be more efficient in terms of GDP/emissions?

[Mordrak]

Something here doesn't compute. If China now emits more greenhouse gases than the US (or about the same) and China's GDP is still below that of the US, then how can China be more efficient in terms of GDP/emissions?

Edit: Ugh, I misread that. Reading comprehension ftw.

[MikeSofaer]

Well, that might be a useful graph if you included only fossil fuels burned for commercial purposes. Meaningless in the form provided.

[skedastic]

This is an impossible position, unfortunately, because nobody cares about the benefits in 300 years from incurring costs now. In fact, most economics break down horrendously at that scale regardless of what type of discount rate you use because the scale spans multiple lifespans of people.


I don't understand your point. What are you proposing as an alternative to cost-benefit analysis, understood in general terms? The economics of the situation don't "break down," they just give answers which we may not like. We don't typically reject results simply because we don't like them.



Let's just assume for a moment that there is an irreversible tipping point, beyond which the earth becomes irrecoverably damaged. What possible utility could you put on that point that would ever make it okay to say "Well, this only pushes that point off by 50 years, but we save 15% in terms of net per capita value, so it's okay?"


Suppose there is a threshold beyond which some cataclysm occurs: another way of saying the same thing is, "It will be extremely costly if we hit this threshold," which is clearly a cost we should should consider when evaluating policy options. If we consider costs of environmental damage that become arbitrarily high, our optimal response may be to enact policies which impose arbitarily high costs to avoid that damage.

Put another way, you cannot argue that cost-benefit analysis is inapplicable and then proceed to argue in terms of the likely costs of failing to enact environmental protection, because then you are implicitly yourself using cost-benefit analysis.


At that point I start looking at cost/viability arguments. Can we save the world from this hypothetical tipping point period? And if so, can we do so without utterly destroying the current human way of life. If yes, then a 15 or a 30% premium in the standard of living is a small price to pay.


But, again, you are actually using cost-benefit analysis: you're just contending that some policy paths have much higher costs than benefits, namely, those that put us on trajectories which cross the "tipping point." Slightly paraphrasing your last sentence, "If yes, then a 15% to a 30% premium in the standard of living is a small price to pay because that price is greatly exceeded by the benefits which would accrue." Equivalently, you think that that costs of reducing our standard of living by 15-30% are exceeded by the benefits we would receive in terms of greater environmental quality.

[DeepT]

If it's climate change, then why was 2006 the "best" year for hurricanes in a long time? Just pure coincidence?

Yeah, I was waiting for this one to come out. You really have no idea, do you? You just didn't see any cities get smashed, and therefor concluded that 2006 was calm hurricane season.

If you had bothered to even an angstrom of research, you will have noticed that there was a shit-ton of tropical activity this year. Those tropical waves were coming off Africa like a machine gun.

So why weren't there any hurricanes? Well if you had noticed the first thing, you might have asked the next question. For the entire hurricane season, the jet-stream was sitting way down south and cut across the Caribbean sea, right across the path of these tropical systems.

It was acting like a giant band-saw that was decapitating every storm system that came across it. These tropical systems couldn't recover before they made land-fall.

You can look at this picture (http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-time/atlantic/winds/wg8wxc.GIF) of what was essentially sitting over the Caribbean area for the entire season. Notice the red coloring means a lot of wind shear. No storm system was going to make it through that without a significant hit to its organization. After a storm system passes that line, it needs some time to reorganize. Considering the fact that the entire gulf was a 'death zone' for hurricanes, it is no surprise that, in fact, there were no hurricanes there.

You also conveniently ignored the 2006 Pacific Hurricane Season (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Pacific_hurricane_season) which exceeded its predictions for activity.

What will 2007 be like? Lets hope the Jet stream does this year what it did last year.

[RepoMan]

What will 2007 be like? Lets hope the Jet stream does this year what it did last year.
Given how different this winter's weather is from last winter, at least around here in NorCal, I would expect the jet stream to behave very differently this summer.

We'll soon see.

[skedastic]

Skedastic - my issue is that you cited only one figure - the lowest one (1.4 percent), amidst a jumble of 4 figures cited by Nordhaus, without a lot of indication by him of how often and long he used the various figures.


I don't think my summary of what he did was inaccurate, Phil.

The paper is a very distilled version of research which appeared in book form (itself based on a long sequence of prior refereed papers). You have to look in the book for the details of where the discount rates come from; Chapter 6 contains an extensive discussion, including cites to the vast literature on geometric discounting over long time horizons, some of which was authored by Nordhaus. Should he have spent more space in this paper spelling out what rates were used and why instead of referring the reader to another source? Maybe there should have been an appendix with more detail, but editors tend to frown upon unnecessary use of their pages.

Of course the discount rate is critical (someone may have even said "The discount rate is critical" in this thead). But your comments have poor Jason thinking that he's saying something deliciously disdainful of economists when he points out that "the discount rate is more than a little bit of an issue." Confusing Jason may be bog easy, Phil, but that doesn't make it ethical.

[mouselock]

But, again, you are actually using cost-benefit analysis: you're just contending that some policy paths have much higher costs than benefits, namely, those that put us on trajectories which cross the "tipping point." Slightly paraphrasing your last sentence, "If yes, then a 15% to a 30% premium in the standard of living is a small price to pay because that price is greatly exceeded by the benefits which would accrue." Equivalently, you think that that costs of reducing our standard of living by 15-30% are exceeded by the benefits we would receive in terms of greater environmental quality.

No I'm not. Because I'm bearing in mind that realistically it's impossible to assign a probability or a cost to things like "The entire biosphere of the world breaks down." This is a singularity in the cost/benefit analysis. For any probability greater than 0.000000000000000000%, such an occurrance completely negates every other conceivable cost benefit comparison, because the cost of such a thing is essentially infinite. It's pretty hard to amortize out the complete biological destruction of the world. (And realistically, let's narrow our focus tremendously and say we don't really care at all about the world as a whole, but only whether or not we can continue to live upon it.)

[Calistas]

If you know of any specific problems that make it a no-go, I'd certainly be interested in reading about them.

Sorry, I don't have anything to hand. I kind of hoped one of you lot would be more expert at it than me! I guess it's to do with the energy inputs and waste outputs of the refining process, but I could not be sure.

If I ever see any more data around I'll post it here some time.

[shift6]

Maybe I'm misreading this, but you just said if we agree to agree with you, then the discussion will be more reasonable?
Yes, misreading.

If we agree with the conclusions of this movie, that humans do not significantly contribute to the warming of the climate, then the discussion will be more reasonable. Instead of focusing on how bad and evil humans are, we can look at ways to deal with the historically inevitable warming trend. Some of these things we look at include pollution control (I'm for that, to be sure), but the participants in the discussion won't continue to incorrectly assert that pollution control will contribute much in terms of slowing it down.

Reframed: if humans are a major contributor, then pollutant control is a major factor in shutting it off and should be one active focus right now. If humans are not a major contributor, then pollutant control is a good idea which could perhaps be tabled until after we figure out how to keep major cities from being deluged.

[skedastic]

No I'm not. Because I'm bearing in mind that realistically it's impossible to assign a probability or a cost to things like "The entire biosphere of the world breaks down."

Again, your previous comments were essentially cost-benefit analysis, whether or not you recognize it as such. And as well they should be, because cost-benefit analysis is little more than a corollary of rational decision making, and no one should prefer irrational decision making. The advantage of doing formal cost-benefit analysis is the analyst must completely specify his assumptions, so the rest of us can see exactly what assumptions were made and how the result follows. The flip side of that coin is that informal cost-benefit analysis, like claiming that we should reduce our standard of living by 15 to 30% to reduce global warming, is opaque. What exactly are your assumptions to get to that conclusion? Why not 5 or 40%?

It is possible to represent both uncertainty and "the entire biosphere of the world breaks down" quantitatively. Uncertainty can be handled in much the same way as its handled in climatological models, by estimating the distribution of outcomes conditional on various policies, which in turn induces a distribution over the net benefits of any given policy proposal.

Catastrophic events can be handled in much the same manner. Cast the problem on a much smaller scale to see how: what is your personal optimal policy with respect to safety? If you get killed in a car accident tomorrow, your loss in some sense infinite. Does that mean you should spend an arbitrarily large amount of money to reduce your probability of getting in accident?

Of course not. We could sketch your decision as follows: suppose if you spend S on safety equipment, your probability of dying is P(S). What value of S should you choose? If you maximize your expected welfare, and the net benefit of staying on this mortal coil is B, you want to maximize [P(S)B - S] over S. We can see that it isn't right to send B off to infinity, because then you'd spend all your time and money doing nothing but trying to avoid getting in a car crash. A better representation of B might be the difference in the discounted values of future welfare streams, with the welfare of being dead normalized to zero. B is, then, bounded.

Notice that cost-benefit analysis is frequently used to evaluate safety and other health-affecting policies.

The same reasoning applies with respect to catastrophic outcomes on a global scale, although granted the difficulties in assessing the situation become considerably more difficult. How much do you think we should spend to be able to prevent world-killer asteroids from hitting the earth? If your answer is less than "everything, and then some!" you agree that bringing infinities into the discussion doesn't make sense.

And once we dismiss the idea that the costs of global warming could be infinite, and instead replace that infinite value with something finite, we're back to plain ol' cost-benefit analysis.

Richard Posner has a popular book on cost-benefit analysis and catastrophic events, but I haven't read it so I dunno if it's any good.

[Nellie]

Reframed: if humans are a major contributor, then pollutant control is a major factor in shutting it off and should be one active focus right now. If humans are not a major contributor, then pollutant control is a good idea which could perhaps be tabled until after we figure out how to keep major cities from being deluged.

Remember that hole in the Ozone layer? It's still getting bigger (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6077018.stm) despite various countries starting to ban CFCs since 1978. According to the article no-one expects to see it start to recover until 2065. So it took us 23 years to more or less stop using chemicals in a way that damages the Ozone layer (quantities peaked in 2001 and have started to reduce) and will take almost a century after we figured out what was wrong with it for things to stop getting worse and start to recover.

I guess in short that means that yes, in the short term (next 200 years or so) we should be looking seriously about how we manage the effects of climate change/global warming in addition to taking steps to reduce pollution generally, if it turns out that human created carbon makes bugger all difference, at least my [grand]kids wont have asthma.

[Gordon Cameron]

Again, your previous comments were essentially cost-benefit analysis, whether or not you recognize it as such. And as well they should be, because cost-benefit analysis is little more than a corollary of rational decision making, and no one should prefer irrational decision making. The advantage of doing formal cost-benefit analysis is the analyst must completely specify his assumptions, so the rest of us can see exactly what assumptions were made and how the result follows. The flip side of that coin is that informal cost-benefit analysis, like claiming that we should reduce our standard of living by 15 to 30% to reduce global warming, is opaque. What exactly are your assumptions to get to that conclusion? Why not 5 or 40%?

It is possible to represent both uncertainty and "the entire biosphere of the world breaks down" quantitatively. Uncertainty can be handled in much the same way as its handled in climatological models, by estimating the distribution of outcomes conditional on various policies, which in turn induces a distribution over the net benefits of any given policy proposal.

Catastrophic events can be handled in much the same manner. Cast the problem on a much smaller scale to see how: what is your personal optimal policy with respect to safety? If you get killed in a car accident tomorrow, your loss in some sense infinite. Does that mean you should spend an arbitrarily large amount of money to reduce your probability of getting in accident?

Of course not. We could sketch your decision as follows: suppose if you spend S on safety equipment, your probability of dying is P(S). What value of S should you choose? If you maximize your expected welfare, and the net benefit of staying on this mortal coil is B, you want to maximize [P(S)B - S] over S. We can see that it isn't right to send B off to infinity, because then you'd spend all your time and money doing nothing but trying to avoid getting in a car crash. A better representation of B might be the difference in the discounted values of future welfare streams, with the welfare of being dead normalized to zero. B is, then, bounded.

Notice that cost-benefit analysis is frequently used to evaluate safety and other health-affecting policies.

The same reasoning applies with respect to catastrophic outcomes on a global scale, although granted the difficulties in assessing the situation become considerably more difficult. How much do you think we should spend to be able to prevent world-killer asteroids from hitting the earth? If your answer is less than "everything, and then some!" you agree that bringing infinities into the discussion doesn't make sense.

And once we dismiss the idea that the costs of global warming could be infinite, and instead replace that infinite value with something finite, we're back to plain ol' cost-benefit analysis.

Richard Posner has a popular book on cost-benefit analysis and catastrophic events, but I haven't read it so I dunno if it's any good.

One nit I might pick with the car-accident analogy is that I don't think most of us consider our personal death to be as much of a catastrophe as the end of the human race. We are willing to go to certain lengths to preserve our own lives but I think this is tempered by our knowledge that we all gotta go sometime. By contrast, the future of the human race is more indefinite (though it doesn't strictly have the potential for an infinite future, given what we seem to know about the way the cosmos works). I suppose it is all cost/benefit analysis but I think people might rationally devote more effort to staving off the end of the human race, than an individual would do to decrease the likelihood of his own death.

[Bob Cherub]

Yeah, I was waiting for this one to come out. You really have no idea, do you? You just didn't see any cities get smashed, and therefor concluded that 2006 was calm hurricane season.

If you had bothered to even an angstrom of research, you will have noticed that there was a shit-ton of tropical activity this year. Those tropical waves were coming off Africa like a machine gun.

So why weren't there any hurricanes? Well if you had noticed the first thing, you might have asked the next question. For the entire hurricane season, the jet-stream was sitting way down south and cut across the Caribbean sea, right across the path of these tropical systems.

It was acting like a giant band-saw that was decapitating every storm system that came across it. These tropical systems couldn't recover before they made land-fall.

You can look at this picture (http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-time/atlantic/winds/wg8wxc.GIF) of what was essentially sitting over the Caribbean area for the entire season. Notice the red coloring means a lot of wind shear. No storm system was going to make it through that without a significant hit to its organization. After a storm system passes that line, it needs some time to reorganize. Considering the fact that the entire gulf was a 'death zone' for hurricanes, it is no surprise that, in fact, there were no hurricanes there.

You also conveniently ignored the 2006 Pacific Hurricane Season (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Pacific_hurricane_season) which exceeded its predictions for activity.

What will 2007 be like? Lets hope the Jet stream does this year what it did last year.

Ah okay got it. So does global warming cause the jet stream to do that or was that something else? Like too much tuna fishing or something.

[Mordrak]

The flip side of that coin is that informal cost-benefit analysis, like claiming that we should reduce our standard of living by 15 to 30% to reduce global warming, is opaque. What exactly are your assumptions to get to that conclusion? Why not 5 or 40%?


Have you dived so deep into science (numbers) that you can't see anything else?

He wasn't arguing that 15 or 30% are legitimate estimates. He was arguing that even if the cost to our standard of living is high, it is worth it. Large drops in the standard of living are better than dead. Yes, there are exceptions. But unless you can show we'll be eating our own shit to stop global warming, well, I think we can manage.


Of course not. We could sketch your decision as follows: suppose if you spend S on safety equipment, your probability of dying is P(S). What value of S should you choose? If you maximize your expected welfare, and the net benefit of staying on this mortal coil is B, you want to maximize [P(S)B - S] over S. We can see that it isn't right to send B off to infinity, because then you'd spend all your time and money doing nothing but trying to avoid getting in a car crash. A better representation of B might be the difference in the discounted values of future welfare streams, with the welfare of being dead normalized to zero. B is, then, bounded.


Gordon already handled this a little bit, but to put it more bluntly, not all costs have a dollar value. I know you say everything can be quantified, but the end of the human race is a debt that cannot be repaid. Do not pass go. Forget jail. Even if one guy survived, it's under water.

At the very best, the cost is the end of the human race. We break even. However, that's only if you agree we don't owe anything to people that don't exist (yet). And if you say the costs today are too high to prevent dinosaur levels of catastrophe, well, let's invent a new term. There are opportunity costs, so how about opportunity benefits? We can take this opportunity to benefit. The dividend is saving our world. What's even more amazing is you get several opportunities everyday to help secure this benefit. Pretty neat, huh?


If we agree with the conclusions of this movie, that humans do not significantly contribute to the warming of the climate, then the discussion will be more reasonable. Instead of focusing on how bad and evil humans are, we can look at ways to deal with the historically inevitable warming trend. Some of these things we look at include pollution control (I'm for that, to be sure), but the participants in the discussion won't continue to incorrectly assert that pollution control will contribute much in terms of slowing it down.


Isn't the contention the premise of the movie?

[Elton]

Gordon already handled this a little bit, but to put it more bluntly, not all costs have a dollar value.

Whether or not you regard the continuity of the human race as having a specific value, are you suggesting that you want governments to NOT take cost-benefit analysis into account? How will you determine how high carbon taxes should be (or whatever your global warming solution is) unless you know what the costs of pollution are? An arbitrary number that's high enough that it "feels" right?

What you and mouselock are saying is that you assign a very high cost to the chance that human-generated global warming causes an all-life-on-earth-killing event. That's understandable. But if you treat the cost of human-influenced earth-death as infinite, then the only response is to do whatever it takes to minimize the probability of that event. Are you comfortable returning to an agrarian society which eschews all industry? All chemicals? All transportation?

(Though now that I think about it, proceeding full-speed ahead with economic growth and technological progress (with added carbon taxes to attempt to fold the cost of pollution into everything) might be the way to minimize planet-killing events, if atmospheric engineering takes a leap and planet-wide climate-adjusting controls are developed.)

[FIDGAF]

I still don't get why anyone would bother to argue that Global Warming isn't a real and relative issue. If it's a possibility, it should be considered and taken seriously. This is like ignoring a big asteroid that might hit the planet. You take the threat seriously and plan how to prevent it from happening, right? Screw the $$$, that doesn't matter if there's nobody here to spend it.

The warmer the ocean, the more El Nino you get. That disturbs the jet streams and creates unpredictable weather all over the planet. Until we can actually predict the weather 100%, I'd say our understanding of how everything fits together is too weak to play games. Since we know that something different is occurring and have reviewed what's changed in the last 200 years, I think it's reasonable to assume at this point that the industrial revolution and it's waste has caused a huge change to our planet.

Ignoring what we think is a problem and all the scientists that believe that there is indeed a serious issue is like running across the highway with a blindfold on.

Like Nellie stated, it takes some serious years to undo this type of damage, so the sooner we start the better IMO.

[DeepT]

Ah okay got it. So does global warming cause the jet stream to do that or was that something else? Like too much tuna fishing or something.

I doubt there is enough evidence to provide any correlation. The jet stream doing that wasn't an aberration. It is uncommon, but not unheard of. I would say we got lucky, however, that is just a guess.

[skedastic]

He wasn't arguing that 15 or 30% are legitimate estimates. He was arguing that even if the cost to our standard of living is high, it is worth it.

Large drops in the standard of living are better than dead. Yes, there are exceptions. But unless you can show we'll be eating our own shit to stop global warming, well, I think we can manage.


What does it mean to say something is "worth it?" The expression encapsulates the notion behind cost-benefit analsis: when we say something is "worth it," we mean that there are pros and cons, but the pros outweigh the cons -- it's "worth" taking the cons to get the pros. Or in other words, something is "worth it" if its benefits exceed its costs. Claiming that reducing our standard of living by 30% to slow global warming is "worth it" is just another way of saying that the benefits of that reduction exceed the costs. Like mouselock, you're railing against cost-benefit analysis and at the same time engaging in cost-benefit analysis (and you go on to do so again, noting that the "dividend" (benefit) we get from reducing the probability of catastrophe, exceeds the cost). Which is good, because otherwise you're just arguing that we should be irrational in the sense that we should do things which have greater costs than benefits, which doesn't make any sense.

Again, there is absolutely nothing we can do to "stop" global warming. The question policy makers are debating is how much effort we should make to slow global warming. All we can do is put ourselves on trajectories on which the rate of warming is slower. It is costly to move to such trajectories. The question is: which trajectory should be on? At what point is it no longer worth it to give up our own quality of life in the interest of further reductions in warming -- 0.3% of GDP? 30%? 99.99%? The answer you and mouselock give is: there is no limit to do how much we should give up in order to prevent even an infinitessimal increase in warming. I don't think that's a sensible answer, and I don't think you guys really do, either.

Mouselock wants to throw infinity into certain equations and then dismiss the idea that we should (or can) evaluate which policies are worth it. A better way of phrasing the result is: if we can change the probability of a world-ending event, then the costs we should be willing to bear to so reduce that probability approach an arbitrarily large number as the cost we assign to that event approaches an arbitrarily large number (it's naughty to just throw infinities around rather than thinking in terms of limits). Consider an extreme example. Suppose that we can build some cool device which has no use except that it reduces the probability we'll all snuff it if a giant asteroid hits the earth. If we build the device, the probability the world ends is

P = 0.1000000000000000000000000000000000000000.

If we don't, the probability the world ends is

Q = 0.1000000000000000000000000000000000000001.

Let's measure outcomes in terms of mortality rather than dollars, for effect (it doesn't matter in which units we measure -- choosing dollars is just a convenience). How many people should we be willing to let die to change the probability of the world ending from Q to P? If your answer is less than "everyone but one, all six plus billions of us should die, except one person" then you agree with that we should not consider the costs of world ending events to be arbitrarily large, "infinite."

In short, I agree with you that we should think about which policies are "worth it." I also think that we need evidence-based, theoretically sound, internally consistent, and transparent methods to decide which policies are worth it.

[Phil_Stein]

BTW, since when is global warming a world ending event anyways?

Potentially major impact? Yes.

End of humanity? I haven't seen any scientific scenarios indicating this.

[Jason McCullough]

Again, there is absolutely nothing we can do to "stop" global warming.

Say what? Research the tech a bit and then build carbon-fixing factories that suck carbon out of the air until the carbon level is back where it should be. It might be expensive as hell, but I don't know where you're getting this "absolutely nothing" business.

[BlueJackalope]

BTW, since when is global warming a world ending event anyways?

Potentially major impact? Yes.

End of humanity? I haven't seen any scientific scenarios indicating this.

Wow. Thanks. I feel so much better now.

[Phil_Stein]

Wow. Thanks. I feel so much better now.

This is what I find frustrating about this topic.

It seems that folks tend to cluster themselves at ridiculous extreme ends of the discussion.

Either global warming is the end of the world that will flood 2/3 of the population and we are all D0MED! or global warming is all a fiction despite the vast scientific consensus on it.

Read the IPCC report(s) folks. Global warming is a real, serious problem. But it is also not the end of the world, nor are the proposed solutions to it economically catastrophic. Whether each of the various solutions is likely to be effective and a good investment of resources is certainly debatable. But there is a middle ground on this issue, and the vast majority of scientists (those that I've read anyways) stand firmly in that middle ground.

[BlueJackalope]

This is what I find frustrating about this topic.

It seems that folks tend to cluster themselves at ridiculous extreme ends of the discussion.

Sorry, your right. I just took the tone of your post to be dismissive unless it was "world ending event".

[Phil_Stein]

On rereading my post, I don't like my use of the word "solution".

Most proposed plans are mitigation strategies - they don't fully eliminate global warming. But for that matter, we don't necessarily NEED to eliminate global warming - just to keep it at a low enough level so that the effects are reasonably tolerable by society.

[TheTrunkDr]

But there is a middle ground on this issue, and the vast majority of scientists (those that I've read anyways) stand firmly in that middle ground.
The problem is there seems to be a large portion of the population who feel changing anything is unreasonable. When people refuse the idea of having to change any aspect of their life, up to and including the kinds of lightbulbs they buy, then there really isn't any middle ground.

[DeepT]

Say what? Research the tech a bit and then build carbon-fixing factories that suck carbon out of the air until the carbon level is back where it should be. It might be expensive as hell, but I don't know where you're getting this "absolutely nothing" business.

Terraformers to Terraform umm.. Terra. The irony would be grand.

[Ch. Hasslbauer]

All those funky delusions about giant mirror satellites and carbon dioxide binding factories... There really are a lot of technocrats on these messageboards. Kind of reminds me of that strange "Will we live forever?" thread.

[antlers]

Say what? Research the tech a bit and then build carbon-fixing factories that suck carbon out of the air until the carbon level is back where it should be. It might be expensive as hell, but I don't know where you're getting this "absolutely nothing" business.

Not really an option, because it would take too much energy. If you did carbon sequestration at the point of combustion, you'd be more efficient, but even that would be quite expensive.

There are a million reasons to get off the fossil fuel train, and global warming is only one of them. Nukes are the way to go.

[Bob Cherub]

John Edwards on Global Warming: "'It'll make world war look like heaven."

CLIMATE OF FEAR

Global warming also makes Jennifer Garner cry :(

[shift6]

I still don't get why anyone would bother to argue that Global Warming isn't a real and relative issue.
Besides Bob Chuerb and maybe two other people, who is arguing this? Again, the video contends with the human/CO2 contribution, not with global warming itself.

BTW, since when is global warming a world ending event anyways?

Potentially major impact? Yes.

End of humanity? I haven't seen any scientific scenarios indicating this.
Warmer earth = more bikinis. Not seeing why anyone wouldn't want to be here for that.

Say what? Research the tech a bit and then build carbon-fixing factories that suck carbon out of the air until the carbon level is back where it should be. It might be expensive as hell, but I don't know where you're getting this "absolutely nothing" business.
J-dizzle, you are 110% amazing. Seriously. Your posts make my entire mind boggle. And by "entire mind" I don't just mean the physical stuff in my head right now, I include my mind as it has existed from birth until death throughout all of that period of time all added up as one fourth dimensional lump, and then including all of the parallel universes in which this lump also exists and their respective timelines. En toto, my mind is completely flabbergasted by some of the shit that you post on this forum.

[Midnight Son]

J
Global warming also makes Jennifer Garner cry :(

What makes you cry? The sneaking suspicion that somewhere, right now, somebody is having a good time?

[Linoleum]

All those funky delusions about giant mirror satellites and carbon dioxide binding factories... There really are a lot of technocrats on these messageboards. Kind of reminds me of that strange "Will we live forever?" thread.

Compare 1907 to 2007. Now try to extrapolate to 2107. Funky delusions how exactly?

[RepoMan]

BTW, since when is global warming a world ending event anyways?

Potentially major impact? Yes.

End of humanity? I haven't seen any scientific scenarios indicating this.
Now you have. (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=30159)

Plenty of paleoclimatological evidence that major temperature spikes have been associated with major greenhouse gas spikes in Earth's past, right at the time of major extinctions (and I mean MAJOR extinctions). Reduce the oxygen content of the atmosphere by 20% and then see how well the human race is doing.

[DeepT]

Not really an option, because it would take too much energy. If you did carbon sequestration at the point of combustion, you'd be more efficient, but even that would be quite expensive.

Not really.

All we need are a lot of wide open spaces full of trees called "forests" and ... oh wait.

[mouselock]

Whether or not you regard the continuity of the human race as having a specific value, are you suggesting that you want governments to NOT take cost-benefit analysis into account? How will you determine how high carbon taxes should be (or whatever your global warming solution is) unless you know what the costs of pollution are? An arbitrary number that's high enough that it "feels" right?

That's actually not what I was getting at. It seems rather futile to try to preserve a way of life by destroying it. But it seems equally silly to quibble over a 10-15% reduction in free money. Realistically something is going to have to give somewhere. My complaints come when the high cost events get totally neglected and the cost/benefit analysis comes down to "Well it costs X billion more dollars to only save 20% more temperature gradient, so why bother?" The "Why bother" is because we have no idea whether that last 20% is enough to prevent things from entering an unrecoverable reaction state.

Maybe there's no way to 100% prevent that endpoint. That doesn't mean the solution is to assign it such a reasonable cost that we can just amortize it away. In essence, I think the method of looking at it ought not to be the current "Well how much can we fix before it hurts a bit" but rather "How much can we fix before we're really destroying anything resembling a modern way of life."

The problem, as always, is that people want to preserve the luxuries now at the expense of the future because, you know, the future is vague and far away and we'll have had full lives by the time it hits anyway. That's hard momentum to fight.


(Though now that I think about it, proceeding full-speed ahead with economic growth and technological progress (with added carbon taxes to attempt to fold the cost of pollution into everything) might be the way to minimize planet-killing events, if atmospheric engineering takes a leap and planet-wide climate-adjusting controls are developed.)

How about taxing the shit (punitively if need be) out of the worst polluters and funneling 50% of that money into cleanup, the other 50% into climatological and cleanup research as a start?

I'm not against technology or industralization. I'm simply against continuing to treat this problem as if it's minor because there's just little bits of evidence here and there and everything points to the entire climatological system being heavily buffered. Buffered systems in general make the problem appear far less bad than it is until it's too late and the buffer is overloaded.

[mouselock]

This is what I find frustrating about this topic.

It seems that folks tend to cluster themselves at ridiculous extreme ends of the discussion.

Either global warming is the end of the world that will flood 2/3 of the population and we are all D0MED! or global warming is all a fiction despite the vast scientific consensus on it.

FWIW, the likely scenario would global warming actually end the earth has nothing to do with flooding 2/3 of the world. Instead it has to do with shrinking what would normally be 2000+ years of climate change into 200+ years. Certain parts of the world's ecosystem have taken millenia to adapt to rather rigid temperature constraints (polar bears for example) and rapid shifts give them no chance to respond on an evolutionary scale.

Now, personally, I suspect the loss of the polar bear would be tragic, but probably not a globe-endangering event. However, shifting weather patterns so that the equatorial rain forests suddenly shifted temperatures by 5 degrees or lost 10% of their moisture or something else similar worries me a lot more. Because the chance of species loss at that level is tremendous. And unfortunately species loss at the lower end can propagate up the food chain rapidly.

There's also that whole ocean anoxia thread in the EE forum to peruse as well. Surely it's not too hard to stretch the imagination and see how events leading to 10%+ biomass loss could be catastrophic for the entire world?

I agree with you that it's unlikely to be a global killer, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. And if it's even possible it seems to me maybe it ought to be factored in when the folks most concerned with their plasma TVs throw out the idea that we can't impact it that much anyway and to do so would cost a plasma TV and a hummer.

[Ch. Hasslbauer]

All those funky delusions about giant mirror satellites and carbon dioxide binding factories... There really are a lot of technocrats on these messageboards. Kind of reminds me of that strange "Will we live forever?" thread.Compare 1907 to 2007. Now try to extrapolate to 2107. Funky delusions how exactly?
I am sure in 1985 you can get plutonium in any corner drugstore, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by.

We're currently running into a lot of crises, considering our problems with dying off seas and climate changes destroying living space. Also we're not very determined to find alternative energies to replace dwindling supplies of oil and uranium. We're also killing off too many theoretically renewable resources. You're free to expect science to solve all our problems, but personally I belief THIS to be the heyday of our society and civilization. I just can't take comfort in hoping for a technological miracle rescue down the road.
(Optimists have more fun in life, but pessimists may be right.)

[Phil_Stein]

mouselock - I still don't see this as an end of the human race kind o' thing.

Species extinction? (i.e. certain plants and animals...) Sure. But the loss of a polar bears or certain tree species is hardly end o' the race stuff.

Remember, with passive and/or active human intervention, we've introduced species of plants and animals across continents and seen them RAPIDLY spread across vast areas, often displacing the native species. If GW caused certain tree species to no longer be able to survive in a particular area, there would surely be others that would spread in to fill the gap.

Tropical rain forests in particular have an enormous amount of species variation. I do not think there are likely scenarios that would wipe out the majority of them.

None of this is to say GW is just groovy or that we shouldn't take steps to mitigate it. I'm just reiterating that I've seen nothing suggesting a reasonable likelihood that it could lead to anything like the end of the human race (or even anything close...)

Also, I wonder if GW alarmists do their cause a disservice, in the long run. Putting up unsupportable "sky is falling" type assertions that aren't backed by mainstream science makes it easier for skeptics to label the entire GW issue a 'swindle'. For credibility with the public (and policy makers), stick to the science, and don't exaggerate the results.

[skedastic]

I agree with you that it's unlikely to be a global killer, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. And if it's even possible it seems to me maybe it ought to be factored in when the folks most concerned with their plasma TVs throw out the idea that we can't impact it that much anyway and to do so would cost a plasma TV and a hummer.

The idea that the opportunity costs of reducing greenhouse emissions come in the form of reduced plasma TVs and Hummers is at best misleading. Standard of living matters: people in places and times with higher levels of development tend to have better outcomes in almost any dimension we might deem important: life expectancy, literacy, freedom from disease, our quality of life depends on development. We face a tradeoff when considering the resources we ought to devote to retarding global warming: we have to give up that quality of life for the next several generations in order to improve, through reduced warming, the lives of subsequent generations. If attempts to reduce warming reduce the rate of growth of economic development, those subsequent generations may not thank us for our efforts, as they may inherit a world with lower temperature but with much lower development, and they may not consider that to be a good trade-off.

Posing the question in terms of lives is the most dramatic way to make this point. People forget that posing costs in terms of dollars is misleading: dollars are just little pieces of paper which don't matter at all. What we mean is that the resources represented by those dollars will be diverted from other goals to the goal of reducing warming. We could measure those resources in any units, not just dollars -- for example, one famous study of price controls in WW2 measured costs and benefits of price controls in units of armored divisions rather than dollars.

Suppose we measure the costs and benefits of global warming prevention in terms of lives. An upper bound on dollars per life is about $50M, which is the reduction in GDP which will induce people to invest enough less in health and safety so as to cause one statistical death. A lower bound is around $1M, which is the cost of saving a statistical life through effective (and underfunded) policies. Take the high figure and suppose that we implement relatively modest programs to reduce warming which reduce the rate of growth in the U.S. by 1 percentage point per year. After, say, 10 years, GDP will be roughly 10 percent lower than it would otherwise have been. That's the equivalent of [ (0.1)(13T $/year) / (50M $/life) ] = 26,000 lives in that year (or multiply by 50 if you're willing to take the $1M per life figure!). That's just in the U.S.; these issues are perhaps much more important in the developing world. Serious efforts to control global warming will involve serious costs: here, we are proposing to sacrifice (at least) 26,000 lives in that year to reduce warming. Put another way, the opportunity cost of implementing this policy will be comparable to the total mortality from traffic accidents in the U.S. after about a decade and will continue to rise (exponentially).

If we do nothing, global mean temperature will hit +4 relative to 1800 somewhere around, say, 2150. How many lives should we sacrifice to change that year to 2160? Implicitly or explicitly, that's the sort of question we must answer.

[RepoMan]

mouselock - I still don't see this as an end of the human race kind o' thing.... I'm just reiterating that I've seen nothing suggesting a reasonable likelihood that it could lead to anything like the end of the human race (or even anything close...) Phil. Phil, I'm -- Phil. I'm OVER HERE, Phil. Are you receiving me? Breaker breaker 1 9, come in good buddy. Earth to Phil. YO PHIL. Am I on your ignore list or some shit?

I posted a link up above, in post #218. Go ahead, scroll back. Whoa! It's blue and underlined! If you click it, and read it, and click again, you'll get to this article (http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00037A5D-A938-150E-A93883414B7F0000). But to save you the trouble, I'm going to quote a huge chunk of it right here.
But within the past few years scientists began sampling the mass extinction boundaries. And to the great surprise of those doing this work, data from the periods of mass extinction, other than the K/T event, suggested that the world's oceans have more than once reverted to the extremely low oxygen conditions, known as anoxia, that were common before plants and animals became abundant.

Among the biomarkers uncovered were the remains of large numbers of tiny photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria. Today these microbes are found, along with their cousins, photosynthetic purple sulfur bacteria, living in anoxic marine environments such as the depths of stagnant lakes and the Black Sea, and they are pretty noxious characters. For energy, they oxidize hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas, a poison to most other forms of life, and convert it into sulfur. Thus, their abundance at the extinction boundaries opened the way for a new interpretation of the cause of mass extinctions.
Scientists have long known that oxygen levels were lower than today around periods of mass extinction, although the reason was never adequately identified. Large-scale volcanic activity, also associated with most of the mass extinctions, could have raised CO2 levels in the atmosphere, reducing oxygen and leading to intense global warming--long an alternative theory to the impacts; however, the changes wrought by volcanism could not necessarily explain the massive marine extinctions of the end Permian. Nor could volcanoes account for plant deaths on land, because vegetation would thrive on increased CO2 and could probably survive the warming.

But the biomarkers in the oceanic sediments from the latest part of the Permian, and from the latest Triassic rocks as well, yielded chemical evidence of an ocean-wide bloom of the H2S-consuming bacteria. Because these microbes can live only in an oxygen-free environment but need sunlight for their photosynthesis, their presence in strata representing shallow marine settings is itself a marker indicating that even the surface of the oceans at the end of the Permian was without oxygen but was enriched in H2S.

In today's oceans, oxygen is present in essentially equal concentrations from top to bottom because it dissolves from the atmosphere into the water and is carried downward by ocean circulation. Only under unusual circumstances, such as those that exist in the Black Sea, do anoxic conditions below the surface permit a wide variety of oxygen-hating organisms to thrive in the water column. Those deep-dwelling anaerobic microbes churn out copious amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which also dissolves into the seawater. As its concentration builds, the H2S diffuses upward, where it encounters oxygen diffusing downward. So long as their balance remains undisturbed, the oxygenated and hydrogen sulfide-saturated waters stay separated, and their interface, known as the chemocline, is stable. Typically the green and purple sulfur bacteria live in that chemocline, enjoying the supply of H2S from below and sunlight from above.

Yet calculations by geoscientists Lee R. Kump and Michael A. Arthur of Pennsylvania State University have shown that if oxygen levels drop in the oceans, conditions begin to favor the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria, which proliferate and produce greater amounts of hydrogen sulfide. In their models, if the deepwater H2S concentrations were to increase beyond a critical threshold during such an interval of oceanic anoxia, then the chemocline separating the H2S-rich deepwater from oxygenated surface water could have floated up to the top abruptly. The horrific result would be great bubbles of toxic H2S gas erupting into the atmosphere.

Their studies indicate that enough H2S was produced by such ocean upwellings at the end of the Permian to cause extinctions both on land and in the sea. And this strangling gas would not have been the only killer. Models by Alexander Pavlov of the University of Arizona show that the H2S would also have attacked the planet's ozone shield, an atmospheric layer that protects life from the sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Evidence that such a disruption of the ozone layer did happen at the end of the Permian exists in fossil spores from Greenland, which display deformities known to result from extended exposure to high UV levels. Today we can also see that underneath "holes" in the ozone shield, especially in the Antarctic, the biomass of phytoplankton rapidly decreases. And if the base of the food chain is destroyed, it is not long until the organisms higher up are in desperate straits as well.

Kump and Arthur estimate that the amount of H2S gas entering the late Permian atmosphere from the oceans was more than 2,000 times the small amount given off by volcanoes today. Enough of the toxic gas would have permeated the atmosphere to have killed both plants and animals--particu-larly because the lethality of H2S increases with temperature. And several large and small mass extinctions seem to have occurred during short intervals of global warming. That is where the ancient volcanic activity may have come in.

Around the time of multiple mass extinctions, major volcanic events are known to have extruded thousands of square kilometers of lava onto the land or the seafloor. A by-product of this tremendous volcanic outpouring would have been enormous volumes of carbon dioxide and methane entering the atmosphere, which would have caused rapid global warming. During the latest Permian and Triassic as well as in the early Jurassic, middle Cretaceous and late Paleocene, among other periods, the carbon-isotope record confirms that CO2 concentrations skyrocketed immediately before the start of the extinctions and then stayed high for hundreds of thousands to a few million years.

But the most critical factor seems to have been the oceans. Heating makes it harder for water to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere; thus, if ancient volcanism raised CO2 and lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and global warming made it more difficult for the remaining oxygen to penetrate the oceans, conditions would have become amenable for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of H2S. Oxygen-breathing ocean life would have been hit first and hardest, whereas the photosynthetic green and purple H2S-consuming bacteria would have been able to thrive at the surface of the anoxic ocean. As the H2S gas choked creatures on land and eroded the planet's protective shield, virtually no form of life on the earth was safe....

Most troubling, however, is the question of whether our species has anything to fear from this mechanism in the future: If it happened before, could it happen again? Although estimates of the rates at which carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere during each of the ancient extinctions are still uncertain, the ultimate levels at which the mass deaths took place are known. The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place. How soon after that could there be a new greenhouse extinction? That is something our society should never find out. If you pop off with this "I haven't seen any evidence that this could be a threat to the human race" business again, I'm going to assume that you have me on your ignore list, because that's the only remaining explanation.

[Phil_Stein]

Err - ok Repo. Subtle :)

Yes, I did see your post briefly last night, but then forgot about it.

Yes, that's a pretty nasty scenario set out by the article in question. But it's the first I've seen of it, and even Al Gore hasn't started beating the drum for it yet (and he's all over sea level changes that are quite far beyond scientific consensus for the next century). I'll keep an eye out for more articles on this one, but right now, a single article that doesn't seem to have been picked up by mainstream GW researchers doesn't alarm me much.

[mouselock]

If we do nothing, global mean temperature will hit +4 relative to 1800 somewhere around, say, 2150. How many lives should we sacrifice to change that year to 2160? Implicitly or explicitly, that's the sort of question we must answer.

How about 100,000? Except instead of taking 100,000 poor, pitiable people from the third world and killing them, let's take 0.01 lifespans from 10,000,000 people in first-world nations to hit the same number. (Since we all know we're talking about aggregate statistics anyway. Or better yet, 0.001 lifespans from 100M people. Let's assume that my average lifespan is 80 years at this point. That's .08 years, or roughly a month of my life. I'm perfectly willing to give up one month out of 80 years in order to try to help stabilize the globe for my grandchildren's grandchildren.

If you'd prefer to think about it in terms of money, though, I'm also willing to give up that bedroom LCD telivision in order to stabilize the globe for my grandchildren's grandchildren. Or are we suddenly going to pretend that there's not enough excess wealth floating around out there that if people were willing to undergo a 0.1% voluntary reduction in consumption power that it couldn't make tremendous differences? Set the AC at 70 instead of 68. Pay another 10 cents per 10 dollars to offset the cost of implementing cleaner controls in factory environments. Accept a penny less on every 100 dollars of stock from these industries.

Are you honestly claiming that the per capita cost of implementing these controls is so significant that we just can't be bothered to do it? Especially if these costs were spread around in the exact same distribution that wealth is amongst the 1st world countries alone? Somehow I sincerely doubt that's the case, but I'm willing to look at hard evidence that doesn't depend on assigning some cost value to how useful it is to actually accomplish temperature reduction. Just assume that accomplishing said temperature reduction is 100% required and has zero economic kickback: How much do I have to pay as my portion of the Kyoto accord? And how much do I have to pay as my portion if the total cost is distributed at the exact same ratio that wealth is distributed within the country? I'm betting I have that much in my wallet as we speak.

[skedastic]

Or are we suddenly going to pretend that there's not enough excess wealth floating around out there that if people were willing to undergo a 0.1% voluntary reduction in consumption power that it couldn't make tremendous differences?


Before you were talking about diverting 15 to 30% of GDP to reducing global warming. Now you're talking about diverting less than one-tenth of one percent of GDP to reducing global warming. You also seem to think that I'm arguing that the optimal amount we should spend is nothing, which is not at all what I was saying.

What I was saying is that the costs of diverting resources to reducing global warming are real costs -- real people will experience lower quality of life. It is therefore important that we think carefully about these sacrifices. It is cavalier and simply wrong to think that these sacrifices will take the form of more single-Hummer instead of dual-Hummer households.



Are you honestly claiming that the per capita cost of implementing these controls is so significant that we just can't be bothered to do it?


No, I'm not. Nothing I've said even vaguely implies that. What I am suggesting is that we enact such policies when we have reason to believe that we will gain more by enacting them than they cost.

Again, we are not trying to decide whether or not we should spend $X to "fix" global warming or do nothing at all. We need to decide how much to spend on reducing warming: the more we spend, the more we can decrease warming. How much should we spend? Your answer is that we should spend the equivalent of 100,000 lives. I think you ought to be able to justify that answer, since we're talking about 100,000 people's existences. What do we gain by sacrificing those lives? Perhaps we should instead spend 10,000 or 1,000,000 or 100,000,000 lives. Or perhaps none. My point is simply that we should think carefully about this decision, we should attempt to choose the best feasible option. A corollary of that observation is that the opinions of people who refuse to do the arithmetic, who refuse to clearly state what tradeoffs we face and which tradeoffs we ought to choose --- who refuse to quantify "how useful it is to actually accomplish temperature reduction" --- are not persuasive.


How much do I have to pay as my portion of the Kyoto accord?


In terms of costs to you, well, the present value of the costs of Kyoto are on the order of $750B, with about 2/3 of that falling on the U.S. That half-trillion is around 1/25th of U.S. GDP. So if you pay your proportion, your share will be about two weeks' pay. How much you got in your wallet?

The fact that the per-capita costs of Kyoto are quite small isn't a reason to support Kyoto, as the benefits are also small. The evidence suggests that if we divert those resources to other ends, we will be better off. That doesn't mean the optimal investment in reducing warming is zero. It is pretty damning of this particular proposal to address GW.

[FIDGAF]

Besides Bob Chuerb and maybe two other people, who is arguing this?


Come on Shift, you know there's more than just them:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=30159
;)

Actually, I'm amazed at just how many people I know that think Global Warming is Voodoo. The thought that this might have some factual basis simply sends them in a panic. It's not like I'm telling them that we found the Jesus tomb or anything, but you'd think I did.

[Drastic]

Actually, I'm amazed at just how many people I know that think Global Warming is Voodoo. The thought that this might have some factual basis simply sends them in a panic. It's not like I'm telling them that we found the Jesus tomb or anything, but you'd think I did.
Part of the global warming acceptance problem is poor marketing. The Jesus Tomb thing brings just one example to mind: the religious right would be firmly on-board the melting icecaps instead of walking on the water dismissively past them if the global warming crowd could market the threat better as being caused by Satan, and pursuing carbon-fixing and other strategies as being righteous and biblically-grounded.

It's pretty logical, frankly. Greenhouse effect rises from more solar energy being trapped by various vapors which are decidedly not a sweet savor unto the Lord. Solar energy is light. Satan is Lucifer--the Light Bringer. It practically sells itself! With a competent marketing push this direction, carbon-fixing factories would be wholly financed from the collection plates of churches across the nation.

If the campaign flags, it can receive an extra push by slyly pointing out that Muslim terrorists are in favor of global warming because of course they want more desert. Donations will triple.

[Jason McCullough]

By the way, where did these Kyoto compliance cost estimates come from?

[Nellie]

Arise!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6290228.stm

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. ...

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain's Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis. ...

"All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that," he told the BBC News website.

"You can't just ignore bits of data that you don't like," he said.
....

"This paper re-enforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of climate science.

[WarrenM]

I don't know if anyone brought this up already but from what I've read the earth had a similar warming trend in the middle ages and as far as I know, nobody was burning fossil fuels back then.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

Oh good. This thread again.

I don't know if anyone brought this up already but from what I've read the earth had a similar warming trend in the middle ages and as far as I know, nobody was burning fossil fuels back then.

This is a false equivalence. There have certainly been warming trends at many times in Earth's history. That does not mean they all have the same causes, or that because a previous trend was not caused by human factors, that the current one isn't.

[WarrenM]

That does not mean they all have the same causes, or that because a previous trend was not caused by human factors, that the current one isn't.
Yes, but since that argument goes both ways it DOES throw doubt into the equation. Because of those previous trends it is impossible to state, as a hard fact, that this one is man made.

[Hawkeye Fierce]

Yes, but since that argument goes both ways it DOES throw doubt into the equation. Because of those previous trends it is impossible to state, as a hard fact, that this one is man made.

Science rarely deals in hard facts. The first principle of science is skepticism. That said, this is basically the "just a theory!" argument that proponents of intelligent design are so fond of. Using past trends as data to support a hypothesis that supports or opposes human-impacted warming is one thing. Simply saying that there have been past trends does not rise to the level of a scientific argument.

[cliffski]

I care about hard facts when it comes to stuff like string theory, or other crazy shit, that has fuck all effect on my daily life. But because scientists say they are 99% sure that tobacco will affect my health, I don't smoke, and because they say they are 99% certain on the global warming thing, I use low energy lightbulbs.
How fucked off will we be if in 40 years time some dude finally has 100% conclusive proof on MMGW, but we are all up to our bellies in water on that day because we refused to address the problem until we were sure?

[Talisker]

No shit -- simple risk management says we should be pouring ENORMOUS amounts of resources into countering global warming. (ENORMOUS == as much as, say, we've spent blowing up another country lately. We can handle that, obviously)

[Phil_Stein]

Yes, but since that argument goes both ways it DOES throw doubt into the equation.
People who have never smoked a cigarette die of lung cancer. How much doubt does this throw into the link between smoking and lung cancer?


Because of those previous trends it is impossible to state, as a hard fact, that this one is man made.
If, by 'hard fact', you mean something that we know with 100% certitude, then I think most global warming experts would agree with you - it is very difficult to be 100% certain about anything this complex. But then, that same issue holds for many areas of science and for many problems which we rationally choose to confront.

[Midnight Son]

Now look here! The very idea that the survival of the species is more important than corporate profits is ridiculous!

[Chris Nahr]

I don't know if anyone brought this up already but from what I've read the earth had a similar warming trend in the middle ages and as far as I know, nobody was burning fossil fuels back then.

Actually I'm pretty sure they were already burning coal back then, weren't they? Not in any amount to be relevant to global warming, though...

[bigdruid]

I don't know if anyone brought this up already but from what I've read the earth had a similar warming trend in the middle ages and as far as I know, nobody was burning fossil fuels back then.
You lose at science. Seriously (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png).

The degree of warming during the middle ages was significantly less, and while the causes aren't known, it apparently did coincide with solar activity, which is not the case today.

Although I'm no climatologist so I'm pretty much regurgitating shit I've read just like 99% of the rest of the posters in this thread.

[Tim Partlett]

There's no need to be so aggressive in your response to epicboy. It is possible to simply disagree. There's plenty of evidence to suggest it was warmer a thousand years ago compared to today, and there have been plenty of episodes of global warming in the earth's past equal to and much greater than today's measured changes.

The popular consensus is that today's change is caused by man, but there's no argument that all previous warming trends were not.

[bigdruid]

There's no need to be so aggressive in your response to epicboy. It is possible to simply disagree.
Yes, but I expect him to do at least a little due-diligence to understand why climatologists (who are intimately familiar with Medieval Warming) think modern day warming is different than that in the past.

Otherwise, just dropping by the thread to say "Oh, I think I read somewhere that there was warming in the past so I guess that discredits everything said by modern climatologists" is either ignorant or disingenuous, and in either case an aggressive response is warranted.

And, yeah, it's possible to simply disagree. But EpicBoy has already said he's not having any kids, and as a result doesn't have any real stake in what happens to the earth 50 years down the road. I have kids, and I *do* care, and so when someone adopts an opinion that puts their future livelihood in jeopardy, it's a little hard for me to just "agree to disagree".

[cliffski]

I've got no kids, live on high ground, and in a country unlikely to be affected as badly as most. I still worry about it, because I would like to think that I'm not screwing up the whole planet for other peoples kids. It's just common courtesy really.