Global warming is one of those tough issues for me. I guess you could call me a skeptic, but I try very hard to be a thoughtful skeptic.
What makes the whole conversation unproductive is there appears to be two sides: one which argues there is no problem and we must do nothing, and the other side says that the problem is going to end the world as we know it and we must change our entire way of living and make it our number one priority.
For me, there is a progression of questions that I must answer before I can sign on to the latter's assertions., And they look something like this:
1. Is the world warming? I think it most certainly is, but I would also note that it appears that the warming trend has halted for the past 10 to 20 years. From what I can gather, scientists have reasons why that might be the case but have not explained it.
2. Is the warming man-made? To a large degree, I believe that it is. However, there are a lot of things that we don't understand about climate (solar cycles, effects of water vapor, ocean CO2 sequestration, etc.) If I had to put a number on it, I would say 50 to 60% man-made.
3. Can we do anything about it? This is where I begin to separate from the global warming crowd. Theoretically, we can certainly do something about it, but having worked in government I just don't see any practical way that we can reduce greenhouse emissions to such an extent that it's going to make a great difference. Further, china and India are ramping up their CO2 emissions, and there's nothing that the developed countries can do about it. Finally, I have ethical objections to telling developed countries that they have to use less energy which will inevitably result in more lives lost due to starvation or simply just malnutrition and poverty.
4. Should we do anything about it? I believe this is a cost-benefit analysis. And I haven't done the analysis myself, but sometimes I question whether spending the enormous amounts of money today is worth putting off an uncertain disaster tomorrow when we have actual problems today that we could be working on instead. We have millions of people every year dying from malnutrition, poor water supplies, malaria, HIV/AIDS, etc. Why not save those actual lives instead of spending the money saving hypothetical lives in 100 years. And indeed, won't we be more suited to save those lines in 100 years than we are right now, meaning that the mitigation effort could be a lot cheaper?
> ...but having worked in government I just don't see any practical way...
Yeah, in the same way that scientists discovered that CFGs are eating away ozone layer, but the world's governments were too incompetent to meaningfully reduce CFG production, and now we end up with all the Penguins dying in Antarctica and people dying of skin cancer in New Zealand?
Or in the same way scientists discovered sulfur emissions caused acid rain, but the US government implemented a piss-poor version of "cap and trade" program[1] that was doomed to failure, and much of the Rocky and Appalachian mountains is now barren wasteland?
Never mind the science (which has literally ocean-ful of evidences now). Even the economics of reducing emission is proven to work.
I think if you equate the difficulty of CFC reduction and sulfur reduction to the difficulty of reducing global CO2 emissions, then you're really not having a serious conversation. There's at least two orders of magnitude of difficulty between the two.
Dude, you can't just say "there are a lot of things that we don't understand about climate (solar cycles, effects of water vapor, ocean CO2 sequestration, etc.)" and then accuse others of not being serious.
Every point you just mentioned has been dealt to death. And if you really want to be serious about "two orders of magnitude of difficulty", please try to quantify it, and explain why, for example, building more solar and nuclear plants just isn't going to cut it.
I'm trying very hard to be constructive here, and I'm not exactly making an argument I'm just telling you where I am on the issue. Clearly I'm not an expert and I haven't read everything there is to read about it.
I still don't really see what's wrong with the statement that I made. Would you argue that we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, solar cycles? Or CO2 sequestration? I am willing to admit that it's possible that we do, but it's a much harder argument to make.
Finally, you are making my original point for me. People seem stuck in the theory and don't pay attention to the practical matters. For example, on the issue of nuclear power, Japan and Germany are in the process of decommissioning their nuclear power plants. The forecast for nuclear power is flat at best and negative at worst.
I'm all for building 10,000 nuclear power plants tomorrow, but it's not politically feasible. If that's your solution, then you're just not being serious.
With respect to the two orders of magnitude of difficulty, a quick Google came up with the following title "Fighting Climate Change Could Cost 4% of Global Economy — but It’s Worth It". The article is by someone supportive of CO2 reduction policies, so it seems fair to take the number as a first approximation. 4% of the global economy is A LOT.
"In response to these predictions a large number of developed countries signed the
Kyoto protocol in 1997. The Protocol is aimed at mitigating global warming, primarily
by reducing net emissions of the main ‘greenhouse gases’: carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon
monoxide (CO), nitrous oxide (NO) methane (CH4) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)). A
variety of proposals have been put forward aimed at achieving the reductions in emissions
proposed under the Protocol.
Some of these proposals, most notably reductions in CFC emissions, involve relatively
low costs and have additional benefits, such as reduced damage to the atmospheric ozone
layer, sufficient to justify them even in the absence of concerns about global warming.
Others, such as reductions in emissions sufficient to stabilize the current atmospheric
stocks of CO2, would involve substantial economic and social costs."
I'm sorry, but even when I try to read your posts sympathetically, all I see is "The science is settled, and you're an idiot" (I especially appreciate you addressing me as "dude"), when I've just pointed out above that at least some of the points you are making are not in fact settled, or even realistic.
I must say I agree with your points and wish more people would approach the area logically with probabilities and cost benefits and the like. Many seem to treat it more like a religion where the high priests of the IPCC pronounce man has sinned by causing warming and we must atone by putting up solar panels which may be ok to feel righteous but is not very effective from an engineering point of view given CO2 emissions keep rising regardless.
Sigh, I don't know how I could explain "the science is settled" without sounding condescending, but let me try.
> I still don't really see what's wrong with the statement that I made. Would you argue that we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, solar cycles? Or CO2 sequestration?
Do we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, hurricanes? No. But when the weather service warns a category-5 hurricane is approaching your town and expected to make a landfall tomorrow afternoon, you don't just ignore that (after all, they don't know everything, and the prediction can (and sometimes does) go wrong) and go on a picnic.
Do we know everything about general relativity? No, but that doesn't stop us from trusting airline pilots who are in turn relying on GPS signal which actually works only because the satellites are compensating for general relativistic effects.
Do we know everything about solar cycles? No, but we have Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), and numerous other satellites whose entire purpose is to observe the sun. If the sun is emitting more solar radiation than before, we'd know.
> The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) concluded that the measured magnitude of recent solar variation is much smaller than the amplification effect due to greenhouse gases but acknowledges in the same report that there is a low level of scientific understanding with respect to solar variation.
In other words, even if we don't know a lot about solar variation, we know enough to rule out the possibility that its effect is large enough to drive global warming. Unless we could somehow hypothesize a new mechanism completely overlooked by scientists so far and somehow that mechanism explains current global temperature trend and we find that the global warming effect was due to the sun instead of CO2 (which would mean that all the current climate models, which agree with measured CO2 and temperature, are actually spectacularly wrong).
Occam's razor says it's CO2.
I'm sorry, the science IS settled. I won't call you an idiot, you might be just misinformed and (due to the misinformation) cannot discern peer-reviewed science from FUDs.
* About economics, I'll just say "building 10,000 nuclear plants" is not the only way (actually, probably not even the cheapest way) to reduce CO2 emission.
And if you're looking at economics, you can't ignore the potential cost of the global warming being real (more likely than not) and we do nothing or very little to stop it (sadly, also likely). During the WW2, USA poured enormous resource into development of nuclear weapon, even when nobody was sure if it's going to work at all, because the cost of doing nothing (and finding it out when Nazis developed one first) was considered unacceptable.
Here's my problem with the "the science is settled" argument:
Every time I go to investigate specific issues, it appears that there are credible people that disagree with the "settled science".
Let me be clear, I'm not arguing the actual point, I'm just trying to explain to you how hard it is for somebody who really does want to know the truth to actually find it. For every person that says one thing, I find another one that makes an equally compelling argument that it is the opposite. I just don't know who to believe.
Take the "global warming pause" problem. I did a Google search and started reading some of the results, and on the first page I came across this apparently well respected scientist who doesn't agree with the consensus. What criteria am I to use to disregard his opinion in favor of someone else's who appears to me to be equally qualified?
Here's the relevant parts:
The claim that the pause has been caused by heat is going into the deep ocean below 700 m is speculative and relies on models undergoing many data adjustments. That speculation is contradicted by two major issues.
First the Argo data has definitively shown the upper 300 meters have cooled slightly since 2003 (Read Xue 2011) and the consensus among oceanographers is that it is in the upper 100 meters that most of the heat is exchanged with the atmosphere.
Second is it defies known physics. IPCC expert Dr. Hans von Storch said in a recent interview "there is evidence that the oceans have absorbed more heat than we initially calculated. Temperatures at depths greater than 700 meters (2,300 feet) appear to have increased more than ever before. The only unfortunate thing is that our simulations failed to predict this effect." He went on to lament “If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”
“There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.”
> 3. Can we do anything about it?
> 4. Should we do anything about it? I believe this is a cost-benefit analysis
Great points. Worrying about climate change is a luxury. Most humans are worried about serious threats to their well being with much shorter time lines. Convincing the population of climate change is challenging. Convincing them to make real sacrifices to combat it seems nearly impossible.
> What makes the whole conversation unproductive is there appears to be two sides: one which argues there is no problem and we must do nothing, and the other side says that the problem is going to end the world as we know it and we must change our entire way of living and make it our number one priority.
This is called a false dichotomy. There are an entire range of viewpoints on this; you've just chosen two extremes to work from.
Some public people have been trying to clarify that the world won't end, it will just be a far more miserable place to live. Fortunately, we have the smog problem in Beijing to point to as a very easy example of what to expect from population centers that don't make efforts to control pollution.
Further, there aren't just the effects of warming to consider, but lots of other environmental concerns too, like overfished oceans and oil spill disasters.
Earth won't end. Earth will get along just fine without us.
> Is the world warming? I think it most certainly is, but I would also note that it appears that the warming trend has halted for the past 10 to 20 years.
It hasn't. There was a "missing heat" problem, that has since been largely resolved by finding quite a bit of warming in the deep ocean. IIRC that study is still pending further research, but seems solid. If it's true, then that's a fairly bad sign, since ocean temperature is a lagging indicator -- i.e., it'll continue to stay warm long after the atmosphere has begun to cool.
> Is the warming man-made? To a large degree, I believe that it is. However, there are a lot of things that we don't understand about climate (solar cycles, effects of water vapor, ocean CO2 sequestration, etc.)
And, of course, the thermodynamics of the increasing numbers of UFOs and spectral spirits.
Seriously, though, the problem here is that, first, those factors have been looked at (although I'll agree that they could benefit from further study -- but so could everything) and they have been found not to be influential, and second, there's no evidence to think in the first place that they should be influential. That is, climate change denialists are running from rebuttal to rebuttal as each one is disproven, despite the overwhelming evidence that scientists do already know what the causes of warming are over the last few centuries.
> If I had to put a number on it, I would say 50 to 60% man-made.
This is a made-up number. It is meaningless.
> Can we do anything about it?
Absolutely. Lots of people have been doing things about it. For example, U.S. energy consumption has leveled off over the last decade, despite an explosion in personal electronics, thanks to increases in efficiency in everything from cars to energy production to the devices themselves.
And every little bit helps.
> This is where I begin to separate from the global warming crowd.
Er, with all due respect, you separated from the global warming crowd quite a while back in your comment.
> Theoretically, we can certainly do something about it, but having worked in government I just don't see any practical way that we can reduce greenhouse emissions to such an extent that it's going to make a great difference.
"I can't make a really big difference, so I won't make a difference at all."
California added more residential solar in 2013 than in all previous years -- combined. Is that not a difference? Countries around the world have been building out renewable energy. Germany is now 25% renewable in energy production; Sweden has become so efficient at converting trash into energy that they're now importing trash from other countries.
Certainly, not being able to make some impossibly large positive difference in emissions isn't an excuse for continuing to make the problem worse, which is what denialists want.
> Further, china and India are ramping up their CO2 emissions, and there's nothing that the developed countries can do about it.
"My neighbor doesn't maintain his yard, so I shouldn't bother to maintain mine."
As the rest of the world continues to move forward in improved environmental technology, there will be increased incentives for China and India to do so too. There will be more political pressure, but the technology will also improve and become cheaper, as it has been for decades. At some point, it will simply make economic and political sense for India, China, and other countries to adopt better environmental technologies.
> Finally, I have ethical objections to telling developed countries that they have to use less energy which will inevitably result in more lives lost due to starvation or simply just malnutrition and poverty.
This is ... a very silly thing to say.
Nobody's calling for energy or food reductions that will reduce populations. On the contrary, continuing to improve energy technology, as well as agriculture and education and medicine, will increase the life expectancy for a population, and, based on all available metrics so far, as people live longer, better educated, healthier lives, they naturally choose to have fewer babies.
What do you think the life expectancy is for the residents of all of the squatters' villages in the Pacific islands that have been destroyed by hurricanes and other storms?
Are you really advocating for continuing the use of old, wasteful technology which, as a side effect, increases the likelihood of devastating storm seasons, because it's better for poor people?
> Should we do anything about it? I believe this is a cost-benefit analysis. And I haven't done the analysis myself, but sometimes I question whether spending the enormous amounts of money today is worth putting off an uncertain disaster tomorrow when we have actual problems today that we could be working on instead.
Alright, look, you're not questioning anything. You're daydreaming. We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. When I was little, we had encyclopedias and public libraries; if I wanted to learn about a subject, I had to put in a lot more effort than is necessary today.
You could choose to spend just a few minutes here and there actually questioning all of this, and you could learn something and then you could have all of the benefits of a slightly more informed opinion, rather than just repeating the political talking points you've heard elsewhere.
And, by the way, climate is an actual problem that we do have today.
> We have millions of people every year dying from malnutrition
...and the technology to feed them, were it not for all of the navel-gazers wondering whether or not we should...
> ...poor water supplies...
...I've personally raised funds to send a hydrologist to Uganda...
> ...malaria...
...Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...
> ...HIV/AIDS...
...tremendous amounts of ongoing research, to the extent that there now exist very low impact, long-term, cost-effective treatments for HIV/AIDS...
> ...etc.
So why do you believe that any of these things has to stop while we build more solar plants or work on further increasing vehicle efficiencies?
> Why not save those actual lives instead of spending the money saving hypothetical lives in 100 years.
Are you talking hypothetically, or practically? Is this a choice that you, personally, actually have to make, ever?
Why don't you visit https://watsi.org/fund-treatments (a YC non-profit), and make a difference in an actual life there, and then come back and opine a little bit more about whether or not we should entirely abandon environmental R&D?
> And indeed, won't we be more suited to save those lines in 100 years than we are right now, meaning that the mitigation effort could be a lot cheaper?
I fully expect that, 100 years from now, people will be having the exact same conversations, in some form or another, that they've been having for the last thousand years: "really, what use is it to do anything at all, if we have to choose between doing one thing or doing another thing?"
I think you've missed the point that I was making, so I'm a little puzzled as to why you're spending all the time to do a line by line takedown. My main point is that I think any money that we are thinking about spending to mitigate global warming now could probably be better used solving world hunger or malaria or something. I don't KNOW that for a fact, and I'm open to arguments one way or the other. Just, to me, real people dying today is just more urgent than hypothetical people dying in the future.
If that's your main point, I already replied to it. Efforts are already underway by governments, scientists, companies, non-profits, foundations, and even somewhat poor individuals like myself to resolve the other issues facing people around the world.
Why do you believe that money spent on environmental technology is slowing the progress in other areas? Do you really think that if countries would just stop building wind power for a few years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would cure malaria more quickly?
Even if that were true, aren't there, I dunno, dozens of other sources of funding that would make more sense to borrow from?
The thing is, your objection here is a really common one, and it always takes the same form: don't spend money on environmental technology, it would be better spent doing (anything at all other than environmental technology) instead. But nobody ever justifies it. Nobody ever bothers to figure out what the relative impacts on human life of environmental technology vs., say, increased funding for malaria research are.
The Dust Bowl disaster in the 1930s was directly caused by human activity. It displaced hundreds of thousands of people (or millions, depending on how you count) and contributed to starvation conditions in large parts of the country. It caused dust pneumonia, which killed people (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcri...).
Drought, extreme weather (both hot and cold), tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, bad air quality -- these things are not hypothetically affecting people. While we can't altogether stop these disasters any time in the near future, we can start doing things now to make them less severe.
Real people have been dying for, at least, close to a hundred years because of human impacts on the environment.
Well, after searching, it appears there is a book that does exactly this. I'm going to read it, and then maybe I will have a better idea of what the relative cost benefits are.
"How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place" - I'm about halfway through, but according to this Copenhagen consensus group, which appears to be made up of Nobel prize-winning scientists, the ROI for global warming mitigation is negative (using the same methodology they applied to the other items they were considering).
What makes the whole conversation unproductive is there appears to be two sides: one which argues there is no problem and we must do nothing, and the other side says that the problem is going to end the world as we know it and we must change our entire way of living and make it our number one priority.
For me, there is a progression of questions that I must answer before I can sign on to the latter's assertions., And they look something like this:
1. Is the world warming? I think it most certainly is, but I would also note that it appears that the warming trend has halted for the past 10 to 20 years. From what I can gather, scientists have reasons why that might be the case but have not explained it.
2. Is the warming man-made? To a large degree, I believe that it is. However, there are a lot of things that we don't understand about climate (solar cycles, effects of water vapor, ocean CO2 sequestration, etc.) If I had to put a number on it, I would say 50 to 60% man-made.
3. Can we do anything about it? This is where I begin to separate from the global warming crowd. Theoretically, we can certainly do something about it, but having worked in government I just don't see any practical way that we can reduce greenhouse emissions to such an extent that it's going to make a great difference. Further, china and India are ramping up their CO2 emissions, and there's nothing that the developed countries can do about it. Finally, I have ethical objections to telling developed countries that they have to use less energy which will inevitably result in more lives lost due to starvation or simply just malnutrition and poverty.
4. Should we do anything about it? I believe this is a cost-benefit analysis. And I haven't done the analysis myself, but sometimes I question whether spending the enormous amounts of money today is worth putting off an uncertain disaster tomorrow when we have actual problems today that we could be working on instead. We have millions of people every year dying from malnutrition, poor water supplies, malaria, HIV/AIDS, etc. Why not save those actual lives instead of spending the money saving hypothetical lives in 100 years. And indeed, won't we be more suited to save those lines in 100 years than we are right now, meaning that the mitigation effort could be a lot cheaper?