I never knew what to think of the whole Climate Change thing. I consider myself a careful skeptic, going on the assumption that the science is much too large to put together. Although I never really questioned the idea that there is evidence of warming or man-made warming, I always questioned the the stated impact.
I've always felt that much of what was presented to us was exaggerated, and I've always felt strongly that the climate scientists were too closely bound to politics, and thus whatever truth was found was obscured by rhetoric. There was also several solutions presented that skated well past the line of absurdity. [1]
Here's to hoping that the climate panels have learned from the mistakes of their past and begin to offer truly critical and balanced opinions, no longer employing scare-tactics.
The hard-core pro-CC crowd accused me of being all sorts of things I am not, such as a wasteful litterbox. Actually, I purchase very few things and certainly never buy Palm Oil or other items that are environmentally destructive. I don't use plastic bags, and I don't drive a car.
In regards to this article, I still don't know what to think. I really wish the report itself would come out before the media jumps all over it and destroys the meaning of this paper, as it is rather important. If the report does say this, I would wonder what changes have occurred in the climate thinking and world to wheel back this much.
Personally I think that climate change is a bit of a distraction. There are lots of good reasons for cutting pollution beyond carbon. Moving to sustainable energy would be worth doing even if climate change didn't exist simply to cut the health impact of dirty energy.
My biggest problem with many of the people that warn of global warming is they proclaim we need to take serious action and then ignore the most plausible solution which is nuclear power. I know not everyone is against using nuclear power but if global warming is a serious issue and I think it is plausible that it is thats where we should be heading, as a bonus nuclear power is great anyways.
I thought the point was to reduce carbon emissions ?("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save)
And please skip the "but this one version now in the lab ..." speech.
> ("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save)
I don't think that's true. Do you have anything to substantiate that claim?
Compared to nuclear, far more people die because of renewable energy per megawatt. It is not better to exhaust the potential of renewable sources, since they lead to more excess deaths. There are a lot of sources that demonstrate this, so I just searched for one: http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/...
Considering that is only one of many different articles I have seen on the occasion, yeah, it doesn't bother me. If you wanted to bother me, you'd post something that debunks the claim. I made a search (albeit, a brief one) for the same and didn't find anything.
Fukushima used a more than 50 year old reactor design, it has very little bearing on either the risk or feasability of building new nuclear plants.
Moreover, even factoring in the risk of extremely outdated or outrageously unsafe by design reactors and the accidents that have occurred at them such as Fukushima and Chernobyl the overall damage caused by nuclear power plants is still far, far lower than that of coal, oil, or even hydropower. The Tohoku earthquake caused the failure of a dam which killed 4 people, more than have died due to the Fukushima disaster. Overall dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands, which is well above even the upper limits of early deaths due to cancer related to the Chernobyl accident. Meanwhile, the world health organization estimates that coal burning causes as much as a million excess deaths per year worldwide.
If CO2 emissions are truly an existential threat to humanity then we should be building nuclear plants like crazy. People who reject the idea of nuclear power but embrace the idea of man made climate change as a catastrophic threat to mankind are either incapable of sane risk assessment or do not truly believe their own claims.
I'm with you on nuclear, but we still don't know how many people are going to die, or rather have their deaths somewhat accelerated or quality of life strongly affected, because of Fukushima. Are we going to be able to get reliable information about an uptick in cancer rates in Japan?
It's almost certainly not going to matter. Go back and read my post above and ask yourself whether there is any chance whatsoever that the Fukushima disaster could possibly cause 50 million deaths.
That's fifty million deaths. Why 50 million? Because that's about how many excess deaths have been caused by coal power over the lifetime of nuclear power.
If Fukushima fails to cause 50 million deaths then the entire nuclear industry will be that much behind in the category of ending human lives. Are new buildouts of fission power plant capacity likely to cause enough deaths to even the balance scales between fission and coal? Extremely unlikely. Even if people build irresponsibly outdated designs like the Fukushima daichi plants or even criminally unsafe designs like the Chernobyl plants it's extraordinarily unlikely that the reduction in threat to human lives caused by being able to shut down coal plants will more than make up for the much smaller risk added due to operating nuclear plants.
Edit: a much fairer assessment of relative risk of coal vs. nuclear would delve into deaths and injuries per kw-h, and it would also compare modern first world coal or gas plants vs. modern first world nuclear plants. But that math has already been done and shows that nuclear power is overwhelmingly one of the safest methods of producing power that has ever been created by mankind. And that remains unchanged even if you factor in Chernobyl and Fukushima (which in many ways are equivalent to allowing Chinese unfiltered coal plants into the equation on the other side). And even if you imagine some speculatively high number of deaths, even as many as tens of thousands, as the potential impact of the Fukushima daichi disaster there is just no way that the track record of the fission power industry to date could fall below the level of any other major power source that could potentially serve as base load power for a large industrialized country. It would take multiple Fukushima disasters happening every few years for the fission power industry to finally become as hazardous as gas or coal.
Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420 000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces.
Fukushima used a more than 50 year old reactor design, it has very little bearing on either the risk or feasability of building new nuclear plants.
Was Fukushima considered a safe design or not? Did the regulatory authorities consider it safe? Did TEPCO consider it safe?
The answer is yes, yes of course they did. If they thought the plant was too dangerous to operate, they would have shut it down or revoked its license. Ever since it was built, everyone involved has been insisting over and over that it was a safe design. It turns out that the regulators, manufacturers and operators were all wrong about that.
So, why exactly should we trust them when they say that a new plant design is safe?
How can nuclear power plant operators, manufacturers and regulators retain credibility when their previous statements have been proven so catastrophically wrong?
I personally don't think deaths due to nuclear power a big deal; my greater concern is that the costs for current nuclear reactors don't make any damn sense. Certainly the long term costs of remediating the Fukushima site are going to be enormous.
How can airline industry maintain any credibility if their claims that air travel is safe were proven wrong so many times by numerous plane crashes?
The answer is numbers. Statistically, traveling by air is extremely safe and instances of crashes, while existent, are very rare. Statistically, instances of people hurt by nuclear power failures are also very rare. Of course, since people have irrational fear of radiation (it is invisible, it could kill you and it could be everywhere, right under your bed! OMG OMG OMG!) and the press is happy to fan the flames on each occasion, each case of nuclear reactor failure gets attention incomparable with attention given to each case of lung cancer due to pollution or workers dying while extracting coal, gas or oil, or each case when you need to clean up a failure in any of the technological chain of the traditional power sources - excluding, maybe, oil spills, but even those get less panic press than radiation (OMG OMG OMG!).
The main cause of fears about nuclear power is, unfortunately, ignorance and innumeracy. The long term advantages of nuclear power vastly outnumber the costs of the dealing with very rare and exceptional failure events. Unfortunately, people are rarely rational when making political decisions, and this decision is very political.
TEPCO and Japan's NISA are not the most trustworthy or competent of organizations, they certainly have a lot of room for improvement.
However, I think you're misinterpreting the importance of the age of the Fukushima reactor design. Specifically the important point is that the extremely obsolete nature of that design means that its short-comings should have little to no bearing on the relative risk of building new nuclear power plants.
Additionally, even with all the problems of Fukushima, many of which are avoidable, it's worth pointing out that those problems did not occur spontaneously. Somehow we've apparently forgotten about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 40 meter high tsunami which killed over 15,000 people while also causing severe damage to the Fukushima reactors. These are not usual operating circumstances. Somehow we give a pass to other technologies that have failed and caused injury to humans after being impacted by extreme natural disasters yet nuclear power must stand on its own.
And yet even despite that and despite many many missteps in the response the Fukushima disaster has not pushed nuclear power into being less safe than any other base load power generation technology, even hydroelectric!
That's almost astounding, but it cuts to the deep failures that humans tend to make when they attempt to judge relative risk of extremely dissimilar things (like flying vs. driving, rock climbing vs. eating cheeseburgers, or nuclear power vs. coal).
Why bother with Nuclear power when renewable energy is already capable of providing many of our energy needs (and efficiency will only improve in the future).
I know tech heads love Nuclear and love to go on about how safe it is in this day and age but it still leaves us with significant and dangerous waste which our great great great grand children will inherit.
No non-CO2 emitting energy system is currently a credible source for base load electrical power except for nuclear. Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed everywhere and everytime it's needed. Solar and wind could be, but it would require building new power storage facilities, and so many of them that it would match or exceed the cost of building out the solar/wind capacity to start with.
That's the reality. If it were different it wouldn't require subsidies to encourage people to build solar or wind power, they would do so spontaneously.
Hydropower is for the most part great when it's available, but it's not available everywhere and it also doesn't come without significant environmental cost. It would not be a net benefit for the world if every country developed a crash program to become as dependent on hydropower as possible.
What "renewable energy" is that? Solar and wind are barely scratching single-digit percentages of energy needs, and this is only because of massive government push to do it, otherwise on pure economic efficiency they'd be below even single digits (so basically now they're just burning money). Hydro can provide tons of energy, but at huge ecological cost which dwarfs nuclear. What else is there?
And many of them are quite expensive and need expensive resources like rare earths which also require significant energy to extract and produce.
Counter argument: South Australia, my state, is well into the double digits for wind. The was also a government push for solar, wind, but right now private generators ate scaling back on dirty fuel options (coal, gas).
This has caused disruption: jobs lost, but arguably towards automation, clean energy and lower carbon emissions
South Australia also has third highest electricity costs in developed world and on the way to become the first. [1] As I mentioned, burning money. Serving economy's energy needs assumes serving them at a price that doesn't cause economy to seize up.
SA also has some geographical advantages to wind power, which aren't present elsewhere, and still their wind farms operate at around 1/3 full capacity.
And as far as I can see, it is driven by massive government investment and regulation. Which again makes one doubt the viability of the idea - if it were that good, why would it be impossible to find someone willing to invest in it without forcibly taking money from people and prohibiting them from making choices according to their preference?
The primary public policy that people who care about climate change have advocated are carbon taxes. Nuclear power proponents insist that these carbon taxes would benefit them significantly. So what more do you want?
In many countries, the nuclear power industry already gets a free ride on liability and special government loans that other industries don't get. How much more do we have to tilt the playing field to favor nuclear power before it is enough?
The thing that bothers me the most is that every single one of these climate change skeptics seem to turn off their brain when it comes to the obvious effects of pollution. Even if climate change isn't occurring, many major cities are covered in smog. Is the next step to deny that breathing dense fog is harmful?
One of the problems with focusing only on CO[2] (or global warming in general) is that it sometimes is in direct conflict to other environmental improvements.
Spending energy to keep air/water/land clean of other pollutants, either on remediation or lower overall efficiency, can boost CO[2] emissions. I'd personally prefer to take the risk on GW if we could cut down on mercury, localized pollution of land and water, etc.
There are some cases where CO[2] reduction is generally related to environmental improvements overall, like swapping in nuclear or (in some places) wind for dirty soft coal, but it's not all the time.
The biggest public policy advocated by people who care about climate change is a carbon tax. The effects of such a tax on the margins are more energy conservation (better weatherization, green roofs, smart grids, etc), and shifting fossil fuel consumption to natural gas and wind/solar. Every single one of those changes yields significant non-CO2 related environmental benefits.
The worst you can say is that natural gas burning requires higher temperatures that produce more NOx emissions, but they also take out a lot more mercury and SOx emissions produced by equivalent coal fired plants. Moreover, because old coal fired plants are grandfathered in, they face less stringent air pollution control regulations than brand new natural gas plants that replace them.
Finally, the costs of doing serious air pollution control in power plants is generally tiny and such controls probably pay for themselves just in reducing asthma cases alone.
My source is my father, who designed air pollution control systems for power plants for the last 30 years or so.
I agree coal -> natural gas is almost exclusively good (the only real counter-argument is that coal -> natural gas precludes coal -> something better than natural gas (nuclear, hydro, magic, etc.)).
The "CO[2] optimization, but otherwise moronic and environmentally destructive" is most biofuels. They're arguably lower CO[2] output (since it's atmospheric carbon), minus the CO[2] used to grow them, but let's assume EROEI of 1+epsilon. You still destroy a bunch of land, use up water (including often fossil water), fertilizer runoff, etc., so the environmental harm outweighs the minor net CO[2] reduction benefit.
Not true of things like the Brazilian fuels, I think. Mainly just that corn ethanol is at best stupid and most likely a crime.
No offence but people such as yourself really are the worst. It's clear that you have absolutely no scientific knowledge about the subject but yet believe you know enough to disparage experts in the field. If you don't know about the subject (and I don't) the only sensible position to take is an objective risk management one:
Chance of worse case scenario (10%) x Impact of worst case scenario (Severe) = Prepare Contingency Plans.
Risk-management of a risk for which there is evidence is not the same as picking among imaginary entities for which there is effectively no evidence. Plus, Pascal's wager suffers from the issue that for every god X, there is a possible opposite god who really hates people who mistakenly believe in X. This offsets the value of believing in X. Evaluating the wager under that observation leaves you with a net belief change of nil. Contrariwise, there's no evidence of a countervailing benefit to global warming that offsets the possible risk of doing nothing about it.
That said, I do have one issue with the argument in that one possible outcome of global warming has effectively infinite cost. That is when everyone dies. I do not know how to multiply (low probability) x (infinity). Maybe someone can explain how a rationalist would handle this case. (Actually, I don't think it's right to call this an "issue." Point of confusion is more accurate.)
You're overlooking the opportunity cost that comes with spending effort and money on "forestalling climate change" today. Read my other post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6388344) for why this is likely an extremely bad idea.
Your argument in the other post only makes sense if economic growth per capita continues.
That's not inevitable. We've grown using fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. Those let us use the stored solar energy of millions of years.
Wind, solar, etc allow us to use the solar energy from single year, and at least currently require fossil fuels to build.
It's possible we'll find a way out of our predicament, but the rapid growth we've seen in the past three centuries is not necessarily good evidence for the continuance of such growth.
In effect you are saying that we have a better understanding of the long-term evolution of the climate than we do of the long-term evolution of Earth's economy.
There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case and considerable evidence that the exact opposite is true.
I'd actually like to see the comparison. It seems to me that there is a case for us understanding the long-term evolution of climate.
We have a decent record of atmospheric composition and temperature in ice cores, and, after all, we do know something about the effect of greenhouse gases -- the direct physics is not too complex. It's the feedback loops -- clouds, biology and so on, that are the challenge.
Likewise with economics. But it seems that the details of the dismal science are even more turbulent...
>There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case and considerable evidence that the exact opposite is true.
What kind of evidence? I've heard of no credible claims for future evolution of Earths economy... with perhaps the exception of R. Hansons rather informal blog posts.
So, you think the U.S. would be much poorer today if it had implemented tighter vehicle emission standards, as Europe did, in the 70s? Do you think human development requires Lincoln Navigator-sized cars with zippy acceleration?
Would progress and wealth creation have been significantly impeded if it were more expensive for people to build massive homes in the desert?
We get to make lots of choices. We get to decide how we spend our free time and what our preferences are. Much of GHG emissions are the product of relatively arbitrary (and often externality-exploiting) human druthers. It would be nice to see this fully quantified, but I suspect we would see a massive reduction in GHG emissions if we all just chose to value reading, soccer, hiking, and vegetarian food over Jetski-ing, NASCAR, motorbike touring, and meat at every meal; if 90% of the people driving < 17 MPG cars went to driving ones that did better than 28.
CO2 emissions would go down a fair bit; how would human progress and wealth creation be hindered if our value system changed thusly?
Rationalist would first abandon that notion that cost of adjusting to different climate is infinite, as it flies in the face of all evidence - humans had adjusted to the very wide range of conditions - and would avoid promoting actions for which positive consequences can not be sufficiently substantiated but negative consequences are readily apparent.
Once you postulate that global warming is the ultimate boogeyman which justifies any expense spent on preventing it, rationalism is going out of the window. One can not operate rationally within the framework that postulates irrational assumptions.
I said I hate the confusing rhetoric. I, as an individual, do feel some responsibility for the earth and the people in it, and I cited a few examples that show this belief. Not sure what the emotional explosions and misguided judgements are about.
Well the financial industry doesn't exactly have a perfect track record of understanding finance either. Even smart experts are just as susceptible to biases and herd behavior as anyone else.
In fact people in many different walks of life are often incentivized to have herd behavior. I witnessed the same thing in medical research quite a bit.
Kind of. This guys point is basically "well I didn't do any research, but I believe X". There are plenty of people outside finance capable of doing basic research who are far more qualified to comment on finance than this guy is to comment on climatology.
I am not sure what a "climate change denier" is. If your scientific opinion requires you to demonize your opposition then something is definitely wrong.
A climate change denier is one who denies that the climate is changing. It says nothing of how they came to that view or the merits of their view. There's no demonization in that.
Do you understand math or logic enough to see that the article author ignores the whole mathematical sentences which state different things in the two reports and just compares the numbers in them, and how invalid that approach is? Why should you give any trust to such an article? Because it gives you the false hope that "everything will be OK no matter our inaction?"
I grew up in a neighborhood that was enveloped by smog so thick that it left soot on the cars and peeled the paint off your house. Not sure what all of this is about, but there is a lot of destruction done to the "Anglo Saxon" you refer to. Look no further than your nearest ghetto or factory town.
> Although I never really questioned the idea that there is evidence of warming or man-made warming, I always questioned the the stated impact.
You are just leaving yourself open to manipulation.
Whatever the science said, 99 44/100% of the whole global
warming/climate change movement was a flim-flam, fraud,
scam for a few people to grab power and money. The recipe goes back to, say, the movie 'The Music Man' about the terrible threats of a pool table in town, to
the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a
rock to "keep the sun moving across the sky",
English morality plays 1000 years ago, and various
other charlatans trying to scare people and, thus, get
power and money.
It was about power and money.
For the science, there was some careful work on
diffusion in an ideal column of gas. Cute, but not
much reason to shut down all the coal fired electric
generating plants with, in a US DoE report a few
years ago, 49% of US electrical energy
and about 23% of all US energy.
Then there was the IPCC report with Ramaswamy's
radiative forcing not much based on science and
not in any physics book I saw. Best I could
say about it was that, mathematically, it was local, linear,
and differential.
Then there's the fact that we know a lot, likely
enough, about the basic chemistry and physics
and know what to calculate -- the Navier-Stokes
equations, black body radiation, molecular
spectral lines, etc. But we also know that
if we set up such computing, then really we are
trying to calculate long term climate change
by weather prediction one microsecond at a time
and that fails to predict actual weather for longer
than about two weeks. Bummer. But that's the
basic chemistry and physics, and we know that.
Moreover, less
detailed but more stable calculations
are necessarily just approximations
and not from first principles of the
basic science where we have confidence.
So, we know too much,
that is, know what we have to do but find that
doing the calculations accurately enough for
meaningful answers is too difficult.
Next, we can be empirical: So there is the US National
Academic of Science report of about 2006 with a
graph on page 2 that shows temperature reconstructions
for the past 1000 years or so. The graph shows (1)
as far as we can tell, in about 2006 the
temperature was exactly the same as in the year
1000 and (2) the increase in the 100 years before
year 2006 was exactly the same as the increase
from year 900 to year 1000. Since year 1000, for
whatever reasons we fell into The Little Ice Age
that did influence some history -- killed off
Viking settlements in Greenland,
had three years of crop failures before the
French Revolution, killed off nearly all of
Napoleon's army on its way back from
Moscow, put ice in the Delaware River the
night Washington crossed it, etc. By
year 1900 or so, we were still pulling out
of The Little Ice Age.
Then there was the bad data: Trying to measure
temperature of the earth by trying to measure the
temperature of the Arctic by pictures of
polar bears and ice bergs falling from glaciers
that reach the ocean.
Net, empirically, the actual temperature record
gives no significant reason for alarm, certainly
no reason to shut down the economy of the
Industrial Revolution which Al Guru would have
us do. The science is too difficult, e.g., we
are not able to do anything like accurate
calculations of the future climate.
In a sense the Al Guru community picked a good
problem, much like the Mayan charlatans did:
Pick a problem too complicated to debunk with
current knowledge, and then bleed people.
To say that the benefits of increased vegetation outweighs the rise in sea levels and summer temperatures is breathtaking in its stupidity and cruelty. The people who are the most affected by climate change are the poorest and least able to relocate. In which way does humanity benefit if millions die in Africa and South East Asia whilst wealthy industrialists get to farm further north than previously.
It's also bizarre to be thinking so short term. So we benefit if there is a 1.2 degree increase in the next 70 years. What about the 70 years after that, and after that ?
Why would millions die? Rising sea levels won't come as a tsunami, it's a slow,gradual rise in sea levels. Of course this will cause havoc for the world's poor, but it's not like we can't plan for it.
Well, for better or for worse, since millions of poor people die each year from readily vaccinated or treated diseases like polio and tuberculosis, it just doesn't seem like the rich nations of the world have the political will to properly take care of them. (Bill Gates is trying though.)
Because millions are dying today as a result of preventable malnutrition or disease. What makes you think the world is going to act to save poor people in SE Asia or Africa ?
And slow changes to climate don't instantly cause millions of deaths it is gradual as well.
You're glossing over quite a bit. The article says the temp increases will occur mostly in winter and at night, which could save many lives. Increased vegetation (not just more north farming) means more food for more people. The IPCC agrees that sea levels will only rise 1 to 3 feet; do you have a source for your claim that "millions" will die from this? (What I can find just talks about 1+ meters of increase.)
The article also claims the data shows that not only were our previous predictions too high, but they might still be too high.
I don't want to sound argumentative but since this issue is so politicized, I'd rather see data and sources than accusations of "stupidity and cruelty".
It means more food for more people IF you are able to relocate to those areas. But since the poorest in the world are generally less able to relocate I fail to see how it will benefit them in any way. And if they are able to relocate what makes you think countries will let them. Look at the issue of "boat people" in Australia or immigration in general in Europe.
This is the sort of problems that directly affect the poorest:
> The people who are the most affected by climate change are the poorest and least able to relocate.
The people who will be the most affected by climate change will be the folks living decades if not centuries from now. And those people will be, on average, orders of magnitude more wealthy than the people of Earth today.
This is even more striking when you consider that the major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions over the 21st century will not be from the wealthy folks living in the current G8 countries but from what are now developing countries (China, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Brazil, etc.)
The moral calculus becomes a hell of a lot more complex when you take this into account. In 50 years the people of Bangladesh are likely to have developed world levels of per capita GDP, and by 2100 they are likely to be richer than Americans living today. Does it make sense to hold back the current development of not just the US but also places such as Bangladesh and China in order to benefit the incredibly wealthy citizens of the future Earth? Moreover, the case for severity of damages to the future Earth due to man made climate change are rather weak. The current best estimate of sea level rise by the year 2100 is rather moderate, much less than a meter and at present being revised downward due to more accurate estimates. Does it make sense to spend even billions of dollars today to save a future world that will have a global world product of literally quadrillions of dollars (adjusted for inflation)? And will have vastly more advanced technology than we do today?
As to what will happen next, I think the people of the future who will have the benefit of: vastly greater wealth, vastly more advanced technology, and hopefully much more accurate climate models borne out by being able to compare models against nearly two centuries of data. And for those reasons they will be unimaginably more capable of both figuring out what changes would be warranted as well as having the ability and wealth to make such changes without incurring a huge amount of personal misery.
This assumes that the cost of fixing the climate doesn't grow faster than economic growth, and that brute work (enormous masses of chemicals, etc) is not essential for fixing the climate. The amount of brute work we can does not necessarily grow with GDP.
Suppose we detect an asteroid which will very likely hit the earth. You might make the same argument. But in the case of an asteroid, the amount of force required to divert it from its path is trivial when it is a long way away, as it becomes closer, grows until it is impossible.
Fortunately, in the case of an asteroid, this fact is calculable today. It would be a pity if when we have 'much more accurate climate models' it turns out to be too late.
It would be much more pity if it turns out we spent trillions of dollars (meaning those trillions of dollars weren't spent on healing people, feeding people, inventing technologies that make people live longer and suffer less from diseases) on something that turned out to be not much more than a blob of hot air expelled by attention-seeking politicians and didn't really require that much resources to be spent on it.
Take the example of rich people buying "carbon credits" that go towards paying poor people in poor countries for not developing their economies (and thus not becoming rich too). I think it is economically inefficient (since it in the long run decreases the overall value produced) but it is also morally reprehensible to bribe someone into suppressing their economic development so you could enjoy yours without guilt. It would be especially bad if it turns out the guilt was over nothing.
I agree with this in theory, but in practice there's no way a government/economy will take those dollars and magically spend them on causes that actually benefit humanity. More likely they go to the war machine, welfare state, and other bureaucratic money pits. Given that, it's probably not a bad thing to spend that money on things that benefit our ecosystem.
In spite of the amount of hate I'll be getting for this:
While the loss of life is saddening the world population is continuing to grow, global warming (as well as disease) can be construed as the Earth correcting for too many humans. Our technological advancements have saved a lot of lives and vastly increased life expectancy, while contributing to global warming. You assume it is our responsibility to ensure no humans die, which under normal circumstances makes sense as according to evolution our purpose is to ensure the survival of our species. However, we will eventually reach the point where a decreased population is more likely to help humanity prosper.
N.B. this is spoken from the view of a detached observer and once anything becomes personal obviously the arguments are different and feelings and emotions come into play.
Pointing out that the article has been published by a corporation who's agenda is as much ideological as it is commercial, and which doesn't shy away from publishing outright lies whilst pursuing that agenda is a constructive contribution imo.
Especially since most of us, including the author (who btw is also strongly ideologically motivated) aren't climate scientists and the actual report isn't out yet.
This is not a particularly credible source, and definitely not an unbiased one, trying to assign meaning to as yet unverifiable data.
I would have thought it to be self-evident, but since you ask...
It's an opinion piece written by a notorious climate-change denialist. Its main source is a document that hasn't been released yet. It is full of breathless hyperbolic speculation, e.g.: "Like a returning comet, it will be taken to portend ominous happenings." It puts the emphasis on the "facts" (because there are precious few actual facts) that support Murdoch's political position and downplays the facts that undermine that position, e.g. "Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is." and "...there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm." i.e. because things might not be getting quite as bad quite as fast as was predicted, that everything is therefore going to be hunky-dory and we should all stop worrying and just carry on burning fossil fuels with abandon, because, hey, we have a 50-50 shot that it will all turn out to be a net win.
I could go on, but life is too short to spend too much time debunking creationists, truthers, and denialists. If you want more, start with this:
It's worth noting that the IPCC is considered by some to be too conservative in its estimates [1].
Just before they released their 2007 report, a paper was published in Science comparing the predictions from the 2001 report with actual changes in global temperature and sea level. [2] While the 2001 report had forecasted a rise in temperature of 0.15C - 0.35C, the actual rise over that period was 0.33C. Meanwhile the rise in sea level over that period exceeded the IPCC's predicted maximums.
So while the IPCC may be "dialing back" their predictions, they do have a known tendency to err on the side of conservatism.
So try this one: http://topher.com.au/50-to-1-video-project/
Nothing to do with Ridley. Presumably there are lot of stupid people in Australia according to you and judging from your recent election.
0:23-ish: No one in the mainstream media in Australia has ever told anyone about Henry fucking Ergas? Well, this is full of shit already. He also ran Concept Economics.
> Concept Economics, the consultancy that recently estimated the costs of the National Broadband Network outweighed the benefits by up to $20 billion, has gone into administration.
Sheesh, what is it with these climate skeptics and their businesses going under?
0:48: Lack of action across the world? Most expensive carbon tax in the world?
You know what, I'm done. I will go on, but considering such a litany of error within a minute and a half, I can spend my time vastly better. But like I said, I'll watch it for amusement value.
Edit: OK, just wanted to add that the carbon tax does not "cost" 10 billion a year by any means. That's near enough the revenue being raised by the government through carbon pricing and near enough all of it makes it back into the economy through various means. One example, there's the rise in the tax-free threshold. Apparently billions of dollars being spent in removing the lowest income earners in the country from the income tax system is money wasted on reducing carbon dioxide a fraction of a percent? I don't think the story goes quite like that.
You're a fool. Thank you for your skepticism, but in this case you've been had. By all means keep it up though, just double-check and don't be misled :)
Edit 2: $3.2 quadrillion for each degree? Sigh, and you actually were brave enough to show this crap to other people? Wow. If you really wanted to do it on the cheap (and that number is still very made up), you could do it for much less, albeit with side-effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_...
Also, the conclusion after the introduction of the carbon tax was that GDP was 0.1% lower than if it hadn't been there. How you get from there to 80% is very funny maths. Hang on, not funny, pathetic.
> Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC's emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.
He caused a bank run, which is all about balancing predictions with risks. It's all about evaluating economic impacts. He is entirely unqualified to make the statement above from that single data point alone.
About the hasty generalisation, I didn't mean to indicate that these would be the effects across the world, and I though that much was obvious. Most of the world doesn't even have coral reefs, for example. It's just that a global perspective might be in order, and most people here aren't likely to live in Queensland.
>He caused a bank run, which is all about balancing predictions with risks. It's all about evaluating economic impacts. He is entirely unqualified to make the statement above from that single data point alone.
Oh I won't refute that, perhaps he is unqualified. That doesn't however refute his argument. It only states that you'll have to look at the argument that much more carefully because he is not likely to be a great source.
What is common with folks justifying the ad hominem is that it is really just a short hand for the argument from authority fallacy. It is implicitly advancing the idea that the merits of the argument rest on the person giving them as though if it were someone else it would be more correct, which of course is wrong.
I think it is reasonable to assume that most people look at the person making an argument and if they are confident in the person, they will take the argument as a truthful assessment. To me though this is lazy and essentially delegates reason, so IMO it is always worth identifying.
Politicians like Matt Ridley can say what they like. I'll believe that things have changed when experts in the field begin to say so, and not a moment sooner.
Your stubborn stance on the issue sounds like the type of response a religious fundamentalist would give when questioned about their beliefs. The "experts in the field" have been shown to make excessive predictions in recent years, perhaps we should keep an open mind about who to trust?
Author: because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is.
Note how unmathematical this approach is. The whole premse of the article and the content are: "There are different numbers, some strange qualifiers in front of them which changed but which I'll ignore, but because I compare just the numbers, they are smaller than before so we can happily continue with global warming."
To hold the temperature increase to about 1.5 degrees, the globe would need to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, and then have negative emissions.
The author's article ignores the timeframes too, like it doesn't matter at all.
I'm not really a scientist, so I can't take any sides here, but I would like to point out a few things (make your own rational judgments). I do know the true principles of science, if little about its practice. Real science is unbiased. Everyone in these threads seems to get so heated that their "side" is right (I've been guilty of it as well, its an easy trap to fall into). Well, real science does not care about sides, it cares about boiling down a system of variables into a probable hypothesis. Even the most likely hypotheses have been shattered - I'm not saying that is the case, but sometimes climatology feels more like faith than science. Real science aims to prove its results wrong, not to prove them right.
Climatology/meteorology/etc are actually very difficult types of science because you cannot simple put the earth in a confined test area where you can tweak the variables on a small level. Yes, we all know that increase in CO2 = increase in greenhouse effect, that is child's science and not a real question. The real question is how much impact do human beings really have on the atmosphere, and to what degree should we change our behavior (if at all) based on that? There are so many variables that are difficult to predict (or even determine in realtime) - the sun's energy output, how much CO2 gets processed by trees, how much CO2 gets trapped in the upper atmosphere (it happens, despite it being heavier than other types of atmosphere), underwater volcanic activity, and so forth. That, and try doing a thermodynamic simulation at earth's scale - the best we can do is very crudely rough it. That said, there is no reason we should trash our environment just because we don't know what is going on - there are a million reasons to gravitate towards clean energy (in particular, sustainable energy).
All I can say is, if you are a real scientist, constantly question your own beliefs, don't fight for them.
Here is my thought on climate change, and something each party overlooks while paying scientists to do research that supports their point. Lets just pretend that hypothetically, we are 100% sure global warming is not caused by human-manufactured pollution. With that being the case, what do we do? Take off pollution controls? Turn every city into a place where you need to wear a mask to breathe? If you've ever been to Shanghai or even Los Angeles it is pretty obvious there are problems with pollution beyond damaging the ozone. Personally, I think that millions of people being able to actually breathe is more important than chemical company x stock price going up because they didn't have to "waste" money on proper disposal and soot filters...
The fact that we get bogged down in a discussion of whether the ozone is being damaged and overlook whether our lungs are being damaged just blows my mind.
> The fact that we get bogged down in a discussion of whether the ozone is being damaged and overlook whether our lungs are being damaged just blows my mind.
Not to diminish your point, which I completely agree with, but the current discussion about climate change is not related to the ozone layer, but is primarily about greenhouse gasses and associated global warming. The former was down to pervasive use of CFCs, which have now mostly been regulated away; the latter is down to (in particular) carbon emissions.
CO2 does not damage the Ozone layer. CO2 is not soot. CO2 does not damage our lungs. Even though it has recently been added to the EPA's list of pollutants (because of the climate change debate), CO2 is not even what people would readily identify as "pollution" - like chemicals that irritate eyes, lungs or sinuses.
The debate is how much - if any - negative impact is being done to our climate by a chemical that is an inevitable byproduct of the combustion of carbon-based fuels (which, outside of nuclear and hydro, offer the cheapest source of energy), and is combatting the risk of negative impact worth the economic impact to our economy.
I am not making a statement about climate change. I am only saying, respectfully, that you deeply misunderstand the debate.
Stopping burning money on economically unviable projects because otherwise boogeyman will come to get us would be a good start. There are billions spent on things having nothing to do with pollution or pollution control. In fact, many of the pollution factors (including soot) are cooling rather than warming.
If the resource are wasted on things that are not necessary, not economically viable and not producing any useful effect - the same resources are not available for being used on things that do produce useful effects - such as filters or better technologies. If, as president Obama said, the goal of the government is to "bankrupt coal industry", why would anyone invest in cleaner and more efficient coal technologies? Why invest in upgrading filters in existing factory if the government will destroy it anyway?
I just wanted to point out that the author is a politician and not a scientist. Also, the globe has warmed by 6-8 degrees F since the last ice age. The temperature difference that the author considers "beneficial" is the difference between Manhattan being a vibrant city and being buried under a mile of ice.
You are mistaken. He is, in actual fact, a scientist. Ridley has a DPhil degree in zoology from Oxford, and he's a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Climate Change (rebranded Global Warming) is such a heated and controversial topic, including in academia, that turns decent people into crazed maniacs (think of Apple or sport team fans). I suggest to stay away from it until something conclusive emerges from the study.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadI've always felt that much of what was presented to us was exaggerated, and I've always felt strongly that the climate scientists were too closely bound to politics, and thus whatever truth was found was obscured by rhetoric. There was also several solutions presented that skated well past the line of absurdity. [1]
Here's to hoping that the climate panels have learned from the mistakes of their past and begin to offer truly critical and balanced opinions, no longer employing scare-tactics.
The hard-core pro-CC crowd accused me of being all sorts of things I am not, such as a wasteful litterbox. Actually, I purchase very few things and certainly never buy Palm Oil or other items that are environmentally destructive. I don't use plastic bags, and I don't drive a car.
In regards to this article, I still don't know what to think. I really wish the report itself would come out before the media jumps all over it and destroys the meaning of this paper, as it is rather important. If the report does say this, I would wonder what changes have occurred in the climate thinking and world to wheel back this much.
[1]http://www.treehugger.com/culture/hose-to-the-sky-still-spew...
Much better to exhaust every ounce of potential out of safe, clean renewable sources first.
And please skip the "but this one version now in the lab ..." speech.
I don't think that's true. Do you have anything to substantiate that claim?
If that doesn't bother you, consider that the facts cited come from a "recent" report published in 1978.
Moreover, even factoring in the risk of extremely outdated or outrageously unsafe by design reactors and the accidents that have occurred at them such as Fukushima and Chernobyl the overall damage caused by nuclear power plants is still far, far lower than that of coal, oil, or even hydropower. The Tohoku earthquake caused the failure of a dam which killed 4 people, more than have died due to the Fukushima disaster. Overall dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands, which is well above even the upper limits of early deaths due to cancer related to the Chernobyl accident. Meanwhile, the world health organization estimates that coal burning causes as much as a million excess deaths per year worldwide.
If CO2 emissions are truly an existential threat to humanity then we should be building nuclear plants like crazy. People who reject the idea of nuclear power but embrace the idea of man made climate change as a catastrophic threat to mankind are either incapable of sane risk assessment or do not truly believe their own claims.
That's fifty million deaths. Why 50 million? Because that's about how many excess deaths have been caused by coal power over the lifetime of nuclear power.
If Fukushima fails to cause 50 million deaths then the entire nuclear industry will be that much behind in the category of ending human lives. Are new buildouts of fission power plant capacity likely to cause enough deaths to even the balance scales between fission and coal? Extremely unlikely. Even if people build irresponsibly outdated designs like the Fukushima daichi plants or even criminally unsafe designs like the Chernobyl plants it's extraordinarily unlikely that the reduction in threat to human lives caused by being able to shut down coal plants will more than make up for the much smaller risk added due to operating nuclear plants.
Edit: a much fairer assessment of relative risk of coal vs. nuclear would delve into deaths and injuries per kw-h, and it would also compare modern first world coal or gas plants vs. modern first world nuclear plants. But that math has already been done and shows that nuclear power is overwhelmingly one of the safest methods of producing power that has ever been created by mankind. And that remains unchanged even if you factor in Chernobyl and Fukushima (which in many ways are equivalent to allowing Chinese unfiltered coal plants into the equation on the other side). And even if you imagine some speculatively high number of deaths, even as many as tens of thousands, as the potential impact of the Fukushima daichi disaster there is just no way that the track record of the fission power industry to date could fall below the level of any other major power source that could potentially serve as base load power for a large industrialized country. It would take multiple Fukushima disasters happening every few years for the fission power industry to finally become as hazardous as gas or coal.
Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420 000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces.
Was Fukushima considered a safe design or not? Did the regulatory authorities consider it safe? Did TEPCO consider it safe?
The answer is yes, yes of course they did. If they thought the plant was too dangerous to operate, they would have shut it down or revoked its license. Ever since it was built, everyone involved has been insisting over and over that it was a safe design. It turns out that the regulators, manufacturers and operators were all wrong about that.
So, why exactly should we trust them when they say that a new plant design is safe?
How can nuclear power plant operators, manufacturers and regulators retain credibility when their previous statements have been proven so catastrophically wrong?
I personally don't think deaths due to nuclear power a big deal; my greater concern is that the costs for current nuclear reactors don't make any damn sense. Certainly the long term costs of remediating the Fukushima site are going to be enormous.
The answer is numbers. Statistically, traveling by air is extremely safe and instances of crashes, while existent, are very rare. Statistically, instances of people hurt by nuclear power failures are also very rare. Of course, since people have irrational fear of radiation (it is invisible, it could kill you and it could be everywhere, right under your bed! OMG OMG OMG!) and the press is happy to fan the flames on each occasion, each case of nuclear reactor failure gets attention incomparable with attention given to each case of lung cancer due to pollution or workers dying while extracting coal, gas or oil, or each case when you need to clean up a failure in any of the technological chain of the traditional power sources - excluding, maybe, oil spills, but even those get less panic press than radiation (OMG OMG OMG!).
The main cause of fears about nuclear power is, unfortunately, ignorance and innumeracy. The long term advantages of nuclear power vastly outnumber the costs of the dealing with very rare and exceptional failure events. Unfortunately, people are rarely rational when making political decisions, and this decision is very political.
However, I think you're misinterpreting the importance of the age of the Fukushima reactor design. Specifically the important point is that the extremely obsolete nature of that design means that its short-comings should have little to no bearing on the relative risk of building new nuclear power plants.
Additionally, even with all the problems of Fukushima, many of which are avoidable, it's worth pointing out that those problems did not occur spontaneously. Somehow we've apparently forgotten about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 40 meter high tsunami which killed over 15,000 people while also causing severe damage to the Fukushima reactors. These are not usual operating circumstances. Somehow we give a pass to other technologies that have failed and caused injury to humans after being impacted by extreme natural disasters yet nuclear power must stand on its own.
And yet even despite that and despite many many missteps in the response the Fukushima disaster has not pushed nuclear power into being less safe than any other base load power generation technology, even hydroelectric!
That's almost astounding, but it cuts to the deep failures that humans tend to make when they attempt to judge relative risk of extremely dissimilar things (like flying vs. driving, rock climbing vs. eating cheeseburgers, or nuclear power vs. coal).
I know tech heads love Nuclear and love to go on about how safe it is in this day and age but it still leaves us with significant and dangerous waste which our great great great grand children will inherit.
That's the reality. If it were different it wouldn't require subsidies to encourage people to build solar or wind power, they would do so spontaneously.
Not in every case. BC Hydro powers BC and sells excess to US Markets.
Hydropower is for the most part great when it's available, but it's not available everywhere and it also doesn't come without significant environmental cost. It would not be a net benefit for the world if every country developed a crash program to become as dependent on hydropower as possible.
And many of them are quite expensive and need expensive resources like rare earths which also require significant energy to extract and produce.
And as far as I can see, it is driven by massive government investment and regulation. Which again makes one doubt the viability of the idea - if it were that good, why would it be impossible to find someone willing to invest in it without forcibly taking money from people and prohibiting them from making choices according to their preference?
[1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/power-pri...
In many countries, the nuclear power industry already gets a free ride on liability and special government loans that other industries don't get. How much more do we have to tilt the playing field to favor nuclear power before it is enough?
Spending energy to keep air/water/land clean of other pollutants, either on remediation or lower overall efficiency, can boost CO[2] emissions. I'd personally prefer to take the risk on GW if we could cut down on mercury, localized pollution of land and water, etc.
There are some cases where CO[2] reduction is generally related to environmental improvements overall, like swapping in nuclear or (in some places) wind for dirty soft coal, but it's not all the time.
The biggest public policy advocated by people who care about climate change is a carbon tax. The effects of such a tax on the margins are more energy conservation (better weatherization, green roofs, smart grids, etc), and shifting fossil fuel consumption to natural gas and wind/solar. Every single one of those changes yields significant non-CO2 related environmental benefits.
The worst you can say is that natural gas burning requires higher temperatures that produce more NOx emissions, but they also take out a lot more mercury and SOx emissions produced by equivalent coal fired plants. Moreover, because old coal fired plants are grandfathered in, they face less stringent air pollution control regulations than brand new natural gas plants that replace them.
Finally, the costs of doing serious air pollution control in power plants is generally tiny and such controls probably pay for themselves just in reducing asthma cases alone.
My source is my father, who designed air pollution control systems for power plants for the last 30 years or so.
The "CO[2] optimization, but otherwise moronic and environmentally destructive" is most biofuels. They're arguably lower CO[2] output (since it's atmospheric carbon), minus the CO[2] used to grow them, but let's assume EROEI of 1+epsilon. You still destroy a bunch of land, use up water (including often fossil water), fertilizer runoff, etc., so the environmental harm outweighs the minor net CO[2] reduction benefit.
Not true of things like the Brazilian fuels, I think. Mainly just that corn ethanol is at best stupid and most likely a crime.
Chance of worse case scenario (10%) x Impact of worst case scenario (Severe) = Prepare Contingency Plans.
That said, I do have one issue with the argument in that one possible outcome of global warming has effectively infinite cost. That is when everyone dies. I do not know how to multiply (low probability) x (infinity). Maybe someone can explain how a rationalist would handle this case. (Actually, I don't think it's right to call this an "issue." Point of confusion is more accurate.)
That's not inevitable. We've grown using fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. Those let us use the stored solar energy of millions of years.
Wind, solar, etc allow us to use the solar energy from single year, and at least currently require fossil fuels to build.
It's possible we'll find a way out of our predicament, but the rapid growth we've seen in the past three centuries is not necessarily good evidence for the continuance of such growth.
There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case and considerable evidence that the exact opposite is true.
We have a decent record of atmospheric composition and temperature in ice cores, and, after all, we do know something about the effect of greenhouse gases -- the direct physics is not too complex. It's the feedback loops -- clouds, biology and so on, that are the challenge.
Likewise with economics. But it seems that the details of the dismal science are even more turbulent...
There's a name for those systems. It's called "the climate".
What kind of evidence? I've heard of no credible claims for future evolution of Earths economy... with perhaps the exception of R. Hansons rather informal blog posts.
Would progress and wealth creation have been significantly impeded if it were more expensive for people to build massive homes in the desert?
We get to make lots of choices. We get to decide how we spend our free time and what our preferences are. Much of GHG emissions are the product of relatively arbitrary (and often externality-exploiting) human druthers. It would be nice to see this fully quantified, but I suspect we would see a massive reduction in GHG emissions if we all just chose to value reading, soccer, hiking, and vegetarian food over Jetski-ing, NASCAR, motorbike touring, and meat at every meal; if 90% of the people driving < 17 MPG cars went to driving ones that did better than 28.
CO2 emissions would go down a fair bit; how would human progress and wealth creation be hindered if our value system changed thusly?
Once you postulate that global warming is the ultimate boogeyman which justifies any expense spent on preventing it, rationalism is going out of the window. One can not operate rationally within the framework that postulates irrational assumptions.
> Its just as invalid for people outside of climatology to comment on this as it is for people outside of finance to comment on financial issues.
You know what. It can be shown that climate skepticism is mostly Anglo Saxon phenomenon. It seems to be related to political and lobbying efforts.
Most of the world, South America, Europe(outside UK), Russia, India, China, ..., acknowledge the climate change and not because of politics.
Maybe you guys should change your Anglo Saxon "I'm not an expert but I have feelings and an opinion" attitude.
You are just leaving yourself open to manipulation.
Whatever the science said, 99 44/100% of the whole global warming/climate change movement was a flim-flam, fraud, scam for a few people to grab power and money. The recipe goes back to, say, the movie 'The Music Man' about the terrible threats of a pool table in town, to the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock to "keep the sun moving across the sky", English morality plays 1000 years ago, and various other charlatans trying to scare people and, thus, get power and money.
It was about power and money.
For the science, there was some careful work on diffusion in an ideal column of gas. Cute, but not much reason to shut down all the coal fired electric generating plants with, in a US DoE report a few years ago, 49% of US electrical energy and about 23% of all US energy.
Then there was the IPCC report with Ramaswamy's radiative forcing not much based on science and not in any physics book I saw. Best I could say about it was that, mathematically, it was local, linear, and differential.
Then there's the fact that we know a lot, likely enough, about the basic chemistry and physics and know what to calculate -- the Navier-Stokes equations, black body radiation, molecular spectral lines, etc. But we also know that if we set up such computing, then really we are trying to calculate long term climate change by weather prediction one microsecond at a time and that fails to predict actual weather for longer than about two weeks. Bummer. But that's the basic chemistry and physics, and we know that. Moreover, less detailed but more stable calculations are necessarily just approximations and not from first principles of the basic science where we have confidence.
So, we know too much, that is, know what we have to do but find that doing the calculations accurately enough for meaningful answers is too difficult.
Next, we can be empirical: So there is the US National Academic of Science report of about 2006 with a graph on page 2 that shows temperature reconstructions for the past 1000 years or so. The graph shows (1) as far as we can tell, in about 2006 the temperature was exactly the same as in the year 1000 and (2) the increase in the 100 years before year 2006 was exactly the same as the increase from year 900 to year 1000. Since year 1000, for whatever reasons we fell into The Little Ice Age that did influence some history -- killed off Viking settlements in Greenland, had three years of crop failures before the French Revolution, killed off nearly all of Napoleon's army on its way back from Moscow, put ice in the Delaware River the night Washington crossed it, etc. By year 1900 or so, we were still pulling out of The Little Ice Age.
Then there was the bad data: Trying to measure temperature of the earth by trying to measure the temperature of the Arctic by pictures of polar bears and ice bergs falling from glaciers that reach the ocean.
Net, empirically, the actual temperature record gives no significant reason for alarm, certainly no reason to shut down the economy of the Industrial Revolution which Al Guru would have us do. The science is too difficult, e.g., we are not able to do anything like accurate calculations of the future climate.
In a sense the Al Guru community picked a good problem, much like the Mayan charlatans did: Pick a problem too complicated to debunk with current knowledge, and then bleed people.
Flim-flam, fraud, scam.
It's also bizarre to be thinking so short term. So we benefit if there is a 1.2 degree increase in the next 70 years. What about the 70 years after that, and after that ?
And slow changes to climate don't instantly cause millions of deaths it is gradual as well.
The article also claims the data shows that not only were our previous predictions too high, but they might still be too high.
I don't want to sound argumentative but since this issue is so politicized, I'd rather see data and sources than accusations of "stupidity and cruelty".
This is the sort of problems that directly affect the poorest:
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/06/19/wa...
And it's not millions dying instantly it's over an extended period of time as well.
The people who will be the most affected by climate change will be the folks living decades if not centuries from now. And those people will be, on average, orders of magnitude more wealthy than the people of Earth today.
This is even more striking when you consider that the major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions over the 21st century will not be from the wealthy folks living in the current G8 countries but from what are now developing countries (China, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Brazil, etc.)
The moral calculus becomes a hell of a lot more complex when you take this into account. In 50 years the people of Bangladesh are likely to have developed world levels of per capita GDP, and by 2100 they are likely to be richer than Americans living today. Does it make sense to hold back the current development of not just the US but also places such as Bangladesh and China in order to benefit the incredibly wealthy citizens of the future Earth? Moreover, the case for severity of damages to the future Earth due to man made climate change are rather weak. The current best estimate of sea level rise by the year 2100 is rather moderate, much less than a meter and at present being revised downward due to more accurate estimates. Does it make sense to spend even billions of dollars today to save a future world that will have a global world product of literally quadrillions of dollars (adjusted for inflation)? And will have vastly more advanced technology than we do today?
As to what will happen next, I think the people of the future who will have the benefit of: vastly greater wealth, vastly more advanced technology, and hopefully much more accurate climate models borne out by being able to compare models against nearly two centuries of data. And for those reasons they will be unimaginably more capable of both figuring out what changes would be warranted as well as having the ability and wealth to make such changes without incurring a huge amount of personal misery.
Suppose we detect an asteroid which will very likely hit the earth. You might make the same argument. But in the case of an asteroid, the amount of force required to divert it from its path is trivial when it is a long way away, as it becomes closer, grows until it is impossible.
Fortunately, in the case of an asteroid, this fact is calculable today. It would be a pity if when we have 'much more accurate climate models' it turns out to be too late.
Take the example of rich people buying "carbon credits" that go towards paying poor people in poor countries for not developing their economies (and thus not becoming rich too). I think it is economically inefficient (since it in the long run decreases the overall value produced) but it is also morally reprehensible to bribe someone into suppressing their economic development so you could enjoy yours without guilt. It would be especially bad if it turns out the guilt was over nothing.
While the loss of life is saddening the world population is continuing to grow, global warming (as well as disease) can be construed as the Earth correcting for too many humans. Our technological advancements have saved a lot of lives and vastly increased life expectancy, while contributing to global warming. You assume it is our responsibility to ensure no humans die, which under normal circumstances makes sense as according to evolution our purpose is to ensure the survival of our species. However, we will eventually reach the point where a decreased population is more likely to help humanity prosper.
N.B. this is spoken from the view of a detached observer and once anything becomes personal obviously the arguments are different and feelings and emotions come into play.
Especially since most of us, including the author (who btw is also strongly ideologically motivated) aren't climate scientists and the actual report isn't out yet.
This is not a particularly credible source, and definitely not an unbiased one, trying to assign meaning to as yet unverifiable data.
It's an opinion piece written by a notorious climate-change denialist. Its main source is a document that hasn't been released yet. It is full of breathless hyperbolic speculation, e.g.: "Like a returning comet, it will be taken to portend ominous happenings." It puts the emphasis on the "facts" (because there are precious few actual facts) that support Murdoch's political position and downplays the facts that undermine that position, e.g. "Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is." and "...there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm." i.e. because things might not be getting quite as bad quite as fast as was predicted, that everything is therefore going to be hunky-dory and we should all stop worrying and just carry on burning fossil fuels with abandon, because, hey, we have a 50-50 shot that it will all turn out to be a net win.
I could go on, but life is too short to spend too much time debunking creationists, truthers, and denialists. If you want more, start with this:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/08/2265541/breaking...
Just before they released their 2007 report, a paper was published in Science comparing the predictions from the 2001 report with actual changes in global temperature and sea level. [2] While the 2001 report had forecasted a rise in temperature of 0.15C - 0.35C, the actual rise over that period was 0.33C. Meanwhile the rise in sea level over that period exceeded the IPCC's predicted maximums.
So while the IPCC may be "dialing back" their predictions, they do have a known tendency to err on the side of conservatism.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Clim...
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6321351.stm
The earth's massive carbon sinks are now sources. Melting tundra, burning forests, boiling oceans (acidification).
If we stopped all human CH4 and CO2 production (stop the economy), the atmospheric levels will still increase.
I also hope that we humans are clever enough to figure out how to sequester CO2 on a massive, industrial scale.
Many humans will certainly survive. But it'll be a bumpy ride.
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/06/01/the-man-who-wants-to-north...
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley and http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Matt_Ridley
If you want to have an idea as to his economic credentials, he's, in a nutshell, responsible for the first bank run in the UK in about 130 years.
Here are just the effects of the state I live in: http://www.climatechange.gov.au/climate-change/climate-scien...
0:23-ish: No one in the mainstream media in Australia has ever told anyone about Henry fucking Ergas? Well, this is full of shit already. He also ran Concept Economics.
> Concept Economics, the consultancy that recently estimated the costs of the National Broadband Network outweighed the benefits by up to $20 billion, has gone into administration.
Sheesh, what is it with these climate skeptics and their businesses going under?
0:48: Lack of action across the world? Most expensive carbon tax in the world?
Kind sir, I have a graph to cure that ailment: http://static.politifact.com.au.s3.amazonaws.com/politifact%...
Austria is AUT. Australia is AUS, in case there's any confusion following the whiplash you just got by this fact-whipping.
1:18: Thank you for that idiocy. Australia is the world's highest CO2 per capita emitter with any population to speak of, apart from the UAE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse.... It has the dirtiest power station in the entire OECD, which alone produce 1/1800th the greenhouse gas emissions on the planet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station
You know what, I'm done. I will go on, but considering such a litany of error within a minute and a half, I can spend my time vastly better. But like I said, I'll watch it for amusement value.
Meanwhile, you go ahead and watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo&list=PL82yk73N8eo...
Edit: OK, just wanted to add that the carbon tax does not "cost" 10 billion a year by any means. That's near enough the revenue being raised by the government through carbon pricing and near enough all of it makes it back into the economy through various means. One example, there's the rise in the tax-free threshold. Apparently billions of dollars being spent in removing the lowest income earners in the country from the income tax system is money wasted on reducing carbon dioxide a fraction of a percent? I don't think the story goes quite like that.
All this is just another example of Christopher Monckton displaying a serious case of illiteracy of various sorts: http://topher.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/50-to-1-sour...
You're a fool. Thank you for your skepticism, but in this case you've been had. By all means keep it up though, just double-check and don't be misled :)
Edit 2: $3.2 quadrillion for each degree? Sigh, and you actually were brave enough to show this crap to other people? Wow. If you really wanted to do it on the cheap (and that number is still very made up), you could do it for much less, albeit with side-effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_...
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17584/is-the-cos...
Also, the conclusion after the introduction of the carbon tax was that GDP was 0.1% lower than if it hadn't been there. How you get from there to 80% is very funny maths. Hang on, not funny, pathetic.
The first is a fine ad hominem example: "This is just stupid" -> Links to the author -> He is not qualified. Does not refute his claims
The second is the Hasty Generalization fallacy: Referencing a single instance as indicative of all areas
He caused a bank run, which is all about balancing predictions with risks. It's all about evaluating economic impacts. He is entirely unqualified to make the statement above from that single data point alone.
About the hasty generalisation, I didn't mean to indicate that these would be the effects across the world, and I though that much was obvious. Most of the world doesn't even have coral reefs, for example. It's just that a global perspective might be in order, and most people here aren't likely to live in Queensland.
Oh I won't refute that, perhaps he is unqualified. That doesn't however refute his argument. It only states that you'll have to look at the argument that much more carefully because he is not likely to be a great source.
What is common with folks justifying the ad hominem is that it is really just a short hand for the argument from authority fallacy. It is implicitly advancing the idea that the merits of the argument rest on the person giving them as though if it were someone else it would be more correct, which of course is wrong.
I think it is reasonable to assume that most people look at the person making an argument and if they are confident in the person, they will take the argument as a truthful assessment. To me though this is lazy and essentially delegates reason, so IMO it is always worth identifying.
Note how unmathematical this approach is. The whole premse of the article and the content are: "There are different numbers, some strange qualifiers in front of them which changed but which I'll ignore, but because I compare just the numbers, they are smaller than before so we can happily continue with global warming."
The facts are different.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=todays-clim...
To hold the temperature increase to about 1.5 degrees, the globe would need to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, and then have negative emissions.
The author's article ignores the timeframes too, like it doesn't matter at all.
Climatology/meteorology/etc are actually very difficult types of science because you cannot simple put the earth in a confined test area where you can tweak the variables on a small level. Yes, we all know that increase in CO2 = increase in greenhouse effect, that is child's science and not a real question. The real question is how much impact do human beings really have on the atmosphere, and to what degree should we change our behavior (if at all) based on that? There are so many variables that are difficult to predict (or even determine in realtime) - the sun's energy output, how much CO2 gets processed by trees, how much CO2 gets trapped in the upper atmosphere (it happens, despite it being heavier than other types of atmosphere), underwater volcanic activity, and so forth. That, and try doing a thermodynamic simulation at earth's scale - the best we can do is very crudely rough it. That said, there is no reason we should trash our environment just because we don't know what is going on - there are a million reasons to gravitate towards clean energy (in particular, sustainable energy).
All I can say is, if you are a real scientist, constantly question your own beliefs, don't fight for them.
I imagine most folks use new tabs, but this was kind of weird trying to back button out of the WSJ site.
The fact that we get bogged down in a discussion of whether the ozone is being damaged and overlook whether our lungs are being damaged just blows my mind.
Not to diminish your point, which I completely agree with, but the current discussion about climate change is not related to the ozone layer, but is primarily about greenhouse gasses and associated global warming. The former was down to pervasive use of CFCs, which have now mostly been regulated away; the latter is down to (in particular) carbon emissions.
The debate is how much - if any - negative impact is being done to our climate by a chemical that is an inevitable byproduct of the combustion of carbon-based fuels (which, outside of nuclear and hydro, offer the cheapest source of energy), and is combatting the risk of negative impact worth the economic impact to our economy.
I am not making a statement about climate change. I am only saying, respectfully, that you deeply misunderstand the debate.
If the resource are wasted on things that are not necessary, not economically viable and not producing any useful effect - the same resources are not available for being used on things that do produce useful effects - such as filters or better technologies. If, as president Obama said, the goal of the government is to "bankrupt coal industry", why would anyone invest in cleaner and more efficient coal technologies? Why invest in upgrading filters in existing factory if the government will destroy it anyway?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley