Let's Call It 'Climate Disruption,' White House Science Adviser Suggests (Again)

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "First there was 'global warming.' Then many researchers suggested 'climate change' was a better term. Now, White House science adviser John Holdren is renewing his call for a new nomenclature to describe the end result of dumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into Earth's atmosphere: 'global climate disruption.'"

Comments

I gotta better name

[fustakrakich]

Pollution.

The simple goal should be to spew as little as possible, regardless of the potential issues.

Re:I gotta better name

[KermodeBear]

What? Don't throw junk into the environment? What is this madness?!

On a serious note, that's what it should really come down to. Don't toss junk into the environment, whatever it is. We should always be trying to reduce the amount of pollutants we produce. You can even find trace amounts of antidepressants and other prescription drugs in our water supply.

There's reasonable steps that society can - and does - take to reduce pollutants, but there's still a lot of things we could be doing more about. Plastics, for example. So much is packaged in giant wads of hard plastic or shrink wrapped plastic. Is it really necessary to keep piling this crap into our landfills? What is wrong with packaging something in paper or paperboard with a bit of natural glue to hold it shut?

Re:I gotta better name

[Richy_T]

It usually turns out that those things use *more* resources than the alternative, hence why they are more expensive. You may save an ounce of oil from the plastics but you use two on the paper processing.

Re:I gotta better name

[dougmc]

Fair enough, but the equilibrium temperature where this happens does change.

"Greenhouse effect" is accurate enough. The energy entering and leaving a patch of plants is going to be equal (on average), but if you build a greenhouse around it the inflow and outflow of energy will still be equal, but the temperature where they are equal will be higher. (The flow isn't just radiative, of course, but as far as analogies go it's far better than mot.)

Re:I gotta better name

[dougmc]

The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result* -- they're two different things. We could make the Earth hotter by putting giant mirrors in orbit that send more sunlight our way ... that would cause climate change but would not be an example of the greenhouse effect at all.

Realistically, the problem with a name change is that politics more than anything else -- calling it by yet another name will make the conspiracy theorists think that you're trying to hide or obfuscate something (the link talks about Benghazi, but the ideas apply to climate change too), and while that's not true, the end result is still that it overall causes people to take the problem less seriously. I think we should stick with "climate change".

Re:I gotta better name

[Beck_Neard]

Depending on the type, plastic packaging can in principle be good for the environment. It's not very energy-intensive to make, can be easily recycled, can be recycled many more times than paper can, and doesn't involve cutting down trees. The key is not to stop using plastic, but to use less packaging when we can. In "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", there's a reason why "Reduce" comes first.

Re:I gotta better name

[OneAhead]

Oh come on, this debate is not even challenging when you start posting links that disprove your own point. The most fundamental flaw in your thinking is that the earth, when modeled as a grey body (because anyone with eyes in their head can see it's nowhere near a black body), has a non-constant emissivity. This emissivity is currently slowly decreasing over time due to science more than a hundred years old. As corroborated by empirical observations linked in my previous post in this thread.

Re:I gotta better name

[khallow]

The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result*

An effect is not a cause. For example, the second definition from that link:

an event, condition, or state of affairs that is produced by a cause

Re:I gotta better name

[Richy_T]

http://www.theguardian.com/mon...

You need to use a ceramic cup 1000 times for the resources used in making it to to match the equivalent single uses of polystyrene cups. You can argue that you might but it only takes a couple of mugs being mishandled and your average is way down.

Of course, I prefer a ceramic cup anyway but you really have to be careful when you assert some things are green over others. Especially when things are price driven. Price tends to (but not always) be an indicator of resource usage.

My grammar is all to pot above. Hope it makes sense.

Re:I gotta better name

[bane2571]

You've missed his main point though: in a price driven world, cheaper things have a cheaper cost because they require less resource input. His example may be extreme in it's impact but the general fact is that everything you do is going to have an environmental impact and without being sure of the actual total life cost of a product most people are very likely to make incorrect assumptions about what is "better" for the environment.

Re:I gotta better name

[Eunuchswear]

in a price driven world, cheaper things have a cheaper cost because they require less resource input.

If you ignore externalities.

Re:I gotta better name

[Eunuchswear]

Anything is a pollutant of there's too much of it in the wrong place.

Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the solution promoted by politicians is to raise taxes and raise costs of energy, I suggest that we levy a tax on every word spoken by politicians. They spew so much hot air that it easily competes with the effects of all the CO2.

Re:Taxes

[microbox]

It should be modded "sad". There are ways to green the energy system without raising the out-of-pocket costs to consumers, or having the government take on debt. If you knew something about the economics of the issue, then you'd already know that. Google is your friend. And an open mind.

Thats a good name

[egarland]

Global warming was always a terrible name because the imagery was all wrong.

Global climate change is more accurate, but still nebulous.

Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening. I personally liked the name "Santa's revenge" from this winter's breakdown of the polar vortex. Melt the north pole, and you'll all get a taste of the cold!

Re:Thats a good name

[stoploss]

Please stop using the slow-boiled frog meme. It's false.

Fourth options

[wjcofkc]

I'm fine with calling it any of those things. But it would be better to settle on globally unified measures to do something about it like we did with the hole in the Ozone Layer (remember that?), or else we may eventually have to call it a fourth option: Global Suicide.

Re:Fourth options

[wjcofkc]

We banned chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone depleting chemicals.

The hole in the Ozone Layer was very real, yes we did cause it, and yes we took international measures to fix it that worked. If you don't believe that you are either daft, very young, trolling, or all three.

nuclear

[phantomfive]

He also promotes using nuclear energy as part of the solution.

Re:nuclear

[Trepidity]

Seems sensible to me. Replacing coal plants with nuclear has a lot of other benefits, too.

Let's just jump to the obvious ending

[gman003]

"Climate Terrorism"

Re:Let's just jump to the obvious ending

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Climate Terrorism or Fracking: A Love Story. The touching story of the love affair of a society's SUVs and cheap fossil fuels.

Disruption sounds temporary ...

[perpenso]

Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening.

Disruption sounds temporary, change sounds more permanent. Change seems a far better word to use.

Re:Disruption sounds temporary ...

[ColdWetDog]

Nothing is permanent. They earth's climate has 'changed' drastically over several billion years.

And disruption really is more accurate. The data really does support that anthropogenic inputs have altered the natural climate flows (along with meteors, volcanoes and perhaps some other things, but this time it's all about us). And this will disrupt many human activities (I suppose it will also change them).

Still and all it's semantics and unlikely to make a dent in the noise surrounding the topic.

Top Ten Future Euphemisms for Global Warming...

[QilessQi]

10. "Global climate engineering"
9. "Atmospheric carbon dioxide deficit reduction"
8. "Carbon gifting"
7. "Meteorological redistricting"
6. "No Cloud Left Behind"
5. "The Hurricane Insurance Investment Initiative of 2024"
4. "The Global War on Terra"
3. "Operation Desert Planet"
2. "Great Flood II: Our Glorious Return to Biblical Times"

And the number 1 future euphemism for Global Warming is...

1. "Occupy Everest"

Environmentalists are starting to support nuclear

[perpenso]

He also promotes using nuclear energy as part of the solution.

Well, it is.

As much as we would all really love solar and wind to scale to a level necessary for global needs that is not going to happen with current technology. Its many decades off. Lots of science and engineering are needed to get solar there. We need something to bridge the gap between today and that future date where solar scales.

If not nuclear then its natural gas, oil and coal.

Even environmentalists are starting to realize this, including a co-founder of GreenPeace.
"Moore says that his views have changed since founding Greenpeace, and he now believes that using nuclear energy can help counteract catastrophic climate change from burning fossil fuels. Says Moore, "The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2 annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles." Moore also cites reports from the Clean Air Council that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. "Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2 emissions annually," says Moore. "Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely." Moore points out that the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. He predicts that advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future. According to Moore, British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, also believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Concerns about past accidents in the nuclear industry were also mentioned, as he claims the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as example, calling it "an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up". He also recognized the difficulty of dealing with nuclear waste."
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Gr...

Regarding nuclear waste from current reactors. 4th generation reactors can use this waste as fuel. And the waste from 4th gen is short lived. Hundred of years rather than tens of thousands.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...

NASA also thinks nuclear has greatly improved the environment.
"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. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...

Re:Shut Up

[rs79]

Pollution? Corporations.

Global climate grant change? Scientists.

How bout we get back to the pollution issue which has been attenuated by climate discussion.

Pollution is not under dispute.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

Re:Shut Up

[Penguinisto]

Devil's Advocate here:

Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor. None of those folks trading in carbon credit are professors. Professional 'Greenwashers' (read: marketing folks who make companies look pretty to the public and environmental orgs) are not professors. The environmental orgs themselves (who often take in some rather healthy donations from corporations, well-heeled individuals, etc).

Also consider that profit does not always mean money. To the average and otherwise-obscure prof or environmental organization, it also means prestige, fame, name recognition, and influence (see also Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc.)

Re:so the hockey stick graph is bullshit after all

[OneAhead]

Nice switch, but nobody said that. You're just trying to drag debunked climate myth #16 into the discussion.

Lets do some SIMPLE math

[oculusprime]

Ah, so the conversation has degenerated to the "controversy" over whether burning fossil fuels could be altering the earth's climate. Look, Carbon Dioxide IS a greenhouse gas. No scientist disputes that if we just keep shoving the stuff in the atmosphere forever, eventually things will warm up. The only question is whether or not we are putting enough up there right now to have this effect. So lets do some simple math: 1 gallon of gasoline requires about 100 tons of biomass. 1 barrel of oil makes 20 gallons of gasoline. The world uses 85,000,000 barrels of oil per day. Doing the simple math, we use the equivalent of 170,000,000,000 tons of biomass per day. The earth's current biomass is estimated at 560,000,000,000 tons. So we burn the equivalent of 1/3 of all the earth's current biomass every single day. I find this pretty compelling.... And don't forget the methane, which we're also pumping up there (both directly by co-release with oil drilling and fracking, and as a side-effect of arctic climate change), and which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.

Re:Lets do some SIMPLE math

[Stumbles]

Water vapor is a greenhouse gas so lets get rid of that why you're at it.

Re:Eh?

[OneAhead]

If you're going to mindlessly regurgitate debunked climate myth #11, at least get the decade right with respect to the canon...

Re:The real reason

[damn_registrars]

And that "Climate Change" is often met with "The climate has ALWAYS changed".

So because climate has changed before, we should just keep doing what we're doing, indefinitely, without worrying about consequences? Sure, climate has changed before, but not to this degree in this short of a time frame.

When losing an argument, stick your head in the sand so you don't hear the argument

There, fixed that for your side. You're welcome.

Re:Eh?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

You missed the global cooling scare of the 80s, don't forget that one. Back then we were headed for another ice age.

That was never actually a thing, except in the media:

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. (source)

Peer-reviewed scientific literature overwhelmingly referred to warming, even back then:

A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). (source)

Re:Shut Up

[Geoffrey.landis]

The only scam here is the environmental exploiters funding junk science and junk social engineering so they can continue to profit from fouling the global commons without cost to themselves. Big Tobacco could have learned a trick or two from these guys.

Actually, it's the other way around-- the tactics used to spread confusion about climate science are ones that they learned from the tobacco industry's fight against health science, when the cigarette companies were trying to discredit the science that showed that cigarettes were bad for health.

It's not merely the same strategy that is being used for spreading the illusion of doubt, it's many of the same people doing it.

Re:Shut Up

[Geoffrey.landis]

Devil's Advocate here: Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't a professor.

Last I checked, Al Gore wasn't relevant in any way. It is only the climate change deniers that are interested in Al Gore-- but they seem to be completely obsessed with him. He's not a scientist, he hasn't written or contributed to any of the papers laying out the science behind anthropogenic climate change, he is not part of the scientific literature. If he didn't exist, the climate models, the analysis of climate data, and the conclusions would be unchanged.

If you're talking about Al Gore, you're really not talking about science. At best, he's a popularizer.

Re:Shut Up

[Immerman]

A lot of the global warming "solutions" proposed by a politicians may well be exploitative power grabs, but that's true of a lot of *everything* they propose. That doesn't mean the problem isn't real, just that they're power-hungry bastards trying to exploit a very real problem for personal gain.
The way I see it there are two possibilities :
(A) There's a global conspiracy of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of climate researchers to "manufacture" a story of one of the largest crisis our species has ever faced for the benefit of political power grabs.
(B) The problem is real, but a lot of scientifically illiterate politicians and social action groups around the globe are more interested in creating non-solutions that serve their own ends than actually addressing the problem efficiently.

Re:Shut Up

[Austerity Empowers]

How can you possibly believe that the massive environmental changes we are creating both for living our daily lives and for powering our cities and running our factories, that the chemicals we're synthesizing that had never been seen on planet earth prior to us, are NOT having an effect on the climate? Is it such a stretch that those changes aren't, necessarily, bad for life as we've known it, given that life as we've known it was adapted to the environment that existed prior to us?

You don't need a PhD or hi-falutin intellectual elite pedigrees to see the obvious. The only questions should be "How bad is it?", and I might agree with you that there's enough money on the table for all parties that it has to be taken with a grain of salt, and a realization that most of us would rather perish than go back to living in caves.

Re:Shut Up

[ShanghaiBill]

Big Tobacco could have learned a trick or two from these guys.

This is completely backwards. The funded part of the denialist movement directly copied the methods of the tobacco lobby, and in many cases employed the same lobbyists.

Re:The real reason

[ShanghaiBill]

When losing an argument, change the rules and the terms so it looks like you're not losing.

Except that the denialists are NOT losing the argument. They are winning. By a landslide. Almost everywhere, the number of people who consider it a serious problem has been going down, while the number that consider themselves skeptics has been going up. The problem is that many scientists think that they will automatically "win" just because the facts are are their side. When it comes to politics, that is an incredibly stupid thing to believe.

It doesn't matter what you call it

[riverat1]

No matter what you call it the physical changes to the Earth's climate can't be denied. This is like throwing a bone to the contrarians so they can claim we changed the name again.

Re:Lets just keep on trying...

[bunratty]

If the science behind global warming is so fake, why don't you expose it and convince everyone it's fake? I see people thinking they're doing that all the time, but I haven't seen one good argument to suggest that our carbon dioxide emissions are not causing significant warming.

Re:Shut Up

[Penguinisto]

Pollution is not under dispute.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. I doubt you will find many people who would credibly argue that pollution is a good thing.

On the other hand, pollution seems so pedestrian... no scare factor in it anymore. No alarms to be raised. The corporations have long since either spun their message to convince the world they're perfectly clean, or they outsourced all the dirty stuff to China.

The ideologues? Well, they no longer have craptacular pollution wonders to point at like they did in the '60s and '70s... I mean, back then you had Love Canal, and thousands of similar examples. They had the public's imagination captured by Soylent Green and Silent Spring. What do you have today? Not even a weak simulacrum compared to back then - at least in the Western world.

So, well, what to do?

Re:Shut Up

[dryeo]

Depends on the government. Currently the American government is in thrall to the banking industry whereas the previous government was in thrall to the oil industry. The banking industry will make money no matter what and see climate change as a chance to build a new bubble so it is kind of true that the American government has an interest in supporting the climate change science as there is money to be made by the bankers but the bankers will make money no matter what.
Here in Canada the government is definitely in thrall to the oil industry and only exists to make sure they make maximum profits. When it comes to science, all they've been able to do is shut it down. Most all climate science stopped in the name of saving money when what they'd really like is science that says man made climate change is bullshit. Seems the scientists would rather be unemployed rather then make up science.

Re:Shut Up

[GodfatherofSoul]

Incorrect. The guy stuck his neck out making GW his cause and trying to promote activism to reverse it. I'm big into documentaries and there have been dozens since that have come out that are just as important that barely made a whiff in theaters. It's ludicrous to think that someone would use the documentary genre to get rich. Al Gore's efforts took off and to add to that he turned out to be a damned good businessman with his Current network.

Besides, the way to get rich is to be a scientist on the take from Big Oil who uses is credentials to pretend GW isn't real.

Re:Lets just keep on trying...

[Xyrus]

The science is fake? You're right. People like Fourier back in the 1820's just started the whole "Global Warming" thing because he wanted to get rich of green energy. I suppose Ahrennius developing the first global climate model in the late 1890's and quantify the possible anthropogenic effects on global temperature was to further capitalize on the big "Green Energy" cash cow.

Maybe Al Gore invented a time machine and went back in time and had a little chat with some of these famous "scientists" in the 1800's just to help line his pockets. After all, what's developing a time machine compared to creating the internet.

And while your being a complete idiot, HAARP is controlling your brain, the Black Night Satellite is real and was sent from Alpha Centauri to gather Krispy Kreme Donuts, and the Lochness Mosnter isn't really a monster, he just needed the money.

Honestly, you act like global warming is some brand spanking new theory developed out of nothing with no supporting evidence. The theory of global warming was first proposed close to 200 years ago, and scientists from as far back as the early 1900's have been warning that unchecked human activities could result in an altered climate. It existed long before Al Gore and Green Energy, or even before the photovoltaic effect was put down on paper.

You have a brain. Use it. You can verify the effects of greenhouse gases with basic high school math and physics. Fourier did it before the invention of the fucking light bulb, let alone calculators and computers.

4th gen reactors use old nuclear waste as fuel

[perpenso]

Well, for 30 or so years. But what then? Then you have a huge pile of radioactive crap sitting there that you can't really get rid of sensibly and that will continue to sit there for a few millennia.

4th gen reactors use waste from previous generation reactors as fuel. The 4th gen waste is only hazardous for a few hundred years.
http://www.ga.com/energy-multi...

Nuclear denier, climate change denier, same thing

[perpenso]

If they're supporting nuclear then they aren't environmentalists.

Actually they are. They looked at the science and realize that if we don't use nuclear in the near term then we will continue to be using fossil fuels. That renewables are regrettable not there yet. These people are all for conservation, solar, wind, etc ... they just accept the science that these can't get us as far as we want. Especially with the billions of people in the developing world coming on to the electric grid. In short, that conservation, renewables and nuclear all need to be part of the solution. To say that nuclear does not need to be a part of the fossil fuel solution is to deny reality, much like the climate change deniers. Nuclear and climate deniers are remarkably similar, just calling different ends of the political spectrum their home, both abusing scientific reality.

Re:Shut Up

[sphealey]

- - - - - - Michael Moore - - - - - -

Yeah, Michael Moore is a professional filmmaker. He makes his living making films. That's what "professional filmmaker" means.

Funny thing is that as the years go by most of Moore's documentaries look better and more prescient. I image the current managers of General Motors wish their predecessors had spent a little less money on giant SUVs and a little more on the internally developing the electric car research that they licensed to Toyota instead.

sPh

Re:Shut Up

[TapeCutter]

Precisely, and the summary is still propagating their bullshit. Researches did not change the terms, it was yet another false debate, both terms had been in use for decades, there was (and still is) a journal called "climatic change" that was established in the 70's, around the same time the term "global warming" started appearing in the literature to describe the current direction of change. The term "climatic change" goes way back, it was in the title of a 1950's paper and probably goes back further than that.

The entire "scientists changed the name" meme was the brain fart of a PR advisor to GWB ( Frank Luntz) who suggested in a memo to Bush that the government change the phrase in it's communications to the public in an attempt to "challenge the science" (ie: shameless propaganda)

From the link: In a 2002 memo to President George W. Bush titled "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America", obtained by the Environmental Working Group, Luntz wrote: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.... Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

They did a similar thing to James Hansen, he gave a talk on his work and was told he couldn't talk about it in public without permission from NASA's political minders. Hansen went to the NYT and the courts to protest and get the censorship lifted, the government complied but then changed the wording of NASA's mission statement, removing the "to understand and protect the home planet" words that justified Hansen's budget.

Re:First it was global cooling

[bunratty]

No, global cooling did not come first. Arrhenius predicted warming due to humans burning fossil fuels in the 1800s. The global cooling fad was pushed by a small minority of climatologists for a very short time. There was never any consensus on that idea.

Love the civility

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny though that you guys never seem to be upset by all the money "big oil" spends on "green" stuff.

Your bigger intellectual problem, however, is that when government funds the stuff you like it does it by stealing money from MY wallet at gunpoint. When "Big Oil" spends money, it takes that money from its own bank accounts. The greenie complaint about "Big Oil" getting subsidies is a scam - oil companies do not get subsidies (money taken, by force, from others and given to them) they just get the same type of tax breaks that other businesses get (i.e. they are not taxed on some of their income because it is acknowledged that this money is being put back into the activity as a cost and is not a profit). Most "green" companies, on the other hand, get ACTUAL subsidies - government takes money from some people and gives it to those "green" companies to fool people into thinking those activities are efficient and cost-effective or cost-competative - ACTUAL subsidies like this should NEVER occur in a "free market" because they encourage sub-optimal economic activity.

NASA: Nuclear saved 1.84 million lives

[perpenso]

Maybe. Coal emits a ridiculous amount of radiation... Also, according to the Torch report, 60k people died from Chernobyl, which is a tragedy, but a drop in the bucket compared to 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. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power."
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/...

Re:what if we're not religious environmentalists?

[Kohath]

Where did he say anything about "the tragedy of the commons"?

He said pollute "as little as possible". That's a quasi-religious purity standard. A non-religious, rational standard for "pollution" would examine tradeoffs: What are the costs and benefits of burning fossil fuels vs. the alternatives? Why can't we use reason to choose what we do rather than environmental dogma?