Slashdot Mirror
Missing Climate Goals Could Cost the World $20 Trillion (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: There are trillions of reasons for the world to prevent temperatures from rising more than 1.5C, the aspirational target laid out in the Paris climate agreement, according to a new study. If nations took the necessary actions to meet that goal, rather than the increasingly discussed 2C objective, there's a 60 percent chance it would save the world more than $20 trillion, according to new work published this week in Nature by scientists at Stanford. That figure is far higher than what most experts think it will cost to cut emissions enough to achieve the 1.5C target. Indeed, one study put the price tag in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If temperatures rise by 3C, it will knock out an additional 5 percent of GDP. That's the entire planet's GDP.
Wouldn't cutting emissions 40% - 60% in the first world cause hundreds of millions or even billions of deaths in places dependent on western aid? Or is that part of the plan?
This commentary published by The Wall Street Journal, written by Fred Singer, claims that warming (and therefore greenhouse gas emissions) has no effect on global sea level rise. Although Singer concedes the physical fact that water expands as its temperature increases, he claims that this process must be offset by growth of Antarctic ice weasels.
Scientists who reviewed this opinion piece explained that it is contradicted by a wealth of data and research. Singer bases his conclusion entirely on a cherry-picked comparison of sea level rise 1915-1945 and a single study published in 1990, claiming a lack of accelerating sea level rise despite continued warming. But in fact, modern research utilizing all available data clearly indicates that sea level rise has accelerated, and is unambiguously the result of human-caused global warming.
Who had them last? Did Trump misplace them? Has anyone checked Hillary's servers?
C'mon people. Those things are very expensive.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I haven't looked into this particular analysis at all, but this is exactly what we should be doing. Rather than making arguments that humans suck and are destroying life-giving Gaia, or trying to scare people with horror stories of runway warming, we should be carefully, rationally, constructing the best possible estimates of the cost of global warming under various scenarios, and then comparing them with the best possible estimates of the cost of various mitigation strategies, including not only cutting carbon emissions (which requires a sub-field of analyses to figure out the best and least impactful way to motivate cutting of carbon production) but also schemes to recapture carbon and schemes to directly cool the planet's climate other ways, such as orbital sunscreens to reduce insolation. And at the same time we should continue investing in climate and economic modeling to refine the estimates.
And we should act on the strategy that produces the best outcome, according to those estimates, even as we continue working to revise the estimates -- and adjust the strategy aprpropriately, in cautious, incremental steps.
This is the rational, Bayesian approach to the problem. And it's the right approach even in the (extremely unlikely) case that the warming isn't anthropogenic, or even if the planet isn't really even warming! Act on the best information you have, cautiously and adjusting for your level of confidence in that information, and keep working to get better information and adjust your approach accordingly. This is rational, logical, and the approach most likely to yield the most favorable outcomes. "Most likely" and "most favorable" are key words; there are no guarantees, but maximizing the probability of good outcomes is the the best way forward.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"Could" is the keyword here... Makes the entire statement completely unfalsifiable and thus unscientific.
No, it makes it a scientific prediction, one backed by rigorous and proper study and validated by peer review.
They aren't just pulling $20 trillion and 60% out of their ass. They have a paper where they show how they derive those figures and justify their assumptions. If you want to falsify their statement there's actually a straightforward process to do so. Read their paper to see where those figures came from, find a calculation that's incorrect, a cost they misprojected, an assumption that's unjustified, or some other way in which you can show their results to be false.
Don't just blithely declaring any scientific finding you don't like to be "completely unfalsifiable and thus unscientific".
I stole this Sig
"Could" is the keyword here... Makes the entire statement completely unfalsifiable and thus unscientific.
15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.
And you could die if you get into a high-speed auto accident while not wearing a seat belt. Or you could live. But your odds are better if you wear the seat belt.
If you're going to dismiss any argument that isn't based on ironclad guarantees, you can't predict much of anything. The future is unknown. Accept it. The best we can do is maximize the likelihood of good outcomes.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I would guess that at least 10 billion people will die over the next 100 years, probably more.
It "used" to be deniers saying there was no warming, but that didn't seem to work, so then they're saying it's natural causes.
It "used" to be deniers saying it's natural causes, but that didn't seem to work, so now they're saying it's humans causing warming but it's not going to get that bad.
Both sides are guilty of getting things wrong (failures are built in to the scientific method) and overstating the effect (either too much or too little). The media inevitably injects emotion to get eyeballs. You have to read between the lines.
The thoughtful have always realized that humans are causing warming, have been for most of the last 150 years, and will continue for the next 50 or so, when hopefully technology and social pressure will finally tip the needle. The warming is locked in for longer. There will be economic downsides and upsides, and some people will suffer and some will profit.
I come at it from the prospective of, we each need to have a conversation with our grandchildren in 50 years, where the trends for CO2 and warming continue, and can we say we did as much as we could to give them the same kind of world we thrived in. Arguments that "the environment could be better!" miss the point, we know we have a great environment now. It's selfish and myopic to assume that the environment in 50 years (assuming warming trends continue) will be better due to technology or what have you.
How do I edit my sig.
Take a look at this: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Those are simple numbers, not complicated simulations. You don't need to be an expert or even an actual scientist to see that the world is actually warming. You also don't need to be an expert to see that it is going at a rate that might start to hurt. Nobody can tell you how much it will hurt, but it will not only cost money, it will be paid in human lives too...
Also, that stuff you're pouring into your car and what you're firing your power stations with, that stuff took hundreds of million of years to get there. Now, we have burned up a sizable amount of that stuff in the last few decades, you don't need to be an expert to see the scalability problem there...
The ozone hole is not bullshit.
Worldwide action to eliminate CFCs in aerosol cans and refrigerators has done much to alleviate the problem. Success at reducing the problem does not mean the problem was bullshit to begin with.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
"... the proposed actions always involve diminishing everyone's lives - living in cold houses in winter and boiling houses in the summer, ..."
Nope, this is just your nihilistic attitude towards the subject at hand. You've decided this is a zero sum game and that you aren't going to be the loser. Well your myopic attitude is your problem. Not someone else's problem!
You see there were lots of right wing nay-sayers suggesting that programs that supported home insulation upgrades were inappropriate and wrong. "You can't pick winners and losers" they said. "Government grant programs are bad" they said. "It's all Al Gore and Big Government, and Climate Change isn't real" they said.
Except, home insulation programs are one specific example of how lives will not be diminished. How homes will not be "cold in the winter" and "boiling in the summer". How to avoid zero sum nihilism.
You see you are a zero sum nihilist, and you want the rest of the world to be as well. Good luck with that, but don't be surprised if the world chooses a different direction. And when they do, I'm sure we'll hear you whining about that too. "Well, if the Deep State hadn't silenced us, we could have won at the expense of everyone else!!! Damn you Al Gore!"
Sad. Pathetic. Small thoughts for small minds.
If it is only going to cause $20 T not to do so, it would appear to be a good deal just to do nothing.
On the first glance: for the survivors, yes.
On second glance: you most likely would never survive it or not like to live under the conditions the survivors will do.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That reminds me of those people who rollover their payday loans into new payday loans because every dollar they put into paying down the loan is a dollar they can't spend on other stuff. In other words, breaking out of they payday loan cycle requires diminishing their lives in the short term.
People who complain about global warming mitigations diminishing their lives are trying to justify the equivalent of locking us all into massive loans which our children and grandchildren will inherit. In the USA, the American Dream is dying.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
I once strongly believed in this, but to my left is a computer that is entirely capable of doing nuclear bomb simulation. I'm curious why there's never any models given that I can simply run.
There is.
http://theconversation.com/mak...
https://opensource.gsfc.nasa.g...