And what was proven before climate change become the latest fad religon, Is that the planet heats and and cools down on it's own, and we are due for heating up.
Please, tell me what evidence supports that "we are due for heating up" in a way that agrees with the heating up that has been observed.
Wheather humans are accelatoring that or not hasn't been proven, it's only theroy...
if you are a guy in upstate PA who owns what could become beachfront property, or a major port, then, greenhouse gasses and rising sea levels are a boon
I submit that if a guy in upstate PA is looking at his house being beachfront property within his lifetime, that's probably not going to be a boon, because the national and global economic disruption from a sea level rise that fast would probably mean he's hiding in his bunker and hunting rats for food.
(Yeah, I know what your point was: some people benefit while others lose out.)
Do you know of a cost/benefit analysis for limiting emissions vs. doing nothing different at all?
There are tons of such analyses. Pretty much all of them find that some emissions reduction is preferred business-as-usual. Read Nordhaus's new book for a pretty mainstream economic analysis.
What is this 'global average temperature' of which you speak?
The surface temperature averaged over the Earth's surface.
Temperature is an intensive thermodynamic property and as such cannot be averaged meaningfully in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere.
You can average it. It's not conserved or anything like that, so it's not really a fundamental physical quantity like heat is. It's still useful as a climatic indicator: it's not going to directly tell you what the planetary radiation balance is (which is what you really want to know), but it's a starting point in inferring it.
Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful.
It's more meaningful than average temperature, but it's also not measured. That's why people use temperature.
It is perfectly possible for the temperature to fall everywhere on Earth and the heat content of the atmosphere to increase.
It's possible, but please note that what we mostly care about in terms of impacts is the surface temperature, not the total atmospheric heat content.
Global ocean temperature, now... that's meaningful, and increasing, but I would take global warming a lot more seriously if the people who are all het up about it showed an even rudimentary grasp of basic physics,
My Ph.D. was in statistical thermodynamics. I stand by my statements.
A sceptic about the magnitude of the effect of CO2 on global heat content may be reasonable. A person who puts there argument in terms of a problematic quality such as global average temperature is not.
That's nonsense. It is perfectly possible to compare hypothetical forcing mechanisms on the basis of their observed influence on globally averaged temperature, if they give different predictions for that quantity. It's not nearly as useful as heat content, but that quantity is also not known. Certainly ocean temperature changes are one line of evidence, but so are surface temperatures, as well as tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures.
Furthermore, since every single story we have seen recently about global warming has announced loudly and clearly that climate scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate,
That's false. "Arctic ice melting faster than expected" doesn't mean "scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate".
Each of these stories, if read by someone who hadn't bought into a religious belief in the infallibility of climate scientists, would be taken as clear-cut evidence that climate science as a whole is terrible at predicting anything to do with climate,
Climate science is reasonably good at predicting radiation balance, heat budgets, and surface temperatures over large scales and decadal time periods. They're still bad at predicting regional climate, and precipitation is mediocre. Weather events like hurricanes are still terrible.
Being established is not the same as being proven or,
Nothing is ever proven in science. Sadly, we don't have the luxury of making decisions in the presence of perfect certainty. "Well established" is what we have to work with.
for that matter, accepted by most everyone.
I'm quite sure it's not accepted by "most everyone", but that doesn't change the evidence which makes it well accepted in the scientific community.
It is crazy how scientific community behaves like just any other group where scientific methods are trumped by polls and consensus.
Scientific methods aren't trumped by polls. There's nothing wrong with polling scientists to see what they think.
It is exactly this herd mentality that prevented the community to look outside string theory for the grand unified theory.
That's nonsense. There are plenty of other theories which compete with string theory. (e.g., in quantum gravity there's loop quantum gravity, dynamical triangulations, etc.)
And "herd mentality" snipes notwithstanding, it's simply the case that some venues are deemed more promising than others. If you gave equal attention to every theory, you'd be spending most of your time on crap, because 90% of everything is crap (Sturgeon's Law). You may be upset that the HEP community decided string theory was the most promising, but if it wasn't string theory, there still would be some theory which was deemed most promising.
Folks like Garrett Lisi had to resort to virtually getting away from civilization to make progress their own radical new ideas.
Yeah, and he ended up with a wrong theory (see, e.g., Distler's detailed analysis), so that's not really supporting your point. It might help your position if he came up with a successful theory.
And you believe that because a skeptic web site said so. Perhaps you should investigate the science a little more closely and, I don't know, read something written by climate scientists. You might want to re-evaluate your biases if your default response is to automatically dismiss pretty much the entire scientific literature on every climate related topic.
When, for some reason, their modelling produces figures they don't like, there always seems to be an "adjustment" in their favor.
That's nonsense. There are places where models agree with data, and places where models disagree with data, which is the case in any science. There isn't any conspiracy to make everything fit; if there were, there wouldn't ever be any disagreement.
There is an interesting website examining the work on global temperature mesurement, Urban Heat Islands etc somewhere, damed if i can find it though.
You're probably thinking of "Watts Up With That". They were crowing a lot about the urban heat island effect, but got a lot quieter after one of their own contributors analyzed the data from stations with no risk of urban contamination and found basically no difference in the temperature record. This is unsurprising, because the urban heat island effect was already found to be insignificant, and at least one of the surface records cross-checks against rural stations anyway. Not to mention the oceans are also warming (no urban heat islands there), the satellites agree with the surface stations (no contamination there), etc.
I'll add one more thing to my post - people old enough will remember back in the 70 and early 80's when we thought we were causing a massive cooling and heading towards and ice age.
"We" (meaning the climate science community) didn't actually think that (see, e.g., here). There were a few papers that got a lot of media hype, but the general view among scientists at the time was "we don't know enough yet, but it's more likely to warm than cool". 30+ years later and the view is "it's very likely to warm, but we're not totally sure how much".
We better be *damn* sure we know what will happen when we intentionally release more change into the world than what we are trying to fix.
Well, one virtue of some of the present geoengineering schemes is that they're fast-acting, and conversely, quick to turn off if they start having side effects. Take stratospheric aerosol injection. Aerosols precipitate out of the atmosphere in a year or two; CO2 stays up for a century or more. If erroneously think the planet is warming and cool it with aerosols, you can turn them off within a few years if you need to. If you erroneously think the planet is cooling and warm it with CO2, your mistake stays around a lot longer. The decision problem is asymmetric.
That being said, your basic point is valid: geoengineering is a lot riskier than just reducing CO2 concentrations back to earlier levels.
I was just pointing out that just because "emitting less gases" is geoengineering, that doesn't mean that it's comparable to other forms of geoengineering.
These people and their models cannot even tell what the weather will be in 5 days but they feel confident that they can affect or even control the weather on a massive scale. Wow!!!
We're not talking about controlling weather, we're talking about controlling climate. We can't predict how something is going to affect the weather in a particular city decades from now. We can predict whether it will affect the average amount of heat being absorbed or retained by the Earth. Many of these schemes are based on phenomena with natural analogs, e.g., aerosol geoengineering which is like artificial volcanoes: we already know that big volcanic eruptions cool the climate.
If we compress the history of our planet and its weather in 1 year, the records we have about weather comprise of less than a second of observations. Do you really want to draw conclusions out of that measly amount of information?
If we were trying to predict the climate 4 billion years from now, you might have a point. While the Earth's past climate history is of interest, the current climate does not directly depend on what the climate was doing billions of years ago.
the ozone hole that appeared over antarctica and caused all the panic is a natural and annual phenomena.
Uh, you know that's bullshit, right?
the annual ozone hole was first measured in 1956-57, long before the ozone destroying CFCs were in common use.
You're confused. There is a seasonal cycle in ozone concentrations. CFCs have added a long-term downward trend on top of that seasonal cycle, meaning that each winter the hole is on average larger it used to be.
There is no overall or permanent depletion of the ozone layer.
Oh please. I hope this isn't one of those claims that "global warming was re-branded `climate change' because it hasn't been proven". The term "climate change" was used by scientists well before global warming ever became an issue, and is still used.
And "well established" != "proven".
Nothing is ever proven in science. Sadly, we don't have the luxury of making decisions in the presence of perfect certainty. "Well established" is what we have to work with.
Adapting is probably a lot cheaper than trying to reverse or to compensate any supposed effect,
Some adaptation will be necessary. Mainstream economists find that a combination of mitigation and adaptation is cheaper and less risky than adaptation alone.
And change means opportunity! not disaster: some changes are good, some are bad.
Some changes are good, some are bad, but change which is too large/fast is usually bad since it's harder to adapt to. CO2 emissions abatement is insurance: we don't know things will be bad, but there's a serious possibility they will be, and the damages could be very large. Maybe they won't be, but it's worth slowing down.
According to the Stern report, the cost of reducing CO2 emissions is around 1% of global GDP (low hundreds of billions if I remember correctly). Have there been any estimates made regarding the cost of any geo-engineering solutions?
Yes. They're a lot cheaper that CO2 emissions abatement in terms of just reducing global temperature, ASSUMING there are no side-effects or failures. There have not yet been many economic studies of scenarios in which geoengineering doesn't work. Those risks are pretty high, so geoengineering doesn't necessarily come out cheaper in a cost-benefit analysis.
Firstly, why would geo-engineering be more likely to generate global agreement to act in a concerted fashion than any other way?
It's not intended to. It's supposed to avoid the need to act in a concerted fashion: a single country can implement some of the cheaper schemes. (That itself is a problem, because then you could have one country controlling everyone else's climate.)
Secondly, we don't exactly have a stellar record of successful interventions in previous attempts to facilitate large scale change in our environment
True.
Thirdly, with so much money on offer for "big engineering" solutions, it would be FAR too likely to promote corrupt processes in the bidding processes around such projects
Maybe, but there's also potential for corruption in, e.g., carbon trading markets.
In my opinion, we need to take steps to decrease our environmental footprint anyway.
There is no statistically significant climate trend of Earth cooling. It's also not true that the Earth cooled 0.7 degrees in 2007 (just look at, e.g., the GISTEMP record your first article cites; it has 2007 as 0.03 C warmer than 2006). Maybe they were talking about some particular cold month. It's rather ridiculous to claim that all the global warming since the 1930s has been "cancelled out" by interannual variability. The Australian has a whole series of extremely dishonest pseudo-skeptical articles on climate change.
You need to seriously learn to tell the difference between weather and climate. One or two years doesn't tell you squat about what the climate trend is doing. Clue: this does not mean that the Arctic sea ice has stopped melting.
Not really. All we know is that the general trend of the earth's temperatures have been rising.
We know a hell of a lot more than that. Start here.
We don't have a clue what caused it, if it will continue, or anything.
We know that the greenhouse effect predicts enhanced surface warming, stratospheric cooling, changes in the diurnal cycle, etc., which have been observed. We know that the warming isn't coming from the oceans (they're gaining heat, not losing it). We know that the heat isn't coming from the Sun (irradiance hasn't gone up to match the temperatures), or reduced volcanic activitiy, etc. Basic atomic physics predicts that the greenhouse effect exists and will grow as CO2 levels increase.
Plus, it isn't even global warming, its local warming some places have higher highs and others don't.
It is global warming, as the global average temperature has increased, as has the average temperature of most locations on Earth.
Just take a look in an Almanac and you will see that the highest temperatures for a given day don't correspond with the CO2 emissions for the year.
Duh. They're not supposed to. The existence of weather doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist.
Ok, so some of the costland is gone and cities must be moved further inland.
Oh, that's all. Let's just relocate some cities. Need to move Manhattan? No problem, technology will solve that, it'll be cheap. Venice goes underwater for good? Who cares, it has no historic value, we can build a new city. 10 million coastal Bangladeshis decide they need to move to India or Pakistan? I'm sure that won't have any political consequences. Technology will just solve that anyway.
That is also assuming that technology will not advance to where that is no longer a problem which my guess is based on technology throughout history is that if there is a problem humans will solve it.
Yeah, that's why there aren't any more problems in the world. Technology solved them all.
Oh right, I forgot about all those times in history when innovation completely ceased and everything stayed where it was for ~200 years. Sure, we can't assume that there will be some miracle, but you can assume that in 200 years we will have enough technology to deal with the problem,
No, you can't. Economists who study this problem include technological innovation in their models (mostly in terms of reduced costs of abatement, but also sometimes in adaptation), but that still doesn't get rid of economic damages either now or in the future or the need for abatement as a risk management option.
The fact is, we don't know what will be possible in 200 years. It's even possible that the world will be poorer, more war torn, or otherwise in LESS of a position to deal with the problem.
Even if technological improvements exist, that still doesn't mean that we want to commit to a certain level of climate change. Suppose we can build artificial islands to replace lost shorelines. Hell, we can probably do that with existing technology. And for the sake of argument, even assume that they cost nothing. That still doesn't mean we want to have to build them. Maybe we want to keep our existing coastal cities. By committing to, say, sea level rise now, we eliminate options for future generations. There are a whole host of ethical questions and impacts that can't be waved away with technology, the dreams of utopian technophiles notwithstanding.
Climate change has large global impacts. 200 years ago we didn't have the technology to avert those impacts. In 200 years we may not either. The climate system is huge, has huge inertia, and affects everything on Earth. It's not easy to control, nor are its changes easy to adapt to, even with high technology. And, my main point, just because we can introduce technological "fixes" doesn't mean that those "fixes" are more desirable than just mitigating the problem in the first place.
Besides, we've already done a bunch of geoengineering by releasing all these gases in the atmosphere. Emitting less of them is also geoengineering, so we're knee deep in the shit we created and we have to do something anyways.
Emitting less of them is also geoengineering, but at least we have a pretty good idea of what that would do, because we know what the planet was like before we started adding those gases in the first place. Any other scheme is inherently riskier, because we don't have direct analogs. (e.g., we know what volcanoes do to the climate. But we don't know what "a few major volcanos every year in the presence of continued increasing CO2 levels" would do, which is effectively what aerosol geoengineering would ultimately require.) I do think we should research geoengineering as a backup plan, but it's a mistake to claim that it's no more risky than just reducing CO2 emissions.
Even if the oceans rise and all of the poles melt, humans will still survive and thrive.
We'll survive, but that doesn't mean that there won't be economic, social, or geopolitical impacts that we'd prefer to have avoided.
Sure, polar bears might go extinct, but so did dinosaurs millions of years before we were even around driving our SUVs.
Again, a non-argument. Just because species have gone extinct in the past doesn't mean we'd prefer to accelerate the extinction rate. I mean, sure, if you place zero value on ecosystems, maybe, but not everyone does.
And then what happens when we get plunged into another ice age because of something?
Then we'll probably wish we'd have saved our fossil fuels to counteract that, instead of using them up now when we don't need the warming.
But that is assuming that everything stays the same, carbon emissions, the sun, and technology.
No, it's assuming that we don't KNOW that miracle solutions will appear. If people in the future have amazing tech and don't care about sea level rise or whatever, great, but it's not really ethical to hand them such a problem assuming that they'll be able to and want to deal with it. "We shouldn't bother to reduce the risk of climate change because maybe we'll have a giant nuclear winter instead" isn't really a compelling position.
The Sun is very unlikely to counteract the greenhouse effect over the long term any time soon. We do have geological records of what the Sun has done in the past. It's conceivable that it could do something really weird in the near future, but again, it's not something you bet on. In tens of thousands of years we might have to worry about the next ice age, in which case we'd probably prefer to save our greenhouse gases for later, when we actually need them.
Sheesh, do you get all your climate science off skeptic web sites? Your whole post is nothing but a laundry list of long-debunked talking points.
There is some evidence that suggests carbon FOLLOWS warming buy several hundreds of years.
You're talking about the glacial-interglacial cycle. That's long been a prediction of Milaknovitch theory, well before any such lag was actually measured. It doesn't mean that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that it doesn't cause warming. It means that there are feedbacks between the climate and the carbon cycle. When glacial temperatures rise, CO2 levels increase (due to, e.g., outgassing from the oceans), as predicted by theory. Increased CO2 levels, in turn, add to the temperature rise. If you leave out the CO2 greenhouse effect, you can't reproduce the amount of warming observed in the glacial-interglacial cycle.
There seems to be a small but growing group of people that feel the sun's activities are far more responsible for warming and cooling that carbon.
If you're talking about the modern warming period, there isn't a growing group of climate scientists who believe that; far fewer believe that now than they did 10 or 20 years ago. The evidence is strongly against it, since the Sun's activities during that period don't actually agree with the warming which is observed.
In the past, solar activity has indeed had significant effects on climate. It can explain a substantial amount (but by no means all) of the warming in the early 20th century. However, solar irradiance simply hasn't changed very much since the 1950s, and can't explain the warming since then, even if you appeal to speculative indirect effects like cosmic ray modulation of cloud cover (as comic rays also haven't changed in a way to explain the observed warming).
Additionally, Methane and water vapor are far more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon.
Once again, that has nothing to do with the fact that CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, and we're adding a lot of it to the atmosphere.
Finally, I just read that temperatures peaked in '98 and have actually cooled by about a half degree or so.
That's wrong. January 2008 was 0.5 degrees cooler than 2007 on average, but a monthly fluctuation in temperature does not mean the Earth is experiencing a cooling trend.
It seems that the earth has always warmed and cooled in cycles.
The Earth has natural cycles, but there isn't any natural cycle which predicts what we've observed in the modern warming period.
I think it is far more effective to effect local solutions than to risk geo-engineering with processes that we don't understand and really can't control.
Global solutions may be required to global problems, but geoengineering is indeed riskier than other alternatives.
Or did you perhaps think that the amount of CO2 in the air the last ten thousand years is the "correct" amount, and the CO2 levels at other points in history (it's been both higher and lower than it is now) are somehow wrong?
Yes, as far as current civilization is concerned, which has adapted itself to a particular climate over the last ten thousand years. We can re-adapt to a new climate, but it's going to be expensive if the change happens within a century or two, and there are very long-term consequences (e.g. sea level rise) that we may or may not prefer to commit future generations to.
Geoengineering itself is not unproven nor crackpot; there is plenty of evidence that it works as far as cooling the climate. The unproven part is the side effects. And nobody's proposing to "risk the entire biosphere" on an untested idea; obviously, it would have to be tested on more limited scales first. Some geoengineering schemes are hard to dial down, but some of them (like aerosol geoengineering) can be turned off pretty quickly, with no worse consequences than a large volcano (say, Pinatubo scale). Sure, large volcanoes can have significant effects, but on that scale they're not going to "risk the biosphere". If it turns out to have extra side effects, you can stop doing it. (Other schemes aren't as easy to dial down; if you fertilize the oceans, you're going to have nutrients in the water for a long time, even if you stop adding them.)
Some of these geoengineering schemes are cheap enough for individual countries to implement unilaterally, which is an even worse problem than mere CO2 emissions abatement from a geopolitical standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
And what was proven before climate change become the latest fad religon, Is that the planet heats and and cools down on it's own, and we are due for heating up.
Please, tell me what evidence supports that "we are due for heating up" in a way that agrees with the heating up that has been observed.
Wheather humans are accelatoring that or not hasn't been proven, it's only theroy...
Just like evolution is only a theory.
if you are a guy in upstate PA who owns what could become beachfront property, or a major port, then, greenhouse gasses and rising sea levels are a boon
I submit that if a guy in upstate PA is looking at his house being beachfront property within his lifetime, that's probably not going to be a boon, because the national and global economic disruption from a sea level rise that fast would probably mean he's hiding in his bunker and hunting rats for food.
(Yeah, I know what your point was: some people benefit while others lose out.)
Do you know of a cost/benefit analysis for limiting emissions vs. doing nothing different at all?
There are tons of such analyses. Pretty much all of them find that some emissions reduction is preferred business-as-usual. Read Nordhaus's new book for a pretty mainstream economic analysis.
What is this 'global average temperature' of which you speak?
The surface temperature averaged over the Earth's surface.
Temperature is an intensive thermodynamic property and as such cannot be averaged meaningfully in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere.
You can average it. It's not conserved or anything like that, so it's not really a fundamental physical quantity like heat is. It's still useful as a climatic indicator: it's not going to directly tell you what the planetary radiation balance is (which is what you really want to know), but it's a starting point in inferring it.
Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful.
It's more meaningful than average temperature, but it's also not measured. That's why people use temperature.
It is perfectly possible for the temperature to fall everywhere on Earth and the heat content of the atmosphere to increase.
It's possible, but please note that what we mostly care about in terms of impacts is the surface temperature, not the total atmospheric heat content.
Global ocean temperature, now... that's meaningful, and increasing, but I would take global warming a lot more seriously if the people who are all het up about it showed an even rudimentary grasp of basic physics,
My Ph.D. was in statistical thermodynamics. I stand by my statements.
A sceptic about the magnitude of the effect of CO2 on global heat content may be reasonable. A person who puts there argument in terms of a problematic quality such as global average temperature is not.
That's nonsense. It is perfectly possible to compare hypothetical forcing mechanisms on the basis of their observed influence on globally averaged temperature, if they give different predictions for that quantity. It's not nearly as useful as heat content, but that quantity is also not known. Certainly ocean temperature changes are one line of evidence, but so are surface temperatures, as well as tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures.
Furthermore, since every single story we have seen recently about global warming has announced loudly and clearly that climate scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate,
That's false. "Arctic ice melting faster than expected" doesn't mean "scientists have no clue whatsoever about what is actually happening in the climate".
Each of these stories, if read by someone who hadn't bought into a religious belief in the infallibility of climate scientists, would be taken as clear-cut evidence that climate science as a whole is terrible at predicting anything to do with climate,
Climate science is reasonably good at predicting radiation balance, heat budgets, and surface temperatures over large scales and decadal time periods. They're still bad at predicting regional climate, and precipitation is mediocre. Weather events like hurricanes are still terrible.
Being established is not the same as being proven or,
Nothing is ever proven in science. Sadly, we don't have the luxury of making decisions in the presence of perfect certainty. "Well established" is what we have to work with.
for that matter, accepted by most everyone.
I'm quite sure it's not accepted by "most everyone", but that doesn't change the evidence which makes it well accepted in the scientific community.
It is crazy how scientific community behaves like just any other group where scientific methods are trumped by polls and consensus.
Scientific methods aren't trumped by polls. There's nothing wrong with polling scientists to see what they think.
It is exactly this herd mentality that prevented the community to look outside string theory for the grand unified theory.
That's nonsense. There are plenty of other theories which compete with string theory. (e.g., in quantum gravity there's loop quantum gravity, dynamical triangulations, etc.)
And "herd mentality" snipes notwithstanding, it's simply the case that some venues are deemed more promising than others. If you gave equal attention to every theory, you'd be spending most of your time on crap, because 90% of everything is crap (Sturgeon's Law). You may be upset that the HEP community decided string theory was the most promising, but if it wasn't string theory, there still would be some theory which was deemed most promising.
Folks like Garrett Lisi had to resort to virtually getting away from civilization to make progress their own radical new ideas.
Yeah, and he ended up with a wrong theory (see, e.g., Distler's detailed analysis), so that's not really supporting your point. It might help your position if he came up with a successful theory.
The IPCC figures are extremely suspect.
And you believe that because a skeptic web site said so. Perhaps you should investigate the science a little more closely and, I don't know, read something written by climate scientists. You might want to re-evaluate your biases if your default response is to automatically dismiss pretty much the entire scientific literature on every climate related topic.
When, for some reason, their modelling produces figures they don't like, there always seems to be an "adjustment" in their favor.
That's nonsense. There are places where models agree with data, and places where models disagree with data, which is the case in any science. There isn't any conspiracy to make everything fit; if there were, there wouldn't ever be any disagreement.
There is an interesting website examining the work on global temperature mesurement, Urban Heat Islands etc somewhere, damed if i can find it though.
You're probably thinking of "Watts Up With That". They were crowing a lot about the urban heat island effect, but got a lot quieter after one of their own contributors analyzed the data from stations with no risk of urban contamination and found basically no difference in the temperature record. This is unsurprising, because the urban heat island effect was already found to be insignificant, and at least one of the surface records cross-checks against rural stations anyway. Not to mention the oceans are also warming (no urban heat islands there), the satellites agree with the surface stations (no contamination there), etc.
I'll add one more thing to my post - people old enough will remember back in the 70 and early 80's when we thought we were causing a massive cooling and heading towards and ice age.
"We" (meaning the climate science community) didn't actually think that (see, e.g., here). There were a few papers that got a lot of media hype, but the general view among scientists at the time was "we don't know enough yet, but it's more likely to warm than cool". 30+ years later and the view is "it's very likely to warm, but we're not totally sure how much".
We better be *damn* sure we know what will happen when we intentionally release more change into the world than what we are trying to fix.
Well, one virtue of some of the present geoengineering schemes is that they're fast-acting, and conversely, quick to turn off if they start having side effects. Take stratospheric aerosol injection. Aerosols precipitate out of the atmosphere in a year or two; CO2 stays up for a century or more. If erroneously think the planet is warming and cool it with aerosols, you can turn them off within a few years if you need to. If you erroneously think the planet is cooling and warm it with CO2, your mistake stays around a lot longer. The decision problem is asymmetric.
That being said, your basic point is valid: geoengineering is a lot riskier than just reducing CO2 concentrations back to earlier levels.
I was just pointing out that just because "emitting less gases" is geoengineering, that doesn't mean that it's comparable to other forms of geoengineering.
These people and their models cannot even tell what the weather will be in 5 days but they feel confident that they can affect or even control the weather on a massive scale. Wow!!!
We're not talking about controlling weather, we're talking about controlling climate. We can't predict how something is going to affect the weather in a particular city decades from now. We can predict whether it will affect the average amount of heat being absorbed or retained by the Earth. Many of these schemes are based on phenomena with natural analogs, e.g., aerosol geoengineering which is like artificial volcanoes: we already know that big volcanic eruptions cool the climate.
If we compress the history of our planet and its weather in 1 year, the records we have about weather comprise of less than a second of observations. Do you really want to draw conclusions out of that measly amount of information?
If we were trying to predict the climate 4 billion years from now, you might have a point. While the Earth's past climate history is of interest, the current climate does not directly depend on what the climate was doing billions of years ago.
The idea is usually to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations to closer to pre-industrial levels (~ 280 ppmv), not all the way to zero.
the ozone hole that appeared over antarctica and caused all the panic is a natural and annual phenomena.
Uh, you know that's bullshit, right?
the annual ozone hole was first measured in 1956-57, long before the ozone destroying CFCs were in common use.
You're confused. There is a seasonal cycle in ozone concentrations. CFCs have added a long-term downward trend on top of that seasonal cycle, meaning that each winter the hole is on average larger it used to be.
There is no overall or permanent depletion of the ozone layer.
The data disagree.
It is rather shifting to "climate change".
Oh please. I hope this isn't one of those claims that "global warming was re-branded `climate change' because it hasn't been proven". The term "climate change" was used by scientists well before global warming ever became an issue, and is still used.
And "well established" != "proven".
Nothing is ever proven in science. Sadly, we don't have the luxury of making decisions in the presence of perfect certainty. "Well established" is what we have to work with.
Adapting is probably a lot cheaper than trying to reverse or to compensate any supposed effect,
Some adaptation will be necessary. Mainstream economists find that a combination of mitigation and adaptation is cheaper and less risky than adaptation alone.
And change means opportunity! not disaster: some changes are good, some are bad.
Some changes are good, some are bad, but change which is too large/fast is usually bad since it's harder to adapt to. CO2 emissions abatement is insurance: we don't know things will be bad, but there's a serious possibility they will be, and the damages could be very large. Maybe they won't be, but it's worth slowing down.
According to the Stern report, the cost of reducing CO2 emissions is around 1% of global GDP (low hundreds of billions if I remember correctly). Have there been any estimates made regarding the cost of any geo-engineering solutions?
Yes. They're a lot cheaper that CO2 emissions abatement in terms of just reducing global temperature, ASSUMING there are no side-effects or failures. There have not yet been many economic studies of scenarios in which geoengineering doesn't work. Those risks are pretty high, so geoengineering doesn't necessarily come out cheaper in a cost-benefit analysis.
Firstly, why would geo-engineering be more likely to generate global agreement to act in a concerted fashion than any other way?
It's not intended to. It's supposed to avoid the need to act in a concerted fashion: a single country can implement some of the cheaper schemes. (That itself is a problem, because then you could have one country controlling everyone else's climate.)
Secondly, we don't exactly have a stellar record of successful interventions in previous attempts to facilitate large scale change in our environment
True.
Thirdly, with so much money on offer for "big engineering" solutions, it would be FAR too likely to promote corrupt processes in the bidding processes around such projects
Maybe, but there's also potential for corruption in, e.g., carbon trading markets.
In my opinion, we need to take steps to decrease our environmental footprint anyway.
Probably.
There is no statistically significant climate trend of Earth cooling. It's also not true that the Earth cooled 0.7 degrees in 2007 (just look at, e.g., the GISTEMP record your first article cites; it has 2007 as 0.03 C warmer than 2006). Maybe they were talking about some particular cold month. It's rather ridiculous to claim that all the global warming since the 1930s has been "cancelled out" by interannual variability. The Australian has a whole series of extremely dishonest pseudo-skeptical articles on climate change.
You need to seriously learn to tell the difference between weather and climate. One or two years doesn't tell you squat about what the climate trend is doing. Clue: this does not mean that the Arctic sea ice has stopped melting.
Not really. All we know is that the general trend of the earth's temperatures have been rising.
We know a hell of a lot more than that. Start here.
We don't have a clue what caused it, if it will continue, or anything.
We know that the greenhouse effect predicts enhanced surface warming, stratospheric cooling, changes in the diurnal cycle, etc., which have been observed. We know that the warming isn't coming from the oceans (they're gaining heat, not losing it). We know that the heat isn't coming from the Sun (irradiance hasn't gone up to match the temperatures), or reduced volcanic activitiy, etc. Basic atomic physics predicts that the greenhouse effect exists and will grow as CO2 levels increase.
Plus, it isn't even global warming, its local warming some places have higher highs and others don't.
It is global warming, as the global average temperature has increased, as has the average temperature of most locations on Earth.
Just take a look in an Almanac and you will see that the highest temperatures for a given day don't correspond with the CO2 emissions for the year.
Duh. They're not supposed to. The existence of weather doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist.
Ok, so some of the costland is gone and cities must be moved further inland.
Oh, that's all. Let's just relocate some cities. Need to move Manhattan? No problem, technology will solve that, it'll be cheap. Venice goes underwater for good? Who cares, it has no historic value, we can build a new city. 10 million coastal Bangladeshis decide they need to move to India or Pakistan? I'm sure that won't have any political consequences. Technology will just solve that anyway.
That is also assuming that technology will not advance to where that is no longer a problem which my guess is based on technology throughout history is that if there is a problem humans will solve it.
Yeah, that's why there aren't any more problems in the world. Technology solved them all.
Oh right, I forgot about all those times in history when innovation completely ceased and everything stayed where it was for ~200 years. Sure, we can't assume that there will be some miracle, but you can assume that in 200 years we will have enough technology to deal with the problem,
No, you can't. Economists who study this problem include technological innovation in their models (mostly in terms of reduced costs of abatement, but also sometimes in adaptation), but that still doesn't get rid of economic damages either now or in the future or the need for abatement as a risk management option.
The fact is, we don't know what will be possible in 200 years. It's even possible that the world will be poorer, more war torn, or otherwise in LESS of a position to deal with the problem.
Even if technological improvements exist, that still doesn't mean that we want to commit to a certain level of climate change. Suppose we can build artificial islands to replace lost shorelines. Hell, we can probably do that with existing technology. And for the sake of argument, even assume that they cost nothing. That still doesn't mean we want to have to build them. Maybe we want to keep our existing coastal cities. By committing to, say, sea level rise now, we eliminate options for future generations. There are a whole host of ethical questions and impacts that can't be waved away with technology, the dreams of utopian technophiles notwithstanding.
Climate change has large global impacts. 200 years ago we didn't have the technology to avert those impacts. In 200 years we may not either. The climate system is huge, has huge inertia, and affects everything on Earth. It's not easy to control, nor are its changes easy to adapt to, even with high technology. And, my main point, just because we can introduce technological "fixes" doesn't mean that those "fixes" are more desirable than just mitigating the problem in the first place.
Besides, we've already done a bunch of geoengineering by releasing all these gases in the atmosphere. Emitting less of them is also geoengineering, so we're knee deep in the shit we created and we have to do something anyways.
Emitting less of them is also geoengineering, but at least we have a pretty good idea of what that would do, because we know what the planet was like before we started adding those gases in the first place. Any other scheme is inherently riskier, because we don't have direct analogs. (e.g., we know what volcanoes do to the climate. But we don't know what "a few major volcanos every year in the presence of continued increasing CO2 levels" would do, which is effectively what aerosol geoengineering would ultimately require.) I do think we should research geoengineering as a backup plan, but it's a mistake to claim that it's no more risky than just reducing CO2 emissions.
We do not have to , global warming is not proven.
It's rather well established by now.
Even if the oceans rise and all of the poles melt, humans will still survive and thrive.
We'll survive, but that doesn't mean that there won't be economic, social, or geopolitical impacts that we'd prefer to have avoided.
Sure, polar bears might go extinct, but so did dinosaurs millions of years before we were even around driving our SUVs.
Again, a non-argument. Just because species have gone extinct in the past doesn't mean we'd prefer to accelerate the extinction rate. I mean, sure, if you place zero value on ecosystems, maybe, but not everyone does.
And then what happens when we get plunged into another ice age because of something?
Then we'll probably wish we'd have saved our fossil fuels to counteract that, instead of using them up now when we don't need the warming.
But that is assuming that everything stays the same, carbon emissions, the sun, and technology.
No, it's assuming that we don't KNOW that miracle solutions will appear. If people in the future have amazing tech and don't care about sea level rise or whatever, great, but it's not really ethical to hand them such a problem assuming that they'll be able to and want to deal with it. "We shouldn't bother to reduce the risk of climate change because maybe we'll have a giant nuclear winter instead" isn't really a compelling position.
The Sun is very unlikely to counteract the greenhouse effect over the long term any time soon. We do have geological records of what the Sun has done in the past. It's conceivable that it could do something really weird in the near future, but again, it's not something you bet on. In tens of thousands of years we might have to worry about the next ice age, in which case we'd probably prefer to save our greenhouse gases for later, when we actually need them.
Sheesh, do you get all your climate science off skeptic web sites? Your whole post is nothing but a laundry list of long-debunked talking points.
There is some evidence that suggests carbon FOLLOWS warming buy several hundreds of years.
You're talking about the glacial-interglacial cycle. That's long been a prediction of Milaknovitch theory, well before any such lag was actually measured. It doesn't mean that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that it doesn't cause warming. It means that there are feedbacks between the climate and the carbon cycle. When glacial temperatures rise, CO2 levels increase (due to, e.g., outgassing from the oceans), as predicted by theory. Increased CO2 levels, in turn, add to the temperature rise. If you leave out the CO2 greenhouse effect, you can't reproduce the amount of warming observed in the glacial-interglacial cycle.
There seems to be a small but growing group of people that feel the sun's activities are far more responsible for warming and cooling that carbon.
If you're talking about the modern warming period, there isn't a growing group of climate scientists who believe that; far fewer believe that now than they did 10 or 20 years ago. The evidence is strongly against it, since the Sun's activities during that period don't actually agree with the warming which is observed.
In the past, solar activity has indeed had significant effects on climate. It can explain a substantial amount (but by no means all) of the warming in the early 20th century. However, solar irradiance simply hasn't changed very much since the 1950s, and can't explain the warming since then, even if you appeal to speculative indirect effects like cosmic ray modulation of cloud cover (as comic rays also haven't changed in a way to explain the observed warming).
Additionally, Methane and water vapor are far more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon.
Once again, that has nothing to do with the fact that CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, and we're adding a lot of it to the atmosphere.
Finally, I just read that temperatures peaked in '98 and have actually cooled by about a half degree or so.
That's wrong. January 2008 was 0.5 degrees cooler than 2007 on average, but a monthly fluctuation in temperature does not mean the Earth is experiencing a cooling trend.
It seems that the earth has always warmed and cooled in cycles.
The Earth has natural cycles, but there isn't any natural cycle which predicts what we've observed in the modern warming period.
I think it is far more effective to effect local solutions than to risk geo-engineering with processes that we don't understand and really can't control.
Global solutions may be required to global problems, but geoengineering is indeed riskier than other alternatives.
Or did you perhaps think that the amount of CO2 in the air the last ten thousand years is the "correct" amount, and the CO2 levels at other points in history (it's been both higher and lower than it is now) are somehow wrong?
Yes, as far as current civilization is concerned, which has adapted itself to a particular climate over the last ten thousand years. We can re-adapt to a new climate, but it's going to be expensive if the change happens within a century or two, and there are very long-term consequences (e.g. sea level rise) that we may or may not prefer to commit future generations to.
Geoengineering itself is not unproven nor crackpot; there is plenty of evidence that it works as far as cooling the climate. The unproven part is the side effects. And nobody's proposing to "risk the entire biosphere" on an untested idea; obviously, it would have to be tested on more limited scales first. Some geoengineering schemes are hard to dial down, but some of them (like aerosol geoengineering) can be turned off pretty quickly, with no worse consequences than a large volcano (say, Pinatubo scale). Sure, large volcanoes can have significant effects, but on that scale they're not going to "risk the biosphere". If it turns out to have extra side effects, you can stop doing it. (Other schemes aren't as easy to dial down; if you fertilize the oceans, you're going to have nutrients in the water for a long time, even if you stop adding them.)
Some of these geoengineering schemes are cheap enough for individual countries to implement unilaterally, which is an even worse problem than mere CO2 emissions abatement from a geopolitical standpoint.