What 10 years of cooling off? The last time that happened was in the 1950's/1960's.
How do you expect us to take you seriously when you won't even take 5 seconds to look up the spelling of a word online? You obviously have little knowledge of the science. Come back once you can converse on the subject at least semi-intelligently.
I was responding directly to your comment, not the thread in general.
It's not a "supposition", it's the conclusion of the last IPCC report after accounting for all the factors with quantifiable economic impact.
My reading of the IPCC AR4 report says that if we take strong action to limit and eventually eliminate net emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases then the cost will be a modest reduction in GDP. But the longer we wait to take that action the higher the cost. From the AR 4 Synthesis Report:
It is very likely that globally aggregated figures underestimate the damage costs because they cannot include many non-quantifiable impacts.
You can't ignore the non-quantifiable impacts just because you can't put a number on them.
True, but the primary cause of man-made extinctions isn't AGW, it's population growth and habitat destruction, and those are related to lack of economic development. Strong measures to prevent AGW are going to make those problems worse by reducing economic growth (IPCC), not better.
Really. What causes habitat destruction if it's not economic development? Of course there are other things that cause it too but development is a major factor. I'm not arguing against economic development, just more thoughtful development.
Modern industrial agriculture depends on little more than sun, warmth, and land...
You obviously don't know much about agriculture. Part of my growing up was on a farm. Without fresh water in the form of precipitation or irrigation, without fertilizers, without energy to run the machinery and without good soil yields would drop precipitously. It would become difficult if not impossible to support the current world population.
The simple fact is that big corporations are job creators.
NO!
The real job creators are the consumers (I hate that word but it works here) who have the money to buy what the corporations (and other businesses) have to sell. No business is going to hire anyone unless they have someone to sell to. If there is demand for some product or service then the demand will be filled, be it by a corporation or an individual business, creating jobs. I'm not saying demand can't be created by coming up with some great new thing (i.e. smart phones) but unless a business thinks it can make a profit selling something it's not going to hire to produce it.
I have never argued that this will be an extinction level event for homo sapiens. We're very adaptable and as long as they can find enough to eat some will survive. But it will lead to the extinction of a lot of other species who are unable to adapt to the rate of change which will make our lives poorer. It's possible it could be an extinction level event for our technological civilization though. The more time you spend on simply surviving the less time you have for higher level thinking and working on things that aren't necessary for your survival. What facts do you have to back up your supposition that at worst "we're talking about a modest reduction in GDP"? I would consider that on the margins of the best case scenario.
No actual scientist in the field ever predicted that Florida would be underwater by 2012. And no, Al Gore did not make that prediction either. You need to pay more attention to the time frames that people put on their projections.
The dip around 2011 was due the the extremely heavy precipitation that hit Australia, the northern Amazon region and a few other places around the world in that time period. It takes some time for all of that water to drain back into the ocean. I believe sea level is back up to the trend line now.
Who knows, it might even bad enough that we notice some of the effects within the lifetimes of our grandchildren.
Or if you're perceptive enough you are noticing some of the bad effects happening right now. On human time scales it's a pretty gradual process starting out slow but steadily getting worse until in 30 or 40 years it's a full blown catastrophe.
In a greenhouse water and nutrients are optimized as well as CO2. That's not so true once you get out into the rest of the world. 33% is an optimal number probably not generally achievable outside of a greenhouse.
Permitting outdated businesses to fail is at the core of progress.
For some definitions of progress. I don't consider locally owned businesses to be outdated. As I said they are part of the local community as I am and helping them helps the whole community remain strong.
Yes, and I shop there at times. But I also shop at the local hardware and building supply places too and only go to Home Depot when they don't have what I want at reasonable prices.
Of course not everything I buy is produced locally although I look for that when I can. I don't expect us to produce everything locally since different areas have different strengths and weaknesses in that regard. But spending money in local retail companies keeps the money in the local economy strengthening it and that is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
On balance, arable land isn't destroyed by climate change, it merely moves around. In fact, arable land may well increase due to climate change, with huge areas of Europe, Siberia, Canada, and Alaska thawing and becoming arable.
Arable land depends on far more than just temperature. Much of the soil in those northern areas is thin and low on plant nutrients and will take centuries to build up to good soil. Climate change doesn't change the day lengths and some plants depend on that for determining their growth cycles. Because of the short days it will still get very cold in the winter (just not quite as cold as it does now but still well below freezing) which may make it impractical to grow many perennial plants that can't survive the winters. When permafrost melts it is not instantly ready for agriculture and make take a century or more to become ready.
It wouldn't shock me if all of the climate disruption reduced human population by half by 2100 but I won't live long enough to see it.
Local businesses are at the core of the community. They employ my neighbors and me*. They support local activities and charities. They pay local taxes. I like dealing with them face to face. All of those things and more are worth more to me than saving a few bucks online. I do buy online for things I can't find locally or maybe if the price difference is ridiculous.
* Actually I work for a medium sized multinational corp. but when I started it was a local business that eventually got bought out. We still are active locally.
I suspect that the UC system is a bit more generous than most but ok. I was thinking more in terms of the management, legal and financial types than PhD scientists.
Government is not a luxury, it's a necessity. If the government is weak or non-existent then before too long you will have warlords and other strongmen enforcing their own form of authority on the majority of the population. Anarchy is a nice ideal but it presumes that enough people buy into it and work effectively to make it viable. I don't think that can ever happen.
What do you think the various governments do with that money? Do they just pile it up and burn it? No, they spend it into the economy or give it to people who spend it. Even if they are wasting it they're still buying products from the private sector and paying salaries with it. If you want to start another recession cut "entitlement" spending by 50%. Then all of those people receiving those entitlements, the vast majority of who spend it almost immediately cut their spending drastically. As tehcyder mentioned above if you make those peoples lives miserable enough you're just fomenting revolution.
Government employees toward the lower end of the wage scale do make pretty good wages compared to the private sector but as you get toward the higher end that's not so true. Compare what a private practice lawyer can make compared to a government lawyer for instance. The President only makes something like $400,000/year. The President/CEO of a huge private company generally makes at least 10's of millions of dollars.
Some of the information I've heard indicates this (the Holocene) is probably one of the long (24,000 year) interglacials so it might be another 10,000+ years before the next glacial starts. However, the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere is probably causing enough warming that the next glacial is probably postponed indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
It's spelled Medieval.
What 10 years of cooling off? The last time that happened was in the 1950's/1960's.
How do you expect us to take you seriously when you won't even take 5 seconds to look up the spelling of a word online? You obviously have little knowledge of the science. Come back once you can converse on the subject at least semi-intelligently.
Current estimates are that human emissions are responsible for 80-120% of global warming.
More efficient at doing what? I obviously don't place maximum economic efficiency above other values.
I was responding directly to your comment, not the thread in general.
It's not a "supposition", it's the conclusion of the last IPCC report after accounting for all the factors with quantifiable economic impact.
My reading of the IPCC AR4 report says that if we take strong action to limit and eventually eliminate net emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases then the cost will be a modest reduction in GDP. But the longer we wait to take that action the higher the cost. From the AR 4 Synthesis Report:
It is very likely that globally aggregated figures underestimate the damage costs because they cannot include many non-quantifiable impacts.
You can't ignore the non-quantifiable impacts just because you can't put a number on them.
True, but the primary cause of man-made extinctions isn't AGW, it's population growth and habitat destruction, and those are related to lack of economic development. Strong measures to prevent AGW are going to make those problems worse by reducing economic growth (IPCC), not better.
Really. What causes habitat destruction if it's not economic development? Of course there are other things that cause it too but development is a major factor. I'm not arguing against economic development, just more thoughtful development.
Modern industrial agriculture depends on little more than sun, warmth, and land ...
You obviously don't know much about agriculture. Part of my growing up was on a farm. Without fresh water in the form of precipitation or irrigation, without fertilizers, without energy to run the machinery and without good soil yields would drop precipitously. It would become difficult if not impossible to support the current world population.
The Board of Directors too.
The simple fact is that big corporations are job creators.
NO!
The real job creators are the consumers (I hate that word but it works here) who have the money to buy what the corporations (and other businesses) have to sell. No business is going to hire anyone unless they have someone to sell to. If there is demand for some product or service then the demand will be filled, be it by a corporation or an individual business, creating jobs. I'm not saying demand can't be created by coming up with some great new thing (i.e. smart phones) but unless a business thinks it can make a profit selling something it's not going to hire to produce it.
I have never argued that this will be an extinction level event for homo sapiens. We're very adaptable and as long as they can find enough to eat some will survive. But it will lead to the extinction of a lot of other species who are unable to adapt to the rate of change which will make our lives poorer. It's possible it could be an extinction level event for our technological civilization though. The more time you spend on simply surviving the less time you have for higher level thinking and working on things that aren't necessary for your survival. What facts do you have to back up your supposition that at worst "we're talking about a modest reduction in GDP"? I would consider that on the margins of the best case scenario.
No actual scientist in the field ever predicted that Florida would be underwater by 2012. And no, Al Gore did not make that prediction either. You need to pay more attention to the time frames that people put on their projections.
Here you go: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/044035/article
The dip around 2011 was due the the extremely heavy precipitation that hit Australia, the northern Amazon region and a few other places around the world in that time period. It takes some time for all of that water to drain back into the ocean. I believe sea level is back up to the trend line now.
Who knows, it might even bad enough that we notice some of the effects within the lifetimes of our grandchildren.
Or if you're perceptive enough you are noticing some of the bad effects happening right now. On human time scales it's a pretty gradual process starting out slow but steadily getting worse until in 30 or 40 years it's a full blown catastrophe.
At 20 feet above sea level you may not be safe from storm surge or a tsunami even now.
In a greenhouse water and nutrients are optimized as well as CO2. That's not so true once you get out into the rest of the world. 33% is an optimal number probably not generally achievable outside of a greenhouse.
Permitting outdated businesses to fail is at the core of progress.
For some definitions of progress. I don't consider locally owned businesses to be outdated. As I said they are part of the local community as I am and helping them helps the whole community remain strong.
Yes, and I shop there at times. But I also shop at the local hardware and building supply places too and only go to Home Depot when they don't have what I want at reasonable prices.
Of course not everything I buy is produced locally although I look for that when I can. I don't expect us to produce everything locally since different areas have different strengths and weaknesses in that regard. But spending money in local retail companies keeps the money in the local economy strengthening it and that is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
On balance, arable land isn't destroyed by climate change, it merely moves around. In fact, arable land may well increase due to climate change, with huge areas of Europe, Siberia, Canada, and Alaska thawing and becoming arable.
Arable land depends on far more than just temperature. Much of the soil in those northern areas is thin and low on plant nutrients and will take centuries to build up to good soil. Climate change doesn't change the day lengths and some plants depend on that for determining their growth cycles. Because of the short days it will still get very cold in the winter (just not quite as cold as it does now but still well below freezing) which may make it impractical to grow many perennial plants that can't survive the winters. When permafrost melts it is not instantly ready for agriculture and make take a century or more to become ready.
It wouldn't shock me if all of the climate disruption reduced human population by half by 2100 but I won't live long enough to see it.
What will drown people is storm surges reaching places they've never reached before because of sea level rise.
Local businesses are at the core of the community. They employ my neighbors and me*. They support local activities and charities. They pay local taxes. I like dealing with them face to face. All of those things and more are worth more to me than saving a few bucks online. I do buy online for things I can't find locally or maybe if the price difference is ridiculous.
* Actually I work for a medium sized multinational corp. but when I started it was a local business that eventually got bought out. We still are active locally.
I suspect that the UC system is a bit more generous than most but ok. I was thinking more in terms of the management, legal and financial types than PhD scientists.
Government is not a luxury, it's a necessity. If the government is weak or non-existent then before too long you will have warlords and other strongmen enforcing their own form of authority on the majority of the population. Anarchy is a nice ideal but it presumes that enough people buy into it and work effectively to make it viable. I don't think that can ever happen.
What do you think the various governments do with that money? Do they just pile it up and burn it? No, they spend it into the economy or give it to people who spend it. Even if they are wasting it they're still buying products from the private sector and paying salaries with it. If you want to start another recession cut "entitlement" spending by 50%. Then all of those people receiving those entitlements, the vast majority of who spend it almost immediately cut their spending drastically. As tehcyder mentioned above if you make those peoples lives miserable enough you're just fomenting revolution.
Not that much in the grand scheme of things.
Government employees toward the lower end of the wage scale do make pretty good wages compared to the private sector but as you get toward the higher end that's not so true. Compare what a private practice lawyer can make compared to a government lawyer for instance. The President only makes something like $400,000/year. The President/CEO of a huge private company generally makes at least 10's of millions of dollars.
Some of the information I've heard indicates this (the Holocene) is probably one of the long (24,000 year) interglacials so it might be another 10,000+ years before the next glacial starts. However, the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere is probably causing enough warming that the next glacial is probably postponed indefinitely.