Base-load production isn't a subsidy or an externality, but if your wider point is about ignoring the deficiencies of one's own position, then I'd suggest people are usually aware of those deficiencies but tend to minimise them, or at least feel sure they're much less of an issue than the deficiencies of the alternatives.
My problem here is the false equivalency. You say that each side is equally bad for glossing over the weaknesses in their arguments, but when those issues differ by orders of magnitude it's not equivalent at all. While no solution is perfect, some answers can be dramatically better than others.
For your example, intermittent renewables are a solvable issue - with storage, with wide distribution and redundancy, with plenty of variation in the mix of sources. The solutions do add to their cost, but even so are cheap enough that they're still competitive. Compare that to fossil fuel emissions, which cost us hundreds of billions annually even before factoring in climate change, and still no effective solution exists. Billions more have been spent piloting "clean coal" plants, promising only to partially reduce emissions, but still without success. Unless you're aware of hidden costs to renewables that are anywhere near the vast costs of fossil fuels, I don't see how the two alternatives are remotely equivalent.
We can't accurately predict the weather for 5 days
Can't predict a coinflip either, yet we can predict very accurately the average result of 10,000 coinflips. Same with climate, which is a long-term aggregate of countless individual weather events. But sure, all those thousands of egghead climate scientists from all over the planet are obviously just making shit up, right? And apparently coordinating it all in a massive global conspiracy.
It's not a fact.
Then how do you explain the vast amount of peer-reviewed evidence supporting it that's cited in the IPCC reports? Gonna wave that all away?
There certainly is a huge monetary motivation to say it's NOT a fact.
Fixed that for you. And if you doubt me, let me know if you find any monetary motivation bigger than $33 trillion in stranded assets. Or perhaps just comparesalaries.
Everything they do makes it LOOK like they are covering shit up.
According to whom? Certainly the studies cited in the IPCC reports are about as clear as it can get. Every scientific institution and meteorological department in the world endorses its conclusions - are all of them also covering this shit up, risking their reputations and sabotaging everything science stands for? Or perhaps other interests just want you to think so? There's certainly plenty of direct evidence for that.
Don't get me started on having Al Gore as a spokeman
Haha, nobody elected Gore as any sort of spokesman other than himself, and certainly he has ZERO to do with the scientific case for AGW. That's like saying the entire Republican party are frauds because Trump is kind of a dick.
show me a solution that does NOT put us back into the dark ages
Well first off, the type of solution has NOTHING to do with the existence of the problem. Seriously, are you really going to deny the problem even exists just because you don't like someone's proposed solution to it? Is that rational?
Second, there are any number of proposed solutions. Pick some that you like. Nuclear is fine by me, if you can make an economic case for it (and certainly in some areas it makes a lot of sense). Solar and wind are obvious choices to be part of the energy mix, particularly in areas where there's lot of sun and/or wind. Geothermal, wave power, thorium - there are plenty of carbon-neutral energy sources to choose from.
And for intermittency, power companies already have to deal with that, since no power plant is perfect - e.g. coal plants are offline 40-60% of the time, so they have to be covered too. The answer is wide distribution and redundancy from a variety of sources ("the wind always blows somewhere") with some storage
Yes, there are certainly some positive benefits from climate change (which are indeed described in the WG2 report), and in the long term (hundreds/thousands of years), once the pace of change has settled down, some (mostly higher) latitudes will likely be significantly better off. However lower latitudes will likely be significantly worse off, and as more energy is pumped into the climate system then extreme weather events are likely to increase too.
But in the short term, the impacts are almost all negative, some massively so. The main reason for this is the rapid pace of the changes - our infrastructure and agriculture are all designed and located for our current climate, so as the climate changes (and we can already see it changing), then we will have to move/fix/protect/upgrade/relocate large amounts of our society along with it. Coastal cities will need levees to deal with higher storm surges, large areas of farmland will need more irrigation or flood protection, etc etc - and any countries or communities that can't afford those adaption costs (or have nowhere to move agriculture or population to) will suffer. The worst off will have to leave, creating refugees that will worsen international tensions - leading the DoD and NATO to class climate change as a "threat multiplier" that is already having visible effects.
Estimating the net monetary costs from these impacts is not easy, but some studies have been done, and they've all concluded the costs of later adaption far outweigh the costs of earlier action to mitigate climate change.
I'm not sure we actually KNOW that the current warming trend is entirely man made
We know to a high level of scientific certainty. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests the world would still be slowly cooling, if it wasn't for our greenhouse gas emissions.
Given that the science behind this specific part of the question is far from conclusive
It absolutely is; that's why every scientific institution on the planet endorses the conclusion that we're causing the warming we're seeing. We can even quantify it - the IPCC AR5 WG1 summary says our emissions of CO2 alone have caused a radiative forcing of 1.68 W m^2 (+/- 0.3), plus another 0.97 W m^2 from methane - which dwarfs the cooling effects of atmospheric dust and nitrates at about -0.42 W m^2 in total. We know it's our CO2 that's causing it because a) we can easily measure the CO2 levels rising rapidly, and b) isotopic analysis shows a match with carbon from fossil fuels (not to mention the observed levels happen to agree nicely with our calculated emissions, and that nothing else has been observed that could come close to causing the effect we're seeing).
None of this attribution has anything to do with our land temperature models (which btw are working just fine).
What's still uncertain is exactly how much warming we'll see, and when. Not what's causing it.
the same companies that fund almost ALL climate research
[Citation needed], but nice try at deflection. CRU itself says:
The Unit undertakes both pure and applied research, sponsored almost entirely by external contracts and grants from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry.
Then there's NOAA and NASA, whose funding is from the government, not the fossil fuel industry, not to mention universities all over the world that run primarily on government grants. Do you have any evidence for this "$1 billion a year" from Big Oil? Or is it all undeclared, like Willie Soon's?
If Big Oil is such a proponent of climate change research, then how come over 80% of their public statements about it are misleading or outright denial?
The American Petroleum Institute, in particular its members Exxon and Chevron, have been funding denial and manufacturing doubt ever since their own scientists told them of the risks of continued fossil fuel use back in the 80s (here is an empirical study describing their efforts to deny and deliberately misrepresent climate science findings, including from their own scientists).
And the reason fossil fuels appeared as cheap as they did was because the huge emission and pollution costs were being borne by the public, rather than the industry. If these externalised costs were factored in, the price of coal-fired electricity would triple (study) - and the RoI for investment in alternatives like renewables or nuclear would have been much larger. Likewise, the health and other external costs of oil exceeded $56 billion annually back in 2005, adding at least 23 to 38 cents per gallon (again without including climate costs).
External costs are a market failure. Regulation is one option to correct that failure, but it's not the only possible option. Feel free to choose a solution that fits your political preferences, but ignoring or hand-waving away the problem won't make it go away. You'll still be paying for it, with excessive health premiums, illnesses and lost productivity, and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths every year.
And the fact that the oil companies deliberately misinformed everyone about the problems with oil, suppressing research and funding pro-oil campaigns they knew full well were untrue or misleading, is quietly glossed over in your attempt to blame anyone else? That's like blaming smokers for getting cancer from the cigarettes they were told were perfectly safe.
What kind of straw man is that? Nobody is suggesting banning all petroleum-based products - the health and climate impacts of plastics are tiny next to fossil fuels that are burned in vast quantities.
What's being demanded is that fossil fuel companies are held accountable for their deliberate misinformation campaigns, and for the hundreds of billions of avoidable health and societal costs that the entire public has had to bear, just so they could keep their bottom lines rosy by delaying as much as possible the inevitable transition to safer energy sources.
You wouldn't go for the "nearest" candidate, you'd go for the asteroid that has the best combination of accessibility and return - probably 162173 Ryugu, an 850m closely-approaching asteroid which has quite reasonable delta-v requirements to get it here, and contains enough nickel & iron to turn an estimated $30B profit on $50-60B costs. We'll get even better estimates when Hayabusa 2 returns samples from it in 2020.
And of course I understand the money has to be diverted from other productive ventures - but a lot of the ventures people currently spend on are not particularly productive. Entertainment is a good example, and if we can divert even a small percentage of viewership towards a Mars mission then that has little real productivity cost elsewhere.
There's no denying the most compelling reasons to explore our solar system today are largely intangible. You're right that it's too soon to turn a guaranteed profit - but given that companies from Planetary Resources to SpaceX are already pursuing long-term plans to do exactly this, they clearly feel the benefits are sufficiently attractive to start investing immediately.
There's a heck of a lot more than $5k on offer as a jackpot for asteroid mining, when most potential targets offer billions in estimated profits (commonly 20-30% RoI) and some even reaching trillions. There are very good reasons for the dozen or so companies currently working towards this to believe their investments will pay off, and in a reasonable timeframe.
But I'm gathering that you're not really opposed to commercial space development or robotic research, just politicians declaring arbitrary manned-flight goals, which is perhaps understandable, even when it worked out pretty well with Apollo. There are certainly scientific reasons to put humans in space, even if only to learn about how it affects those humans and what we can do about that, but there's not many commercial cases where it's currently worth the effort.
Nonetheless, there's still the other reasons I mentioned, which you didn't address. It's undeniably inspirational to a lot of people (because it certainly is "cool", and epic pioneering journeys make damn good TV as they found with Apollo - the entertainment rights alone could pay for a sizeable chunk of the cost). And habitat redundancy is a species survival issue, something we do not want to ignore forever. Plus it's a lot more feasible than you seem to think - at least in the opinion of Musk and his engineers, who probably have a better idea of that than you or I.
So if you agree that pure research and long-shot investments can be worthwhile, despite no immediate prospect of profits, why do you feel that "sending a bunch of crap into space" is done for no reason?
Apart from the many ancillary benefits of space research (spinoff technologies, entertainment prospects etc), the science we learn in space and on other worlds is often clearly applicable to our own world, or at least could well be in the future.
And for human space travel, there's no denying the enormous inspirational boost that society gets when humans achieve something as epic as travelling to a different world. How many of today's terrestrial scientists and engineers, valuable and productive members of society, were inspired by their childhood memories of Apollo?
Then there's the prospect of vast resources in the asteroid belt, the longer-term objective of habitat redundancy for the species, general ongoing growth and expansion etc etc - all clearly beneficial to society, at least at longer time scales.
I'd like to see laws on the books that would require new commercial developments to include solar+battery for each housing unit.
This is one of the dumbest things we could do. In order to make a real change, alternative energy HAS TO ACTUALLY MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE.
It only sounds dumb if you keep ignoring the elephant in the room: external costs.
The economic fact of the matter is, fossil fuels cost us a lot more than the sticker price, and not only in nebulous future climate costs but in real, measurable damage to our health. US coal alone costs $300-500 billion a year, easily doubling the wholesale cost. When you look at the whole picture, it actually made economic sense to get off fossil fuels a long time ago, and what doesn't make sense is why people keep pretending these costs don't exist.
Since it's abundantly clear that the energy market is in no hurry to factor these external costs into their prices, the issue has to be forced - ideally by government evaluating full, levelised costs for all the alternatives then applying a suitable market correction (regulatory mandate, carbon price, cap & trade, whatever suits your politics), or the hard way - let the problem keep getting worse until the pain can no longer be ignored, and hope that the alternatives aren't too unattractive.
We've done exactly this in any number of other industries (sulphur emissions cone to mind), but the energy industry has been pushing back extra hard.
Science is simply a collection of facts and theories of various quality.
Let me stop you right there. A collection of facts is called "evidence". Theories without evidence are called "hypotheses". Theories with evidence are called "theories", and a theory with sufficient evidence from independent sources to convince a majority of scientists in the field that it is highly unlikely to be methodological error is accepted as "knowledge" - unless/until it is superseded by a better theory that more completely or more elegantly explains the evidence. We call this process the "scientific method", and I'll thank you not to redefine it.
The knowledge that humans are causing the climate change we're seeing is a result of the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in dozens of different geophysical fields accumulated over decades, which have convinced the vast majority of practicing scientists in those fields that yes, AGW is really a thing. Of course there is plenty of science to be done in the details of "where" and "when" and "how much" etc, but unless/until someone comes up an alternate theory that better explains all the evidence then anyone simply claiming "the scientists are wrong and this one guy is right" is going to get dismissed out of hand.
The fact that you cite only a blog (that cites only other blogs) to back up your claim, while ignoring the vast number of peer-reviewed studies showing otherwise (rigorously cited and summarised in the IPCC reports), not to mention the considered conclusions of every major scientific, academic, and meteorological organisation on the planet, shows only that you are happy to cherry-pick your sources and aren't too concerned about quality of evidence. Your claim that your practical expertise in a single aspect somehow enables you to contradict the conclusions of thousands of trained and practicing climatologists from many other fields who have spent decades actually gathering evidence shows only that you don't realise how little you actually know about those fields.
More directly, your evidence-free claim that contrary science is being suppressed is pure conspiracy fodder. Your reference to "money to be made" might actually be on the ball - if you had noticed that there was vastly more money being made by those with an interest in seeing climate science discredited, not to mention no shortage of documented evidence of those interests spending hundreds of millions doing exactly that. BTW I'm happy to cite reputable sources for any of these statements, but I'm assuming at this stage that you're unlikely to consider new evidence.
And if you think pages as provably wrong as that CO2 denial link are convincing, then think again. Point 1 is nonsense (greenhouse gases work by re-emission of energy back towards the surface, not just absorbing it), point 2 is apparently claiming that the Stefan-Boltzmann constant has been wrong all this time (who knew), and point 3 is true but irrelevant to the issue, which is how much energy is effectively blocked. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, perhaps stemming from the simplified popular explanation of CO2 as a "blanket" that is getting thicker, but of course the actual atmospheric science is rather more nuanced than this (as practicing climatologists are well aware).
For example, it's true that the atmospheric column as a whole already absorbs most of the IR on the CO2 absorption bands - but it cannot be "completely opaque" as absorption is logarithmic, and thus some IR still gets through. Secondly, it's much easier for IR to escape from the uppermost layers of the atmosphere where CO2 is thinner, so increasing CO2 makes a significant difference to the energy radiated from there. And third, we've directly measured the decreasing IR radiation in those CO2 bands from satellites, so we have hard experimental evidence of the increasing greenhouse effect in action.
How about if it was something that the customers needed anyway, and the choice was between a product with most of its costs up-front, and a cheaper-looking but dirtier product that cost consumers and society a lot more in the longer term? Obviously the first is a better investment overall, but the second would still look attractive to many, unless a way was found to make the greater costs more obvious.
I'm not a fan of heavy-handed legislation either, but when the current alternative is a product that is popular only because its hundreds of billions of annual external health costs (in the US alone) are not being factored into the sticker price, then it seems obvious to me that leaving it solely up the free market is clearly not in our best interest.
IF CO2 becomes a problem?? What on earth do you think all that science has been telling us for the last 50 years?
And honestly I didn't think you were that naïve, to think that we would "already" have fixed the source of the problem. Did you also miss how vested interests have been funneling hundreds of millions into manufacturing doubt, while covering up their own scientists' findings?
It's taken all this time just to get enough popular interest in the issue for politicians to look past the lobbyists' dollars. Only now have all the governments in the world reluctantly agreed to start doing something (with a single notable exception).
Yes it's a solvable problem, but all the solutions are expensive so political will is almost nonexistent. But because some solutions are a lot more expensive than others, it's something we should have started tackling properly decades ago.
Algae would be more feasible than trees, sure - for some values of "feasible".
Using your figures (which seem in the ballpark from the papers I looked at), we'd still need 4x the area you cite - an ocean patch the size of Egypt - just to keep up with the CO2 emissions from a single year (assuming that doesn't keep increasing). The ocean farms would need atmospheric CO2 to be concentrated, and the gas bubbled through the algae for efficient growth, or you'd be sharply limited by CO2 absorption, needing a much larger area. Your pipelines/ships would be delivering billions of tonnes of algae a week to be sequestered somewhere where decay products would remain trapped (i.e. not food or fuel), which just creates huge new problems. Disused mines would not be adequate for long, you'd have to heat it to create stable biochar then transport and bury that somewhere, which adds even more expense.
And all of these massive costs would be ongoing, with no returns, just a continual drag on the economy. Who's going to pay for that - and keep paying for it, forever?
Do you honestly think that such a massive engineering project is actually a better solution than attacking the problem at its source by phasing out fossil fuels (which would also save hundreds of billions in associated health costs from particulates), and switching to renewables and/or nuclear?
A tree can absorb as much as 22kg of CO2 in a year. Humans emitted 40 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2015, about half of which was absorbed by existing plants and (mostly) oceans. So we need to plant around 900 billion more trees - just to stop it getting worse.
You think we can do that, find the land to grow and keep that many trees - and to lock down all their fixed carbon to stop it decaying right back into the atmosphere? Still think plants are the answer?
Or maybe it's just gonna be easier to get off coal.
The biodome mention was obviously hyperbole, so maybe don't take that comment too literally.
And as for cost - first, a few percent of GDP would cause another recession, and that cost every year adds up pretty fast. Second, climate costs accelerate as we move further away from our norm so that annual cost would only grow. Third, those studies I mentioned all show that mitigation costs a lot less than adaption, so financially we'd be foolish not to act. Fourth, we'd avoid a lot of the more existential risks that become significant when climate changes this rapidly, and those are hard to plan for. And fifth, getting off fossil fuels has the added benefit of saving the hundreds of billions that the US currently spends each year on pollution health costs - that should also be factored into any real accounting of costs and benefits.
It is not, however, an existential threat. It will not cause Western society to collapse (though some more vulnerable nations may not be so lucky).
It will be very expensive to deal with, and I expect that is what the GP is most concerned about (but not "terrified", as you seem to prefer to believe). Maybe look up how much the Netherlands has spent on its dyke system, and consider the cost of that for every coastal city on the planet. Have a look at what New York spent after Sandy's storm surge, and is now spending on new levees.
And that's just sea level. Have a look at all the other negative impacts described in the IPCC WG2 report, maybe read some of the many studies that attempt to count the net cost - and you too may be concerned for the sheer size of the bill any kids of yours will be stuck with.
You are proposing that copyright caries a compulsory right to grant licenses in perpetuity.
Yes, it actually does. That's the whole point of copyright; that, in exchange for a time-limited protected monopoly on the authors' work, the work is granted in its entirety to the public once the copyright period expires.
We do in fact have direct observations of ocean temperatures dating as far back as 1662. Thermometers did exist before the days of satellites, even if accuracy and coverage wasn't up to modern standards. Temperatures recorded then weren't even close to what we're seeing today.
In fact, we have multiple lines of evidence going back much further than that (cited thoroughly in e.g. the IPCC WG1 reports such as Chapter 5, Paleoclimate Archives) that show that the speed of current climate changes are unprecedented in anything like recent history (including ice ages). This is not surprising, considering that we can clearly see from the observational record that levels of greenhouse gases have risen from "more or less normal" to "unprecedented in the last 800,000+ years" in just the last century or so. Our knowledge of past conditions is a lot less limited than you seem to think - maybe try browsing some of the papers cited in WG1.
Since the observational evidence is entirely consistent with our physical models of past conditions, based on the known atmospheric conditions, solar output, GHG concentrations, recorded volcanism etc, speculation that "it could've been different, we just don't know" won't gain you much traction in actual scientific circles. You'd have to provide pretty solid observational evidence of anomalous ocean temperatures in the past, if you want scientists to accept that such conditions were in any way likely.
Here's an EIA report listing the amounts and types of direct subsidies and tax incentives in 2013 specific to the energy industry, for both renewables and fossil fuels, broken down by type.
It does not include any incentives that are also available to other industries, nor does it go into any detail about past subsidies (obviously fossil fuels have been receiving these subsidies a lot longer than renewables).
Slashdot Mirror
Base-load production isn't a subsidy or an externality, but if your wider point is about ignoring the deficiencies of one's own position, then I'd suggest people are usually aware of those deficiencies but tend to minimise them, or at least feel sure they're much less of an issue than the deficiencies of the alternatives.
My problem here is the false equivalency. You say that each side is equally bad for glossing over the weaknesses in their arguments, but when those issues differ by orders of magnitude it's not equivalent at all. While no solution is perfect, some answers can be dramatically better than others.
For your example, intermittent renewables are a solvable issue - with storage, with wide distribution and redundancy, with plenty of variation in the mix of sources. The solutions do add to their cost, but even so are cheap enough that they're still competitive. Compare that to fossil fuel emissions, which cost us hundreds of billions annually even before factoring in climate change, and still no effective solution exists. Billions more have been spent piloting "clean coal" plants, promising only to partially reduce emissions, but still without success. Unless you're aware of hidden costs to renewables that are anywhere near the vast costs of fossil fuels, I don't see how the two alternatives are remotely equivalent.
Nobody mentioned subsidies (which aren't all that different, if you only look at direct, industry-specific subsidies).
But to wave away the vast differences in external costs between the two as "tribalistic whining" is almost as ludicrous as the OP.
We can't accurately predict the weather for 5 days
Can't predict a coinflip either, yet we can predict very accurately the average result of 10,000 coinflips. Same with climate, which is a long-term aggregate of countless individual weather events. But sure, all those thousands of egghead climate scientists from all over the planet are obviously just making shit up, right? And apparently coordinating it all in a massive global conspiracy.
It's not a fact.
Then how do you explain the vast amount of peer-reviewed evidence supporting it that's cited in the IPCC reports? Gonna wave that all away?
There certainly is a huge monetary motivation to say it's NOT a fact.
Fixed that for you. And if you doubt me, let me know if you find any monetary motivation bigger than $33 trillion in stranded assets. Or perhaps just compare salaries.
Everything they do makes it LOOK like they are covering shit up.
According to whom? Certainly the studies cited in the IPCC reports are about as clear as it can get. Every scientific institution and meteorological department in the world endorses its conclusions - are all of them also covering this shit up, risking their reputations and sabotaging everything science stands for? Or perhaps other interests just want you to think so? There's certainly plenty of direct evidence for that.
You want data? Oh we deleted it.
Oh look, found it again.
You have an opinion we don't agree with?
Then provide evidence to back it up, or STFU. That's how science works.
The curves don't match what we said was going to happen ten years ago?
They look OK to me.
Don't get me started on having Al Gore as a spokeman
Haha, nobody elected Gore as any sort of spokesman other than himself, and certainly he has ZERO to do with the scientific case for AGW. That's like saying the entire Republican party are frauds because Trump is kind of a dick.
show me a solution that does NOT put us back into the dark ages
Well first off, the type of solution has NOTHING to do with the existence of the problem. Seriously, are you really going to deny the problem even exists just because you don't like someone's proposed solution to it? Is that rational?
Second, there are any number of proposed solutions. Pick some that you like. Nuclear is fine by me, if you can make an economic case for it (and certainly in some areas it makes a lot of sense). Solar and wind are obvious choices to be part of the energy mix, particularly in areas where there's lot of sun and/or wind. Geothermal, wave power, thorium - there are plenty of carbon-neutral energy sources to choose from.
And for intermittency, power companies already have to deal with that, since no power plant is perfect - e.g. coal plants are offline 40-60% of the time, so they have to be covered too. The answer is wide distribution and redundancy from a variety of sources ("the wind always blows somewhere") with some storage
The IPCC Working Group 2 report covers that.
Yes, there are certainly some positive benefits from climate change (which are indeed described in the WG2 report), and in the long term (hundreds/thousands of years), once the pace of change has settled down, some (mostly higher) latitudes will likely be significantly better off. However lower latitudes will likely be significantly worse off, and as more energy is pumped into the climate system then extreme weather events are likely to increase too.
But in the short term, the impacts are almost all negative, some massively so. The main reason for this is the rapid pace of the changes - our infrastructure and agriculture are all designed and located for our current climate, so as the climate changes (and we can already see it changing), then we will have to move/fix/protect/upgrade/relocate large amounts of our society along with it. Coastal cities will need levees to deal with higher storm surges, large areas of farmland will need more irrigation or flood protection, etc etc - and any countries or communities that can't afford those adaption costs (or have nowhere to move agriculture or population to) will suffer. The worst off will have to leave, creating refugees that will worsen international tensions - leading the DoD and NATO to class climate change as a "threat multiplier" that is already having visible effects.
Estimating the net monetary costs from these impacts is not easy, but some studies have been done, and they've all concluded the costs of later adaption far outweigh the costs of earlier action to mitigate climate change.
There's no drivers behind the wheel in the Waymo taxis in Phoenix. True Level-4 self-driving cars are already here.
I'm not sure we actually KNOW that the current warming trend is entirely man made
We know to a high level of scientific certainty. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests the world would still be slowly cooling, if it wasn't for our greenhouse gas emissions.
Given that the science behind this specific part of the question is far from conclusive
It absolutely is; that's why every scientific institution on the planet endorses the conclusion that we're causing the warming we're seeing. We can even quantify it - the IPCC AR5 WG1 summary says our emissions of CO2 alone have caused a radiative forcing of 1.68 W m^2 (+/- 0.3), plus another 0.97 W m^2 from methane - which dwarfs the cooling effects of atmospheric dust and nitrates at about -0.42 W m^2 in total. We know it's our CO2 that's causing it because a) we can easily measure the CO2 levels rising rapidly, and b) isotopic analysis shows a match with carbon from fossil fuels (not to mention the observed levels happen to agree nicely with our calculated emissions, and that nothing else has been observed that could come close to causing the effect we're seeing).
None of this attribution has anything to do with our land temperature models (which btw are working just fine).
What's still uncertain is exactly how much warming we'll see, and when. Not what's causing it.
the same companies that fund almost ALL climate research
[Citation needed], but nice try at deflection. CRU itself says:
The Unit undertakes both pure and applied research, sponsored almost entirely by external contracts and grants from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry.
Then there's NOAA and NASA, whose funding is from the government, not the fossil fuel industry, not to mention universities all over the world that run primarily on government grants. Do you have any evidence for this "$1 billion a year" from Big Oil? Or is it all undeclared, like Willie Soon's?
If Big Oil is such a proponent of climate change research, then how come over 80% of their public statements about it are misleading or outright denial?
The American Petroleum Institute, in particular its members Exxon and Chevron, have been funding denial and manufacturing doubt ever since their own scientists told them of the risks of continued fossil fuel use back in the 80s (here is an empirical study describing their efforts to deny and deliberately misrepresent climate science findings, including from their own scientists).
And the reason fossil fuels appeared as cheap as they did was because the huge emission and pollution costs were being borne by the public, rather than the industry. If these externalised costs were factored in, the price of coal-fired electricity would triple (study) - and the RoI for investment in alternatives like renewables or nuclear would have been much larger. Likewise, the health and other external costs of oil exceeded $56 billion annually back in 2005, adding at least 23 to 38 cents per gallon (again without including climate costs).
External costs are a market failure. Regulation is one option to correct that failure, but it's not the only possible option. Feel free to choose a solution that fits your political preferences, but ignoring or hand-waving away the problem won't make it go away. You'll still be paying for it, with excessive health premiums, illnesses and lost productivity, and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths every year.
And the fact that the oil companies deliberately misinformed everyone about the problems with oil, suppressing research and funding pro-oil campaigns they knew full well were untrue or misleading, is quietly glossed over in your attempt to blame anyone else? That's like blaming smokers for getting cancer from the cigarettes they were told were perfectly safe.
What kind of straw man is that? Nobody is suggesting banning all petroleum-based products - the health and climate impacts of plastics are tiny next to fossil fuels that are burned in vast quantities.
What's being demanded is that fossil fuel companies are held accountable for their deliberate misinformation campaigns, and for the hundreds of billions of avoidable health and societal costs that the entire public has had to bear, just so they could keep their bottom lines rosy by delaying as much as possible the inevitable transition to safer energy sources.
You wouldn't go for the "nearest" candidate, you'd go for the asteroid that has the best combination of accessibility and return - probably 162173 Ryugu, an 850m closely-approaching asteroid which has quite reasonable delta-v requirements to get it here, and contains enough nickel & iron to turn an estimated $30B profit on $50-60B costs. We'll get even better estimates when Hayabusa 2 returns samples from it in 2020.
And of course I understand the money has to be diverted from other productive ventures - but a lot of the ventures people currently spend on are not particularly productive. Entertainment is a good example, and if we can divert even a small percentage of viewership towards a Mars mission then that has little real productivity cost elsewhere.
There's no denying the most compelling reasons to explore our solar system today are largely intangible. You're right that it's too soon to turn a guaranteed profit - but given that companies from Planetary Resources to SpaceX are already pursuing long-term plans to do exactly this, they clearly feel the benefits are sufficiently attractive to start investing immediately.
There's a heck of a lot more than $5k on offer as a jackpot for asteroid mining, when most potential targets offer billions in estimated profits (commonly 20-30% RoI) and some even reaching trillions. There are very good reasons for the dozen or so companies currently working towards this to believe their investments will pay off, and in a reasonable timeframe.
But I'm gathering that you're not really opposed to commercial space development or robotic research, just politicians declaring arbitrary manned-flight goals, which is perhaps understandable, even when it worked out pretty well with Apollo. There are certainly scientific reasons to put humans in space, even if only to learn about how it affects those humans and what we can do about that, but there's not many commercial cases where it's currently worth the effort.
Nonetheless, there's still the other reasons I mentioned, which you didn't address. It's undeniably inspirational to a lot of people (because it certainly is "cool", and epic pioneering journeys make damn good TV as they found with Apollo - the entertainment rights alone could pay for a sizeable chunk of the cost). And habitat redundancy is a species survival issue, something we do not want to ignore forever. Plus it's a lot more feasible than you seem to think - at least in the opinion of Musk and his engineers, who probably have a better idea of that than you or I.
So if you agree that pure research and long-shot investments can be worthwhile, despite no immediate prospect of profits, why do you feel that "sending a bunch of crap into space" is done for no reason?
Apart from the many ancillary benefits of space research (spinoff technologies, entertainment prospects etc), the science we learn in space and on other worlds is often clearly applicable to our own world, or at least could well be in the future.
And for human space travel, there's no denying the enormous inspirational boost that society gets when humans achieve something as epic as travelling to a different world. How many of today's terrestrial scientists and engineers, valuable and productive members of society, were inspired by their childhood memories of Apollo?
Then there's the prospect of vast resources in the asteroid belt, the longer-term objective of habitat redundancy for the species, general ongoing growth and expansion etc etc - all clearly beneficial to society, at least at longer time scales.
I'd like to see laws on the books that would require new commercial developments to include solar+battery for each housing unit.
This is one of the dumbest things we could do. In order to make a real change, alternative energy HAS TO ACTUALLY MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE.
It only sounds dumb if you keep ignoring the elephant in the room: external costs.
The economic fact of the matter is, fossil fuels cost us a lot more than the sticker price, and not only in nebulous future climate costs but in real, measurable damage to our health. US coal alone costs $300-500 billion a year, easily doubling the wholesale cost. When you look at the whole picture, it actually made economic sense to get off fossil fuels a long time ago, and what doesn't make sense is why people keep pretending these costs don't exist.
Since it's abundantly clear that the energy market is in no hurry to factor these external costs into their prices, the issue has to be forced - ideally by government evaluating full, levelised costs for all the alternatives then applying a suitable market correction (regulatory mandate, carbon price, cap & trade, whatever suits your politics), or the hard way - let the problem keep getting worse until the pain can no longer be ignored, and hope that the alternatives aren't too unattractive.
We've done exactly this in any number of other industries (sulphur emissions cone to mind), but the energy industry has been pushing back extra hard.
Science is simply a collection of facts and theories of various quality.
Let me stop you right there. A collection of facts is called "evidence". Theories without evidence are called "hypotheses". Theories with evidence are called "theories", and a theory with sufficient evidence from independent sources to convince a majority of scientists in the field that it is highly unlikely to be methodological error is accepted as "knowledge" - unless/until it is superseded by a better theory that more completely or more elegantly explains the evidence. We call this process the "scientific method", and I'll thank you not to redefine it.
The knowledge that humans are causing the climate change we're seeing is a result of the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in dozens of different geophysical fields accumulated over decades, which have convinced the vast majority of practicing scientists in those fields that yes, AGW is really a thing. Of course there is plenty of science to be done in the details of "where" and "when" and "how much" etc, but unless/until someone comes up an alternate theory that better explains all the evidence then anyone simply claiming "the scientists are wrong and this one guy is right" is going to get dismissed out of hand.
The fact that you cite only a blog (that cites only other blogs) to back up your claim, while ignoring the vast number of peer-reviewed studies showing otherwise (rigorously cited and summarised in the IPCC reports), not to mention the considered conclusions of every major scientific, academic, and meteorological organisation on the planet, shows only that you are happy to cherry-pick your sources and aren't too concerned about quality of evidence. Your claim that your practical expertise in a single aspect somehow enables you to contradict the conclusions of thousands of trained and practicing climatologists from many other fields who have spent decades actually gathering evidence shows only that you don't realise how little you actually know about those fields.
More directly, your evidence-free claim that contrary science is being suppressed is pure conspiracy fodder. Your reference to "money to be made" might actually be on the ball - if you had noticed that there was vastly more money being made by those with an interest in seeing climate science discredited, not to mention no shortage of documented evidence of those interests spending hundreds of millions doing exactly that. BTW I'm happy to cite reputable sources for any of these statements, but I'm assuming at this stage that you're unlikely to consider new evidence.
And if you think pages as provably wrong as that CO2 denial link are convincing, then think again. Point 1 is nonsense (greenhouse gases work by re-emission of energy back towards the surface, not just absorbing it), point 2 is apparently claiming that the Stefan-Boltzmann constant has been wrong all this time (who knew), and point 3 is true but irrelevant to the issue, which is how much energy is effectively blocked. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, perhaps stemming from the simplified popular explanation of CO2 as a "blanket" that is getting thicker, but of course the actual atmospheric science is rather more nuanced than this (as practicing climatologists are well aware).
For example, it's true that the atmospheric column as a whole already absorbs most of the IR on the CO2 absorption bands - but it cannot be "completely opaque" as absorption is logarithmic, and thus some IR still gets through. Secondly, it's much easier for IR to escape from the uppermost layers of the atmosphere where CO2 is thinner, so increasing CO2 makes a significant difference to the energy radiated from there. And third, we've directly measured the decreasing IR radiation in those CO2 bands from satellites, so we have hard experimental evidence of the increasing greenhouse effect in action.
How about if it was something that the customers needed anyway, and the choice was between a product with most of its costs up-front, and a cheaper-looking but dirtier product that cost consumers and society a lot more in the longer term? Obviously the first is a better investment overall, but the second would still look attractive to many, unless a way was found to make the greater costs more obvious.
I'm not a fan of heavy-handed legislation either, but when the current alternative is a product that is popular only because its hundreds of billions of annual external health costs (in the US alone) are not being factored into the sticker price, then it seems obvious to me that leaving it solely up the free market is clearly not in our best interest.
40 bn tonnes - but half is absorbed by oceans etc. So 20,000,000,000 tonnes excess CO2 divided by 0.022 tonnes per tree equals 909,090,909,090 trees.
IF CO2 becomes a problem?? What on earth do you think all that science has been telling us for the last 50 years?
And honestly I didn't think you were that naïve, to think that we would "already" have fixed the source of the problem. Did you also miss how vested interests have been funneling hundreds of millions into manufacturing doubt, while covering up their own scientists' findings?
It's taken all this time just to get enough popular interest in the issue for politicians to look past the lobbyists' dollars. Only now have all the governments in the world reluctantly agreed to start doing something (with a single notable exception).
Yes it's a solvable problem, but all the solutions are expensive so political will is almost nonexistent. But because some solutions are a lot more expensive than others, it's something we should have started tackling properly decades ago.
Algae would be more feasible than trees, sure - for some values of "feasible".
Using your figures (which seem in the ballpark from the papers I looked at), we'd still need 4x the area you cite - an ocean patch the size of Egypt - just to keep up with the CO2 emissions from a single year (assuming that doesn't keep increasing). The ocean farms would need atmospheric CO2 to be concentrated, and the gas bubbled through the algae for efficient growth, or you'd be sharply limited by CO2 absorption, needing a much larger area. Your pipelines/ships would be delivering billions of tonnes of algae a week to be sequestered somewhere where decay products would remain trapped (i.e. not food or fuel), which just creates huge new problems. Disused mines would not be adequate for long, you'd have to heat it to create stable biochar then transport and bury that somewhere, which adds even more expense.
And all of these massive costs would be ongoing, with no returns, just a continual drag on the economy. Who's going to pay for that - and keep paying for it, forever?
Do you honestly think that such a massive engineering project is actually a better solution than attacking the problem at its source by phasing out fossil fuels (which would also save hundreds of billions in associated health costs from particulates), and switching to renewables and/or nuclear?
A tree can absorb as much as 22kg of CO2 in a year. Humans emitted 40 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2015, about half of which was absorbed by existing plants and (mostly) oceans. So we need to plant around 900 billion more trees - just to stop it getting worse.
You think we can do that, find the land to grow and keep that many trees - and to lock down all their fixed carbon to stop it decaying right back into the atmosphere? Still think plants are the answer?
Or maybe it's just gonna be easier to get off coal.
The biodome mention was obviously hyperbole, so maybe don't take that comment too literally.
And as for cost - first, a few percent of GDP would cause another recession, and that cost every year adds up pretty fast. Second, climate costs accelerate as we move further away from our norm so that annual cost would only grow. Third, those studies I mentioned all show that mitigation costs a lot less than adaption, so financially we'd be foolish not to act. Fourth, we'd avoid a lot of the more existential risks that become significant when climate changes this rapidly, and those are hard to plan for. And fifth, getting off fossil fuels has the added benefit of saving the hundreds of billions that the US currently spends each year on pollution health costs - that should also be factored into any real accounting of costs and benefits.
It's far from mythical.
It is not, however, an existential threat. It will not cause Western society to collapse (though some more vulnerable nations may not be so lucky).
It will be very expensive to deal with, and I expect that is what the GP is most concerned about (but not "terrified", as you seem to prefer to believe). Maybe look up how much the Netherlands has spent on its dyke system, and consider the cost of that for every coastal city on the planet. Have a look at what New York spent after Sandy's storm surge, and is now spending on new levees.
And that's just sea level. Have a look at all the other negative impacts described in the IPCC WG2 report, maybe read some of the many studies that attempt to count the net cost - and you too may be concerned for the sheer size of the bill any kids of yours will be stuck with.
You are proposing that copyright caries a compulsory right to grant licenses in perpetuity.
Yes, it actually does. That's the whole point of copyright; that, in exchange for a time-limited protected monopoly on the authors' work, the work is granted in its entirety to the public once the copyright period expires.
We do in fact have direct observations of ocean temperatures dating as far back as 1662. Thermometers did exist before the days of satellites, even if accuracy and coverage wasn't up to modern standards. Temperatures recorded then weren't even close to what we're seeing today.
In fact, we have multiple lines of evidence going back much further than that (cited thoroughly in e.g. the IPCC WG1 reports such as Chapter 5, Paleoclimate Archives) that show that the speed of current climate changes are unprecedented in anything like recent history (including ice ages). This is not surprising, considering that we can clearly see from the observational record that levels of greenhouse gases have risen from "more or less normal" to "unprecedented in the last 800,000+ years" in just the last century or so. Our knowledge of past conditions is a lot less limited than you seem to think - maybe try browsing some of the papers cited in WG1.
Since the observational evidence is entirely consistent with our physical models of past conditions, based on the known atmospheric conditions, solar output, GHG concentrations, recorded volcanism etc, speculation that "it could've been different, we just don't know" won't gain you much traction in actual scientific circles. You'd have to provide pretty solid observational evidence of anomalous ocean temperatures in the past, if you want scientists to accept that such conditions were in any way likely.
Here's an EIA report listing the amounts and types of direct subsidies and tax incentives in 2013 specific to the energy industry, for both renewables and fossil fuels, broken down by type.
It does not include any incentives that are also available to other industries, nor does it go into any detail about past subsidies (obviously fossil fuels have been receiving these subsidies a lot longer than renewables).