Reducing temperature differences would intuitively seem to produce milder weather but there are lots of examples in science where that sort of intuition has proved wrong because of other factors.
Granted. My bet is that there are so many other stochastic factors at play that average global temperature has very little at all to do with weather distribution.
I was merely pointing out your statement about a dearth of hurricanes since Katrina was not justified.
No, I'm asserting that there isn't the relationship between global climate and natural disasters that you suppose. In your hypothesis, where global temperature drives natural disasters, you should have some lower limit at which a cold world has no natural disasters.
However, we know that natural disasters don't disappear in a colder world, and we know that they don't increase in a warmer world. Natural disasters, or more specifically severe weather events, occur with a distribution and rate that simply defies long term prediction.
Given such inherent uncertainty in a stochastic system, the only effective course of action is to prepare for the inevitable disaster - and the trick to that is to use the cheapest energy we possibly can to raise the standard of living for the people most at risk.
Bearing in mind that Kenya, as a least developed country, is not required to buy carbon credits for it's emissions.
And again, you've failed to clarify your question - if you're talking about exempting 3rd world countries from any CO2 scheme, what benefit is that going to do for global CO2 levels? Your implied proposal flies in the face of your basic assertion that CO2 emissions must be capped on a global scale.
Now you appear to be claiming that Climate Change will NOT lead to an increase in violent weather events in Bangladesh.
" Although there has been a dramatic increase in the number of hurricanes occurring in the North Atlantic since mid-1990s when compared to the period starting in the 1970s, the distribution of hurricanes in the 1950s was similar to today’s activity level. "
Of course, you use the weasel word "climate change", when I think you really mean "climate warming". I would further put to you a question - how cold does the world have to get before all "violent weather events" disappear? Show your work!
To repeat, the accepted hypothesis states that adaption is an order of magnitude more expensive than mitigation
Okay, if that's your hypothesis, what observations would convince you that the hypothesis is wrong? Perhaps subsidizing solar energy heavily in Spain, and creating 1 job for every 2 lost?
And let's say your hypothesis is correct, are you disputing that "mitigation" must be done by everyone in the world, including the 3rd world people whose lives are dramatically effected by the cost of energy? Is your "mitigation" only a 1st world concept, and if so, by what basic logic does it actually mitigate anything if it simply shifts emissions to the 3rd world?
Changing the temperature balance between two regions will definitely have an effect on weather. Simple thermodynamics tells you that.
Wait, wait - when we say we're going to "change the climate" on a global scale, that isn't an assertion that we know how, or if the temperature balance would change. It could has a positive effect on the weather, or a negative effect on the weather - in a stochastic system, you'll just never know.
That being said, I believe the common wisdom (although I don't have immediate reference at hand to back it up), is that the poles will warm much faster than anywhere else, leaving the tropics mostly alone. Changing the temperature balance so that there is less difference between areas on the earth seems like it would give more mild weather, since there isn't a large temperature gradient to cause all kinds of turbulence.
In regards to your hurricane hypothesis, look at the graph you cite:
"Although there has been a dramatic increase in the number of hurricanes occurring in the North Atlantic since mid-1990s when compared to the period starting in the 1970s, the distribution of hurricanes in the 1950s was similar to today’s activity level. Therefore, this increase cannot be explained solely on the basis of climate change."
Regarding species extinction, surely any nominally intelligent person can grasp the qualitative difference when extinction rates are orders of magnitude higher than at any other time in human history.
Natural selection does not have a rate limit. The knee-jerk assumption that any species currently existent today must be preserved at all costs is just silly. Look, pandas are cute and all, but if the damn buggers won't have sex enough to have more babies, well, maybe we just need to sit back and let that dead end go.
BTW, can you name ten species that have gone extinct in your lifetime?
By your arguments, laws against murder for cannibalism are "artificially increasing the cost of food"
Not at all - humans grow much too slowly to make them cost effective food. Pigs and cows, now they're yummy and inexpensive!
The ends of ensuring everybody has power for a few cents less per kWh do not justify the costs of utilizing such an incredibly destructive and harmful energy source.
I dispute your assertions of destruction and harm, but even so, turn it around -> the ends of ensuring that no destruction or harm ever come from any energy source does not justify depriving people of the ability to pull themselves out of poverty.
What about the risk of increasing the greenhouse effect and reducing our ability to control it so much that we enter a runaway chain reaction?
There's no such thing as runaway global warming -> if there was, it would have happened already at higher concentrations of CO2. But to your other point about the impending ice age, if you did believe that human CO2 emissions were the only thing that was staving off the next dramatic cooling of the planet, and the destruction that would cause for humanity, wouldn't you WANT to emit more CO2?
So has the acid rain in China destroyed all of their forests? Turned all of their waterways into lifeless wastelands?
Look, of course SOx and NOx turn into acid. The question is, what is the impact? GP was trying to make a point about having power over the entire earth, and cited acid rain. While it is certainly possible to have local impacts to paint jobs, it does not destroy forests and waterways wholesale.
If anything, what they need to do is stop eating carbohydrates.
It is well know that the world is the most productive during ice ages.
*facepalm*
Okay buddy, I've got some prime crop land for sale for you, smack dab in the middle of greenland. I'm sure the incredibly cold temperatures will be very productive for you!
Bearing in mind that Kenya, as a least developed country, is not required to buy carbon credits for it's emissions.
So let's be clear here - you expect to give a free pass to all 3rd world countries on CO2 emissions, and only place caps on 1st world countries? All this does is redistribute wealth, and redistribute CO2 emissions...it doesn't seem like such a system would do anything to stop CO2 levels from rising at all.
What? Climate change causes an increase in hurricanes
Be specific. If you're asserting that warming climate causes an increase in hurricanes, well, supposedly the last few years since Katrina have been the warmest ever, but hurricanes have been quiet.
Conversely, if cooling climate causes a decrease in hurricanes, I would love to know what temperature we'd have to get to in order to have zero hurricanes. Show your work!
In addition Climate Change causes disruption the natural snow melt cycle on the mountains where the rivers begin (the himalayas).
Oooh, oooh, I know the answer to this one! GLACIERGATE!
Acid rain or ozone hole are not big problems because mankind has DONE SOMETHING about them.
Really? What great program stopped acid rain? How about some facts instead of wild supposition:
" There is no better example of this than the EPA's wildly scary 1980 report suggesting acid rain was causing a kind of ``aquatic silent spring'' in Northeast America and Canada:
``It is in the lakes and streams where the most dramatic effects of acid rain have been observed. The increasing acidity of lakes in North America and Europe has been documented.... This has led to a decrease in populations of fish and other aquatic organisms.''
This report led to the establishment of a 10-year scientific study of the causes and effects of acid rain, or what is called the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP).
Unfortunately for the environmentalists, this assessment actually tried to be scientific, that is, to avoid reaching conclusions first and then searching for evidence to support them.
The result in 1987, after more than $300 million was spent in exhaustive study, was to conclude essentially that regional SO2 concentrations were causing no discernible damage to crops or forests at present levels of acid rain emission (about 22 million tons a year, down from 32 million in 1970)."
There has never ever been such a reduction of biodiversity outside of castastrophic events.
What does this have to do with natural selection? Look, if mankind manages to exterminate cockroaches, from the arctic to the antarctic, I'll believe that we have a significant impact and some dangerous voodoo powers. But really, this knee jerk reaction to the loss of any single species is downright...biblical.
But the number of hurricanes and natural disasters haven't increased. Theoretically, if you can guarantee that reducing your CO2 output, you'll stop all hurricanes and natural disasters, great - in fact, it would be very interesting to calculate at what global temperatures hurricanes and natural disasters stop happening at all (although it may be arbitrarily close to -373C).
In the meantime, we know that providing cheap energy to people improves their standard of living, and enables them to better survive the natural disasters that have always come and will always come, no matter what humans do.
As I've made clear, I think DDT should be used in some cases, but I'd rather have it banned than let it get into the hands of people looking for a magic bullet that cures all their insect problems.
Well, for the destruction of malarial mosquitos, I would assume your support then. As a general pesticide you make a strong case that it can be abused (although to be fair, the bald eagle was more impacted by habitat loss than any chemical agent), but the knee jerk reaction to "Silent Spring" essentially took away the premiere weapon in the arsenal against malaria.
As for the biodiversity and habitat diversity being helped by rapid global warming, you have to specify the time scale you are talking about. Is it a million years? Sure. A hundred thousand years? Probably. Ten thousand years? Probably not. A thousand years? Certainly not.
Why not? Take any ice age transition of 1000 years, and you certainly get increased biodiversity and habitat. Life requires energy, and thrives in it. Just pick any square mile of tundra compared to any square mile of tropical rainforest.
Current sea level rise has occurred at a mean rate of 1.8 mm per year for the past century
2mm/year * 100 years = 200mm, or 20cm
Of course, this is a global average, so the specific sea level rise, and tidal ranges for bangladesh may be significantly different than this. In any case, the tidal range of Chittagong, Bangladesh looks like around 3 meters:
Now, I haven't seen any research asserting that average sea level increases show up in higher high tides, or just higher low tides, or some combination, but that might be neat to see.
So, maybe in 500 years, 50% of the land would be flooded. 500 years is a long time to use as much cheap energy as we can to pull the people of Bangladesh out of poverty.
Okay, so follow along with me for a second, riverat ->
Weather counts. Climate does not.
The earth is a big place. You could have an average global temperature of 22C, and a specific weather distribution that is pleasant - tropical and temperate zones habitable to humans, and poles less so.
You could also have that same average global temperature of 22C, and a specific weather distribution that is decidedly unpleasant - tropical areas at 160C, and polar and temperate areas ridiculously chilly to make up for it.
So now let's take the average global temperature of 22C, and raise it 1C - what will it do to the *weather*? It could make things more warm at the poles, and leave everything else relatively untouched. It could be a simple across the board 1C change. In any case, we cannot say anything about what it will do, if anything to precipitation patterns, or other weather timing - or at least I haven't heard it claimed anywhere that any of the GCM models have any accurate weather prediction out 50 or 100 years.
Now, perhaps your hypothesis is that a warmer globe has more extremes, but given the dearth of hurricanes since Katrina (and supposedly rising temperatures during this period), it seems hard to make that kind of assertion.
Actually, that's a legitimate question - what is the point of public funding? One might think about indoctrinating children to pledge allegiance, or perhaps conditioning them to factory life...
In any case, one of the big problems with the K-12 system is that there is never any failure, and with no consequences you simply cannot hope to motivate most people. Even a student flunking every grade from K-12 will move on to the next year, ready or not. They may screw the averages on state tests, but there is no individual accountability at all.
Frankly, if public schools could kick kids out for failing to perform, they'd be much more useful - not every kid is going to take advantage of educational opportunities afforded to them, and simply warehousing them in classrooms is a detriment to those children that do want to work hard and learn.
How are the carb levels on that red herring that you're serving up?
Pretty good. Fish is fat and protein, so you can eat as much as you want.:)
An extra 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour (the wind PTC) is hardly something that will make you walk to work, give up AC, running water, or fresh food. It's practically unnoticeable - $13 a month
Do that without subsidies, and maybe you're talking turkey. Distort the market with subsidies, and you're going to have both significant and unintended effects.
No matter how you arrange it, you experience the combination of weather and climate.
No, you experience weather. Climate is simply the average of lots of individual "weathers". You could have the same global "climate" of 12C with a much different weather distribution -> double the heat at the tropics, and decrease it accordingly at the poles. THIS would be catastrophic on a bazillion levels, because WEATHER matters, not climate. But if the global "climate" goes to 14C, and that extra 2C is simply warming of the poles, the weather experienced by everyone pretty much stays the same.
FYI, smog tends to make worse existing illnesses. It's especially bad for those with asthma, young children, the elderly, and those with heart and lung disease
How much worse? What illnesses? How would you *price* that? If I have asthma (which I do, but blame cats, not smog), and smog makes it worse, and I have a hard time breathing twice a day instead of once a day, what price are you going to put on that? Show your work!
Heck, I challenge you to find a *single* time when the oceans acidified when there *weren't* significant extinctions as a result.
Well, acidification is a function of temperature (since CO2 dissolves more), so let's just call out the entire Cretaceous period.
Tides vary from near zero to upwards of 12m. No big deal, right?
The benefits found tend to only work for a few years before leveling back off as something else becomes a bottleneck -- nitrogen, water, etc. The benefits, when present, are small enough that when you factor in the other forecast changes (water, temperature, etc), these tend to dwarf them.
Ooh, I love this - CO2 benefits only work for a while because they're overwhelmed by other factors like....TEMPERATURE!
Okay, now rigorously apply that same sort of skepticism of magnitude of effect to CO2 concentrations on other things, including temperature, which can be effected by other factors that dwarf CO2. Show your work!
Gotcha. Religion = Peer-reviewed Science.
Certainly...lots of "peers" got to review the canonical bible, right? Don't forget climategate! We can make peer review *anything we want it to be*!
Far too short of a time period. That's the sort of time period over which other factors, such as ENSO, dominate. Several decades are needed for the climate signal to dominate.
I agree on your first bit, but I'd say several hundred years are need for the climate signal to dominate. But let's go with 30 years (several decades) - if the CO2 levels keep rising, but temps fall in the next 30 years, would you admit that the link is merely a phantom?
My own proposal is to let the free markets work, but to tax energy sources such that their true cost to society is included. For instance, pollution from coal is probably responsible for a lot of secondary health conditions, and probably even shortened lives in places
The problem there is that you've made an arbitrary decision about what the "true cost" is. You could take that same rationale and assert we should tax carbohydrate sources (fruit juice, breads, muffins, bagels) because of the cancer, heart disease, obesity and diabetes they cause, and maybe have a case since the causality there is clear...but when you talk about taxing coal or petroleum because of some extra coughing or sneezing one might have to do in their lifetime, you're just making stuff up.
come up with a number that not only factors in the cost of global warming (increased hurricanes, if nothing else)
Except, of course, that hurricanes have actually been incredibly quiet for the past few years with ever increasing temperatures (at least according to NOAA).
At any rate, if you priced (taxed) energy sources according to their true cost to society, then, almost by definition, capitalism will seek the optimum solution on its own
I'll agree, but you're counting on politicians here to come up with something "true". Capitalism will adapt to the destructive tendencies of government, of course, but that doesn't stop the destructive consequences from hurting people. The chances of the IRS being able to calculate the "true" cost of solar subsidies, or corn subsidies, or carbohydrates, or petroleum, or cosmetic surgery, or anything else is wishful thinking. Someone comes up with a prior motivation, decides what is right, what is wrong, then arbitrarily imposes a cost on it to modify behavior indirectly. How "true" this ever is, in any case, is incredibly doubtful.
1. How would pricing carbon emissions cause children to starve? Demonstrate the causal link
Take "Family A" in Kenya with ten children. They are in poverty, at the ragged edge of existence. They can just barely afford the food they get from the market. The price of food in the market includes the energy costs of transportation, say at, 10% of the raw cost of the food.
Increase the transportation costs by making petroleum more expensive to say, 20%.
Now pick one child that gets to starve to death.
please show us on a map the 5 mile radius where displaced persons could move to to get away from climate induced flooding in bangladesh.
Okay, first off, "climate induced flooding" is arm waving - hurricane flooding is *weather* not *climate*.
Second of all, Bangladesh has 55,599 sq mi of area - even a cursory glance at google maps shows that in the event of a hurricane, there is land to take shelter further inland...of course the real problem is that the shelters are those that can be afforded by the poorest of the poor, that is to say, straw houses to the big bad wolf.
Instead of pretending like we can make the big bad wolf stay away by refusing to exhale, why not build the brick house by utilizing the cheapest energy we can get our hands on?
If we had the will to eradicate malaria with DDT, we'd almost certainly be able to do it without DDT.
You mention that "will" has a price tag - and DDT is the cheapest solution. We may have enough will to spend $1 per person, but maybe not $100 or $1000. "Able to" and "will do" are often just a matter of dollars apart, unfortunately, and if we hadn't freaked out about DDT with the fraudulent "Silent Spring" introduction, we could have been well on our way to eradicating malaria in Africa.
Rapid global warming will increase biomass, but reduce biodiversity or ecological diversity.
No, factory farming and large scale agriculture does that -> there's no historical precedent for increased biomass during a warming period with reduced biodiversity.
Rather those mechanisms reflect the fact that removing the carbon from the atmosphere has a real economic cost associated with it, and the practice of dumping the carbon into the atmosphere ought to reflect that follow on cost.
Those are artificial mechanisms reflecting a hypothesis you have, not a fact. It is a fact that yesterday was XXC in Los Angeles, CA at 12:00pm. It is a hypothesis that an increase of CO2 to 600ppm is going to cause universal economic losses 100 years from now.
If there was a natural price to be paid for CO2 emissions, it wouldn't require legislation or government to define it.
Secondly the Stern Review indicates that whilst there is a cost associated with reducing our carbon emissions to a sustainable level, that cost is a fraction of the cost of doing it later PLUS adapting to a new climate.
That's again, a hypothesis (or at least wild speculation). You have no idea what kind of distribution of weather (which matters to people) you would get from changes in climate (which, as an average of averages, doesn't matter at all to people), so you can hardly assert that the only thing driving the need for adaptation (of any sort, to any inclement *weather*) is directly related to micro-changes in climate.
But the key thing is that they are not contributing to the emissions problem, and therefore have no need to contribute to the cost of it.
You're misunderstanding the situation here -> in order for them to come out of poverty, they need more energy per capita. You cannot simply make that happen out of thin air. You must dig in the ground, burn the forest, or capture it with expensive solar/wind/geothermal. This comes at a cost. Forcing them to use higher cost energy (by eliminating low-cost petroleum) keeps them in poverty, period.
Or are you suggesting that the 3rd world should be able to use the cheapest energy they can find, and only the 1st world should bother reducing emissions?
If we care at all about the poorest of the poor, the poor in general, or even if we were cynical and cared only for our own economic outcome, we'd start emissions reduction immediately.
That's not true at all. If I was forced to stop using air conditioning tomorrow because of increased prices, how would that help make the price of heating oil for a family in Kenya go down?
Emissions reduction is a red herring. If you want to redistribute wealth from rich to poor, just say so, and take all the socialist garbage that goes along with it. Don't try to pretend that there is some sort of justification from the physical world that makes wealth redistribution a good idea.
Those events come no where near releasing the amount of CO2 we, as a species, have released in the last 100+ years.
Citation, please. Supervolcanoes, and the ancient times of historic vulcanism have far dwarfed anything any species on earth has ever done.
In the ice cores, the globe started warming, which triggered the release of CO2. The CO2 then reinforced the warming trend, leading to more warming.
And how did that warming ever stop? Did CO2 suddenly stop working as a warming element?
More importantly, how do you know that the CO2 didn't come first, then the warming second? What would that look like on a graph?
You've essentially posited this theory -> in the past, warming comes first. in the present, CO2 comes first. You *assert* this is because man created CO2 in the present, but that's an assumption, not a proof.
Put this way, you've essentially created an ad hoc exception to the historical record versus the present day record in order to avoid a confounding of your theory (that CO2 is the cause of temperature rise). If an alien came to the barren earth 20 million years from now, and looked at ice cores, would the CO2/temp lag/lead change in the 20th century on compared to the millions of years of history before? Would that graph make any sense at all?
Nice strawman, and you beat it with alacrity. Well done!
Then you agree that CO2 is a limited positive feedback mechanism that has an upper limit? If so, would you please let us know what that upper limit is in terms of ppm? Would you agree it is a logarithmic limit?
Yes, so let get moving on building truly cheap energy -- wind, solar, biomass -- and get away from fossil fuel and fission systems that are only getting more expensive even if we don't bother to count externalities.
"truly cheap energy". If it's "truly cheap" then the profit motive will kick in and you don't need to subsidize it or penalize other forms of energy. "truly cheap" is a cop out, because you want to put your finger on the scale. You ignore externalities of wind, solar and biomass (dead birds, expensive rare earth materials, higher food prices causing starvation in the third world), but you want me to worry about petroleum emitting plant food into the atmosphere? Really?
But for human civilization, rapid warming -- rapid change of any sort -- will be disastrous.
Because of course the Holocene maximum and Medieval warm period were terrible for human civilization. And the rapid change over the past 50 years with computers, cell phones, pagers, fax machines and cable have been disastrous for civilization.
Your house rapidly warms in the morning, rising in temperature nearly 10C. Has this been a disaster for you every day?
What, you want us to spread air pollution around? Ship it from the cities to the rural areas? Make sure everyone gets their fair share of SO2 emissions?
The health consequences of power are FAR higher than the health consequences of higher energy costs.
No, the health consequences of carbohydrate intake are FAR higher than the health consequences of power.
What health consequence have you suffered because of power? Asthma? Headaches? Cancer? Now how many positive health consequences have you gotten because you don't have to walk to work? Or because you have A/C, or running water, or fresh food delivered to a market from across the world, or any number of energy intensive modern comforts?
1) Weather exists *atop* the climate signal.
Climate is an aggregation of weather. A climate signal exists *atop* individual weather events.
You really think that emitting PM, NOx, SOx, etc into the atmosphere is unquantifiable in terms of health consequences? Tell that to people breathing smog in LA.
Moving the goalposts here. CO2 is a different beastie than SOx and NOx. That being said, I've been living in LA for almost 20 years, breathing the smog -> what health consequence have I had? A need for a little more kleenex once in a while? A bout of coughing here and there? The scale of the "consequences" you talk of are miniscule.
Reliable? I'm sorry, but was it the US or Denmark that has big problems with power system reliability?
What, Denmark stopped using all petroleum products?
The times in history in which the ocean has become acidic have been associated with mass extinctions.
Citation, please.
Sea level rise occurs everywhere
Sea level rises actually are not evenly distributed across the globe (similar to disparities in tidal levels for various places).
And not all plants respond positively to increases in CO2 anyway even when they are CO2-limited. Basically, all peer-reviewed literature disagrees with you.
Citation, please.
Not to mention that the economic affects of mitigation versus inaction have been well studied as well, and completely disagree with you as well.
And there are also a number of holy books that have been well studied, that completely disagree with me on all sorts of topics. That's missing the point. The point is this -> the argument for taking drastic action is based on the most tenuous of projections, and the precautionary principle can, and has, caused us more harm than good (low-fat/high carb diets for example).
Here's a question for you though -> what observational data would make you change your mind about the topic? What would you have to observe for your theory to be confounded? A country doing mitigation losing GDP while a country doing "inaction" gaining GDP? CO2 levels rising and temperatures falling for 5 years? 10 years? 15 years?
I'm cautious of accepting your assertions because it does not seem that any observation could possibly shake your faith.
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Granted. My bet is that there are so many other stochastic factors at play that average global temperature has very little at all to do with weather distribution.
Look at the graph again -
2005 - 15 hurricanes
2006 - 5 hurricanes
2007 - 6 hurricanes
2008 - 8 hurricanes
2009 - 3 hurricanes
From a peak of 15, we've dropped to 3. My use of "dearth" was meant as "scarcity" not "complete lack of", apologies if I wasn't clear.
No, I'm asserting that there isn't the relationship between global climate and natural disasters that you suppose. In your hypothesis, where global temperature drives natural disasters, you should have some lower limit at which a cold world has no natural disasters.
However, we know that natural disasters don't disappear in a colder world, and we know that they don't increase in a warmer world. Natural disasters, or more specifically severe weather events, occur with a distribution and rate that simply defies long term prediction.
Given such inherent uncertainty in a stochastic system, the only effective course of action is to prepare for the inevitable disaster - and the trick to that is to use the cheapest energy we possibly can to raise the standard of living for the people most at risk.
And again, you've failed to clarify your question - if you're talking about exempting 3rd world countries from any CO2 scheme, what benefit is that going to do for global CO2 levels? Your implied proposal flies in the face of your basic assertion that CO2 emissions must be capped on a global scale.
" Although there has been a dramatic increase in the number of hurricanes occurring in the North Atlantic since mid-1990s when compared to the period starting in the 1970s, the distribution of hurricanes in the 1950s was similar to today’s activity level. "
Of course, you use the weasel word "climate change", when I think you really mean "climate warming". I would further put to you a question - how cold does the world have to get before all "violent weather events" disappear? Show your work!
Okay, if that's your hypothesis, what observations would convince you that the hypothesis is wrong? Perhaps subsidizing solar energy heavily in Spain, and creating 1 job for every 2 lost?
And let's say your hypothesis is correct, are you disputing that "mitigation" must be done by everyone in the world, including the 3rd world people whose lives are dramatically effected by the cost of energy? Is your "mitigation" only a 1st world concept, and if so, by what basic logic does it actually mitigate anything if it simply shifts emissions to the 3rd world?
Wait, wait - when we say we're going to "change the climate" on a global scale, that isn't an assertion that we know how, or if the temperature balance would change. It could has a positive effect on the weather, or a negative effect on the weather - in a stochastic system, you'll just never know.
That being said, I believe the common wisdom (although I don't have immediate reference at hand to back it up), is that the poles will warm much faster than anywhere else, leaving the tropics mostly alone. Changing the temperature balance so that there is less difference between areas on the earth seems like it would give more mild weather, since there isn't a large temperature gradient to cause all kinds of turbulence.
In regards to your hurricane hypothesis, look at the graph you cite:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/997f3b835c1606af6f4319b88795e48c.png
The trend is nearly flat going back over 100 years.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/15/research-suggests-that-hurricane-forecasts-on-intensity-could-never-be-feasible/
"Although there has been a dramatic increase in the number of hurricanes occurring in the North Atlantic since mid-1990s when compared to the period starting in the 1970s, the distribution of hurricanes in the 1950s was similar to today’s activity level. Therefore, this increase cannot be explained solely on the basis of climate change."
http://www.fortfreedom.org/n15.htm
Natural selection does not have a rate limit. The knee-jerk assumption that any species currently existent today must be preserved at all costs is just silly. Look, pandas are cute and all, but if the damn buggers won't have sex enough to have more babies, well, maybe we just need to sit back and let that dead end go.
BTW, can you name ten species that have gone extinct in your lifetime?
Not at all - humans grow much too slowly to make them cost effective food. Pigs and cows, now they're yummy and inexpensive!
I dispute your assertions of destruction and harm, but even so, turn it around -> the ends of ensuring that no destruction or harm ever come from any energy source does not justify depriving people of the ability to pull themselves out of poverty.
There's no such thing as runaway global warming -> if there was, it would have happened already at higher concentrations of CO2. But to your other point about the impending ice age, if you did believe that human CO2 emissions were the only thing that was staving off the next dramatic cooling of the planet, and the destruction that would cause for humanity, wouldn't you WANT to emit more CO2?
So has the acid rain in China destroyed all of their forests? Turned all of their waterways into lifeless wastelands?
Look, of course SOx and NOx turn into acid. The question is, what is the impact? GP was trying to make a point about having power over the entire earth, and cited acid rain. While it is certainly possible to have local impacts to paint jobs, it does not destroy forests and waterways wholesale.
http://www.fortfreedom.org/n15.htm
Um, it's the healthcare system, not the petroleum causing problems:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200808010350.html
If anything, what they need to do is stop eating carbohydrates.
*facepalm*
Okay buddy, I've got some prime crop land for sale for you, smack dab in the middle of greenland. I'm sure the incredibly cold temperatures will be very productive for you!
So let's be clear here - you expect to give a free pass to all 3rd world countries on CO2 emissions, and only place caps on 1st world countries? All this does is redistribute wealth, and redistribute CO2 emissions...it doesn't seem like such a system would do anything to stop CO2 levels from rising at all.
Be specific. If you're asserting that warming climate causes an increase in hurricanes, well, supposedly the last few years since Katrina have been the warmest ever, but hurricanes have been quiet.
Conversely, if cooling climate causes a decrease in hurricanes, I would love to know what temperature we'd have to get to in order to have zero hurricanes. Show your work!
Oooh, oooh, I know the answer to this one! GLACIERGATE!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7062667/Pachauri-the-real-story-behind-the-Glaciergate-scandal.html
Sure it is. You've just decided that the value that other people put on some mythical idea of "climate" is incorrect.
link for the quote: http://www.fortfreedom.org/n15.htm
Really? What great program stopped acid rain? How about some facts instead of wild supposition:
" There is no better example of this than the EPA's wildly scary ...
1980 report suggesting acid rain was causing a kind of ``aquatic
silent spring'' in Northeast America and Canada:
``It is in the lakes and streams where the most dramatic
effects of acid rain have been observed. The increasing acidity
of lakes in North America and Europe has been documented.
This has led to a decrease in populations of fish and other
aquatic organisms.''
This report led to the establishment of a 10-year scientific
study of the causes and effects of acid rain, or what is called
the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP).
Unfortunately for the environmentalists, this assessment
actually tried to be scientific, that is, to avoid reaching
conclusions first and then searching for evidence to support
them.
The result in 1987, after more than $300 million was spent in
exhaustive study, was to conclude essentially that regional SO2
concentrations were causing no discernible damage to crops or
forests at present levels of acid rain emission (about 22 million
tons a year, down from 32 million in 1970)."
What does this have to do with natural selection? Look, if mankind manages to exterminate cockroaches, from the arctic to the antarctic, I'll believe that we have a significant impact and some dangerous voodoo powers. But really, this knee jerk reaction to the loss of any single species is downright...biblical.
But the number of hurricanes and natural disasters haven't increased. Theoretically, if you can guarantee that reducing your CO2 output, you'll stop all hurricanes and natural disasters, great - in fact, it would be very interesting to calculate at what global temperatures hurricanes and natural disasters stop happening at all (although it may be arbitrarily close to -373C).
In the meantime, we know that providing cheap energy to people improves their standard of living, and enables them to better survive the natural disasters that have always come and will always come, no matter what humans do.
Well, for the destruction of malarial mosquitos, I would assume your support then. As a general pesticide you make a strong case that it can be abused (although to be fair, the bald eagle was more impacted by habitat loss than any chemical agent), but the knee jerk reaction to "Silent Spring" essentially took away the premiere weapon in the arsenal against malaria.
Why not? Take any ice age transition of 1000 years, and you certainly get increased biodiversity and habitat. Life requires energy, and thrives in it. Just pick any square mile of tundra compared to any square mile of tropical rainforest.
Also from Wikipedia:
2mm/year * 100 years = 200mm, or 20cm
Of course, this is a global average, so the specific sea level rise, and tidal ranges for bangladesh may be significantly different than this. In any case, the tidal range of Chittagong, Bangladesh looks like around 3 meters:
http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/locations/1231.html
Now, I haven't seen any research asserting that average sea level increases show up in higher high tides, or just higher low tides, or some combination, but that might be neat to see.
So, maybe in 500 years, 50% of the land would be flooded. 500 years is a long time to use as much cheap energy as we can to pull the people of Bangladesh out of poverty.
Okay, so follow along with me for a second, riverat ->
Weather counts. Climate does not.
The earth is a big place. You could have an average global temperature of 22C, and a specific weather distribution that is pleasant - tropical and temperate zones habitable to humans, and poles less so.
You could also have that same average global temperature of 22C, and a specific weather distribution that is decidedly unpleasant - tropical areas at 160C, and polar and temperate areas ridiculously chilly to make up for it.
So now let's take the average global temperature of 22C, and raise it 1C - what will it do to the *weather*? It could make things more warm at the poles, and leave everything else relatively untouched. It could be a simple across the board 1C change. In any case, we cannot say anything about what it will do, if anything to precipitation patterns, or other weather timing - or at least I haven't heard it claimed anywhere that any of the GCM models have any accurate weather prediction out 50 or 100 years.
Now, perhaps your hypothesis is that a warmer globe has more extremes, but given the dearth of hurricanes since Katrina (and supposedly rising temperatures during this period), it seems hard to make that kind of assertion.
Actually, that's a legitimate question - what is the point of public funding? One might think about indoctrinating children to pledge allegiance, or perhaps conditioning them to factory life...
In any case, one of the big problems with the K-12 system is that there is never any failure, and with no consequences you simply cannot hope to motivate most people. Even a student flunking every grade from K-12 will move on to the next year, ready or not. They may screw the averages on state tests, but there is no individual accountability at all.
Frankly, if public schools could kick kids out for failing to perform, they'd be much more useful - not every kid is going to take advantage of educational opportunities afforded to them, and simply warehousing them in classrooms is a detriment to those children that do want to work hard and learn.
Pretty good. Fish is fat and protein, so you can eat as much as you want. :)
Do that without subsidies, and maybe you're talking turkey. Distort the market with subsidies, and you're going to have both significant and unintended effects.
No, you experience weather. Climate is simply the average of lots of individual "weathers". You could have the same global "climate" of 12C with a much different weather distribution -> double the heat at the tropics, and decrease it accordingly at the poles. THIS would be catastrophic on a bazillion levels, because WEATHER matters, not climate. But if the global "climate" goes to 14C, and that extra 2C is simply warming of the poles, the weather experienced by everyone pretty much stays the same.
How much worse? What illnesses? How would you *price* that? If I have asthma (which I do, but blame cats, not smog), and smog makes it worse, and I have a hard time breathing twice a day instead of once a day, what price are you going to put on that? Show your work!
Well, acidification is a function of temperature (since CO2 dissolves more), so let's just call out the entire Cretaceous period.
http://www.co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/faq2.html#26
Tides vary from near zero to upwards of 12m. No big deal, right?
Ooh, I love this - CO2 benefits only work for a while because they're overwhelmed by other factors like....TEMPERATURE!
Okay, now rigorously apply that same sort of skepticism of magnitude of effect to CO2 concentrations on other things, including temperature, which can be effected by other factors that dwarf CO2. Show your work!
Certainly...lots of "peers" got to review the canonical bible, right? Don't forget climategate! We can make peer review *anything we want it to be*!
I agree on your first bit, but I'd say several hundred years are need for the climate signal to dominate. But let's go with 30 years (several decades) - if the CO2 levels keep rising, but temps fall in the next 30 years, would you admit that the link is merely a phantom?
The problem there is that you've made an arbitrary decision about what the "true cost" is. You could take that same rationale and assert we should tax carbohydrate sources (fruit juice, breads, muffins, bagels) because of the cancer, heart disease, obesity and diabetes they cause, and maybe have a case since the causality there is clear...but when you talk about taxing coal or petroleum because of some extra coughing or sneezing one might have to do in their lifetime, you're just making stuff up.
Except, of course, that hurricanes have actually been incredibly quiet for the past few years with ever increasing temperatures (at least according to NOAA).
I'll agree, but you're counting on politicians here to come up with something "true". Capitalism will adapt to the destructive tendencies of government, of course, but that doesn't stop the destructive consequences from hurting people. The chances of the IRS being able to calculate the "true" cost of solar subsidies, or corn subsidies, or carbohydrates, or petroleum, or cosmetic surgery, or anything else is wishful thinking. Someone comes up with a prior motivation, decides what is right, what is wrong, then arbitrarily imposes a cost on it to modify behavior indirectly. How "true" this ever is, in any case, is incredibly doubtful.
Take "Family A" in Kenya with ten children. They are in poverty, at the ragged edge of existence. They can just barely afford the food they get from the market. The price of food in the market includes the energy costs of transportation, say at, 10% of the raw cost of the food.
Increase the transportation costs by making petroleum more expensive to say, 20%.
Now pick one child that gets to starve to death.
Okay, first off, "climate induced flooding" is arm waving - hurricane flooding is *weather* not *climate*.
Second of all, Bangladesh has 55,599 sq mi of area - even a cursory glance at google maps shows that in the event of a hurricane, there is land to take shelter further inland...of course the real problem is that the shelters are those that can be afforded by the poorest of the poor, that is to say, straw houses to the big bad wolf.
Instead of pretending like we can make the big bad wolf stay away by refusing to exhale, why not build the brick house by utilizing the cheapest energy we can get our hands on?
You mention that "will" has a price tag - and DDT is the cheapest solution. We may have enough will to spend $1 per person, but maybe not $100 or $1000. "Able to" and "will do" are often just a matter of dollars apart, unfortunately, and if we hadn't freaked out about DDT with the fraudulent "Silent Spring" introduction, we could have been well on our way to eradicating malaria in Africa.
No, factory farming and large scale agriculture does that -> there's no historical precedent for increased biomass during a warming period with reduced biodiversity.
Those are artificial mechanisms reflecting a hypothesis you have, not a fact. It is a fact that yesterday was XXC in Los Angeles, CA at 12:00pm. It is a hypothesis that an increase of CO2 to 600ppm is going to cause universal economic losses 100 years from now.
If there was a natural price to be paid for CO2 emissions, it wouldn't require legislation or government to define it.
That's again, a hypothesis (or at least wild speculation). You have no idea what kind of distribution of weather (which matters to people) you would get from changes in climate (which, as an average of averages, doesn't matter at all to people), so you can hardly assert that the only thing driving the need for adaptation (of any sort, to any inclement *weather*) is directly related to micro-changes in climate.
You're misunderstanding the situation here -> in order for them to come out of poverty, they need more energy per capita. You cannot simply make that happen out of thin air. You must dig in the ground, burn the forest, or capture it with expensive solar/wind/geothermal. This comes at a cost. Forcing them to use higher cost energy (by eliminating low-cost petroleum) keeps them in poverty, period.
Or are you suggesting that the 3rd world should be able to use the cheapest energy they can find, and only the 1st world should bother reducing emissions?
That's not true at all. If I was forced to stop using air conditioning tomorrow because of increased prices, how would that help make the price of heating oil for a family in Kenya go down?
Emissions reduction is a red herring. If you want to redistribute wealth from rich to poor, just say so, and take all the socialist garbage that goes along with it. Don't try to pretend that there is some sort of justification from the physical world that makes wealth redistribution a good idea.
Citation, please. Supervolcanoes, and the ancient times of historic vulcanism have far dwarfed anything any species on earth has ever done.
And how did that warming ever stop? Did CO2 suddenly stop working as a warming element?
More importantly, how do you know that the CO2 didn't come first, then the warming second? What would that look like on a graph?
You've essentially posited this theory -> in the past, warming comes first. in the present, CO2 comes first. You *assert* this is because man created CO2 in the present, but that's an assumption, not a proof.
Put this way, you've essentially created an ad hoc exception to the historical record versus the present day record in order to avoid a confounding of your theory (that CO2 is the cause of temperature rise). If an alien came to the barren earth 20 million years from now, and looked at ice cores, would the CO2/temp lag/lead change in the 20th century on compared to the millions of years of history before? Would that graph make any sense at all?
Then you agree that CO2 is a limited positive feedback mechanism that has an upper limit? If so, would you please let us know what that upper limit is in terms of ppm? Would you agree it is a logarithmic limit?
"truly cheap energy". If it's "truly cheap" then the profit motive will kick in and you don't need to subsidize it or penalize other forms of energy. "truly cheap" is a cop out, because you want to put your finger on the scale. You ignore externalities of wind, solar and biomass (dead birds, expensive rare earth materials, higher food prices causing starvation in the third world), but you want me to worry about petroleum emitting plant food into the atmosphere? Really?
Because of course the Holocene maximum and Medieval warm period were terrible for human civilization. And the rapid change over the past 50 years with computers, cell phones, pagers, fax machines and cable have been disastrous for civilization.
Your house rapidly warms in the morning, rising in temperature nearly 10C. Has this been a disaster for you every day?
What, you want us to spread air pollution around? Ship it from the cities to the rural areas? Make sure everyone gets their fair share of SO2 emissions?
No, the health consequences of carbohydrate intake are FAR higher than the health consequences of power.
What health consequence have you suffered because of power? Asthma? Headaches? Cancer? Now how many positive health consequences have you gotten because you don't have to walk to work? Or because you have A/C, or running water, or fresh food delivered to a market from across the world, or any number of energy intensive modern comforts?
Climate is an aggregation of weather. A climate signal exists *atop* individual weather events.
Moving the goalposts here. CO2 is a different beastie than SOx and NOx. That being said, I've been living in LA for almost 20 years, breathing the smog -> what health consequence have I had? A need for a little more kleenex once in a while? A bout of coughing here and there? The scale of the "consequences" you talk of are miniscule.
What, Denmark stopped using all petroleum products?
Citation, please.
Sea level rises actually are not evenly distributed across the globe (similar to disparities in tidal levels for various places).
Citation, please.
And there are also a number of holy books that have been well studied, that completely disagree with me on all sorts of topics. That's missing the point. The point is this -> the argument for taking drastic action is based on the most tenuous of projections, and the precautionary principle can, and has, caused us more harm than good (low-fat/high carb diets for example).
Here's a question for you though -> what observational data would make you change your mind about the topic? What would you have to observe for your theory to be confounded? A country doing mitigation losing GDP while a country doing "inaction" gaining GDP? CO2 levels rising and temperatures falling for 5 years? 10 years? 15 years?
I'm cautious of accepting your assertions because it does not seem that any observation could possibly shake your faith.