Yes. If I can't heat my home during a blizzard, my kids die. If I can't afford food because it costs too much in transportation costs to get it to me, my kids starve.
You see, the poorest of the poor don't even have electricity. They're worried about whether or not they can afford to buy cooking and heating fuel, not about how much it'll cost for them to run their Xbox 360.
Trotting out the Starving Children in Africa TM so we can keep driving our SUVs to the corner store is just tacky.
Any less tacky than trotting them out so we can lord over those "evil oil companies" with increased government bureaucracies to put the power in the hands of a tiny elite who decides who lives and dies?
Really cheap petroleum over the last few decades hasn't magically made that poverty go away.
Well, mostly because of our other misguided environmentalist movements, such as the banning of DDT. Take away malaria, and Africa has a chance. Ban a safe chemical to appease the white liberal gods of the environment, and the cheap energy of the world can only fend off the end, it can't get any traction.
Even so, nobody is saying that all energy should be expensive. They're saying that fossil fuels should be more expensive
That's saying the same thing. If petroleum is the cheapest, and you raise its price, you've effectively raised the price of energy. Until you manage technologically to generate energy for cheaper than petroleum, any artificial distortion is going to increase price, period.
I'm all for making petroleum more expensive if the way we do it is by actually generating energy from other sources for *less*. I'm not all for it if we need to artificially juice the game to make it *seem* like something is cheaper when it is not.
Are you saying that a warmer planet would have greater biomass? Is that better for life? Or are you saying that a warmer planet has greater biodiversity? Or greater diversity of habitats? Are you saying all living things will be happier?
Yes. Yes. Yes. No, I'm saying more living things will be happier - I understand that happiness is not evenly distributed, but yes, life, on the whole will be. All of the "weather is not climate" caveats apply.
Either global warming increases storm activity, or it doesn't. You can't have increased hurricanes and storms and increased desert.
Extinction of ocean species and the rising sea level makes sea-based food sources unreliable.
Citation please. We've had much higher sea levels and much more acidic oceans and just as many if not more ocean species. Overfishing is your real problem there, not sea level rise.
The heat island effect turns modern cities into genuine health threats.
No, it turns them into phantom instances of "global" warming:) If you didn't have that heat island effect, you'd have to burn more heating oil to keep things livable in the winter.
If anything, I would think a colder world would be more suited to industrial society
Only if you're willing to cull the population. You simply cannot sustain a dense population without more arable land, and a colder world will screw that to all hell (not to mention a world with less CO2 concentrations...you have heard of "greenhouses" and what they're used for, right?)
The interesting thing about "global" warming is that it is not evenly distributed....the tropics don't get all that much hotter, but the poles do. So the lush tropical forests get more range, temperate climates move up a bit, and the polar regions of ice and snow shrink a bit. So more specifically, increases in global average temperatures doesn't raise the maximums, it raises the minimums - which frankly, is a great thing for humanity. My summers don't get much hotter, but my winters are much more mild. That's a win-win.
Okay, here's your choice - a) watch your children die of starvation this year. b) survive an extra two hurricanes in your lifetime, and relocate inland 5 miles over your lifetime.
Let's baseline here - we have tidal shifts of ocean level that measure in the meters every day, and rising ocean levels that measure in the millimeter range every year. We have temperature differences between night and day on the order of tens of degrees C, and global temperature fluctuations on the order of tenths of degrees C over a hundred years.
The sting from an additional 10cm of ocean height, and.5C over a hundred years is way less than the sting of watching your kids starve to death.
Just don't make it pricier for the poor. It's artificial, after all.
Okay, that's a pretty open call for wealth redistribution if I've ever heard one. Now, for anyone who has any sort of resistance to the idea of wealth redistribution (and the wealth destruction it causes), you've reached an impasse.
But I'll tell you what - you can certainly lead by example. Redistribute *your* wealth, prove how effective that is, and eventually people will see the error of their ways and follow you, right?
Ah, demonizing DDT - the failed environmentalist experiment that has killed 40 million african children over the past 40 years.
Welcome to Africa. We've got malaria here, that has kept us in poverty for hundreds of years. Mothers have to stop working to care for their sick children, and end up watching their best and brightest die. Lefty green liberals demonized a perfectly safe agent (DDT), and prevented the eradication of malaria in Africa while other parts of the world moved forward and pulled themselves out of misery.
We wiped out malaria in the US with DDT. We wiped out malaria in Singapore with DDT. DDT has time and time again proven to be safe, effective, and has had no lasting health effects to anyone, anywhere, much less a bird's egg.
At some point, warm is too warm and Waterworld isn't just a shitty movie.
We've been much warmer than today, and didn't turn into Waterworld. We've been much colder than today, and life barely maintained its tenuous grasp on the planet. Even taking the absolute worst case scenario of CO2 doomsayers (and that's a huge leap of faith), we are hundreds, if not thousands of years from "too warm".
Pretending we know the future exactly, and taking drastic action to avoid it, has real and present dangers to the present without any guarantee that they are necessary.
Now look, if there was an alien spaceship hovering over our planet, and it had just started wiping out all the ice and glaciers across the world, I'd be the first person to volunteer to ride a nuke into orbit to destroy them before they could complete the job. But right now, the whole CO2 temperature thing is a *correlation* not a causality.
Coal is only "cheap" because it doesn't have to pay for its externalities....So merely making them pay for the health consequences of their emissions alone would put them out of business.
Boy, if we could only do that for the damage carbohydrates does to our health, you could just ignore the effect of coal entirely. But I digress -> comparing possible long term health consequences to certain death of millions of children in poverty because energy is artificially priced high indicates to me that the externalities have been taken into account. Coal is "cheap" because the externalities are not nearly as important to us as the benefits of having a reliable and economical power system.
Everything has "externalities", but to assert that you're going to be able to identify and link them any better than a random choice is hubris, I would submit.
What do you think it does to poor fishermen when the ocean acidifies, dramatically lowering coral growth rates and hurting population of various kinds of phytoplankton?
Well, I've never known a fisherman to fish for coral or phytoplankton. I do know that the ocean has been more and less acidic over the ages, and fish still swim in the sea.
What do you think it does to poor Bangladeshis when they lose another large chunk of their country every decade, and a corresponding higher elevation suddenly finds itself at risk of storm surges?
If they had cheap power, they could build levees and dams to stave off that kind of *weather* (as opposed to climate).
What do you think the expansion of the Sahara does to poor Africans?
Except rising CO2 levels increases plant growth and *shrinks* the Sahara.
I'll posit this -> poor Bangladeshis, Africans, and others would be better off if they were able to industrialize with the rapid acceleration of the use of coal and petroleum products, no matter what the mysterious future holds. You *think* that reducing cheap energy *might* prevent future inclement weather events. I *know* that raising people out of poverty *will* give them the power to survive future inclement weather events.
And how would you measure that danger? Compare it to the manufacturing dangers of solar/wind/nuclear with the various industrial processes required for that?
Put more simply, if I was poor, and had the opportunity to see my children grow up to be grandparents, and then die of some toxin related disease because we lived too close to a refinery, I'd choose that over watching my children starve to death before they were 12.
Human poverty is only relieved when we have increased energy use per capita. You can do that by increasing your energy supply (cheap energy), or reducing your capita (mass starvation and death). You only get to pick one.
Let me ask you this question -> do you also see a 50 year lag in the ice-core data for CO2 versus temperature? If you didn't, would that falsify your hypothesis?
I think maybe you misunderstood the intent. "stop something that is, well, already happening anyway" is not necessarily the clearest way to express oneself (quoting GP), but in your basement analogy, you've lost the sense of how long it has been happening. It's been happening before the house and the tap were even there - your comment essentially asserted causality that wasn't in the GP's logic.
So to the point, this isn't an "early stage" (climate has changed, well, always), and there's no reason to believe it will "inevitably get worse" without our intervention. It's a misapplication of an analogy to a strawman that wasn't presented.
Except acid rain was a fraud. And the ozone hole still oscillates. And rain forests grow better with more CO2 in the air. And of course species go extinct all the time - after all, we do believe in natural selection, right?
Okay, you got me on the agricultural practices, but we've also greatly increased crop yield and staved off mass starvation around the world with improved petroleum based fertilizers.
I'll tell you what, though, if humans manage to kill off every mosquito in the world, I'll believe you.
Well, here's my question - what observation would have falsified their theory? It's not about "1) it's probably impossible to prove it", it's about "1) it's probably impossible to disprove it". If you can't disprove something with observation, you're practicing belief and religion, not science.
Somehow Green liberals have adopted Earth as a God and religion.
I think the metaphor needs to be extended a bit -> it's not just that "Earth" has become a God, but they've diametrically opposed humanity to that God. We are evil, earth is good. Green liberals have adopted Earth as God, but also designated the mass of humanity as Satan.
Sigh. Global warming is supposed to increase the energy of the atmosphere, which is supposed to increase evaporation, which is supposed to increase the number of storms and hurricanes, which of course will mean a global drought. Right.
I'm for a hot world where crops grow better because of increased CO2, where people don't die in the winter because they don't have heating oil, and where biodiversity and life is increased by larger ranges of habitat.
We might agree on what's happening, and even on who to blame, but we're a long way from agreeing that anything needs to be fixed.
Mod parent up - the precautionary principle can go both ways. It's theoretically possible that limiting CO2 will save us all. It's also theoretically possible that limiting CO2 will doom us all. Asserting that we *must* act in order to stave of a theoretical future is a tacit admission that we really don't know what the hell we're talking about.
Example of the precautionary principle epic fail of the 20th century - low-fat diets. Ancel Keys, curse his soul, decided that fat was the cause of heart disease. His life was a crusade dedicated to reducing fat consumption, and we can lay at his feet the blame for moving the US to a low-fat, high carbohydrate diet over the past 40 years. In that time, incidence of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases has skyrocketed. Despite growing evidence that the low-fat dogma was incorrect, every study that confirmed it was touted, and every study that confounded it was denied. To this day we continue to misapprehend the true problem in our diets -> carbohydrates. Nobody thinks wheat bread is evil, and everyone knows lard will clog your arteries. Except that it isn't true. And some white asshole in a lab coat decided 40 years ago that *WE MUST ACT NOW* to save us from a scourge of heart disease.
There are *real* consequences from getting things wrong on the precautionary principle. Sometimes, although it may be difficult, the right move is to wait for more data.
You think that putting a date 30 years out to curb our countries carbon emissions is drastic?
Yes. Artificially increasing the price of energy will harm the poorest of the poor, and increase poverty and misery throughout the world. Cheap energy means better lives for humanity, period. Telling a family in Africa that they have to watch their children die of malnourishment, exposure to the elements and disease because we're going to make it too expensive for them to afford energy is pretty drastic.
Here's the only place I'd like to get to: agreeing that 1) climate is warming to a point of unnatural irreversible damage and 2) man made factors are contributing to it
#2 might be a reasonable assertion, but #1 is falsified by the historical record. A warmer planet is a better planet for life, period. We've had warmer periods in the past that were not "irreversible", and humanity has flourished during warm periods.
If I had the choice between political action sufficient to keep atmospheric carbon below 350 ppm + a teaching job, vs no action and a "research" position where I would really just make up stuff, I'd choose the former, like any person not mad with greed.
That wasn't the question. The question was whether or not we should stop all further climate research since the science is "settled", and redirect those resources to political actions (advertising, regulation, enforcement of regulation, military action, etc). Whether or not you get to be a researcher or teacher or garbage collector is irrelevant to the question (even if, you are in fact now, a climate researcher with a vested interest in keeping your current job).
CO2 is a feedback. As the world gets warmer, more of it gets into the atmosphere, primarily from the ocean.
To our best knowledge, CO2 is a positive feedback constrained by its absorption spectrum. Once it is saturated, it cannot act as a feedback. So check here:
1. The earth gets slightly warmer due to a Milankovitch cycle. 2. This causes some CO2 to be released from the oceans. 3. This causes the earth to warm slightly. 4. Goto step 2 until CO2 has reached a point where it is saturated and cannot contribute more warming. 5. Other effects apply.
The problem with your original exhibition was that it cannot apply to periods of cooling and warming simultaneously. For example:
1. The earth gets slightly cooler due to a Milankovitch cycle. 2. This causes some CO2 to be absorbed by the oceans. 3. This causes the earth to cool slightly. 4. Goto step 2
If CO2 was a positive feedback that was overwhelmingly potent, it would prevent any cooling periods at all. Reduce its efficacy in positive feedback enough to explain the cyclic variations in temperature in the historical record, and it becomes a minor and insignificant player in the climate equation, following the trend but not determining it.
And haven't I explained enough times in this thread (three, as I recall) why this is the case?
Perhaps you just haven't realized yet that your explanation is incorrect. How does the CO2 know whether or not to be a cooling feedback or a warming feedback? Can it do both? Or maybe, just maybe, CO2 simply follows temperature changes that overwhelm any "feedback" effect, positive or negative (take your pick, but pick just one) - that would certainly explain the historical record better than a "smart CO2" molecule.
That CO2 is a weak feedback is contradicted both by theoretical results (physical models) and paleoclimate reconstructions.
Hold on a tick - that talking point has been debunked well enough before. CO2 has a logarithmic absorption, so there is an upper limit to any positive feedback it could provide (theoretical model), and paleoclimate reconstructions show that it *lags* temperature changes by about 800 years.
The last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today, global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.
And the last time global temperatures were 5 degrees higher than they are today, we were in the medieval warm period, with CO2 at lower levels than today, sea level approximately the same, and about the same arctic and antarctic ice. Of course, that's even assuming you've got the CO2 levels correct in your calculation in the first place.
The disjunction between CO2 levels and temperature in the past make it pretty clear, by observation, that the two are not intrinsically related, nor is CO2 a strong positive feedback.
Humanity hasn't even experienced the kind of temperatures we see now, until now.
That's simply untrue. Both the Holocene optimum and the Medieval Warm Period were much warmer than today.
(btw, if they were only looking for funding, it would make good sense for them to say that "we need decades of work to understand this properly". But they are calling for political action rather than further funding for themselves.)
Make no doubt about it, they're asking for more funding as part of the "political action" they demand. To believe otherwise is to be willfully naive. If they were only looking for "political action", all of the climate research centers would be shut down (since the science is "settled"), and all of the money would be poured into whatever cap and trade scheme is their latest solution-du-jour.
In order for these people to get funding, they need to claim not only "we need decades of work", but they also have to claim "this is the most critical research for all for all of mankind because without it we'll die a fiery death". But let's turn this around and ask you the question, do you think it is reasonable to cut all funding to every climate scientist today, and instead just jump to political action, since the science is "settled"?
You're fallen into the very trap you're complaining about. The effects of cloud cover are unknown.
Actually, you've made my point for me exactly -> I'm not asserting knowledge where we don't have enough information or observation to assert it, I'm simply asserting that you cannot pick one "lever" and declare victory without understanding that there is more complexity out there.
Does the term "ice age" mean nothing to you? Seriously? The world has had run away cooling and heating in the past, possibly even got near totally frozen at one point.
Milankovich cycles and the like make changes to the inputs of energy, not the feedbacks of GHG or cloud cover. Ice ages, if you look at the historical record, behave like a cycle of saturation and crash...and the scary part is that we're well overdue for another one. A runaway positive or negative feedback would continue until it reached its maximum, and then perhaps oscillate close to the extreme, but it wouldn't magically restore itself through negative feedbacks. You can go ahead and try this out with a speaker and an amp -> start a positive feedback cycle, and tell me when it is magically overwhelmed by the negative feedbacks it overcame in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. If I can't heat my home during a blizzard, my kids die. If I can't afford food because it costs too much in transportation costs to get it to me, my kids starve.
You see, the poorest of the poor don't even have electricity. They're worried about whether or not they can afford to buy cooking and heating fuel, not about how much it'll cost for them to run their Xbox 360.
Any less tacky than trotting them out so we can lord over those "evil oil companies" with increased government bureaucracies to put the power in the hands of a tiny elite who decides who lives and dies?
Well, mostly because of our other misguided environmentalist movements, such as the banning of DDT. Take away malaria, and Africa has a chance. Ban a safe chemical to appease the white liberal gods of the environment, and the cheap energy of the world can only fend off the end, it can't get any traction.
That's saying the same thing. If petroleum is the cheapest, and you raise its price, you've effectively raised the price of energy. Until you manage technologically to generate energy for cheaper than petroleum, any artificial distortion is going to increase price, period.
I'm all for making petroleum more expensive if the way we do it is by actually generating energy from other sources for *less*. I'm not all for it if we need to artificially juice the game to make it *seem* like something is cheaper when it is not.
Yes. Yes. Yes. No, I'm saying more living things will be happier - I understand that happiness is not evenly distributed, but yes, life, on the whole will be. All of the "weather is not climate" caveats apply.
Either global warming increases storm activity, or it doesn't. You can't have increased hurricanes and storms and increased desert.
Citation please. We've had much higher sea levels and much more acidic oceans and just as many if not more ocean species. Overfishing is your real problem there, not sea level rise.
No, it turns them into phantom instances of "global" warming :) If you didn't have that heat island effect, you'd have to burn more heating oil to keep things livable in the winter.
Only if you're willing to cull the population. You simply cannot sustain a dense population without more arable land, and a colder world will screw that to all hell (not to mention a world with less CO2 concentrations...you have heard of "greenhouses" and what they're used for, right?)
The interesting thing about "global" warming is that it is not evenly distributed....the tropics don't get all that much hotter, but the poles do. So the lush tropical forests get more range, temperate climates move up a bit, and the polar regions of ice and snow shrink a bit. So more specifically, increases in global average temperatures doesn't raise the maximums, it raises the minimums - which frankly, is a great thing for humanity. My summers don't get much hotter, but my winters are much more mild. That's a win-win.
So, there were never any volcanic events (incredibly large scale volcanic events that lasted years upon years) that distributed additional CO2?
And how would the CO2 know that it was *caused* by warming rather than it needed to cause more warming?
Or how about this -> why didn't CO2 concentrations stop ice ages from happening?
If CO2 is a unlimited positive feedback mechanism, it should behave that way no matter how it is generated. The molecule has no memory.
Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand.
When you distribute "burden", you're distributing wealth. Whether or not you call it "taking" money or "giving" money, it's still a redistribution.
Okay, here's your choice - a) watch your children die of starvation this year. b) survive an extra two hurricanes in your lifetime, and relocate inland 5 miles over your lifetime.
Let's baseline here - we have tidal shifts of ocean level that measure in the meters every day, and rising ocean levels that measure in the millimeter range every year. We have temperature differences between night and day on the order of tens of degrees C, and global temperature fluctuations on the order of tenths of degrees C over a hundred years.
The sting from an additional 10cm of ocean height, and .5C over a hundred years is way less than the sting of watching your kids starve to death.
Okay, that's a pretty open call for wealth redistribution if I've ever heard one. Now, for anyone who has any sort of resistance to the idea of wealth redistribution (and the wealth destruction it causes), you've reached an impasse.
But I'll tell you what - you can certainly lead by example. Redistribute *your* wealth, prove how effective that is, and eventually people will see the error of their ways and follow you, right?
Ah, demonizing DDT - the failed environmentalist experiment that has killed 40 million african children over the past 40 years.
Welcome to Africa. We've got malaria here, that has kept us in poverty for hundreds of years. Mothers have to stop working to care for their sick children, and end up watching their best and brightest die. Lefty green liberals demonized a perfectly safe agent (DDT), and prevented the eradication of malaria in Africa while other parts of the world moved forward and pulled themselves out of misery.
We wiped out malaria in the US with DDT. We wiped out malaria in Singapore with DDT. DDT has time and time again proven to be safe, effective, and has had no lasting health effects to anyone, anywhere, much less a bird's egg.
http://reason.com/archives/2004/01/07/ddt-eggshells-and-me
We've been much warmer than today, and didn't turn into Waterworld. We've been much colder than today, and life barely maintained its tenuous grasp on the planet. Even taking the absolute worst case scenario of CO2 doomsayers (and that's a huge leap of faith), we are hundreds, if not thousands of years from "too warm".
Pretending we know the future exactly, and taking drastic action to avoid it, has real and present dangers to the present without any guarantee that they are necessary.
Now look, if there was an alien spaceship hovering over our planet, and it had just started wiping out all the ice and glaciers across the world, I'd be the first person to volunteer to ride a nuke into orbit to destroy them before they could complete the job. But right now, the whole CO2 temperature thing is a *correlation* not a causality.
Absolutely. A modern industrial society needs a much more productive arable land mass. A warm world has more productive arable land mass.
Boy, if we could only do that for the damage carbohydrates does to our health, you could just ignore the effect of coal entirely. But I digress -> comparing possible long term health consequences to certain death of millions of children in poverty because energy is artificially priced high indicates to me that the externalities have been taken into account. Coal is "cheap" because the externalities are not nearly as important to us as the benefits of having a reliable and economical power system.
Everything has "externalities", but to assert that you're going to be able to identify and link them any better than a random choice is hubris, I would submit.
Well, I've never known a fisherman to fish for coral or phytoplankton. I do know that the ocean has been more and less acidic over the ages, and fish still swim in the sea.
If they had cheap power, they could build levees and dams to stave off that kind of *weather* (as opposed to climate).
Except rising CO2 levels increases plant growth and *shrinks* the Sahara.
I'll posit this -> poor Bangladeshis, Africans, and others would be better off if they were able to industrialize with the rapid acceleration of the use of coal and petroleum products, no matter what the mysterious future holds. You *think* that reducing cheap energy *might* prevent future inclement weather events. I *know* that raising people out of poverty *will* give them the power to survive future inclement weather events.
And how would you measure that danger? Compare it to the manufacturing dangers of solar/wind/nuclear with the various industrial processes required for that?
Put more simply, if I was poor, and had the opportunity to see my children grow up to be grandparents, and then die of some toxin related disease because we lived too close to a refinery, I'd choose that over watching my children starve to death before they were 12.
Human poverty is only relieved when we have increased energy use per capita. You can do that by increasing your energy supply (cheap energy), or reducing your capita (mass starvation and death). You only get to pick one.
Let me ask you this question -> do you also see a 50 year lag in the ice-core data for CO2 versus temperature? If you didn't, would that falsify your hypothesis?
I think maybe you misunderstood the intent. "stop something that is, well, already happening anyway" is not necessarily the clearest way to express oneself (quoting GP), but in your basement analogy, you've lost the sense of how long it has been happening. It's been happening before the house and the tap were even there - your comment essentially asserted causality that wasn't in the GP's logic.
So to the point, this isn't an "early stage" (climate has changed, well, always), and there's no reason to believe it will "inevitably get worse" without our intervention. It's a misapplication of an analogy to a strawman that wasn't presented.
Except acid rain was a fraud. And the ozone hole still oscillates. And rain forests grow better with more CO2 in the air. And of course species go extinct all the time - after all, we do believe in natural selection, right?
Okay, you got me on the agricultural practices, but we've also greatly increased crop yield and staved off mass starvation around the world with improved petroleum based fertilizers.
I'll tell you what, though, if humans manage to kill off every mosquito in the world, I'll believe you.
The problem in your example is that the basement is flooding because the seas have risen 10m. Go ahead, turn the tap off all you like.
Well, here's my question - what observation would have falsified their theory? It's not about "1) it's probably impossible to prove it", it's about "1) it's probably impossible to disprove it". If you can't disprove something with observation, you're practicing belief and religion, not science.
I think the metaphor needs to be extended a bit -> it's not just that "Earth" has become a God, but they've diametrically opposed humanity to that God. We are evil, earth is good. Green liberals have adopted Earth as God, but also designated the mass of humanity as Satan.
Sigh. Global warming is supposed to increase the energy of the atmosphere, which is supposed to increase evaporation, which is supposed to increase the number of storms and hurricanes, which of course will mean a global drought. Right.
I'm for a hot world where crops grow better because of increased CO2, where people don't die in the winter because they don't have heating oil, and where biodiversity and life is increased by larger ranges of habitat.
We might agree on what's happening, and even on who to blame, but we're a long way from agreeing that anything needs to be fixed.
Mod parent up - the precautionary principle can go both ways. It's theoretically possible that limiting CO2 will save us all. It's also theoretically possible that limiting CO2 will doom us all. Asserting that we *must* act in order to stave of a theoretical future is a tacit admission that we really don't know what the hell we're talking about.
Example of the precautionary principle epic fail of the 20th century - low-fat diets. Ancel Keys, curse his soul, decided that fat was the cause of heart disease. His life was a crusade dedicated to reducing fat consumption, and we can lay at his feet the blame for moving the US to a low-fat, high carbohydrate diet over the past 40 years. In that time, incidence of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases has skyrocketed. Despite growing evidence that the low-fat dogma was incorrect, every study that confirmed it was touted, and every study that confounded it was denied. To this day we continue to misapprehend the true problem in our diets -> carbohydrates. Nobody thinks wheat bread is evil, and everyone knows lard will clog your arteries. Except that it isn't true. And some white asshole in a lab coat decided 40 years ago that *WE MUST ACT NOW* to save us from a scourge of heart disease.
There are *real* consequences from getting things wrong on the precautionary principle. Sometimes, although it may be difficult, the right move is to wait for more data.
Yes. Artificially increasing the price of energy will harm the poorest of the poor, and increase poverty and misery throughout the world. Cheap energy means better lives for humanity, period. Telling a family in Africa that they have to watch their children die of malnourishment, exposure to the elements and disease because we're going to make it too expensive for them to afford energy is pretty drastic.
#2 might be a reasonable assertion, but #1 is falsified by the historical record. A warmer planet is a better planet for life, period. We've had warmer periods in the past that were not "irreversible", and humanity has flourished during warm periods.
That wasn't the question. The question was whether or not we should stop all further climate research since the science is "settled", and redirect those resources to political actions (advertising, regulation, enforcement of regulation, military action, etc). Whether or not you get to be a researcher or teacher or garbage collector is irrelevant to the question (even if, you are in fact now, a climate researcher with a vested interest in keeping your current job).
Nice strawman though :)
To our best knowledge, CO2 is a positive feedback constrained by its absorption spectrum. Once it is saturated, it cannot act as a feedback. So check here:
1. The earth gets slightly warmer due to a Milankovitch cycle.
2. This causes some CO2 to be released from the oceans.
3. This causes the earth to warm slightly.
4. Goto step 2 until CO2 has reached a point where it is saturated and cannot contribute more warming.
5. Other effects apply.
The problem with your original exhibition was that it cannot apply to periods of cooling and warming simultaneously. For example:
1. The earth gets slightly cooler due to a Milankovitch cycle.
2. This causes some CO2 to be absorbed by the oceans.
3. This causes the earth to cool slightly.
4. Goto step 2
If CO2 was a positive feedback that was overwhelmingly potent, it would prevent any cooling periods at all. Reduce its efficacy in positive feedback enough to explain the cyclic variations in temperature in the historical record, and it becomes a minor and insignificant player in the climate equation, following the trend but not determining it.
Perhaps you just haven't realized yet that your explanation is incorrect.
How does the CO2 know whether or not to be a cooling feedback or a warming feedback? Can it do both? Or maybe, just maybe, CO2 simply follows temperature changes that overwhelm any "feedback" effect, positive or negative (take your pick, but pick just one) - that would certainly explain the historical record better than a "smart CO2" molecule.
Hold on a tick - that talking point has been debunked well enough before. CO2 has a logarithmic absorption, so there is an upper limit to any positive feedback it could provide (theoretical model), and paleoclimate reconstructions show that it *lags* temperature changes by about 800 years.
And the last time global temperatures were 5 degrees higher than they are today, we were in the medieval warm period, with CO2 at lower levels than today, sea level approximately the same, and about the same arctic and antarctic ice. Of course, that's even assuming you've got the CO2 levels correct in your calculation in the first place.
The disjunction between CO2 levels and temperature in the past make it pretty clear, by observation, that the two are not intrinsically related, nor is CO2 a strong positive feedback.
That's simply untrue. Both the Holocene optimum and the Medieval Warm Period were much warmer than today.
Make no doubt about it, they're asking for more funding as part of the "political action" they demand. To believe otherwise is to be willfully naive. If they were only looking for "political action", all of the climate research centers would be shut down (since the science is "settled"), and all of the money would be poured into whatever cap and trade scheme is their latest solution-du-jour.
In order for these people to get funding, they need to claim not only "we need decades of work", but they also have to claim "this is the most critical research for all for all of mankind because without it we'll die a fiery death". But let's turn this around and ask you the question, do you think it is reasonable to cut all funding to every climate scientist today, and instead just jump to political action, since the science is "settled"?
Actually, you've made my point for me exactly -> I'm not asserting knowledge where we don't have enough information or observation to assert it, I'm simply asserting that you cannot pick one "lever" and declare victory without understanding that there is more complexity out there.
Milankovich cycles and the like make changes to the inputs of energy, not the feedbacks of GHG or cloud cover. Ice ages, if you look at the historical record, behave like a cycle of saturation and crash...and the scary part is that we're well overdue for another one. A runaway positive or negative feedback would continue until it reached its maximum, and then perhaps oscillate close to the extreme, but it wouldn't magically restore itself through negative feedbacks. You can go ahead and try this out with a speaker and an amp -> start a positive feedback cycle, and tell me when it is magically overwhelmed by the negative feedbacks it overcame in the first place.