You still have provided no scientific support or argument for your two main claims: the possibility of a +10C temperature rise, and the possibility of an "extinction level event".
Neither the pamphlet nor the book you point to are credible scientific sources. The pamphlet bases many of its conclusions on the opinions of a few people and press articles, and the book is not a "meta study", it's a popular science book by an environmental activist with an agenda.
The government can do applied research without becoming a totalitarian state.
Yes, it can. I think it's a good thing when government pays for research.
What I object to is your repeated statements that that is the only way we could have gotten those technologies. That's not only unreasonable, it's historically wrong.
The problem isn't government, it's you and people like you.
True, demanding something doesn't guarantee you get it. On the other hand, *not* demanding something *does* guarantee you won't get it.
That's true in planned economies like the Soviet Union. In market economies, you don't have to demand things to have your needs met.
If nobody in the government demanded a satellite based navigation system, there wouldn't be GPS. If nobody in the government demanded a robust, survivable way of transporting data packets between heterogeneous networks, there wouldn't be the Internet. If nobody in the government demanded a way of automating a wide variety of computations, the computer as we know it wouldn't exist.
You're thinking like a good little totalitarian and fascist.
You don't understand. Chu is part of the government elite now. He used to have to obey the laws of physics, but these days, he just needs to snap his fingers and the universe bends to his will.
The maximum theoretical potential of advanced lithium-ion batteries that haven't yet been demonstrated to work is still only about 6 percent of crude oil."
I won't lie: any day one of these child porn scumbags is caught is a good day.
Production of child pornography should obviously be illegal because it clearly harms the children involved. And distribution of illegally produced material should also be illegal.
But it is not reasonable to throw people in jail merely for web searches. Some people who search for child pornography do so because they watch it, and some people who watch child pornography go on to harm children. But making such reasoning the basis of law is a bad legal principle.
There's no sudden change anywhere in my arguments.... +10C in a bit over 80 years would be an extinction level event. We *might* survive it, but it's very far from certain.
That's the problem: you are not making an argument at all, you're simply repeating your claims ad nauseam.
Please note that the +10C in ~88 years is not my prediction, it's set forth as a new possible worst case scenario after several indicators points to reaching the +2C goal
My guess is that you misinterpreted a recently published MIT climate model study, but since you are just picking numbers out of thin air, it's impossible to tell.
Given the timescales involved in the Eocene optimum, I have no doubt we would find a technological solution to the problem
There is no technological solution needed. Compared to 20000 years ago, we have had a +10C temperature increase and a 120m rise in sea levels. Are we reduced to cowering under plastic domes eating hydroponic food? Entire civilizations were wiped off the face of the earth and most people don't even remember. So why should another +10C and another 70m, even if they could occur, be any different?
however it might put a strain on our society past it's capacity to withstand, causing widespread hunger, wars and significant reduction of the population
It may, or it may not, but those are normal human conditions, not "extinction level events". My parents lived through the destruction of their country and massive refugee crises. People pick up the pieces, rebuild, adapt, and get on with their lives.
Why would Apple be in trouble? They'll copy Samsung and Sony's phones, they'll patent the rectangular version of it, market the hell out of it, and finally sue everybody for stealing Apple's innovation. Apple has been getting away with that for thirty years.
The study excludes suggestions of rapid melting: "Antarctica is not losing ice as rapidly as suggested by many recent studies. What’s more, snowfall in east Antarctica still seems to be compensating for some — but not all — of the melting elsewhere in Antarctica." It generally just seems to confirm what people had been assuming was happening anyway: a modest amount of melting in response to increasing temperatures. Note that melting from ice sheets only accounts for 20% of total sea level rise.
The search engine "obviously" tries to use its own users for lobbying interests "under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet", wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling, politicians of the CDU and CSU conservative parties, who together form the biggest block in the German parliament."
As opposed to... the German press and publishers, who have been abusing their position to misinform and manipulate public opinion for their own financial gain for decades.
So you propose a 50 year human exodus from the tropics for most of 3-6 billion people as a solution to us as opposed to just cleaning up the mess we made
I don't "propose" anything and there is no "as opposed to". Climate change is inevitable. We can't remove the carbon from the atmosphere, and nations aren't agreeing to stop adding to it either. Sea level rise has been happening independent of AGW anyway. You can either wallow in apocalyptic visions, or you can simply accept it and deal with it. And dealing with it doesn't require either mass death or a mass exodus.
The San Francisco bay expands engulfing the entire Silicon Valley and the wine country of the North Bay.
That's not going to happen because SF Bay is filling up faster naturally than any sea level rise; if it weren't for active conservation efforts, the bay would be disappearing. For the same reasons, Bangladesh's land mass is actually growing and will likely continue to grow for decades despite sea level rise. Your scenarios are unreasonable.
(Not that it's important to the discussion, but humans are less efficient at converting starch to usable energy than herbivores; and we cannot use cellulose at all)
Well, you brought it up not me. I'm just wondering what leads you to believe this. In humans, starch is converted to glucose by amylase and then used in aerobic respiration. What would be more efficient than that?
And humans actually can digest cellulose and even lignin directly to some extent http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8719737 But the usual means is to use a symbiote like a rabbit or cow.
Let's summarize. You put up the straw man that temperatures may rise by +10C, then you shift the goal even further by postulating that such a +10C change is extremely rapid. But you're still simply begging the question: you're assuming that if you just make conditions extreme enough, at some point humans will go extinct. And for good measure you add some ad hominems. That's not an argument, it's FUD and speculation; you haven't made your case.
I could rest my case here. But the Eocene optimum and the survival of species during large and abrupt changes during the past 100ky show that species have no trouble rapidly colonizing new habitats when conditions change and that they have places to go. An additional problem with your reasoning is that humans primarily depend on domesticated species anyway that we grow where we want. All this means that your statements about human extinction are not just unsupported but actually contradict what we know.
You just don't seem to realize what an extreme claim human extinction is. Human extinction would mean that there is no place on earth capable of supporting even a few tens of thousands of humans, despite the existence of numerous domesticated and wild food species in most environments, thousands of islands, and vast tracts of land at all latitudes, and despite the demonstrated ability of people to survive even in deserts and through ice ages.
You severely underestimate the changes a +10C increase would bring. Unless we build closed-loop habitats for ourselves well in advance, there is very little chance of the human race surviving. None of our domesticated plants or animals would survive.
Where do you get this from? Nothing is going to go above the Eocene optimum, a time when CO2 was at 2000ppm and there ice caps had completely melted (that may have been +12C). Mammals did just fine, as did lots of stuff we eat, so it's a good bet people would do just fine as well.
Our evolutionary advantage, our intelligence, comes at a very high price. We are fragile and we require a lot of energy in a very specific form. We are not very good at converting starch to usable energy.
Humans live and thrive anywhere from the high arctic to the Sahara desert with no problems. We survived several major ice ages, several periods of +10C temperature rises and falls, and hundreds of feet of sea level rise and fall. We're so energetically efficient that we can hunt and kill just about any creature on earth simply by following it until it falls over. Why on earth do you think we're these fragile creatures that go extinct at the drop of a hat?
(And starch is polymerized glucose; short of a glucose IV, there's no more efficient energy source for humans. That's why it's so fattening.)
Poor Bangladesh is already in deep guano. Water is rising, and they live on a flood plain. A population half that of the United States lives in profound poverty and they will be displaced by the effects of Global Warming in this century... where do they go? The likely answer is away.
We've had global warming and sea level rise for 20000 years and people have always coped with it via migration. The only reason Bangladesh is so strongly affected because it has been artificially separated from India, impeding the natural migrations that would normally happen in response to climate change. But even in the baroque system of modern nation states, AGW will open up plenty of new land in Siberia, Canada, and Northern Europe where people from any flooded areas will be welcome and needed.
Making borders more open for migration is certainly a lot easier and rational than the kind of costly and ineffective anti-AGW efforts you have in mind. And if you can't get people to agree to something as rational, simple, and beneficial as immigration, the kinds of policies you envision are never going to pass anyway.
You're misapplying that. The "argument from ignorance" fallacy tell you that just because you haven't seen something, you can't conclude that it doesn't exist. That's because you may not have looked or may not have had a chance to observe it. But police and media are looking for such cases, are capable of identifying them, and would be reporting them publicly. If you look for something that could happen to millions of people and you don't observe it, it is reasonable to conclude that it's rare.
But the longer we wait to take that action the higher the cost.
In different words, you agree that it is all about financial tradeoffs.
You can't ignore the non-quantifiable impacts just because you can't put a number on them.
All the impacts you have been worried about are quantifiable: flooding, destruction of arable land, etc., and the IPCC did put numbers on them. You can't double-count those impacts by saying they don't cost much, but they are civilization threatening nonetheless. If they were civilization threatening, they would have a high cost associated with them and the IPCC would have incorporated them into the cost model, even with a high uncertainty.
What causes habitat destruction if it's not economic development?
Large populations without economic development cause environmental destruction, because they slash and burn for agriculture, use forests for firewood, hunt species to extinction, and reproduce faster, etc. Given the same population size, more economic development results in less environmental destruction and less population growth. That's why allocating our resources to economic development is more important than allocating it to preventing AGW.
Without fresh water in the form of precipitation or irrigation, without fertilizers, without energy to run the machinery and without good soil yields would drop precipitously.
I'm aware of that, and I stand by my statement, since any of those can be obtained with energy and AGW does not threaten the energy supply. Furthermore, the IPCC report itself is clear about North American and European industrial architecture not being threatened by AGW, so, frankly, what are you talking about?
You argued that civilization may be doomed because of destruction of agriculture because of AGW. I have yet to see any plausible argument supporting that view.
I have never argued that this will be an extinction level event for homo sapiens
That's what this thread has been about. If you're arguing about something else, you're arguing about a straw man.
What facts do you have to back up your supposition that at worst "we're talking about a modest reduction in GDP"? I would consider that on the margins of the best case scenario.
It's not a "supposition", it's the conclusion of the last IPCC report after accounting for all the factors with quantifiable economic impact. Furthermore, you want to convince others to act, so you need to provide convincing arguments for your positions; the default action is to do nothing.
But it will lead to the extinction of a lot of other species who are unable to adapt to the rate of change which will make our lives poorer.
True, but the primary cause of man-made extinctions isn't AGW, it's population growth and habitat destruction, and those are related to lack of economic development. Strong measures to prevent AGW are going to make those problems worse by reducing economic growth (IPCC), not better.
It's possible it could be an extinction level event for our technological civilization though. The more time you spend on simply surviving the less time you have for higher level thinking and working on things that aren't necessary for your survival.
How is AGW supposed to cause this? Modern industrial agriculture depends on little more than sun, warmth, and land (freshwater, minerals, and oil make it more efficient, but aren't necessary). How is AGW threatening any of these inputs? All studies and predictions (IPCC etc.) talk about modest increases and decreases in productivity, with Europe and North America largely being a wash overall. As far as modern Western agriculture is concerned, AGW is a non-issue.
I'm curious as to what argument was demolished? During the last maxima a lot of species went extinct, all significant change cause extinctions. That some thrived doesn't disprove that others went extinct.
The original discussion was about extinction of humans. Humans survive in environments from the desert to the arctic, eating pretty much anything that's available. There is no realistically possible degree of climate change that would cause humans to go extinct on earth.
When that argument failed, you tried to side-track the argument by talking about extinction of species and mass extinctions. "Mass extinction" sounds scary, but doesn't matter much to human survival. These days, most of our food comes from a few domesticated plant and animal species in simple ecologies that we control. All we need for food production is sun, water, and space.
Of course, while not threatening to human survival, extinctions are undesirable because they reduce quality of life. Extinctions due to human activities are primarily due to overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction, ultimately rooted in poverty and overpopulation. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions won't address those problems, it will aggravate them by slowing economic development.
What you are missing is that there is no such thing as being "done" with map data. It's an ongoing effort, with data changing all the time. Google is at the plateau where they are probably as good as it is realistic to be. Apple only has to reach the same level where Google is, while Google is essentially at a static position.
Google is doing indoor maps, maps, streetview and navigation in the most inaccessible places in the world, integration of data from a huge user community, plus search results, plus business data, plus its social network. How is that "a static position"? And how is Apple going to catch up, with no social network, a smaller user community, no search engine?
Slashdot Mirror
You still have provided no scientific support or argument for your two main claims: the possibility of a +10C temperature rise, and the possibility of an "extinction level event".
Neither the pamphlet nor the book you point to are credible scientific sources. The pamphlet bases many of its conclusions on the opinions of a few people and press articles, and the book is not a "meta study", it's a popular science book by an environmental activist with an agenda.
Yes, it can. I think it's a good thing when government pays for research.
What I object to is your repeated statements that that is the only way we could have gotten those technologies. That's not only unreasonable, it's historically wrong.
The problem isn't government, it's you and people like you.
That's true in planned economies like the Soviet Union. In market economies, you don't have to demand things to have your needs met.
You're thinking like a good little totalitarian and fascist.
You don't understand. Chu is part of the government elite now. He used to have to obey the laws of physics, but these days, he just needs to snap his fingers and the universe bends to his will.
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/kurt-zenz-house/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology
Production of child pornography should obviously be illegal because it clearly harms the children involved. And distribution of illegally produced material should also be illegal.
But it is not reasonable to throw people in jail merely for web searches. Some people who search for child pornography do so because they watch it, and some people who watch child pornography go on to harm children. But making such reasoning the basis of law is a bad legal principle.
That's the problem: you are not making an argument at all, you're simply repeating your claims ad nauseam.
My guess is that you misinterpreted a recently published MIT climate model study, but since you are just picking numbers out of thin air, it's impossible to tell.
There is no technological solution needed. Compared to 20000 years ago, we have had a +10C temperature increase and a 120m rise in sea levels. Are we reduced to cowering under plastic domes eating hydroponic food? Entire civilizations were wiped off the face of the earth and most people don't even remember. So why should another +10C and another 70m, even if they could occur, be any different?
It may, or it may not, but those are normal human conditions, not "extinction level events". My parents lived through the destruction of their country and massive refugee crises. People pick up the pieces, rebuild, adapt, and get on with their lives.
There are many waterproof Android phones on the market worldwide. The problem is that US carriers are so restrictive and have such a small selection.
Why would Apple be in trouble? They'll copy Samsung and Sony's phones, they'll patent the rectangular version of it, market the hell out of it, and finally sue everybody for stealing Apple's innovation. Apple has been getting away with that for thirty years.
Is it really so hard to look this up on Wikipedia yourself?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
The study excludes suggestions of rapid melting: "Antarctica is not losing ice as rapidly as suggested by many recent studies. What’s more, snowfall in east Antarctica still seems to be compensating for some — but not all — of the melting elsewhere in Antarctica." It generally just seems to confirm what people had been assuming was happening anyway: a modest amount of melting in response to increasing temperatures. Note that melting from ice sheets only accounts for 20% of total sea level rise.
As opposed to... the German press and publishers, who have been abusing their position to misinform and manipulate public opinion for their own financial gain for decades.
I don't "propose" anything and there is no "as opposed to". Climate change is inevitable. We can't remove the carbon from the atmosphere, and nations aren't agreeing to stop adding to it either. Sea level rise has been happening independent of AGW anyway. You can either wallow in apocalyptic visions, or you can simply accept it and deal with it. And dealing with it doesn't require either mass death or a mass exodus.
That's not going to happen because SF Bay is filling up faster naturally than any sea level rise; if it weren't for active conservation efforts, the bay would be disappearing. For the same reasons, Bangladesh's land mass is actually growing and will likely continue to grow for decades despite sea level rise. Your scenarios are unreasonable.
Well, you brought it up not me. I'm just wondering what leads you to believe this. In humans, starch is converted to glucose by amylase and then used in aerobic respiration. What would be more efficient than that?
And humans actually can digest cellulose and even lignin directly to some extent http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8719737 But the usual means is to use a symbiote like a rabbit or cow.
Let's summarize. You put up the straw man that temperatures may rise by +10C, then you shift the goal even further by postulating that such a +10C change is extremely rapid. But you're still simply begging the question: you're assuming that if you just make conditions extreme enough, at some point humans will go extinct. And for good measure you add some ad hominems. That's not an argument, it's FUD and speculation; you haven't made your case.
I could rest my case here. But the Eocene optimum and the survival of species during large and abrupt changes during the past 100ky show that species have no trouble rapidly colonizing new habitats when conditions change and that they have places to go. An additional problem with your reasoning is that humans primarily depend on domesticated species anyway that we grow where we want. All this means that your statements about human extinction are not just unsupported but actually contradict what we know.
You just don't seem to realize what an extreme claim human extinction is. Human extinction would mean that there is no place on earth capable of supporting even a few tens of thousands of humans, despite the existence of numerous domesticated and wild food species in most environments, thousands of islands, and vast tracts of land at all latitudes, and despite the demonstrated ability of people to survive even in deserts and through ice ages.
Where do you get this from? Nothing is going to go above the Eocene optimum, a time when CO2 was at 2000ppm and there ice caps had completely melted (that may have been +12C). Mammals did just fine, as did lots of stuff we eat, so it's a good bet people would do just fine as well.
Humans live and thrive anywhere from the high arctic to the Sahara desert with no problems. We survived several major ice ages, several periods of +10C temperature rises and falls, and hundreds of feet of sea level rise and fall. We're so energetically efficient that we can hunt and kill just about any creature on earth simply by following it until it falls over. Why on earth do you think we're these fragile creatures that go extinct at the drop of a hat?
(And starch is polymerized glucose; short of a glucose IV, there's no more efficient energy source for humans. That's why it's so fattening.)
Same as always: nationalism, xenophobia, totalitarianism. If you keep a lid on those, humanity can cope with anything.
Insurance, like anything else that matters, is not about possibility, it is about probability.
We've had global warming and sea level rise for 20000 years and people have always coped with it via migration. The only reason Bangladesh is so strongly affected because it has been artificially separated from India, impeding the natural migrations that would normally happen in response to climate change. But even in the baroque system of modern nation states, AGW will open up plenty of new land in Siberia, Canada, and Northern Europe where people from any flooded areas will be welcome and needed.
Making borders more open for migration is certainly a lot easier and rational than the kind of costly and ineffective anti-AGW efforts you have in mind. And if you can't get people to agree to something as rational, simple, and beneficial as immigration, the kinds of policies you envision are never going to pass anyway.
You're misapplying that. The "argument from ignorance" fallacy tell you that just because you haven't seen something, you can't conclude that it doesn't exist. That's because you may not have looked or may not have had a chance to observe it. But police and media are looking for such cases, are capable of identifying them, and would be reporting them publicly. If you look for something that could happen to millions of people and you don't observe it, it is reasonable to conclude that it's rare.
industrial architecture -> industrial agriculture
In different words, you agree that it is all about financial tradeoffs.
All the impacts you have been worried about are quantifiable: flooding, destruction of arable land, etc., and the IPCC did put numbers on them. You can't double-count those impacts by saying they don't cost much, but they are civilization threatening nonetheless. If they were civilization threatening, they would have a high cost associated with them and the IPCC would have incorporated them into the cost model, even with a high uncertainty.
Large populations without economic development cause environmental destruction, because they slash and burn for agriculture, use forests for firewood, hunt species to extinction, and reproduce faster, etc. Given the same population size, more economic development results in less environmental destruction and less population growth. That's why allocating our resources to economic development is more important than allocating it to preventing AGW.
I'm aware of that, and I stand by my statement, since any of those can be obtained with energy and AGW does not threaten the energy supply. Furthermore, the IPCC report itself is clear about North American and European industrial architecture not being threatened by AGW, so, frankly, what are you talking about?
You argued that civilization may be doomed because of destruction of agriculture because of AGW. I have yet to see any plausible argument supporting that view.
That's what this thread has been about. If you're arguing about something else, you're arguing about a straw man.
It's not a "supposition", it's the conclusion of the last IPCC report after accounting for all the factors with quantifiable economic impact. Furthermore, you want to convince others to act, so you need to provide convincing arguments for your positions; the default action is to do nothing.
True, but the primary cause of man-made extinctions isn't AGW, it's population growth and habitat destruction, and those are related to lack of economic development. Strong measures to prevent AGW are going to make those problems worse by reducing economic growth (IPCC), not better.
How is AGW supposed to cause this? Modern industrial agriculture depends on little more than sun, warmth, and land (freshwater, minerals, and oil make it more efficient, but aren't necessary). How is AGW threatening any of these inputs? All studies and predictions (IPCC etc.) talk about modest increases and decreases in productivity, with Europe and North America largely being a wash overall. As far as modern Western agriculture is concerned, AGW is a non-issue.
The original discussion was about extinction of humans. Humans survive in environments from the desert to the arctic, eating pretty much anything that's available. There is no realistically possible degree of climate change that would cause humans to go extinct on earth.
When that argument failed, you tried to side-track the argument by talking about extinction of species and mass extinctions. "Mass extinction" sounds scary, but doesn't matter much to human survival. These days, most of our food comes from a few domesticated plant and animal species in simple ecologies that we control. All we need for food production is sun, water, and space.
Of course, while not threatening to human survival, extinctions are undesirable because they reduce quality of life. Extinctions due to human activities are primarily due to overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction, ultimately rooted in poverty and overpopulation. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions won't address those problems, it will aggravate them by slowing economic development.
Google is doing indoor maps, maps, streetview and navigation in the most inaccessible places in the world, integration of data from a huge user community, plus search results, plus business data, plus its social network. How is that "a static position"? And how is Apple going to catch up, with no social network, a smaller user community, no search engine?