http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...

Text version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus

I would love to hear any environmentalist's objections to Lomborg's conclusions if you disagree with him.

I haven't ready the fine details of the economic analysis they've done, but I don't think that they have (or are able to) calculate the effects that warmer global temperatures will have on all species on all parts of the earth. If they have gone into that much detail and still found it more beneficial to let temperatures rise then I wouldn't have an objection.

If there were some global pool of money that needed to be prioritized, that would be one thing. When you're asking individual citizens of individual countries to prioritize, you're going to get very different results.

As an American, I want my money to go toward improving the lives of Americans.

What's different about that than saying: "I want the food that I buy to feed my family". "I want the money I pay on my shelter to shelter my family."

It seems that everyone, wants the money they spend to help them and their loved ones to one extent or another. Saying I want to help my countrymen I read as just being an exstention to this.

More and more frequently I hear statements from Americans about looking after 'home' first despite the fact that looking at the statistics Americans should lead an idyllic life while many go hungry every night.

Being the only world super power (at least for the next 20 years) the world can't afford America to constantly look inwards. If it does, it will loose it's super power status even more quickly.

"If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above."

http://belgingur.is/nmm2008/wp-content/uploads/utdraettir/go...

Yes, the climate changes on its own. Sometimes it does this "rapidly". But there is no known mechanism in place to produce anything like what we are seeing. Conversely, CO2 greenhouse effects have been qualitatively understood (even it quantitatively modelling it is a bitch) for many decades. I'm not sure which "most people" you think are ignoring the argument, but I assure you it doesn't include climate scientists. It's just that it doesn't make any scientific sense. We know with certainty that fuel burning is producing a rapid spike in CO2 levels. We know with certainty that CO2 is an effective greenhouse gas. We know to within reasonable error bars that the climate is changing rapidly. Do the math. Occam's razor demands that we look at CO2 as the undeniably best hypothesis. No one has a better one.

And the land bridge didn't melt, because it's made of land, and land doesn't melt. :) What happened is that the sea levels rose due to melting glaciers on the continents and flooded it. It's still there, it's just a shallow sea instead of a connecting lowland between asia and alaska.

Wow, I'm glad you have all the answers. I did not intend to fire off a political debate, I am just truly curious. I think that immediately accepting that it's all because of us is disingenuous to the scientific method.

Whether or not the majority of climate change is due to CO2 released by human activity (which I'm still yet to be convinced of), my question was whether the small-scale changes being championed (CFLs, hybrids on an individual scale, living less comfortably (less A/C, bottled water, etc.), and so on) are really going to make a difference in regards to the climate. That's all I was pondering. See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230272 . I think my tone may have been misunderstood.

And the land bridge didn't melt, because it's made of land, and land doesn't melt. :) What happened is that the sea levels rose due to melting glaciers on the continents and flooded it. It's still there, it's just a shallow sea instead of a connecting lowland between asia and alaska.

I stand corrected. I had learned incorrectly in grade school, apparently (not surprising). I did see my error when reading the Wikipedia page; I'm not sure why I didn't edit my post. Let's pretend the definition I was referring to was:

  3. to pass, dwindle, or fade gradually (often fol. by away): *His fortune slowly melted away.*

"The best way to understand Beijing's size is to visualize what Manhattan might be like without the Hudson and East Rivers. Beijing just keeps going. Manhattan is almost 23 square miles. Beijing is more than 150!... Given the size, you can probably imagine the traffic. It's like Los Angeles without interstates, at rush hour, in the rain. It's impossible to get anywhere quickly. I was warned before my trip that traffic would be worse than anything I'd ever seen, and it was. One evening, it took our crew nearly two hours to go about eight miles... Had the Olympics been held last August, the air quality in Beijing would have been in violation of the World Health Organization standard every single day..."

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=3453777

The problem with technological solutions is that there have been unintended consequences whenever we have tried to meddle in the environment, so it will have to be done very carefully.

And in the worst case where we simply can't stop burning, there are at least ideas out there about how to reduce atmospheric CO2 directly. Planting trees in the tropics is one, burying biomass is another. There are even some borderline-scary notions about seeding blooms in the ocean with iron.

But it all starts with a recognition that action is required. Get off your butts, basically.

What if the policies on the table are feel-good policies meant to show that they are "doing something", but the costs of those policies are higher than any likely benefit? That is a good description of what I feel about the current state of Global Warming "solutions".

What's different this time? (For one, there wasn't anyone who would benefit from carbon trading or taxes back then.)

Were it to happen in the near future, it would be a disaster. The areas that would be drowned are the areas we are currently using to feed ourselves.

And I think you're a little confused about "not unprecedented". The current CO2 levels certainly are unprecedented for us as a species, and in fact most or all current ecosystems. Rapid climate change can and has caused mass extinctions in the past. Is that a "problem" to you? It is to me.

I'll admit to being stunned at the number of global warming deniers on hacker news. I honestly thought folks here would be a little better informed.

Personally, I just take the IPCC reports as the best state of the current knowledge and proceed from there. They do not predict that the central US will be flooded anytime soon. They predict 2C warming over the next century which will produce changes that are annoying but survivable. In other words, nothing worth returning to the stone age for.

All the more shrill predictions and extreme policy measures don't seem to be backed up by evidence or any sensible cost-benefit analysis.

I accept the science, I just don't accept all the panic.

And as far as hyperbole goes:

> In other words, nothing worth returning to the stone age for.

Taking the bus and paying more for electricity is "returning to the stone age?" Now who's panicking?

The thing that always gets me about this debate, and the energy debates in general, is that energy efficiency is still far and away the most productive energy investment around: what is needed is ways for individual consumers to make those investment easily.

if (anti_carbon && anti_nuclear) { return to_stone_age; }

Magical unicorns could come and eat our crops, causing mass global starvation. Why hasn't the government done anything, such as mandating unicorn shields for farmers?

My point is that the worst-case scenario is irrelevant. It matters how likely the worst-case scenario is to occur. Any discussion of the magnitude of possible damage without discussing the odds is fear-mongering at its most base. It's the same thing Bush does when he states that the terrorists could end the American way of life. Sure they could, if they blew up enough cities. But how likely is that?

  Stop.
  

That's funny, I haven't heard that any serious scientist thought human life was threatened in the near future, outside of Bangladesh. The "we're all going to die" crowd seems to be on the side of unreason to me. They are once again letting there environmentalist ideology run ahead of the evidence, but this time they unfortunately have the ears of the world's governments.

  Bangladesh
  

Either way, the solution to this and any problem is engineering. I'm formulating an essay on this topic that I'll post soon.

I assume you watched "The great global warming swindle" ?

Pretty compelling IMHO.

Occam's razor demands that, if the temperature of the earth has shifted wildly throughout its entire history, then it will continue to do so, today and tomorrow.

Occam's razor demands that the usual suspects are trying to seize control of the means of production and distribution. Again.

Occam's razor demands that, the same people concerned with global warming should be placing most of their demands against coal-fired countries like China, and in favor of Nuclear power. This is not happening.

When trillions of dollars are on the line, Occam's razor demands following it, and not the same "climate scientists" who were predicting doom from "global cooling" in the 1970s.

Welcome to the internets, an exciting place for you to learn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

The data quickly contradicted the global cooling predictions, as will happen again--perhaps. Of course, such contradictions are never a problem for people with an overriding political purpose. Instead of one crisis, they are happy enough to take the opposite crisis. Whether they have to switch again anytime soon is to be seen. Global temperature trends are sometimes quick and sometimes long.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/02/11/a-200...

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/loehle_fig3.JPG

99.999 percent of temperature swings occurred before the industrial age. Occam's razor again suggests that we should not blow trillions (yes, trillions) of dollars on anti-production boondoggles.

But sadly it still got a front page scare article in "Time"

For the greenies conservation is the answers to everything, but ultimately that is a ludyte pipe dream. I don't see any countries with a serious plan to ramp up nuclear power to a level that will replace hydro-carbons. And I think that is the only real alternative.

1. Cheap solar power: http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3. 2. Moving the entire nation of Israel from gas to electric: http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/. Efficient power storage seems like the only missing link. But what we have now is already enough to move forward.

But I'm actually a bit confused about this as well. When I was in France, I visited a town called aigues-mortes, where walls that had once been used to keep the mediterranean at bay were now miles inland. England was once so warm that vineyards were common in the south.

So please don't take this as a denial of disaster... I admit ignorance here. But hasn't the earth been much warmer while humans were around? Is humanity actually threatened, or is it that our modern civilization has gotten so hard-wired to our climate that we can't deal with change? For instance, suppose we were going through a period of warming that was natural, rather than human induced - would we still be looking for ways to reverse it?

Or is it that the change is on such an epic and sudden scale that the temperatures of the past 20,000 years will all seem temperate after what the current round of global warming will induce?

I think the answer is that many greenies are ideologically opposed to any human alteration of the environment whatsoever. So, rather than calmly weigh the costs and benefits of current policy, they try to instill as much fear in the general populace as possible to get their way.

Yes. That's what the scientists seem to be saying.

I'm no climate scientist -- I just downloaded the first paper I've ever looked at on the subject. It's James Hansen's most recent preprint, which is conveniently available as a PDF here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

It's a preprint, so it's still under review, some bits of it are more hypothetical than other bits, maybe the grad student dropped a decimal place, blah blah blah, caveats caveats. But presumably ice core temp data is pretty well documented in the literature by now, so if we stick to those figures we should be okay.

Figure 2 is what we're looking for -- specifically, the red and the purple curves. The red curve is an estimate of global temperature going back 400k years, based on ice core data. The purple curve is measured global temperature since the late 1800s.

My back-of-the-envelope summary here:

-- Just by squinting at the purple curve, we see that the Earth has warmed something like 0.5C since 1900.

-- The Earth, on average, is now about as warm as it has ever been since the end of the last glacial period, 10k years ago. Although, obviously, temperatures vary across the surface of the earth and over time by a lot more than 0.5C, and these curves are fuzzy estimates based on data at one or two points, so don't expect it to apply to your backyard, or to any specific winter's day.

-- If the Earth warms another 1deg C, we'll have a global average temperature comparable to the highest seen in the last half million years. When will that happen? Considering (naively) only the slope of the purple curve in Figure 2, which is based on contemporary measurements by humans with thermometers, it might be a couple hundred years or less.

-- Homo sapiens, according to genetic studies, is about 200,000 years old. So, yeah, the earth has been warmer than it is today "while humans were around", but your grandchildren might not be able to say that anymore.

-- If you want to compare the current (global average) temps with the (global average) temperatures when your French walls were built, check out the inset graph at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Holocene_Temperature...

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I can squint at this data and see the legendary Medieval Warm Period (peaking about 1000 years ago; that's when England had those nice vineyards) followed by the legendary Little Ice Age (the last 1000 years, up to about 150 years ago). And the current global temp is on there, too, on the left edge. If you can't see it at first glance: Look higher on the scale. ;)

-- Yes, global temperatures have risen very quickly before. Check out the start of the Holocene interglacial, or the Eemian interglacial. But nobody was around to write about that -- it was before history was invented. So I think you can safely call this an "epic" event, since every recorded epic ever is newer than the last time this happened.

It's hard to get your mind around. If only some older species than ours had kept records, maybe we'd have a better frame of reference. It's a pity those Homo erectus were such slackers.

It isn't enough to argue with a certain type of personality, though. Some people become extremely well informed, and can always argue one level of detail lower that I'll ever be able to do. At some point, I just have to listen to the experts. It does seem very clear to me that the most reliable, objective experts on this field are supporting very grim predictions.

Some people become extremely well informed, and can always argue one level of detail lower that I'll ever be able to do.

The trick is to learn to tell the difference between "an argument at a lower level of detail" and "a big cloud of chaff". It's an art. Descending into the data and looking at it for yourself is part of the answer, but it's not always enough -- some people will try to circle around and around, up and down, through a forest of details as part of a strategy to bewilder and exhaust you.

We know of times when the temperatures were higher than the projections. We also know what was happening on earth at that time. If those things don't match the predictions for the effects of global warming....

We also know of times when the CO2 levels were much higher than today and the temperatures then. If the algebra applied to current/projected CO2 levels and current/projected temps doesn't tell us the temps when the CO2 levels were higher....

The big question is: can we do that (and at what cost)?

The problem is that the cost is likely to be very, very high especially since we as a species have only recently pulled ourselves out of mass-poverty. Even now, half the globe resides in poverty. Is it worth it to spend a significant portion of our newfound wealth on climate stabilization when half the world is still poor and the prospect for near-term economic growth is bright? I don't think so unless the climate problem is much, much more pressing than most scientists think it is.

I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude.

Environmentalists have been screaming "we're all going to die!" every 5 years for the last 40. Check out the first chapter of Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Many of the still well-respected names in environmental policy have been drastically, self-servingly disingenuous in the past in order to push a radical environmental agenda that frankly was not backed up by evidence. Anyone who does not carefully filter the hoopla from the fact is blind to history.

Excuse me if I don't jump every time an environmentalist screams "dance!"

"We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring." Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: "It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."

Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically.

Lomborg notes, "As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world." Lomborg's book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html

And it's a lot more than just the environmentalists concerned about global warming. It's reached a broad enough consensus among scientists that it's safe to say it's time to do something about it.

Combating it consists mainly of doing things that, in the long term, we should and/or need to do anyway. No matter what you think about fossil fuels in regards to the environment, the one thing we know for certain is that they won't last forever, and with China and India coming online, they probably won't last much longer. Be it in two decades or a century (and even the most optimistic geologists don't foresee us having oil for much longer than that) we will eventually have no choice but to switch to electric cars and renewable energy. And given that both are currently cost-competitive (or nearing that) and will only get cheaper, now is clearly the time to begin the process.

The fact that a stopped clock is correct twice a day is no reason to consult it.

It's both efficient and good to scorn and ignore folks who get it wrong consistently.

> And given that both are currently cost-competitive (or nearing that) and will only get cheaper, now is clearly the time to begin the process.

If they're really cost-competitive today and getting cheaper, no govt action is needed.

If govt action is required to make it cost-competitive, it isn't cost-competitive.

The fact is, most people can't (or can't be bothered to) tell the difference between a respectable climatologist and a hippie worried about global cooling.

This is a widespread, but specious, argument. The cost of moving away from fossil fuels is X% of the world's wealth with current technology and Y% of the world's wealth with technology 20 years from now. If we can expect the world to be richer 20 years from now (a reasonable assumption) and technology to be better (again a reasonable assumption) then Y is probably much less than X. It will be a much bigger sacrifice to make the change today than tomorrow.

The point is, although our economy will probably naturally convert away from fossil fuel technology in the long run, forcing the process to accelerate entails significant extra costs on a significantly poorer world. It is NOT costless, as the phrase "things we should and/or need to do anyway" seems to imply. The argument is simplistic and involves a narrow view of the problem.

I see no valid reason to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources faster than what is already happening in the market.

What this means is that the market is very poor at long-term thinking and investing (which is why I agree with Andreesen about dual class stock structures). In short (and he sums it up better than I could, so read his article if you want clarification) our market has become very bad at long-term strategizing.

You are betting your own money on being correct, aren't you?

Check out the Oregon Petition to see just how much 'consensus' there is on the issue. Also, the book "The Deniers."

  1. bustling excitement or activity; commotion; hullabaloo; to-do.
  2. sensational publicity; ballyhoo.
  3. speech or writing intended to mislead or to obscure an issue.

Check www.breathingearth.net and watch the counts of births/deaths, how quickly they move.

Watch the deaths. Try to imagine each one as a real human being with a funeral, mourners, leaving a gap in other's lives. It's hard - impossible? 100,000 people is a _lot_ of people.

That's not considering all the suffering that happens before many of those deaths from illness, disease, accident, war, muggings and assaults...

I don't think people could stay sane if we couldn't be dismissive (or perhaps, accepting) of mass suffering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_petition http://www.amazon.com/Deniers-Renowned-Scientists-Political-...

Pointing out that things will change over the next hundred years is not very interesting to me -- it's what I would expect. Pointing out that we effect the environment is also a non-starter -- of course we do. Assuming that since we exist and change nature that somehow we must "un-change" it is muddle-headed, in my opinion. It's a religion looking for a science. Since the first microbes colonized the oceans life forms have been changing the climate. It is a natural part of this planet's evolution. There is nothing immoral or unethical about it.

Now if we want to have some artistic discussion about what the global thermostat should be set at, let's have it. But let's be honest about what we're doing and not wallow around in dire predictions of global calamity. It seems to me the reason the environmentalists scream so loud is because they have such a thin case.

I'm only trying to comment on the type of political discussion we're having. The science may be sound or not. But science is just a prop in this discussion. The real issue is all around the religious feeling that we should feel guilty for existing, consuming, and changing our world to suit us -- basically for becoming an evolved species.