Stop. There is no meaningful argument: the current, epochally high rate of CO2 release is driving current climate change.
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.
Stop. There is no meaningful argument: the current, epochally high rate of CO2 release is driving current climate change.
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 most important question to me is this: what can we realistically do about it? Specifically, will major efforts on the part of the "first world" make a difference when we consider say China, which is rapidly ramping up to modern consumption levels without the commensurate environmental controls?
China is well on their way to becoming an American-like consumer and polluter. I'm not sure what we can realistically do about it since modern lifestyle is correlated with energy use (e.g. climate-controller rooms a.k.a. AC)
"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..."
At this point, we most likely need a technological solution. Global warming solutions have a huge "tragedy of the commons" issue to contend with.
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.
We can reduce consumption where we can, and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies. I'm less pessimistic than you are about China's ability to regulate itself, but even if you accept that China (or whoever) is going to continue burning coal as if there were no tomorrow, that's not an excuse for making things worse.
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.
>and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies
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".
Interestingly enough, the current and projected CO2 levels are not unprecedented. And, when the CO2 levels were much higher, the "if we don't do something" disasters didn't happen.
What's different this time? (For one, there wasn't anyone who would benefit from carbon trading or taxes back then.)
Flatly incorrect. I don't know what disaster you're talking about specifically, but the biggest and most obvious impact from melting polar ice (antarctic, not arctic) is the loss of low-lying land area. This absolutely has happened during previous warm periods. The north american midwest is flat because it used to be an shallow sea.
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.
>The north american midwest is flat because it used to be an shallow sea.
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.
That's out of context. It was an example of the kind of change the earth has seen in epochs where polar ice melts completely, not a prediction for the immediate future. And the IPCC has 4C as its upper bound, not 2, and in any case they don't predict motion of antarctic ice sheets due to lack of models. Their predictions for sea level change are conservative, basically.
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?
Suppose there's a 10% chance that the Gulf Stream will turn off (an event which has previously occurred, and which was followed by extreme rapid cooling of northern Europe), given one set of policy choices, and a .1% percent chance, given another set. How much should we be willing to pay to implement the second set?
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.
That logic doesn't work. You might as well argue that traffic laws are inappropriate because you almost certainly won't get killed on the way home today.
This is called "risk assessment", and it's an important and crucial part of any policy discussion. You don't just pick the average and assume that will happen, you weigh costs vs. risks across the board, including the "best" and "worst" scenarios, and try to come up with a safe, conservative plan for avoiding the worst effects.
I think you're misunderstanding the use of the "worst case" in the IPCC report. Those aren't OMGWTFBBQ scenarios from someone's dreams, they are the scenarios from the actual science that lie within a reasonably tight bound. They are likely consequences for some value of "likely" (probably a 95% confidence, or the like).
I don't think that anyone is denying that global warming is happening. However a) it's not entirely clear what the underlying cause is (i.e. how much is greenhouse gases, how much is increased solar activity etc) and b) the "solutions" being advocated by the Green lobby are inconsistent with their stated aims.
if (anti_carbon && anti_nuclear) {
return to_stone_age;
}
I agree, for the most part, with everything you way. Some of the minor stuff is wrong: Greenpeace (the biggest player on the "green activism" front) caved on the nuclear issue a few years back and accepted it as a part of a carbon-neutral energy policy. And the solar thing is mostly bunk -- you hear about it far, far more in propaganda pieces from the deniers than you do in the actual science community. Is is a plausible hypothesis? Yeah, sure. Does it look like a better bet than CO2 forcing? Hell no.
What drives me nuts, though, is the insistence on the part of the denalists here that because there is some disagreement as to numbers, the whole notion of carbon controls, consumption reductions, and the like need to be thrown out the window just because "we're not 100% sure". That's a policy issue, not a scientific one, and it's just plain insane. We're looking at a worst case (but still entirely plausible) effect of massglobalstarvation within the century, and the denialist attitude is ... wait for more data?
>We're looking at a worst case (but still entirely plausible) effect of mass global starvation within the century, and the denialist attitude is ... wait for more data?
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?
Reason has been tolerating this particular brand of unreason - that is, the climate-change naysaying - for a long time. Hearteningly, it is learning to stop. You don't like a little brusqueness in defense of human life, move to some other planet.
>You don't like a little brusqueness in defense of human life, move to some other planet.
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.
A 2% improvement yearly means a doubling in 35 years. Think about that next time someone talks about the minor cost of slightly dampening economic growth. The third world would certainly be better off with climate change and twice the wealth than slightly delayed climate change and the same level of wealth.
Either way, the solution to this and any problem is engineering. I'm formulating an essay on this topic that I'll post soon.
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.
I can't vote for China's leaders, but I'm all in favor of pressure where applicable. And I do support nuclear power as at least part of the solution.
So do I pass your anti-communist filter (seize control of the means of production, indeed -- you sound like Joe McCarthy)? Do you believe I'm not just trying to take your stuff? And, yet, I believe strongly that this is a problem worth fixing.
And frankly I don't know what you're talking about with that "global cooling doom" nonsense. I think maybe you're confused with nuclear winter, which was a notion from about the same time.
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.
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.
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.