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?
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.