Climate Change skeptics? [ot]

Resorting to childish mockery when you don't like the farts.

Let's talk about climate change. Many scientists and politicians see it as the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.
It's a big challenge, but I'm not sure I would put it above everything. One of the reasons it's hard is that by the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited. Like with viruses, the problem is latency. The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Right . . . we're not virtuous yet, are we?
We're not even close – we're emitting more CO2 every year. In order to get a 90 percent reduction of carbon, which is what we need, the first thing you might want to get is a year of global reduction, and we have not had that. U.S. emissions are down right now, partly because we buy more goods from overseas. But even if you invented some zero-carbon energy source today, the deployment of that magic device would take a long time.

Are you hopeful that global climate talks will lead to a solution?
Many climate-change discussions are off-target because they've focused on things like the $100 billion per year that some people believe should be spent by the rich world to help the developing world, which is not really addressing the problem. At the same time, discussion about how to increase funding of research-and-development budgets to accelerate innovation is surprisingly missing. We haven't increased R&D spending, we haven't put a price signal [like a carbon tax] in, and this is certainly very disappointing. I think it's a real test of the boundary of science and politics – and an acid test of people's time horizons. Before the economic downturn, attitudes in the U.S. about climate change had become quite enlightened, and then there was a big reversal, which I believe was a result of people's worries about their immediate economic situation. Talking about problems that will have a significant effect 30 or 40 years out just gets off the agenda, and there's this shrill political debate that is distracting people. So we've made some progress, but you can't take the progress we've made and linearize it – if you do, you really are going to find out how bad climate change can be.

Let's say climate change was delayed 100 years. If that were the case, science would take care of this one. We wouldn't have to double the Department of Energy budget, because there's five or six different paths to go down. And 100 years, at the current rate and speed of science, is a long time.

We're heading for big trouble, right?
Absolutely. That's why I happen to think we should explore geo-engineering.­ But one of the complaints people have against that is that if it looks like an easy out, it'll reduce the political will to cut emissions. If that's the case, then, hey, we should take away heart surgery so that people know not to overeat. I happened to be having dinner with Charles Koch last Saturday, and we talked a little bit about climate change.

[Charles Koch? You gotta be kidding. What'd he say?]