Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 1, 2012 - 11:03am PT
|
Shingle, it's cool to ask questions. But 'denier' goes to the folks who refuse to look at the scientific answers they get in return.
You see, they deny the facts, hence the moniker.
A fabulous quote on this thread:
Dood, I'm not googling them....
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
In fact, one could say that indescriminate use of the terms 'skeptic' or 'denier' pose their own strawman premise.
One could say anything, but I honestly don't believe that "use of terms" is the core problem here. What I see is people rejecting what they don't want to believe, no matter how it was phrased. They may seize on some detail of the phrasing to rationalize their rejection.
|
|
Shingle
climber
|
|
Well, in my opinion, this was summed up nicely way back at Post #122:
As a working geoscientist (geologist/geophysicist) the one thing I am aware of is that yes, we have gone through cycles like this in geologic history, long before there were greenhouse gas emissions. That being said, I do believe that we are contributing to the problem, how much? enough that it makes sense to do what we can.
Do I think that we can realistically make a dent when emerging economies like China and India are not fully on board? No!
Do I think that we are being a bit ignorant and arrogant about what we will be able to accomplish with our endeavours? Yes!
Do I think that natural phenomena like one single volcanic eruption can make years of Kyoto type measures irrelevant? Yes!
Do I think that the whole global warming bandwagon has become a cash cow for academia? yes!
That being said, I do think that we need to develop as many new energy sources as we can. Sadly, as altruistic as we may be, these won't become viable UNTIL they become economic.
We are, after all a race that is more reactionary than forward thinking.
We did develop some good data back-up systems leading up to Y2K. But I guess that even though I agree in the more basic development of energy sources and emission control, I'm afraid I believe that a lot of what is happening strikes me as "Chicken Little" philosophy.
I'm out.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
Shingle:
Well, in my opinion, this was summed up nicely way back at Post #122:
Are you ydpl8s too?
|
|
Shingle
climber
|
|
Are you ydpl8s too?
No I'm not. Correlation does not imply causation (or is that out of fashion?).
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
It's a question of econommics, at least in the next 100 years. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If we reduce greenhouse gas emissions now (e.g. drive cars that get 35 mpg instead of 15 mpg) it is much cheaper and easier than dealing with the aftermath of rising ocean levels, crop failures, disease, etc.
The Fet has cut through a lot of the emotion on this issue with that statement. Unfortunately, we know very little about marginal costs and benefits, and therefore spend an awful lot of time shouting in ignorance.
In the meantime, I would suggest that people consider how Chiloe has approached this debate. He stays focused on the science, rather than speculating on the motivation of those with whom he disagrees. The science tells us rather important information, such as the likely range of climate effects of reductions, increases or maintenance of current greenhouse gasses. That helps economists try to estimate marginal costs and effects.
I find it only prudent to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but how much and what specific actions to take I find open to much rational debate. Is there any consensus, for example, that we should immediately stop combustion of any and all fossil fuels? If you think so, you live in a world quite different from mine.
California's action is symbolic, but there is no economic basis for saying it is either intelligent or stupid. We simply don't know enough, but it makes us feel good, and that provides some utility in and of itself for some people. I, for one, think we're stupid to do nothing, but I am uncertain how far to go. I think we'd get more progress on this issue if we faced squarely the fact that its resolution involves the preferences and consequences to people now and in the future. Too many try to sweep this fact under the rug, and pretend that those considerations don't matter. They form the heart of the real controversy.
Put another way, what do we want? Everyone seems to detour around that question, and we need to stop and listen to what people want, rather than berating them for telling us what they want, or pretending that what we want depends on altruism, rather than personal preference.
John
|
|
Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
|
|
what do we want?
That is the question, isn't it? We're not the wee Bangladesh and there
isn't much consensus amongst 'we' other than wee-weeing on each other.
Only when the anti-illuminati come out of the other end of their black hole
will we have a hope of coming to some sort of rational decisions.
|
|
Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
|
|
Is there any consensus, for example, that we should immediately stop combustion of any and all fossil fuels
Uh, strawman much?
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
Shingle:
Correlation does not imply causation (or is that out of fashion?).
Hah, still the height of fashion. I just googled that exact cliche and got almost 1.3 million hits.
But that long quote you posted read more like internet talking points than anything based on science. Parsing just one part of the first sentence,
we have gone through cycles like this in geologic history,
A cycle, is it? How can you tell? What is the period of this cycle? What repeating force drives it?
long before there were greenhouse gas emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions have been there as long as Earth's had an atmosphere, and their feedbacks had something to do with how weak orbital forcing (like Milankovitch cycles) or short-lived vulcanism can produce larger climate change.
Or another internet talking point,
Do I think that natural phenomena like one single volcanic eruption can make years of Kyoto type measures irrelevant? Yes!
Have you done the math? Some people have.
Here's the USGS summary about this talking point:
Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for a projected 35 billion metric tons (gigatons) of CO2 emissions in 2010 (Friedlingstein et al., 2010), release an amount of CO2 that dwarfs the annual CO2 emissions of all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2011).
...
There continues to be efforts to reduce uncertainties and improve estimates of present-day global volcanic CO2 emissions, but there is little doubt among volcanic gas scientists that the anthropogenic CO2 emissions dwarf global volcanic CO2 emissions.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
Uh, strawman much?
No. Proof (through a rhetorical question) that there is a limit to what actions we are prepared to take.
John
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
No. Proof (through a rhetorical question) that there is a limit to what actions we are prepared to take.
John, why would anyone need proof, rhetorical or otherwise, of that? We don't seem prepared to take much action at all, just letting the planet run the experiment.
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
Chiloe, I think we need to acknowledge that we aren't willing to do "whatever it takes" and, in the same way, we need to acknowledge that doing nothing does indeed make us one big experiment -- with potentially disastrous consequences.
Only if we acknowledge both do we have any basis for trying to arrive at a compromise that will lead us to do something. Too many in the real debate -- namely what to do about this -- make arguments from an absolutist position. What they say sounds, to their critics, either like "Do nothing," or "Do everything."
I find the rhetoric, and its effect on the debate, particularly interesting. My wife's cousin wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on scientists whose rhetoric enabled their work to cross-fertilize other disciplines. Our shouting has had the opposite effect in climate change matters. We guarantee that we won't listen to each other.
This, incidentally, is why I deeply appreciate and keep praising your approach. By concentrating on the science, and not on the personal flaws of your opponents, you make it much more likely that people read and understand what you say. If we had more of that, we'd act much more intelligently.
John
|
|
Shingle
climber
|
|
Interesting EOS article.
Can you tell me how many gigatons per year of CO2 reduction would have resulted from adoption of Kyoto-type measures? I'm guessing it was less than 1 gigaton, but like most amounts with this issue, it seems hard to pin down.
Also, the I read the #122 comment as comparing Kyoto reduction amount to to the amount emitted in a super-eruption event, or perhaps a Krakatoa-type eruption.
Willing to stand corrected if the numbers pan out.
|
|
GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
|
|
Shingle wrote True - I suppose this has become a house of straw since GO said: "marine life is not immune to massive stress events"
and that was not my argument either.
Bullsh#t.
Here is precisely what you said (I quoted it in my original response)
I find it hard to believe that sea life which has adapted to the extreme stressors to Earths climate occurring over hundreds of millions of years will not somehow adapt to the relatively minor changes being discussed here.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the timeline or not, but in the last "hundreds of millions of years" there have been several mass extinction events. My point is that the "adaptation" you refer to sometimes means that entire orders of life on Earth are wiped out. Is that really the kind of "adaptation" you think is no big deal?
So, to answer your further question (hyperbolic or not), the stress on the marine environment may well be as severe (if not more-so) as that experienced at the end of the Cretaceous. Particularly if things continue as they are going today.
GO
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
Also, the I read the #122 comment as comparing Kyoto reduction amount to to the amount emitted in a super-eruption event, or perhaps a Krakatoa-type eruption.
That's silly. Gerlach writes that Pinatubo, one of the largest 20th-century eruptions, emitted about .05 gigatons of CO2. Anthropogenic contributions are running around 35 gigatons/year, so a century-scale volcano contributed about 1/700th of one year's worth of anthropogenic CO2. Or as USGS put it, the human contribution is equivalent to "an extra 11,200 Kīlauea volcanoes" (per year). Or, scaling way down to the very modest goals of Kyoto, they hoped for a 5% reduction which (if applied worldwide) could amount to something on the order of 1.5 gigatons or 30 Pinatubos. Per year!
Can we imagine one sudden eruption on 35-gigaton scale? I don't know, maybe you can, but if the Yellowstone Caldera and its friends all blow at once, we're phucked. Party's over, no point even to feed the dogs so why do that either.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
Only if we acknowledge both do we have any basis for trying to arrive at a compromise that will lead us to do something. Too many in the real debate -- namely what to do about this -- make arguments from an absolutist position. What they say sounds, to their critics, either like "Do nothing," or "Do everything.
Thanks, John, I think I understand at least some of where you're coming from. I've got no sophistication about the economics, and my frequentist imagination balks at guessing probabilities for unrepeatable events.
The science seems to be pretty unanimous, though, that we're poking a dragon with sharp sticks. Also that the dragon is quite capable of economy-wrecking or even civilization-ending behavior. So my unsophisticated qualitative sense is that if we poked it even a little bit less, that would be a good thing, and a lot less would be better.
All the more so because climate is not the only dragon we're poking, and might not be the first to wake up.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
Asian countries (mostly China and India but there are other big ones too such as Indonesia) have lots of coal, can buy even more, and are burning more and more for power.
That's not going to change anytime soon, so you all are just going to have deal with it.
http://www.economist.com/node/21548237
At least the increased biomass caused by extra CO2 will presumably be put to good use.
|
|
k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Mar 1, 2012 - 08:43pm PT
|
If You Take Climate Change Seriously, You Have to Throw Out the Free-Market Playbook
An Interview with Naomi Klein
Solutions: In your cover story for the Nation last year, you say that modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the political Left, including redistribution of wealth, higher and more progressive taxes, and greater government intervention and regulation. Please explain.
Naomi Klein: The piece came out of my interest and my shock at the fact that belief in climate change in the United States has plummeted. If you really drill into the polling data, what you see is that the drop in belief in climate change is really concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. It’s been an extraordinary and unusual shift in belief in a short time. In 2007, 71 percent of Americans believed in climate change and in 2009 only 51 percent believed—and now we’re at 41 percent. So I started researching the denial movement and going to conferences and reading the books, and what’s clear is that, on the right, climate change is seen as a threat to the Right’s worldview, and to the neoliberal economic worldview. It’s seen as a Marxist plot. They accuse climate scientists of being watermelons—green on the outside and red on the inside.
Read the whole piece here.
Members of the Left have been resistant to acknowledging that this worldview is behind their support of climate action, while the Right confronts it head on. Why this hesitancy among liberals?
There are a few factors at work. Climate change is not a big issue for the Left. The big left issues in the United States are inequality, the banks, corporate malfeasance, unemployment, foreclosures. I don’t think climate change has ever been a broad-based issue for the Left. Part of this is the legacy of siloing off issues, which is part of the NGO era of activism. Climate change has been claimed by the big green groups and they’re to the left. But they’re also foundation funded. A lot of them have gone down the road of partnerships with corporations, which has made them less critical. The discourse around climate change has also become extremely technical and specialized. A lot of people don’t feel qualified and feel like they don’t have to talk about it. They’re so locked into a logic of market-based solutions—that the big green groups got behind cap and trade, carbon markets, and consumer responses instead of structural ones—so they’re not going to talk about how free trade has sent emissions soaring or about crumbling public infrastructure or the ideology that would rationalize major new investments in infrastructure. Others can fight those battles, they say. During good economic times, that may have seemed viable; but as soon as you have an economic crisis, the environment gets thrown under the bus, and there is a failure to make the connection between the economy and the climate crisis—both have roots in putting profits before people.
...
This part is really good:
What comes after communism and capitalism? What’s your vision of the way forward?
It’s largely about changing the mix in a mixed economy. Maybe one day we’ll have a perfect “ism” that’s post-communism and -capitalism. But if we look at the countries that have done the most to seriously meet the climate challenge, they’re social democracies like Scandinavia and the Netherlands. They’re countries with a strong social sphere. They’re mixed economies. Markets are a big part, but not the only part, of their economies. Can we meet our climate targets in a system that requires exponential growth to continue? Furthermore, where is the imperative of growth coming from? What part of our economy is demanding growth year after year?
If you’re a locally based business, you don’t need continual growth year after year. What requires that growth is the particular brand of corporate capitalism—shareholders who aren’t involved in the business itself. That part of our economy has to shrink, and that’s terrifying people who are deeply invested in it. We have a mixed economy, but it’s one in which large corporations are controlled by outside investors, and we won’t change that mix until that influence is reduced.
Is that possible?
It is if we look at certain choke points like corporate personhood and financing, and it makes sense for us to zero in on aspects of our system that give corporations massive influence. Another is media concentration. If you had publicly financed elections, you’d have to require public networks to give airtime to candidates. So the fact that networks charge so much is why presidential elections cost more than a billion dollars, which means you have to go to the 1 percent to finance the elections. These issues are all linked with the idea that corporations have the same free-speech rights as people, so there would also be more restrictions on corporate speech.
Now there is one smart cookie.
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
Nsaomi Klein must seem intelligent to those who don't know economics. To those who do, however, she's simply a reactionary.
John
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!