When we read that global carbon dioxide emissions rose in 2011 to a record high, thanks mostly to China, how exactly are we to feel? How should we react when we hear about politicians in Washington hastily permitting Shell Oil to explore in the Arctic, over the objections of scientists who worry about our priorities and the feasibility of cleaning up possible spills? These stories of the lack of large-scale will to fight climate change and mobilize a green energy economy make ordinary people wonder if climate change is really something that requires urgent action. This nonchalance exists despite polling that finds a majority of Americans would regulate carbon dioxide. Simply put: Is climate change something to be worried about enough to take bold action against or something to merely keep an eye on?
Many on the right will not entertain the distinction. Climate change is neither something to combat incrementally nor something to be viewed as a major challenge to human existence. The conservative (and flame-throwing) Heartland Institute recently went as far as comparing belief in climate change to terrorism. The more intellectual, libertarian approach is to view climate change as a possible challenge, but to resist alarmism. In fact, many libertarians see environmentalists as paranoid. Yet these same thinkers believe that technological solutions will mitigate any possible threats.
Physicist and computer scientist David Deutsch, in a similar vein, writes in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, that climate alarmists (he fingers Paul Ehrlich as one) warned about massive imminent climate change in the '70s that would decimate agriculture and leave us in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. He recalls attending a lecture by Ehrlich and writes, "I do not know about the others, but I can remember when I stopped worrying. ... Once I realized Ehrlich's prophecies amounted to saying, 'If we stop solving problems, we are doomed,' I no longer found them shocking, for how could it be otherwise?" Deutsch's theory is that we fall into a trap when viewing the planet as Spaceship Earth, a biosphere we evolved to adapt to and live sustainably on. He sees societies that try to live sustainably as becoming static societies where new ideas and ways of living are not encouraged.
Others view climate change as requiring us to change how we use energy, but in cool-headed ways. If solutions are needed, thinkers like economist Ed Dolan say, they should be market-based: "The proper policy approach is clear: First set energy prices as a realistic level that reflects all costs, including pollution, climate change, and national security, as well as drilling and delivery."
And still, there are others who are the most concerned about climate change, such as climate scientists, who justifiably preach doom. The possibility of unforeseen flips, or tipping points, could cause seemingly isolated climate threats to compound with other threats and produce warming much faster than expected. Fred Guterl reports how the melting of Greenland's ice sheets could affect the jet stream and throw Europe into another ice age. Similarly, deforestation in the Amazon could effect the El Niño-La Niña cycle, which could reinforce problems with monsoons in India and Africa.
Then there are ticking time bombs that climatologists know about but those further afield might not consider in their more relaxed approach to climate change. The New York Times reported that temperatures in the Arctic are becoming so unstable that the great store of carbon locked in the permafrost -- double the carbon in the atmosphere already -- is becoming a legitimate area of concern.
If there is a trend in the amount of worry about climate change, it is that those most aware of the economic and environmental data tend to press the most for large-scale action and those on the outside looking in advocate for a slow-go approach or wonder what all the fuss is about. I personally trust the scientists more than the pundits and those from other fields. The question is how can the public, which is concerned enough about carbon dioxide to want something to be done about it, match their so-far-mild concern with the serious threat we face and convince corporations and governments to act? We should be worried. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote, "Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate." A little anxiety could motivate many people to press for action.
Jeffrey Ball: Energy: Who Cares?
Kit Vaughan: Gambling With the Future of the Planet
Steven Cohen: Clean Energy Caught in the Political Mire
After we have suffered our own global climate Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the near future, the governments of the world will not have a lot of choice but to wake up to global warming.
Patience.
It is scientifically irrefutable that humans are influencing the climate. We create vast amounts of heat trapping gas by burning things. We don't currently know exactly how much effect that this heat trapping gas is going to have when combined with natural cycles, but we have a good ballpark idea. And, we can extrapolate from a wealth of other knowledge that we already have and say that we are facing a problem that, if left untreated, will completely change, maybe wreck our current way of life.
Take for instance, food. Increasingly extreme weather is starting to cut into US agricultural production. It won't take a lot of cutting now for people to really start feeling a pinch.
My advise to climate change deniars: open your eyes and ears and pay less attention to your own rhetoric. You are going to have to deal with huge amounts of change ahead, and it is starting to happen already. Nature and history are not going to deal kindly with the people who get the wrong answer to this problem.
Should we be thinking more global?
"Current evidence suggests that that the concentrations of atmospheric CO2 predicted for the year 2100 will have major implications for plant physiology and growth. Under elevated CO2 most plant species show higher rates of photosynthesis, increased growth, decreased water use and lowered tissue concentrations of nitrogen and protein."
http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of-rising-atmospheric-concentrations-of-carbon-13254108
"Models predict that plants might grow anywhere from 12 to 76 percent more if atmospheric carbon dioxide is doubled, as long as nothing else, like water shortages, limits their growth."
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/printall.php
http://www.usda.gov/oce/forum/2012_Speeches/Glauber.pdf
"FY 2012 US agricultural exports are forecast at $131 billion, down $1 billion from the November forecast, but are still forecast to be the second highest on record in both nominal and real terms. The decline from record exports in FY 2011 reflects record global crop production which has weakened prices and export volumes."
Also BTW, the amount of exports doesn't say anything about what is left over for the American consumer, does it? It just tells us how well the exporters are doing shipping our food off to other countries.
Easy to talk about harvest forecasts in spring. Doesn't mean much though , does it?
If there ever was a thought in her head it must have fallen out while surfing.
Parrot!
To me, this is how a thinking conservative should view the threat of anthropogenic climate change. The need for action is clear, as is the need for caution. For example, I'd like to see us start replacing all fossil-fueled stationary power planets with cleaner alternatives, but I don't want that process to cause a boom-bust cycle, which we've seen in the energy industry before.
Although I'm worried about AGW, I'm also kind of optimistic these days. We're in one of those moments in history when civilization is improved, when we take a step toward a better future. The clean energy revolution is on, and it feels good to be on the right side of the fight.
And most of us cower at that word, for it is a word of authority. It's a word that grownups use, and they are still in charge. Based on that word, police are free to arrest you any time, any place. It is "un-American" to contradict that word. So it tells us that this is no time for fun and games. We are all in imminent danger in a system where the Heartland Institute is the subliminal voice of normalcy. We have to fish or cut bait. We can't go back home again., It's onward to a new America, or else...
But the more you learn about how the IPCC operates the less true such statements appear to be.
In fact, the same small group of people are often involved. These people quote the IPCC in their own work and then turn around and write the next IPCC report. The fact that some of them are employed by Greenpeace doesn’t disqualify them from participating in the IPCC. Nor does it prevent other IPCC authors from citing their work.
In sum, climate science is a small, incestuous, inbred little community. In no way does it represent the world’s finest scientific minds.
And when the IPCC starts writing about gender equality, marginalized populations, and traditional knowledge, it provides ordinary people with one more reason not to take it’s so-called science seriously."
http://tinyurl.com/7r77jh2
Cambridge, class of 007.
That's what I'm talking about.
As to the other purposes of the IPCC, they are non-scientific, and are about fixing the issue.
In any case, you've just written another in your long line of deceitful propagandist posts, that has nothing of substance to it.
And while sale are a bit disappointing, GM has brought to the market a PHEV car and LG Chem is building a large battery factory in Michigan.
And Molycorp has reopened a rare earth mine in CA, these minerals are essential for the green industries.
Why? Money, money and profits.
The economic system is on default, and no politician beholden to the ruling oligarchs of commerce who profit from this self-destructive paradigm will touch it, in ways that have any meaningful solutions.
It will have to come from the bottom up, because we are taking about wholesale change in fundamental relationships of how we organize human affairs.
And that won't come by knowledge alone, when it comes to asking people to change what they have become accustomed to doing all-their life-unless a disaster of scale hits us. Katrina wasn't enough.
Maybe 3 Katrina's at once will.
The inertia in the system will not let us see this now- but was we progress- wow. The public is about to be hit with something that will shatter all their known understanding of life. Good luck.
The problem is that a relatively slight change...the breakdown of the seasons, for example, will bring disaster because we absolutely depepnd on reliable weather in order to conduct agriculture.
The seasons were more stable during those times. The earth had more broadly tropical weather.
Yeah, but not humans, and cetainly not the vast civilization we've built that is completely based on the preindustrial CO2 level.