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What Would You Need to Know to Worry About Climate Change?
I’m neither a climate alarmist nor a skeptic, and I’m unqualified to be either. I reckon that somewhere between Proposition A (life as we know it on Earth is coming to an end and we’re all going to boil to death) and Proposition B (an entire scientific field, along with the media, is engaged in a massive conspiracy to perpetuate a hoax, for reasons no one can explain) there’s a huge, very complicated scientific literature I haven’t read, comprising many specialist disciplines about which I know nearly nothing.
Right now, if you asked me clearly to explain to you what a Milankovitch cycle is, why pacific decadal oscillation matters, or my opinion about the influence of past ice volume change on modern sea levels — well, you just heard the totality of my opinions. If you told me to assume carbon dioxide levels will double in the coming century, that I have a month to model the effect this will have on the climate, that I have to do it unaided, and that if I fail to do it in a way that suggests passing familiarity with the state-of-the-art research, I’ll die? I’m dead.
I have no strong and defensible views on climate science, save the certainty that to arrive at strong and defensible views, I’d have to learn quite a bit. I find it impressive that many people who clearly haven’t got more reason than I do to have a strong view have one nonetheless.
With issues like this, I suspect, the position one takes is more a matter of accidental association than of any underlying or consistent ideology. There’s no special reason, for example, for American socialists to like granola. But they love the stuff, so American conservatives are instinctively suspicious of granola. In truth, the relationship between granola and any meaningful understanding of “right” and “left” is incidental.
I do have a friend, though, whose views about this are genuinely well-informed. If I wanted to outsource my opinions about this to someone else, I’d choose him. He’s a physicist I’ve known since he and I were undergraduates; he went on to have a distinguished career in sea-ice modeling. He’s current with every aspect of this debate. I know his character to be honest and modest: I just can’t imagine him claiming to know something he doesn’t, participating in a hoax, or having no clue what he’s talking about.
Recently, I sent him an e-mail asking him what he’d concluded after studying this problem for 30-odd years. How useful, I asked, are computer simulations of the Earth’s past, present, and future climate states? What really happens when you couple components of the climate system without resorting to flux adjustments?
I thought I’d share his reply. (I’ve lightly edited the exchange for his privacy and so that the chronology makes sense).
Here’s what really bothers me: reading about climate change in, say, a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece. What a predictable load of nonsense, year after year. In contrast, here’s a well-informed, closely reasoned piece of semi-technical science writing. There are no equations, but it helps to know some science (for instance, what the Coriolis effect is), and it takes some effort to keep causes and effects straight.
I’m curious: When you read this article (taking you as an examplar of a bright, well-educated, but scientifically untrained layperson), does it make sense to you? It’s a good example of a puzzling observation (expanding Antarctic sea ice) that scientists hammer away at from different directions for a decade or so, until they have a more-or-less satisfying explanation, while the big picture (dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year is a bad idea) remains unchanged.
But start with the fact that Antarctic sea ice is expanding and hand it to the editors of the Wall Street Journal. You’ll get something like this: “Climate scientists would have you forget that, while Arctic sea ice area is declining, the area of Antarctic sea ice is actually increasing! And the scientists have no explanation! The models are wrong! Climate has changed in the past, it’s changing now, it’s all part of a natural cycle, and there’s nothing to worry about!”
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t indulge in exclamation points, but this is always the structure of the argument. Good luck finding in the popular media a detailed exposition of the science. I think science writers have decided that the details are simply too complicated for most people, so they try to emphasize that the core science (that which one needs to know to make rational policy decisions) is settled, while scientists are still quibbling (as they should) about the finer details.
In other words, he firmly believes the core science is, indeed, settled, basically in favor of Proposition A.
Goodness, I replied. That’s dreary. What policies seemed to him genuinely merited by the science? And whatever they were, how would he propose convincing China and India to adopt them?
His reply:
I agree that most liberals who hold strong views about climate change would have as much trouble rigorously defending their views as most conservatives. But since we can’t all be experts on all aspects of science (for instance, I’m clueless about medicine and biology), I think it’s legitimate to defer to the science consensus, where there is one. The burden of rigor should rest on those who deny what really is an overwhelming consensus.
I don’t think it’s a historical accident that liberals trust climate science and conservatives don’t. Since dealing with climate change requires some degree of international government action, it makes sense that those on the right would be less welcoming of the science. My naive hope at one time was that most people would accept the science (to the extent that there are clear and compelling reasons to believe it), and then we’d have a vigorous debate over the appropriate policy responses (taxes versus carbon markets versus top-down regulation). No such luck.
Among people I know at the lab, there’s a generational split. Nearly all the climate skeptics I know are over 60. One of my friends thinks this is because people born before about 1960 grew up with assumptions of unchecked material progress, whereas those born later find it easier to accept the idea of limits to growth (the big blue marble, the End of Nature, and all that).
Which policies would I like to see adopted? In the US, I’d like to see a carbon tax, levied at the point of entry (ports, pipelines, etc.), starting low (say, $25/ton of carbon) and increasing gradually and predictably over time. I’d refund the proceeds to everyone on a per capita basis, so that anyone who uses less than the per capita mean amount of energy comes out ahead. (This would be the majority, since median energy use is well below the mean.) In this way I’d try to build a constituency of energy-conserving right-leaning voters: “Keep your big-government hands off my carbon refund!”
I’d supplement this tax with gradually tightening efficiency standards for vehicles, home appliances, building insulation and so on. I’d avoid cap and trade.
I’m out of my depth when it comes to diplomacy. But I suppose that for India and China, I’d try to make broad deals like the agreement announced a few weeks ago. Also, the carbon tax would apply to imports from any country that didn’t have an equivalent internal tax, so there wouldn’t be a free ride for countries that lack adopt similar policies.
Overall, I think of myself as a raging moderate.
There we go. I don’t know enough to have my own opinion, but when I outsource the question to the most qualified and trustworthy person I know, that’s what I get.
So, my questions for everyone here would be:
1) What kind of scientific evidence would persuade you, personally, that the alarmists are basically correct?
2) If you don’t think you could hope to master the relevant literature to the degree required to assess that evidence, would you be willing to outsource your opinion about it to someone else? If so, who? And why?
3) Assuming the alarmists’ most extreme predictions are correct, what policies do you think would have any hope of mitigating the damage? (I don’t have an informed view of the science, but I do have an informed view of diplomacy, and I agree with my friend that he’s out of his depth. The Paris climate accord is no more enforceable than the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It won’t work.)
Assuming his views about the science are correct, can anyone here imagine a policy strategy that might save the planet?
Published in General, Science & Technology
But this is precisely the position of every government in the West. It informs the ‘policy’ ‘debate’, it is what is taught to children, it is the position from which any deviation is treated as akin to mental illness.
And, yes, it is extreme.
Let’s say a super-contagious mutation of avian influenza, a comet strike, and an alien invasion are near. That would be far more interesting.
It makes sense to me that, if all else was equal I would expect that adding CO2 to the atmosphere would increase its heat retention. It’s easy enough to do an experiment that will show this, and it’s been done many times.
It also makes sense that if the atmosphere warms up, its ability to hold moisture in the form of water vapor will also increase. This is basic chemistry. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas as well, it makes sense that CO2 effect would be magnified to some degree – a ‘positive feedback’.
Up to now, I’ve described what the ‘consensus’ of scientists believes. But there are MANY feedbacks. Some are positive, and some are negative. We’ve identified some, but there are no doubt many we have no idea about. For example, receding ice changes the Earth’s albedo. Increased water vapor in the atmosphere increases cloud formation, which also changes the albedo. Warmer, wetter weather stimulates plant growth, which scrubs CO2 out of the atmosphere. Changing climate patterns may change ocean currents and affect how heat moves around the world. Algae blooms may grow in size and frequency and absorb more CO2 and sequester it, or perhaps warmer oceans will cause the release of deep-ocean clathrates and accelerate the warming.
We understand some of these feedbacks, know of others but can’t yet determine their effect (the big one is the effect of clouds, which is still not really known), and then there are the unknown unknowns – the feedbacks that we not only do not understand, but do not even know of their existence. We discover new ones all the time.
And here we are still just talking about the physics, chemistry, geology, biology, astronomy, and other hard sciences involved in this.
Here I call upon empirical minarchism. We know, through repeated observations, that any power given to government will be used primarily to strengthen government at the expense of the citizenry and, wherever possible, to enrich those in and connected to government. (See, e.g., the responses to the real, grave and near threat of radical Islamicist terrorism.) Often – often enough to be the default assumption – such powers are used in such a way that the threat for which they were originally developed goes unchecked. (Ditto.) Meanwhile the liberties of the people and institutions of civil society – the highest and best reasons for wanting to live in the first place – are weakened.
Therefore, the only rational policy response is nothing. The only rational and moral policy position is a massive and permanent reduction in the power of the state.
QED. The political science is settled.
Finally, let’s assume that the hard sciences point us at least in the direction that there is likely to be some warming due to man’s output of CO2 if we keep pumping it into the atmosphere. Do we have enough information to act? Not even remotely.
The next question we then have to ask is, “How much CO2 will man pump into the atmosphere over the next hundred years?” Do you know how the IPCC calculates this? They have a very simple formula that sets future fossil fuel output as proportional to economic growth. After all, in the past that’s been a pretty good indicator.
But then again, in the past you could have measured wealth by how many horses and wagons existed for a given population – until one day it stopped making any sense. Past performance does not guarantee future results. A trend line drawn from 1850 to 1900 would have shown that horse manure was going to become a tremendous health hazard. The Malthusians who predicted global famine by now relied on trend lines plotted from the past to the future. But we know that complex systems don’t work that way – they have periods of stability, but sometimes crash and change drastically. The motor car comes along, or Peak Oil, or a global war, and suddenly none of the old trends make any sense.
So predicting how much carbon we will burn in the next 100 years is a fool’s game. If we develop an energy source that’s cheaper to use and doesn’t have other drawbacks, fossil fuels will vanish from general use very quickly. If we become more of an information economy and everyone works at home using VR equipment, fossil fuel consumption will change. There are a million factors that could completely change the way we use energy in the next 100 years, and we have no idea what they might be.
This is one reason why the IPCC’s estimates are so wide – from less than 2 degrees C by 2100 to more than 8 degrees. The lower number is just slightly higher than what we’d expect from natural warming in the first place, and would not represent a serious problem for the economy or the planet. We might even benefit from it. The best the IPCC can do for prediction is to come up with a whole bunch of different scenarios for what the world might look like, and offer a range of forecasts depending on each scenario, and with those forecasts having rather large error bars due to our gaps in knowledge.
But now, let’s say that we know for certain that if nothing changes we will pump enough CO2 into the air to cause warming in the range of 2-8 degrees by 2100. Do we have enough information to act? Nope.
Next, we have to understand the effects of that warming. After all, why would we do anything if the warming just helped the planet anyway? The truth is, we don’t really know how the planet will respond to the warming. It’s certainly likely that warming will be bad for some species, and good for others. There will be die-offs, and new species will take the place of the ones that couldn’t adapt. So it has been for billions of years.
But how about man? What are the human and environmental costs and benefits of warming? Again, we have to just guess, because no one knows what kind of technology we will have in even 20 years, what human migration patterns will look like, what the economies of the developing world will look like, etc. So again, we have to basically create scenarios and make educated guesses. But ask yourself – if all of the world’s scientists in 1900 had tried to predict what humanity would look like around the globe in 2000, how far off do you think they would have been? Even if they cast a range of guesses, do you think any of them were likely to come anywhere close to the truth? How about scientists of 1950 trying to predict how we would be living just 50 years later? Just because we have ‘best guesses’ doesn’t mean that those guesses are anything other than a wild stab in the dark.
If we follow their policy prescriptions, they will be right.
But let’s say that we know what the future mankind will look like, what tehnologies will exist, how many people will be on the Earth and where they live, what the economic distribution looks like, etc. And given our knowledge of the climate and our knowledge of what mankind will look like in 2100, we can make some pretty good guesses as to how much damage will be caused for each temperature increase, and that we know the probabilities for each increase amount. Do we have enough NOW to act?
Nope. Because acting presupposes that what you are proposing to do will actually work, and that it won’t cost more than what the damage would be. Furthermore, spending money today to avoid a harm 100 years from now requires that you discount the future damage just as you would calculate an annuity. No one would or should spend $100 today to avoid $100 in damages a hundred years from now. After all, you could just put that $100 in the bank, collect interest for a century, and then pay the future $100 in damages with cash and have a boatload left over.
So what’s a reasonable ‘discount rate’ for future damage? No one can agree. And it makes a huge difference because of compounding. For example, if you invested $100 today and got 2% per year interest on your money, in the year 2100 it would be worth $527. But if you got 10% on it, it would be worth $299,000! So spending a trillion dollars today on climate change may not be worth doing even if the damage in 100 years might be fifty trillion dollars. The people of 2100 would much rather have the extra money and just pay for the damage.
But some environmentalists say the discount rate should be zero, because you can’t put a price on changing the planet, period. So now I guess we need to add some philosophers to our cadre of scientists or something – as if they’d be any better at coming up with a rational answer. We’ve run into an intrinsic values problem.
But let’s say that we know that climate change will harm the planet, and that we all agree that it would be a good idea to stop it, even at a very high cost. NOW can we act?
Nope. Because all we’ve done up to this point is to come up with a problem statement, and we haven’t even begun to talk about a solution! Wanting to act is irrelevant if we don’t have the capacity to act. None of this matters if the actions we propose to take will be ineffective in stopping the problem.
And that’s the real problem, in the end. It’s all moot unless we can develop a serious action plan that has a chance of working, which has defined costs and benefits, and which can reasonably and confidently be implemented on a global scale with some confidence that the agreements will hold over decades, through recessions and wars, and when the costs of stopping climate change become huge.
So far, I haven’t seen that plan. People throw around ‘carbon taxes’ as the solution, but none of them can explain how that will work on a global level. After all, if China and India don’t play along, then every pound of CO2 we don’t emit lowers their social cost of carbon, freeing them to emit more, and every dollar we add to the cost of domestic energy increases their comparative advantage in energy and increases the incentive to not follow suit.
So now you have to have faith in large world institutions like the UN to be able to formulate and maintain these treaties. If you don’t, then none of this matters because no global solutions are going to work anyway.
The current climate debate is conceding all of this to the activists, because the right is still stuck trying to argue step one when the rest of the world has moved on, leaving the greens and the left in general alone to formulate all the plans and try to implement them. We’ve allowed the debate to be framed as, “Either you don’t believe in global warming at all, in which case you are a filthy denier, or else you do believe in it, in which case you must shut up and let us do exactly what we want.”
We need to be smarter and more nuanced about this issue.
Short answer to your question #1: At this point, none. At all.
Reasons: 1. The ecofascists have lied to me again and again (c.f. Mann, Michael, IPCC lies exposed by the Heartland Institute and many others, East Anglia Climate Data Deception) and have slandered their own when their own turned against them (c.f. Lomberg, Bjorn and Vahrenholt, Fritz). Yes, Claire, there is a conspiracy to suppress evidence against and distort evidence in support of the AGW hypothesis. Even The Guardian has admitted this, though its writers tried to downplay the significance of the scientific fraud at work. At this point, I am assuming fraud and lies as my starting point when I hear someone defending the AGW hypothesis. I’ve got more than two decades worth of published reasons for that assumption.
2. The historical record of written chronicles and physical records from dendrochronology, ice core samples and paleontology all show that the planet has been much, much warmer and had much, much higher CO2 concentrations with no harm done to living things- especially not us.
Does your friend suggest that nuclear power should be the alternative to fossil fuels? Because, if not (and I have only a very basic understanding of any of this), it seems to me that most “green” energies are just as problematic for the environment as oil. Solar power, for example, relies on batteries whose production is toxic. And in order for solar power to be a viable alternative, lots of batteries are needed.
Consider also the horrifying results when scientists, in what seems like criminal arrogance to someone like me, get it completely wrong. Take Allan Savory. He believed that grazing animals were causing desertification, a process which appears to accelerate climate change. So he culled 40,000 elephants. Then he realized that, in fact, grazing herds are required to maintain the health of CO2-absorbing grasslands. I give him great credit for his honesty and the work he has done to correct the mistake. But 40,000 elephants!
Arahant’s comments on the politics (BP, for instance, had underwater real-time video of their oil spill, but referred Sharyl Attkisson upon her requesting it to the Coast Guard, which then refused to release it until she filed a Freedom of Information Act request) and Dan Hanson’s comments on the science seem right to me.
H/t: Sandy, who told me about Allan Savory a few years ago.
How about the money hole?
I beg to differ. I believe it. The science is pretty much rock-solid on this one: in about 4 billion years the sun will become a red giant large enough to engulf at least Mercury and possibly the Earth. The oceans will boil and the planet will be rendered completely uninhabitable.
The proper policy response to the science is to initiate a program of interstellar travel and colonization of other solar systems, however given the amount of time we needn’t rush. We can safely procrastinate for at least another 2-3 billion years before we really start to worry about it.
Claire – And what is your friends explanation / defense of the wholesale data rigging we’ve seen from East Anglia, NASA and the likes of Michael Mann? And is he simply aware of the half life of “facts?” Harvard mathematician Samuel Arbesman has shown that 50% 0f all settled scientific facts are rendered obsolete over a 45-year period.
And while it’s not a conspiracy, consider the way the alarmists and the government feed off of each other. The alarmism gives the scientists money and gives the politicians power.
Consensus wouldn’t do it. There was a consensus that combustion was the release of phlogiston. The history of science is replete with examples of discarded consensus.
Not being a scientist, I’m not sure there would be any “scientific evidence” that would persuade me, especially considering the extent that “science” has become so politicized.
What it would take to persuade me that Climate Change is real would be if:
I think one thing that deserves parsing out is that there’s a fair deal of distance between what actual climate say and what climate alarmists say. That is, the IPCC reports don’t back up Al Gore and his like claim. My sense is that many are reluctant to say so, as doing so would be spun as them saying there’s nothing important going on.
My knew SOP in debating alarmists is to ask them what, precisely, they think will happen and what confidence they have about it. How much will sea levels rise? How much temperature change, etc. This gets it out of the emotional zone and into something approaching facts.
Consistent, accurate predictions with low error bars that show that the dangers of climate change are worth the loss in economic growth.
Yes, and that’s a normal, sensible thing to do. I generally defer to Matt Ridley.
If they were true, then a carbon tax might be a partial solution. So would getting our heads out of the sand about nuclear energy. So might paying poor people in low-lying areas like Micronesia and the Maldives to relocate. Grant and prize money regarding space-born solar arrays would probably be even smarter.
Threads like this are (is?) the reason I love Ricochet.
My impression of the current climate debate is of someone who is able to hear for the first time in his life. In the last few decades, we have built an infrastructure of global climate data collection that has allowed us to hear for the first time all of the changes that occur during the regular operation of the planet.
The alarmist response is to (accurately) point to all of the changes that are occurring and say “we must stop these!”, whereas the skeptic says “I’m not sure; I think these may have been happening all along.”
By asking the question “what would you need to hear now to believe AGW is a problem?” assumes the alarmist position that we have enough data from the past to compare our current data to. And I’m just not sure that we do.
I remember the days when a new ice age was predicted. Today I read an article saying that global warming has prevented a new ice age. Climate alarmists’ response was that preventing an ice age is very bad! They prefer a return to ice covering most of Europe? This does not give me a lot of faith in their concern for humanity.
Could some kind of evidence persuade me that the alarmists are correct? Yes, but since there is a lot of money at stake for alarmists and they have been very willing to cook data in the past, it would have to be from a source that doesn’t profit greatly and has been skeptical in the past.
As for policy–I think we should use a lot more nuclear energy. People I trust tell me new technologies make it very safe.
How about some evidence that Global Warming is actually occurring? The unadjusted temperature records show global cooling since 1940, the warming only exists in the adjustments, which always go in the direction of making warming appear.
In the financial world, this would be prima facie evidence of fraud.
Asking a friend who’s also not familiar with the basic facts of the issue his opinion is no better than uninformed opining by yourself.
This is a complicated issue, and it takes a while to understand what’s going on.
Claire – “Assuming his views about the science are correct,…..”
I can’t assume that until I trust the data and its “adjustments”. Below is one of the more amazing plots showing “Man Made Global Warming”. The temperature on the Y axis is not the measured temperature, it is the adjustment made to the measurements. This was taken from http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/14/problematic-adjustments-and-divergences-now-includes-june-data/
Great discussion. I concur with Valiuth’s points and will add a couple.
Policies. We better hope there is not catastrophic warming because it’s a pipe dream that the world can tackle this via treaty or agreement. A few months ago, I did a Ricochet post showing global, EU, US and China emission trends 1990-2013. Here it is. In 1990, the US/EU were more than 40% of global CO2 emissions; today it’s 25% and continuing to shrink. The industrialized West will have little impact on the climate future. It is China and the rest of the world where CO2 emissions are rapidly growing (China now has more emissions than the US+EU). At the recent Paris climate meeting, China pledged to stop growing emissions by 2030 – on its current pace that will mean adding at least the equivalent of current emissions in the US to its total.
Whatever is going to happen (or not happen) to the world’s climate before 2050 is already baked in because of CO2’s long lasting atmospheric presence. For the longer term there is no reasonable prospect of total global emissions being reduced in an amount the proponents of CAGW have told us is needed to avoid the worst outcome (60% reduction from 1990 emission totals) before the latter half of this century. Whether or not the US self-imposes a carbon tax is simply irrelevant.
If you believe in CAGW, best plan for adaptation to a warmer world.
If the alarmists are right, what should we do? Does centralizing decisions about energy use make sense? Does centralizing any economic reality make sense? Does new technology, come from Government controls or from robust market competition? Do people who are centrally controlled adjust better than people and economies who are free under the rule of clear laws. Can regulators improve matters, can they know what they need to know in order to guide the infinite complexity of evolving economies? Do most government policies at the local state and national level lead to more waste or less waste? Does not waste have a large energy component? Why is it that people who want to centralize find that freedom threatens climate change? But fail to recognize that the dead weight burden of government increases waste and hence all resource use. Would consumption taxes reduce consumption and increase savings? So regardless of the science, remedies should drive the argument. And the divide over remedies, hopefully, will remain strong. Those of us who believe we live in a Hayekian world believe the centralizers have always been wrong, that freedom under the rule of very clear laws can do wonders and that even if regulators were not always captured, ( and they are) we give them impossible tasks. Markets work. Centralized economies cannot. Regulations and laws are very different things.
What would it take to change my mind? My view is that there is some warming due to human activity but am unconvinced it is of the degree that CAGW proponents believe.
I would need to see a better correlation between the model predictions and actual temperature trends to change my thinking. Instead, the increasing discrepancy between predictions and actual data tell me there is something going on that the advocates are not taking into account.
Related to that is a convincing explanation of why all of the climate feedbacks induced by increasing CO2 are positive (which is what the models assume), rather than more of a mixed bag – which is what the actual data seems to indicate. The feedback issue is extremely important – simple calculations of doubling CO2 show a temperature increase of only about 1 degree C (which would get lost in natural climate variation); it’s only by assuming massive positive feedback loops that you get to the levels predicted under CAGW.
The Earth, historically, has been much warmer than it is now. We are in the middle of an ice age, when you look at things on a global scale.
Every increase in temp in the history of mankind has been a good thing. *Every* increase.
I say, bring it on. I am pro-global warming.
Pity the record shows a “pause”.
By the way, the sea level has been going up since ice last retreated. That has been long before the industrial revolution.
Whatever happens, we will adapt.
Last year I posted a short, back of the envelope analysis of the man-made portion of Global Warming. I was looking at how sensitive the climate is to increased “human activity” and concluded that it isn’t. The Rico-search, being what it is, is unable to find that comment, so here it is from memory.
Start by saying that human activity = per capita energy consumption. In 1860 the per capita consumption of energy was measured in coal equivalents and was equal to about 100Kg of coal per year. By 2000, the per capita consumption was equal to about 2000Kg for a factor increase of 20X.
The population of the planet in 1860 was ~1B.
The population of the planet in 2000 was ~6.1B, a factor increase of about 6X.
In short, human activity, as measured by energy consumption has increased by 120X since 1860.
Looking at various claims by Global Warming Alarmists the amount of temperature increase since 1860 is about 1.9C, of which they attribute .4C to human activity.
Any system that can take a 120X increase in the inputs and only move .4C is “insensitive”. So my conclusion is that the climate is remarkably insensitive to human activity.
BUT – pretending for the moment that the .4C is the critical factor and imagining that humans really are responsible for it – the only thing that will work would be for us all to reduce our consumption of energy by 120X. Which means the planet has to move from the lifestyle of Iceland (which has the highest energy consumption on the planet) to about half of Eritrea (which coincidentally has 120X less energy consumption than Iceland.)
Or lefties could propose that we keep the current lifestyle and just cull the human race to ~5M people remaining. (Coincidentally, that was the plot of the movie Kingsmen, released last year.)
“I studied political science in grad school. I can’t believe that socialism is a hoax. It’s too big to be a hoax….”
Yet we know socialism is a hoax, and the same exact people are those perpetrating the global warming hoax, using the exact same methods.
So why should global warming being a hoax be hard to believe?
They’re known as “watermelons”, red on the inside, green on the outside.
Question 1) I would need to know exactly what percentage of carbon produced by man has contributed to what percentage of global temperature increase? If the case can be made that decreasing that input will result in reducing the output, I would entertain it.
Question 2) I already have. Roy Spencer, Judith Curry just to name a couple off the top of my head. Both are scientists and both have some legitimate questions for the Global Warmongers.
Question 3) I would defer to Bjorn Lomborg on that. What I will say is that transforming our system of government to and turning over our national sovereignty to a global communist government is certainly not the way to fix this if there is actually a problem. This has always been my biggest hang-up on the whole Climate Change debate: if this is such a serious problem, then why do all the proponents of this theory recommend the same solutions: more power for a centralized government either in DC or from the UN? Certainly this should ring some alarm bells for freedom loving people.
Finally, I would tell your friend that not all skeptics derive their skepticism from the Wall Street Journal. Another alarm raising notion, that the skeptics are not as informed as the proponents.
Hmmm…sounds like a good title for a book…maybe written by someone known to Richochetti through his various podcasts ….
Claire,
My father was a scientist and I sold EPA certified instruments for measuring CO/CO2 with calibration and data logging thrown in. This statement about a scientific consensus is completely absurd. If you don’t have it, the complete conclusive scientific verification, you don’t have IT. My father would be the first one to tell you not to assume anything. Lots of phenomena seem logical and one would guess to be true but nature is subtle. A poll of the feelings of scientists is a ridiculous method. If the arctic ice is shrinking at a rate considerably less than the antarctic ice is growing than the burden of proof is heavily on the climate alarmists as this data alone makes the entire set of assumptions of MMGW immensely unlikely.
Let me drop the science for a moment and talk about something that I observed so long ago in the Humanities Depts. As the full blown revolutionary fervor of the late sixties / early seventies wound down (the revolution wasn’t going to happen) the revolutionaries needed a place to invest their energies. They discovered environmentalism and those who had been on the barricades 69-73 were now getting the hang of environmental ideology by 75.
Mr. Lovelock’s GAIA hypothesis was to me an obvious recipe for immense ideological mischief. Take one part Malthus, one part Marx, and one part Carl Jung then mix radically with lots of unproven scientific hypotheses. You now can bamboozle everyone because it will take an immense effort to generate real data that refutes the hypotheses. Better still Malthus, Marx and Jung will provide ample attraction for disaffected left-wingers who could care less what the empirical truth is and just want their ideological prejudice affirmed.
What is absolutely amazing is that after 45 years of GAIA craziness Jim Lovelock himself has become a climate skeptic. Somehow I don’t think this is because he has “assumptions of unchecked material progress”. It is because he has a conscience and after 45 years of immensely costly difficult data collection the case for MMGW is over. There isn’t any! (and I’m not sorry for the exclamation point)
A better question would be how many lives and how much GNP has been lost because of environmental neurosis? How many more lives and how much more GNP will be lost if we don’t snap out of it!
Regards,
Jim