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Which Beliefs about Global Warming Are Legal?
It seems to me that there are about eight questions that you’d need to ask to learn someone’s full opinion about global warming:
- Is the planet currently warming?
- To what extent is anthropogenic carbon dioxide responsible for global warming?
- How bad will global warming get?
- How much time do we have to respond?
- When will our understanding of global warming be sufficient to allow us to deal with it effectively?
- When will technology be advanced enough to deal with global warming?
- How do we handle the economics of dealing with global warming?
- How do we handle the politics of dealing with global warming?
I made a list of what I thought were possible, reasonable answers to each of these questions, and came up with two answers for the first, four for the second, five for the third, and so on. Multiplying the number of possible answers for each question I got:
2 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 3 x 5 = 129,600
So there are 129,600 possible combinations of answers. Some of the possible combinations, though, are internally inconsistent. For example, someone who believes that global warming will never get bad at all would not believe that we need to respond right away. Being conservative (because, hey, we’re conservatives), let’s say that only 10 percent of the possible combinations are logically consistent. That leaves us with 12,960 possible opinions on global warming.
An important question for New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, then, is: Which of these 12,960 opinions are legal to hold? This is not a rhetorical question given that Mr. Schneiderman is currently investigating ExxonMobil for the possible crime of holding the wrong opinion.
Note: My “matrix” of questions and answers is available on request. Just send me a Ricochet message.
Published in Law
It should be illegal to use that phrase.
My first question is similar to your third:
If that can’t be answered (and it can’t), then the whole idea that warming is per se bad is mooted.
Global warming is real and man-made, but we can’t do a thing about it. I say bring on the coal powered SUVs! We can’t cause the apocalypse twice!
My question is: do you prefer warming or cooling? Stable is not and has never been an option.
It’s not the next phase. Consider gay marriage.
Isn’t that the Dem’s solution to everything?
Huh. I have dramatically different answers. Imagine that.
Global warming is real and desirable and not noticeably man-made, and we need not do anything about it. Coal powered SUVs don’t sound all that practical to me, but I feel no guilt driving my Chevy Suburban around.
You might find the “What Temperature Should the Planet Be?” post helpful on the difficult technical points.
Wanna twist the knickers of a global warming alarmist? Ask them one simple question… is the crusade against global warming a moral issue, or a scientific issue?
Then sit back and watch as they attempt to justify their “science” using the words of morality and faith.
It’s like René Descartes never existed, or something.
It’s important to define your timeline here. The planet has definitely been warming over the past 150 years. During that period, there have been some cooling trends that lasted several decades. But the overall trend is pretty clear. There is enough variability in temperature that a flat or negative temperature trend can persist for a long time and not disprove the overall warming trend. Whether the warming trend will continue into the future is a harder question, as the atmosphere is complex and chaotic, and fundamentally unpredictable. Still, if you were forced to bet on the future, the smart money would be on a continuation of the warming trend, at least over the next few decades.
There’s a strong consensus, based on good evidence, that man-made CO2 is contributing to warming. We understand the mechanism through which Co2 traps heat very well. We have atmospheric sensors showing a fairly rapid rise in atmospheric CO2, and can’t identify any other sources of it. The larger question is how much effect CO2 has, and what other sources are driving climate change. That’s a harder question to answer.
This is a hard question. Even if we accept that short-term warming is partially due to man-made CO2 increases, we still have a fairly poor understanding of how the overall climate will react to that over the medium to long term. The key questions revolve around feedback – the climate system has myriad positive and negative feedback mechanisms that kick in over various timeframes. The most alarmist of climate scientists tend to focus on positive feedbacks such as water vapor, ice melt causing albedo changes, etc. But equally important feedbacks such as Co2 uptake increases from greening, cloud coverage changes, ocean current changes and biological changes like algae blooms are much less certain.
My personal feeling is that in a complex system like the climate negative feedbacks must dominate or the system would not have remained stable for billions of years. But it’s an open question as to whether those feedbacks would kick in over timescales that would work for us, and how much variability they allow before recovery. A stabilizing feedback that takes 1000 years to fully kick in and which allows the temperature to rise 5 degrees before having an impact isn’t much help to us. But certainly cloud feedback could be expected to kick in very shortly, and we still don’t understand the real impact of that.
We have no idea, and anyone who puts a hard deadline on this is selling something.
I’m not sure this is the question to ask. It’s entirely possible that we will NEVER have a complete understanding of global warming, yet still have valid arguments for ‘acting’. For example, you could invoke the precautionary principle and say that it’s precisely because we don’t know how bad it could be that we should stop interfering in atmospheric chemistry. The law of unintended consequences and all that. But any ‘precautionary’ argument has to weigh risks against costs, and that’s something the climate alarmists tend to gloss over.
This is a broad question. ‘Dealing’ with global warming could include mitigation, prevention, or a combination of both. It could include new energy sources that can economically replace fossil fuels, new techniques for scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it, cloud seeding, or some yet undiscovered thing we can’t even guess at.
If we are talking about power that can replace fossil fuels in large amounts, we already have it – nuclear power. France gets close to 80% of its power from nuclear and has low energy prices, so we know it can be done. But if we aren’t going to use nuclear power and must use renewable energy, forget it in the short term. Solar and wind will never replace more than 20-30% of our power needs, and even those kinds of numbers are wildly optimistic. And such a transition would take decades – time that the alarmists say we don’t have.
My best guess – we don’t. There will be carbon taxes, and attempts to regulate power sources out of existence, but they will either be unsuccessful at seriously curtailing fossil fuel use, or to the extent that they work will cause so much economic damage that the political will for them will rapidly vanish. The only hope for ‘doing something’ about global warming is either a breakthrough in cheap renewable energy or a change in the political opposition to widespread nuclear power.
War. Countries act in their own best interest, and right now China, Russia, India, the Middle East, the US, and Canada have a huge vested interest in maintaining a fossil fuel infrastructure. The only way you’re going to get Russia or China to stop burning fossil fuels is to threaten them, blockade them, etc. Oh, they might half-heartedly sign on to some climate treaty if they think it’s in their short-term interests to do so, but they are guaranteed to break those treaties as soon as they become economically painful. And so will we. See: Kyoto.
Heck, those models can’t even be used to go back in time and provide correct temps (from data that already exists).
Acting before understanding also runs into the precautionary principle. If the situation is as dire as alarmists believe, then we should not take actions that make the problem worse. Unfortunately, we’ve already done that with corn-based fuels.
We may have also made things worse with solar and wind power. It could be that, with the current level of technology, solar collectors and wind turbines actually cost more energy to fabricate, install, and tie into the grid than they will produce in their useful lifetimes.
Another important question: If anthropogenic climate change is happening and a real threat, who would you trust with the power to make and enforce the rules that would reverse it? I read somewhere that what is called climate change “denial” is more often distrust. Count me in for trusting no one with that kind of power. More information, lots of public argument, behavior change where it is feasible; that’s why the one nation that is not entirely officially on board with the climate change treaty has already done the most to reduce CO2 production.
I like this analysis.
Re this: Waddaya mean, “us”, Kemo Sabe? If it happens slowly,and people are left free, it may be enough for individuals (and organizations) to make small changes over several generations. If, e.g., the sea is rising as slowly as some predict, why can’t people just move inland every once in a while? Real estate prices would slowly change, and people and corporations would adjust slowly without anyone having to make them.
Ah, the ‘precautionary principle.’ Those who staunchly defend this principle were strangely mum when it came to light bulbs that, given a semi- strict reading of the law, require a HasMat team to come to your home if you break one.
My favorite assessment of that principle was summed up thusly: If it had been around in the time of Ben Franklin (or earlier in France), the indoor stove would have been prohibited.
For me the answers for all but #7 are the same: “I don’t know”.
For #7, my answer is “very, very cautiously, there are a LOT of poor people escaping poverty by burning fossil fuels, let’s not screw that up because it is a very, very good thing”.