Let’s Debate It…
We’ve all seen the long-winded, often off topic, discussions in the comments section of the Tatler of the merits of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I doubt I’m going to convince true-believers they’re wrong, anymore than the AGW folks are going to convince me they’re right.
However in the Spirit of Stephen Hawkins in 1776 — “I’ve never seen, heard, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. Hell yes, I’m for debating anything!”
For the sake of argument, let’s say the AGW folks and AlGore (GreenPeace be Upon Him) are right — the Earth really is warming, and it’s our fault. Now, what precisely do you propose we do about it?
The ball, as they say, is in your court.
There are blogs and blogs and more blogs dedicated to the topic, and they never reach any kind of resolution, so it isn’t going to happen here. Sorry, it just isn’t. Here’s a fairly technical one, frequented by (and run by) scientists and engineers.
http://judithcurry.com/
Read the comments. Any thread. They never resolve anything. There is no consensus, and never will be one.
Oh, I’m not actually looking for consensus here, but let’s see what the AGW types come up with, what their REAL solutions are, what they actually think.
That’s what IPCC WG3 is all about. You know, the one that was written by Greenpeace activists, citing Greenpeace literature.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/24/greenpeace-and-the-ipcc-the-edenhofer-excuse/#more-43990
Should we debate the metabolic pathways of fairies and ogres, too?
How about perpetual motion machines?
The real debate should be about how we establish and maintain systems that prevent criminal hoaxes like AGW from ever happening in the first place.
Look, I’m a big fan of criticism of environmentalists’ ridiculous obsession with global warming; however, we should probably be precise here. I don’t think there can be any doubt that human activities like releasing various gases to the atmosphere and changing landscapes from green to paved will affect climate to some degree. The question is: to what degree?
Building upon the answer to that question, we, but especially environmentalists, need to acknowledge that the global climate has always been changing and always will be changing. So, the questions we humans ought to be asking ourselves is:
1) What would the climate be doing without any of our activity?
2) What are the costs and benefits of our activity influencing the climate towards either warming or cooling?
A cursory glance at temperatures over the last couple thousand years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial) indicates
1) It isn’t yet as warm as it was during the last interglacial. In light of that fact, how can climatologists be so sure that current probably warming isn’t jut in the same rough pattern of the previous interglacial.
2) Sometime in the next maybe couple thousand or even couple hundred years, global temps will plummet and we’ll be back in a deep ice age. Yikes.
It seems so beyond the realm of possibility that we could warm the global climate too much to a degree that life can’t tolerate. As far as I’m concerned, we should be making our actions trend towards helping the global climate get warmer, not colder.
Part of dealing with constant climate change, though, is being good Biblical stewards and giving life their natural habitat to be able to flow with a constantly changing climate. I am in favor of radically changing the way we humans live on surfaces, living more compactly in cities, to allow more wild areas. We have a responsibility as stewards to be good stewards, not replace all the highest trophic levels with ourselves only.
I am in favor of maximizing the freedoms of all people everywhere. The Earth can take of itself.
And if it can’t, we’ll fix it with terraforming. And we’ll get other planets, too, if we stop making ourselves SMALL. The whole obsession with ‘saving the Earth’ is Earth centered worship. Religion.
Earth is not a goddess. It’s a hunk of rock. This is akin to worshipping your bedroom. Or at best, your garden.
BTW, warming the Earth doesn’t make it LESS suitable for human habitation. On the contrary. The ICE AGE is an issue. Heat, not so much.
” So, the questions we humans ought to be asking ourselves is:
1) What would the climate be doing without any of our activity?
2) What are the costs and benefits of our activity influencing the climate towards either warming or cooling?”
Close. The actual questions are:
1) What is the optimum temperature of the Earth for mankind?
2) Can we do anything to bring about this optimum temperature.
I would argue that the optimum temperature is actually warmer than today’s.
@Sarah
The Bible tells us to be good stewards of life. There is definitely a difference between Gaia-worship and being good stewards, but I’m not getting the sense from your comment that you’re adequately distinguishing.
It is wrong for humanity, in my view, to take up so much of the landscape that tons of other species die out. We’re intelligent, we ought to be able to find ways to have high standards of living while not causing extinctions of animals like the Red Wolf, frogs, etc.
My comment here has sort of a futuristic angle to it as well. If we don’t do our best to respect the living space of living beings lower than us, how can we expect a future Artificial Intelligence to respect us? AI doesn’t have to be hostile like in Terminator; rather, it could just be like us and callously disregard other species (like ours) and cause their extinctions while just selfishly pursuing its own ends like we’re doing now.
There has to be a happy medium between Gaia-worship on one end, while on the other end arrogating most of the planet’s surface to our own use and causing mass extinctions like we’re doing right now.
@gahrie.
I feel that what you’re doing is taking the same unrealistic attitude that environmentalists are taking. We do not understand global climate well enough to know for sure that it’s actually warming, let alone understand it well enough to keep it at an equilibrium. That’s really grand hubris – Our science and engineering isn’t anywhere close to that. Global climates are like huge boulders rolling down a perpetual slope – We can try to influence their direction, but to try to stop them would be almost impossible. We can definitely terraform other worlds, though; that’s just influencing the direction of a boulder.
I think you are just trying to start another fight.
What should we do about it? Think Ghost-busters. Wasn’t it Sigourney Weaver’s line, “Are you gods?”
Pope Gore and Co.: “We can fix the climate. Just give us enough money and enough power over your lives, and we can fix this.”
Me: “Are you gods?”
Pope Gore: “No.”
Me: “Then… Die!” Zap!
Happy ending to AGW nonsense.
The actions they propose do not effect the supposed causes of AGW, they always amount to wealth redistribution and more power for them. This betrays their motives and goals.
If I remember correctly, the first climate summit was either called by or presided over by Margaret Mead, who was a very conspicuous fraud. ( again…telling )
I will have to look it up, but I believe she, or they, decided the primary problem facing humanity was population growth and it was decided that it could be approached by creating solutions to an imagined climate problem.
You are right Mr. Richardson to call them out, just dont expect a response.
This gets closest to the point I made at:
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/07/23/terrorism-and-global-warming-alarmism-same-motives-and-outcomes/
It’s an issue of attack versus defense. The alarmists’ solution is statist, a pretty name for feudalism, where the few control nearly all resources, money, and arms.
On the other side is Liberty, a rare experiment which in early America meant that individual civil and political rights were ascendant, and the Bill of Rights was a barrier prohibiting government from infringing on God-given rights.
Like Breivik, the alarmists advocate a form of violence, transferring our property into their pockets for an alleged benefit to be granted later. This is similar to the armed robber telling you that if you give up your wallet, he won’t kill you.
Statism operates under the same meme. If you go along, we’ll let you live. Serfdom is self-imposed, where the disarmed agree to cringe and lick the master’s hand in exchange for life, even though that life is constricted by fences (laws handed down by the master) and rife with poverty. Statism also works best where the state replaces God.
The Liberty lovers/Constitutionalists are in the position of acting in self-defense, which is not violence, but defense against it. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction: This is God’s law manifest on the physical plane.
This should remove any doubt about who the IPCC policy “experts” are, and what they’re all about.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/18/ipcc-official-%E2%80%9Cclimate-policy-is-redistributing-the-worlds-wealth%E2%80%9D/
Give Suthenboy a dollar. Yup, I’m calling them out. They have basically three choices, give us some real, useful solutions, give us the usual redistributionist drivel or fail to respond, thereby revealing themselves as cowards.
I figure any of the above is a net positive.
Again, follow the links at WUWT and Climate Audit about the IPCC WG3 and their incestuous relationship with Greenpeace. It’s not, as you say, that they don’t have solutions. It’s that their solutions don’t work. That’s even worse. They literally want us to scrap the technology that we have that works economically and reliably in exchange for what’s behind door #3. And what’s behind door #3 is a windmill that’s not spinning because there’s no (or too much) wind.
OK, I came back to see what they had to say……as I suspected, deafening silence.
You can strap your pistols on, stand in the street at high noon and wait all alone until the crickets are chirping and the moon is coming up, they aint gonna show.
One Australian climatologist said all the proposals we have won’t make much of a dent for at least a thousand years. So assuming for a moment that the earth IS warming and we ARE the major cause, what we are prepared/able to do isn’t much more than a small hill of beans. If you analyze the situation, what the UN and other political-fops seem to be saying is that developing countries like China, India et al are prepared to do NOTHING because they need coal, oil, etc, to develop. So, the developed world must take up the slack and make up for everyone else’s carbon “pollution” as well as our own, and give them a bunch of money to help them as well. This sounds more like a con job than a solution to any crisis, but that is consistent with the actions of such as Al Gore and Prince Chuckie, who spew carbon like the Titanic while cursing us for what, in comparison, is an occasional fart.
So there’s little reason to take their bull seriously but plenty of reasons not to.
I’ve never understood the AGW hysteria. If we omit the claims of Al Gore, there’s no evidence that it would be catastrophic. More, an increase in the ambient energy level is something we might be able to use, clever creatures that we are. But beyond all that, no proposal I’ve seen would have a measurable effect on the global temperature — assuming we could ever determine what it is!
As an college instructor in an energy related field, I’ve had this discussion many times with my students. And the amount of re-education that has to take place to supplant the environmental dogma with propagated through our public education system is astonishing. Most of the students have just unquestioningly accepted the default environmental position as the truth. Not only have I consistently made the scientific case against AGW, but I’ve also proposed exactly what the author here has postulated, i.e. What if AGW is true? So what?
A couple of points.
Although the vast majority of data collection points that supporters of AGW use to support their argument are located in the Northern hemisphere, and relatively few are located in the Southern Hemispherre, it can be safely stated that from 1976 thru 1998, the average surface temperatures of the earth in at least the Northern Hemisphere did rise. Also, during this same period of time, the amount of manmade carbon emitted into the atmosphere also rose. (So did the amount of water vapor, but that is another argument.) Therefore, the hypothesis of AGW was not in and of itself without any basis. However, as most scientifically and mathematically informed people know: Correlation does not prove causation.
In fact, the amount of manmade carbon emitted into the atmosphere has continued to increase over the past 13 years while temperatures have leveled off and started to drop. Also, if AGW was true, then not only should surface temperatures have risen, but upper atmospheric temperatures should also have risen. This was PROVEN not to be true as early as 1995.
But what really baffled my students was when I asked them “Why is global warming a bad thing?” The reality is that while some coastal lands and low lying islands might be degraded due to global warming, vast new lands would suddenly become available for agriculture and common uses that hitherto have been left dormant in modern history. There was a reason the Vikings called Greenland by that name, and a global warming trend that returned the earths temperatures to the level of the 14th century might actually be a boon to the earth, not a curse. Vast lands in Russia, far Northern Europe and North America could be settled, cultivated, and provide sustenance for an even more populous world. Also, as any serious student of World History can attest, the period of medieval time that corresponded to the last previous warmer period was a time of relative prosperity. So why could that not be true again?
Why isn’t Global Warming something desirable, and to be looked at as a blessing instead of a curse?
Your question is fair.
First kill off all the “we always wanted to make people do this and AGW is the excuse to do it now” thinking.
Establish a system for reviewing proposals:
What is the proposal?
What does it cost?
How much CO2 will it reduce?
Does it require future technologies?
How much does it disrupt society?
How much does it disrupt the economy?
Analysis must be provided by people other than advocates.
Costs must be real, complete life cycle, with no subsidies
This will kill off lots of stupid projects like electric cars.
Choose projects based on cost effectiveness of reducing CO2
We need two sources of energy: Electric and Fuel for transportation. Each has different solutions. The easiest to replace is Electric. My guess is that if we replaced Electric we would be able to continue to use CO2 generating Fuels for years to come, kicking that can down the road.
As for Electric I am open to all-of-the-above. Certainly generators that provide base load are better than those that vary.
Replace coal with gas
Add more/better generators to existing dams
Raise the height of existing dams – we need the water storage anyway
Build new dams
Use solar to provide for peak load
Modular nuclear
Wind – personally I hate it, but if it can be done without problems…
This is not an overwhelming problem except that it attracts ideologs.
I don’t think that a carbon tax really helps because it tends to diffuse attention in every direction at the same time. It creates a lets reduce everyone’s use by 10% thinking which stops you from making a few really impactful choices and letting the rest of society get on with business.