Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

To answer the question (IMHO): Yes

And only the most shallow of "global warming" types argue that human impact on climate "began" with industrialization. Forest clearing has contributed to climate change.

I am enouraged by this link as I oppose both the Luddite-Greens who "blame the West" and the "climate change is a hoax" crowds.

= = =

I would observe that IF de-forestation for agriculture thousands of years ago affects gloal CO2 levels THEN burning fossil fuels must impact global CO2 levels as well since fossil fuels merely are carbon sinks for plants and animals that lived millenia ago.

Posted by Bill White at January 24, 2007 07:03 AM

A comment on the geo-politics of global warming.

I believe that China's plans to burn a gadzillion tons of coal will swamp most any "conservation" efforts we may make in America, unless we choose to develop energy technologies that are carbon neutral and then use a Kyoto-II like process to force the Chinese to buy those technologies from us. At the bayonet point of global economic boycott.

Not driving SUVs? That merely slows the LendLease payments we send to the Salafis in Saudi Arabia.

Posted by Bill White at January 24, 2007 07:11 AM

If the number of defectors from a global agreement to limit CO2 emissions is not too many, they can be coerced with a combination of carbon tariffs and atmospheric CO2 extraction/sequestration.

(If there are too many defectors, the required tariffs would be too high and trade would just stop.)

Posted by Paul Dietz at January 24, 2007 07:49 AM

This is why we need to develop carbon neutral energy sources. Nuclear being the most obvious.

Pebble bed reactors would be one possible technology we could develop and deploy and then tell the Chinese, buy PBRs and stop buring coal, or else.

But we need to get beyond BOTH of these positions:

"Its all a hoax!"

and

"The West is evil"

Posted by Bill White at January 24, 2007 08:12 AM

I'm not convinced that global warming is real. However, if it is, I think its good, not bad, and should actually be promoted rather than stopped. I think its the only thing keeping us out of the next ice age and I think a warmer planet is definitely better than a colder one.

If global warming is real, I say, "Bring it on".

Posted by Kurt9 at January 24, 2007 09:16 AM

to Kurt,

It is refreshing to see someone not completely brainwashed into the propaganda of "global warming crisis/disaster" scenario. It is very, very important that the few clear thinkers remaining should oppose drastic gov't action as the socialist "cure" is almost certainly going to hurt us more than the so called problem.

I would caution you that the data shows clear evidence of global warming -- not necessarily from human activity -- but mostly likely so. Don't lose credibility by seeming to deny the factual data.

Your point that warming may be beneficial, not cataclysmic as claimed by the conventional narrative, has not be adequately studied. One the face of it, I don't imagine that anyone in the US will have trouble adjusting to a climate change. There are very large benefits to warming that are not addressed by the crisis crowd.

Posted by Fred K at January 24, 2007 10:39 AM

Indeed.

However, as the man said, if the climate must change I suspect that our civilization can stand a warmer environment a whole lot better than a colder environment.

Posted by Michael at January 24, 2007 12:04 PM

I suspect that our civilization can stand a warmer environment a whole lot better than a colder environment.

Sure. We don't actually need those trillions of dollars of near-sea-level real estate. I'm sure replacing all those 'broken windows' will stimulate the economy no end. And those people living near sea level in the great river dela in Bangladesh, I guess they can learn to inhale water or something. Ditto for those island nations in the Pacific that will cease to exist. Maybe after most of the coral in the world's oceans dies as ocean pH falls they can dredge the remains and build some seawalls.

Exaggerated sarcasm aside, there are real costs associated with rapid change in climate, and the cost of avoiding changes is often overestimated (the cost of SOx emission control in the US, for example, was a factor of 6 below the estimates made before the emissions trading system was mandated.)

Posted by Paul Dietz at January 24, 2007 02:01 PM

I did not say it was a good idea and I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture. I just believe warming would be more survivable in the long run.

If I happen to be in Bangladesh and the creek rises I can move inland and more or less carry on, but if the creek freezes I and my neightbors are much more likely to die of exposure or starvation as the world's industrial and infrastructure grinds to a halt. In my opinion less likely in a warm world.

We survived the Little Ice Age more or less because of our general lack of dependance on advanced technology but I remain unconvinced that our modern civilization would do as well (if well is the word).

Posted by Michael at January 24, 2007 03:05 PM

Paul, the water levels are only going up 2-3 feet over a few centuries. Much worse things happen because of land settling, yet we haven't move New Orleans. We will build walls where needed - but even that won't be necessary in most places. Rising seas only really effect a few places that are already at risk from storms and such anyway.

Personally, I think "global warming" is real, as in they have measured a one degree increase in the last decade. The worst case heating is about 10 degrees, and most of that comes from the poles getting warmer. Warming was almost certainly caused by humans (though not through carbon dioxide - our crime was to remove the dust and soot from the upper atmosphere).

I think that global warming is just change - neither good nor bad. The liberals (scientists) are anti-change. They say lookee no touchee. As an engineer, I am pro-change. Let it get warmer, and fix any issues that come up. And since we will not have killed our economy to do it, everyone is happier.

Why is no one talking about how Canada will become the breadbasket of the world?

(Of course, I can see why the political hacks in the liberal party like this so much. They make lots of noise and get to abuse their power. They make harse environmental laws and then let their friends sneak by unnoticed. And then in a decade they get to declare victory - see, nothing happened! Better keep paying me so that nothing will keep happening!)

Posted by David Summers at January 24, 2007 06:36 PM

Sure. We don't actually need those trillions of dollars of near-sea-level real estate.

Wouldn't the trillion dollar sea-level real estate just move 500m inland? I don't understand this line of reasoning. And this is a gradual process, it will take centuries. How much has land use changed since the industrial revolution? How much since the second world war? The lifetime of a typical building is well under 100 years, why can't we simply rebuild our new housing stock a couple kilometers inland?

Hippies panic about massive famines and the movement of the agricultural belt, but are we even sure we'll be performing manual outdoor farming in the next century? Could it be possible that much like we've already begun to do with lettuce, we'll start heavily automating food production and specifically genetically engineer our foodstuffs to be efficiently grown in an indoor climate controlled environment?

Posted by Adrasteia at January 24, 2007 09:02 PM

A warming climate is an easily measurable and copiously measured fact. That humans have contributed to it is also an obvious fact (the relevant physical properties of CO2 being an open book to anyone who passed undergraduate physics). How much we've contributed is open to debate, and whether we can do anything about it is even less clear.

The posited danger is the speed of the change, and whether ecosystems can adapt fast enough. Yes, Canada will become like Ohio, which seems good, if the important plant species can migrate north fast enough. Forests don't migrate very fast, unfortunately: half a mile a year seems very optimistic. And if the important species need to move 500 miles in two centuries, there's a big problem.

Same thing with ocean habitats. Change the thermal gradients, and you may radically change the circulation system (e.g. the Gulf Stream may stop, turning Britain into Greenland). Can important ocean species, phytoplankton, corals, etc., migrate fast enough? No one knows.

For myself, I think the idea of stopping global warming is laughable, and not worth discussing. The world is not going to simply stop using combustion, and it's hard to see how anything short of that would do anything significant. It's a damn big atmosphere, with a lot of inertia.

A more sensible species would focus its attention away from magical thinking about solar-electric cars and a billion Chinese (and another billion Africans) agreeing to stay in the 19th century for another few decades, and instead think about mitigating the effects to the extent possible, reserving as much flexibility as possible for the possibility -- no, probability -- that they will be at least in part quite surprising.

Posted by Carl Pham at January 25, 2007 03:00 AM

Sure, global warming is a good thing. It must be - after all, the cause of it makes money for the oil industry, gives trillions to the Arabs so the American military has an excuse to break things and kill people, and who needs Tuvalu, half of Bangladesh and part of Florida anyway? And as for those pesky Dutch...

It would even make more profits for the healthcare and drug industries, as plagues hitherto confined to the tropics spread to the industrialised West and new treatments need to be developed for them.

Good news all round, right?

Posted by Fletcher Christian at January 25, 2007 07:23 AM

Carl, a more sensible species would transfer its attention from making more craters in a desert and converting ores to rusting heaps of metal in a dump, to doing something about tapping resources billions of times greater than available currently, available only a couple of hundred miles away. Straight up - that's the rub.

Posted by Fletcher Christian at January 25, 2007 07:28 AM

Paul, the water levels are only going up 2-3 feet over a few centuries.

The page you linked to said the best projection was 19 to 37 inches by 2100. That's not several centuries.

And let's hope it's that little. I have suspicions it make be several times that by 2100 under business as usual.

Posted by Paul Dietz at January 25, 2007 10:12 AM

Why, Fletch? All energy comes from the Sun. It's just a question of what medium you use. I see nothing wrong with using up the stored solar energy in the form of oil that's been lying around, while we think of something else.

In the late eighteenth century England essentially denuded itself of good marine lumber in order to build its fleet of ships. Was that a bad idea? Should they have conserved on lumber, built fewer ships (giving up, of course, their mastery of the seas)? Poured their resources into research into whatever the eighteenth century imagined would be the successor to the wind-driven sailing ship?

I don't think so. The wealth they made in trade with wooden sailing ships eventually made it possible for them to develop and build iron steamships. Had they moped around as a third-rate trading nation, picking up the crumbs the Dutch and Spanish left, they might well have imagined an iron steamship -- but they'd not have been to build one, or a fleet of 'em.

The best technology for a given time period is not necessarily the best technology period. Economics is very important. Sometimes it's a better idea to use the cheaper, crappier technology to build yourself to the point where you can afford the better tech. Other choices may lead to the perfect driving out the good.

Posted by Carl Pham at January 25, 2007 06:45 PM

Does anyone (in the world) have a model of the climate that accurately predicts climate change that has been observed so far?

Posted by Mark at January 25, 2007 09:38 PM

Re: the book Plows, Plagues and Petroleum...

The science fact segment of Analog magazine has a nice writeup on that book, very interesting. The idea that human activity is postponing an approaching ice-age is something that should give global warming alarmists pause, but probably won't.

At a panel on global warming I poised the question, "There seems to be an assumption that the status quo global climate is ideal. If we engineer our climate, what temperature is the target goal? Is a warmer or a cooler climate a greater hazard to humanity?" The answer they gave was the climate of 1970 was the assumed ideal. No significant thought or study has gone into what is the best climate for humanity, they just assume an unchanged climate is the best of all possibilities.

That's what bothers me about the global warming alarmists. They take one reasonable theory and then they use it to jump to a pre-conceived 'solution'. There is a lot of truth to the description of some environmentalists as watermelons -- green on the outside, red on the inside. These people are just using environmentalism as a means of grabbing power, trying to scare the rest of us into accepting their fantasy goal of a socialist paradise.

Posted by Brad at January 26, 2007 02:51 AM

The idea that human activity is postponing an approaching ice-age is something that should give global warming alarmists pause, but probably won't.

The evidence doesn't support this idea. The next ice age isn't due for a long time:

It now seems likely (Loutre and Berger, Climatic Change, 46: (1-2) 61-90 2000) that the current interglacial, based purely on natural forcing, would last for an exceptionally long time: perhaps 50,000 years.

There seems to be an assumption that the status quo global climate is ideal. If we engineer our climate, what temperature is the target goal?

A change can be bad in that it causes individuals to suffer losses that are not their fault. For example, how do you feel about millions of people in the delta in Bangladesh losing their lands and livelihoods?

In this sense, preventing anthropogenic climate change is like any other pollution control. We don't take the attitude that factories can dump filth into the local air or water as long as the net overall benefit is positive, or even if the polluters pay compensation.

What denialists are upset about is their pollution gravy train is being upset.

Posted by Paul Dietz at January 29, 2007 06:28 AM

"The evidence doesn't support this idea."

Well the evidence cited in Plows, Plagues and Petroleum suggests otherwise.

"A change can be bad in that it causes individuals to suffer losses that are not their fault. For example, how do you feel about millions of people in the delta in Bangladesh losing their lands and livelihoods?"

When discussing long term global climate change, getting wrapped up in such extremely localized conditions as you suggest is a silly way to decide global policy. The only sensible policy is whatever will minimize catastrophic consequences for most of humanity over the long term. Right now though the world is in an interglacial period, we still are in the middle of an ice age!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

Is a Lttle Ice Age (or worse) to be preferred to the Holocene climatic optimum?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

"What denialists are upset about is their pollution gravy train is being upset."

It's the possible consequences of some ideas for fending off global warming that are scary. The 'cure' may end up being worse than the disease.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/30433.html

"In this sense, preventing anthropogenic climate change is like any other pollution control. We don't take the attitude that factories can dump filth into the local air or water as long as the net overall benefit is positive, or even if the polluters pay compensation."

I guess you never heard of the Kyoto treaty idea of carbon emissions trading!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emissions_trading

Posted by Brad Tyler at January 30, 2007 08:16 PM

Well the evidence cited in Plows, Plagues and Petroleum suggests otherwise.

Well, I gave a reference to a specific paper in the peer reviewed literature. When did these putative references cited in P3 appear? I suspect they were well before 2000.

When discussing long term global climate change, getting wrapped up in such extremely localized conditions as you suggest is a silly way to decide global policy.

Why? We don't follow that logic in controlling pollution in the US.

Posted by Paul Dietz at January 31, 2007 07:14 AM

"When did these putative references cited in P3 appear? I suspect they were well before 2000."

The book was published in 2005.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8014.html

Posted by Brad at January 31, 2007 08:55 PM

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