Helpful when reading this thread to keep in mind Michael Mann's six stages of climate change denial:
1. CO2 is not actually increasing.
2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming.
3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes.
4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor.
5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us.
6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it’s too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.
Interesting note from the l0phet article the other day regarding how fire codes and regulation in cities didn't come about even after great disaster swept the city.
Wysopal offered this grim precedent: Cities were once
vulnerable to disastrous fires, which raged through dense
clusters of mostly wooden buildings. It took a giant fire
in Chicago to spur government officials into serious
reforms, including limits on new wooden structures, a
more robust water supply for suppressing blazes and an
overhaul to the city’s fire department.
“The market didn’t solve the problem of cities burning
down,” Wysopal said, predicting that Internet security
may require a historic disaster to force change. “It
seems to me that the market isn’t really going to solve
this one on its own.”
But here’s a frightening fact: The push to create tough
new fire-safety standards did not start after the Great
Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed hundreds of people and
left 100,000 homeless. It took a second fire, nearly
three years later in 1874, to get officials in Chicago to
finally make real changes.
Though I wouldn't accept #5 and #6 exactly as phrased, it does seem like positive effects ought to be balanced against the negative, and the uncertainty of future technological developments ought to inform our current decision of how much to spend addressing climate change.
Your position is similar to that of Swedish environmentalist and academic, Bjorn Lomberg who accepts that rising CO2 levels are the cause of warming, and that this is a problem, but argues that the dangers are overstated and resources would be better devoted to mitigation of climate change and addressing other pressing issues such as global poverty.
Despite his relatively orthodox views, he was recently run off campus at the University of Western Australia where he had set up a think tank, The Consensus Centre, to which the Australian government had pledged $4 million.
Bjorn Lomborg is a sad case. He titled his book The Skeptical Environmentalist and everyone got the message, without reading the book, that he was a climate-change skeptic -- and for the most part labeled him as an "enemy" and rebuffed him. It was just a public relations disaster.
For what it's worth, he's not a "skeptic" in any of the conventional ways. I also remember looking at the IPCC reports once when I was a young physics student and saying, "hey, it's only a couple degrees Celsius over many years?" I was educated enough to realize that you could predict bad storms etc -- what I like to tell people right now is that it's like having a really huge boulder and, right next to it, digging a little ditch, only to cause the boulder to smack you down: the small change in the height of an equilibrium can still have a huge effect if a big enough system is relaxing to the new equilibrium. Someone came up with a memorable name for it: it's less of a concern about "global warming" and more about "global weirding." It took me a while to appreciate that there is a small (but scary) probability that the slope that the boulder is on might have a net incline one or the other way, so that the boulder might not just hit us but roll over us if it gets disturbed far enough from equilibrium. It makes a lot of sense for there to be a big scientific research program about that, even though no IPCC model predicts runaway climate change because the probability is so low and the possible causes are typically unexpected.
With that said: though hurricanes, floods and tornadoes certainly can have a massive economic impact, Bjorn has a good point of "the weather disasters that we know will happen due to the warming that we know is happening are important, but let's figure out how this compares to other things which we can predict really well, and see where our money is best spent: climate-change relief efforts, or climate-change mitigation, or general alleviation of poverty, or what?"
What I think is most missing from all of this is: we're talking about so little money, especially if we compare to governments' military expenditures, going towards the science. What would be great is if a government said, "hey, we're putting forward this huge grant to climate change research just because we think research is intrinsically good and want to support this huge project of, y'know, knowing more."
I am quite happy saying, "Climate change is a plausibly serious problem and the current best solution is to build nuclear (fission) power plants today to replace base load coal, to shift from income taxes to carbon taxes and tarifs immediately, to build solar power and storage immediately, and to phase in regulations that will make it essentially impossible for new thermal coal development. We should also have public subsidies for nuclear and solar to ensure rapid deployment."
When I say that I fequently get called a climate change denier, because that is a label used primarily (not exclusively) by people whose primary goal is smashing global capitalism, and who find climate change a useful stick to beat their political enemies with.
> We should also have public subsidies for nuclear and solar to ensure rapid deployment."
Can you elaborate on the relation between the nuclear energy industry and insurance companies? Even as someone who sympathizes with the goal of "smashing global capitalism," I would find it interesting to know what the free market has to say in this respect.
It's important to understand that if we completely shut off CO2 production today, the climate would continue to warm significantly for decades/centuries into the future. And that warming might not be completely catastrophic, and could even seem positive in some ways to a minority of world citizens. The 350ppm of 350.org is still way above pre-industrial levels, but is seen by most as safe.
However, that's no longer what anyone is arguing about. What is argued about is the continued effect of dumping 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere year after year after year with no end in sight, while we're already over 400ppm. Any arguable positive effect, we've already achieved - it's the 4-5C of warming we're currently on track for that scientists claim, with good reason, will be catastrophic for human civilization and the present state of life on earth.
You're certainly not denying climate change, but maybe you're someone who doesn't care about the impact, as long as humanity survives. And why should we care? There are so many reasons not to care.
- We're out of touch with nature.
- Even for those in touch with nature, the human scale is too short to personally see and feel any change.
- The individual's responsibility is extremely diluted with the rest of humanity.
It will sound cheesy, but I care because of the beauty of nature. An extinction event is something that destroys biodiversity, and biodiversity is the source of this beauty as I feel it. Maybe the diversity of life will return in another form a few million years later (and maybe not), but simply understanding the act of destruction that is underway does impact me emotionally, and makes me want to stop it.
> and the uncertainty of future technological developments ought to inform our current decision of how much to spend addressing climate change.
Well, that does not necessarily sound like something the author of the grandparent comment would disagree with, especially when you consider that the technological developments may not universally be regarded as solutions (e.g. geoengineering).
The first four stages have always baffled me. Anyone who knows basic chemistry understands how carbon dioxide interacts with infrared radiation. Combine that with the fact that human activity is releasing tens of billions of tons of CO2 every year, which does not magically disappear. In fact, it's quite measurable.
The climate is complex, but the basic facts of the situation are incredibly simple and unavoidable. And yet, people have still tried.
Indeed, I studied chemistry and certainly believe that carbon dioxide interacts with infrared radiation, but actually understanding that process is a totally different story.
What I don't like about "my side" of the climate change conversation is that it so often underestimates the difficulty and time investment necessary to really understand this stuff, and in so doing, disrespects people who aren't scientists. Is it any wonder then, that those people turn to the side that is willing to put things in terms they understand instead of making them feel stupid?
We need more Carl Sagan types; people who recognize that their years of scientific study have put them in a position to understand things that vanishingly few people can even conceptualize, and make it their work to educate rather than condescend.
Another interesting tidbit: You'll find this on both sides of most public discussions I guess.
A whole lot of the people who tries to defend man made global warming in public forums seems to be parroting what they have heard, just like the naysayers.
Getting to the facts instead of gettings served up brochures seems hard and asking questions gets you smacked down by a bunch of zealots.
Which is why I found this piece interesting: at least some numbers and charts that seems understandable.
Lots of people across broad spectrums do this all the time. It's uncomfortable to publicly admit you don't know something; a lot of people, especially otherwise smart people, try to apply their expertise in one area to another area they have no specialized knowledge in.
Programmers as a group are maybe a little bit worse about this than most other groups (except maybe physicists), because they view themselves as "systems people", and "everything is a system", therefore similar rules apply everywhere: software is buggy by nature, so scientific research must suffer from similar error rates, for example.
Well, a lot of people argue that the moon landing was a hoax (without knowing basic engineering) and that the holocaust didn't happen (without knowing basic history). I find it more depressing than baffling.
Well, carbon dioxide's interaction with infrared radiation would be more studied by physics than chemistry.
Also, I kind of hate these types of statements. I could say something like, "Anybody that knows anything about music should know that parallel minor of A Major is F# minor," but it's not like I would be adding anything to any discussion by saying such.
I don't think the general population is thinking about it that much. To me, the main denial seems to be a dislike and/or distrust of the people advocating the AGW theory.
For example, having Al Gore as a prominent figure of the AGW theory movement for a number of years is enough to make them suspicious. They see him fly in private jets, own multiple humongous homes, make investments that will pay off if things like carbon credits become mainstream, release a movie 9 months after Katrina that promised more and more severe hurricanes that never materialized, etc, etc. He might not be a duck but he sure seems to quack a lot.
The other main denial seems to be things like, "It's cold today - in your face global warming".
I think Michael Mann is giving people far too much credit.
There's also the pretty standard *these scientists' intuitions about causal links between human activity, atmospheric CO^2 and recorded temperature might well be right. But you're not convincing me to pay carbon taxes or cycle. Which is less unreasonable than it sounds when you consider the evidence of human ability to slow or reverse climate change (at all, never mind through eyecatching civic initiatives) is in rather shorter supply than the evidence of human ability to adapt to climate change.
1. CO2 is not actually increasing.
2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming.
3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes.
4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor.
5. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us.
6. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it’s too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.