Who Will Suffer Most from Climate Change? (Hint: Not You) | Hacker News Reader

Who Will Suffer Most from Climate Change? (Hint: Not You)

gatesnotes.com

79 pointsus0r89 comments

Although true, I think headlines like this give a lot of people an impression that the First World won't suffer. Climate change over +2C will hit the U.S. hard, and the fact that other places are worse off won't be consolation. At the rate we're going, that's not future generations, it's many of today's working people at retirement age.

(For details, an excellent source is Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, with extensive references.)

> Climate change over +2C will hit the U.S. hard, and the fact that other places are worse off won't be consolation.

Care to elaborate? I don't see how that would be a problem. Agricultural areas would shift, and maybe we'd have to move some stuff further inland/build dikes/turn cities into Venice. Anything I'm missing?

I don't see how that stuff is worse than energy controls (people have no idea how important energy is for the economy), plus even if we change, other countries won't.

>Care to elaborate? I don't see how that would be a problem. Agricultural areas would shift, and maybe we'd have to move some stuff further inland/build dikes/turn cities into Venice. Anything I'm missing?

All of those things sound like huge problems.

Humans have been adapting to nature and vice versa for all of history. Those things I mentioned are not enough to stangle the economy.

I mean, if you are going to impoverish people, what's the point? Isn't preventing global warming supposed to be for the sake of helping people?

Again, people don't understand how essential cheap energy is.

Cheap energy is a cornerstone of our (modern, American) way of life, to be sure, and losing it would be awful. For us. But there's the OP's point- climate change will screw over vast numbers of people who didn't even benefit from cheap energy to begin with.

It would be interesting to see an in-depth quantitative analysis of the effects of dramatically reduced fossil fuel use versus dramatic climate change, in terms of a general global sum of badness (and if anyone knows of such a resource, please link it!) But there's more to the whole matter than global utilitarianism- there's also the sheer unfairness of the situation.

Plenty of economists have compared the economic impact of taking action now vs. dealing with the damage later. Action now is much, much cheaper.

Not according to a bunch of Nobel Prize winning analysts at the Copenhagen Consensus. They said the effort/resources would be much better spent solving problems for the poor today. Curbing CO2 by some small amount in 85 years will yield, by a large margin, the least benefit of money spent today.

This isn't a topic they dared to cover, but imagine the benefit to the hundreds of millions in Africa living without access to reliable cheap power if their countries could secure international loans for coal plants. Jobs, prosperity, food, industrialized living.

Here's a debunking from one of the economists involved. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/aug/22/climate...

I got as far as "and they have the infrastructure to mitigate severe depletion of resources like fresh water and arable land."

The IPCC has never stated there is a high probability of a loss of arable land and fresh water. They've stated it is a possibility with a high amount of unknowns. And given that CO2 barely warms the Earth, it is the water vapor feedback loop that is the mechanism for large amounts of global warming, it seems odd to believe the world's atmosphere would get wetter, but there would be less rainfall.

Yea, but action now has a "tragedy of the commons" aspect to it in that not acting lets you freeload off of your neighbors who do. Taking action later to deal with the damage is local expenditure of resources for local benefit.

A fair amount of the required effort is a good idea in itself, e.g. efficiency improvements in business, converting coal plants to natural gas to reduce air pollution health effects, wind is the cheapest and easist to build power source for new electricity capacity, solar correlates brilliantly with usage, electric cars/busses/taxis are great for big cities and so on.

It gets trickier later, but a lot if it just needs a tiny push in the right direction, as can be seen by the many countries around the world, already doing the "impossible" with relatively little fuss.

The bigger economic issue is that a very small number of people benefit directly from coal usage, and they can buy off politicians easily without challenge from the millions of people who suffer the ill effects indirectly through healthcare costs etc.

Action now is much, much cheaper.

Only if you pick the right action. Doing something big and expensive now that turns out to have negligible effects or unintended consequences will lead to us not only exhausting resources now, but also having to spend exactly the same in the future.

So while I agree that action now is important, let's not fall into the trap of "We most do something. This is something. Let's do this".

Humans have been adapting to nature BY SUFFERING MAJOR HARDSHIP for all of history.

No, cheap energy is not "essential." It's essential to living like a suburban American, but when you see Europeans living more comfortably than Americans, while consuming far less energy, that ought to give you pause.

It also should give you pause to notice how "essential" it is for the sea not to force you to relocate, something global warming is slowly doing to hundreds of millions of people.

32 of the 48 countries in Africa are in an energy crisis according to the World Bank. Think how many millions of lives could be improved/saved by cheap coal plants, with immediate benefits. Or, the horror, nuclear power plants in 15 years.

We're leaving hundreds of millions in abject poverty today, for some mild to negligible benefit in the future (We aren't cutting CO2 emissions from industrialized nations much anytime soon).

Or wind and solar (including PV, CSP and domestic water heating) seeing how they are cheap and easy to roll out? Why wait 15 years for nuclear that is seen as too expensive as well as socially unacceptable in many nations, when you can get immediate returns with wind? Why poison the air with coal when you can use distributed solar and save on grid expansion costs?

Because a modern coal plant can provide rock steady power at $.05/kwh, day in and day out. Yes, thorium, uranium, VOC's, and mercury suck. And the CO2 isn't exactly a benefit. But compared to the abject poverty, or even eternal "developing" status some countries acquire, it is probably a worthwhile investment, or at least should be given as an option. At least until solar becomes cheaper and we find a way to store energy for when it is needed. [EDIT] Because this isn't just about providing retail power to consumers, but commercial power to factors and industry, to generational wealth to pull whole societies out of poverty.

But asking the Congo to invest in massive solar farms when it can't afford cheap coal, is just cruel.

And Vietnam, China and many other countries see nuclear as the only sensible option. We only have about 3 billion years of fuel left (including thorium, but excluding the immeasurable amount of uranium that could be mined from Ocean water).

Solar's fine, but very inconsistent. I work in natural gas myself, but I know quite a few people in Solar. It's great in some areas, not so great in others. They get a lot of calls during the winter wondering why they're getting no production out of their panels when it's snowing or has recently snowed.

Wind more and more is looking like it might be a nightmare. Natural gas is way cheaper in terms of energy provided when you factor in maintenance costs of wind turbines. In addition, there's significant concerns about the environmental impact of wind farms.

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2013/02/rethinking-wind-pow...

Natural Gas is actually insanely good right now in terms of carbon footprint versus cost. Most countries don't have the infrastructure for NatGas E&P though like we do in the US, and it's mostly a local resource.

I'd be more supportive of gas if the industry weren't so resistant to measuring and controlling their methane leaks.

A growing number of environmentalists support nuclear. James Hansen, for example, advocates advanced nuclear in his book Storms of My Grandchildren. Several other very prominent environmentalists talk about their conversion to nuclear advocacy in the documentary Pandora's Promise.

And we could cut CO2 emissions from industrialized countries quite soon, with the right kind of nuclear power. ThorCon, for example, has a design for a molten salt reactor using existing technology, which could be built in modular form at a rate of 100GWe capacity per year by a single shipyard. It'd be safe, very proliferation resistant, six times more fuel-efficient than conventional reactors, and as cheap as natural gas. Their only problem is that the NRC won't let them do anything.

75% of U.S. coal plants are scheduled for retirement within the next decade. Air pollution from coal kills thousands of Americans per year, according to the American Lung Association. We have lots of shipyards. We have a historic opportunity here, if the government will get out of the way.

Modern nuclear power plants have negligible environmental impact.

Yes, they should be built everywhere.

Look at Louisiana for example of harm.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/losing-ground-sout...

> In just 80 years, some 2,000 square miles of its coastal landscape have turned to open water, wiping places off maps, bringing the Gulf of Mexico to the back door of New Orleans and posing a lethal threat to an energy and shipping corridor vital to the nation’s economy.

A football field size area of land is lost every hour. That's going to have massive economic and cultural impact on the rest of the US.

and how is that different than what man has gone through all his existence? We still find ruins today underwater that obviously at one time were quite a bit above the surface. I am quite sure that Venice wasn't built with the idea it would have the water problems today. There are even areas of the world previous underwater that are not.

In summary, people like to exaggerate the issue by ignoring the past. Climate change became the focus after their previous terms all bit the dust. It became the cause celebrity when big business found a way to exploit it for money and politicians found it gave them more control over people; in turn how to coerce donations from groups not previously bending the knee.

It is all so very easy to make it sound dire but the exaggerations border on religious fanaticism and the name calling/branding of anyone who doesn't agree one hundred percent is similar in nature

You say it's an exaggeration -- a believable claim -- but that's something you've got to actually demonstrate, not just speculate assertively.

Nuance, nor perspective, among many other things, do not lend themselves well to any discussion about climate change, which is awfully sad. You are exactly correct that this is a 21st century religion, regardless of the accuracy of the discussion around it.

No, you're being downvoted because the only reason you think there isn't nuance or perspective is because you seem to be ignoring it.

You want perspective? The mass die-offs in fish stocks, vertebrate life, and ecosystem damage is essentially unrecoverable.

We are changing the atmospheric composition at a rate greater than that of many of the natural catastrophes that have wiped out a significan amount of the biosphere. The models that work in accordance to our understanding of climate science have very well-delineated scenarios, all of which are considerably worse than the status quo. Some of those have consequences which will end in the Earth having a significantly lower carrying capacity for life, human included. And not in a thousand years; we're talking a span of 30 to 50.

Have you even seen the effects that we're having on the ocean through acidification? What do you think will happen when the ocean can no longer support the amounts of phitoplankton responsible for generating most of the oxygen we use, and which are the base of the planet's food chain?

Have you every studied agronomical sciences? Do you know what the impact on crops is when you have extended flooding and drought, or when the average temperature of a site is raised by a few degrees?

Again, your hyper-alarmist reply only bolsters my point. No perspective, no rationality, just pure paranoia. Anyone with even a slightly divergent view continues to be dissuaded from saying anything. These sorts of responses only validate my views. I'll say a prayer for the phitoplankton, though [eye roll].

There's literally thousands of scientific papers in disciplines of environmental science, agronomical sciences, glaciology, geology, oceanography, climate science, and the dozens of biological subdisciplines which are documenting this.

Do you want to bring on the evidence or do I need to quote a few hundred papers authored by experts in their respective fields?

Ah yes, the predictable downvotes which only validate my comment.

Having not read the source material referenced by OP, the biggest concerns I have (that are not commonly addressed) are as follows:

1: increased ocean acidity due to CO2 dissolving into water. A lot of the smaller lifeforms (coral, others) rely on calcium carbonate for exoskeletons, even small changes in PH can greatly reduce their capability to extract such from the water. There will also be many more unexpected implications, so the total impact on ocean biomes is unknown.

2: global warming means more energy in the weather systems, which means greater fluctuations and more chaotic weather, not necessarily just a small increase in average temperature. Think bigger hurricanes, more severe floods and droughts, higher winds, etc.

From IPCC report "Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis" chapter 2:

"In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale." (2.6.2.2)

"In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought since the middle of the 20th century, owing to geographical inconsistencies in the trends." (2.6.2.3)

It's not as simple as more energy -> more chaotic weather -> more severe floods and droughts. Unlike other parts of global warming, many changes in extereme events are hypothetical and unsettled. (For floods, we are not sure of sign!)

3: increase in days over 100F. Being hotter isn't just an inconvenience: photosynthesis stops working efficiently when temperatures are over 100F (fun chemistry fact: chemical reactions are temperature sensitive; this is why your body tries to maintain a very narrow temperature range. Otherwise, the chemical reactions all run at the wrong speed (or not at all), and the delicate balance of chemical pathways is disrupted). So when temperatures get too hot, plants switch from photosynthesizing and storing energy to burning their stored sugars and respiring. Forests begin emitting CO2 instead of consuming it; crops do not have the extra sugars to store as fruits and grains for us to harvest and eat.

That's less than 38°C. At Brazil, we have huge areas of florest that rarely see a temperature smaller than that during the day.

Are plant leaves cooler than the environment?

The rain forests themselves will be quite a bit cooler -- they tend to average 80F/27C, with temperatures rarely much higher than 92F/33C. I think it's a side effect of the constant rain.

I'm not sure about your non-rain forests. It's possible they are seasonally operating at a loss -- storing sugars during the cool seasons and burning them during the hot seasons.

Averaging the florests do not mean much.

As I've said, there are big areas of rain-florest in Brazil that rarely see less than 38°C during the day. There are also big areas of savanna that stay around that temperature for half a year (the half that rains). The fact that there are also cooler areas does nothing to explain how plants survive on those both.

I do think it's quite likely that plants keep leaves bellow the environment temperature, I'd just like somebody that knows it to confirm it or not.

Another big concern is shifting precipitation patterns. Our civilisations and current ecosystems are build for current patterns, and floods in deserts during droughts in normally wet areas don't help anyone.

Water sources for Kansas aren't surface waters but ground waters. Problem is that the recharge rate is far outstripped by current crops we're growing. Western Kansas will slowly turn into a desert due to this reality. The same goes for most of Oklahoma and Nebraska. These are the states which grow the wheat and corn that goes into your food stuffs. You think bread is expensive now wait until a gallon of fresh water costs more than a gallon of gas. Then you'll feel the pinch of Malthus' Curse.

It's ludicrous to suggest that fresh water will ever be more expensive than gas. The price of gas would have to drop by a factor of about a thousand to get to the realistic maximum price for fresh water (the cost of producing water via desalination).

Of course, farmers are so used to cheap water that it would be a huge shock to the agricultural economy for the price of water to rise to even 1/1000th the price of gas.

I may be hyperbolic in my statement regarding the price of water, but the fact remains the more scarce the water the more expensive the crops that need it. Food crops will become prohibitively expensive as fresh water sources become harder to find or transport to areas were water is scarce. This is a reality that we can't avoid anymore. We either bite the bullet and get ready for what will be a multi-generational Grapes of Wrath or just lay down and die. There's no half-measures when Nature dictates the situation.

Major ag and commodities companies are already buying land in Canada and Australia with this expectation.

Yeah, but it's likely to be not sufficient to handle a growing population either. I expect that the long term solution is to take to space and create artificial habitats or cut down on our population (most likely option imo).

I feel bad for the state of discussion on HN that you were downvoted for asking an honest, polite request for more information.

Asking why it is a problem to move cites honestly sounds more like trolling than a honest question.

Moving or converting cities does seem like an incredible undertaking. However, it also looks like making the world reign in its carbon emissions sufficiently has been tried and is not yet successful; maybe it's actually impossible as opposed to just difficult. At least changing the world to adapt to climate change doesn't have the tragedy of the commons working against it, because when a local government works to prepare for whatever is going to happen, the benefit accrues locally to the people making the sacrifice.

I read several of javert's posts, and I don't get the impression of a troll.

The issue at hand, isn't the people in the first world.

how would you move a city like Mumbai? Or how about any of the villages in the hinterlands, like Waynard Kerala, Nagpur Maharashtra, random village in Bihar.

There is very strong regional centrism when CC gets discussed on the web (for obvious reasons). Local government has a hard time getting by now, in the places that have it at all.

Moving a city? Building infrastructure to manage water shortages?

I do not see how those human beings, with those resources, are going to achieve that.

Only a few groups can talk about adapting to climate change.

Since you mention it...

I recently lost 11 points in the span of a few minutes (while writing a comment), apparently because someone went and downvoted all my recent comments.

I've seen other suspicious behavior for months, but it's more anecdotal, so I won't go into it here.

tl;dr I am probably getting vote brigaded.

edit: And now I am "submitting too fast" and can't continue the conversations I am in (though I can still make edits). I don't know how the algorithm for that works, but I suspect (from experience) it's partially based partially on how many downvotes you're getting, because I often hit this without submitting quickly or all that much. Also from experience, it takes a really long time before you can start submitting again. So I'm effectively silenced (until next time...).

edit2: "If you talk about downvotes, chances are you'll get downvoted" (below---I'm still "rate" limited). Well, someone else raised the issue of culture on HN (not me), and I'm providing data. This is constructive, as opposed to simply bitching about getting downvotes, which I am being accused of. That is wrong and I never do that, as my comment history will prove. This accusation is conflating two entirely different things and is really unjust and unhelpful. Again, having someone systematically downvote your comment history is not the same as complaining about people downvoting a particular comment because they don't like it. Calling me a "bore" because I am reporting abusive behavior is beyond the pale.

"A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours."

If you talk about downvotes, chances are you'll get downvoted...

>> "A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours."

Where is that quote from? It's been a while since I've seen such an elitist snarky statement and I'd like to know who to attribute it to.

Frankly, I couldn't tell you. I get my quotes from `nc alpha.mike-r.com 17`; some come with attribution, some don't. A great quote though, no?

(Aside: Why doesn't everyone run a QoTD server? The world would be a better place for it.)

politics, environmentalism, and sexual orientation, are highly clique oriented here to the point you might as well be on reddit.

There are a couple cities moving now, more or less; mostly cities in Syria trying to move to Germany as far as I can tell. Don't see how that movement is worse than energy controls?

Imagine Bangladesh trying to move its cities. There are about 157 million people there. Let's say only the quarter of the population that's on the low-lying coastal areas currently experiencing a lot of flooding need to move. Is the Bangladeshi government going to organize a nice resettlement program? Are they going to rent land in India to move everyone to? Or are we gradually going to see more and more folks individually and collectively saying, F..., I need to get to Europe for the safety and opportunity of my children. Imagine just a quarter of those Bangladeshis in low-lying areas making their way to Europe: 10 million people trying to move to avoid the floods and the threat of death, with few to no cash reserves, moving across the continents paying smugglers and trying to ride trains on top of trains.

This year (Jan-Aug 2015) only 350,000 people tried to make it into the EU in this way and it's already affecting political stability in the region.

http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/06/19/wa...

Two wrongs do not make a right, and thinking that climate warming only poses a minor inconvenience is ignorant. Please do some further research or you could misconstrued as a rude troll.

> plus even if we change, other countries won't.

Because the US has no political power, amirite?

On completely separate note, as an Australian, I'd like to thank the US for pushing it's list of verboten drugs onto us, for pressuring us to take part in it's wars of convenience, for pushing it's IP laws down our throat via treaty obligations, and for bending us over the desk with our "free trade" agreements.

Seems to me that Australian politicians took all those "suggestions" and made them even worse for your own population.

Don't blame other countries, your own government are the ones fucking you - I can tell that from experience and recent history in my own country...

You're describing a false dichotomy. where only one party can be responsible for screwing people over. Who said I gave no blame to our own politicians?

In any case, people seem to have missed my point, which is that the US has plenty of political power to get other countries to play ball. Do people really believe that something called a 'superpower' has negligible influence?

As long as citizens of Australia blame America and not their own politicians the status quo is safe, and pols can sell out without fear of repercussions.

Obviously the other main culprit (for putting carbon into the air) is China, and it's not worth it for the US to try to exercise power over them.

As to the list of stuff you're complaining about, you can only blame Australia (i.e., your fellow citizens and your politicians). Australia absolutely could just not do that stuff. The US is not going to invade Australia.

The reason Australia goes along with it is because it wants to.

And it wants to because it's a whole lot like the US. All the former British colonies have a lot in common.

We probably should have all just stayed in one big empire. After all, the US Founders bungled up our system permanently by claiming that rights come from God, which is only a way to supposedly invalidate rights.

What are you on about, China is way behind the US in emissions per per capita:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

And three million kilotons ahead on emissions total, which are what matter. Also, how and where was this data collected? We know that we can't trust companies to report this accurately. Was it collected by the state? Since it's not privacy-related, I sort of trust the US to report accurately, whereas I don't trust the PRC to do so.

Also those emissions are relatively easy to fix since it's mostly cheap and nasty coal plants. They're already sick of coal plants due to local pollution, and switching electricity generation tech is much easier than say changing 100 year old car based city structures. And they are well positioned to do renewables & nuclear.

And yet that same chart shows China has twice as much in total emissions as compared to the US. Pick your preference I guess.

Plus I don't remember hearing quite as many reports of extremely polluted cities outside of China as I hear about in China.

I don't think it's especially useful to think about emissions by country for the purpouses of thinking who can effect change. Any more than a small town resident should feel discouraged about voting in national elections.

People need to be doing their part in all the reference groups they belong to, be it their field of expertise, their local government, international communities they belong to etc. "Act locally, think globally".

I'd also expect mosquito and pest populations to spiral out of control in areas where they are already bad, and spread to areas that didn't have them previously. Changes like this could cause collapse/redistribution of ecosystems pretty reliably.

The rice farmers I met in Bihar, for instance, are now growing a new variety of flood-tolerant rice—nicknamed “scuba” rice—that can survive two weeks underwater.

Found this extremely interesting. Probably because, I was surprised by the thought that, this could be done

Pros and cons? CO2 is of course the primary carbon source for plants. Not the merest hint here of the enormous degree of planet-greening with record crop yields equivalent to millions of dollars that's taken place as a result of the increase in atmospheric CO2.

When discussing the results of this increase, typically, articles like this and hundreds more http://www.planetseed.com/relatedarticle/co2-production-inte... take pains not to mention it.

According to CSIRO" “CO2 fertilisation correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa.” This means that arid regions across the world would have not greened if CO2 levels had not increased.".

Hardly worth mentioning I guess.

Drought, excess heat, loss of irrigation from snowpacks and glaciers, and topsoil loss from drought combined with occasional torrential rainfalls have the opposite effect on plant growth.

For plants that aren't protected in greenhouses, increased CO2 can make them more vulnerable to insects. This is true of soybeans, for example: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080324173612.ht...

I hope you noticed your quote specifically says correlated.

Also, you're presenting an argument that has actually been looked at for decades in the literature, which would be evident from a leisurely google scholar search of terms such as: climate change, CO2, respiration, net ecosystem production, terrestrial vegetation, food supply, etc.

I've attempted to grab some links to papers that seem to be publicly available. [5] is a review from the Royal Society, and [3] is straight out of Science if you care about credentials.

2001. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2486.2001....

1994. [2] http://ecoethics.net/cyprus-institute.us/PDF/Rosensweig-Food...

2006. [3] http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/26790/PDF

2004. [4] http://www.preventionweb.net/files/1090_foodproduction.pdf

2005. [5] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/360/14...

Definitely worth mentioning, as well as the evidence that high CO2 levels tend to promote weed growth and decrease effectiveness of agricultural herbicides [1] and promotes growth of lower-quality versions of food crops [2]. Even in my gardens I have a lot more greenery, and it's mostly low-quality foliage. We don't have increased food production.

[1] http://allenpress.com/publications/pr/WEES59_1 [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-public/rising-co2-p...

Interesting, it almost acts like a natural defense mechanism for the planet. The problem is, it's not enough.

It's great if the CO2 increase has led to greater food production, but that increased foliage hasn't stopped or slowed the CO2 increase. So yes, it's probably "hardly worth mentioning".

Eh, if you are talking about impact of climate change on agriculture, of course this is worth mentioning, and most sane sources do.

For example, quoting IPCC report "Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability" chapter 7, "Evidence confirms the stimulatory effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) in most cases on crop yields (high confidence)".

Let's see: Event A will cause event B. Event B will will be really bad. So, let's go on and on about how bad event B will be, all the direct effects and all the indirect effects. On and on.

So, get people all up on their hind legs based on how bad event B will be.

But event A, what about event A?

How do we know that event A will happen?

When do we get solid information about the chances of event A?

Event B: Gigantic flocks of pigs flying over our largest cities and dropping huge piles of pig poop. Let's talk about all the really horrible problems all those flying pigs will cause. Let's get the EPA, USDA, CDC, etc. working really hard on the problem. Let's pass a lot of new laws restricting and taxing pigs. Let's have the NIH doing genetic studies on how to do genetic engineering to throttle the flying pigs. We need a UN effort to constrain all those flying pigs with some treaties with some severe sanctions to protect the world, including the poorest people who will be hurt the worst, from all those flying pigs.

In all of this, what is the chance of event A, the chances of the gigantic flocks of flying pigs?

So, since event B with those pigs would be so bad, we get to neglect talking about event A that the pigs will fly at all?

I smell the faint whiff of propaganda pig poop.

Look, I respect you greatly, but this is not something to be cavalier about just because the environmentalists act like it's the Great Revival and throw up too many hosannas for our liking. Ocean acidification is real, greenhouse and ocean thermal effects can't be explained away by sunspots and yes Virginia, there is such a thing as phenomenology in science, despite what people like Koonin might say.

Sure, significant and massively destructive "ocean acidification" would be really bad.

Not would be, is. It's happening now.

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/11/disaster-weve-wrought-wor...

Newsweek? Gee, I remember Newsweek, 1975 and their prediction of horrible, destructive, massive, life killing, earth ruining, devastating, hideous, humongous, drum roll, please, "global cooling", with a scan of their cover story in

http://denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf

Right, Newsweek, that is, newsies looking to grab people, by the heart, the gut, below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears, to get eyeballs for ads and ad revenue.

They are in the ad business. Their content is just smelly bait to catch eyeballs for their ad business.

Their stuff is garbage, as low as it can go, no higher than necessary, for their ad revenue, in the short term. Their reputation? They assume their target audience doesn't care and, thus, they don't care.

Their content is really from the literary fiction tradition of drama and art as in communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion. So, they want to concentrate on the drama of the human experiences, the horrible things that will happen to humans.

They like to play on fears, the threats of both nature and society, as in E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, the main sources of human anxiety.

The newsies won't do any better as long as people keep reading them and they keep getting ad revenue.

You should not have taken the newsies seriously in 1975, and you should not today.

Again, emphasize all the horrible things that would happen with massive global cooling. Like emphasizing all the horrible things that would happen with gigantic flocks of flying pigs over our cities dropping thousands of tons of pig poop a day. It would be really bad. There would be disease, death, gigantic economic losses. What are going to do about this gigantic pig poop problem?

To see more of how this goes, watch the now classic movie The Music Man talking about the terrible threat of a pool table in town and, thus, the need for a boy's band -- that will be $19.95 import fee.

For more, review some of how the old English morality plays went and how much of Christian religion went in those days and nearly to the present -- terrible threats from sin and the Devil, now we will pass the offering plate, sing the Doxology, and see the 10%.

Got some spectacular stuff that way -- look up the Bishop's Residence in Munich. Build something like that for yourself and it would really set you back.

The good thing about the movie was Shirley Jones -- we're talking drop dead gorgeous, just what you want next to you under piles of blankets on those long, cold nights from the "global cooling".

It wasn't just Western Civilization; parts of the New World did much the same: Indeed the ancient Mayans had some such thoughts and responded by killing people and pouring their blood on a rock as at

http://books.google.com/books?id=DgqLplWtGPgC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA...

from page 76 of

Susan Milbrath, 'Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)', ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University of Texas Press, 2000.

They didn't have enough solid science to know that (A) their blood would have no effect on the sun and (B) there was no danger that the sun would stop moving across the sky.

Ah, where can we get some of that massive, hideous, life-ending global cooling? I was counting on it, getting under the covers with Shirley Jones!

That global cooling scare was never about science, the earth, or temperature -- those were all just misdirections, as in a magic show, to hide what was really going on. E.g., standard advice: "Always look for the hidden agenda.".

What was really going on? Sure, just obvious, just from common sense and People 101, the usual suspects: A flim-flam, fraud, scam to get money and power. Right, the two, usual biggies -- money and power.

I'm not in the business of the sky is falling, but I can happily cite peer reviewed, more respectable (in the scientific community) _observations_ and measurements on ocean acidification, as opposed to the prognostications in the seventies you are referring to.

Or, for example, if you want to drill down more into this clathrates issue, I can put you in personal touch with some experts at Stony Brook and you can ask all the detailed questions you like via email.

Okay, from your urging, I looked up ocean acidification and found

http://www.whoi.edu/fileserver.do?id=165564&pt=2&p=150429

with Ocean Acidification. They have a lot of seemingly serious organizations with their logos at the bottom, e.g., NOAA. Of course, nearly all those organizations (the IAEA is there and I can't guess why) are in the business of screaming about CO2 from humans -- so objectivity is in question.

They had their chance, and they blew it; they just didn't make a convincing case at all. About all they really said was that if I go swimming in the ocean and exhale into the water, then my CO2 will make the water more acidic. I agree. Obviously both true and trivial.

But that's also right where they blew it: They never got to how much CO2 and how much more acidic. So, in principle nearly everything they said would also hold for my case of blowing bubbles at the beach -- literally. They had a chance -- they blew it.

Why? Incompetence or just covering up that so far the CO2 is nowhere nearly enough to do much to the oceans anytime soon, and I don't know which, but in either case they didn't turn me into a CO2 and ocean acidification alarmist.

Early on they said that the atmospheric CO2 makes the surface water more acidic. I thought, "Sure, but so darned what?" It's just the surface water, and there's a lot more water out there and a lot of mixing. So, now, the whole ocean, human CO2 is going to make the whole ocean a lot more acidic? When? How? Via how darned much CO2 and how much more acidic? No answer.

The whole ocean? In another context, I'd take that as a thigh slapping joke from Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny.

Next I think, significantly harmful CO2 in the ocean? Gotta be kidding because of sea floor smokers, volcanoes, e.g., think Hawaii, and sea floor spreading and associated volcanic activity from plate tectonics, e.g., the line from Iceland south through the central Atlantic and around much of the planet.

Next, especially in the top layers of the ocean are Phytoplankton, that is plankton that are plants and, thus, suck up CO2. They mentioned some means of the oceans getting rid of the CO2 but didn't mention plants. Gads.

My objections are not solid science, but their PDF didn't address even my simple, obvious, first-cut points. So, their PDF fails both the sniff test and the giggle test.

Maybe their worst was their

"16 Full recovery of the oceans will require tens to hundreds of millennia. Over decades to centuries, neither weathering of continental rocks, deep ocean mixing, or dissolution of calcium carbonate minerals in marine sediments can occur fast enough to reverse OA over the next two centuries."

The first problem, grade F on the giggle test, is "hundreds of millennia". That's hundreds of thousands of years, just to do something about CO2 since the start of the industrial revolution? This is from Bugs Bunny?

In hundreds of thousands of years the oceans would routinely handle the CO2 from hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity but would struggle with the industrial output of CO2 from, say, 200 years? Grade F on the sniff test.

This statement needs at least some support from actual numerical estimates of the quantities involved; just that statement in that PDF document is at least incompetent as writing if not science.

Yes, they did mention pH:

"4 Average global surface ocean pH has already fallen from a pre-industrial value of 8.2 to 8.1, corresponding to an increase in acidity of about 30%."

Boy, does that scream out for a reference, some supporting arguments (e.g., just how much CO2 would that take, even if none of it was taken up by plants), and the significance of that much change in pH.

Without getting out a chemistry book, maybe I see how their change from pH 8.2 to 8.1 is "an increase in acidity of about 30%." Gee, 30%; that sounds big, dangerous, etc. Wow! 30%! Gads.

So, 8.2 is not acidic but basic. pH is essentially hydrogen ion concentration. So, in a basic solution, expect nearly no hydrogen ions. So, if pH 8.2 has nearly no hydrogen ions, then 30% more hydrogen ions to pH 8.1 is 30% of nearly nothing and, thus, nearly no change. Sorry, I have to get up and turn off my screaming, loud BS meter that just went off ....

They blew it.

This PDF is from Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Goofy, The Three Stooges, Groucho Marx, George Carlin, NOAA, or all of those?

It that's even roughly the best argument they can make, then they added evidence of no serious problem from "ocean acidification".

Tell you what: Next time to the beach, I'll bring a roll of Tums and drop a few into the ocean. For what's in the PDF, that should solve any problem.

For that PDF, there's a much better explanation than a significant threat to the oceans: They want to fit in with the CO2 alarmists and, thus, get grant money.

I'm all for good research, but first they need to learn how to write. I would not approve their grant request.

Gotta quit reading this stuff or unplug my BS meter ....

Let's see: For their pH 8.2, they have

"4 Average global surface ocean pH has already fallen from a pre-industrial value of 8.2 to 8.1, corresponding to an increase in acidity of about 30%."

So, the 8.2 was "average", "surface", and "pre-industrial".

Hmm .... Where'd they get that number? How the heck was that known then, i.e., "pre-industrial"? And it was just "surface" which is already suspect.

For the 8.1, is that really comparable? That is, measured in the same places, at the same times of year? For the 8.1, was there some recent high sea state for a lot of mixing or a big rain storm with fresh water?

We can't just accept those numbers; we need references.

In general, for that PDF, we need references. Just due to the lack of references, the PDF gets a grade of F due to failing to meet just common high school term paper writing standards.

That PDF is junk.

The authors of the PDF are attempting a flim-flam, fraud, scam. That PDF is about money and politics, not science or pH.

Here's their references: http://www.whoi.edu/OCB-OA/page.do?pid=112616

I think you are saying that climate change may not necessarily occur? Why do you think so? (Just curious)

We have a lot of really solid evidence of significant climate change going back at least 110 million years. There is also evidence back 65 million years, 600,000 years, and 500 years.

For the last 2000 years there is

Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council, 'Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years', ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196 pages, National Academies Press, 2006.

still available at

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html

The fact that climate has gone through major changes before is the reason people are worried. If it had been stable for a billion years, we could be confident that powerful negative feedbacks keep it that way.

Instead, we see minor initial changes kicking off positive feedbacks that take things much further. Hansen's book goes into this in detail.

>The world’s poorest farmers show up for work each day for the most part empty-handed. That’s why of all the people who will suffer from climate change, they are likely to suffer the most.

So, these poor farmers will demand low-cost solutions to manage these problems. Entrepreneurs would sense this(Bill already did) and start building these tools. It's just how capitalism works.

Unless, there's a crony global economy where corporations buy up government and hold illegitimate monopolies.

As consequence, they are unproductive and unable to keep up with innovation. The world doesn't get what it needs. Bill would also be a good example.

"So, these poor farmers will demand low-cost solutions to manage these problems."

Poor farmers can demand lots of things. They won't get them.

" Entrepreneurs would sense this(Bill already did) and start building these tools. It's just how capitalism works."

Bill Gates is not an entrepreneur. He's a philanthropist. His activities fund a lot of entrepreneurs. And that's an important distinction.

The reason there are solutions in the works for these poor farmers is not that the farmers are demanding them. The reason is that BILL GATES is demanding them.

Poor farmers in this context means subsistence farmers (people who literally live hand to mouth). They don't make the same sort of money even a cash crop farmer would make even at the best of times in the same country.

I wouldn't blame this on governments/corporations. I would blame it on people choosing to have children they can't necessarily support.

I think people should have the right to do that, but they should have to face the consequences.

> I would blame it on people choosing to have children they can't necessarily support.

It's not like that they perceive to have a choice: If one lives from day to day (or here harvest to harvest) and has never heard of pensions nor any chance to ever receive one, children are the only security one has for old age.

In all likelihood, they also don't have access to education or birth control.

Actually, they have children to support themselves.

Without mechanization, it becomes increasingly harder to support yourself without relatives to take care of you after you retire.

There is a delay between rising living standards, education and number of children finally decreasing. It's unrealistic to expect things to happen much faster for them than it happened for everybody else.

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